It's Murder, My Son (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (38 page)

Unable to keep the sarcasm out of his tone, Mac asked, “Why would she change after you married another woman?”

“Were you intimate with your secretary?” David wanted to know.

“No!” Travis practically shouted before bursting into laughter. “My wife is one of the most beautiful women in the world. Why would I lower myself to someone like Betsy Weaver? Why would I have to?”

David glanced at Mac before replying, “Are you trying to tell us that Betsy killed herself in your bed as an act of symbolism?”

“Of course,” Travis said. “After I married Sophia, she became depressed and started acting weird. When she found out that I was having an affair with Katrina—”

“What?” David exclaimed.

With a quiet laugh, Travis looked up at the painting over the fireplace. “Come on, Dave. Did you really think you were the only one?”

“Katrina said you forced yourself on her.”

“I guess we should have gotten our stories straight, but when Sophia walked in on us, she didn’t give us a chance.” Travis’s smile faded. “Betsy couldn’t understand how I could have an extramarital affair with Katrina, who I hadn’t seen in years, and not her. She took her anger out on Katrina. I saw her following Katrina around.” He hung his head. “I should have said something. If I had, Katrina would still be alive.”

After giving Travis a moment to suck in a deep breath and regain what little composure he appeared to have lost, Mac demanded that he tell them what had happened that weekend.

“Betsy had been shadowing me for a long time. Frankly, I’ve gotten used to it. On Saturday, I went to the lounge at the Inn. A woman sent a drink over to me. Of course, I had to thank her. She told me that she was my biggest fan.” He chuckled. “One thing led to another and we made a date to get together at her place. On the way to my car, I ran into Betsy and she was hysterical. She accused me of cheating on her. I saw then that I had no choice but to put an end to this. So I told her how it was. The next afternoon, I came home and found her in my bed. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what happened. I couldn’t let Sophia find Betsy in our bed. I tried to carry her to her cottage, but she weighed a ton. I only got her as far as the pool and dropped her.” He shook his head with a laugh. “I know all about lividity, but rolling that lard ass over onto her back was like trying to move a whale.”

David raised an eyebrow in Mac’s direction before asking, “Do you have the name and address of the new friend you hooked up with on Saturday?”

“Yes, but I can’t give it to you,” Travis said. “She’s married, too. You’ve both seen how jealous Sophia gets. If she found out, there’s no telling what she would do.” With a grin, he added, “I don’t know what it is about me that I pick these jealous types.”

David replied, “We understand, but I still need to check out your alibi. I will be discreet.”

While Travis scribbled out a name and address on a sheet of the typing paper from the inbox, Mac asked, “Did you ever read any of Betsy’s writings?”

“I read a couple of her manuscripts,” Travis said. “They were pretty much rewrites of my books.”

Mac told him, “Your agent told us that she called him Saturday night and insisted on seeing him first thing Monday morning. Do you know what that was about?”

“No.” Travis handed the information about his alibi to David. “I planned to ask her, but never got the chance on account of her offing herself.”

*   *   *   *

When Archie found Betsy Weaver’s cottage, she sighed with relief to find that her laptop didn’t have a password login. Her relief faded when she found that it also didn’t have any pictures, files, or documents.

Someone had taken the laptop back to its factory settings and deleted all of Betsy’s files in the process.

They had neglected to take her notebooks.

Scanning random sections, Archie knelt on the floor to dig through the piles of yellow tablets. As she had suspected, the books contained storylines, outlines, and character notes for murder mysteries. She was shuffling through a two-foot-tall pile of notebooks on the floor in Betsy’s bedroom when she heard, “What are you doing?” hissed into her ear.

Shrieking, Archie clutched the notebook she was reading to her chest.

Mac laughed.

“Don’t you know better than to sneak up on a girl?” She whirled around and slapped his legs with the writing tablet.

He knelt next to her. “Did you find anything?”

“I found something missing. Someone wiped out Betsy’s hard drive. Her desk is cleared out. No disks, no flash drives. No nothing.”

“So whoever killed her didn’t want anyone to find what she was working on,” Mac said. “Who?”

“The Black Diamond,” Archie said. “Think about it. The Black Diamond is a master of disguise. Who knows more about makeup and changing looks than a supermodel?”

Mac chuckled. “Sophia?”

“Unaware that his new bride moonlights as an international assassin, Travis brings Sophia home. Betsy is here blending into the wallpaper so that Sophia doesn’t notice her. But Betsy notices Sophia, who notices Roy Herman and Peter Marlstone. Maybe Sophia even contacts the Sanchez family to negotiate the hit. Betsy thinks she has found the story to make her writing career happen; but, she also becomes a dangerous liability to the Black Diamond, who must eliminate her.”

“Sophia was in New York this weekend,” he said.

“Do we know that for a fact?” She asked, “What did Travis say?”

“That it was a suicide and he dumped the body by the pool because she died at an inconvenient location.”

“Do you believe him?”

“No, someone forced those pills and booze down her throat, and then put her on ice before dumping her next to the pool.”

Convinced of her assessment, Archie declared, “Sounds like a mob hit to me. That points to the Black Diamond.”

Mac gathered the notebooks scattered around them. “We need to find out what Betsy had been working on that got her killed.”

“What are you doing?”

Almost dropping the books she held in her arms, Archie gasped when she saw Sophia behind Mac.

She had tied her wet hair up in a scarlet scarf matching the bikini she wore under a black overwrap. To illustrate her impatience, she tapped the toe of one of her high-heeled sandals while waiting for them to explain their presence in her guest house.

Mac turned around to answer. “We’re investigating a murder.”

“Murder? Give me a break. Who’d care enough about that dweeb to want to go to the trouble of killing her?”

“We think someone killed Betsy because she uncovered something while researching one of Travis’s books,” Mac explained. “We need to take the notebooks to read for possible evidence about what she may have found.”

She waved her hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Take them. They’re nothing but trash. Get them out of here.”

Mac glanced at Archie. Sophia was unconcerned about what could be in Betsy’s notebooks. While Archie gathered them in a laundry basket, he made conversation with their hostess. “I saw your painting. It’s really a masterpiece.”

“Painting?”

“The one Deloise did of you that’s hanging in the study,” he said. “Not every woman can say she was painted by Antonio Deloise.”

Her reaction surprised him.

“Augh! That! I wish Travis would burn that piece of crap.” She screwed up her face. “It doesn’t even look like me.”

Mac stepped up to Sophia. “Did you tell Deloise that you didn’t like the painting? Maybe he could have fixed whatever you didn’t like.”

Her lips curled. “Travis wanted to surprise me. He had given Antonio some pictures from my portfolio to paint from.” She tilted her head. “What are you looking at?”

“Your eyes,” he said.

“A movie critic called them bedroom eyes.” She licked her lips. “Do you like them?”

“Mac!” Archie shoved the laundry basket into his back. “I’m ready to go.”

*   *   *   *

The sun went down on what Archie had considered to be a productive day. She had spent most of the evening reading through Betsy Weaver’s notes. Now, she yearned for dinner and conversation with Mac.

She found him asleep on the back deck. Clutching one of Robin’s books to his chest, he leaned back in a chair with his feet propped up on the corner of the table. Curled up in a tight ball, Gnarly was sleeping under his master’s raised legs. Archie considered snapping a picture of the scene. They reminded her of Mickey Forsythe and Diablo.

She snapped her fingers next to Mac’s ear. “Hey! What’s happening?”

Growling and barking at the same time, Gnarly sat up. His head collided with Mac’s legs, which knocked his master off balance so that he almost fell from his chair.

With a smile, Archie said, “I came to see if you wanted dinner.” 

“I don’t know.” Mac rubbed his eyes. He woke up more to tell her that he was reading.

“Looked like you were sleeping to me.” She sat across from him. “I was reading, too. Betsy wrote a lot. Like Travis, she was into murder mysteries. She was good, too.”

Mac marked his place in Robin’s book and set it aside. “If she was so good, why did she work for Travis?”

“There’re a lot of very good writers out there who can’t get published, either because of timing, or not knowing the right people. Betsy thought she wasn’t pretty enough.”

“People don’t care what authors look like. Either they like what they write or they don’t.”

“Betsy had some issues.” She sighed. “One of the outlines I read in her notes is a chapter by chapter copy of Travis’s second book. Now, I haven’t read every mystery out there, but based on that, it’s entirely possible that Betsy, while she wrote well, had trouble coming up with original plotlines. I also found notes for a mystery about a series of murders in a resort town. The killer ends up being the mayor, who ends up not being who he claimed to be.”

“Sounds familiar,” Mac said.

“Makes one think that maybe Betsy had been lurking in the wrong place at the wrong time. The ME believes her time of death was before Marlstone’s. Maybe he killed Betsy before the Black Diamond caught up with him. Wouldn’t that be ironic?”

Studying the cover of the book he had been reading, Mac didn’t hear what she had said. “Why would a writer mail a package special delivery to herself?”

“Proof of copyright.” Archie gasped. “That package that Gnarly brought home. Betsy had mailed it to herself. She’s a writer. A quick and inexpensive way for writers to prove the date of writing a manuscript is to mail it to yourself special delivery. You file the package away without breaking the seal. The postmark is a legal record of the date the manuscript was completed. Did you open it?”

“I was going to return it to her,” Mac said. “It turns out she was dead one full day when Gnarly brought it home.”

“Let’s go open it.” Archie jumped to her feet.

A shot rang out from across the cove. The windows in the French door behind them shattered.

Mac flew out of his chair, plunged Archie down onto the deck, and covered her with his body. Barking loud enough to wake up everyone on the Point, Gnarly raced down to the dock.

“Gnarly!” Archie attempted to get up to save the dog.

Mac pushed her back down. “Stay down!”

Another shot echoed across the lake followed by the roar of a jet ski speeding away.