The Missing Chapter

The door was white, the hall walls were white, the carpeting was white. I found Debra Mitchell’s doorway just before snow blindness hit. I peeked in through the doorway and saw a mostly white office fully half the size of Wolfe’s, with a desk in one corner and a sofa and chairs grouped around a coffee table in the other. A woman was seated behind the desk, talking on the phone. “Yes, correct. Yes, they’ve got the guests lined up for the next three weeks, except for next Tuesday. That damned, loopy inventor from South Dakota, or maybe it’s North Dakota, the one who developed a car that runs on cornstarch or something like that, pooped out on us, said he was too busy to make the trip. Can you beat that? Too busy to be interviewed live on network TV? No wonder he’s never left whichever stupid Dakota he’s in.” She finally looked up, saw me standing in the doorway, and nodded, telling the person on the other end that she had to go. Then she pressed another button and told someone else, presumably a secretary, to hold her calls.

“Please come in, Mr. Goodwin,” she said with a cool smile, standing and coming around the desk. Debra Mitchell was worth a second look, as well as a third and a fourth. She was tall, at least five-ten in her heels, and whatever her weight, it was perfect for her height. Black, shoulder-length hair framed a face, high cheekbones and all, that would have looked just fine on the cover of any fashion magazine on any newsstand from here to Sri Lanka.

“I’m sorry I didn’t notice you standing there.” She gestured me to the sofa while she sat in one of the chairs at right angles to it, smoothing the hem of her emerald-green dress. “I recognized your name, of course. You work with Nero Wolfe. Horace Vinson told me he was going to try to hire Mr. Wolfe to find out what... what really happened to Charles.” She looked down and then up at me, her golden-brown eyes shrewd. “Does your being here mean Mr. Wolfe will investigate his death?”

I nodded. “It does. Ms. Mitchell, I understand from Mr. Vinson that you agree with him that Charles Childress was murdered.”

“Of course I do!” she snapped, slicing the air with a manicured hand. “He would never have killed himself. Never! It’s too absurd to even discuss. Charles had everything to live for. His writing, our... our life together.” Her face registered more anger than sadness.

“But he did have drastic mood swings, didn’t he?”

“Of course he had mood swings. Charles was artistic, for God’s sake. But if everyone here with mood swings killed themselves, this town would be smaller than Utica.”

“Point taken. Had he been unusually depressed lately?”

“No, he had not,” she said tightly. “Oh, he was ticked off about his new contract, and I don’t blame him. Horace, whom I like very much, let Charles down badly and wouldn’t agree to much more than what he had gotten for his first Barnstable books. Charles was upset about that, and about the review that weasel had done in the Gazette.”

“I understand he also was angry with his agent and his editor at Monarch.”

“And with good reason in each case,” Debra said, her voice still tight. “As you probably are aware, they became his ex-agent and his ex-editor.”

“I am. Did Mr. Childress ever say anything to make you think that he was in danger?”

She shook her head vigorously and fingered the diamond pin on her floral print scarf. “No. In fact, Charles never seemed afraid of anything — or anyone. He was always ready to take on the world.”

“I understand that he wasn’t from New York.”

“No, although he had lived here for, oh, I don’t know, maybe twelve years. He comes — came — from some small town somewhere in Indiana. His parents are both dead. His closest relatives are a couple of aunts out there, both widowed, I think. I never met them, but I talked to one of them on the phone the other day, so did Horace; she made the arrangements to have Charles’s body shipped back home for burial.”

“Did you know he owned a gun?”

She nodded reluctantly. “Yes, he told me when he bought it — that was a couple of months ago. Some apartments on his block had been burglarized, even one in his own building, I think. Charles seemed almost proud of the fact that he’d picked it up. He grinned when he showed it to me, like a kid with a grotesque new toy. He laughed and said something macho like ‘Anybody who tries to bust in here is going to get the surprise of his life — and if he gets cute, it’ll be the end of his life, too.’ ”

“Did Mr. Childress carry any life insurance that you’re aware of?”

She made a noise that I could only describe as unladylike. “Not a chance! Charles didn’t have any use for it. He said insurance was the biggest waste of money since the building of the pyramids.”

“Do you know who the beneficiary of his estate was?”