Only Madeline Schutz knew how anonymous a bestselling author could be. Her novels with their shiny glitzy covers beckoned to travelers in every airport of the nation, they were a staple of the book displays in supermarkets, she herself had seem them, dog-eared and supple as an evangelist's Bible, in the hands of dreamy-eyed youths of all ages, but no one made a connection between her and the M. X. Schutz on those covers. They were paperback originals, published by a small firm in Kenosha that decided to take a plunge into science fiction. They had yet to get more than a perfunctory notice in
Publishers Weekly.
The longest review she had ever had, of the third of the Empyrean Chronicles,
Miranda and the Moonlet
, had been in a Nashville paper, and the reviewer spent most of the time discussing an alternative plot. Perhaps if her high sales had spelled wealth, Madeline could have been more philosophical about this, but the contract she had signed with Argyle Houseâfor ten booksâhad been carefully drawn, and Madeline received only a small share of what must be the enormous profits.
At the time, she had been so eager to get into print, to be a published author, that she had hardly glanced at the contract before signing and sending it back to Kenosha lest the publisher change his mind. It had been a sacred moment when she held a copy of the
first chronicle in her hand and felt that her dreams had at last been realized. A year later, after she had sent in the second chronicle, she had yet to receive a royalty report. She wrote a timid letter of inquiry and received a phone call in return. J. J. Rudolph turned out to be a woman, and she was effusive with her praise. Madeline was assured that her series had surpassed all the expectations of the house. She asked when she would receive her royalties. There was a long pause.
“Do you have a copy of your contract there, Madeline?”
“Should I get it?”
“No need for that if you can remember the main points. Your royalties will be based on the second and later printings.”
“Not on the first?”
Ms. Rudolph was patient. She outlined for Madeline the risks a publisher took in launching a series aimed eventually at ten volumes. Placing titles with the distributors who alone could make or break a book was not the work of a summer day. “You realize that your books are available everywhere.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“You will be delighted to learn that arrangements are being made for second printings of both the first and second chronicles.”
“How many copies are there in the first printings?”
“Three hundred thousand! You can imagine what that costs us.”
“I don't seem to be on
Amazon.com
or the other online book sites.”
“We have had our disagreements. Our board has voted not to do business with them.”
“Will the second printings be as large?”
“One hundred thousand copies each.”
Later Madeline could not remember how the conversation had ended. After hanging up, she had got out her contract with Argyle House and for the first time read it carefully. She could not believe
she had signed such an agreement. No, that wasn't true. She could very easily believe it. At that point in her career, she would have
paid
to get her book in print. A week after her phone call, she received a check for twenty thousand dollars, which was described as an advance against royalties for the second and later printings of the first two chronicles. Madeline doodled on a pad trying to establish what her royalty on one hundred thousand copies would be. Her royalty was 10 percent but, she noticed, not of the cover price of the novel but of the net earnings of Argyle House. J. J. Rudolph responded to her next letter promptly and briefly. There was a 60 percent markup on her titles. Madeline joined the Authors Guild and immediately sought their advice on her arrangements with Argyle House. The answer was not comforting.
She was assured that most contracts were eminently fair to authors, but there were rare exceptions, and, alas, Argyle House was one of them. Hers was not the first complaint they had received. If she had sought advice before signing the contract, she would have been advised to take her work to another publisher.
Another publisher! How many had turned her down before that bright day when Argyle House had expressed interest in her work. The tragic truth was that even now, knowing what she did, having received the letter from the guild, she would have gone ahead and signed the contract.
She had always written quickly. Now her pace became quicker still. Her only hope of release from the servitude of the contract was to finish the ten chronicles and then hope to find an honest publisher.
Then the body had been found hanging in a garage in Fox River and identified as hers. One of her purses was missing and some clothing.
Her first crazy thought was that it was a warning from Argyle House. They had somehow learned of her inquiries at the Authors
Guild. Perhaps the guild had contacted them. Madeline left her apartment and drove to Elmhurst and took a motel room using her mother's maiden name, paying cash to avoid any question about her credit card. For several days she cowered in dread. She had not even brought her computer. She never traveled without a computer, but she would have been incapable of rocketing off into outer space in her present mood. She watched the news; she read the newspapers. On the fourth day she became angry. She would go to the police and explain that that was not her body they had found hanging in the garage.
What a relief it had been to pour out her story to Agnes Lamb. The interview with Tetzel the reporter not so much, since he seemed to resent most of what she told him.
“The Empyrean Chronicles?” Agnes had cried. “I have them all. I love them.”
“Thank you.”
“I've never met a real live author before.” Agnes reached out to touch Madeline's arm as if to see if she was real. “You know what I kept thinking when Mr. Mintz let me into your apartment and I saw the manuscript on your desk? I thought, that is the last chronicle.”
“I wish it were.”
“You don't mean that.”
“Sometime I'll tell you all about being a famous author.”
She did tell her, later, all of it, feeling like a fool as she described it all. Agnes listened to her with a stern expression. Then she began to take notes.
“Agnes, what if there is some connection between Argyle House and the woman found hanging in the garage?”
“The thought is bound to occur,” Agnes said.
Cy had Pippen read him her complete report on the woman found hanging in the garage of Amy Gorman's apartment, as much for the information as for the pleasure of the company of the lovely and inaccessible assistant coroner. That she was a strikingly beautiful woman would have been obvious to anyone with eyes to see; that she was inaccessible, at least to Cy, stemmed from the fact that she had a husbandâthe ob-gyn man, or Ojibwa, as Cy thought of himâand that there was a Mrs. Horvath, the love of his youth and middle age, till death do they part and all the rest. Still, in the case of Pippen, Cy was incapable of custody of the eyes.
“I miss the phrase âritual killing.'”
“I looked it up. It doesn't apply. Unless Elizabethan practices were ritual killings.”
Cy waited. Pippen loved to explain. When Henry VIII or Elizabeth hanged someone, the victim was cut down while still alive, then drawn and quartered. This victim, no longer Madeline Schutz, had been mutilated while she still hung.
“Probably after she was dead. Have you identified her yet?”
“Agnes is working on it.”
They were seated in the cafeteria on a middle floor of the courthouse,
accessible to cops, coroners, and clerks of court. Pippen wore her lab coat over a black turtleneck with a medallion adorning her bosom. From time to time, she tossed her head and her ponytail responded.
“Did you find a knife?”
“No.”
“It probably wasn't a knife. Do you know that instrument that looks all handle with a razor blade that can be released by pressing a button? I don't know what they're called.”
“Why not a knife?”
“These were incisions, not cuts.”
“A deranged surgeon?”
Pippen shrugged. Cy drove from his mind the instruments that Pippen used on bodies when performing an autopsy. “How will Agnes go about making an identification?”
“She's open to suggestions.”
“There was paint under the fingernails.”
“Under?”
“Oil paint. Maybe she was an artist.”
“Not a housepainter?”
“You could have it analyzed.”
Pippen closed the report and laid a long-fingered hand upon it. She might have been displaying her rings, except that Cy was certain that she had no idea of the moral war that raged within him whenever they were together. No one knew but his confessor, who was puzzled by Cy's story.
“Impure desires?”
“Not really.”
“What, then?”
“Carelessness about the occasion of sin?”
“I think you're being scrupulous.”
“I hope so.”
Temporary relief came with absolution and lasted until the next time he saw Pippen.
When they left the cafeteria, they descended in the elevator to Pippen's refrigerated quarters in the basement of the building. Her ostensible boss, Lubins, a political hack, was seldom there. Cy collected a specimen of the paint from beneath the fingernails. The clothing that had been found in the trash can in the garage was already in the lab, along with the purse. All that had been stolen from the real Madeline Schutz. The paint beneath the fingernails would not give them an identification, only an occupation or maybe a hobby.
Agnes was waiting for Cy when he got to his office. She rattled off an account of her visit with Madeline Schutz. “Should I look into Argyle House?”
“Isn't that pretty far-fetched?”
“Yes, but what's near-fetched?”
“Remember when the lawyer suggested to Amy Gorman that she shouldn't go home? Who did she stay with?”
Agnes consulted her notes. “Susan Devere.”
“Of the Devere family?”
“Hence the name.”
“What does she do?”
“Let's find out.”
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Barrington, Illinois, has become a large area of new homes surrounding the town of that name. Susan Devere lived in the town, in a modest trilevel the upper level of which had been converted into a studio. She came to the door in a smock, her hair pulled back on her head, a look of annoyance on her face. They showed her their ID.
Agnes said, “We're looking into the body found in your friend's garage.”
A mouth opened in surprise is seldom attractive, but in Susan's case it erased the annoyance and made her look beautiful. She fiddled with the lock and opened the door.
“She still staying with you?” Agnes asked as they went in.
“Would you want to go back to that house?”
“You're a painter,” Cy said.
She made a face. “You're a detective.” Her tone was somewhere between sarcasm and teasing. Her smock was smeared with paint; there was a daub on the side of her nose.
“Where do you work?”
“Come on.”
She led them upstairs into a large room lighted by skylights. It was a mess. An easel stood at an angle to catch the light; there were little tables around it covered with tubes and bottles, and brushes galore standing handles down in what looked like a Ball canning jar. Rags. A plume of smoke rose from a huge ashtray. Along the walls several pictures in various stages of completion were propped. The canvas on the easel was a portrait.
Cy studied it. “Amy Gorman?”
“You are a detective.”
“And you're quite an artist.”
“That, unfortunately, is still a minority opinion.”
“What made you an artist?”
“Affluence. My family has more money than any family ought to have. But I was damned if I was going to become a patron of this or that.”
“Like your grandmother?”
“Our tainted family's solitary boast. Is that sacrilegious?”
“Why would it be?”
“Wordsworth was referring to the Blessed Virgin. Our tainted nature's, etc., etc.”
Neither Agnes nor Cy had anything to say to that.
Cy said, “The murdered woman was a painter, too.”
“How do you know that?”
“There was paint under her fingernails.”
Susan examined her own nails, then nodded. “It's hard to get out. Hence the nail polish.”
“Has Amy Gorman any idea why her garage was selected?”
“We never talk about it. What's there to say?”
“How did you come to know her?”
“Through her son, the one now in Iraq.”
“Do artists ever get together?”
“How do you mean?”
“Meetings, whatever.”
“There are clubs. Those who work in pastels sometimes meet together to criticize one another. So do watercolor people. Oils? We're a pretty solitary group. About the only time we meet is for art shows.”
Cy said, “I wonder if you would do us a favor. The paint under the fingernails is about all we have to go on. Would you take a look at the body and see if it's anyone you ever saw?”
“A dead body!”
“It is pretty gruesome,” Agnes said. “Think of it as a favor to Amy Gorman.”
“I'm already providing her with a hideout.”
“Isn't she back at work?”
“Yes. I couldn't do what you ask.”
It took fifteen minutes to convince her that if Agnes could stand a visit to the morgue, so could Susan Devere. “The coroner is a woman,” Agnes added. “A very pretty woman.”
Cy glanced at Agnes as if she had revealed his secret.
Pippen met them as if she were a hostess, and in her presence Susan Devere relaxed.
“I've never been in a morgue before.”
“Most are here on a first visit,” Pippen said cheerily. “Let's go. If 'twere done well 'twere done quickly. Is that right?”
“Close,” Susan said.
Down some steps and into a storage room, where Pippen went humming to a drawer, grabbed the handle, and slid the body out. Head first. Agnes wheedled Susan around to the side.
“My God, it's Bobby!”
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“I've never fainted before in my life,” Susan said when they got her to Pippen's office and a cup of coffee was put in her hands. “Can I smoke here?”
“It's not going to harm any of my customers.”
Susan lit up. “Bobby who?” Agnes asked.
Her name was Roberta Newman. That was enough to get Agnes going, and soon they had not only a name but an address, a list of traffic violations, an application for a fishing license, and the tag number of her automobile.
Meanwhile, Cy took the still shaken Susan back to Barrington. “How well did you know her? Bobby?”
“I didn't know her at all. I knew who she was. Our family foundation gave her a grant. She kept winning prizes.”
“You've been a great help.”
“Don't ever ask again.”