Murder Most Merry

She was the caterer, and she was some cupcake, all right. Close-cut brown hair framed her small oval face and set off a pair of China-blue eyes. She had an English accent, roughed up some by ten years in New York, and she was short and slender and curvy, and I could see why our client had hoped she would stick around.

And now she’d whipped up a batch of eggnog, and ladled out cups for each of us. I waited until someone else tasted it—after all the mystery novels Haig’s forced on me, I’ve developed an imagination—but once the Corn- Wallaces had tossed off theirs with no apparent effect, I took a sip. It was smooth and delicious, and it had a kick like a mule. I looked over at Haig, who’s not much of a drinker, and he was smacking his lips over it.

“Why are we here?” he said, echoing the violinist’s question. “Well, sir, I shall tell you. We are here as friends and customers of our host, whom we may be able to assist in the solution of a puzzle. Last night all of us, with the exception of course of myself and my young assistant, were present in this room. Also present was the original manuscript of an unpublished novel by Cornell Woolrich. This morning we were all gone, and so was the manuscript. Now we have returned. The manuscript, alas, has not.”

“Wait a minute,” Jon Corn-Wallace said. “You’re saying one of us took it?”

“I say only that it has gone, sir. It is possible that someone within this room was involved in its disappearance, but there are diverse other possibilities as well. What impels me. what has prompted me to summon you here, is the likelihood that one or more of you knows something that will shed light on the incident.”

“But the only person who would know anything would be the person who took it,” Harriet Quinlan said. She was what they call a woman of a certain age, which generally means a woman of an uncertain age. Her figure was a few pounds beyond girlish, and I had a hunch she dyed her hair and might have had her face lifted somewhere along the way, but whatever she’d done had paid off. She was probably old enough to be my mother’s older sister, but that didn’t keep me from having the sort of ideas a nephew’s not supposed to have.

Haig told her anyone could have observed something, and not just the guilty party, and Philip Perigord started to ask a question, and Haig held up a hand and cut him off in mid-sentence. Most people probably would have finished what they were saying, but I guess Perigord was used to studio executives shutting him up at pitch meetings. He bit off his word in the middle of a syllable and stayed mute.

“It is a holiday,” Haig said, “and we all have other things to do, so we’d best avoid distraction. Hence, I will ask the questions and you will answer them. Mr. Corn-Wallace. You are a book collector. Have you given a thought to collecting manuscripts?”

“I’ve thought about it,” Jon Corn-Wallace said. He was the best-dressed man in the room, looking remarkably comfortable in a dark blue suit and a striped tie. He wore bull-and-bear cufflinks and one of those watches that’s worth five thousand dollars if it’s real or twenty-five if you bought it from a Nigerian street vendor. “He tried to get me interested,” he said, with a nod toward our client. “But I was always the kind of trader who stuck to listed stocks.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it’s impossible to pinpoint the market value of a one-of-a-kind item like a manuscript. There’s too much guesswork involved. I’m not buying books with an eye to selling them, that’s something my heirs will have to worry about, but I do like to know what my collection is worth and whether or not it’s been a good investment. It’s part of the pleasure of collecting, as far as I’m concerned. So I’ve stayed away from manuscripts. They’re too iffy.”

“And had you had a look at As Dark as It Gets?”

“No. I’m not interested in manuscripts, and I don’t care at all for Woolrich.”

“Jon likes hardboiled fiction,” his wife put in, “but Woolrich is a little weird for his taste. I think he was a genius myself. Quirky and tormented, maybe, but what genius isn’t?”

Haig, I thought. You couldn’t call him tormented, but maybe he made up for it by exceeding the usual quota of quirkiness.

“Anyway,” Jayne Corn-Wallace said, “I’m the Woolrich fan in the family. Though I agree with Jon as far as manuscripts are concerned. The value is pure speculation. And who wants to buy something and then have to get a box made for it? It’s like buying an unframed canvas and having to get it framed.”

“The Woolrich manuscript was already boxed,” Haig pointed out.

“I mean generally, as an area for collecting. As a collector, I wasn’t interested in As Dark as It Gets. If someone fixed it up and completed it, and if someone published it, I’d have been glad to buy it. I’d have bought two copies.”

“Two copies, madam?”

She nodded. “One to read and one to own.”

Haig’s face darkened, and I thought he might offer his opinion of people who were afraid to damage their books by reading them. But he kept it to himself, and I was just as glad. Jayne Corn-Wallace was a tall, handsome woman, radiating self-confidence, and I sensed she’d give as good as she got in an exchange with Haig.

“You might have wanted to read the manuscript,” Haig suggested.

She shook her head. “I like Woolrich,” she said, “but as a stylist he was choppy enough after editing and polishing. I wouldn’t want to try him in manuscript, let alone an unfinished manuscript like that one.”

“Mr. Mihalyi,” Haig said. “You collect manuscripts, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“And do you care for Woolrich?”

The violinist smiled. “If I had the chance to buy the original manuscript of The Bride Wore Black,” he said, “I would leap at it. If it were close at hand, and if strong drink had undermined my moral fiber, I might even slip it under my coat and walk off with it.” A wink showed us he was kidding. “Or at least I’d have been tempted. The work in question, however, tempted me not a whit.”

“And why is that, sir?”

Mihalyi frowned. “There are people,” he said, “who attend open rehearsals and make surreptitious recordings of the music. They treasure them and even bootleg them to other like-minded fans. I despise such people.”

“Why?”

“They violate the artist’s privacy,” he said. “A rehearsal is a time when one refines one’s approach to a piece of music. One takes chances, one uses the occasion as the equivalent of an artist’s sketch pad. The person who records it is in essence spraying a rough sketch with fixative and hanging it on the wall of his personal museum. I find it unsettling enough that listeners record concert performances, making permanent what was supposed to be a transitory experience. But to record a rehearsal is an atrocity.”

“And a manuscript?”

“A manuscript is the writer’s completed work. It provides a record of how he arranged and revised his ideas, and how they were in turn adjusted for better or worse by an editor. But it is finished work. An unfinished manuscript...”

“Is a rehearsal?”

“That or something worse. I ask myself, what would Woolrich have wanted?”

“Another drink,” Edward Everett Stokes said, and leaned forward to help himself to more eggnog. “I take your point. Mihalyi. And Woolrich might well have preferred to have his unfinished work destroyed upon his death, but he left no instructions to that effect, so how can we presume to guess his wishes? Perhaps, for all we know, there is a single scene in the book that meant as much to him as anything he’d written. Or less than a scene—a bit of dialogue, a paragraph of description, perhaps no more than a single sentence. Who are we to say it should not survive?”

“Perigord,” Mihalyi said. “You are a writer. Would you care to have your unfinished work published after your death? Would you not recoil at that, or at having it completed by others?”

Philip Perigord cocked an eyebrow. “I’m the wrong person to ask,” he said. “I’ve spent twenty years in Hollywood. Forget unfinished work. My finished work doesn’t get published, or ‘produced,’ as they so revealingly term it. I get paid, and the work winds up on a shelf. And, when it comes to having one’s work completed by others, in Hollywood you don’t have to wait until you’re dead. It happens during your lifetime, and you learn to live with it.”

“We don’t know the author’s wishes,” Harriet Quinlan put in, “and I wonder how relevant they are.”

“But it’s his work,” Mihalyi pointed out.