Death on Demand (4 page)

She couldn’t lose her bookstore. It was the first thing in all her life that had been her own, and it was her only link with the happiest portion of her past, those idyllic summer days, curled up in a hammock behind Uncle Ambrose’s tiny house, poring over the adventures of mousey Miss Silver, elegant Lord Wimsey, and gimlet-eyed Miss Marple.

Annie relished running Death On Demand. She’d loved mysteries since her first Nancy Drew. She loved mystery readers, who ran the gamut of society, with a small
s.
She enjoyed tipping readers to new, good writers, such as Jane Dentinger, Dorothy Cannell, and Charlaine Harris. She liked the way readers could surprise you: the wispy-haired spinster who never missed a McBain, the island plumber whose favorite author was Amanda Cross. Now, there was an accomplishment: to become a best-selling mystery writer and also win tenure at Columbia—the twin achievement of Carolyn Heilbrun, who writes as Amanda Cross.

She’d enjoyed meeting writers during her summer visits, but she’d never until now had a chance to know any of them well. She had to admit she didn’t exactly love all these mystery writers. Still, she liked some of them a lot. Elliot was a stinker.

The phone at the cash desk rang.

Blast Max. He probably needed directions.

Steeling herself, she stayed put.

Would everybody come tonight?

Her Sunday Night Specials, when the store was open only to writers, were popular. At least, they had been until now. Every Sunday evening, one of the Regulars provided an informal program. One Sunday, the Farleys, who wrote children’s mysteries, told the Regulars about Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who built a mansion high above the Hudson with her profits from the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books and several other series which first her father, then she, authored. The Stratemeyer syndicate had worked under nearly fifty pseudonyms and sold over one hundred million books. During one session, Harriet Edelman, whose own hero was infamously clever, traced the history
of the comedy mystery from Mary Roberts Rinehart’s first injection of mild humor in
The Circular Staircase
through Constance and Gwenyth Little, Craig Rice, Donald Westlake, Stuart M. Kaminsky, and Joyce Porter to Gregory Mcdonald’s triumphantly cocky and irreverent Fletch books. Another Sunday, Captain McElroy, or Capt. Mac as they called him, drew on his experiences as a former police chief to explain with stolid thoroughness how to avoid leaving fingerprints on almost any kind of surface. He was an unpublished author, but warmly welcomed by the group because of his expertise—he’d spent several years early in his career in the Miami Police Department. One thing he’d learned: In searching for a kilter, try nearby cafes for descriptions of customers shortly after the murder. Killing makes people hungry.

Until now, the Sunday evenings had been special and a lot of fun. Until last week, when Annie realized something odd and ugly was happening to her Sunday evenings. That night, Harriet Edelman had arrived early and made straight for the coffee bar at the back.

“Give me some of that good Kona stuff.”

Annie poured the dark, aromatic coffee into two white mugs and handed one to Harriet, whose battery of bracelets jangled musically as she took it. She stared down into the black coffee, then said savagely, “I swear to God, if you won’t screw an editor, you can’t get anywhere!”

“Surely it’s not that bad. Besides, aren’t most editors women?”

Harriet’s mouth twisted. “Maybe, but I still say you can’t get anywhere if you don’t have pull—and you’ve got a lot better chance if you live in Manhattan and know the bastards.” Her faded blond hair drooped across a high, domed forehead. Thick horn-rimmed glasses increased her owlishness. Oddly enough, Harriet wrote frothy mysteries which featured wryly funny heroes. Annie chalked it up as one of nature’s jokes.

“Dropping sales, half-assed reviews, and if everything weren’t lousy enough,” Harriet continued bitterly, “some low-life wrote my editor and told her my last book had a stolen plot. Can you believe that?” Harriet’s voice rasped up into shrill outrage.

“Oh, ignore it,” Annie soothed. “Didn’t someone once say there were only ten plots, and they’ve all been used?”

Harriet wasn’t listening. Her sallow face glistened with anger. “Don’t think I don’t know who did it.”

Annie looked at her with concern. The hatred in her voice was shocking, and horribly inappropriate against the snatches of conversation as the writers milled toward the tables in the coffee area.

“Stick’s
his best. No doubt about that.”

“No, no.
Switch
is tighter, tenser.”

“I’ll tell you who has the most original mind in crime fiction today—Tom Perry, bar none.”

“Don’t tell me you still read Dorothy Savers?”

Bullish voices, didactic, perhaps, but none with the frightening edge of desperation in Harriet’s.

Harriet’s fingers dug into Annie’s arm. “If it really is him—if he did it, I’ll kill him.”

Was it fate or irony or black humor that Elliot chose that moment to clap his hands for attention?

Annie looked up sharply and broke free of Harriet’s grasp. What was Elliot up to? Emma was scheduled to speak tonight.

The writers settled swiftly around the tables at the back of Death on Demand. Elliot stood near the coffee bar, the customary spot for the speaker. He clapped his hands again. “I know everyone’s eager to hear Emma tonight.”

The Regulars looked obediently and expectantly toward Emma Clyde, whose fictional detective Marigold Rembrandt was second only to Miss Marple in readers’ affections and earned Emma an astounding seven figures a year. Plump, motherly, and utterly down-home, Emma always seemed slightly bewildered by her fame, but Annie noticed that her mind worked with the precision of an IBM PC
jr
.

“No doubt Emma will be happy to share the secret of her enormous success,” Elliot continued unctuously. “You know, I really felt pretty uncomfortable when I realized I would be following her next week. However, I’ve given a lot of thought to the program I plan to present.”

Ego, ego, Annie thought. Elliot can’t bear to spend a whole evening listening to another writer, so he’s going to horn in on Emma. She got ready to move forward and cut him off before he did any more damage.

“I’ve been doing some investigating, some
real
investigating. You know, digging out those delicious little secrets people try so hard to hide.”

“More true crime? Some shoplifter’s memoirs?” Fritz Hemphill’s thin voice was sardonic.

Elliot’s head swiveled toward Fritz.

Annie was reminded unpleasantly of a snake.

Fritz wrote male adventure with blood, guts, and enough macho for a battalion of Green Berets.

“Not a shoplifter. No, I have something much more special in mind. My publisher and I are convinced this will be a best-seller.”

“Like
Kiss a Stranger?”
Fritz asked sarcastically.

Oh, wow. Only Fritz would be courageous or crazy enough to say that aloud. Everyone knew Elliot’s last book was a bomb and had been remaindered six months after it came out. It was a true-crime book, a horrific description of a Hollywood starlet’s foolish and deadly passion for a hitchhiker.

Someone snickered, probably Harriet.

Elliot’s face darkened, but his voice remained pleasant.

“No, this little volume will knock their socks off. You know how the public has this enormous appetite to know all about their idols? Dirty laundry and all? Well, I’ve decided to tell everybody the truth about a very special group. Don’t you agree it will make a hell of a book to tell all about some well-known writers? Mystery writers, that is.”

The silence was absolute.

“The real truth—all the gritty, nasty little secrets.” Elliot’s eyes glistened with malicious pleasure as he scanned the frozen faces of his listeners.

“Sounds boring to me,” Emma said lightly, but her light blue eyes sparkled angrily. “Not enough sex appeal, Elliot.”

“I can assure you, my dear, there will be plenty of sex.”

That was last week. Everyone had stayed for Emma’s presentation, but they all scurried out afterward without the usual good-natured bickering and jousting. All week long Annie had procrastinated on deciding what—if anything—she could do to prevent tonight’s explosion.

It was her shop. It was up to her.

But, after all, these people were adults. They certainly
didn’t need her to play Big Momma. They might even resent it.

It was her store—and she resented Elliot using her evening to poke and gouge at her friends. Moreover, she wasn’t about to let him believe he’d cowed her with his threats to raise her rent.

Okay. She would …

Annie sat bolt upright in the cane chair and looked toward the central aisle. She couldn’t see it, of course, not from her comfortable bunging spot on this side of the diagonal bookshelves. She didn’t have to see the central aisle or into the coffee area to recognize that sound. When the back door to Death On Demand was pulled shut, a loose cupboard in the receiving room always snapped to with a sharp crack, like a .22 rifle.

She reminded herself that it was Sunday morning, she was alone in her store, and the back door was locked. But she’d heard that sharp, unmistakable crack.

Annie slipped to her feet, skirted the table, another cane chair, a floor lamp, and the clinging fronds of a fern. The central aisle was shadowy. Afraid she might attract another Mrs. Brawley, she hadn’t turned on the lights. She’d wanted peace and quiet to ponder her problems. So it was quite dim here in the center of the store. She could see a portion of the coffee area. It was utterly quiet, utterly still.

She opened her mouth to call out, but there was something so heavy and ominous in the waiting silence that her throat closed.

This is silly.

But that cupboard
had
slammed shut. She’d
heard
it.

Stealthily, feeling vaguely foolish, she edged down the central aisle, her eyes seeking out the shadowy corners, that dark splotch near the doorway to the delivery room.

A sudden wave of panic swept over her. She remembered something Capt. Mac had said in his talk. “Listen to your instinct. If you ever feel, even for an instant, that something is wrong, dead wrong, run. Run and scream.”

Terrific advice. Except she couldn’t scream. Her breath was bunched like a pineapple in her throat, and her legs wobbled.

Annie turned toward the front of the store and crouched,
like a track athlete waiting for the starter’s gun. Okay. As soon as she could force a deep breath, she was going to break and run for the front door and …

Annie blew out the bulge of air in a whoosh and felt like a fool.

She stood and walked a little unsteadily up the aisle and stopped to look into Agatha’s languorous green eyes.

“You’d think I wrote mysteries, wouldn’t you, Agatha? What an imagination!” She scooped up the sleek black cat from her basket, which rested on top of the Christie section, and stroked her gleaming fur, knowing Agatha would tolerate the effrontery for only a moment. A predictably independent feline, Agatha never stayed in the same room with a stranger. In fact, with few exceptions, she fled to hide beneath her favorite fern the instant anyone entered the shop. Obviously no stranger had come into the storeroom. She’d probably imagined that noise. Perhaps it was the crack of a broken branch outside. In any event, it was time to stop behaving like a Barbara Michaels’ heroine.

Agatha growled politely.

Laughing partly from relief and partly from embarrassment, Annie put Agatha gently back on the shelf. Agatha, of course, jumped down. Everything was okay; it was just another Sunday morning. How absurd to imagine anyone would break into the shop. After all, there was absolutely no reason for anyone to break and enter. It wasn’t as though there would be cash in hand. She’d almost have to borrow money to buy lunch. The whole episode was just a product of her overly vivid imagination. Like reading
My Cousin Rachel
when she was fourteen and, for a doom-laden week, suspecting that Uncle Ambrose intended to do away with her.

Nevertheless, she checked the back door. It was kicked. There was nothing to worry about. As for the evening, she would fix Elliot’s wagon. She would take the floor first and point out that the Sunday Night Specials were supposed to have programs beneficial to the writers, and she felt there was a lack of interest in Elliot’s program, and why didn’t they take a vote on it? That would put Elliot in his place, all right.

T
he whistle was frankly admiring and subtly erotic.

Annie didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t need to.

“How did you find me?”

“Dear Ms. Laurance, always so direct. I arrived on the ten-thirty ferry. Since there is only one ferry on Sunday morning, I was forced to count fiddler crabs while waiting. Fascinating creatures. When I reached your snug little island, I immediately rented a condo near the harbor and began my quest. I will confess I was surprised to find that the proprietress of Death On Demand is so slothful that she doesn’t open on Sundays, but I recalled that said proprietress is tiringly vigorous and deduced that she would probably be found on the beach, either jogging or swimming. How disappointed I am to find her stretched out on a beach towel with her face covered by the latest issue of
Vogue.”