Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Indeed?” Haig raised his eyebrows. He’s been practicing in front of the mirror, trying to raise just one eyebrow, but so far he hasn’t got the knack of it. “And just where will Mr. Halloran be Friday night?”

“Where they’ll all be,” Mavis Mallory said. “At Town Hall, for the panel discussion and reception to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mallory’s Mystery Magazine. Do you know, I believe everyone with a motive to murder me will be gathered together in one room?” She shivered happily. “What more could a mystery fan ask for?”

“Don’t attend,” Haig said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she told him. “I’m Mavis Mallory of Mavis Publications. I am Mallory’s — in fact I’ve been called the Mallory Queen. I’ll be chairing the panel discussion and hosting the celebration. How could I possibly fail to be present?”

“Then get bodyguards.”

“They’d put such a damper on the festivities. And I already told you they’d be powerless against a determined killer.”

“Miss Mallory—”

“And please don’t tell me to wear a bulletproof vest. They haven’t yet designed one that flatters the full-figured woman.”

I swallowed, reminded again that we live in an abundant universe. “You’ll be killed,” Haig said flatly.

“Yes,” said our client, “I rather suspect I shall. I’m paying you a five thousand dollar retainer now, in cash, because you might have a problem cashing a check if I were killed before it cleared. And I’ve added a codicil to my will calling for payment to you of an additional twenty thousand dollars upon your solving the circumstances of my death. And I do trust you and Chip will attend the reception Friday night? Even if I’m not killed, it should be an interesting evening.”

“I have readof a tribe of Africans,” Haig said dreamily, “who know for certain that gunshot wounds are fatal. When one of their number is wounded by gunfire, he falls immediately to the ground and lies still, waiting for death. He does this even if he’s only been nicked in the finger, and, by the following morning, death will have inevitably claimed him.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “Has it got anything to do with the Mallory Queen?”

“It has everything to do with her. The woman—” he huffed again, and I don’t think it had much to do with circular breathing “—the damnable woman is convinced she will be murdered. It would profoundly disappoint her to be proved wrong. She wants to be murdered, Chip, and her thoughts are creative, even as yours and mine. In all likelihood she will die on Friday night. She would have it no other way.”

“If she stayed home,” I said. “If she hired bodyguards—”

“She will do neither. But it would not matter if she did. The woman is entirely under the influence of her own death urge. Her death urge is stronger than her life urge. How could she live in such circumstances?”

“If that’s how you feel, why did you take her money?”

“Because all abundance is a gift from the universe,” he said loftily. “Further, she engaged us not to protect her but to avenge her, to solve her murder. I am perfectly willing to undertake to do that.” Huff. “You’ll attend the reception Friday night, of course.”

“To watch our client get the axe?”

“Or the dart from the blowpipe, or the poisoned cocktail, or the bullet, or the bite from the coral snake, or what you will. Perhaps you’ll see something that will enable us to solve her murder on the spot and earn the balance of our fee.”

“Won’t you be there? I thought you’d planned to go.”

“I had,” he said. “But that was before Miss Mallory transformed the occasion from pleasure to business. Nero Wolfe never leaves his house on business, and I think the practice a sound one. You will attend in my stead, Chip. You will be my eyes and my legs. Huff. ”

I was still saying things like Yes, but when he swept out of the room and left for an appointment with his rebirther. Once a week he goes all the way up to Washington Heights, where a woman named Lori Schneiderman gets sixty dollars for letting him stretch out on her floor and watching him breathe. It seems to me that for that kind of money he could do his huffing in a bed at the Plaza Hotel, but what do I know?

He’d left a page full of scribbling on his desk and I cleared it off to keep any future clients from spotting it. I, Leo, am safe and immortal right now, he’d written five times. You, Leo, are safe and immortal right now, he’d written another five times. Leo is safe and immortal right now, he’d written a final five times. This was how he was working through his unconscious death urge and strengthening his life urge. I tell you, a person has to go through a lot of crap if he wants to live forever.

Friday night foundme at Town Hall, predictably enough. I wore my suit for the occasion and got there early enough to snag a seat down front, where I could keep a private eye on things.

There were plenty of things to keep an eye on. The audience swarmed with readers and writers of mystery and detective fiction, and if you want an idea of who was in the house, just write out a list of your twenty-five favorite authors and be sure that seventeen or eighteen of them were in the house. I saw some familiar faces, a woman who’d had a long run as the imperiled heroine of a Broadway suspense melodrama, a man who’d played a police detective for three years on network television, and others whom I recognized from films or television but couldn’t place out of context.

On stage, our client Mavis Mallory occupied the moderator’s chair. She was wearing a strapless and backless floor-length black dress, and in combination with her creamy skin and fiery hair, its effect was dramatic. If I could have changed one thing it would have been the color of the dress. I suppose Haig would have said it was the color of her unconscious death urge.

Her panelists were arranged in a semicircle around her. I recognized some but not others, but before I could extend my knowledge through subtle investigative technique, the entire panel was introduced. The members included Darrell Crenna of Mysterious Ink and Lotte Benzler of The Murder Store. The two sat on either side of our client, and I just hoped she’d be safe from the daggers they were looking at each other.

Rocky Sledge’s creator, dressed in his standard outfit of chinos and a T-shirt with the sleeve rolled to contain a pack of unfiltered Camels, was introduced as Bartholomew Halloran. “Make that Bart,” he snapped. If you know what’s good for you, he might have added.

Halloran was sitting at Mavis Mallory’s left. A tall and very slender woman with elaborately coiffed hair and a lorgnette sat between him and Darrell Crenna. She turned out to be Dorothea Trill, the Englishwoman who wrote gardening mysteries. I always figured the chief gardening mystery was what to do with all the zucchini. Miss Trill seemed a little looped, but maybe it was the lorgnette.

On our client’s other side, next to Lotte Benzler, sat a man named Austin Porterfield. He was a Distinguished Professor of English Literature at New York University, and he’d recently published a rather learned obituary of the mystery story in the New York Review of Books. According to him, mystery fiction had drawn its strength over the years from the broad base of its popular appeal. Now other genres had more readers, and thus mystery writers were missing the mark. If they wanted to be artistically important, he advised them, then get busy producing Harlequin romances and books about nurses and stewardesses.

On Mr. Porterfield’s other side was Janice Cowan, perhaps the most prominent book editor in the mystery field. For years she had moved from one important publishing house to another, and at each of them she had her own private imprint. “A Jan Cowan Novel of Suspense” was a good guarantee of literary excellence, whoever happened to be Miss Cowan’s employer that year.