The Missing Chapter

“Mea culpa. No question about it. As I said before, I’d had too much to drink. But having conceded that, I was still surprised by what happened.”

“How do you interpret his reaction?”

Ott’s fingers brushed his bandage and he chuckled. “You’d like me to say that Keith Billings’s right to the face indicates to me that he blew Charles away, wouldn’t you? Well, I can’t honestly do that, as much as I loathe the man. He’s a jerk, but sorry, I don’t see him as a murderer.”

“Is it true you didn’t press charges against him?”

“Yeah,” he said, waving the thought away with a hand. “Eleanor wanted me to, but I wasn’t hurt badly. And besides, what happened was as much my fault as his.”

“That’s charitable of you,” I remarked.

“Charitable, hell!” he said, chuckling again. “Besides, the story has a happy ending of sorts. Keith Billings had been hanging out in Cowley’s for years; it’s almost a second home for him. When I was still lying on the floor being tended to, I heard Pierre — he’s the maître d’ — telling Billings in that cultured French voice of his that he wasn’t welcome in the place anymore.”

I thanked him for his time.

“No problem. I wasn’t going anyplace. I was just sitting here thinking about how Billings has been banned from Cowley’s.” His chuckle had grown to a cackle, and Ott was still cackling when I excused myself and left.

My next stop, at eleven-twenty that Saturday morning, was Billings’s place on Eighty-second. His building, a drab, nine-story gray monolith, didn’t appear to be in the same ballpark as Ott’s. As Billings had told me earlier, there was no doorman. I found the editor’s name on the directory in the unadorned, beige lobby and leaned on his buzzer. Nothing. I pushed again, waiting for a half-minute.

I was about to walk out when the intercom barked a fuzzy sound I took to be a sour and decidedly uncordial “Yes?”

“It’s Archie Goodwin,” I pronounced carefully into the speaker. I translated the response as “Whaddya want?”

“I’d like to see you for a couple of minutes,” I said.

The response was a groan, followed by a four-letter word, and then a pause. “All right, dammit, come on up,” he rasped.

Two ceiling lights were out, making the sixth-floor corridor even more dismal than it would have been. Billings’s door was ajar, and I rapped my knuckles lightly on it, causing it to swing open. The editor sat slumped on a tired sofa in the small living room, arms crossed and face pouting. “Why don’t you do like the TV commercial tells you to and phone first?” he grumped, not bothering to get to his feet.

“A gross lapse in etiquette on my part. Sorry,” I told him insincerely as I settled into the nearest chair without waiting for an invitation.

Billings maintained his seat and his pout. “Before you start in, I’ll save you some breath. Yes, I popped Frank Ott in Cowley’s night before last. No, I’m not sorry I did it. Yes, I’d been drinking. No, our argument had nothing to do with the fact that Charles Childress is dead. Okay, what’s next?”

“Thanks for helping me along. Do you often deck people in public places?”

“My, we’re hostile today, aren’t we? What I do in public places is not really any of your business, is it, Mr. Goodwin? But I’ll answer anyway. No, I am not normally given to physical violence. With Frank Ott, I am willing to make an exception, however.”

“How does it happen that Mr. Ott is so favored?”

His pout turned to a rigid smile. “We went through this drill once before, when you came to my office. Remember? As I told you then, Ott worked on Vinson to get me canned from Monarch, or at least taken off the editing of the Childress books. Even given that, I probably would have ignored him when I went into Cowley’s the other night, except that he started mouthing off, whining loud enough for the whole damn bar to hear, claiming that I had killed Charles in revenge for his part in my — how shall I term it? — departure from Monarch.

“He kept it up, so I went over to the booth where he and his wife were sitting, and I chewed on him, told him to get the hell up. He did, and I let him have it. He went down like a rock. His wife got hysterical, the lounge lizards have something to talk about for the next few weeks, and I was told to go away and stay away. End of story.” Billings clapped his hands once for emphasis and fell back against the cushions, yawning.

“You told me when we talked last week that you didn’t think Childress was murdered. Do you still feel that way?” I asked.

He let his eyes move around the cluttered room — to the bookshelves, to the two-foot-high pile of newspapers stacked in one corner, and to the television set, which rested on a stand and had a layer of dust on its screen. “It’s funny, the way things happen,” Billings said, interlacing his hands behind his head and looking at the ceiling. “If I hadn’t walked into Cowley’s Thursday night — and if I hadn’t downed a few vodkas earlier — I probably would still believe beyond any doubt that Charles the Obnoxious blew his brains out.”