The Missing Chapter

Fritz sighed and turned back to building the cassoulet Castelnaudary that Wolfe and I would be devouring in the dining room in a little more than two hours. He frets when Wolfe isn’t working, which means he almost always frets. Fritz figures we’re constantly on the brink of bankruptcy, and nothing I ever tell him to the contrary seems to help.

Actually, this time I was more than a little worried myself. We hadn’t done any work in months, unless you count the child’s play in which we — make that I — collared the Fifth Avenue jewelry store clerk who made a cute little game of substituting passable imitations for the expensive ice in his employer’s display cases and carting the genuine articles away. It took all of three days before I doped out which of eight employees in the pricey store was making the switches. I caught the poor wretch in the act, and our reward was enough to keep Wolfe in beer, books, and bouillabaisse for a couple of moons.

Not that we hadn’t had other recent opportunities for gainful employment, as in a pair of potential cases, each of which would have given the bank balance a healthy transfusion. But both times, Wolfe found excuses for taking a pass. The real reason he turned thumbs down — and I told him so — was downright laziness, combined with a contrary streak as wide as his back.

I should correct myself. Lazy is not a word to be strictly applied to Nero Wolfe. Stubborn, yes, but not lazy. He allots four hours every day — nine to eleven in the morning and four to six in the afternoon — to nurturing the ten thousand orchids in the plant rooms on the roof of the brownstone. Most of the rest of his waking hours are spent either in the dining room devouring Fritz’s superb lunches and dinners, or in his office, where he devours anywhere from five to ten books a week, sometimes juggling three at a time. Okay, the guy’s not doing push-ups, but his mind is in high gear, so scratch the lazy comment.

My roles in the operation are varied. I handle Wolfe’s correspondence, balance the books, work with our live-in orchid nurse, Theodore Horstmann, to keep the germination records up to date, and serve as so-called man of action when the two of us are working at being private detectives — duly licensed by the Sovereign State of New York. I also function as a burr under Wolfe’s saddle when he doesn’t feel like working. Obviously, I hadn’t been a real good burr of late, and I’d been indulging in mopery on that April Tuesday morning when the phone rang.

“Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”

“Mr. Goodwin, my name is Horace Vinson. I am in the publishing business, and I would like to engage Nero Wolfe to investigate a murder.”

The good old direct approach; that’s a guaranteed way to get my attention. Another is name recognition, and I immediately recognized Vinson’s name. “Who got murdered?” I asked, poising a pencil above my stenographer’s pad.

“Charles Childress. He was shot a week ago.”

“The writer,” I said. “Found in his apartment in Greenwich Village last Tuesday, an apparent suicide. Three paragraphs in the Gazette the next day, somewhere back around page thirteen.”

The response was a snort. “Suicide, hell! Charles was killed. Those idiots who masquerade as police in this town don’t think so, but I know so. Are you interested or not?”

I told Horace Vinson I’d take it up with Wolfe, which I did when he descended from the plant rooms. That brought the glare I was expecting, so I got up and walked all of three paces from my desk to his, placing a computer printout on his blotter. “That,” I told Wolfe, “is the result of your consistent refusal to reenter the work force. You may recognize those figures as our bank balance. Note how the last nine entries have been withdrawals. Note also that if we continue at the current pace, we will be forced to file for bankruptcy after another fourteen withdrawals.”

“Your mathematics are suspect, as usual,” Wolfe said with an air of unconcern.

“Okay, maybe you’ve got some other funds tucked away, a fortune you’ve never told me about. Even so, given our monthly expenses, you’d need at least—”

“Archie, shut up!”

“Yes, sir.”

Wolfe closed his eyes, presumably because looking at me was more than he could bear. He stayed that way for over a minute, then awoke and favored me with another glare. “Confound it, call Mr. Vinson, tell him to be here tomorrow at eleven.”

Which is why I was sitting in the office chatting with Horace Vinson, editor-in-chief of Monarch Press, at eleven the next morning when the groan of the elevator announced Wolfe’s descent from the plant rooms. The lord of the manor paused at the office door, dipped his head a fraction of an inch in our guest’s direction, then detoured around his desk, placing a raceme of orchids in a vase on the blotter before settling into the chair that was expressly constructed to support his seventh of a ton. “Mr. Vinson,” he said. His version of an effusive greeting.