His office was a windowless cubicle in a back corner of the newsroom. “Not much, but it’s home,” he said with a smile, gesturing me to a chair as he dropped into the upholstered one behind his paper-littered desk.
“So, you’re an honest-to-God, card-carrying New York private dick, eh?” Southworth chuckled, considering me over the tops of half-glasses. “Never thought I’d live to see one.”
“I enjoy bringing excitement into people’s lives,” I said. “Actually, I’m the legs for another detective, Nero Wolfe.”
He raised both chin and eyebrows. “Ah, him I’ve heard of, yeah. I’m from New York — the state, not the city. I worked on the Syracuse paper for fourteen years. Copy boy first, then police reporter, and on to the copy desk. After that I was city editor on a couple of small dailies in upstate towns nobody ever heard of. When my marriage fell apart, I came out here and — oh, hell, you don’t want to hear my life story any more than I feel like telling it. Now what interests you and Nero Wolfe in this out-of-the-way corner of the Midwest?”
“Charles Childress.”
“That’s kind of what I figured, although I don’t know why. From the reports we got, there wasn’t any question but that it was a suicide.”
“Mr. Wolfe has a client who thinks otherwise. And he agrees with the client.”
Southworth chewed absently on a pencil. “And you’re here to find out if there’s something in the guy’s background that might suggest a motive for murder, right? I’m afraid I’m not going to be a hell of a lot of help, Mr. Goodwin. Normally, going to the local newspaper in a situation like this would make damn good sense. But here it doesn’t, for two reasons: First, I’ve only been in Mercer a little over three years, so I don’t know where the skeletons are buried like somebody who’s home-grown would. And most of the staff is even newer to the paper than I am. Second, when I took over as editor, I changed the character of the Mercury a great deal. It used to concentrate almost exclusively on the folksy stuff — club news, farm news, nonmalicious gossip. We still do some of that, only because we have to, being a community paper. But I’ve swung more toward what I hope is probing coverage of things like the county government and the board meetings of the towns where we circulate. And believe it or not, the paper has dug up some corruption here and there. Not headline news by big-city standards, but we did get a member of the county board indicted for taking money under the table.
“And you know what — the readers love it! A local family, the Kirbys, owns the Mercury, and to describe them as conservative is like saying western Kansas is flat. When we started getting harder-edged in our reporting, I was worried that one Kirby or another would pressure me to back off. Wrong. It turned out that their country club friends — the bankers, the retailers, the owners of the big cement plant over in Mapes — were all hoping somebody would get on the case of the local politicos.”
Southworth took off his glasses and pressed his palms against his eyes. “Anyhow, that’s a long-winded way of saying that I don’t know much about Childress. Oh, we ran a piece when he died, of course. Apparently he was one of the three most famous people to ever come out of Mercer. The other two were a Medal of Honor winner in World War I and a high school basketball star back in the fifties who ended up going to the pros. Anyway, our obit on Childress was on page one — about eight ’graphs, most of it on his writing career, along with a picture we had in our files — it’s the one used on his books. I’ll get you a copy of that issue.”
“Thanks. As I understand it, he spent several months in Mercer about two years ago during his mother’s final illness. A couple of people who knew him in New York felt that he was different when he came back East.”
The editor looked interested. “Yeah?”
“They said he seemed older, grimmer, and more distracted than before. Other than his mother’s death, did anything happen while he was here?”
Southworth wrinkled his forehead. “Not that I’m aware of, but it just occurred to me that we did a feature on him, a profile, during the time he lived here taking care of his mother; I’d forgotten all about it until you mentioned her. Not a bad piece — Gina Marks did it. I’ll get her.” He sprang from his chair, and went to the doorway. “Gina, got a minute? Come on in,” he said in a voice that was neither a command nor a plea.
A slender woman of about twenty-five with straight black hair and dark, wide eyes gingerly stepped into the office, looking first at Southworth and then at me.
“Have a seat,” the editor boomed. “Gina, this is Archie Goodwin, a private investigator from New York. He’s looking into Charles Childress’s death, got an idea there may be a possibility he was murdered. You interviewed Childress for that feature when he was staying here. How did he strike you at the time?”
Eyes wider, she looked from me to Southworth and back again. “God, I don’t know,” she said in a throaty voice, spreading long-fingered hands, palms up. “That’s hard to say, it’s been so long ago, now. He wasn’t terribly friendly, I remember that much. Darlene — she’s our feature editor—” this explanation was for my benefit, “gave me the assignment, and the first time I called Childress at his mother’s house, he started out being just plain rude, said he was in Mercer only for personal reasons and didn’t want to be bothered with the press. When I told him a lot of people all over the county read his books and would love to know more about his work, he softened a little and asked me to call him again in two weeks or so. I did, and that time, he ended up talking to me.”
“Where was the interview? At his mother’s house?” I asked.
Gina Marks shook her dark head vigorously. “Oh, no. I did offer to go out there — it’s on the county road about halfway between here and Clark’s Grove — but he said he’d rather meet me in town. I ended up interviewing him one morning in a booth at the Old Skillet. It was about ten, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves.”
“Was he forthcoming?”
“Not very! I got enough for my piece, but just barely. He seemed, I don’t know... sort of distant, and resentful, too, like I was intruding on his time.”
“Well, he did have a lot on his mind then,” Southworth put in.
“Did he talk much about his life in Mercer?”
Gina gave me a thumbs-down and a sour look. “No, and obviously, that’s what I had wanted. But all I got was that it was his mother who stimulated his interest in reading, and literature in general, starting when he was twelve or thirteen. Beyond that, he didn’t want to talk about Mercer at all. I think he looked down on this area as some sort of cultural desert. And it was obvious that he resented having to spend time here, even to take care of his mother. Frankly, Mr. Goodwin, the man didn’t impress me one bit. He was a snobbish, arrogant, shallow transplant to the big city who tries to ignore the place he came from and what it taught him.”
“So he didn’t mention anyone else from here — relatives, friends?”
“Oh, he tossed off some obligatory, predictable compliment to one of his high school English teachers, who died years ago,” she said hotly. “But it was so damn rehearsed, he’d probably used it in a dozen other interviews.”
“Did you talk to anybody else for your story?” I asked.
“No — he made me feel so guilty for invading his privacy that I was just happy to pull what I did out of him. And what I wrote ended up being almost entirely on his approach to writing, with very little about his years in Mercer. To be honest, I’m not proud of that piece. I’d do it differently today.”