A Stiff Critique (7 page)

“And Slade certainly didn’t need a job. He made a fortune on his thrillers. And I believe he had inherited wealth to begin with.”

“Tell me more about Slade’s writing,” I commanded. An idea was beginning to tickle the back of my brain. If Slade made so much money off his writing, maybe someone had killed him to steal his latest manuscript.

“As you know, he writes—or wrote—thrillers,” Carrie said. “Often international. Thrillers with deep character development. I’ve always found it hard to believe that he could write such fully-realized fictional characters while remaining completely insensitive to any non-fictional characters, otherwise known as human beings.
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was his new manuscript, the one he gave to you.” She looked across at me. “Do you want to know what it’s about?”

I nodded. Why not?

She leaned back in her chair. “You’ll have to trust my memory on this,” she cautioned. “Basically, it concerns a group of sixties radicals and what became of them. During the late sixties, these radicals sold dope to support a sort of underground railroad for Vietnam draft evaders. Then a sheriff is killed and they’re forced to disband.” She circled a pointed finger in the air. “Flash forward to the nineties. Now the members of this group are all being contacted by someone who wants to use their particular services. A mysterious someone. That’s the suspense component—Who is this someone?” She paused.

“Who does it turn out to be?” I asked, caught up in her secondhand recital.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I haven’t finished it yet.”

I was surprised at my own disappointment. I really wanted to know. Either Slade had been a good writer or Carrie was a good storyteller. Or both. I took another piece of bread as a consolation prize.

“So, is it well written?” I asked with my mouth full.

“Hell, yes,” Carrie grumbled. “That is what’s so aggravating—or was so aggravating—about Slade. He was a damn good writer. His
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characters are wonderful. A man who did the wheeling and dealing in the sixties is a banker now. And Slade makes you believe it. And the woman who killed the sheriff has become a Catholic nun. Then there’s the firebrand leader who became an actor and is now dying of AIDS.” She shook her head ruefully. “Good stuff.”

“It sounds like it,” I muttered. “Now I want to read the damn thing.”

“Well, you’ve got a copy,” Carrie pointed out. “And Slade—”

But then the dogs and the cat went crazy again, exploding into a bedlam of sounds that drowned out the rest of her words. They yowled and howled and yipped as they ran from the kitchen. But this time they didn’t head for the back door. They headed for the front.

I looked at Carrie. She looked back at me. And her eyes were wide again.

- Five -

Carrie continued to stare across the table at me as the pounding of my pulse joined in a rhythmic counterpoint to the raucous animal sounds. Who the hell was at the door this time? We’d already had the Mafia.

Carrie stood up, shaking her head violently. Was she shaking away her own fear? Then her eyes contracted to normal size once more.

“Ye gods and goddesses,” she murmured, trying on a smile. “I certainly am popular tonight.”

I started to get up, too.

“No, Kate,” she said, straightening her spine. “It’s just someone at the front door. In any case, it is
my
door. You stay here.”

Before I could argue, she had left the room.

I snuck into the hallway on tiptoe, holding my breath. I wasn’t going to stay glued to my chair if there was a possibility of danger to Carrie. But I didn’t want her mad at me either. She was mighty formidable for a small woman. In fact, she was mighty formidable for a woman of any size.

After she had ordered the animals into silence, she opened the door. I couldn’t see her from my spot in the hallway, but I could hear. First there was a rustling and clicking as she unlocked the door, then the creak as she swung it open.

“Travis,” Carrie said then. Her voice sounded funny, but not afraid funny. It was something else.

“Got your message on my machine,” came a brusque male voice. “Did someone really murder Slade?”

Silence. I wondered if Carrie was nodding. I wondered why she’d called Travis.

“Are you okay?”

“Of course, I’m okay,” Carrie answered. “There was no need for you to…”

I scurried back to my kitchen chair, ashamed of my eavesdropping, then took a deep breath to replenish my depleted oxygen.

A few more breaths later, Carrie came back to the kitchen with Travis in tow.

“Kate, you remember Travis Utrelli,” she said with a nod my way. Then she turned her back on me to look up at Travis, who towered over her by more than a foot.

I didn’t blame her for resting her eyes on him rather than me. Travis was looking as handsome as ever despite the scowl that nearly converged his lush black eyebrows over his big brown eyes. I wondered how old he was. He didn’t look more than thirty. His long black hair fell unfettered to his shoulders. His nose was straight, his cheekbones were high and his lips were full. Did his ancestors come from India? South America? Wherever roving gypsy boys came from?

“Hi, Travis,” I piped up.

He took the time to meet my eyes over Carrie’s shoulder and nod in greeting. But the frown never left his face while he did. And a moment later, he was gazing intently at Carrie again.

“Is everything really cool?” he asked urgently. “I can hang out here if you need me—”

“I’m fine,” Carrie assured him, putting her hand on his arm.

I wished I could see the expression on her face. Was that just the touch of a friend? Or a lover?

He clasped her hand. She didn’t pull away.

“If anyone ever hurt you, they’d have me to answer to,” he muttered. His frown deepened. He looked even more handsome. And dangerous. A chill prickled the hair on my arms.

“There is no call to be so protective, Travis,” Carrie said a beat later. And then she did pull away. “I assure you I am not in any personal danger.”

She turned back to me, a weak smile on her face. I looked at her, wondering what Travis meant by “they’d have me to answer to.” Under the circumstances, the phrase sounded frightening. But then the male of the species is given to those kind of pronouncements, I told myself.

My thoughts must have shown on my face.

“Don’t worry, Kate,” Carrie said. “Travis is a friend. I’ll be safe with him for the evening.”

Was I being dismissed?

After a few more moments of awkward silence, I was pretty sure I
was
being dismissed, but I dragged Carrie into the hall with me to make sure.

“Are you all right alone with this guy?” I whispered.

“I am perfectly capable of defending my virtue, such as it is,” she whispered back with a grin. “I don’t need a chaperon.” Was she misunderstanding me on purpose? Or was I misunderstanding her?

“Carrie, you think a member of your group is a murderer,” I reminded her impatiently. “What if it’s Travis?”

Her grin disappeared.

“No, not Travis,” she said. Her hands rose suddenly, palms out. “Not Travis,” she repeated, jerking them awkwardly, Richard Nixon-style.

“But—”

“I will be perfectly fine,” she insisted, dropping her hands and pulling back her shoulders.

She led me to the front door at a brisk pace, then turned to enfold me in a tight hug.

“Thank you, Kate,” she whispered and released me.

“I’m not sure if—”

“Don’t you worry,” she ordered and opened the door.

I stepped out through the doorway, trying to think.

“I’ll let you know when I schedule the emergency group meeting,” she added.

The door closed before I could respond.

I drove home through the dark, my shoulder muscles aching with tension as I gripped the steering wheel, wondering all the way about Carrie’s relationship with Travis. It was better than remembering Slade’s battered head. Were Carrie and Travis lovers? And if so, so what? It was about time Carrie found someone to love. As far as I knew, she hadn’t been serious about anyone since her husband Cyril had died. But what if Travis was a murderer? What if Carrie was? I shook my head hard. I wasn’t going to even let myself think that.

As I pulled into my driveway, popping gravel, another thought hit me. Maybe Travis was the one Carrie really suspected of murder, despite her protests. Was that why she had turned off the computer? Was that why she wanted so badly to investigate?

I didn’t have any answers to my questions by the time I climbed the stairs and opened the front door.

C.C. was waiting for me in the entry hall, on the other side of the door. She meowed in disapproval. Where had I and my lap been when she needed us? Not to mention the fact that she was starving. C.C. was always starving.

“Cease and desist!” I shouted.

C.C.’s eyes widened. She silently tilted her head for a moment. A smile twitched my lips. Then she started yowling in earnest.

“All right, all right! It’s dinner time,” I conceded.

I dropped my purse next to Slade’s manuscript on the pinball machine and trotted into the kitchen to feed her, turning on my answering machine on the way.

“Hi, this is Judy,” the machine said as I scooped Friskies Senior into C.C.’s bowl with an old pie server.

Judy was my senior warehousewoman. I hoped nothing was wrong. “I didn’t want to call from work yesterday,” she said, “but I thought I’d call from home. Jean’s brother came in yesterday to hassle her. Right after you left. He’s this born-again geek and he’s real uptight about their parents getting a divorce. I mean, more than Jean even! Jeez, what a jerk! Got Jean all uptight again. She even managed to screw up the big order for the chiropractor’s convention.” There was a pause, then Judy finished cheerfully, “Just thought you’d want to know.”

“Thank you for sharing,” I told the machine.

C.C. looked up at me suspiciously. She must have caught the sarcasm in my tone. Then she looked back down and pulled a chunk of Friskies out of her bowl onto the floor. I pretended not to see her and threw the pie server into the sink.

The next voice on the tape was my ex-husband, Craig’s. It sounded forlorn as it came out of the tinny speaker.

“Just wanted to know if you’d like to go out to dinner with me tonight,” he proposed. “Maybe tomorrow night. Or the next—”

“No, I wouldn’t!” I snapped. I ran to the answering machine, shut off the tape and hit rewind. “Not now. Not ever.”

No matter that Craig was the one who had left me. His pleas could still trigger an explosion in me composed of anger and guilt in equal parts. And the guilt was getting weightier now that I was ready to marry Wayne. It wasn’t logical, but then, guilt rarely is.

I sat down at my desk. It was late, after ten, but the day’s events had left me too keyed up to read. Or to go to bed. I needed to get to work.

At least I had a short commute. I put in most of my sixty hours a week for Jest Gifts from my home office, dropping in at the Oakland warehouse periodically to issue paychecks and take care of crises. I contracted out the actual manufacturing of the gift items.

Unfortunately, designing the gag gifts was the least of my work. Checking over the hundreds of mail orders a week, producing and correcting advertising copy, and keeping an eye on work orders took far more time. And payroll, miscellaneous paperwork and general bookkeeping took an equally big chunk. Taking care of disasters took the biggest chunk of all. My disaster correspondence alone could have kept a hired secretary busy. But I had a hard enough time paying Jean and Judy their salaries, not to mention mine.

I ran my eyes over a stack of paper containing questionable orders, a leaning white tower of unpaid bills and a shorter pile of ledger sheets which I needed to transcribe for my accountant. Then I grabbed the sketch I had made earlier of a computer necktie and computer-bug tie tack. I had drawn the computer as an elongated screen atop a box atop a keyboard. What if it could be represented as a keyboard hanging sideways instead?

*

By Tuesday afternoon, I was working on the stack of unpaid bills. Over the previous three days I had wondered who killed Slade Skinner, reviewed the members of the critique group in my mind continuously, and come up empty every time. But I hadn’t called Carrie. I hadn’t wanted to encourage her. I had even begun to hope she had given up the idea of investigating.

The Hutton police hadn’t talked to me since Saturday either. Maybe they had arrested their hypothetical, interrupted burglar.

The phone rang just as that happy thought occurred to me. It was Carrie.

“No, Kate. No one has been arrested,” Carrie assured me when I proposed the idea. “It is still up to us to pursue this matter. I apologize for taking so long to get back to you. It took some time to convince everyone to come to an emergency meeting. The others have agreed to Thursday evening.” She paused as my stomach turned over. “You will be able to attend, won’t you?”

I thought about lying, but despite my stomach’s vote, I couldn’t get my mouth to say no. Carrie told me she’d pick me up Thursday evening, and hung up.