The Living Room (50 page)

“What did you tell him?”

“Don’t worry. I didn’t blow your cover. I simply pointed out that if we can quickly discredit the will signed a few days before Dominick’s death, we can move on and focus on the claims of the illegitimate children. He thought it was a good strategy. Also, if Mildred Burris was involved in a murder or assisted suicide, it will drop her charity out of the running for a piece of the pie, too.”

The casual way Chris tossed out the possibilities made Amy uneasy.

“You make it sound like a question on a law school exam,” she said.

“You’re right. I have to treat my cases with a certain amount of detachment to keep my thinking straight.”

“Who told you to do that?”

“One of my law school professors. I don’t remember much from the course, but he dropped several nuggets of practical advice that have stuck with me. That’s one of them.” Chris paused. “Besides, you’re expending enough emotional energy in the Dominick case for both of us.”

“Which is one reason I’d make a lousy lawyer.”

“I don’t know about that. Combine your intellect with your instincts, and you would be—”

“Don’t go there,” Amy cut in. “I’m already trying to juggle two careers and a family.”

Before diving back into the dictation, Amy organized Mr. Phillips’s desk for his arrival. She had returned to working on the lengthy memo when he arrived and came into her office.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“I’m on the last ten minutes,” she said.

“Get it to me as soon as possible. I want to revise it before sending it out.”

“Yes, sir. It will be on your desk shortly.” Amy paused. “I have one question.”

“What is it?”

Amy had to voice her concerns.

“I’m not sure that Dr. Ramsey is the right person to head up the analysis.”

“I know you didn’t recommend his company, but that decision has been made.”

Now that she’d brought up the subject, Amy wasn’t going to go away so easily. She spoke rapidly.

“While I was typing the memo, I wondered whether his previous connections in Nigeria were a good thing. He knows business and government people in the oil and mineral exploration area, but what if he has a conflict of interest or someone is paying him extra ‘consultant fees’ to buy his influence? There are people in Nigeria who will make a lot of money on this project even if it doesn’t pan out. If Dr. Ramsey is working with them on other deals, he might recommend you go forward on this one to keep his friends happy. It’s just a thought.”

Amy stopped to take a breath. Mr. Phillips eyed her for a moment.

“Do any of your concerns come from your dreams?”

Amy swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“Tell me.”

“It wasn’t nearly as specific as with Michael Baldwin. I saw Dr. Ramsey’s face the same night but didn’t know who he was until his name came up the other day and I checked his firm website. I recognized him immediately.”

“Did you see him with a big check, black hat, et cetera?”

“No, sir. But the way it happened makes me think he’s not someone who should be trusted.”

Mr. Phillips closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed his forehead.

“Amy, is this going to keep coming up? You’re making something that is already complicated more difficult. I’m not prepared to practice law this way.”

“What happens in the dreams is not something I can control, but if you tell me to keep quiet—”

“Let me think about it,” Mr. Phillips interrupted.

The lawyer returned to his office, and Amy completed the memo. Mr. Phillips was right. He couldn’t let her dreams dictate his professional decisions. Amy stopped typing and glanced up. But should he? When she took the memo into his office and put it on the corner of his desk he didn’t look up.

The closer it got to noon, the more nervous Amy became. She’d received an e-mail from Bernie confirming everything. They were going to use their cell phones for any private communication they didn’t want the acquisitions editors to hear. Amy hadn’t eaten breakfast, and her stomach was growling at 11:30 a.m. She went back to the kitchen. Usually there was an unclaimed snack on the table for anyone to eat. Today the offerings included half a powdered donut, a tiny bag of airline pretzels, and a few pieces of freeze-dried apple. Amy was so hungry that her decision wasn’t what to eat but the order to do so. Most people would have saved the donut for dessert, but Amy didn’t. She guiltily ate the donut, followed by the pretzels, and then finished off the apples. As she put the last bite in her mouth, Janelle came into the kitchen carrying two large plastic containers.

“What am I going to do with this Cobb salad?” she asked. “Betsy
ordered it, but then her husband came by to take her out for a surprise lunch.”

Amy was chewing a piece of very dry, tasteless apple. She looked at the clock. She still had a few minutes before she needed to set up in the conference room.

“I’ll take it,” she said. “Who should I pay?”

“No one. Betsy told me to give it away.”

The salad was simple and delicious, and even though she didn’t have time to eat all of it, the meal and conversation with Janelle helped Amy’s mood. While they ate, she told Janelle where to route the conference calls when they came into the office.

“That is so exciting,” Janelle gushed.

“This is small compared to some of the other meetings you coordinate.”

“Are you kidding me? There’s no way a bunch of boring legal stuff can compare with this. Who knows, someday there may be a plaque on the outside of this building announcing that Amy Clarke the author worked here.”

Amy laughed. She wished she could bottle Janelle’s enthusiasm and take a drink every time she needed a pick-me-up.

At 11:57 a.m., Amy was set up in the conference room staring at a large screen where the caller’s face would be projected. Behind her were wood-paneled walls, a couple of oil paintings, and a bookshelf. She didn’t know where the editors would be sitting when they came on the line, but they couldn’t be in a classier environment. Her cell phone vibrated. It was Bernie.

“Are we set?” he asked.

“Yes. The receptionist will route the call to this conference room.”

“Do you look like a lawyer, a writer, or a secretary?”

Amy had tried to dress stylishly for the call. “I’m not high fashion, but there will be some color in the picture.”

“Good. You’ll be talking to Diana Carmichael. Diana is from India, and members of her family are some kind of local rulers in the southern part of the country. She went to school in England and
sounds British. She came to New York when the new owners took over the company a couple of years ago.”

“That’s not the name you mentioned the other day. I spent some time researching Kate Heigel’s background.”

“They’re on the same level. This is all about you, not them. Put some water and instant fertilizer on that little ego of yours so it can grow in a hurry.”

The light on the phone connected to the video lit up, and Janelle’s voice came through.

“Ms. Carmichael is on the line.”

“Okay.”

“She’s holding on my end, too,” Bernie said. “Activate the call.”

In a couple of seconds a woman who appeared to be about Amy’s age appeared. She had dark skin and was wearing glasses with modern frames. Bernie’s face appeared in the top right-hand corner of the screen. He immediately started talking.

“Hey, Diana, thanks so much for setting this up. Is everyone connected?”

“Yes,” Amy said. “Diana, it’s nice meeting you.”

“And you as well,” the woman answered with a clipped British accent. She glanced sideways at a computer screen that was barely visible from the angle of the camera. “I’m sorry my assistant didn’t get in touch with you earlier. Kate pitched your book to the committee this morning. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we decided it doesn’t meet our needs at this time and won’t be making an offer.”

Amy felt her face go pale. She looked in desperation at Bernie, who spoke. “Kate and I had a lengthy conversation about Amy the other day, and all signs were full-speed ahead.”

“Not now. Feel free to resubmit either a concept or a completed manuscript in the future. The writing is passable, but we’re going in a different direction for this niche on our publishing calendar for the next twenty-four to thirty-six months.”

“You’ve signed somebody else?” Bernie asked.

“Bernie, you know I can’t answer that,” Diana said in a patient tone of voice. “Listen, I really must be going. Best of luck to you both.” The screen went blank. Amy slowly picked up her cell phone.

“Bernie? Are you there?”

“That really ticks me off!” the agent exploded. “Kate Heigel owed me the decency of a direct call letting me know that we’d been kicked to the curb. Sending a second-string player to do it was an insult!”

“You said Diana and Kate were on the same level.”

“Oh, they have the same title, but Kate is the queen bee. When I saw that Diana was going to handle the call, I assumed it was because Kate knew enough about you already and wanted Diana to pick up the scraps.”

“Somebody knew enough to make a decision this morning.”

“That’s because another writer swooped in and scooped your spot. I’ve kept all this confidential, which means Kate has been playing me to get someone else to jump on board.”

“What do you mean?”

“Kate told an agent who represented an author she wanted to sign that she was considering a hot, young, unknown writer in the character-driven romance genre, and if he didn’t act fast, the door would hit his client’s rear on the way out.”

“So I was just a bargaining chip?”

“Yes.” Bernie swore, then quickly apologized. “I know you don’t say stuff like that, but sometimes it fits.”

“What do we do now?”

“Talk to Lynn Colville at 1:30 p.m.”

“Will you tell her what happened with Diana?”

“Are you kidding? I’ll let her know I’ve talked to Kate, who told me she was very interested in signing you to a three-book deal, and we’ve just finished a conference call with Diana.”

“That’s not true.”

“What part? Everything I said happened. I’m just leaving out the ending. When you tell someone about a book, do you tell them the whole story or just enough to make them want to read it?”

“It’s not the same.”

“Look, Kate was chomping at the bit the other day, and we both talked to Diana. The news from her wasn’t what we wanted to hear, but Lynn doesn’t have to know that. These editors are superparanoid about missing the chance to score the next big thing. It’s professionally embarrassing for them to read about authors they rejected who then hit the jackpot for another company. That’s the fear we have to play on.”

“I’m not sure,” Amy replied slowly.

“Just answer the writing questions. Leave the battle strategy to me.”

thirty-three

S
tuck with an additional hour of uncommitted time, Amy returned to her desk. Mr. Phillips was at lunch. She checked her in-box, and there was a message from Chris asking her to contact him about the depositions of Beverly Jackson and Dr. Lawrence Kelly. She picked up the phone and buzzed his office.

“What do you need?” she asked.

“Any more dreams would be nice. I’ve been fantasizing about asking Dr. Kelly a question that would reveal I had information about him that no one else in the world could know. Do you realize how much leverage that would give me with a witness? If a witness thinks I already know everything, he’s much more likely to spill it all voluntarily.”

“The dream puts him in the room under suspicious circumstances at the time of Mr. Dominick’s death. What more could you want?”

“Something that will really shake him up if he tries to deny having anything to do with it.”

“I think the best approach is to bring out inconsistencies between his testimony and Beverly Jackson’s. She won’t be present when you depose him, will she?”

“No.”

“I’ve told you everything.”

“Okay, but maybe you’ll get something else before next week. Is Mr. Phillips asking you to help him prepare for Ms. Burris’s deposition?”

“He never does,” Amy answered. “The only thing he asks me to do is run background checks.”

“Will you do that for me with Kelly and Jackson?”

“I already did—”

“No, I mean everything. Run down every rabbit.”

Amy was startled. For a second, Chris sounded like Bernie Masters.

“Okay,” she said.

Not wanting to start a new project, she logged on to the system. It took only a few minutes to come to a dead end for additional information about Beverly Jackson. The nurse had lived a vanilla life. She’d been married to the same man for twenty years and had two children. She’d never been fired from a job and had one traffic ticket received in a town on the coast that was notorious for setting up speed traps for tourists.

Then Amy stumbled upon a new nugget of personal information. Jackson’s younger child, a teenage boy, suffered from a severe case of cerebral palsy. Seeing a poignant picture of Jackson with her son made Amy wonder how the nurse could have justified her participation in Mr. Dominick’s death. But as she stared at the picture for several moments, a possible rationale for Jackson’s involvement with Mr. Dominick’s death hit her.