Death of the Mallory Queen

  DEATH OF THE MALLORY QUEEN

  Lawrence Block

  "I am going to 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 bis 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," he 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."

  "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 read of 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 ax?"

  "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 light 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 found me 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 tee 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.

  After the last of the panelists had been introduced, a thin, weedy man in a dark suit passed quickly among the group with a beverage tray, then scurried off the stage. Mavis Mallory took a sip of her drink, something colorless in a stemmed glass, and leaned toward the microphone. "What Happens Next?" she intoned. "That's the title of our little discussion tonight, and it's a suitable title for a discussion on this occasion. A credo of Mallory''s Mystery Magazine has always been that our sort of fiction is only effective insofar as the reader cares deeply what happens next, what takes place on the page he or she has yet to read. Tonight, though, we are here to discuss what happens next in mystery and suspense fiction. What trends have reached their peaks, and what trends are swelling just beyond the horizon."

  She cleared her throat, took another sip of her drink. "Has the tough private eye passed his prime? Is the lineal descendant of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe just a tedious outmoded macho sap?" She paused to smile pleasantly at Bart Halloran, who glowered back at her. "Conversely, has the American reader lost interest forever in the mannered English mystery? Are we ready to bid adieu to the body in the library, or—" she paused for an amiable nod at the slightly cockeyed Miss Trill "—the corpse in the formal gardens?

  "Is the mystery, if you'll pardon the expression, dead as a literary genre? One of our number—" and a cheerless smile for Professor Porterfield "— would have us all turn to writing Love's Saccharine Savagery and Penny Wyse, Stockyard Nurse. Is the mystery bookshop, a store specializing in our brand of fiction, an idea whose time has come—and gone? And what do book publishers have to say on this subject? One of our number has worked for so many of them; she should be unusually qualified to comment."

  Mavis certainly had the full attention of her fellow panelists. Now, to make sure she held the attention of the audience as well, she leaned forward, a particularly arresting move given the nature of the strapless, backless black number she was more or less wearing. Her hands tightened on the microphone.

  "Please help me give our panel members full attention," she said, "as we turn the page to find out—" she paused dramatically "—What Happens Next!"

  What happened next was that the lights went out. All of them, all at once, with a great crackling noise of electrical failure. Somebody screamed, and then so did somebody else, and then screaming became kind of popular. A shot rang out. There were more screams, and then another shot, and then everybody was shouting at once, and then some lights came on.

  Guess who was dead.

  That was Friday night. Tuesday afternoon, Haig was sitting back in his chair on his side of our huge old partners' desk. He didn't have his feet up— I'd broken him of that habit—but I could see he wanted to. Instead he contented himself with taking a pipe apart and putting it back together again. He had tried smoking pipes, thinking it a good mannerism for a detective, but it never took, so now he fiddles with them. It looks pretty dumb, but it's better than putting his feet up on the desk.