A Dangerous Fiction (26 page)

I wished Mingus were with me.

Hand in hand, the young couple strode off into the park. I turned to watch them go. When I turned back, a man was standing in front of me. He smiled hopefully, but I knew at a glance that this was just some random doofus trying his luck. He was too old, too ordinary—a nebbish, Molly would have called him. His thin hair was the color of dirty dishwater, and his features were so indeterminate, so inconsequential, that I forgot his face even as I looked at it, which I did for just a moment before turning away.

“Hello, Jo,” he said.

“You?”
Outraged, I whipped my head around. “You're Sam Spade?”

“In the flesh. May I?”

I cleared a space for him to my left, keeping my bags between us. Could this really be the man who had ripped my life apart, this little sad sack of a man? He wore what he no doubt imagined was a writer's uniform: a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows and corduroy slacks that swished when he moved.

“You're a hard woman to reach, Jo,” he said.

“So I'm told. Didn't stop you, though, did it?”

“I can be very persistent. Good thing for both of us.”

“Not so good for my friends.”

His colorless eyes blinked at the unscripted line. “What's that?”

Slow down, I told myself. Draw him out; make him confess. “You attended that writers' conference in Santa Fe, didn't you?”

He beamed. “You remember.”

“I remember you gave me a plot summary, but you never showed up to discuss it.”

“Wasn't the right time. All those wannabes. You wouldn't have seen me in the right light.”

“It would have saved a lot of trouble if you'd spoken to me then.”

“It would have saved even more,” he said, with a touch of asperity, “if you hadn't rejected me in the first place. Not that I blame you, Jo. I blame the people around you who kept us apart.” He leaned toward me, and I thought he was going to touch me.
Go ahead,
I thought at him. My right hand was in my jacket pocket.
Give me an excuse.

He kept his hands on his thighs. “All I wanted was for you to read my book.”

“You don't feel you went too far?”

“No, why would I? Artists are meant to push the boundaries. We're outliers; the usual rules don't apply. You know that, surely. You couldn't have been married to Hugo Donovan without knowing it.”

It didn't escape me that this was the very argument I'd made on Hugo's behalf. It sounded specious, coming from him. It sounded foul.

“Writing's a job like any other,” I said. “It doesn't convey absolution.”

“It did for him,” he said serenely. “It will for me.”

“Seriously, man, you dare compare yourself to Hugo?”

“I know he was a better writer. But he's gone, and I'm just coming into my powers. There's greatness in me, Jo, I've always known that. All I needed was the right muse to bring it out, and now I've found her.”

He smiled. His breath stank of tuna fish and mints. It made me sick. Beyond loathing, though, I felt a jarring dissonance, like the feeling you get when a novel you're enjoying suddenly lurches off track. How could it be, how was it possible that this puffed-up nothing, this waste of skin, could bring down two great women who towered head and shoulders above him?

“You promised,” I said, “that when we met you'd answer my questions.”

He lowered his watery eyes and whispered, “Stanley.”

“What?”

“Stanley Drucklehoff. You can see why I'd need a nom de plume.”

“I don't give a fuck what your name is. I want to know why you did it.”

“Did what?” he said.

I have read Hannah Arendt; I know all about the banality of evil. But “banal” was too banal a word. This was murderous vapidity, lethal stupidity. The question came to me again, more insistently this time. How could this nebbish have tricked two of the world's smartest women into letting him in?

A cold draft ruffled the hair on the back of my neck, and suddenly I felt the presence of Rowena and Molly hovering behind me. Back in Hoyer's Creek, people used to say that a murder victim never rested until the blood of his killer was sprinkled on his grave. I'd rejected that superstition along with all the rest, but it came back to me now with the force of conviction. Something was owed these ghosts, and it had fallen to me. I closed my hand on the dagger's hasp. Its blade was sharp enough to slice envelopes, but too dull and short to kill. It would do damage, though, and damage needed to be done.

“Why Molly?” I said. “Why Rowena?”

“Why ask me? I'm not God, though I may write like him.” He tittered. His laugh, surprisingly high-pitched, sounded like a neighing horse.

“You promised me answers.”

“I thought you meant my real name, not the meaning of life. But since you ask, sure, I'll take a shot. Why do bad things happen to good people? I believe there's always a reason. Maybe old relationships have to die to make room for new ones. Death is nature's way of opening our eyes to what else is out there.”

“Which makes you what, a force of nature?”

“Me? I'm just a writer.”

“No, you're not.”

He blinked, puzzled but still smiling, like a man waiting for the punch line to a joke. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you have zero talent. You can't write. Not even a vanity publisher would touch that so-called novel of yours. It was the worst drivel I've ever read.”

He looked like Dracula in the moment the stake enters his heart. “No, that's . . . What do you mean? How can you look me in the face and say that? You love my work. You said so yourself.”

“I lied.”

“You're lying now.”

I leaned in close. “All the talent in the world wouldn't justify what you've done, but you have none. No talent, no taste, and nothing to say. You did it all for nothing.”

I might as well have used the dagger. He was bleeding out in front of me. Never in my life had I spoken such words to a writer; wouldn't have thought myself capable of it. I've always respected the effort, if not the result, for a writer can pour as much of his heart's blood into a bad novel as a good one. Now I felt like one of those perverts who gets off on crushing small animals underfoot. But he murdered Rowena, I told myself. He murdered Molly.

Sam Spade stumbled to his feet. He reeled away from me, and without thinking I flew after him. Suddenly the entire park seemed to explode into motion. Two men appeared out of nowhere to grab Spade and hurl him to the ground. A pair of arms caught me around the waist and swung me away. “Put it away, you idiot,” a voice said, close to my ear. Tommy Cullen's voice. I had no idea what he meant until I glanced down and noticed the dagger in my hand. I shoved it into my pocket, and Tommy let go.

Sam Spade writhed on the ground, hands cuffed behind him, surrounded by a knot of men. After a moment, one of them separated himself from the group and trotted over. I recognized Suarez, who'd led the investigation into Rowena's murder.

“You did good, Mrs. Donovan,” he said. “You're a gutsy lady.”

“He didn't confess.”

“This ain't
Columbo
. You did good.” Suarez hesitated. He looked like he had something more to say and it was giving him agita. “One of my guys saw a knife.”

“No, he didn't,” Tommy said before I could answer.

“He's pretty sure.”

“He's mistaken.”

They stared at each other. Behind them I saw Sam Spade being hoisted to his feet. Dead leaves and bits of gravel clung to his face. The murderer lunged at me, but his captors held him back. “You bitch, you fucking bitch! You'll pay for this!”

Suarez looked at Spade, then back at Tommy, and finally at me.

“Tricky thing, lamplight,” he said.

“L
adies, gentlemen, and writers,” I began, to the accompaniment of much laughter and the clinking of forks against glass. Being for the most part unseated, my guests could not rise; but they quieted and turned toward me. Standing on a platform at the end of the room, I continued. “As you know, the police have arrested the man we believe responsible for the murders of Rowena Blair and Molly Hamish. Although this man has not yet been charged with the murders, he is being held on related charges, and I fully expect that once the police finish their investigation, he will be held to account for all his crimes.”

A burst of applause greeted this announcement. I beamed at the crowd, which consisted of the people who'd sustained me over the past months: the editors who'd made a point of signing my books, the clients who'd stood by me despite their own victimization, friends, fellow agents, and, above all, my faithful staff. At the margins of the room, the sleek, black-clad waiters held their trays and waited for me to finish.

“No arrest or conviction can restore what was taken from us. But I have learned—you have shown me—how much remains. Without the love and support of the people in this room, plus a few who couldn't be here tonight, I never would have made it through. To you, my friends.” I raised my glass.

Another round of applause, then the waiters plunged back into the fray, holding high their trays. Renting Maison D'être for the evening, even a Monday evening, had been a great extravagance, but my gratitude demanded expression, and there could not have been a more fitting venue than the restaurant where Molly, Rowena, and I had last been together, the night Rowena made her entrance on a litter carried by four half-naked men.

I stepped off the platform and made my way around the room, greeting my guests. Keyshawn Grimes, looking every inch the up-and-coming writer in a suit jacket and jeans, broke off a conversation with his editor to kiss me on both cheeks. We exchanged a few words and I moved on through the crowded room. Most of the writers victimized by Sam Spade had come, along with other clients who'd gone out of their way to express their concern and support during the whole ordeal. Jean-Paul and Lorna were tasked with making sure none were left standing alone, a duty Jean-Paul performed with his usual social fluency and Lorna with a grim doggedness that normally would have annoyed the hell out of me but today seemed a welcome sign of normality. Their ministrations left Chloe free to make the rounds of editors, and I could tell by the swath of smiles and handshakes that she was introducing herself as Hamish and Donovan's newest full-fledged agent. I looked about for Harriet but couldn't spot her in the mass of people, nearly all taller than me.

Near the bar, my client and lawyer, Sean Mallory, was chatting with Leigh Pfeffer, whose painting he'd seen at my place and admired. Beside him, Teddy Pendragon held forth to a group of people including Larry Sharpe, publisher of Pellucid, and a couple of agents. Teddy was the only person in the room I was not happy to see, but I had no one but myself to blame for his presence.

The arrest of Sam Spade (as I continued to think of him, though his real name was in fact Stanley Drucklehoff) had affected me in strange ways. Terror, it seemed, had iced over a number of other emotions that came welling to the surface once the threat was removed. I still missed Molly every day, but my mourning was punctuated by odd eruptions, like patches of melting ice on a frozen pond: euphoria at having my life back, gratitude for those who'd helped, inchoate longings for something more . . . even a sense that more was possible. It was during one of those soft spots that I'd picked up my home phone without checking caller ID and found myself talking to Teddy Pendragon. Ever since I'd refused his shiva call, Teddy had besieged me with flowers and notes apologizing for whatever he'd done to offend me. Now he begged my forgiveness again; and this time, feeling churlish for having turned him away, I granted it freely and threw in for good measure an invitation to tonight's soiree. Regretted it at once, of course, but the invitation could not be rescinded, and so there he was, working the room as only Teddy could.

As I approached the bar I heard him saying, “. . . the same sort of obsession. Mark David Chapman thought he was Holden Caulfield. This guy thinks he's the second coming of Hugo—” He broke off when he noticed me and assumed a bedside sort of voice. “Dear Jo, what a time you've had.”

“Got it all figured out, have we, Teddy? Neat and tidy and wrapped in a bow?”

“It's human nature to try, don't you think? Although in this case, the mind boggles.”

“Not yours, surely.”

He laughed. “Now there's the old Jo. Warm and fuzzy doesn't last long with you, does it?” Then, in an aside to the others, “I'm afraid our hostess subscribes to the novelist's view of literary biography; that is, she hates it.”

“I don't hate it,” I said. “My husband used to say that biography's goal was to cut great men down to their biographer's size . . . but Hugo could be harsh. It's true that biography satisfies a certain voyeuristic curiosity we all share, but the important thing about an artist is surely his work, not his life.”

“Ah,” said Teddy, raising a pudgy finger, “but where does that work come from?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it does. For as long as art has existed, people have wondered about its source: hence the ancients' invention of muses. If you rule out supernatural inspiration, which we tend to do these days, what's left but the artist's life and times?”

I patted his arm and addressed the spectators. “If you gave Teddy a horse, he'd not only look it in the mouth, he'd give it a colonoscopy.”

“Charming image.” Teddy was still smiling, but there was a lot going on behind those pale blue eyes. “I could put out a shingle: ‘Proctologist to the stars.'”

Even as we traded barbs, I found myself scanning the crowd for a gleaming bare head, though I knew perfectly well I wouldn't find it. Max had declined my invitation, and not only because he was in L.A. “It's too soon,” he'd said last weekend when we talked on Skype.

“It's been two weeks since the arrest,” I said. “How is that too soon?”

“They haven't charged him with the murders yet. Last time I spoke to Cullen, all they had on him was stalking.”

“You talked to Tommy?”

Max leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest, so he looked more than ever like Mr. Clean. “That's what interests you, that I talked to
Tommy
? What are we, back in high school?”

“No,” I said, hoping the webcam wasn't good enough to register slight changes in color. “It's just that I haven't heard from him lately.”

“And that matters because . . . ?”

“It doesn't. Why should it? He's got his perp, case closed and on to the next. I get that.” So what if it left me with one more hole in my Swiss cheese of a life? I suppose all crime victims feel this odd sense of loss when their case is resolved and the investigators move on. Or maybe it was the kiss, which I couldn't quite get out of my mind. At the time I'd thought it meant something; but sometimes, I guess, a kiss is just a kiss.

“The point is,” Max said, “there are still a lot of unanswered questions. How did this Drucklehoff get to Molly and Rowena? How could he have written those spot-on e-mails and put together the distribution list?”

“He is a printer, you know.”

“He's a clerk in a retail print shop: hardly a publishing maven!”

“He could have stolen my laptop in Santa Fe, downloaded a bunch of stuff, and put it to use.”

“Maybe. The point is, we don't know and he's not talking.”

“He might never talk,” I said. “We may never know.” Though Max's frustration with this answer was evident, I had made my peace with uncertainty. There is no understanding the mind of a psychopath. Just the other day I'd read a story in the
Times
about a man charged with murdering a woman simply in the hope that her brother would come out of hiding to attend the funeral. There are people among us, people who look and, for the most part, act like the rest of us, for whom a human life has as much value and weight as a pawn in a game of chess. Cross the path of such a person and your life may be lost or upended for reasons so petty that they defy detection by the normal mind.

I could live with not understanding why. Unlike fiction, real life is full of plots that never get resolved. What bothered me was the how of it. How did Stanley Drucklehoff do all the things he did? How did he get to Molly and Rowena? Unless he confessed, we'd never know.

Eventually, I was certain, the police would assemble their case, and Drucklehoff would be charged with both murders. But I was in no mood to wait for the law to wend its stately way. After several weeks of blissful routine, I'd begun to breathe normally again. Somehow I needed to draw a line between the past hellish months and the future; and the dinner at Maison D'être, I'd decided, would be that line.

The maître d' announced that the buffet was open. At once the margins of the room thinned out as my guests gathered around the serving table. On the sparse outskirts I noticed Gordon Hayes, standing like a sentinel with Mingus at his side.

I flagged down a passing waiter. “Bring me a sirloin steak, would you, please?”

“Yes, ma'am. How would you like that? Rare, medium—”

“Raw, cut into chunks, and packed in a doggy bag. It's for my bodyguard there.”

The waiter followed my eyes, nodded, and hurried off to the kitchen.

I joined Gordon, gave him a hug. Then I hunkered down next to Mingus and hugged him, too. He licked my cheek once with his warm tongue, then squirmed until I let him go.

Gordon reached down and hauled me to my feet. “Are you sure about this?”

I ran my hand through the dog's thick black ruff. Giving him back was harder than I'd ever imagined it would be, but seeing the way he'd greeted and now cleaved to Gordon made it easier. “Got to cut the umbilical cord sometime. He deserves his country retirement.”

“If you ever need him again—”

“I won't hesitate. Thanks, Gordon.”

His narrow eyes crinkled. “Just looking after my interests.”

Well-trained as Mingus was, there was no point in torturing him at the buffet table, so I went and filled a plate for Gordon. The menu was eclectic but hearty: there were crab cakes and Black Mission fig salad, wild mushroom risotto, chicken pot-au-feu, and tender short ribs. I'd eaten nothing all day, and the smells rising from the buffet reminded me how hungry I was. I gave Gordon his plate—Mingus's dinner, I noticed, had already been delivered—and went back to get one of my own.

By then everyone was seated at the tables, eating. The noise had died down to a muted thrum of conversation amid the tinkling of cutlery and glass. Silvery light reflected off the tin ceilings. Finding myself alone for a moment, I looked around the glittering room at my guests, New York's finest publishers, editors, agents, critics, and writers. These are my friends and colleagues, I thought. This is my life. I started as a scrawny, unloved orphan, and look where I am now.
And then, with a bow to Molly:
If this isn't great, what is?

Holding my plate, I looked for a congenial table and noticed two people alone at a table for six: Harriet, with Charlie Malvino by her side. I hurried over, unhappy to see them alone. If anyone suspected our parting was less than amicable, my sitting with them should refute it.

“Nice speech,” Charlie said as I joined them. He wore tight jeans and a graphic tee under a blazer. Harriet wore a black wool dress with crisp white cuffs and looked like his maiden aunt.

“Is it official?” I asked. “I didn't know if I should say anything or not.”

“Signed the papers this morning,” he gloated while Harriet, picking at a crab cake, eked out a sour smile.

“So what is it? The Malvino-Peagoody Literary Agency?”

“Peagoody Malvino Literary Management, actually,” Harriet said stiffly. She'd done something to her hair, tamed it into a kind of pixie cut that perched uneasily atop her long, angular face.

“Sounds fine. I wish you both every success.”

Charlie thanked me, but Harriet pursed her lips and would not meet my eyes. She hadn't believed I would call her bluff, and in fact I nearly hadn't. Harriet was an accomplished agent with a serious client list. It should have been, as she'd said, a no-brainer. And yet Molly had never offered Harriet a partnership; she chose me instead. I thought about that, and about Harriet's habit of lecturing me in staff meetings, and the timing of her ultimatum. I churned it over in my mind until gradually my thoughts clarified into a decision to let her go. Like Tolkien's Galadriel, I would diminish and yet remain myself.

She was shocked when I told her, disbelieving at first, then furious. A generous settlement had, I hoped, taken the edge off that fury. I'd allowed her to take her clients' backlist with her, although contractually those books belonged to the agency, not her. This gave her fledgling company a small but vital float and accounted, I presumed, for Charlie's smugness. In return, though, I'd kept Chloe. Given a choice between accompanying Harriet as her assistant and staying with me as an agent, she hadn't hesitated.

Now Charlie wore the sly, sated look of a fox who's raided the chicken coop, while Harriet looked like one of the chickens. “Be careful what you wish for,” Molly always said.