“Anyway, the clubs themselves on the whole were pretty kind to Charles — they were mainly delighted to have new Barnstable stories. And Charles, too, spoke to the local chapters; he was like a hero to them, and of course he liked that — who wouldn’t? But he also got a lot of mail from individuals, not necessarily PROBE members, and some of it was on the nasty side. You know, in preparation to edit Charles’s books, I read most of the ones Sawyer wrote — they all were published before I joined Monarch. I immersed myself in them and took a bookful of notes. But as well as I thought I knew the series, these people pounced on all sorts of minuscule inconsistencies in Charles’s books. And some of them berated him for no other reason than because he had the effrontery to add to what they saw as a sacred canon.”
“Did all this bother him?” I asked.
“Hell yes, it did. He’d pop his cork and fire off angry replies until finally, I just quit forwarding correspondence to him unless it was favorable.”
“Pretty thin-skinned. Did any of these letter-writers threaten Childress?”
“Not that I’m aware of. They were purists, but they weren’t that hostile.”
“As far as you know, did anyone else ever threaten him?”
Billings leaned back and smirked. “No, Mr. Goodwin. I’m afraid that you and Nero Wolfe are really going to have to pull a rabbit, or at least a hamster, out of a hat this time to construct a halfway-believable murder scenario.”
I smiled benignly. “In the years that you knew Childress, did anything unusual happen to him? A personal crisis, a trauma of any kind?”
“You really are reaching, aren’t you? Frankly, if you were hooked up with anybody except Wolfe, I’d ask you to get the hell out of here, but even I make allowances for genius, which is what I understand your boss claims to be. As far as personal crises, Charles always seemed to be immersed in one of his own making. Hell, as I’m sure you know, just in the last few weeks he had feuded in print with me, with his agent, and with that popinjay who masquerades as a book reviewer for the Gazette.”
Billings paused to run a palm across his cheek and yawn. “The only time I remember Charles being upset by something unrelated to his writing was when his mother died. That was, oh... probably around two years ago now. He spent months in his hometown out in one of those interchangeable ‘I’ states in the Midwest — maybe Illinois or Indiana, while she deteriorated. It was pretty rough on him. When he came back, he seemed, I don’t know... distracted is probably the best description. And he stayed distracted for months. During that time he even quit squabbling with me over changes I made in his precious prose.”
“I suppose it’s understandable that he’d be shaken,” I responded.
“I guess so, except that he never seemed particularly close to his mother while she was alive and healthy. If I recall correctly, he told me just before he went home during her illness that he hadn’t been back there in seven or eight years. And it’s not exactly halfway around the world from here.”
“Except maybe in outlook. During the period when he was ‘distracted,’ did he keep on writing?”
“Yeah. In fact, he cranked out quite a bit while he was with his mother, too. He’d send me batches of chapters periodically; they were okay, about the same quality as what he did here.”
“Did he ever say anything about his months in the Midwest?”
“Not much. I asked once how he occupied himself all day, but he brushed me off with some comment about there being nothing to do except to write and talk to his relatives and take long walks down back roads. He said once that he didn’t fish, he didn’t hunt, and he didn’t know a Jersey from a Holstein. And didn’t want to.”
“The apple fell pretty far from the tree. You made a reference earlier to his feuding in print with you, Franklin Ott, and Wilbur Hobbs. Did those attacks in Book Business and the Manhattan Literary Times surprise you?”
Billings screwed up his face. “Not really. I had already left Monarch to come here, but it made me mad, damn mad. I wasn’t surprised because I’d had enough experience with the guy to know that his modus operandi was to blame other people for whatever writing problems he had. Hell, look how he took Ott over the coals in those articles.”
“Franklin Ott?”
He nodded. “Charles wasn’t stupid enough to mention him by name, of course, but everybody knew who he was writing about. Have you talked to Ott yet?”
“Briefly.”
“Did he tell you that he lost three of his clients, including a topflight science-fiction writer, within days after that damn piece of Charles’s ran?”
“He mentioned that he has had some turnover,” I said.
Billings slapped his leg. “Some turnover — ha! For a few days there, it was more like an exodus. Oh, I know, he’s picked up a couple of new names since, but that can’t match what he lost, at least not in terms of dollars.”
“Interesting. What were the circumstances of your departure from Monarch?”
That raised the flicker of a smile, which disappeared as quickly as it arose. “Somehow, I think you already know a good deal about that, Mr. Goodwin. But of course you’d like to hear it straight from this horse’s mouth. All right; after Charles’s third Barnstable book, Death in the North Meadow, went to press, he went to Horace Vinson and demanded a new editor. He told Horace that we had ‘irreconcilable personality differences’ — that’s actually the phrase he used, the intransigent bastard. Now you’ll never get me to badmouth Horace Vinson — he’s a wonderful bookman, and a true gentleman of the old school. The man redefines the word ‘courtly.’ But it’s commonly known inside the business, and maybe outside, too, that whenever there’s a conflict, Horace will invariably side with the author against the editor. And he did here. He told me that he was giving Charles a new editor, and that he hoped I’d understand.
“I’d seen something like this coming for a long time,” Billings continued glumly, “so I wasn’t terribly surprised. For one thing, I knew damn well that Ott, snake that he is, was lobbying hard to get me pulled off Charles’s books. I was very calm during our conversation, but I told Horace firmly that as long as I was Monarch’s mystery editor, I expected to edit all of the house’s mysteries. To me, that was simply non-negotiable. In that pleasant, engaging way he has, he held his ground, and the result was that we agreed to disagree. I resigned, which I know saddened him. Off the record, he gave me a very handsome severance, something he was not obligated to do. And that’s all there is to it. End of story.”
“Are you happy here?”
“Happier than I thought I’d be. Westman & Lane is a smaller house than Monarch, and I’m handling a wider range of fiction, although I still get to edit mysteries, which are my first love. And of course, Mr. Goodwin, there is one more thing that you want to ask me.”
“There is?”
“Absolutely. You want to know if I can account for my movements on the day that Charles was found dead. I know the drill pretty well. After all, I do edit mysteries, as you’re well aware.”