Written Off (18 page)

“I don’t have that kind of money,” I told him.

“An author with a successful book series?” Duffy sounded honestly surprised.

“Makes just about enough to not have to take a day job to pay the rent,” I said. I don’t know why people think midlist authors like me are paid like steroid-infused outfielders.

“Even on a short-term basis, you can’t afford a bodyguard?” he asked.

“Would one guy make that much difference?” I countered. “I don’t have any experience in this kind of thing, except when I can manipulate the situation to be exactly what I need.”

Duffy thought, never turning his head. But he did stretch his neck a bit. “In all candor, one bodyguard against the criminal we seek would probably not be very helpful, but he would be better than nothing.”

“What about you?” I suggested. “You seem to be between gigs at the moment.”

“Perhaps I am more valuable to you doing what I know how to do,” he said. “I’m not especially useful in physical situations; I do better with mental exercises than push-ups.”

That had a little more information in it than a casual listener might have caught. “You don’t plan to stop investigating, do you?” I asked.

Duffy looked very determined. “No,” he said.

Adam Resnick, so excited he was working weekends, had called me Sunday afternoon with the news that Glenn Waterman had arrived from Los Angeles and taken up residence at a trendy downtown hotel in Manhattan. His office would call me to confirm a time and place for our Monday meeting, Adam had said, and then I should call him because Adam would not be at the meeting. Normally the call would go through the agent, but Adam said Waterman’s assistant (nobody has a secretary anymore) insisted I be contacted directly. I balanced being professionally excited with being personally terrified. Excited won, but it was a photo finish.

Ben Preston had shown up at my door two hours after Duffy had left. Before he left, Duffy had personally checked every room himself (including the basement because Duffy was not as big a coward as me) and declared the place kidnapper free. Ben said the meeting with Rafferty had gone on another hour and a half, and in all that time, Rafferty had said a grand total of nothing that he considered useful, except
for reiterating at least seven more times that she was in charge and he wasn’t. Perhaps “useful” was the wrong word.

I’d offered to order in food—the last thing I wanted to do was cook—but Ben said he wanted to do some more work, looking into the convenience store video with a tech expert who might be able to clarify the image better. At the door, I think he was debating whether to try to kiss me, then decided it was better to appear professional to reassure me and left.

Wrong choice, Ben.

Brian Coltrane had called to tell me he wouldn’t be calling for a couple of days because Cathy was annoyed with him for spending too much time with me. I felt that mentioning the increased probability of my being murdered would be considered passive-aggressive and told him I’d be here when he called again. Then I wondered if I would.

Finally, Paula had called, a real rarity for a Sunday, to tell me she believed she was close to discovering whether Duffy had used another name before four years ago.

“Where are you getting that from?” I asked.

“No fair telling,” she answered, which made me wonder why she’d called to begin with.

Duffy Madison, bless him, did not call. He was the only one who either realized that I needed some alone time or was so absorbed in his own thoughts that inquiring about my status just never occurred to him. I was betting on the latter.

So after all the phone calls were done and the e-mails (nope, not one with any serious threats attached, except a message that encouraged me to “enhance” my “manhood”) were read, I was ready to do some serious revisions. But first, perhaps a
break from the tension.
You’ve Got Mail
on the Blu-ray player. That sounded about right: a
fun
movie about e-mail.

I brewed myself an iced coffee with a splash of chocolate syrup (Ben Preston had ruined me—he’d be responsible for the weight I gained now), positioned myself optimally on the sofa, slipped the disc into the proper electronic device, and armed myself with a remote control that had more buttons than the navigation console on the
QEII
.

I was just about to hit the play button when the doorbell rang.

After scraping myself off the ceiling, I threw on a pair of shorts and a fairly respectable top (had I forgotten to mention being in pajamas until the early afternoon?) and crept with great trepidation toward my front door. I had a strong aversion to looking through the peephole; I had somehow now convinced myself that just seeing the person I dreaded could mean my immediate demise. Nobody said I was rational; I’m a writer.

Pulling a move from the TSTL playbook, I attached the chain on the front door and took a deep breath before opening it enough to see who was waiting to do me in on my front step.

“What are you doing opening the door without checking first?” my father demanded. “I could have been a homicidal maniac.”

That
was what I supposed to do after I got home last night: call Dad.

I let him in, noting with some horror the size of the rolling suitcase he’d brought with him. “You don’t really need to stay, Dad,” I attempted. “You can see I’m all right.”

“Yeah, but then you won’t call again, and I’ll be forced to drive down here again. Nope, I’m staying.” He rolled the Chrysler Building into my living room and looked around. “You’ve redecorated.”

“Did it ever occur to you that
you
could have called
me
?” I asked. “I would have told you I was okay and spared you the drive. And the packing. That must have been a lot of packing.”

“I threw a few things in a bag. Is my room all set for me?”

Groaning inwardly, I set Dad up in my guest room and forgot about visiting with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Dad did a perimeter search of his own, the third in a day, and found the same lack of intruders that Duffy and I had both discovered.

We sat on the sofa in the living room, and Dad, looking more concerned than when I’d come back from my prom at eight the next morning, asked me for an update, which I gave him. “So who are the suspects so far?” he asked.

“There aren’t any I know about,” I told him. “But the FBI generally doesn’t call me with every new development.”

“Well, you can’t wait for the feds,” he said, shaking his head at the very idea. “Who would you look at for this crime? You write crime novels.”

“I write
fiction
, Dad. The criminals all do what I want them to so they can get caught.”

But the look on his face would broach no such dodge. “Okay,” I said. “If I were thinking about it—”

“I can’t imagine how you’d be thinking about anything else.”

I let that go. “The attacks have all been about writing,” I went on. “One woman was hit with a typewriter, one electrocuted with her laptop, one suffocated with rejection letters, and Sunny was stabbed with a fountain pen.”

“So where does that take you?” Dad was leading me in a direction that he had no doubt already traveled.

“It’s business, not pleasure. There isn’t going to be an angry ex-husband anywhere because these four women were unrelated. There isn’t going to be a monetary motive because not all of them were successful, and even Sunny wasn’t in Stephen King territory. It’s something about crime writing specifically.”

Dad looked like a proud teacher. In fact, he looked like Duffy when I had made a similar breakthrough. It was really starting to annoy me. “Okay, that seems right. So who would be mad enough at four crime novelists to kidnap and kill all of them?”

I closed my eyes to think and to get the idea of Dad and Duffy melding into one person out of my head. “It could be a lot of people. An aspiring author who thinks the writers were blocking his way to fame and fortune. A rival author who thinks they stole some ideas. They didn’t have the same editors, publishers, or agents. One of them didn’t have an agent at all. So that’s a dead end. A book critic who really hates crime novels. A man who’s tired of women writing stories about people like him getting caught after making stupid mistakes. It could be anybody.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I packed for more than one night,” my father said when I was done.

That didn’t sound good. “Why?”

“Because it sounds like we have a lot of people to talk to.”

*   *   *

Paula volunteered (after I asked her) to come in on a Sunday. It was sweet of her. She reminded me, too, that working on the weekend was double time. That was less sweet but deserved.

She began by finding out who had represented each of the authors who had been taken and killed, and for the ones who had publishing contracts, who had acquired and edited their work. That would have taken me three hours but took Paula seven minutes. It would have been quicker, but she had never met my father before and spent two minutes getting acquainted.

Missy Hardaway, the author of the cozy mysteries, had represented herself in negotiations with Ballmer Press, the Baltimore-based publishing company, which was a three-person operation whose owner, Harrison Belechik, was also the editor, Paula told me.

J. B. Randolph had been published by Criterion, one of the medium-sized houses in New York City. Her editor was Madlyn Beckwirth, the publisher’s specialist in crime fiction, and her agent was Lance Galbraith, one of nine agents working out of an office in SoHo, Artistic Reps Ltd.

Marion Benedict, who had lived in Farmingdale but was never published, had no agent nor an editor, which made that line of investigation seem stupid on reflection. On further reflection, however, came the idea that we really didn’t have
anything else to try. That fueled our thoughts, or mine, anyway. I can’t tell you what Dad or Paula was thinking.

Sunny Maugham, I already knew, was represented by Mandy Westen, and her editor was Carole Pembroke at Arlington House. The police and the feds already had that information, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I was pretty sure it was still legal to call an agent on the phone.

Paula had also furnished me with contact information for the agents and editors, which wouldn’t be useful until the next day. Finding someone in the publishing business on a Sunday is roughly as likely as being hit by lightning while picking up your Powerball winnings. At your wedding.

“What else can we do?” Dad asked when all the data had been printed out in triplicate and distributed to each of us (Paula is nothing if not efficient). “If we can’t call people today, what’s left?”

“We need to Google all the writers who were targeted and see if there were people leaving nasty comments about them,” I suggested. Okay, so I’ve Googled myself once or twice; it’s not a crime. Some late nights you feel like seeing how your books are being received. Some late nights it’s better not to look. The Internet is vicious; it’s like high school, only everybody in the world is in your graduating class.

“I can handle that,” Paula said, as I knew she would. “If there’s a recurring pattern in the way they’re heckled, I’ll find it. That might lead us somewhere. I’ll check reviews, too.”

I sat at my desk, which makes me feel like Captain Kirk on the bridge of the
Enterprise
. You can swivel around and pretend you’re in charge of things. Paula was my Lieutenant
Uhura, communicating via computer with the rest of the universe. Dad was my Bones, always questioning the morality of what was going on and never not on my side. And my Spock . . .

There was no choice; I had to call Duffy.

He answered on the first ring. “Is everything all right?” That was, coming from Duffy, touching. Other people would have tried “hello,” but given his personality, I would have expected a dissertation on the use of the cellular phone to convey information in various digital forms and . . . I fell asleep in the middle of my own sentence.

“I’m fine,” I told him. “Nothing’s happened. But my father, Paula, and I are trying to strategize, and I thought it would be helpful if you could drop by and contribute. Are you in the middle of something?”

“I am attempting to triangulate the killer’s location through travel patterns, Internet connections, and behavioral analysis,” he said. A lot of people, I’m told, watch baseball games on Sunday afternoons in the summer.

“So not much, then,” I suggested.

His voice had a low chuckle buried in it. “I suppose not. Would you like me to drop by?”

“I thought I said that. Do you like sub sandwiches?”

He hesitated. In the books, Duffy is a vegetarian, but without reading them, this Duffy couldn’t know that. “Certainly,” he said.
Gotcha!

“Good. Can you stop at No SUBstitutes on Mayhall Avenue on your way?” Duffy couldn’t find a way to say no, so I got Paula’s and Dad’s orders, gave him mine, and thanked
him for the help. Duffy sounded a little sheepish but agreed to get to my house as soon as possible.

“He’s getting subs?” Paula asked with a knowing tone.

“Yup. He doesn’t know Duffy is a vegetarian.” I grinned at her.

“Is he a vegan?” Dad asked.

“No.”

“They make cheese subs,” Dad contributed. That hardly seemed called for.

While we were waiting for Duffy, Dad agreed to go out for some soda and macaroni salad, because you can’t have subs without macaroni salad. Duffy in the books wouldn’t drink beer or wine, and I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure this one didn’t know that, so the diet soda, which he does drink obsessively in my novels, was for him.

Paula began to attack her laptop keyboard in her office, and that left me alone with my thoughts for the first time today. Which, although it was what I had wanted earlier, turned out to be not that good a thing.

It was fun to play detective with Duffy and my entourage. I loved rallying Paula, and having Dad around was always a kick—for a while. I knew that within three days, I’d want him back in his barn doing whatever it was he does in his barn. And Duffy, while certifiably insane, was at least interesting to observe in order to get ideas for my next book.

But sitting here by myself, the possibility—if not probability—that there wouldn’t be a next book, mostly because I’d be dead, was sinking in. This guy had killed four other crime fiction writers for no clear reason. And he had
made it clear that I was the very author he’d choose to dispose of next. So far, nobody had come close to finding him, not even the always stalwart and resourceful Duffy Madison, who only one female FBI agent seemed to think was even a little fallible. I’d have to ask him about that the next time I saw him.

Or would I? Did I want to know of Duffy’s failures, if he was committing himself to keeping me breathing? Was it better to be blissful (if this was bliss, I’d hate to see despair) in my ignorance? The only reason I could think of to assume Duffy himself wasn’t the mad killer was that he’d had plenty of opportunity to abduct or murder me in the times we’d spent alone and so far had not availed himself.

That wasn’t very much. Who the hell had I just asked to buy me a sub sandwich?

I got up and walked to Paula’s doorway, if for no better reason than to not be left alone with my thoughts. She looked up at me and took off the glasses she uses for the computer screen. “What’s up?” she asked. The reporter’s notebook she uses to take down my more profound thoughts was close to her right hand, I noted. Paula is the most efficient woman on the planet.