Chasing Venus (8 page)

“There’s also a timing
issue.
 
She’s at a critical juncture
in her career, the sort of thing that comes around only once.
 
She’s got this new series and it’s going
gangbusters.
 
Extra printings, the
whole deal.
 
The publisher’s pushing
her like never before—print ads, radio, huge co-op buys.”
 
He waved his hand.
 
“Don’t ask me what those are.
 
The point is this woman could be going
from obscurity to stardom, like right now.”

“I don’t get it,” Reid
said.
 
“That sounds like a good time
not
to start killing people.”

“But,” Sheila said,
“you could make the argument that if some of the competition is out of the way,
she has a bigger opportunity to become a bestseller.
 
Because all those people who want to buy
mysteries would have to buy hers.”

“Exactly,” Simpson
said.

“That’s a stretch,”
Reid said.
 
“Besides, aren’t the big
sellers now the books by O’Neill and Wimble and Boswell?”

“Right now, sure,” Simpson
agreed.
 
“But not for long.
 
And those authors are never going to
have any new books out, are they?”

There was only one
answer to that question.
 
Reid’s
mind worked as he watched the quartet from the stools throw a few bucks on the
bar and file out the
taqueria
door, stealing glances
at him the entire way.

“There’s another
thing,” Simpson said.
 
“She knew
which poison killed Boswell.”

“Curare, right?” Reid
asked.

Simpson seemed taken
aback.
 
“Where’d you hear that?”

Sheila stepped in.
 
“We interviewed a toxicologist for the
show.
 
He was 99 percent sure it was
curare, given what he’d heard about the case.”

“Well, evidently it is
pretty obvious.
 
There’s something
else, too, though.
 
Her prints are
on the blowgun that shot the dart that killed Boswell.”

Sheila’s eyes
widened.
 
“Really?”

Simpson raised his
hands as if to ward off any quick conclusions.
 
“Hers aren’t the only ones.
 
Apparently the party guests were
handling all these collector’s items that Boswell had at her estate and the
blowgun was one of them.
 
And the
other thing is, when Boswell actually took the hit, this woman wasn’t in the
room.
 
She left shortly before.”

Sheila nodded.
 
“So you’re thinking she might have been
in the garden, where no one could see her.
 
Shooting the dart through the French doors.”

“Who is this author,
anyway?” Reid asked.

“Her name’s Annette
Rowell.”

Reid leaned across the
table toward Simpson.
 
“Annette
Rowell?”

“I got you one of her
books.”
 
Sheila pointed at him.
 
“You read part of it on the plane.”

And a whole lot more of it last night.

Simpson’s eyes were on
him.
 
“You know her?”

“I met her at the
funeral.”
 
And again afterward, when I chased her to her car.

“I didn’t know
that.”
 
Now Sheila’s eyes were on
him, too.
 
“Did you get her on
camera?”

“No.
 
She refused to be interviewed.”

“Did you think that was
strange?”
 
Simpson’s gaze didn’t
waver.
 
“Most people want to go on
camera, right?”

“Most do.”
 
He shrugged, though in truth he wasn’t
feeling nonchalant.
 
“Not
everybody.”

“I wish we had her on
camera.”
 
Sheila slapped the table,
her bangles clinking.
 
“Do you still
have the book?
 
Do you remember if
her photo is in it?”

In fact, Reid had a
very clear recollection of the photo.
 
He slid out of the booth to pull the book out of his briefcase and hand
it to Sheila.
 
She flipped to the
back cover and held the book open so both she and Simpson could see.
 
“She’s attractive,” Sheila said, her
eyes already off the photo and on Reid.

Reid kept his voice
neutral.
 
“She is.”

Simpson swiped his
napkin across his mouth, then tossed it on the table.
 
“Higuchi’s down in your neck of the
woods right now talking to her ex.”

“She was married?”
 
That popped out before Reid could make
sure it sounded casual.
 
He wasn’t
sure it had, given the appraising expression on Sheila’s face.

“For seven years,”
Simpson said.
 
“She put the guy
through his medical training and then he dumped her.
 
Ain’t
that a
cliché.”
 
He threw a twenty on the
table.
 
“Sorry, gotta go.
 
By the way, anything new on Bigelow?”
 
He slid out of the booth.

“Nothing yet.”

Simpson nodded, slapped
Reid on the arm.
 
“Keep me posted.”

“You do the same.”

Simpson exited, the
bell on the door jangling noisily behind him.
 
Sheila raised her index finger to summon
the check but kept her dark eyes fixed on Reid.
 
“Interesting new development.”

“I guess so.”
 
Reid busied himself with studying the
check, though with only three food entries and three drinks it wasn’t hard to
add up.

“It’s quite a
circumstantial case they’re building against this Annette Rowell,” Sheila went
on.

“But as Simpson said,
he doesn’t like it.”
 
Reid handed
the server a credit card and finally was forced to meet Sheila’s gaze.

Her eyes were
clear.
 
“I don’t think you do,
either.”

*

Five days later, past
midnight, the broadcast long over, Sheila Banerjee sat in her office, one of
several glass-walled cubicles on the west side of
Crimewatch
’s darkened studio.
 
The building was empty; Reid, everybody was gone.
 
Overhead, fluorescent lights buzzed like
cicadas.
 
Through her contact
lenses, gummy after so many hours of use, Sheila could see her reflection in
the glass that surrounded her.
 
She
didn’t like what she saw: a workaholic getting old before her time.

She sighed.
 
Only a dozen more
tipsheets
to review before she could call it a night.
 
Then she wouldn’t have to think about
Crimewatch
again until Monday.
 
And all weekend she’d have the
satisfaction of knowing it had been a good show that had produced a good haul
of tips.
 
The phone banks had lit
up.

She rested her cheek on
her hand and skimmed the top
tipsheet
on the
pile.
 
It had to do with the segment
on the writer murders.
 
It was
anonymous, though the phone-bank staffer had noted that the caller was male.
 
The no-name tips were always suspicious,
as most callers liked to take credit for their purported sightings.
 
But every once in a while one turned out
to be accurate.

The staffer had been
typing fast, apparently; the
tipsheet
was littered
with misspellings and typos.
 
But
Sheila got the gist.

CHECK OUT THE MISTERY
WRITER ANNETT ROWELL.
 
I SAW HER
BURY SOMETHING IN HER BACKYARD IN BODAYGA BAY.
 
IT SEEMED SUSPICIOUS.

She stared at the
page.
 
Her mind turned to Reid.
 
Somehow … somehow she hadn’t liked the
look on his face when Annette Rowell’s name had come up at their lunch with Lionel
Simpson.

Sheila rolled her chair
back from her desk and slid open the shallow center drawer where she stored
pens and paper clips and other small office supplies.
 
Way in the rear—where no one would
accidentally find it—was a photo.
 
Her hand closed on it and drew it out.
 
It was creased and its edges were soft
from handling.

She smiled.
 
The picture had been taken at the Santa
Monica pier several years before, on a glorious Southern California
Saturday.
 
For a change, Reid wasn’t
wearing his leather jacket.
 
He had
on a blue plaid Madras shirt, which she’d given him.
 
He was grinning and his arm was flung
around her shoulders.
 
She was
grinning, too; in fact, she looked delirious.
 
Even now she remembered very clearly the
wonderful warmth of his body next to hers.
 
It had been in that brief, oh so brief window of time when she’d thought
that something might finally happen between them.
 
But nothing had.
 
The chance had caved in on itself,
become nothing more than a celluloid hope.

What had stopped
him?
 
So many times she’d asked
herself that question.
 
They’d had a
few heart-pounding weeks of more-than-friends, gotten tantalizingly close to
sleeping together, and then he’d just shut down.
 
He’d made some lame excuse; she didn’t
even remember what it was, it was so clearly not the real reason.
 
To this day she didn’t know what the
truth was.
 
Too much familiarity,
because they worked together?
 
Their
different cultures?
 
The fact that,
because they worked together, he couldn’t love her and leave her like he did
everybody else?
 
She envied those
other women, sometimes.
 
In some
ways they had more of him than she did.
 
She was his friend.
 
Always
his friend.
 
Which was so much and
yet so much less than what she longed for.

Reluctantly she
returned the photo to its hiding place.
 
It was important to find the person who was killing those writers, she
told herself.
 
The crimes were
heinous.
 
Who knew when the murderer
might strike again?
 
Innocent lives
were at risk.
 
She had a
responsibility to do the right thing, make sure this tip made its way swiftly
to the right hands.

She checked her
cell.
 
Yes, she had Lionel Simpson
among her contacts.
 
And tomorrow,
first thing, she would call him.

*

She couldn’t get away
from it.
 
Not here, not anywhere.

Annie looked out at her
writing students, massed as usual on a Saturday afternoon at the Cookies and
Cozies Bookstore in Berkeley, not far from her parents’ home.
 
Keeping her appointment to teach the
class, as though everything in her life were just hunky-dory, was part of the
Annette Rowell All-Discipline, All-the-Time Program.
 
She’d embarked on it after the divorce
and was still at it.
 
And why?
 
It worked.
 
In the beginning it had gotten her
through heartache.
 
Now it was
getting her through being both a murder suspect and a potential murder victim.

"Sorry, guys,” she
told her students.
 
“I can’t tell
you anything more about the murders than you’ve read in the papers.”
 
She didn’t know how she managed to say that
and sound truthful.
 
Another trick
she’d learned somehow.

She was met with a sea
of incredulous, doubting, and disappointed faces.

"I can't believe
you don’t have inside information."
 
That, snidely, from a dark-haired pseudo-intellectual type whose prose
was as lazy as his posture.
 
"I
mean, you were at Maggie Boswell’s party, right?
 
And you write this murder mystery shit
all the time.
 
Didn’t you get, like,
a vibe from somebody?"

The only vibe she was
getting was that she should expend less effort teaching her future
competition.
 
Sometimes the goal of
“giving back” seemed too noble by half.
 
How had Michael done it all those years?
  

A gorgeous redhead with
major pretensions of literary stardom piped up from the rear.
 
"Have you been questioned by the
police?
 
Were your prints
taken?"

“I have been questioned
by the police,” she allowed, which roused everyone’s attention.
 
Butts shifted in chairs, heads rose from
laptop keyboards, and even Wanda Kilter's knitting needles stopped
clacking.
 
“Of course, everybody who
attended Maggie Boswell’s party was questioned.
 
And no, my prints weren’t taken.”
 
Not
then, anyway
.

Disgruntled sighs all
around.
 
Except from one keen-eyed
woman in her late fifties who, as always, sat in the front row on the far
left.
 
She sported out-of-date
oversized glasses, a tie-dyed tee shirt, and khaki cargo pants, and it looked
as if her long gray hair rarely encountered a comb, let alone a pair of
scissors.