Who’s Afraid of Nero Wolfe?

by Loren D. Estleman
Art by Allen Davis

There were a hundred good reasons not to answer the Help Wanted notice in The Habitual Handicapper, and only one to answer it; but answer it I did, because I’d been canned for gambling on company time and I was on parole.

The text was brief:

Nimble-witted man needed for multitudinous duties. Salary commensurate with skill. Room and meals included. Apply at 700 Avenue J, Flatbush.

Seven Hundred was a townhouse, one of those anonymous sandstone jobs standing in a row like widows at a singles club. It ran to three stories and a half-submerged basement, with glass partitions on the roof for a garden or something. A balding party in a cutaway coat someone had forgotten to return to the rental place answered the doorbell. “Who are you, I should ask?”

I took a header on the accent and replied in Yiddish. “Arnie Woodbine, nimble of wit.” I held up the sheet folded on the advertisement.

“Mr. Lyon is in the plant rooms ten minutes more,” he said, in Yiddish also. “In the office you can wait.”

I followed him down a hall and through the door he opened, into a big room furnished as both office and parlor, with a big desk that looked as if it had been carved out of a solid slab of mahogany, rows of oak file cabinets, scattered armchairs, a big green sofa, and a huge globe in a cradle in one corner, plastered all over with countries that no longer existed.

As I sat, in an orange leather chair that barely let my feet touch the floor, I came down with a case of déjà vu. There was something familiar about the setup, but it was as tough to pin down as a dream.  Whatever it was, it put my freakometer in the red zone. I was set to fly the coop when something started humming, the walls shook, a paneled section slid open, and I got my first look at Claudius Lyon.

He was the best-tailored beach ball I’d ever met: five feet from top to bottom and from side to side in a mauve three-piece with a green silk necktie and pocket square, soft cordovans on his tiny feet. His face was as round as a baby’s, with no more sign of everyday wear-and-tear than a baby’s had. He was carrying something in a clay pot. I was pretty sure it was a tomato plant.

On his way from the elevator he reached up without pausing to straighten a picture that had been knocked crooked by the vibration in the shaft. So far I didn’t exist, but when he finished arranging the pot on the corner of his desk and lowered himself into the nearest thing I’d ever seen to a La-Z-Boy on a swivel, he fixed me with bright eyes and introduced himself. He didn’t offer to shake hands.

When I told him my name, he grinned from ear to ear, a considerable expanse. “Indeed,” he squeaked.

I didn’t know why at the time, but I was dead sure I already had the job. He asked about my work experience. I gave him an honest answer. I’m always honest about my dishonesty when I’m not actually practicing it. “I’m a good confidence man in the second class and a first-class forger. I’ve got diplomas from two institutions to prove it. I don’t have them on me, but you can confirm it by calling my parole officer.”

He dug a finger inside his left ear, a gesture I would get to know as a sign his brain was in overdrive. The faster and more industriously he dug, the more energy his gray cells were putting out. When he finished he offered me refreshment. “This is the time of day for my first cream soda.”

I declined, not adding that there’s no time of day I’d ever consent to join him or anyone else in one. He startled me then by turning his head and shouting, “Gus!” I’d assumed he’d tug on a bell rope or something. The balding gent in the rusty tailcoat entered a minute later carrying a tray with a can on it and a Bam-Bam glass. He took the tray away empty and Lyons poured, drank, and belched discreetly into his green pocket square.

“I admire candor, up to a point.” He folded and tucked it back in place. “Yours falls just to the left of that. As it happens, a man who can sell another man a bill of goods would be valuable to this agency. I can also foresee a time when an aptitude with a pen would toe the mark.”

“What agency’s that?”

He lifted the place where eyebrows belonged. “Why, a detective agency, of course. What did you think the job was?”

The coin dropped into the pan; I knew what it was about the situation at 700 Avenue J that had sent centipedes marching up my spine. Claudius Lyon then punched the appropriate button.

“Are you familiar with the work of a writer named Rex Stout?”

* * *

That was three years ago. My debt to the State of New York is square, so thank God I don’t have to keep convincing my P.O. that my association with a screwball like Lyon is legit.

The sticking point was my felon’s status, and the impossibility of my ever qualifying for a license as a private investigator. Lyon hasn’t one, either, lacking as he does the professional experience. He gets around it by not charging for his services.

It’s no hardship because he’s as rich as the dame who writes the Harry Potter books. His late father had made certain improvements to the gasket that sealed the Cass-O-Magic pressure cooker, which is no longer in manufacture, but NASA has adapted the improvements to the door of the space shuttle, and the royalties come in regular as the water bill; I know what I’m talking about, because it’s my job to deposit the checks in his account. I ordered a deposit only stamp and charged it to household expenses, but I never use it. Lyon’s signature is childlike, absurdly easy to duplicate on the endorsement, and I round the amount deposited to the nearest thousand and pocket the rest.

It can be as little as a few bucks or as much as a couple of hundred, and if we ever decide to go our separate ways I can afford to coast for a year or so before I have to turn again to the Help Wanted column.

Claudius Lyon is obsessed with the writings of Rex Stout, or more particularly those of Archie Goodwin, whom Stout represented as literary agent until Stout’s death. Goodwin recorded the cases he’d helped solve for his employer, Nero Wolfe, a fat, lethargic genius who grows orchids on the roof of his New York City brownstone, drinks lots of beer, eats tons of gourmet food prepared by Fritz, his Swiss chef and major-domo, and makes expenses by unraveling complex mysteries put to him by desperate clients, many of them well-heeled. Wolfe rarely leaves home and pays Goodwin to perform as his leg man and general factotum.

For a fat little boy growing up in Brooklyn, Nero Wolfe was the nuts. Lyon loved to read mysteries, but he knew he’d never have the energy to emulate Sherlock Holmes, or the physique to withstand and deliver beatings à la Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, or the good looks to seduce pertinent information out of swoony female suspects like the Saint. Wolfe’s obesity and sedentary habits, however, suited him right down to his wide bottom.

Some weeks before we met, Lyon had bought the Brooklyn townhouse, had it retrofitted to resemble Wolfe’s sanctum, and changed his name legally to echo his hero’s; Claudius, like Nero, was a lesser Roman emperor, and he felt he’d improved on the original by choosing a surname inspired by a predator more closely associated with the circuses of Rome. I haven’t asked him what name he’d gone by before that. The bureaucrat who sends his checks had been wised up, he himself hasn’t seen fit to volunteer anything, and while I firmly believe that the contents of another man’s wallet might as well be mine, the secrets of his past are his own. To quote Lyon: “Discretion and integrity are not solely the province of the law-abiding.”

I might not be working for him if Arnie Woodbine and Archie Goodwin didn’t look like the same name if you squinted at it and took your eyes out of focus. He was especially pleased to learn that it’s Arnie, not Arnold, on my birth certificate; Goodwin had not been born Archibald.

But maybe I doubt too much. The notice I’d read in the racing sheet had appeared for a week in the New York Times, the Daily News, and the Brooklyn papers, and had brought only disappointment in the form of an army of errand boys whose wits were about as nimble as a lawnroller, and one feminist who protested Lyon’s insistence upon hiring a man. (Gus told me the master of the house hid in the plant room until she was ejected.) I’m shorter than Goodwin, not in as good shape, and have a cauliflower ear courtesy of an early disgruntled mark that makes it more of a challenge for me to charm women; but at least I’m not a feminist, and my wit has been known to turn a respectable cartwheel from time to time.

I’m one of his lesser compromises. To begin with, he has no tolerance for adult beverages. Even the so-called non-alcoholic beers blur his judgment, and one bottle of Wolfe’s brand of choice threatens to send him skipping naked through Coney Island singing “Wind Beneath My Wings.” He drinks the cream soda that contributed in no small part to his lard, and keeps track of his consumption by counting the empties in the recycling bin beside his desk.

His other substitutions are strictly Bizarro world. 1. Wolfe’s favorite color is yellow. Lyon prefers green, and overdoes it. With all the red in the rare old office rug handwoven by the Mandan tribe—which was wiped out by smallpox two minutes after the first European sneezed on it, hence the rarity—all those strong shades of green dotted about look like Christmas year-round. 2. Gus is no Fritz in the kitchen, although his repertoire of kosher recipes is prodigious. 3. The heartiest strain of orchid withers and turns black at Lyon’s hand. Roses are no improvement. By the time I came along he’d begun cultivating brawny garden fare like tomatoes and kale, which Gus tries his best to make work with gefilte fish.

At the very least, Lyon’s brown thumb has spared him the ordeal of replicating Theodore Horstmann, Wolfe’s resident expert on orchids. Tomatoes require no maintenance beyond watering, fertilizing, and spraying for bugs, and he spends most of his two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon on the roof watching TV. He knows more about the backstories of all the characters in daytime dramas than any other man in the five boroughs. I’ve taken dozens of letters at his dictation pointing out errors in Soap Opera Digest to its editors.

So with my introduction into the Lyon household, the metamorphosis was complete, if skewed a bit. You’d think he’d have been as happy as a Wisconsin nut in a Waldorf salad. Instead he went into a tailspin that took all the manic out of his depression for weeks, and with sound reason; or anyway as sound as his reason ever got.

No mystery.

He’d placed another advertisement in all the regulars and The Habitual Handicapper:

Vexed? Stymied? Up a tree? Consult Claudius Lyon, the world’s greatest amateur detective. No fees charged. Your satisfaction is my reward. Apply in person at 700 Avenue J, Flatbush.

The notice ran for weeks, during which time Jimmy Hoffa could have camped out on the stoop with no risk of being discovered. At Lyon’s prodding I made several trips outside to push the doorbell to make sure it was working. It rang with a kind of ha-ha that the little fatty couldn’t have appreciated very much.

“Try taking out ‘amateur,’” I suggested. “People think if you don’t charge anything, that’s all your services are worth.”

“I’m unlicensed.”

“I didn’t say send them a bill. Just don’t say you don’t in the ad.”

“The phrase ‘the world’s greatest detective’ would violate the truth-in-advertising laws. Nero Wolfe is still practicing, and he is demonstrably the world’s finest in his profession.”

“Who’s afraid of Nero Wolfe?” I sang.

“I am. When he discovers I’ve counterfeited his life and livelihood, I fully expect a visit from Nathaniel Parker, his attorney. Since I do not claim to be Nero Wolfe, I cannot be accused of theft of identity, and because I accept no emolument for my efforts on behalf of my clients, I am not guilty of fraud. So long as I stay within the law, I’m a flea-bite in Wolfe’s thick hide, nothing more. To stray over the line would bring doom upon this roof.”

He slumped in his chair, looking like Humpty-Dumpty at the base of the wall. I let him sulk, opened the laptop on my desk, and pecked out this gem:

Mystified? Claudius Lyon never is. See for yourself. No fees charged where satisfaction is not met. Apply, etc.

I showed him the printout. I hadn’t seen him smile like that since I’d told him my name. Remember, I’m a first-class second-class con man; although I had to strangle my basic instincts to dupe people into thinking it might cost them when it wouldn’t. It’s a Bizarro world, as I said. I e-mailed the text to all the sheets, then opened the dictionary program Lyon had installed for me and decided “emolument” is a good word.

That was Thursday. On Friday we had our first client. . . .






Be sure to read the exciting conclusion in our June issue, on sale now.

"Who’s Afraid of Nero Wolfe?" by Loren D. Estleman, copyright © 2008 with permission of the author.

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