Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (20 page)

The narrator blinked. “What? The cake? What cake?”

“Any cake,” sighed Rose. “You can’t judge a cake from two eggs, and you can’t judge a book from a plot summary. A bad writer can ruin anything. Just write the book and shut up.” She stalked off in the direction of the
hors d’oeuvres, but her way was blocked by a bearded man in a fringed buckskin jacket.

“Hello, little lady,” he beamed at her in a B-movie twang. “You wouldn’t happen to be an editor, would you?”

“Why do you ask?” Her eyes were glittering, the way they always did when people said words like
shorty
or
pulp fiction
.

“Why, I just happen to have a new chapbook here that is Rod McKuen and Kahlil Gibran rolled into one. I’m Jess Scarberry.” He paused, waiting for cries of recognition that were not forthcoming. “I’m going to be doing a reading from it at eleven tomorrow. Why don’t you come?” He beamed at a serious young woman in horn-rimmed glasses who was standing near Rose. “And you, too, of course, ma’am.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” said Rose, edging past him as she reached for a cheese cube. Jess Scarberry wandered away in search of other victims.

When he was out of earshot, Amy Dillow snickered. “I can’t believe he thinks anybody will come to his stupid reading,” she sniffed. “John Clay Hawkins is lecturing that hour on the poetic tradition.”

“Really?” Rose wondered what else was going on at that hour. Flea-dipping seemed preferable.

Amy nodded, eyes shining. “He’s been published everywhere! Even the
Virginia Quarterly Review
. And John Ciardi once called his work
well-crafted
.”

“That silver-tongued devil,” murmured Rose.

“I’m doing my dissertation on Dr. Hawkins,” Amy confided. “I think Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin are just too overdone, don’t you?”

“Well, that’s because people have heard of them,” said Rose. “I suppose you’d have a better chance of getting a professorship as a Larkin scholar than as a Hawkins expert. Still, it must be useful to be able to discuss the symbolism of the poetry with its author.”

Amy looked shocked. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that! What would he know about that? He just writes them. It’s up to us scholars to determine what they mean. But I do see quite a bit of Dr. Hawkins. I’m sort of working as his volunteer secretary, too. I just hate to see him wasting his time on anything but his Muse.”

Rose grunted. “I wish somebody felt that way about mystery writers.”

“That’s him over there,” whispered Amy, pointing at a silver-haired man with a shiny blue suit and a leathery tan. The substance in his glass did not look like fruit punch. He was surrounded by several other men—an unusual occurrence for a male poet at a writers’ conference. Even Amy seemed to feel that the phenomenon warranted an explanation. “Those other men are also regional poets. That young one in the leather jacket is Carter Jute, and the gaunt, elderly one is Mr. Snowfield. And there’s the guy in the cowboy outfit who just invited us to his poetry class. I don’t know who he thinks he is.”

Rose smiled in the direction of Jess Scarberry, talking shop and, no doubt, chapbooks with the academic gentry of his field. “That,” she said solemnly, “is the
poet lariat
.”

Meanwhile, in the Poets’ Corner, John Clay Hawkins was smiling genially as the discussion of poetry went on around him. He had already sized up Scarberry as a con man poet, but he wasn’t particularly offended by him. After all, was an iambic pentameter sex life really so much worse than what poor old Snowfield did—using his lackluster lyrics to evade teaching freshmen, and as an excuse for pomposity with other members of his department. Young Jute, he decided, was going through a phase, probably on his way to becoming a William Faulkner clone. He had already acquired the drinking problem, and he seemed to revel in the inaccessibility of his work, as though being incoherent made him smarter than anybody else. Hawkins sometimes wanted to say to these people,
“All babies are incoherent, but they grow up. That is the principal difference between an infant and a poet.” But he never said anything so unkind. Other people’s folly didn’t really annoy John Clay Hawkins; they all seemed very remote.

Mostly he was tired. His career as a poet had begun while he was in graduate school, when he had written a slim volume of poems commemorating the marriage of his former roommate, Norman Grant, to a cheerleader named Lee Locklear. The poems were tastefully obscure, so as not to resemble the bawdy limericks usually offered by groomsmen on such occasions. He had meant them as a gift, since he couldn’t afford so much as a shard of the expensive china pattern the couple had chosen, but the former roommate had been a literary type himself, and flattered by this poetic tribute, he had sent copies of
Grant and Lee’s Union
to
The Carolina Quarterly
and to various other prestigious Southern publications. The editors of those august journals, not apprised of the coming nuptials, assumed that the verses were a retrospective of the Civil War, and the verses were published to considerable acclaim in several magazines. The LSU Press brought out the entire collection the following year, and it won an obscure prize thanks to the presence of an LSU man and a Civil War buff on the panel of judges. After that, John Clay Hawkins found that people took it for granted that he wanted to continue being a poet, and to his surprise he found that he was rather good at it, so he kept writing. Long after Mrs. Lee Locklear Grant had dumped Norman Grant for a Wachovia Bank vice president, Hawkins continued to receive writing fellowships, and to spend a good part of his non-teaching time lecturing at various universities. After twenty years of unfailingly patient workshops and well-performed readings that people actually understood, Hawkins found himself enshrined in academic hearts somewhere between Robert Frost and Yoda, the Jedi Master of
Star Wars
. He bore beatification
with quiet dignity, and went on writing simple, beautifully phrased poems about rural life. Sometimes, though, hearing the same old questions for the hundredth time that day left him feeling unutterably weary.

He turned to smile at a twittery woman who was tugging at his elbow. “Tell me,” she said, through Bambi eyelashes, “where do you get your ideas for a poem?”

An elegant woman also bent on speaking to him had overheard this remark. “Poets get ideas everywhere,” she snapped. “That’s what makes them poets!” Having thus frightened the church bulletin versifier out of the fold, the dark-eyed young woman offered her hand to John Clay Hawkins. “My name is Samari,” she purred. “I also write verse.”

“You must meet Carter Jute,” Hawkins murmured, recognizing an example of his colleague’s taste in women.

The woman ignored his ploy. “I especially wanted to speak to you. I have found the ranks of scholarly poetry to be rather a closed circle”—she glanced over at Jess Scarberry and shuddered delicately—“with good reason, perhaps. But I do think I have a special gift, and I’d like you to read my work and to suggest some places that I could send it.”

As often as this trap had sprung shut on him, John Clay Hawkins had not yet devised a foolproof way to get out of it. He tried his first tactic: the Aw Shucks Maneuver. “Oh, I just buy
Poet’s Market
every year, and send ’em on out to whoever seems to like my sort of work,” he said modestly, studying the tops of his shoes.

“Yes, but you’re a
name
,” Samari persisted. “I’m not. It would really help if you’d recommend it. Then I could say that
you
told me to send it to them.”

Hawkins studied the jut of Connie Maria Samari’s jaw, and the sharklike glitter of her eyes, and he recognized the Type Three Poet, the Lady Praying Mantis. In relationships she eats her mate alive, and professionally, she is as singleminded as Attila the Hun. Struggling would
only prolong and embitter the encounter. Worst of all, he actually had to look at her work. A simple “Send it to Bob at
Whistlepig Review
” would not satisfy her. She wanted a diagnosis based on a reading. “Well, bring it along later,” he sighed. “I’ll be in my room—406—after eleven. I’ll look at it then.”

As she moved away in search of other prey, Hawkins remembered that he had also promised to have drinks with Jute, Snowfield, and Scarberry after eleven, and he had promised interviews or consultations with two other novices. Fortunately, Hawkins was a night person, and his lecture wasn’t until eleven the next morning.
Surely
, he thought,
there must be quicker forms of martyrdom
.

Rose Hanelon, who went to bed with the chickens (exclusively), had been sound asleep for several hours when the pounding on her door called her forth from slumber. Groping for her eyeglasses and then her terry cloth bathrobe, she stumbled toward the door, propelled only by the thought of dismembering whoever she found when she opened it.

“Miss Hanelon?” An anxious Margie Collier, looking as if she’d thrown her clothes on with a pitchfork, fidgeted in the doorway. The sight of a glaring gargoyle in a dressing gown did little to calm her. “Did I wake you?” she gasped. “I mean—I thought you writers worked late at night on your manuscripts.”

“No,” said Rose between her teeth. “I’m usually out robbing graves at this hour, but it’s raining! Now what do you want?”

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but since you are a mystery writer, we thought—Oh, Miss Hanelon, there’s been a murder!”

“How amusing for you.” Rose started to close the door. “These little parlor games are of no interest to me, however.”

“No! Not a murder game! A real murder. Someone has killed John Clay Hawkins!”

“That is too bad,” said Rose, shaking her head sadly. “He wasn’t my first choice at all.”

Eventually Margie Collier’s urgency persuaded Rose that the matter was indeed serious, and her next reaction was to ask why they had bothered to wake her about it, instead of calling the local police. “They aren’t here yet. Besides, we thought they might need some help,” said Margie. “The people at this writers’ conference are hardly the criminal types they’re used to.”

“No, I suppose not. They’re the criminal types
I’m
used to.” She stifled a yawn. “All right. Give me ten minutes to get dressed. Oh, you might as well tell me about it while I do. Save time. What happened?”

Margie sat down on the bed, and modestly fixed her eyes at a point on the ceiling while she recited her narrative. “About midnight, a woman named Samari went to Dr. Hawkins’s room to show him her manuscript—”

“I’ve never heard it called that before—” Rose called from the bathroom.

“She’s a poetess.” Margie’s tone was reproachful. “She knocked, and found the door ajar, and there he was, slumped in his chair at the writing table. Someone had hit him over the head with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.”

“Was it empty?”

“I believe so. There wasn’t any spilled on the body. Ms. Samari came and got me, not knowing what else to do.”

“An empty whiskey bottle.” Rose wriggled a black sweater over her head. “Dylan Thomas would probably approve of that finale,” she remarked. “There. I’m ready. If you insist on doing this. I’ll bet the police shut down this show the minute they get here.”

“Maybe so,” said Margie. “But that won’t be until sometime tomorrow. The storm is too bad to take a boat across. And they won’t risk a helicopter, either.”

“What? We’re stuck here? What if somebody becomes seriously ill?”

“I asked the hotel manager about that. He said there’s a registered nurse on the staff. Actually, she’s the dietician, but in an emergency—”

“Never mind. I guess I’m elected. Let’s go investigate this thing.”

Margie brightened. “It’s just like a mystery story, isn’t it?”

“Not one that my editor would buy.”

Although Rose Hanelon wrote what she liked to call traditional mysteries, she was well-versed in police procedure, first of all because she read widely within the genre, and secondly because the townhouse adjoining hers belonged to a police detective who liked to talk shop at his backyard cookouts. He particularly enjoyed critiquing the police procedurals written by Rose’s fellow authors. With no effort on her part, Rose had assimilated quite a good working knowledge of law enforcement. She wondered if it would serve her well in the current emergency. Probably not. People had to cooperate with police officers, but they were perfectly free to ignore an inquisitive mystery writer, no matter how knowledgeable she was about investigative procedure.

“Do you think you’ll be able to solve the crime?” asked Margie, who was scurrying along after Rose like a terrier in the wake of a St. Bernard.

“I doubt it,” said Rose. “The police have computers, and other useful tools for ferreting out the truth. Paraffin tests, ballistics experts. If Joe Villanova had to use his powers of deduction to solve cases, he’d be in big trouble. He’s a police officer; lives next door to me. He’d probably arrest me for even trying to meddle in this case. Too bad he’s not here.”

“Oh, but you’ve written so many mysteries!” said Margie. “I’m sure you know quite a bit.”

“I can tell you who I want to be guilty,” Rose replied. “That’s what I do in my books.”

“Do you want to examine Mr. Hawkins’s body?”

“No. I’m not a doctor, and I don’t want to get hassled for tampering with evidence. Let’s just go and badger some suspects, shall we?”

Margie nodded. “I asked the hotel manager to put the poets in the hospitality suite.”

“I hope they didn’t bring along any manuscripts,” muttered Rose. “The very thought of being cooped up with a bunch of bards gives me hives.”

“It seems strange, doesn’t it, to think of poets as murder suspects. They are such gentle people.”

Rose Hanelon raised her eyebrows. “Have you ever been in an English department?”

The door to the hospitality suite was open, and the sounds of bickering could be heard halfway down the hall. “I think we should just conduct a memorial service in Hawkins’s scheduled hour tomorrow,” Carter Jute was saying. “It would be a nice way to honor his memory. I wouldn’t mind conducting the service.”

Jess Scarberry, the poet lariat, sneered. “I’ll bet you wouldn’t mind, Sonny, but remember that I’m also scheduled to do a reading at that hour. You’re not taking away my audience for some phony displays of grief.”