A Romantic Way to Die (17 page)

Belinda laughed. “That might be true when they’re writing, but not when they’re talking. Most of them are like tape recorders. When you give them a topic, it’s like punching the play button. You get the same thing every time.”

Rhodes and Belinda were sitting outside the dormitory in plastic lawn chairs beside a plastic table under a tall pecan tree. They’d had to brush the leaves out of the chairs before they could sit. The chairs and table had once been white, but they’d been outside for a while and they hadn’t been cleaned often. If ever. There were dark spots of something that Rhodes suspected might be mildew on them here and there.

Belinda rummaged around in her leather Dooney and Bourke bag and came out with a Marlboro hard pack and a butane lighter.

“You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”

Rhodes said he didn’t mind, and Belinda looked on the table for an ashtray. There wasn’t one.

“I’ll just use the yard,” she said. “I don’t think anyone will mind, do you?”

Rhodes said he didn’t think so.

Belinda lit her Marlboro, took a deep drag, and tossed her head, shaking the long braid that hung down her back.

“I was looking at some book covers yesterday,” Rhodes said. “I saw one of yours.”

“Which one?” she asked, exhaling smoke.

“I think it was called something like
Passion in the Pines.
”

Belinda laughed again. “Sounds good, but it’s not one of mine. Try again.”

“Was I close?”

“Not really. I do have one coming out in a month or two called
The Passionate Pirate
.”

“That’s the one,” Rhodes said. “The pirate looked a lot like Terry Don Coslin.”

“I had a feeling we’d get around to talking about him sooner or later,” Belinda said, flipping ashes on the grass.

“He did have quite a reputation,” Rhodes said. “If you know what I mean.”

“I know, all right. Everybody knows. It’s not as if it’s a secret. And I already know what your next question is.”

Rhodes wondered if she’d save him the trouble of asking it, and she did.

“I never slept with him,” she said. “I didn’t have to. I’m not big enough to have any influence on the cover selection for my books. It was just the luck of the draw. But if I’d had a choice, I’d have asked for Terry D. on my cover anyway. He didn’t have to sleep with me. His picture was worth a lot in sales. I think
The Passionate Pirate
would have sold an extra ten thousand copies because of it.”

“Would have?” Rhodes said.

“Now that he’s dead, it’ll probably sell an extra twenty-five thousand copies. Maybe more.”

“So dying was a good career move.”

“I’ve heard that one before. But it wasn’t so good for Terry D. For me, maybe.”

“You realize that you’re giving yourself a pretty good motive for murder, I guess,” Rhodes said.

Belinda flicked some more ashes into the air and watched them settle to the grass.

“Let me tell you something, Sheriff,” she said. “You might think I’m like some of those other women in there, but I’m not. It’s true that most of them would kill to sell a few more books, but I wouldn’t. I don’t need the fame, and I certanly don’t need the money.”

“I thought everybody could use a little money,” Rhodes said.

“Not everybody’s a millionaire,” Belinda said.

She dropped her cigarette to the ground and crushed it with the toe of her shoe.

“You’ve made a million dollars as a writer?” Rhodes said.

“Of course not,” Belinda told him. “Nobody does that, at least not anybody I know. Nora Roberts does, and Sandra Brown does, but I don’t know them. You don’t run into them at workshops like this one for some reason. Anyway, I made my money in the stock market.”

“You play the stock market?”

Rhodes was surprised. He thought writers sat around in their studies, surrounded by books, and wrote all the time.

“I don’t
play
,” Belinda said. “I work at it. I do research. I study trends. I bought Dell Computer when it went public. I bought
Amazon.com
early on. I bought Qualcomm when it was under fifty dollars a share.”

Rhodes didn’t know much about the stock market, but he did know about Dell Computer, because it was a Texas firm. And he’d heard about the amazing success of
Amazon.com
.

“If you have so much money, why do you write?” he asked.

“That’s what writers do,” Belinda said. “It’s not as if we have a choice. Making money is just a sideline.”

Rhodes thought about his conversation with Ivy. He couldn’t explain to her why he continued in his job, but if he’d thought of it, and if he’d had a way with words, he might have put it just the way Belinda had. Ivy thought he had a choice. He wasn’t so sure that was true.

“Are we finished?” Belinda asked. “I might want to attend the next session.”

“I guess we’re finished, for now,” Rhodes said. “Marian Willoughby’s not doing the next session, is she?”

“No. Serena is. Why?”

“Because Marian is the one I want to talk to.”

“Why her?”

“Because she’s the one who didn’t seem to remember where you were when Henrietta was killed,” Rhodes said.

Belinda sat back in her chair and considered Rhodes. Then she got out another cigarette, lit it, exhaled, and said, “You bastard.”

“Sneaky, maybe,” Rhodes said. “But that’s about the extent of it.”

“I didn’t think you even noticed that little bit with Marian,” Belinda said.

“And observant,” Rhodes said. “Sneaky and observant.”

“And a bastard.”

“If you say so.”

“You think I killed Henrietta and Terry Don both, don’t you.”

“I don’t know what to think. I’m still trying to sort things out and let the pieces fall into place.”

Rhodes wasn’t lying. He thought he knew some of what had happened, or at least he was constructing a scenario that would explain a lot of things, but he hadn’t reached any conclusions so far.

“Well, I didn’t kill either one of them,” Belinda said. “I’m not even in Henrietta’s stupid little book.”

“So you’ve heard about that,” Rhodes said.

“Everybody’s heard about it. The ones who didn’t know before she was killed know now. It’s the talk of the workshop.”

Rhodes should have known.

“You might not be in the book, but you weren’t with Marian Willoughby when Henrietta died,” he said. “Were you?”

“No. If you must know, I wasn’t. I’d sneaked off for a smoke, and I thought it might look bad for me if I said I was off by myself. So I asked Marian to say I was with her.”

“Why did you think you’d need an alibi?”

“I didn’t think that. I just didn’t want any trouble.”

“So you really don’t have anyone to vouch for you,” Rhodes said.

“No. But when you think about it, neither does Marian. And I can think of a few questions you could ask that woman with the funny red hair, by the way, when you get through worrying about me.”

“Lorene?”

“I think that’s her name. Where does she buy her hair coloring?”

Rhodes said he didn’t have any idea.

“What should I ask her?” he said.

“You could ask her where she was when Henrietta died. She was Henrietta’s roomie, after all.”

“I know, but she doesn’t have a motive. And she was with two other women when Henrietta died.”

“That’s what she told you. I heard her. But is it the truth?”

“Is there any reason to think they’d lie for her?”

“Maybe not,” Belinda said, blowing out a smoky plume. “But Marian lied for me.”

“Not very well,” Rhodes pointed out.

“True. But it’s something to think about.”

“I’ve already thought about it. I’m going to check on everyone’s alibis.”

“What if they’re all fabricated, like mine was?”

“Then I’ll have an even longer list of suspects,” Rhodes said.

“I suppose I’m still on the list, then.”

“As a matter of fact,” Rhodes said, “you are.”

“What would I have to do to get off?”

“Prove you’re not guilty.”

“I’m not sure I can do that. But if I were the sheriff, I know I’d find out about that redhead. Lorene. What’s with the names of people around here, anyway? Lorene. Vernell. Henrietta.”

“Don’t forget Belinda,” Rhodes said.

Belinda laughed. “You’ve got me there. I guess not everyone can be named Jennifer or Tracy.”

“Right.”

“But no matter what my name is, I didn’t kill anyone. I promise.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Rhodes said.

24

T
HE PERSON RHODES WANTED TO TALK TO NOW WASN’T MARIAN or Lorene. It was Chatterton. Rhodes went back to the dormitory with Belinda and located Chatterton sitting in the front room, alone.

“The session’s about over,” he told Rhodes listlessly. “Everyone’s in there except me. I wasn’t interested.”

Rhodes asked him to come outside and have a talk.

“It’s a nice day,” Rhodes said. “The sunshine will do you good.”

Chatterton didn’t seem to think so, but he went along.

“How are you going to handle lunch today?” Rhodes asked.

“Somebody from the Round-Up will be bringing it out in a little while,” Chatterton said. “They’ll set up some tables out here, and we’ll eat under the pecan trees. I guess I should be thankful that it isn’t raining.”

“It’s too bad about the building,” Rhodes said.

Chatterton stood looking out over the countryside and didn’t say anything for a while. Then he looked over at the main building. The outside stones in the kitchen area were black from the smoke and fire damage.

When Chatterton finally spoke, there was a catch in his voice.

“It’s not just the building,” he said. “I can’t believe everything that’s happened here. Two people have been killed, and everything I worked for is ruined.”

“You must’ve had insurance,” Rhodes said.

Chatterton walked over to one of the plastic chairs and sat down. His shoulders slumped, and he looked utterly defeated.

“Not enough, if you’re thinking I’m the one who tried to burn it,” he said. “I would never have done that, not for any amount of money. I worked for two years to make this place what it is, and now it’s all wasted.”

“The building can be repaired,” Rhodes said.

“Not easily. Those old buildings are a lot more fragile than they look. It would take a lot of time and money, and I’m not sure I’m up to going through all that again. Do you know why I did it in the first place?”

“To make money?” Rhodes guessed.

“Absolutely not. I hoped to get back my investment eventually, sure, but that’s not why I did it. I told you about my name, didn’t I?”

“You said something about not being related to an English poet, but that’s all.”

“Thomas Chatterton. My parents were university English professors, and with the family name being what it was, they couldn’t resist naming me Thomas.”

“I don’t remember him from school,” Rhodes said.

“There’s no reason why you should. He was a very minor poet, and he died before he was eighteen. But he produced some remarkable work in his short life. I never produced anything, which was a big disappointment to my parents.”

“You were a poet?”

“No. I tried. And I tried fiction and nonfiction, too. But nothing I wrote was ever published. Luckily I had a real job, like most of those people in there. When my parents died, they left me a little money, and I thought about using it to help writers. I’d heard about this place and what Simon Graham tried to do with it. I knew it was vacant and for sale, so I decided it would be my contribution to literature. Now it doesn’t look that way at all.”

“But you have the money to rebuild, don’t you?”

“No. And the insurance won’t help. I was underinsured, if anything. Who would ever have thought something like that would happen?”

No one, Rhodes thought. It took a unique combination of people and events to bring it all about. But there was a chance that Chatterton had been a part of it.

“You told me the other night that you were in the dormitory when Henrietta was killed,” Rhodes said. “You were checking to make sure everything was in order and the people had everything they needed. I didn’t hear anybody back you up on that.”

Chatterton opened his mouth, then closed it.

“I thought you were interested in my insurance,” he said after a few seconds.

“I was,” Rhodes said. “For a while. Now I’m interested in something else.”

“Why can’t we just stick to one subject?”

Rhodes didn’t have an answer for that one. His interview technique wasn’t anything he’d learned in a class or from a book. It was just something that had developed over the years. He wasn’t sure that jumping from one topic to another gave any better results than anything else, but it was something he did from time to time. It certainly seemed to have disconcerted Chatterton.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Chatterton said.

“But you weren’t in the dormitory.”

“No,” Chatterton said. “I wish I had been, but I wasn’t.”

“You were watching television,” Rhodes said.

“How in the world did you know that?”

“I guessed. I saw the TV set in your room, and I remembered what you said about there not being any television here because you believed in reading and writing, not watching TV.”

“I did say that, didn’t I?”

“But you didn’t mean it, at least not for yourself.”

Chatterton sighed. “I suppose not. I wish I did, but ever since I gave up writing, I find that I don’t like reading very much. It makes me feel inferior somehow to read a book by someone who really can’t write any better than I can, or at least it seems to me they can’t, and to know that they’ve sold not only that book but others besides. And that they’re widely read and popular.”

“In other words,” Rhodes said, “you’re jealous.”

“I don’t like the word, but I suppose it fits.”

Rhodes made a leap of faith, or maybe it was just another guess.

“You weren’t jealous of Henrietta, though. You were jealous of Vernell.”

Chatterton looked beyond surprise.

“How on earth did you know that?”

Rhodes could have said it was just a hunch, but he didn’t want to reveal trade secrets. Besides, there was more to it than that.