The Christie Caper (27 page)

“Eavesdropping?” The skeptical eyes bored into Annie’s.

“I’m trying to find out everything I can about Neil Bledsoe.” Annie’s tone was crisp.

A long, thoughtful pause, then a tiny nod. “I went to work for Bob Masters as a receptionist right out of school. I read manuscripts at night, for a reader’s fee. Bob thought I had promise. I worked my heart out. Four years later, he made me a full partner. That was in 1978.” The rapid monotone came to a full halt.

“Yes?” Annie encouraged.

“The most exciting days of my life. Beginnings are always wonderful.” A tiny smile touched her face, just for an instant, then her somber look returned. “I was too young to know that every beginning leads to an end. But for a while, it was glorious. I discovered Pamela Gerrard. Pamela …” Margo fingered the spoon beside her coffee cup. “In 1981, Bob hired Neil. I was against it from the first, but Bob thought he would be a draw for hard-boiled writers.” She absently stirred her coffee. “I suppose Neil knew I didn’t want him hired. Then I overheard him on the phone, making a date with a young writer who’d sent in her manuscript to see if we’d take her on. Bob was out of town. I really unloaded on Neil.” A mirthless laugh. “I thought I’d taken care of it. Funny thing is, it never occurred to me to run to Bob. About
a month later, I came to work and there was a note from Bob on my desk. I was fired. For unprofessional activities. Bob left town the same day. He refused to accept calls from me. I cleared out my desk, but I kept writing and calling. Finally, I got it out of a secretary there. About a half-dozen unsolicited manuscripts had arrived. Each author received a letter, signed with my name, asking for a fifty-dollar reading fee. Some agencies do require reading fees, but not the best ones. Certainly not Bob’s. And the letter asked that the checks be made out to me. One of the authors called up to complain and got Bob. So he fired me.”

“Bledsoe sent out the letters in your name? How could that work? If the authors sent checks, wouldn’t they have come to you?”

“I tracked down the receptionist. She said Neil told her to intercept letters from certain people, that I had asked him to take care of those inquiries. It never occurred to her to question it, and by the time I wised up enough to hunt for some answers, he’d already gotten her sacked.” A bright flush suffused the agent’s cheeks. “He forged my name, cashed the checks. I got through to Bob finally. He didn’t believe me.” The hurt was naked in her voice, all these years later. “Bob said nobody would go to that kind of effort just to cause someone else trouble. Bob was killed in a car wreck six months later. He died thinking the young girl he’d treated like a daughter had cheated him and made his agency look cheap.” She cleared her throat. “So, yes, I know what a bastard Neil is.” She looked at Annie levelly. “Neil will lie, cheat, steal, connive, whatever it takes, to help himself.”

Annie was quite willing to believe all evil of Neil Bledsoe. “But at least you got away from him when you left the agency.”

“Did I? Can anyone ever be free of someone like Neil, as long as he’s alive to ruin lives?” Her eyes glittered “I suppose I’ve just made myself suspect number one.” She looked, just for an instant, quite capable of murder, her face hard, her hands clenched.

Annie thought of the tattered brown diary and briefly shook her head.

The agent relaxed slightly. “But God knows I’m not the
only one here who loathes Neil. Poor Victoria Shaw and Nathan Hillman and Derek Davis.”

Annie waited.

The words seemed dredged from deep inside Margo. “Neil might as well have picked up a gun and shot Bryan Shaw and Pamela Gerrard.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes,” Margo said, almost dreamily, “I think Neil takes a sheer, perverse delight in evil, that it attracts him the way a woman does, that there’s the same element of lust and exploitation. He despises goodness; he sees it as weak, effeminate. There could be no worse judgment in his mind.” Margo lifted her coffee cup, then put it down without taking a sip. “Bryan Shaw was my best client. Almost the only client I had when I started out on my own. I had never expected to be on my own. I’d made no provision for it. When Bob kicked me out, I was so stunned, I didn’t even try to take any of my authors with me. Bryan called, wanted to know what happened. I told him. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I think about Bryan and wonder if he would still be alive and published if he hadn’t come with me. You see, Neil left the agency for Hillman House. He replaced Bryan’s editor just as I turned in Bryan’s latest book. Oh, God, why did Neil do it?”

“Turn down Shaw’s last manuscript?”

Margo lifted her cup, drank the cold coffee. “Turning it down wasn’t the problem. If he’d just turned it down, I could have sold it somewhere else. No, it’s worse than that. I sent it around. Word gets out quickly when a name author is available. This is a small community, you know. We know each other. People talk. And I had no reason to be secretive about where I’d sent Bryan’s book. Actually, I talked it up, wanted everyone to know a superb talent was available. So Neil listened, then he had lunch with those editors, and in the course of gossip let it be known, oh so confidentially, that Bryan’s sales were down. Way down. That pre-orders for his last book had been embarrassing. So, nobody wanted Bryan. There’s nothing worse than the author who leaves a big house, and the word gets out his sales have taken a nosedive. By the time I found out what was going on, it was
too late. Bryan was dead.” She leaned back in her chair, her face somber.

“And Pamela Gerrard?”

Margo’s eyes darkened. “Pamela was ripe for the plucking. Just divorced. You know what happens when women divorce. They lose twenty-five pounds. Their makeup is perfect. And they are as brittle as those gorgeous, dying leaves in the fall. Showy and colorful and breakable. She’d just made the bestseller list for the first time. But all that does is terrify an author. Most of them, at least. This was just before Bob kicked me out. Pamela was in town and I was going to take her to lunch. Neil dropped by my office and somehow without my knowing quite how it happened, he came to lunch with us. It was like leading a lamb to slaughter. He came on to Pam like nothing I’ve ever seen. I might as well have been invisible. Neil is,” she said reluctantly, “a sexy bastard.”

Annie made no effort to deny it Bad and mean and dangerous, but sensually, lustfully, magnificently male.

“They flew to Reno three weeks later and got married. Poor Pam. So beautiful, so gifted. So foolish.”

Money was often difficult to trace. But this particular documentation had all the earmarks of fakery. Max finally wormed behind the facade of Allied Everest Company in Dallas, Texas, which had paid Neil Bledsoe more than a half million dollars for “consulting” in 1974. Obviously, this sum was the source for Bledsoe’s investment in
Have Gun, Will Travel.
Interestingly enough, the short-lived company had no books that could be traced. Checks with other businesses at that address uncovered no memory that Allied Everest had ever rented there. Max traced ownership of the building to a world famous tough-guy writer whose suicide had shocked the publishing world in 1975.

A tête-à-tête with Lady Gwendolyn reminded Annie of the thrill of riding a roller coaster, the sudden, heart-stopping plunge, the racketing climb to another peak, and the wind-whistling descent It engendered enormous excitement, although intellectual rather than physical.

“Brava,” the old author said, as Annie finished her recounting of her interviews. “Quick, now. Who’s most likely?”

“Margo Wright.” Annie was surprised at her own answer. In answer to the unspoken question, she added, “Margo holds a grudge. And somehow”—Annie hated saying it—“I can see her tipping that vase, pushing down on the crow bar, and feeling it move … and enjoying it!”

“Very interesting.” Lady Gwendolyn snagged a spidery handful of Spanish moss, dangling from a live oak, as they walked deeper into the wildlife preserve. On the dike to their left, a wide smudge marked an alligator crossing. A cotton rat darted beneath a clump of saw palmetto. “I’ve been thinking about our suspects today, and I certainly understand the basis for your conclusion.” She reached out, gripped Annie’s arm, and pointed toward the half-submerged log in the plant-choked pond.

A pine-cone crackled beneath Annie’s foot, but she, too, glimpsed the fat, muddy brown cottonmouth just before it slithered into the green-scummed water.

As the ripples faded away, Lady Gwendolyn continued, her voice faintly regretful, “But I’m sorry to say I can’t help thinking Fleur Calloway is the likeliest.”

Annie hated to hear that, hated it because she liked Fleur Calloway very much and hated it because she had a deep respect for this old lady.

Eyes that had seen much of life and found it both glorious and dreadful focused briskly on Annie. “But the picture is still murky. And I keep having a sense that someone is playing with us … and that worries me most of all.”

Victoria Shaw followed Annie to one of the poolside tables. Annie chose one with an umbrella to escape the late-afternoon heat. The author’s widow was aglow with happiness. As they settled in the shade, she twittered, “Mrs. Darling, I can’t ever thank you enough for writing and inviting me personally.” She leaned forward to confide, “I almost didn’t come, you know.” She paused and the happiness fled her faded blue eyes. “But you wouldn’t know about—about Bryan’s illness.”

Annie steeled herself. “Oh, Mrs. Shaw, so many readers
miss him and his books.” This, at least, was true. But her next words were a ploy, no more, no less. “One fan insists there was a title scheduled for publication before he died that didn’t come out.” She shook her head ruefully. “Fans are so stubborn. I imagine that it was a work in progress. Certainly if such a book existed, the publishers would have brought it out.”

“The Clue at Hacienda Dolores.
” Victoria fumbled at her straw purse, lifting out a leather cigarette case. She opened it, then hesitated. “Do you mind?”

Annie did, but she was willing to inflict only so much misery. She smiled and murmured, “Certainly not” But she was a little surprised. Although many women of this age group smoked, it seemed out of character for Victoria Shaw.

The older woman, her hands trembling a little, lit the cigarette, blew away a plume of smoke, then said apologetically, “I quit for so many years. Bryan and I both. But since he’s gone, it doesn’t really matter.”

There was no intent in her words to shock or affront. It was merely a statement of fact, and it caught at Annie’s heart.

It didn’t really matter.

Two halves that make a whole.

Annie understood that. For a terrible instant, she imagined herself without Max. Nothing, then, would make much difference, would it?

It was a moment she would never forget.

Independence, the watchword for today’s women. Independence, admired and honored, encouraged and approved.

Could anyone truly love and remain independent?

No.

As for going on alone with any joy at all, that would take grit beyond measure.

“I’ve thought about having it privately published,” Victoria said quietly. “But Bryan wouldn’t have liked that. He was a professional.”

Privately published. That was the last resort of writers with unsalable manuscripts. Bryan Shaw would have been humiliated.

“You mean the book was complete and his publisher didn’t publish it?” Annie simulated shock. She did it without
pleasure. Sometimes Lawrence Sanders’s Captain Edward X Delaney didn’t like his role, either.

Victoria’s thin face turned old as Annie watched, lines of misery etched at her eyes and her lips, the light in her eyes quenched. She drew deeply on the cigarette, suppressed a cough. “It was the last book in a three-book contract. Bryan’s editor left for another house. They hired a new editor. Bryan sent his book to Margo to submit. It was the ninth in his Father Corrigan series, and he was pleased with it. But a little worried. You know how authors are.”

Annie recalled Emma’s words:
It all has to do with vulnerability.

Victoria didn’t wait for an answer. “Authors are so unsure of themselves. They can write a wonderful book and look at you with terror in their eyes. You see, in their hearts they’re always afraid this book won’t be good, this book isn’t right…. And yet, they know how well they can write. Sometimes,” her eyes glowed again, “Bryan would come out of his study and he’d give me a sheet and ask me to read it and say, ‘Oh, God, Torie, it’s the best I’ve ever done. Torie, it’s wonderful!’ Then he’d look at me with that fear in his eyes.”

She dropped the cigarette to the flagstones, used the tip of her shoe to grind it out. “He sent in his last manuscript. To Neil Bledsoe.” She slumped in her chair, old, defeated. “Neil Bledsoe killed my husband.”

Victoria said it quietly enough, but the hatred was there in a voice tight with anger. “Neil wrote Bryan a dreadful letter. He made fun of his book. You can make fun of anything, you know, if you want to. He made fun of it. But more than that, he berated Bryan, said the book was stupid, tedious, childish, poorly written.” Anger burned in her eyes. And murder in her heart?

Hands shaking, she lit another cigarette. “Neil rejected the manuscript. I told Bryan it didn’t matter, he could find another house. His agent”—a flicker of energy—“you’ve met Margo? She was Bryan’s agent. She was furious, said it was absurd, that they’d simply take the book somewhere else.”

The cigarette smoke dissipated in the bright summer air. “That was in the seventies. A bad time for mysteries. No one
else bought it. Bryan got cancer.” She looked at Annie steadily. “He died within six months. Because he didn’t want to live any longer. You see, he was too proud to keep on writing if no one wanted his books … and he couldn’t live without writing.”

Annie’s stride checked, but her eyes didn’t deceive. Laurel was entering the hotel beauty salon, certainly no surprise. Annie had once accompanied Laurel on a shopping trip through the cosmetic section of Lord and Taylor’s in New York. She was glad, for Max’s sake, that his mother was independently wealthy, both from her own family and five lucrative marriages. Not, of course, that Laurel would be so crass as to consider wealth a prerequisite for marriage. But she had told Annie once, “My dear, love and marriage are so much more successful when everyone is
comfortably
situated. Impecunious young men can be very charming, delightful companions on a rainy fall afternoon, but not suitable for a long-term commitment. Poverty is so
tiring.
And only for the young, one always hopes.” Annie had wondered to herself how any commitment from Laurel could be considered long-term, but had been wise enough not to comment aloud. So, it came as no surprise to see Laurel wafting into the expensive salon. It startled Annie considerably that she was accompanied by Natalie Marlow, who looked exceedingly scruffy in contrast to Laurel’s as ever elegant appearance. Annie couldn’t resist sidling closer. Laurel’s husky contralto was unmistakable: “… such a pleasure to spend time with such extraordinarily talented people. I do so admire your great gifts.”