The Missing Chapter

It was a long way from luxurious, but I am willing to concede that all those years in the brownstone have spoiled me. Except for two windows with closed blinds, the room was all bookshelves, to the ceiling. I’m used to being surrounded by bookshelves, but these were something else. They held a small-town library’s worth of volumes, but also sheaves of typing or computer paper, bound by rubber bands, which were jammed horizontally or vertically into every space not otherwise occupied. And the desk was groaning with more of the same.

“Goodwin, eh? Yeah, I know who you are. Have a seat,” Franklin Ott said absently, waving a hand toward three unmatched guest chairs while he studied something in a manila folder. Ott was thin all over — chest, shoulders, face, even his straw-colored hair, what little remained of it. I sat while he finished reading from the folder and tapping on the desk top with the eraser end of a gnawed yellow pencil. He shook his head, slapped the folder shut, and leaned back, cupping his hands behind his head.

“Let’s see how good I am,” he cracked with a lopsided grin. A bobbing Adam’s apple caused his polka-dotted bow tie to vibrate with every syllable. “Your boss, the famed Nero Wolfe, has been hired by somebody — I don’t know who but I can make an educated guess — to poke around into the death of Charles Childress, a death this certain somebody figures is murder, not suicide. Being the shrewd and thorough fellow that he is, Nero Wolfe knows, of course, that Childress had been on less-than-friendly terms with several people in this town, a certain literary agent among them. To steal a line from an ebullient former mayor of this great metropolis, ‘How am I doing?’ ”

“Not bad,” I said, nodding. “Anything more you want to add?”

Ott hooked his thumbs under his belt and shrugged. “No, it’s your turn to sound off. I’ve read a lot of mysteries, but I’ve never seen a live detective before. Do you come out of the hard-boiled school, or are you the urbane type?”

“Beats me, although I don’t recall that anybody’s ever called me urbane. Why don’t you take notes and tell me what you think when we’re finished? First off, how long were you Childress’s agent?”

Ott studied some of the bundled manuscripts on the opposite wall before replying. “Just about four years. He’d had somebody else, but he dropped her because he didn’t think she had enough good contacts in the publishing houses, which was true — I know the woman.”

“Were you glad to get him as a client?”

“Yeah, at the time, which doesn’t say a whole lot about my ability to read character. Charles had done a few so-so mysteries for a small publisher, although they didn’t make him much money. Horace Vinson at Monarch noticed him, though, and felt he had a lot of potential. This was not long after Darius Sawyer had died, and the shrewd Mr. Vinson wanted very badly to find a way to keep the Barnstable royalties pouring in.”

“I gather Sawyer’s books were big money-makers.”

Ott made a face and twitched his shoulders. “Yeah, they did all right, but at least part of Vinson’s strategy was that new Barnstable books would stimulate sales of the backlist, too. Backlist is the old books,” he explained. “Hell, there must be at least two dozen Barnstable books by Sawyer, maybe more, and Monarch has the rights to all of them. Makes good business sense.”

“So Childress hired you to strike a deal with Vinson, right?”

“That’s pretty much it. Charles said he’d heard good things about me, and he knew I had several authors at Monarch.”

“Was he happy with what you worked out originally?”

“Mr. Goodwin, Charles Childress was never very happy with anything or anyone, as I was to find out all too soon. He was a colossal pain in the ass at every step of the way, and if I had any brains at all, I would have dropped him right after I negotiated that first damn Barnstable contract. Now you, as a highly skilled interviewer, will no doubt ask me why I didn’t drop him. I’ll save you the effort. The answer is greed — pure, simple, unadulterated greed.”

“That hardly sets you apart from the rest of us.”

“I suppose not. I kept thinking there might be a film deal in the Childress stuff.”

“But there wasn’t?”