By Marv Waschke channeling Rex Stout
My name is Archie Goodwin. I work for Nero Wolfe, the detective with largest circumference in New York City. In an earlier time, a person with Wolfe’s girth would have been stuffed and put on exhibition by P.T. Barnum. Wolfe also believes he is the most intelligent detective in New York City. He could be right. The 20 stone genius lives with me and Fritz Brenner in an old brownstone in midtown Manhattan. Fritz is Swiss and New York’s greatest chef. You need only ask Nero Wolfe, or me, about Fritz’s cooking.
That Thursday morning, I had the blues. The postman left a letter from my Aunt June in Chillicothe, Ohio. My uncle Jerry, who used to take me fishing for catfish on a lake a couple miles east of town, has had cancer in his left leg for two years now. He started taking an experimental drug, novoquinalone, last year and we were all hopeful. The docs said his cancer was shrinking. Today, Aunt June wrote to say that the drug helped a few patients like Uncle Jerry, but only a few, and the drug company had called it quits. They gave Uncle Jerry a supply of the drug to last a couple more months, but the company would not manufacture any more. It did not look good for Uncle Jerry.
I am Wolfe’s beast of burden, amanuensis, and jack-of-all-trades. My job is to stand in the way of anything that might cause Wolfe to leave the house, miss a meal, or interrupt his twice-daily thrips-chasing sessions in his orchid greenhouse on the roof. I also do some detecting when my other duties don’t interfere.
I didn’t know his name at the time, but Welch rang the doorbell on Thursday at twelve-thirty, post meridiem. I stepped out onto the stoop to talk to him. A taxi was pulling away at the corner. Out of habit, I noticed the number. I told Welch it was a bad time, but he insisted on seeing Wolfe. His left eye twitched. Something was wrong with him, I couldn’t say what, but I took pity on the poor guy and let him in.
“I’ll ask Wolfe, but no promises.” His jaw sagged, but he let me take his hat and coat.
Lunch is at one sharp in the Wolfe household. Fritz had set the table for a simple meal by Wolfe’s standards. Shad roe on toast with caper sauce and shallots, stone crab claws, marinated Brussels sprouts, spiced cold tongue, and Caesar salad garnished with Portuguese anchovies.
A year ago, I flew my Aunt June to New York to take her mind off Uncle Jerry’s illness and teach Fritz to make a proper apple pie. After Wolfe simmered down from the affront of a woman in his kitchen, he has insisted Fritz make Aunt June’s pie on the first Thursday every month. Last October, Wolfe suggested that Fritz replace the Rome apples in Aunt June’s recipe with his favorite upstate apple, Cortlands. Wolfe, Fritz, and me agreed that the Cortlands were a success. Wolfe FedEx-ed my aunt a bushel of upstate Cortlands and she graciously agreed that they were excellent, but I don’t think she made any pies with them. Today was Aunt June’s apple pie day and the old brownstone smelled pretty good.
I told Welch I did not expect Wolfe to see him until after lunch at two. He looked at me like I had drowned a kitten. I didn’t get him. He wore a well-cut gray worsted suit, conservative and expensive, but his eyes had the glassy dilated pupils of a junkie and his moves were jerky. I didn’t think he was high, but he looked like he had taken something strong.
I parked Welch in the front room and closed the door while I checked with Wolfe. The lock on the front room door is fixed to automatically snap shut. That way guests parked in the front room can’t wander through the house. We had a problem with a wandering guest on a case some years back. Since then, we have taken precautions.
Wolfe was in the office, reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I described Welch’s condition and his request. With lunch on its way to the table, and apple pie in the air, Wolfe of course refused to see him. I scribbled the taxi number on my pad; I hate to let a fact escape after I have it in captivity.
Wolfe asked what I had written down. When I replied, he said “Pfui” and returned to tipping points.
After a moment, he squinted in the way that shows he is peering into the future and surveyed my desk, which was clean except for my pad.
“Call Saul Panzer. I want to speak to him. And get out of the office. Watch our guest.”
I got Saul and connected him with Wolfe. Saul is a free-lance detective who is almost as much of a marvel as I am. I went to the kitchen and picked up the extension.
“Archie, hang up!” Wolfe kicked me off the line. He does that when he thinks I don’t need to know.
I left the dining room and unlocked the front room door to tell Welch that he had an hour or more to wait, and show him the door if he wanted out.
He was on the divan with his head flopped down on his white shirt. The neck was at an unhealthy angle. Vomit fumes were in the air, and I knew that with lunch ready and Fritz serving, the cleanup detail would be mine. It’s in the job description.
I bent over gingerly and touched his carotid. There was no hurry about calling 911. I adjusted the position of the corpse to keep the organic fluids off the upholstery for the moment and used my handkerchief to slip his wallet out of his breast pocket. John Welch, Manhattan address, a good size roll of cash. I slipped the wallet back, and returned to the office. Wolfe had finished his call.
“Welch refuses to leave,” I said to Wolfe. He contorted his jowls into what a charitable audience might pass as a frown.
“Pfui. Is this flummery? You have a pistol. Shoot him. I won’t see him and I won’t have him in my house, no matter who he is.”
I shot back my best supercilious look, which I have been working on ever since Wolfe told me what supercilious means. He knows I won’t shoot anything without a darn good reason.
“Shooting won’t do any good. He’s already dead. I don’t think I can delay calling 911 much longer.” I gave him the details. My ability to gather and give details is one of the reasons I am a marvel.
“Can’t you wait until after lunch? The shad roe is at its peak.”
I doubled down on supercilious. Shad roe at its freshest and best is only so-so with me.
“I suppose we could say that we didn’t notice him until after lunch, but somehow, Inspector Cramer is bound to show up, and you know he won’t buy it. Besides, Mr. Creepy is leaking fluids. I want him in a body bag before he ruins the divan.”
“Confound it. My house will be swarming with Cramer’s vandals. I won’t stand for it. I didn’t invite this…” Wolf clenched his teeth. “This person.” He grimaced and looked longingly toward the dining room. “Give me ten minutes with the shad roe, then make your infernal phone call. Surely that will do. And don’t tell the vandals that I am at lunch. Imply that I have gone out. Maybe they won’t bother me.”
“Fat chance,” I muttered. Wolfe might as well join King Canute and go to work on the tide. Sometimes I have hunches, hunches that don’t make sense at the time, but turn out to be brilliant. I had one now: fatty had seen a way to get an advantage from the body in the front room.
He hoisted himself from his chair. It always amazes me how deftly he moves his seventh of a ton to the dining room without crushing something. Turning like a grotesque ballerina, he aimed for the dining room door, floated across the hall, circled the table, and placed himself in his chair without hitting anything. Fritz was there to slide him under the table. There he was, facing the dining room door, tucking in his napkin.
Whatever I think, I work for Wolfe. If he says wait, I wait. With ten minutes to kill, I sat down at my desk and entered hand written orchid breeding records into the computer. I have shown Wolfe how to enter the records directly into his iPad with the app I paid a kid to write, but the fatty claims he can’t use it, which is hypocritical because he has no problem using the Fulton Fish Market app to check on shad roe deliveries.
When Wolfe’s ten minutes were up, I picked up the phone on my desk and dialed. I told the 911 operator that a dead body was leaking on the divan, but there was no hurry, modern cleaning products being what they are. She had no sense of humor.
The EMTs arrived first. One was female. Wolfe would fuss over that, but I still brought them in. I considered letting the lock snap and confine them to the front room, but thought better of it and pushed the button on the latch to click the lock off. It didn’t take the kids long to deduce that this one was for Inspector Cramer from homicide. They stayed until the first squad of scientists arrived with crime scene tape, and then skedaddled off to save lives.
The scientists were intent on sniffing and bagging. They did not even look up when Cramer burst in the front door. I took his hat and coat and hung them up. He was still wearing his heavy winter coat. It was chilly this March, although on the first of the month I had switched from wool to a light over coat. A man must stick to his principles. Cramer knows Wolfe’s schedule as well as I do, and he knew he was barging in on Wolfe’s lunch. That made Cramer noticeably cheerful, which is grotesque and made me cringe.
Wolfe finished the shad roe, but he had not made it through the stone crab when the vandals began kicking each other’s butts and taking each other’s names in style. Aunt June’s apple pie would have to be eaten cold, unless NYPD’s finest confiscated the pie as evidence like they did a platter of Fritz’s home-cured corn beef sandwiches the time a blackmailer slipped into the office, shot me in the leg, and Cramer got a bench warrant to chase me through the house trying to capture my other leg. More details some other time.
“Well Goodwin, who’s the client?” Cramer said with as much of grin as he could muster.
“No client,” I said.
Cramer gave me a look that would have been natural on a shad.
“Where’s Wolfe? I am talking to him.”
“Sorry, he’s not available at the moment.”
Cramer glanced at his wristwatch. “Nuts. He’s eating his lunch, and now his lunch is going to be interrupted,” he said, striding to the dining room door.
Cramer threw the door open just as Wolfe was lifting a choice morsel of stone crab claw to his mouth. Wolfe’s eyebrows rose and the whites of his eyes began to show. He returned the crab meat to his plate. Cramer may not have known it, or maybe he did, but for Wolfe, the conveyor belt from plate to his mouth is sacrosanct. Interrupting a meal is barbaric; stopping the conveyor is an abomination.
“Who’s your client?” Cramer barked.
“What business is it of yours?” Wolfe barked back. I leaned against the doorframe, ready for canine entertainment.
“Homicides in Manhattan are my business. This is Manhattan. Who’s your client?”
“Your reasoning is faulty, but I’ll make a concession to your mental processes. I have no client.”
I nodded my head. “That’s right Mr. Cramer. No clients and the bank account is low. We were just discussing hiring out to the carnival. Wolfe can wear a wig and be the fat lady. I have experience taming lions.”
“Maybe it’s time for me to pack you up and haul you off to the station,” Cramer snapped. He gestured to Sergeant Purley Stebbins, Cramer’s private muscle.
“Archie, call Nathaniel Parker,” Wolfe said.
Parker is Wolfe’s lawyer with three degrees from Harvard, no soul and less sense of humor. Cramer has tangled with Parker many times, and carries scars to help him remember.
“Aw nuts,” Cramer said.
He extracted a cigar from his breast pocket and rolled it between his hands. He never smokes them. Inspector Cramer’s cigars are hand props, not smokes. I am grateful. On an inspector’s salary, they were more likely Tampa Throwouts than Dunhill Cabrares.
“Do you know anything about Welch? What he was doing in your front room?”
“You’ll have to ask Archie. I know nothing about it,” Wolfe replied. If Inspector Cramer hates Wolfe, the right verb to describe his attitude toward me is beyond my vocabulary. Wolfe might know the proper word.
“Well, Goodwin?”
“He came to the door. I locked him in the front room to wait. I thought his suit was conservative for a man who worked for a living. That’s about it.”
Cramer glared. Wolfe finished his interrupted forkful of crab, but he was gritting his teeth so hard he had trouble opening his mouth. He set down his fork.
“Do you know who he is?” Wolfe said.
“We know his name, we know he was a consultant for Doilette, Rareby, and Follette. An expert on dressing IPOs, whatever that means, not much else,” the inspector said.
“An IPO dresser tidies up the books for messy little companies that want to go public. It can drift into securities fraud,” I said. I read the business page of the Times, unlike ordinary operatives who never get past the true crime section in Newsday.
“When did you get your MBA?” Cramer said, putting more emphasis on “you” than I cared for.
“I am entering high finance the day Mr. Wolfe starts paying a living wage.” Wolfe hates it when I discuss my salary with the city officials. I get regular raises, but raises are like potato chips. One is never enough.
“Enough! You know nothing. All of you. Get out of my dining room!” Wolfe stormed.
Bye bye Miss American Pie, I thought.
Inspector Cramer started to retreat. If his people had any clues, he would not have laid off Wolfe that easily.
The doorbell rang. One of the city hired help shuffled toward the door, but I headed him off. If I deserved a living wage, I had better cover my station. I cracked the door.
“Where’s Wolfe? We have to see him now,” a baritone alpha male voice boomed. Behind him, a smaller less-alpha male stood quietly.
“Go away. He’s busy.” I used my best beta male voice. It drives alphas crazy when a beta orders them around. I closed the door in the baritone’s face.
He started to pushed back, but I slid the battering-ram-proof bolt on him. He began to pound on the door.
“Police! Police! I need a policeman,” I yelled. “Vandals are at the door.” I like to put mileage on the civic employees in my life.
Inspector Cramer shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Take care of that clown, Purley,” he growled at Stebbins.
Purley, spoke quietly into the microphone on his lapel. Three seconds later the baritone alpha was talking to a pair of gorillas with guns, badges, handcuffs, and no sympathy.
“He wants to come in,” the gorilla most resembling a human being said through the door.
I had already detected that. “What does he want?”
The baritone wanted to see Wolfe about Welch, Cramer wanted to see the baritone. Wolfe was not leaving the dining room. I had a decision: send the baritone packing, let Cramer at him, or bring him to Wolfe. I brought him to Wolfe.
I opened the door and the gorillas pushed them in. I grabbed the baritone’s elbow and powered him into the dining room. The gorillas followed with the little guy. Wolfe was shoving in a Brussels sprout as we entered.
“I am Dr. Julian Townsend, this is Dr. Ralph Tinger. We are hiring you to sandbag a rat, John Welch. He is destroying my IPO.” There was something furtive about Tinger. It would not be polite to describe my impression of Townsend.
“I don’t discuss business at meals,” Wolfe said without looking up as he surveyed his plate, choosing a morsel to send to its undeserved end.
“Of course you do. Everyone discusses business at lunch. That is what lunch is for.”
Saying that to Nero Wolfe brings consequences.
“You sir, are a barbarian and an idiot. Get out of my dining room. You pollute my air.” Wolfe did not bother to raise his voice, but he raised his shoulders an eighth of an inch, showing the extent of his extremis.
“But I intend to pay. I want to hire you.”
“I do not sandbag rats for a living nor do I deal with barbaric idiots.” Wolfe looked up at Cramer. “Inspector Cramer, could I ask you to extract this debris from my dining room? Throw him in jail. I press trespassing charges.”
“Can’t. Goodwin let him in.”
“That was imprudent, Archie.” Wolfe wrinkled his lips in my direction, doing his best to express distaste. Since distaste already dripped from his every pore, the effect was minimal.
“Remove him,” Wolfe said.
“Ix-nay. Ou-yay ould-cay use-ay a-ay ient-clay,” I uttered in a secret code that Wolfe would understand.
The phone rang in the office. A civil servant moved to pick it up, but I was faster and got it first. “Ah, ah, ahhh,” I said, waving a finger at him. “This telephone is still private.”
It was Saul for Wolfe. “Saul, Mr. Wolfe,” I shouted across the hall into the dining room. “Do you want to take it?” Without waiting, I carried the portable to Wolfe. To my surprise, he took the phone from me and began speaking quietly, but not quietly enough for my sharp ears.
“Wolfe here—Hmmmh, I see.” He listened for half a minute, staring at his reflection in the tabletop Fritz kept carefully polished. “You’ve spoken to Mr. Cohen? Do you want more time? … Ah, yes.” So Saul was talking to Lon Cohen at the Gazette. At that point, Wolfe listened for three minutes forty-seven seconds. I checked it by my watch. Saul bills us for his time and I check the bills.
Wolfe’s switched the phone off and handed it to me.
“Confound it! Sit down, all of you.” Wolfe likes eyes at a level. He can’t be bothered to tilt his head back, so everyone else must sit. Pure logic. “Fritz, clear the lunch service from the table, leave the sideboard.” My jaw dropped. Once or twice in the past ten years, Wolfe has cut his lunch short, but he has never, never, never conducted business in the dining room. But there were city employees and Aunt June’s apple pie in the house, both of which bore watching. Inspector Cramer put his unlit cigar back into his breast pocket.
When the shuffling of chairs settled down, Purley Stebbins was standing in the doorway, but Townsend, Tinger, Cramer, and I were all seated. Fritz stood in the kitchen door.
Wolfe began.
“You. Mr. Townsend. Why did you come here? Who is Welch to you?”
Townsend looked around at his audience seated at the table. Wolfe’s dark eyebrows were lowered, his half-eaten lunch removed. I wondered if Wolfe would nap during the slow parts. Tinger, assorted employees of the NYPD, and Inspector Cramer all more or less focused on Wolfe. The silver coffee service on the mahogany sideboard glittered in the March sun that had found a chink in the clouds, but no coffee was forthcoming. Fritz had placed Aunt June’s apple pie under a glass cover on the sideboard. Wolfe’s eye darted to the pie, then back to Townsend.
“I won’t answer to an audience,” Townsend replied. He was still an alpha baritone.
“Mr, Townsend, surely these questions can be answered from the public record. Your demand for privacy is fatuous.” Wolfe scratched with his fingernail at an invisible spot on his tie. He hates spots on his tie. Especially the invisible ones that he can’t see to remove.
“I intend to say things that are not on the public record,” Townsend baritoned.
Wolfe shook his head a quarter of an inch from side to side. “Inspector Cramer may be interested in private conversations, but I am not. Let’s leave it where it is. Why did you come? Who is, was, Welch to you?”
“I won’t answer. I want a private discussion.”
“I am not a member of the bar. If you say anything to me that is material to a crime, I am obliged to inform Inspector Cramer.”
“Damn right he is,” Cramer interceded and chomped on his unlit cigar.
“You see, Mr. Townsend, you might as well answer me now,” Wolfe said. “I can and will find the answers if I care to, and Inspector Cramer has many more resources than I.”
The little guy who came with Townsend took over for his alpha friend. “Townsend is CEO of Zismus. A drug research and development start up. I’m head of research and working on a drug for Alzheimer’s.” Tinger’s voice was not baritone, but it wasn’t falsetto either, and he used what he had. “It’s a drug to make a start-up wealthy– every year more patients will take the drug daily for the rest of their lives to ward off dementia. That is a market for you! The results have been promising and Townsend is considering an IPO. Up to now, Zismus has had no time to hire MBA s. We practice research, not business management. The Zismus books are a mess and there are a dozen other things to tidy up that Wall Street and the SEC would not like. As Zismus stands, an IPO is out of the question. So Townsend went out and found Welch to get us ready for an IPO and the SEC. It’s not news that I think Welch is a supercilious little prig and an IPO is premature, but I didn’t want him dead. We want you to clear this up Mr. Wolfe. We are low on cash, but we can offer shares in a good thing.”
That was quite a speech for a beta and called for a reassessment of Dr. Tinger. I did not expect this give and take between the Zismus’s alpha and beta.
Wolfe yawned before he spoke.
“In some ways, our interests may correspond, but I will not discuss fees until the job is clearly defined.” Wolfe said. I knew he had no interest in stock speculation, but I took a note. This was the first time Wolfe ever negotiated with a client in front of Inspector Cramer. Townsend and Tinger exchanged quizzical glances.
“Mr. Townsend, do you concur with Dr. Tinger’s account?” Wolfe asked. I pinched myself. Not only was he negotiating, he was actually investigating a murder, or what appeared to be a murder, at the dining room table. It was hard to believe. I slipped out my iPhone and discretely snapped a few pictures. Posterity demands proof. Wolfe squinted, reducing the distance between his upper and lower lids by a thirty-second of an inch. He had caught me in the act, but he went on.
Townsend was silent, but he clenched his fists tightly enough to turn his knuckles white. I was not sure if it was only an alpha frustrated by an upstart beta, or if something more significant was happening.
“Mr. Townsend, are you willing to let Dr. Tinger speak for you?” Wolfe put a challenge to Townsend’s alphahood in his voice. He is very good at theatrics, especially when he wants something badly, like his lunch.
“I would rather do this in private. It may be public record, but it is embarrassing to me.” His alpha was fading.
“So you have more than a financial interest in the Zismus’s success?” Wolfe was at his mildest, wearing Townsend down with sandpaper instead of his usual handful of crushed gravel.
“Yes, I do. I have always had an interest in saving lives, but instead of medical school, I became involved in research. Eventually Tinger and I formed the Zismus partnership. Later, I found several rounds of venture capital cash for us, but the VCs are getting restless.”
“VCs?” Wolfe raised an eyebrow inquisitively.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Jargon. Venture capitalists. Groups that invest in startup companies follow strict formulas to avoid throwing good money after bad. The more they invest, the more cautious they become about investing more. At a certain point, a startup must go public or die. Zismus is at that point.”
“So the two of you are about to go bankrupt?”
Tinger half rose, then thought better of it, and sunk back into his chair, but he spoke up. “We lose everything and a few dozen employees who have been working at slave wages in hope that their stock grants will make them millionaires when we go public.”
“I assume you and Townsend have large stock grants also?”
Townsend answered this time. “Yes, of course. If Zismus succeeds as we expect, we will be counting our millions. But for now, we look for spare change in the davenport to buy pizza.”
“And you are sure about the coming windfall?” The set of Wolfe’s jowl was skeptical. A private detective who counts chickens before they hatch doesn’t get to spoon caviar on his coddled eggs.
“Welch was sure we would make it and he is, was, the expert. Our books are in bad shape, but he said they would do after a good scrubbing. And the reports on our research look good. Another month and we should be ready.” That was Townsend. His baritone was losing its confidence.
Tinger spoke up. “We are not ready. If we IPO, it will be a complete bust. Our latest field tests have been disappointing. We don’t have it right yet. If those tests get out, we are dead.” Tinger was not speaking loudly, but with conviction.
“Welch said they didn’t have to get out.”
“Welch is a crooked ignoramus. If the drug does not work, we are ruined. The tests show it doesn’t work. It’s crooked to ignore the results and he is an ignoramus if he thinks the results can be hidden.”
Wolfe smiled faintly and said “Admirable, Dr. Tinger, but if the drug is worthless, why not thrown in the towel now? Why not accept the wisdom of your venture capitalists and stop trying to fix a bad investment with good money?”
Tinger slapped the table forcefully. “The drug is not worthless. We have three stereoisomers of the compound. The test results show our first isomer was not easily accepted by human receptors, but when it was accepted, it worked perfectly. This confirmed that the drug works. There is a good chance that one of the other isomers will be clinically effective. We’ve got to hold on until the other two can be tested.”
“I have to take your word for that,” Wolfe said. “You are talking mumbo-jumbo to me. How long would these additional tests take?”
“Six months would be enough testing to satisfy the VC s for another round of financing, or enough for an IPO. The FDA will require much more testing before we can put the drug on the market.”
“He’s right. But we can complete the tests after the IPO. We have to move now.” A little baritone had returned to Townsend’s voice.
“And jeopardize ever bringing the drug to market?” Tinger’s face reddened. Anger, I guess.
“Will it matter if we are all homeless, eating dog food from a tin can?” Townsend’s voice had become a beta baritone. I decided to work on reproducing that voice the next time I am in the shower, but I will not describe Wolfe’s facial reaction to that last comment.
“Are you in debt Mr. Townsend? I warn you, I have checked your bona fides.” That must have been Saul Panzer’s phone call.
“My affairs are private!” Townsend stood up. He had raised his hands like a boxer in fighting position. If the dining room table had not separated him from Wolfe, I would have moved in on him, but the table could protect Wolfe as well as I could. Besides, Purley was behind Townsend and had put a fatherly hand on his shoulder. Without a word, the fatherly hand pushed Townsend back into his chair. Inspector Cramer’s attention perked up.
“I’ll take over from here,” the inspector barked.
“You will not!” Wolfe barked back. The old dogfight again. “This is my house, my dining room, and I will preside at my table. If you want to question my guests, take them and your vandals to your station. I have no stake in this investigation other than regaining the peace of my house. Get out of here or let me investigate. Either way, Inspector. Archie, call Mr. Parker. Apprise him.” Again, Wolfe glanced at Aunt June’s apple pie on the sideboard. It had cooled by now, but, as the man said, there are only two good kinds of pie: hot and cold.
“Go ahead. But I warn you, this is my crime scene,” Inspector Cramer growled.
“Your crime scene, my house,” Wolfe growled back.
I stepped toward the office to call Parker to sort it out, but Wolfe stopped me. “Archie, that call can wait if the inspector stays in his place.”
Cramer rumbled, but did not say anything intelligible.
Wolfe continued. “Mr. Townsend, would you like to tell us about your finances? Or shall I report?” Wolfe said.
Townsend’s energy trickled down to his feet and onto the floor. “I’m worse than broke. Every credit card is maxed out. I’m behind on every payment. Our house is foreclosed. My wife has moved to a hotel. I’m living in the Zismus office.” The baritone was not baritone at all and the color had left his face and packed up for Fort Lauderdale. In less than three minutes he had sprouted a three-day beard.
“Did Mr. Welch know of your troubles?”
Townsend heaved a sigh and began to speak while still exhaling. “Oh yeah, he knew and reminded me every minute. He was a sadist. Every hold up, every problem, he shoved in my face, knowing how much I needed the IPO to go through. And after each one, he explained how vital he was to the solution. This morning he said he had found something so bad, he had to hire a private investigator like Nero Wolfe. Even he was shaken. When I asked what it was, he said he needed help from a top-notch investigator, but it would all work out.”
“Did he say what he wanted investigated?”
“Yes. He needed to investigate Tinger. I told him that was preposterous. He said there was a mix-up in the tissue sample records early in the research. Until the records were straightened out, we were badly exposed, he said. I asked how, but he wouldn’t say, only that the investigation would be compromised if Tinger was aware of it.”
Wolfe looked openly and longingly at Aunt June’s apple pie, then gave his head one of his mini-shakes. “Both of you, Townsend and Tinger, are biochemists?”
“We both have doctorates in biochemistry, but I am an administrator now, not a researcher. I get the grants, purchase equipment for the labs, hire the employees, and pick the associates, but I haven’t worked the soup for fifteen years,” Townsend said.
“I am also an MD, but I have never practiced medicine,” Tinger said. His face was better composed than Townsend’s.
“I suppose you both would know about poisons, poisons that would be difficult to detect,” Wolfe said smoothly.
Townsend was first to reply. “Well, yes, in theory, I suppose. But like I said, it’s been fifteen years since I did any real biochemistry. I don’t think I know any more about poisons than anyone else.”
“Poison is not a term for a biochemist.” Tinger volunteered. “You can kill with almost anything, even water can be fatal. Many anti-cancer drugs used in chemotherapy are deadly, but administered correctly, save lives. Everything is poison, nothing is poison.” As Tinger rattled off this mini-lecture for our edification, I found it instructional, Wolfe listened intently, and the city employees elbowed each other in the ribs to keep awake.
“Ah. So you know a great deal about deadly substances and how to administer them.” Wolfe tilted his head back a single degree and stared down his nose at the pair. “What do you suppose Welch wanted investigated, Dr. Tinger? He said it had to do with tissue sample records.”
Now Tinger looked at the Aunt June’s apple pie. It is a free country, but I don’t like just anyone looking at my aunt’s pie. Giving the pie two seconds scrutiny, Tinger spoke. “Well, early on, I donated a number of samples from my own tissues, but I can’t see how that would matter.”
“I didn’t know that,” Townsend said, surprise painted all over his baritone face. “I should have known that.” The golden timbre had disappeared when he admitted to penury. Now the pitch was going too. Self-realization in a bamboozled alpha is a painful sight.
“Why? Why samples from yourself?” Wolfe asked.
“I.. I.. We were short on samples and the research had to get started, so I decided my tissue would be as good as any,” Tinger tugged at his tie.
“That appears odd to me. Mr. Townsend. You say you would you have expected to know?” Wolfe’s appetite for his meals is second only to his appetite for the hunt. If he slathered, Wolfe would have been slathering now. Instead, he moved a quarter of an inch forward in his chair, one hip at a time.
“I didn’t know about the shortage. If I had, I would have contributed also,” Townsend said. “That is the kind of problem I am expected to solve.”
“I did not want to upset you,” Tinger said, not looking at anyone.
“Dr. Tinger, what could an investigator have discovered about you? Some dark secret from your youth? Something shameful in your heritage?” Wolfe was bearing down on Tinger like a highway contractor with a pavement breaker.
“No, no. Nothing like that.”
“Do you consider the disease you are attempting to cure shameful?”
“No, not at all. It is a disease. We don’t know why it occurs. There is nothing shameful about it.”
Wolfe adjusted his plump white hands into attack position on the table, but how much he knew, I still don’t know. “In some cases, Alzheimer’s is genetic, is it not?” Wolfe asked.
“In some cases, no doubt. But the overall etiology of the disease is not known.”
“But, Dr. Tinger, I believe some cases of early on-set Alzheimer’s have been studied in detail and a genetic basis has been established.”
“That’s true,” Townsend said.
“The name of the family was never revealed publicly, but perhaps it is known in research community…” Wolfe was leading them to the winners circle like dogs at the Westminster Kennel Club show.
Townsend spoke up again. “Efner was the name, Efner.” Townsend turned to Tinger. “Ralph, your mother’s name was Efner, I’m sure it was. You took a week off for her funeral when we were first year graduate students. You used my seminar notes to catch up for exams.”
“Dr. Tinger, was your mother one of the Efners in the study? If so, weighting the study with your own tissues could have grave ethical implications. This was Welch’s concern, was it not Dr. Tinger?” Wolfe glanced at the pie.
Tinger was up on his feet before Purley could put a fatherly hand on his shoulder. “I’m leaving. I’ve heard enough of this nonsense.”
“Impossible,” Wolfe said quietly. “You poisoned John Welch in my house. Inspector Cramer, could you continue your investigation at the station? I think I have done enough for you today. Take Archie with you if you need him.”
And that, I believe, was the whole point. Cramer took me to the twenty-third street station and the DA’s office. All afternoon, they asked me questions Wolfe had already answered for them.
I did not get back to the brownstone until dinner time. I was famished. Cramer and the DA were on an austerity budget and the city could not afford to offer me a sandwich.
Fritz released the bolt on the front door to let me in. The collision between the odors from the kitchen and my nostrils caused me to miss a step and drop my hat as I went inside. This was OK because after a session with Cramer and the DA, I always brush my hat thoroughly before I put it in the hall closet. I glanced in at my desk and saw the Frisky Cleaning Service card. They come in once a month to give the brownstone a thorough going over. Fritz must have called them in a week ahead of schedule. I ducked into the front room and it smelled of furniture polish and floor wax, not city employees and corpses. I had lucked out on cleaning up the fluids.
I returned to the office and sat down at my desk.
Wolfe looked up from his tipping book. “Well, were Inspector Cramer and the District Attorney satisfied?”
“Yes they were, and then some.” I grinned.
“I suppose you must report.” He heaved a sigh. “Summary only. Dinner is soon.”
I proceeded. I won’t bother to give you a verbatim report of my non-verbatim summary. That would be silly.
The nub was that Tinger had developed a drug that would only help his own genetic line. Tinger’s DNA programmed him for Alzheimer’s before he turned fifty. By donating his own tissue samples to Zismus, Tinger developed a drug to stave off his own symptoms, but it was useless to anyone but him, his sister, and three cousins. And he didn’t even bother to tell the sister and cousins. The mumbo-jumbo about stereoisomers, was just mumbo-jumbo. He faked the evidence on those too.
Wolfe snorted at that point in the report.
Tinger was terrified of an early IPO because the spotlight on Zismus would reveal that the drug was no good to anyone but Tinger. He had to keep the facts under wraps until he had time to manufacture his own lifetime supply and vamoose. City employees searched his sock drawer and found a one-way first class ticket to Croatia (no extradition treaty and a warm welcome for biochemists.) Wolfe interjected his “Pfui.” Wolfe was born in Montenegro, Croatia’s neighbor to the east.
To slow down the IPO, Tinger poisoned Welch. It was just luck that Welch bought it on our divan. The ME is not sure, but he thinks Tinger may have given Welch the Zismus drug just before he left in a taxi for our brownstone.
That was the taxi whose number I wrote into my notebook. It was all Saul needed to track down Welch and Zismus. From Saul’s information, Wolfe had deduced enough to ferret out an excuse to send me and the Cramer show downtown.
Fritz’s dinner was superb, as usual. It was what I call a “double with” dinner. Tomato bisque with basil and sour cream, roast prime rib with horseradish and cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes with brown butter and goat cheese, and a Charlotte Russe with amaretto and Chantilly cream for dessert. Wolfe and I discussed the approach of spring and I mentioned that the Mets looked good. Wolfe shuddered at the pointless expenditure of motion at a baseball game as Fritz brought in the magnificent Charlotte Russe.
“What about Aunt June’s pie?” I said.
“When the interrupted lunch resumed, Mr. Wolfe ate it all,” Fritz replied with a discrete Swiss roll of the eyes. I said nothing. I could have been upset, but Fritz knows I prefer his Charlotte Russe to Aunt June’s apple pie any day. If Wolfe had wanted the entire pie, he only had to ask.
Wolfe finished his dessert, took his coffee into the office, picked up his book, and ignored the help.