The Missing Chapter

“What made you change your mind?”

Billings rolled his eyes. “Oh, come off it, will you? I thought big-time private eyes were supposed to be quick on the uptake. And you work with no less than the great Nero Wolfe. Is it possible that you don’t have a clue?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“Maybe you really don’t have a clue,” Billings responded with a sneer. “Think for a moment about what happened at Cowley’s: I walk in, obviously tight, and quiet, sedate Frank Ott, who has never bothered to acknowledge me — let alone my existence — when we’ve met in public before, suddenly goes on the attack with venom, all but accusing me of pulling the trigger on Childress. He was totally out of character. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“Help me along,” I said with a grin.

Billings actually laughed. “Goodwin, you need help like Saudi Arabia needs sand. Why do I feel like I’m being messed with?”

“Beats me. Do you really think Frank Ott has a strong enough motive for murder?”

“I wouldn’t have said so a few days ago, but... well, dope the thing out for yourself,” Billings said through clenched teeth. “Ott was savaged, albeit unfairly, by Childress in that diatribe in Book Business. So was I, of course, but by the time the vicious article ran — and God, was it vicious — I was already gone from Monarch and was established in a new job with a new publisher. Ott, however, did not have the luxury of changing jobs. He was entrenched in his own literary agency. Where was he going to go?”

“And you’re suggesting that he killed Childress, making it look like suicide?” I asked.

He bounced on the sofa and aimed an index finger at me, firing once. “You said it, Goodwin, I didn’t. And I won’t. But taking a detached look at the situation, one would be forced to conclude that Frank Ott’s best hope for survival as a literary agent was to dramatically take to the offensive and discredit his attacker. And what better way than to point to that attacker’s self-destruction as overwhelming evidence of a deranged and unbalanced character?”

“Assuming that you are right, why would Ott, having accomplished his mission of making a murder look like a suicide, then bait you into a fight?”

“Aha!” Billings crowed. “Why indeed? I’ll grant you that he didn’t know for sure I would be in Cowley’s Thursday night, but — and this is a big ‘but’ — anyone who knows my, shall we say, habits, knows that I stop at Cowley’s more nights than I don’t. So the odds were on his side. Now, Frank Ott already had gotten rid of Childress, but that wasn’t enough for him. He also wanted to ruin me if he could. He hated me for pointing out Charles’s many deficiencies as a writer.”

I snorted. “So he got to his feet and meekly let you punch out his lights?”

Billings stretched both arms above his head and made Vs with the fingers of each hand, in the manner of one R. M. Nixon. “Precisely! He threw out the line, and I took the bait. He goaded me, knowing I would lose my temper and do something stupid. He set himself to take the punch, which also was pretty stupid. In the midst of all this stupidity, I did one smart thing, though. I went to my bosses at Westman & Lane the morning after the episode — yesterday — and told them exactly what happened. They’re very understanding, I’m happy to report.

“And now, Mr. Goodwin, you’ll say good-bye,” Billings snarled, finally rising from the sofa to gesture me to the door. I was only too glad to leave.

Twenty

By the time I found myself on the sidewalk in front of Keith Billings’s building, lunch already was well underway in the brownstone. Rather than disturb Wolfe’s digestion by barging in at mid-meal, I ducked into a hole-in-the-wall eatery on First Avenue that dishes up the best hot turkey sandwiches in the city, a fact they proclaim in scarlet capital letters and an exclamation point on a white canvas banner six feet wide that stretches across a wall behind the counter. I straddled a stool, ordering the house specialty — what else? — along with a glass of milk, and I chewed on both the sandwich and our case.

Debra Mitchell assured us that a wildly jealous Patricia Royce had Childress’s blood on her hands; Belinda Meeker appeared convinced that her cousin, Clarice Wingfield, did the deed; and now, Keith Billings was pointing his finger at Franklin Ott. So far, nobody had directly accused Billings, Ms. Mitchell, or the arrogant Wilbur Hobbs, but my reading was that with a little encouragement, I could get each of these three also nominated as the killer by one or more of the other suspects.