Written Off (9 page)

I glanced quickly at the computer screen as I hit the mouse button to start it up. “Uh . . . no. Have you been checking my
e-mails?” I doubted Paula would have neglected to mention if a raving maniac had gotten back to me, but the possibility always existed until confirmed or denied. Duffy taught me that. Or I taught him. The line was blurring.

“No. Should I?” Paula showed not suspicion but perhaps curiosity.

“No, absolutely not. I’ll handle that end. If there’s anything important that you need, I’ll forward it to you.” I turned my back on her, politely, telling her I was getting to work now. I heard Paula get up and walk back toward her office.

The first order of business was to call Preston. Maybe they’d made an arrest and he was calling to thank me for my exemplary bravery and effort in helping to incarcerate a dangerous killer.

Hey, you dream what you dream, and I’ll dream what I dream.

“I’ve been monitoring your e-mail,” he said once I’d identified myself. It was a lovely greeting, I thought. Invasion of privacy as an icebreaker. “The guy hasn’t responded to you yet.”

“Great. It gives me something to look forward to. Why did you call me, then?”

“I wanted to know about your relationship with Duffy.”

Well, that was a new one. “My what with who?” I asked. I thought it was a legitimate question.

“You and Duffy. How you know each other. The two of you were acting strange last night, uncomfortable in an odd sort of way, and I need to know if what’s going on between the two of you is going to compromise my investigation.” I didn’t
know Preston well, but I couldn’t hear a smile in his voice, which meant that—contrary to all logic—he wasn’t kidding.

“I don’t have a relationship with Duffy,” I said. “I met the man two days ago and only talked to him at length yesterday on the way back and forth to Ocean Grove. What are you getting at, Mr. Preston?”

“It’s Ben, please.” Like that was going to help him after what he’d just dumped in my lap. “And I’m not getting at anything. It’s just that I’m a pretty decent judge of human behavior, and there was something going on between you and Duffy last night.”

“There isn’t anything that’s going to interfere with your work,
Ben
,” I said. Okay, so there was a little more emphasis on the name than I’d planned on. “You can rest assured of that.”

“That’s fine,” he said. And then he didn’t say anything else.

“I’m just wondering if anyone’s bothered to call Sunny’s editor and her agent,” I said. “If she was planning on traveling, they might know—well, her agent would, anyway—and even if she wasn’t, the attacks seem to be based on being an author. They’d have some insight, wouldn’t they?”

“That’s very nice advice,” Ben said. “But we’ve already had people talk to them. Her agent is Mandy Westen and her editor is Carole Pembroke. We’ve gotten what we can from them to begin with.” Was he being a wiseass? I could out-wiseass him any day of the week. I’m a writer.

“So you called to check in on me and Duffy?” I asked. “Isn’t
that
a little odd all by itself?”

“I had to be clear on that point,” Preston said. “Now I’m clear.”

“Okay,” I agreed, because frankly, what else was there to do? “So let me ask
you
something. How well do
you
know Duffy Madison?”

There was a pause. Preston’s eyes were probably crinkling; I’d seen him do that the night before. I was, of course, impervious to such things. Except that I was imagining him doing it now. “Impervious” is a relative term. When you use it like I do, anyway.

“We’re not dating, if that’s what you’re asking,” Preston said.

“It wasn’t, but thanks for clearing that up. I mean, do you trust him? Has he told you much about himself? What can you tell me about Duffy?”

I could hear Preston’s county-issued chair squeak. He must have leaned forward. “I don’t know that much about him personally. He’s all business when we call him in on a case.” Then he paused, but not long enough for me to jump in. “Why?”

“Are you aware that I write books with a character named Duffy Madison?” I asked. “A character who’s a consultant on missing persons cases for the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office?”

Preston had clearly never read one of my books, but it was possible he’d heard about them. The “coincidence” of my character and his consultant having the same name (and job) should certainly have been a topic of conversation among the investigators.

“You mean you just changed counties when you used him for a character?” Preston said. “I thought you just met Duffy a couple of days ago.”

“I did. And no, I didn’t change counties. I’d never heard of your Duffy Madison when I started writing the books four years ago.”

I could pretty much hear the light bulb go off over Preston’s head through the phone. “Right around the time Duffy started working with us,” he said. I’m not sure he was even conscious of being on the phone anymore.

“That’s right. Kind of a big coincidence, don’t you think?”

I thought that confronting Preston with this information—leaving out the part about Duffy believing I had psychically given birth to him—might lead to some revelation that would prove conclusively the man who was working for him and the man I’d been imagining for five books now were different. In that mine was imaginary, and his was crazy.

“How is that possible?” Preston asked.

“That’s an excellent question. How do you think it could be? Because I’ve been going at it around and around in my head since Tuesday, and I haven’t come up with anything.” I checked my e-mail again; still no new communiqués from the creep with a thing for mystery authors. That was good, right?

“I thought you said you met him two nights ago, on Wednesday,” Preston said. Investigators. They never let
anything
go.

Well, this was a problem. I didn’t want to out Duffy as the complete nut job I thought he was, just in case he wasn’t. In that case, I’d be ruining his career. On the other hand, if
he were a bloodthirsty madman, it was probably better his employers know that.

So I hedged my bet. “He called Tuesday night asking me about Julia Bledsoe, but I didn’t know her by that name, so we barely talked,” I said. It was within driving distance of the truth and could be seen as at least some cause for further discussion without suggesting openly that Duffy be fitted for a jacket with very, very long sleeves.

“Uh-huh,” Preston said. So he wasn’t a scintillating conversationalist. There are other things that can be important. Like those crinkling eyes. “That doesn’t really answer the question, does it?”

“I said since Tuesday, and that was three nights ago,” I explained. Again.

“The question about why he seems to be a version of your character, despite you never having heard of Duffy when you started writing.” Oh yeah.

“I can’t explain that,” I said, and that was precisely the truth. I mean, I
could
explain it, but the only reasonable way to do so would be to suggest that Duffy was nuts, and not being a licensed psychoanalyst, it wasn’t in my province to say that. “Can you?”

“No, and I don’t like it.” Next Preston would be telling me that mysteries give him a bellyache. Men can be driven by role models they get from bad movies.

“As an investigator, how would you research it?” I asked. I’d given Paula a list of tasks to perform, but maybe Preston could simplify the problem or use the resources at his disposal, which were undoubtedly better than the ones Paula or I had.

“I could ask Duffy,” he said.
Brilliant, Holmes! How does the man do it?

“I’ve already asked him,” I said. That was probably a mistake. Duffy’s explanation would not help anyone’s case here, and Preston’s inevitable question would be . . .

“And what did he say?” Can I predict them, or what?

“Well, he couldn’t explain it, either,” I said. Certainly, Duffy couldn’t explain it
adequately
, and that was one way of interpreting the question.

“Odd. Normally he’d mention something like that to me.” Normally? Something like that? How often did these situations come up?

“Well, maybe he’s embarrassed. Maybe he thinks the other guys in the office will read the books and make fun of him.” Now I was acting like Duffy’s mom. Be nice to my boy and I’ll bake you cookies.

“Duffy doesn’t embarrass easily,” Preston said. That was true, at least of the Duffy I wrote. One time I had him emerge from a sewer pipe wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a snorkel, and he hadn’t even flinched.

“Maybe you shouldn’t bring this up just yet,” I suggested. “Observe him for a while and see if you can pick up on anything.”

I couldn’t hear Preston nod, but I was sure he did just that. “That seems reasonable. In the meantime, I think we should talk about how you conceived of this character. Are you free for dinner tonight?”

Well, that came out of left field! It was so unexpected that I said, “Yes, I am,” without thinking once about it. That’s not like me.

“Great,” Preston answered. “I’ll pick you up at your house around eight. Okay?”

I was off the phone before I realized what had happened. Did I have a date with Ben Preston? Or were we conferring about one of his colleagues?

It was best not to think about it, although deciding what to wear was definitely going to be a problem. I got up and walked into Paula’s office.

The room was larger than mine and did not look out on my somewhat muddy backyard. It was decorated as Paula would have it—I’d insisted on that—which meant that everything was done in subdued colors, tastefully accented, and completely neat. I feared for Paula’s mind.

She was staring at her laptop, which she kept open on her desk, when I walked in. She looked up with the same “Do you have something else for me to do?” face I’d seen before, when I actually
had
something else for her to do.

“I was talking to Ben Preston, the investigator on the case in Bergen County,” I told her. “We were talking about this Duffy guy and whether he’s legit.”

“There’s some question about that?” Paula asked.

I shrugged. “From Preston’s end, anyway. Next thing I know, he asks me to continue discussing Duffy over dinner tonight.”

Paula’s eyes widened a little, and she let a tiny grin show on her face. “And?”

“And the question becomes, is this a date?”

She snorted a little. “Yeah! It’s a date, Rachel! If he’d just wanted to compare notes, he could have kept doing that on
the phone. You’re going on a date. That’s okay with you, isn’t it?”

It was okay with me. It had been a while since I’d broken it off with the last guy I was seeing, whose name was Phillip. Not Phil, Phillip. I should have known right away. I am a serial monogamist but hadn’t been monogamizing with anyone for about six months. Phillip had left a scar. Mostly one about how stupid I was to date him to begin with.

“Yeah, it’s okay. But what—?”

“We’ll talk about what you’ll wear when you’re getting ready to go. What time?” I told her. “Fine. Before then, we’ll discuss possibilities. I’ll get some organized. Don’t worry at all about that.” She rubbed her hands together like a comic book villain and turned her attention back to her computer screen.

“Have you found out anything about Duffy yet?” I asked.

“Too soon.” She was engrossed.

I tiptoed back to my office to avoid disturbing her. There are days when it’s hard to tell which one of us is the other’s assistant.

Rather than ponder that, I decided to turn my attention to Sunny Maugham. There had to be something I could do; Duffy himself had said I had a unique insider’s perspective on the case. Well, he’d said
something
like that.

I pulled up a file listing members of the Mystery Authors Association. The MAA is not a trade union; it’s more like a social club for writers who like to get together and complain about their publishers, worry about electronic books,
and try to figure out how to get their novels to the front table at Barnes & Noble.

Sunny and I had really only talked that one time. I couldn’t be counted as a close friend of hers or even someone who knew her habits. I was a little bit in awe when we met at the hotel bar and thanked her profusely for her help. However, given the six-ton brick of guilt Duffy and Preston had dumped on my shoulders, I wanted to at least do what I could in her most dire hour.

They say that kidnapping cases grow cold after forty-eight hours. According to Duffy, Sunny had been missing four days at least. That wasn’t good.

All I could think to do was call some of my acquaintances at the MAA and do the research. I started with Emily Estebrook, whose real name was Bess Adelstein.

“Bess,” I said after the usual catching up, “have you heard about Sunny Maugham?”

“I did.” Bess sounded worried. Bess, like most good authors, is a touch dramatic. “An awful thing.”

“Have you heard from her lately?” I asked. I knew Bess and Sunny were at least better acquainted than Sunny and I were.

“Not for a month or so,” she answered. “We weren’t in close touch all the time; we usually called when one of us had a book that needed a blurb on the cover.”

“How did she seem when you talked to her?” This wasn’t going much of anywhere.

“Nothing special. She was working on a stand-alone. Something about a woman who solved crimes through playing the flute. I didn’t get it, but Sunny could make anything work.”

“You’re talking about her in the past tense,” I noted.

Bess’s voice caught. “My god, I am,” she said. “I’m an awful person.”

“No, you’re not.”

She didn’t react directly to that. “Hey, what’s this interest in Sunny? You thinking of writing something about it?” Crime fiction writers have a code:
nothing
is off-limits.

“Not me,” I said. “I’m sticking with Duffy Madison.”

If Bess read my books, she’d know that Duffy investigates missing persons cases and would point out that it would be right up my alley, but the sad fact is, most of us don’t read the others’ books. That’s out of a real concern about inadvertently “appropriating” ideas, a need to disengage from the genre when not actually writing something ourselves, and a deep and abiding envy that every writer feels for every more successful writer, even the ones we truly love. It’s not personal; we just think our books should be on best sellers lists. It’s okay if yours are too. So long as they’re not higher than mine.