A Stiff Critique Read online

  “Did Slade really challenge Mave about meeting Phoebe Mitchell?” I asked next.

  “Oh, he did indeed,” Carrie replied. “The Saturday before last, he even wrote out the math to disprove Mave’s claim. As Mave would have put it, she was madder than a wet hen. But her anger appeared to be short-lived. She was friendly to Slade, as well as to everyone else by the time we left that day.” Carrie sent me a quick frown. “Kate, do you really think Mave had a motive?”

  I shrugged my shoulders and stared out the window. Hutton’s tasteful gardens and trimmed hedges looked even more beautiful now, in the twilight.

  “Do you think Slade really based his characters in Cool Fallout on members of your group?” I asked after a few more glimmering blocks floated by.

  “You mean, I presume, the scheming, social-climbing real estate agent and the Chinese-American nerd?” Carrie said.

  I nodded. She thought for a moment.

  “Yes, I believe so,” she answered finally. “Although I can’t say I actually noticed the resemblance while I was reading the manuscript. I suppose I might have done so had it featured a short, plump African-American attorney.” Carrie let out a loud, full-bodied laugh. The car veered to the left in appreciation.

  “It is an appropriate comeuppance for Nan, in any case,” she said, giving the wheel a compensatory jerk to the right. “Nan thinks she’s immune to satirical treatment. Perhaps Slade wanted to prove that she wasn’t.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “No, not really.” Carrie sighed, serious again. “He probably used Nan simply because he needed a character and hers was handy. I would imagine he didn’t even stop to think the similarity might be noted and objected to. The man was not sensitive to others.”

  “Do you think Nan—”

  “Killed him because of the characterization?” she finished for me. “No, I don’t. Nan can be a grade-A bitch sometimes, but I don’t believe she’s a murderer.”

  That took care of that theory. But I had another one. Actually, I had two or three more.

  “How about Russell?” I asked for a start. “Did you see the way he stared at me?”

  Carrie turned to look at me herself for a moment, then looked back at the road. “Yes, I did,” she said slowly. “You’ve never met him before?”

  I shook my head vehemently.

  “Maybe he’s attracted to you, Kate. You’re not an unattractive woman.”

  “But I already have a sweetie,” I objected.

  “Russell doesn’t know that,” Carrie pointed out.

  I groaned. She was right. I was so used to being with Wayne, I imagined our relationship was tattooed on my face.

  “Russell can seem a wee bit strange, I know,” Carrie said. “But he’s a very bright man, a really keen observer of human nature. In fact, I’ve often thought that he seems odd precisely because his focus is so absolute. Very few people are able to concentrate so intensely, to be so still.”

  “Well, I don’t want him concentrating on me,” I said sullenly.

  “Don’t worry, Kate,” Carrie chuckled. “I’m just thinking aloud. I am not proposing that you date the poor man.”

  “Do you think Slade’s book was good enough to steal?” I asked, more than ready to change the subject.

  “Now that’s an interesting question,” Carrie murmured.

  It must have been a very interesting question. Carrie didn’t give me an answer until we were out of Hutton and on the highway headed home, five minutes later.

  “The issue isn’t really whether Cool Fallout is good enough to steal,” she told me as she switched lanes. “It is a well-written book, and likely to be a real money-maker for his publishers. But the real issue is whether anyone else but Slade could sell it for the money it deserves. Now, I don’t know if his publishers have seen it or bought it yet. But if they have, it seems likely that they would spot any duplicate on the market. And there’s yet another obstacle for our hypothetical thief, the simple fact that Slade had a name. When Slade sold a book, he could ask for a six-figure advance and receive it. But the offer of a commensurate advance to an unknown author would be highly unlikely, no matter how good the manuscript.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed.

  “But don’t be too quick to give up the idea,” Carrie added. “What if someone in the group knew or thought they knew that the publishers hadn’t seen the manuscript yet? And what if he or she wasn’t sufficiently sophisticated to realize that the book would be devalued without Slade’s name?”

  “Who?” I asked quickly.

  “Joyce,” she answered just as quickly. But then she shook her head. “I can’t imagine money being a temptation to Joyce. The woman lives as if she’s taken a vow of poverty. She gives the lion’s share of her income to charity, anyway.”

  “What if she wanted to raise money for Operation Soup Pot?”

  Carrie shook her head. “No,” she said, taking one hand off the steering wheel to wave away the suggestion. “Not Joyce. Not even for the poor.”

  “How about Travis?” I proposed.

  Carrie’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. She straightened her shoulders against the fabric of the car seat.

  “No,” she answered brusquely. “Not Travis.”

  “Why not Travis?” I pressed.

  Carrie didn’t answer. She just gripped the wheel and pressed her lips together into a tight line.

  “Carrie, what’s the deal between you and Travis?” I asked. “Are you in love with him or what?”

  “That’s none of your—” she began. But then she shook her head. Her shoulders slumped away from the seat. “Of course, it is your business. I have made it your business, haven’t I?”

  I was glad she’d taken care of both sides of the argument herself. I wouldn’t have stood a chance arguing against her.

  “I do have certain…feelings for Travis,” she admitted.

  That was a big help. Suddenly, Carrie’s verbal precision seemed to have disappeared.

  “Travis has told me that he’s in love with me,” she went on after a moment. One brown, freckled hand pulled away from the steering wheel to make chopping motions in the air. “But he’s so young, Kate. He’s more than ten years my junior. And…”

  “And what?” I prodded.

  “I don’t know if I really want to love another man,” Carrie finished in a rush. “Not after what I went through with Cyril. He was such a good man. To watch him die like that…” She shook her head, then closed her eyes.

  For one long second, I was torn between sympathy and visions of us crashing on the highway if she didn’t open her eyes again.

  “Carrie?” I prompted nervously.

  She opened her eyes again. My heart settled back down into my chest.

  “Travis isn’t going to die like Cyril,” I declared emphatically. What the hell, it was almost certain to be true. Especially since Carrie was ten or fifteen years older than Travis. If anyone was going to die first—

  “Travis is awfully sweet, isn’t he?” Carrie said dreamily, interrupting my morbid train of thought.

  “He is gorgeous,” I offered. As far as I was concerned, Travis wasn’t “sweet” at all. Brooding and belligerent was more like it.

  “It’s not only his appearance, Kate,” Carrie told me. “It’s his innocence, his belief that he can make the world a more just place. His untarnished kindness. He makes me feel young again.”

  Damn. She really was smitten.

  “Not that I’ve committed myself to him in any way,” she assured me. “But maybe, once all this is over…”

  She never finished that sentence. And by the time she pulled into my driveway, popping gravel, I still hadn’t worked up the courage to ask her specifically if she suspected Travis of Slade’s murder.

  She stopped the car, put it in Park and turned to me expectantly.

  “Listen, Carrie,” I said, telling myself it was time to be assertive. Or at least to be something close to assertive. “I�
��m afraid I’m a failure as a sleuth and as a writer. I’m not going to share my poetry with the group, and I can’t finger the murderer either. I’m sorry, but that’s all she wrote.”

  A brief frown crossed her face, but then she threw her hands into the air and grinned. “Don’t worry, Kate,” she said cheerfully. “We’ve barely begun our investigation.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to dispel the sudden tightness in my chest. “I think we’ve, or at least I’ve done enough investigating,” I told her in my firmest voice.

  “We’ll both sleep on it,” she declared. Then she reached over and put her arm around my shoulders. “You’re a good friend,” she added softly and squeezed.

  I took another deep breath. And let it out again. I wouldn’t try to argue with her now. I got out of the car instead and said goodbye.

  “Don’t forget your floppy,” Carrie called as I was about to slam the car door. She handed me Donna’s computer diskette. MY FAMILY, THE FAMILY, black letters on a white label, stared up at me in the failing light.

  “Oh, thanks,” I said automatically as Carrie backed out of the driveway. Right, thank her for making you a Mafia target, I chided myself.

  I turned and climbed my front stairs, holding the diskette as if it were dynamite. Which, of course, it was.

  C.C. was waiting for me when I opened the door, yowling her whiskers off. She wanted food, damn it. And not that dry stuff in her bowl either. She wanted that good stuff in the little expensive cans. I put Donna’s diskette on the pinball machine next to Slade’s manuscript and trotted into the kitchen to open a can for C.C. I didn’t feel like arguing with her either. At least I was consistent.

  C.C. attacked her kitty pate with one last meow and then the house was silent except for the faint sound of slurping and chewing. I walked into my office in that silence and heard the sound of footsteps on the driveway gravel. The sound was unmistakable. I had long ago trained myself to hear the approach of solicitors before they reached my door. I stood up straight, holding my breath. Then I heard it again. A shoe on gravel. Not a paw. Not a tire. A shoe.

  My mouth went dry. Who the hell was walking up my driveway at this time of night? Neighborhood kids, I told myself. Late-evening Jehovah’s Witnesses. But my body didn’t buy either explanation. It sent my pulse into overdrive and moistened my palms and armpits just in case I hadn’t gotten the point. Someone was out there.

  - Nine -

  I tiptoed to the front window, then sucked in some much needed air as I slowly slid the curtain back to uncover an inch-wide sliver of glass. I pressed one eye against that cool sliver and peered out into the dark, unable to see much of anything at first. Moonlight was all that illuminated the driveway. Then I heard a foot scruff the gravel once more. Another jolt of adrenaline improved my vision dramatically. Finally I saw it, a dark figure standing stock-still halfway between my house and the street.

  I strained my eyes to see more detail, but the effort was useless. I couldn’t tell who that figure was. I couldn’t even tell if it was male or female. Though I was pretty sure at this point that it wasn’t canine.

  A new feeling flooded my body along with all the adrenaline. Anger. God damn it, I wouldn’t be afraid in my own house! I dropped the curtain and ran to the front door.

  But the dark figure must have run too. It was gone from view by the time I made it down the stairs.

  I heard the sound of a car starting as I ran the length of the gravel driveway. And then the sound of the same car accelerating. I got to the street just in time to see its rear lights disappear, and then all I heard was the hum of traffic from the main road.

  I stopped running and stood panting in frustration at my mailbox.

  Who had my visitor been? An organized-crime associate of Donna’s father? But I had only seen one person. And two men had come to Carrie’s. And how would they know I had a copy of Donna’s manuscript so quickly anyway? Then another possibility jumped into my mind in full video. Russell Wu. Standing stock-still and watching me through his tinted glasses. I shivered in the warm evening air and told myself I had been right the first time, the visitor was just some neighborhood kid wandering in. Then I remembered that most of the neighborhood kids weren’t old enough to drive yet.

  I stomped back up the driveway, cursing my own fear. There was no reason to assume the figure had anything to do with Carrie’s critique group. It could have been my ex-husband, Craig, for that matter. I paused as my foot touched the bottom step of the front stairs. It probably was Craig, I decided. I liked that theory. It was safe.

  I walked back up the stairs and into the house, convincing myself of the nice, new, safe theory.

  Twenty minutes later, I had decided it was too late to work on Jest Gifts anyway and settled down in my Naugahyde comfy chair with the copy of Cool Fallout in my lap. I turned the title page face down. Chapter One stared up at me.

  “Peter Dahlgren looked at his watch and thought he saw death in the movement of the second hand—”

  C.C. leapt, making a perfect landing in the middle of the page.

  I had just persuaded her to sit under the manuscript rather than on top of it when the phone rang.

  “Hello,” I answered hesitantly, now afraid of who might be on the other end.

  “Kate?” came a deep, concerned voice. Wayne’s voice, I realized a second later.

  “Sweetie!” I whooped, standing in my excitement and dropping both the manuscript and C.C. “I’m so glad you called!”

  “You okay?” he asked, the concern still evident in his tone. Wayne could be too damn perceptive sometimes. For less than a heartbeat, I considered telling him all about the murder. And about Donna’s family. And about the dark figure. It would have worried him right on home.

  “I’m fine,” I lied instead. He needed his time with his uncle. And I needed my time to snoop, I realized suddenly. “That is, aside from resisting Craig’s not so subtle advances.”

  Wayne chuckled. The rough sound warmed me over the line like a favorite wool blanket. I snuggled back down into my comfy chair. “Poor guy’s probably frantic,” he growled. “I would be too if I was losing you.”

  “Do you feel sorry for him?” I asked, really curious. Craig was the one person who seemed exempt from Wayne’s all pervasive sympathy.

  “Maybe after the wedding I’ll feel sorry for him,” he answered. “Right now I feel sorry for me. I miss you, Kate.”

  “I miss you too,” I whispered, suddenly feeling the separation as an ache in my throat and chest. I pulled my shoulders back sharply as an antidote. “How’s your uncle?” I asked.

  Wayne and I talked for close to an hour. I couldn’t say what about. Only that we laughed and longed for each other and hung up finally after mutual declarations of affection.

  C.C. jumped back in my lap once I put the phone down. I scooped up Slade Skinner’s manuscript, laid it on top of C.C. and began to read again. Cool Fallout was a poor substitute for Wayne’s warm body, but it would have to do.

  A few chapters later, I had decided that Carrie was right. Slade Skinner was a good writer. After a brief, tantalizing glimpse of the nineties, he’d flashed back to the sixties and the people who lived at the Brightstar commune, selling illegal drugs to support an equally illegal underground railroad for Vietnam draft evaders. As I turned the pages I went back in time with them, back to a time when I had agonized over my boyfriend’s draft status, learned of the death of my first friend in Vietnam and marched against the war the next week. I could almost smell the dope and patchouli oil. And hear the chants: “Hell no, we won’t go!” And the songs: “Ain’t gonna study war no more, ain’t gonna study war no more…”

  But Slade’s characters did more than march. Jack Randolph was Brightstar’s leader in the sixties, as handsome and as charismatic as a Kennedy. By the nineties he’s a has-been actor dying of AIDS. Patty Novak was his lover and right-hand assistant at Brightstar, glimpsed briefly in the future as a real estate agent bearing a marked resemblan
ce to Nan Millard. Jack’s sergeant-at-arms was ex-Catholic Kathy Banks who loved Jack too, if only platonically. She also loved guns and justice in equal proportions. I already knew from the beginning of the story that she would return to the church more than twenty years later as a nun.

  But I liked Peter Dahlgren the best of Slade’s characters, a man destined to become a banker, who negotiated dope deals in the earlier years with a cerebral excitation that felt sexual in nature. And completely pleasurable. Then there was Warren Lee, who sat quietly in the background, intent on the passports he was forging, easily recognizable as Russell Wu even then.

  By the time I put down the manuscript, I was convinced that Brightstar had been close to paradise. I wanted to be there working for a just cause alongside Slade’s characters. And I felt a peculiar combination of dread and curiosity knowing that disaster was coming. I left my chair reluctantly and set the manuscript on a pinball machine. My eyes felt gritty. It was way past my bedtime.

  I was glad for Slade’s characters when I went to bed and pulled up the covers that night. I figured they would keep my mind off his murder. I figured wrong.

  I closed my eyes and immediately thought of Mave Quentin and Phoebe Mitchell. Was Mave fit enough at her age to beat someone to death with a dumbbell?

  I rolled over on my side. Then there was Donna Palmer and the Mafia connection. I wondered if Palmer was her married or maiden name. Not that Mafioso had to be Italian. Look at Bugsy Siegel.

  *

  Hours later, I fell uneasily asleep, only to wake the next morning from a dream in which a grinning Bugs Bunny wielded a machine gun. Then I saw what he was shooting at. It was a manuscript whose pages dripped blood as they floated to the floor.

  I drowned my anxiety in Jest Gifts paperwork all of Friday morning and most of the afternoon. It was close to four o’clock when the doorbell rang, breaking my concentration as effectively as a joy buzzer detonating under a cushion. I even jumped in my chair. C.C. gave me one slow look of disgust and leapt from my lap.