Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“That’s wonderful.”

“Yes, you’d have been proud of me,” said David Barr.

“I am goingto be murdered,” Mavis Mallory said, “and I want you to do something about it.”

Haig did something, all right. He spun around in his swivel chair and stared into the fish tank. There’s a whole roomful of tanks on the top floor, and other aquariums, which he wishes I would call aquaria, scattered throughout the house.

(Well, not the whole house. The whole house is a carriage house on West Twentieth Street, and on the top two floors live Leo Haig and Wong Fat and more tropical fish than you could shake a jar of tubifex worms at, but the lower two floors are still occupied by Madam Juana and her girls. How do you say filles de joie in Spanish, anyway? Never mind. If all of this sounds a little like a cut-rate, low-rent version of Nero Wolfe’s establishment on West Thirty-fifth Street, the similarity is not accidental. Haig, you see, was a lifelong reader of detective fiction, and a penny-ante breeder of tropical fish until a legacy made him financially independent. And he was a special fan of the Wolfe canon, and he thinks that Wolfe really exists, and that if he, Leo Haig, does a good enough job with the cases that come his way, sooner or later he might get invited to dine at the master’s table.)

“Mr. Haig—”

“Huff,” Haig said.

Except that he didn’t exactly say huff. He went huff. He’s been reading books lately by Sondra Ray and Leonard Orr and Phil Laut, books on rebirthing and physical immortality, and the gist of it seems to be that if you do enough deep circular breathing and clear out your limiting deathist thoughts, you can live forever. I don’t know how he’s doing with his deathist thoughts, but he’s been breathing up a storm lately, as if air were going to be rationed any moment and he wants to get the jump on it.

He huffed again and studied the rasboras, which were the fish that were to-and-froing it in the ten-gallon tank behind his desk. Their little gills never stopped working, so I figured they’d live forever, too, unless their deathist thoughts were lurking to do them in. Haig gave another huff and turned around to look at our client.

She was worth looking at. Tall, willowy, richly curved, with a mane of incredible red hair. Last August I went up to Vermont, toward the end of the month, and all the trees were green except here and there you’d see one in the midst of all that green that had been touched by an early frost and turned an absolutely flaming scarlet, and that was the color of Mavis Mallory’s hair. Haig’s been quoting a lot of lines lately about the rich abundance of the universe we live in, especially when I suggest he’s spending too much on fish and equipment, and looking at our client I had to agree with him. We live in an abundant world, all right.

“Murdered,” he said.

She nodded.

“By whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“For what reason?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you want me to prevent it.”

“No.”

His eyes widened. “I beg your pardon?”

“How could you prevent it?” She wrinkled her nose at him. “I understand you’re a genius, but what defense could you provide against a determined killer? You’re not exactly the physical type.”

Haig, who has been described as looking like a basketball with an Afro, huffed in reply. “My own efforts are largely in the cerebral sphere,” he admitted. “But my associate, Mr. Harrison, is physically resourceful as well, and—” he made a tent of his fingertips “—still, your point is well taken. Neither Mr. Harrison nor I are bodyguards. If you wish a bodyguard, there are larger agencies which—”

But she was shaking her head. “A waste of time,” she said. “The whole Secret Service can’t protect a president from a lone deranged assassin. If I’m destined to be murdered, I’m willing to accede to my destiny.”

“Huff,” Haig huffed.

“What I want you to do,” she said, “and Mr. Harrison, of course, except that he’s so young I feel odd calling him by his last name.” She smiled winningly at me. “Unless you object to the familiarity?”

“Call me Chip,” I said.

“I’m delighted. And you must call me Mavis.”

“Huff.”

“Who wants to murder you?” I asked.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “It sometimes seems to me that everyone does. It’s been four years since I took over as publisher of Mallory’s Mystery Magazine upon my father’s death, and you’d be amazed how many enemies you can make in a business like this.”

Haig asked if she could name some of them.

“Well, there’s Abner Jenks. He’d been editor for years and thought he’d have a freer hand with my father out of the picture. When I reshuffled the corporate structure and created Mavis Publications, Inc., I found out he’d been taking kickbacks from authors and agents in return for buying their stories. I got rid of him and took over the editorial duties myself.”

“And what became of Jenks?”

“I pay him fifty cents a manuscript to read slush pile submissions. And he picks up some freelance work for other magazines as well, and he has plenty of time to work on his own historical novel about the Venerable Bede. Actually,” she said, “he ought to be grateful to me.”

“Indeed,” Haig said.

“And there’s Darrell Crenna. He’s the owner of Mysterious Ink, the mystery bookshop on upper Madison Avenue. He wanted Dorothea Trill, the Englishwoman who writes those marvelous gardening mysteries, to do a signing at his store. In fact he’d advertised the appearance, and I had to remind him that Miss Trill’s contract with Mavis Publications forbids her from making any appearances in the States without our authorization.”

“Which you refused to give.”

“I felt it would cheapen the value of Dorothea’s personal appearances to have her make too many of them. After all, Crenna talked an author out of giving a story to Mallory’s on the same grounds, so you could say he was merely hoist with his own petard. Or strangled by his own clematis vine, like the woman in Dorothea’s latest.” Her face clouded. “I hope I haven’t spoiled the ending for you?”

“I’ve already read it,” Haig said.

“I’m glad of that. Or I should have to add you to the list of persons with a motive for murdering me, shouldn’t I? Let me see now. Lotte Benzler belongs on the list. You must know her shop. The Murder Store?”

Haig knew it well, and said so. “And I trust you’ve supplied Ms. Benzler with an equally strong motive? Kept an author from her door? Refused her permission to reprint a story from Mallory’s in one of the anthologies she edits?”

“Actually,” our client said, “I fear I did something rather more dramatic than that. You know Bart Halloran?”

“The creator of Rocky Sledge, who’s so hard-boiled he makes Mike Hammer seem poached? I’ve read him, of course, but I don’t know him.”

“Poor Lotte came to know him very well,” Mavis Mallory purred, “and then I met dear Bart, and then it was I who came to know him very well.” She sighed. “I don’t think Lotte has ever forgiven me. All’s fair in love and publishing, but some people don’t seem to realize it.”

“So there are three people with a motive for murdering you.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are more than three. Let’s not forget Bart, shall we? He was able to shrug it off when I dropped him, but he took it harder when his latest got a bad review in Mallory’s. But I thought Kiss My Gat was a bad book, and why should I say otherwise?” She sighed again. “Poor Bart,” she said. “I understand his sales are slipping. Still, he’s still a name, isn’t he? And he’ll be there Friday night.”