Melanie’s place was on Fifth Street between Avenue C and Avenue D. I could never figure out why. I mean, I could figure out why the building was there. It had no choice. Buildings tend to stay where you put them, and nobody would have allowed this building in a decent, neighborhood anyway. But Melanie did have a choice. She wasn’t wildly rich, and I don’t suppose she could have stayed at the Sherry-Netherland, but she could have had a better apartment in a safer neighborhood with the income she got from her father’s estate. Instead she lived on one of the most squalid and unsafe blocks in the city.
“You know,” I’d told her a day or two ago, “if you really insist on having this irrational fear of being murdered, you ought to move out of this rathole. Because when you live here, being murdered isn’t an irrational fear. It’s a damned rational one.”
“I feel secure here,” she said.
“The streets are wall-to-wall junkies and perverts,” I said. “The muggers have their own assigned territories so they don’t mug each other by mistake. What makes you feel secure?”
“It’s a settled neighborhood, Chip.”
I walked through it now. It was at its very worst in the afternoon because the light was bright enough to see how grungy it was. It was also bright in the morning, but there was no one around. Starting a little after noon, the rats would begin to peep out of their holes.
I got to her building. They still hadn’t replaced the front door. No one knew who had taken it, or why. I walked up four very steep flights of stairs and knocked on her door.
There was no answer.
I knocked a couple more times, called her name a lot, and then tried the door. It was locked, and that worried me.
See, Melanie would only lock her door when she was home. I know most people do it the other way around, or else lock it all the time, but she had a theory on the subject. If a junkie burglar knew she wasn’t home, and found the door locked, he would simply kick it in. This would mean she would have to pay for a new lock. If, however, she left it unlocked, he would come in, discover there was nothing around to take, and finally settle for ripping off her radio. Since the radio had cost fifteen dollars and the big cylinder lock had cost forty, it was clear where the priorities lay.
I knocked again, a lot louder. She would not be asleep at this hour. And her telephone had been busy just a few minutes ago. Of course telephones in New York are capable of being busy just for the hell of it, but—
I got this sudden flash and didn’t like it at all. So I did something I’ve wanted to do for years. I think it’s something everybody secretly wants to do.
I kicked the door in.
You’d be surprised how easy that is. Or maybe you wouldn’t when you stop to think that some of the most decrepit drug addicts in the world do it a couple of times a day. I hauled back and kicked with my heel, hitting the door right on the lock. On the third try the door flew open and the forty-dollar lock went flying, and I lost my balance and sat down without having planned to. I suppose a few tenants heard me do all these things, but they evidently knew better than to get involved.
The apartment was a rabbit warren, a big living room and a long hallway that kept leading to other rooms, some of them containing Salvation Army reject furniture, some of them papered with posters of Che and stuff like that. Actually I think Melanie paid as much rent for the place as I paid for a room in a decent neighborhood. She said she liked having plenty of space. Personally, considering the condition of the rooms, I would think that a person would pay more for less space. One room in that building would have been bad enough. Five rooms was ridiculous.
The telephone was in the living room. It was off the hook. I worked my way through the apartment, calling out her name, picking up more and more negative vibrations and getting less and less happy about the whole thing. I found her in the back room. She was spread out stark naked on her air mattress, which is just how I had always hoped to find her.
But she was also absolutely dead, and that was not what I had had in mind at all.
Two
She wasn’t the first corpse I had ever seen. One summer I picked apples for a while in upstate New York, a job which consisted largely of falling off ladders. The other pickers would go out drinking when they were done, and sometimes I would tag along. There was usually at least one fight an evening. Sometimes somebody would pull a knife, and one time when this happened it wound up that one guy, a wiry man with a harelip, caught a knifeblade in his heart and died. I saw him when they carried him out.
The first book I wrote, I covered my experiences apple-picking, but never put that part in. God knows why.
So she wasn’t the first corpse I ever looked at, but she might as well have been. I kept thinking how horrible it was that she looked so beautiful, even in death. Her pale white skin had a blue tint to it, especially in her face. Her eyes were wide open and I could swear they were staring at me.
I knew she was dead. No living eyes ever looked like that. But I had to reach down and touch her. I put one hand on her shoulder. She’d been dead long enough to grow cool, however long that takes. I don’t know much about things like that. I’d never had to.
I almost didn’t see the hypodermic needle. She was on her back, legs stretched out in front of her, one arm at her side, the other placed so that her hand was on her little bowl of a stomach. That hand almost covered the hypodermic needle. After I saw it, I picked up her other arm and found a needle mark. Just one, and it looked fresh.
I put her arm back the way I had found it. I went to the bathroom and threw up and came back and looked at her some more. I must have stood there staring at her for five minutes. Then I paced around the whole apartment for another five minutes and came back and stared at her some more.
This wasn’t shock. I was in shock, of course, but I was being very methodical about this. I wanted to notice everything and I wanted to make sure I remembered whatever I noticed.
I left her apartment, closed the door, walked down the stairs and out. I walked all the way over to First Avenue before I caught a cab. The cab dropped me at 14th Street and Seventh. I walked quickly from there to my rooming house on 18th Street, a few doors west of Eighth.
When I was in my own room on the third floor, the first thing I did was lock the door. The second thing was to go into the bathroom and remove the towel bar from the wall. It’s a hollow stainless steel bar, and there was a little plastic vial in it that contained several dollars’ worth of reasonably good grass. I poured the grass in the toilet and flushed, rinsed out the vial, and tossed it out the window. Then I went through the medicine cabinet. I couldn’t find anything to worry about except for a few codeine pills that my doctor had prescribed for a sinus headache. I thought about it and decided to hell with them, and I flushed them away, too. That left nothing but aspirin and Dristan, and I didn’t think the cops would hassle me much for either of those. I put the towel bar back and washed my hands.
I looked in the mirror and decided I didn’t like the way I was dressed. I put on a fresh shirt and a pair of slacks that didn’t need pressing too badly. I traded in my loafers for my black dress shoes.
Then I went downstairs to the pay phone in the hall. I dropped a dime in the slot and dialed the number I know best.
Haig answered the telephone himself for a change. We talked for a few minutes. Mostly I talked and he listened, and then he made a couple of suggestions, and I hung up the phone and went off to discover the body.
I guess I’ll have to tell you something about Leo Haig.
The place to start, I suppose, is how I happen to be working for him. I had been looking for a job for a while, and things had not been going particularly well. I got work from time to time, washing dishes or bussing tables or delivering messages and parcels, but none of these positions amounted to what you might call A Job With A Future, which is what I have always been seeking, though in a sort of inept way.
My problem, really, was that I wasn’t qualified for anything too
dynamic. My education stopped a couple of months before graduation from Upper Valley Preparatory Academy, which is to say that I haven’t even got a high school diploma, for Pete’s sake. And my previous work experience—well, when you tell a prospective employer that you have been an assistant to Gregor the Pavement Photographer, a termite salesman, a fruit picker, and a deputy sheriff in a whorehouse in South Carolina, well, what usually happens is his eyes glaze and he points at the door a lot.
(I don’t want to go into all this ancient history now, really, but if you’re interested you could read about it. My first two books, No Score and Chip Harrison Scores Again, pretty well cover the territory. I don’t know that they’re much good, but you could read them for background information or something. Assuming you care.)
Anyway, I was living in New York and doing the hand-to-mouth number and reading the want ads in The Times, and there were loads of opportunities to earn $40 a week if you had a doctorate in chemical engineering or something like that, but not much if you didn’t. Then I ran into an ad that went something like this:
RESOURCEFUL YOUTH wanted to assist detective. Low pay, long hours, hard work, demanding employer. Journalistic experience will be given special consideration. Familiarity with tropical fish helpful but not absolutely necessary. An excellent opportunity for one man in a million. …
I didn’t know if I was one man in a million, but it was certainly one advertisement in a million, and nothing could have kept me from answering it. I called the number listed in the ad and answered a few questions over the phone. He gave me an address and I went to it, and at first I thought the whole thing was someone’s idea of a joke, because the building was obviously a whorehouse. But it turned out that only the lower two floors were a whorehouse. The upper two floors were the offices and living quarters of Leo Haig.
He wasn’t what I expected. I don’t know exactly what I expected, but whatever it might have been, he wasn’t it. He’s about five-two and very round. It’s not that he’s terribly heavy, just that the combination of his height and girth makes him look something like a basketball. He has a head of wiry black hair and a pointed goatee with a few gray hairs in it. That beard is very important to him. I’ve never seen it when it was not trimmed and groomed to perfection. He touches it a lot, smoothing and shaping it. He says it’s an aid to thought.
I spent three hours with him that first day, and at the end of the three hours I had a job. He spent the first hour pumping me, the second showing off his tropical fish, and the final hour talking about everything in the world, himself included. I went out of there with a lot more knowledge than I had brought with me, A Job With A Future, and a whole lot of uncertainty about the man I was working for. He was either a genius or a lunatic and I couldn’t make up my mind which.
I still haven’t got it all worked out. I mean, maybe the two are not mutually exclusive. Maybe he’s a genius and a lunatic.
The thing is, the main reason I got the job was that I had had two books published. You may wonder what this has to do with being the assistant of a private detective. It’s very simple, really. Leo Haig isn’t content with being the world’s greatest detective. He wants the world to know it.
“There are a handful of detectives whose names are household words,” he told me. “Sherlock Holmes. Nero Wolfe. Their brilliance alone would not have guaranteed them fame. It took the efforts of other men to bring their deeds to public attention. Holmes had his Watson. Wolfe has his Archie Goodwin. If a detective is to make the big time, a trustworthy associate with literary talent is as much a prerequisite as a personality quirk and an eccentric hobby.”
Here’s something I have to explain to you if you are going to understand Leo Haig at all.
He believes Nero Wolfe exists.
He really believes this. He believes Wolfe exists in the brownstone, with the orchids and Theodore and Fritz and all the rest of it, and Archie Goodwin assists him and writes up the cases and publishes them under the pen name of Rex Stout.
“The most telling piece of evidence, Chip. Consider that nom de plume, if you will. And of course it’s just that; no one was ever born with so contrived a name as Rex Stout. But let us examine it. Rex is the Latin for king, of course. As in Oedipus Rex. And Stout means, well, fat. Thus we have what? A fat king—and could one ask for a more perfect appellation to hang upon such an extraordinary example of corpulence and majesty as Nero Wolfe?”
Haig hasn’t always been a detective. Actually he’s only been a detective about a year longer than I’ve been an assistant detective. Until that time he lived in a two-room apartment in the Bronx and raised tropical fish to sell to local pet shops. This may strike you as a hard way to make a living. You’d be right. Most tropical fish are pretty inexpensive when you buy them from the pet shop, and even that price has to be three or four times what the shopkeeper pays for them, because he has to worry about a certain percentage of them dying before he can get them sold. Haig had developed a particularly good strain of velvet swordtails—the color was deeper than usual, or something—and he had a ready market for most of the other fish he raised as well, but he was not getting rich this way.
The way he got rich took relatively little effort on his part. His uncle died and left him $128,000.
As you can probably imagine, that made quite a difference in his life. Because all of a sudden he didn’t have to run around New York with plastic bags full of little fishes for sale. He could do what he had always dreamed of doing. He could become the World’s Greatest Detective.
Raising fish had been Leo Haig’s only way to make a living, but it had not been his only interest. He has what is probably the largest library of mystery and detective fiction in the world. I think he has just about everything ever written on the subject. The Nero Wolfe novels, from Fer-De-Lance to the latest one, are all in hard cover; after he received his inheritance he had them all rebound in hand-tooled leather. He’s been reading all of these things since he was a kid, and he remembers what he reads. I mean, he can tell you not only the plot, but the names of all the characters in some Ngaio Marsh mystery that he read fifteen years ago. It’s pretty impressive, let me tell you.
The house is pretty impressive, too, and he has emphasized that he wants me to write about the house, but I’ll wait until I come to the part about going there and then I’ll describe it for you. I’ll just say now that he picked it when he had collected his inheritance and started to set up shop as a detective. He moved in with his books and fish tanks, he managed to get a license as a private investigator, he listed himself in the Yellow Pages, and he sat back and waited for the world to discover him. The trouble is that he’s too rich and he’s not rich enough. If he had more money, like a couple of million, it wouldn’t matter if he ever worked or not. If he had less money, like nothing substantial in the checking account, it would mean that he’d have to take the few cases that come his way. But he’s got just enough money to let him maintain high standards. He won’t touch divorce work, for example. He won’t do any sort of snooping that requires electronic gear, which he regards as the handtools of the devil. And he won’t accept anything routine. What he wants, really, is to handle nothing but baffling murder cases that he can solve through the exercise of his incredible brain, with the faithful Chip Harrison doing the legwork and writing up everything afterwards.
I know his secret hope. Someday, if he makes enough of a name for himself, if he keeps his standards high, develops just the right sort of eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, possibly someday Nero Wolfe will invite him over to the louse on 35th Street for dinner.
That’s really what he lives for.
I suppose my civic duty called on me to phone the police as soon as I discovered Melanie’s body. I’m glad I didn’t let my civic duty interfere with my instinct for self preservation, because it turned out that Detective Gregorio took my towel bar off the wall and checked it out to see if I had drugs stashed in it. That was just about the first place he looked. I’m never ke
eping anything incriminating in there again, believe me. Pick a place that you figure is the last place the police would think of looking, and that’s the first place they think of looking. It’s the damnedest thing.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What happened was, I went back to Melanie’s place, figuring it was possible that the police had already found her without my help, but they hadn’t. I had left a book on the floor so that it would be moved if anybody pushed the door more than a third of the way open, and it was still in its original position, so it seemed unlikely anybody had been in the apartment since I’d left it.
I went on inside, and I had an irrational hope that I had been somehow mistaken and Melanie would turn out to be alive after all, which is pretty stupid to write down and all, but impossible to avoid wishing at the time. Of course she was still there, and of course she was dead, and of course I felt sick all over again, but instead of throwing up any more I went into the living room and called 911. The person who picked up the phone put me on HOLD before I had a chance to say anything, which would have! been aggravating if I’d been bleeding to death or some; thing, but then a couple of seconds later a cop came on the line and I gave him the story. They were fast enough after that. It was 5:18 when I placed the call and the first two patrolmen arrived at 5:31. You would have thought it would take them almost that long to climb the stairs. They spent most of their time walking around and opening drawers and telling me not to touch anything. They were basically waiting for the detectives but they didn’t want to look as though they were waiting for the detectives, so they asked me a lot of boring questions and sneaked a lot of peeks at Melanie’s body. This seemed very disrespectful to me, but I didn’t think they would care to hear my feelings on the matter so I kept them to myself.