Corpus Corpus (9 page)

STILL SAVORING THE amusement of Bogdanovic's embarrassed look at being forced by Wiggins to stand up and accept public acclaim, Goldstein realized with a start that Wiggins now spoke of him.

"In Chief of Detectives Harvey Goldstein," he said, "this grand and beloved city of ours has for nearly twenty years had in its service a man with utmost dedication to leading such stalwart sleuths as Detective Bogdanovic in a relentless struggle against crime, especially the most fascinating one of all...murder. But he and his intrepid assistant have not come here tonight to solve a case, unless one of you has homicide on the mind. If you do have a plan, I caution you against acting it out. The chief is not here to solve a crime, but to lead us in a toast to the woman who has graciously accepted our invitation to represent Miss Lily Rowan and to present the Nero Wolfe Award. Therefore, with great pleasure and without further ado, I give you Chief Goldstein."

With balding head barely visible above the podium, he said, "Except in the category of beauty, I detect nothing of Lily Rowan in the woman who represents her here this evening. Lily is lazy. Very lazy. She is, to use Nero Wolfe's adjectives, 'rich, intemperate, and notorious.' She once lived at the Ritz and now owns a posh penthouse on an exclusive block of East Sixty-third Street with a Kashan carpet that set her back fourteen thousand dollars. She spends summers at her place near Katonah and owns a ranch in Montana. But she doesn't have a clue as to how to get somebody indicted nor how to try capital cases, whereas in that department the woman I am honored to toast in her role of Lily Rowan is without par."

Beaming as he stood beside Dane with a glass of club soda in his hand, Bogdanovic said softly, "Here's to you, Maggie."

When the toasters resumed seats, she rose. "As Lily Rowan, I thank you from the bottom of my lazy, rich, intemperate, and notorious heart. As myself, I simply can't avoid comparing this evening to one in the Wolfe case entitled 'The Silent Speaker.' "

Her eyes turned down to Bogdanovic.

"For benefit of Chief Goldstein's aide-de-camp," she said, lighdy touching his shoulder, "who informed me during the meal that regarding Nero Wolfe he is an ignoramus . . ."

Titters of amusement rippled around the room.

"For Sergeant Bogdanovic's enlightenment, then," she went on, looking round the room, "in 'The Silent Speaker' Cheney Boone had been invited to make the main speech at a dinner in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria. Of the fourteen hundred guests, a hundred were invited to a private reception. To go over notes for the speech, Boone left the group to shut himself up in a small room off the stage. It was there that Alger Kates would discover him dead on the floor. Murdered."

With a sidelong look, she saw Janus clutch his throat as if he were straining for breath, then pitch forward so that his head struck the table with a thud. Amid gasps of alarm, he jerked upright with a broadening grin and bellowed in a feigned western drawl. "I'se here to git my award and no damn murderer's gonna keep me from it. So git on with it, darlin'. Time's a wastin'."

"Theo, I can't imagine who'd wish to kill you," she replied with a litde laugh. "Except everyone who saw you at work on TV in a certain recent murder trial."

Shoulders twitching with laughter, Janus grumbled, "The verdict's in, Maggie, and you cannot try the case over. Or file an appeal. Dem's da rules."

"Indeed they are, Theo. And nobody wants to change them. I thank God that ours is a system that believes it is better that a thousand guilty men go free than an innocent one go off to prison."

A THUNDERCLAP OF applause and a rain of cheers left no doubt that the Wolfe Pack wholeheartedly agreed with Maggie Dane and that nothing Theodore Janus might say during his speech could change their minds. They had not gathered to honor him for his work as America's most famous defense lawyer. It was because he had compiled an encyclopedia that he clutched their Nero Wolfe Award, in the form of a small bust of the immense detective they so revered and who in their minds and hearts existed not in the imagination of Rex Stout and his readers but actually, along with Archie Goodwin and the others, in an elegant brownstone somewhere on West Thirty-fifth Street.

Taking Dane's arm as they followed Goldstein and Wiggins into a more intimate room for a private reception arranged by Janus for members of the steering committee, Bogdanovic said, "I don't want to disillusion you, Maggie, but I worked for a time in the Tenth Precinct, which covers West Thirty-fifth Street. There are no residences. It's all industrial property."

'Just because you stayed awake on Christmas Eve and never saw a bearded fat man in a red suit doesn't mean there's no Santa Claus, Detective."

"Right. And if I staked out Baker Street in London and didn't see a tall guy in a cape and fore-and-aft hat would not mean Sherlock Holmes isn't living there."

She let go of his hand and came to an abrupt halt. "Well of course he's not! He's old, retired, and keeping bees in Sussex."

"What about Nero Wolfe? He must be pretty long in the tooth by now, too. What has he retired to keep?"

"Same as he kept when he was working cases," she answered as she walked on. "Orchids!"

Catching up with her, Bogdanovic slowly shook his head. "Do any of the detectives in all those books you and Goldstein never cease reading ever die?"

"Hercule Poirot passed away in 1975. His obituary ran on the front page of the New York Times. Since no obit has appeared for Holmes or Wolfe, they are obviously alive and well."

Entering the room, its atmosphere already suffused with the pungent aroma of cigars, Bogdanovic found Janus standing at the bar in the center. Holding a box of them open for all takers as Bogdanovic approached, he said, "I know Cuban cigars are banned in America, Detective, but have one anyway."

"Thanks, but no thanks."

"What a stalwart defender of the law you are! Well, if I am to be arrested for possession of contraband, so be it. If a genuine Cohiba isn't worth going to jail for, what is?" Offering the box to Dane, he said with a smile, "How about you? More and more women are smoking them nowadays, especially in Hollywood. They call it 'cigar chic' "

"You know me, Theo. I've never been interested in keeping up with the latest vogue."

"And you never objected to my smoking cigars, either. Thank God you weren't like the Maggie in Rudyard Kipling's poem. As I recall, it's called 'The Betrothed' and is about a man who's having second thoughts about marrying a gal named Maggie who's given him an ultimatum to choose between herself and his cigars. Part of it goes:

    Open the old cigar box,—let me consider anew,—   Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you?

    A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;

    And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a Smoke."

Bogdanovic grunted and said, "Maggie, if you'd care to kill him right now, I'd be delighted to testify on your behalf that it was justifiable homicide."

"Don't worry, John," she said, lightly kissing Janus on the cheek. "If I wanted Theo dead, he'd have been pushing up daisies long ago."

"Since you won't take my cigars," said Janus, "I hope you'll enjoy the line cognac I'm providing. It's not everyday that I'm given the Nero Wolfe Award, made all the sweeter because it came from the hands of the second-best lawyer in the country."

A moment later as she sipped brandy, Bogdanovic stared at Janus as he distributed more cigars. "Look at him," he said. "How can you put up with that condescending snob? Second-best. Meaning he's the top."

"If he isn't, please tell me who is."

"Maybe I should arrest him for possession of contraband."

"If you do so," she said, surprising him by giggling like a schoolgirl, "you'll be made to look the fool."

"Really? How so? Cuban cigars have been banned in the United States since the 1960s."

"They're not Cuban. It's an old scam of Theo's. Only the box and the bands are Cuban. The real Havanas are kept in a special humidor in a locked room at his ranch upstate and when he travels in a box in the glove compartment of his Rolls-Royce, from which he takes what he needs and transfers them to a leather pocket case."

"What a shyster! No wonder he gets along so well with the top mugs in the mob. Birds of a feather."

"Mark Twain didn't hang around with gangsters, but he did the same thing once. He had friends who constantly accused him of smoking the worst cigars in the world. One of them was notorious for smoking only costly and elegant cigars. So one day Twain went to his house when no one was looking and took some of the man's choicest. He removed the labels and put the cigars into a box of his own stogies, then passed them out to those friends at dinner. After they'd gone he found the cigars on the lawn, only partially smoked, where the snobs had tossed them away. The next day the person he'd stolen them from told him that someday he was likely to get shot for giving people such awful cigars."

"But Janus isn't making a point, is he? He's perpetrating a fraud on people who just gave him an award, and in my book that makes him as low as a snake's bellybutton. Well, snakes have been known to get their heads bashed in. Or swallowed by bigger ones."

"They can also be murder weapons, as in
Fer-de-Lance
, Nero Wolfe's first recorded case."

"I haven't read it."

"A fer-de-lance is a snake."

"There was also a deadly snake in the Sherlock Holmes case that Dr. Watson called 'The Speckled Band.' "

Goldstein's voice intruded. "It was a swamp adder, trained to climb a bell rope."

Turning to Goldstein, Bogdanovic blurted, "A trained snake?"

"It answered to a whistle," said Dane, grinning.

"Unfortunately for Dr. Grimesby Roylott of Stoke Moran," said Goldstein, holding a half-smoked Janus cigar, "it ignored common wisdom about never biting the hand that feeds you and sank its fangs into its owner and trainer. Dare I ask you what's prompted this discussion of snakes?"

Dane answered, "Your assistant thinks Theo Janus is one."

"You're holding the evidence in your hand," Bogdanovic said. "The band on your cigar says it's Cuban, but it isn't."

"Is that so?" Goldstein said, studying the black and gold band. "Is an arrest for consumer fraud imminent?"

Bogdanovic glared at Janus. "No, but I wouldn't slap the cuffs on anybody who gave Janus a poke in the eye, either."

Goldstein puffed the bogus cigar, took it from his mouth, and declared, "Fake Havana or not, it's a pretty good smoke. All this talk about Havana cigars being the best in the world is, in my opinion, a bunch of baloney. Many fine cigars are being made in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Jamaica."

As he spoke, he heard the chirping of Bogdanovic's beeper.

"Of course," he continued while Bogdanovic read the message in the window of the device, "the best cigar is the one you don't have to pay for. There is no such thing as a bad free cigar, no matter who gave it to you."

With a worried expression, Bogdanovic interrupted. "Excuse me, Chief. The message was from Red Reiter. He wants a callback as soon as possible."

"Did he say where he is?"

"No. And I don't recognize the phone number he listed," said Bogdanovic, reaching into his inside coat pocket for his cellular phone. "I think it's an uptown one."

Looking around the room, Goldstein said quietly, "Discretion is the thing, Johnny. Members of the press might still be around. Use a phone booth in the lobby."

Watching Bogdanovic impatiently threading through the happy throng that stood between him and the exit, Dane smiled a little, then turned to Goldstein. "You can always tell a detective!"

"Yes," he replied through a puff of smoke, "but not much."

"May I deduce that Red Reiter is another of the breed?"

"He and his partner are what you might call a first-response team," he said, looking anxiously toward the exit. "It's their job to check out situations that might require my attention."

"As in situations that might require the personal appearance at the scene of the crime by the chief of detectives and what our dear friends in the news media like to call high-profile cases?"

"That's it exactly."

"Well, let's hope this very pleasant evening isn't going to turn out to be one of them."

As they both looked toward the door, Theodore Janus arrived at Goldstein's side. "Pardon this old bloodhound for butting in, Chief," he whispered, tapping a finger to the side of his nose, "but the hurried departure of your sterling aide-de-camp after being beeped and your rapt attention on the door through which he departed so hastily suggest to my keen olfactory sense that the game may be afoot. Dare I hope it's a juicy case of murder?"

"What's the matter, Theo?" demanded Dane, playfully poking him in the ribs. "Is that beat-up briefcase of yours empty?"

"Have you forgotten the first lesson I taught you in law school, my darling? There's always room for one more opportunity to hold the prosecution's feet to the fire known as proof beyond a reasonable doubt."

"What was the tide of that course?" asked Goldstein. "Was it by any chance 'How to Get Rich by Chasing Ambulances'?"