A chill rippled down my spine. Not so much for myself—well, not only for myself. I didn’t want to bring potential legal trouble down on Izzie, let alone J.X.
“Jerry is going to have his day in court,” Sanderson said. “We’ll see who’s crying then!”
Chapter Thirteen
“If you want to ditch dinner with my father tonight, it’s not a problem,” I said to J.X. as we stumbled around the kitchen the next morning.
He had not slept well the night before. That was mostly because I had not slept well the night before. True, I did not sleep well a lot of the time, but Violet Sanderson’s phone call had rattled me, as it was no doubt intended to do. No doubt it was intended to rattle both me and J.X., but in the end I had made the decision to keep quiet about it until J.X. returned from his book tour.
As menacing as Sanderson’s message was, she had not said anything we did not already know, and J.X. had enough on his mind. If I’d gone to him about her call, he’d have cancelled that damn book tour for sure, and as much as I privately wanted that very thing, there was no justification for it.
“No, I don’t want to ditch dinner. I’ve been waiting to meet the man for a year!” J.X. held up the coffee pot in inquiry.
“Not a year,” I objected, holding my mug out to be filled. “You can’t count the months before we were officially together.”
“Long enough.” J.X. popped a couple of bagels in the toaster oven, then sat back down at the table. “I’m looking forward to tonight.”
“It’s just we both know you have this very tight deadline—”
He cocked an eyebrow. “You’re a lot more worried about this deadline than I am.”
“I noticed!”
“Life doesn’t stop because I have a deadline.”
I said ruefully, “It did for me when I was writing.”
He shook his head. “That’s not healthy.”
“Maybe not, but it was efficient.”
J.X. made a dismissive sound. “When you get back to writing again, things are going to be different. I’m not going to let you shut me out like you did David.”
It was my turn to express disdain. “When I get back to writing? Ha!”
J.X. got all dark-eyed and earnest, as he always did when I talked about my writing career being over. “You will, Kit. You burned out, that’s all. You needed a break, and that’s what you’re having.”
I said testily, “I wasn’t burned out. I was dropped by my publisher.”
“There are all kinds of burnout,” he answered, which was inarguable.
I stirred my coffee, glanced up, and he was watching me with that sometimes unnerving attentiveness. Attentive and sympathetic. A hard-to-resist combo.
“I think David was the reason I started shutting the rest of the world out,” I admitted finally. “I didn’t want to know what he was up to, and I used work to barricade myself from…”
“Being hurt.”
“Maybe,” I said uncomfortably. It still astonished me, the embarrassing confessions he dragged out of me. All because of his insidious gift of being able to really listen.
“It makes sense. But I’m going to give you plenty of reasons to keep that door—”
The phone rang, mercifully cutting short our conversation.
It was J.X.’s publicist, and he ended up excusing himself and taking the call from his office.
I buttered the toasted bagels, spread cream cheese on mine and almond butter and honey on his. I left his breakfast to keep warm on a plate under a pot lid, and headed for my own office.
When I tried the new number for Joe E. or Joey, whichever it was, I got an answering machine.
“This is Derek, Michael, Rafe, and Joey’s phone,” announced a cheerful chorus of male voices, bringing back long-ago memories of frat houses and first apartments.
I felt a surge of elation. Joey still lived there.
I debated leaving a message, but ultimately decided against it. Forewarned was forearmed, and I wanted my quarry defenseless and forthcoming.
Of course, the elusive Joey might not have any useful information regarding Dicky’s current whereabouts. Nor was Joey my only avenue of investigation. There was always social media. I signed into J.X.’s Facebook account and did a search for Dicky Dickison. A couple of Richard Dickisons came up, but they all appeared to be too old to be Dicky. There was a Dick Dickison located in Florida, but the account was set to private.
To see what Dick shares with his friends, send him a friend request! advised Facebook.
It was tempting, but I didn’t want to abuse J.X.’s generosity in letting me use his account—or involve him in a potentially sticky situation.
I tried a general internet search and found a slew of possible leads. Most of them led to deceased persons much older than Dicky. There was one YouTube channel belonging to a Dick Dickison, and the videos looked like the kind of thing Dicky had liked: Honest Trailers, book trailers, interviews with authors—including a very old interview with me. The music playlist was all stuff I remembered Dicky liking: Imagine Dragons, AWOLNATION, American Authors, and KONGOS. The account profile revealed nothing, but I felt pretty sure this was Dicky’s channel and experienced another rush of excitement. Maybe I was closing in on him.
Unfortunately, the last time anything had been uploaded was over a year ago—before Dicky had announced he was leaving me for David.
My excitement wilted. The abandoned YouTube channel didn’t mean Dicky was dead, though. Maybe he’d found other things to occupy his time.
My bird-dog instincts fully aroused, I went back to delving through boxes, trying to locate Dicky’s résumé or job application.
I didn’t find either, but I did come across the old deed to the Hiawatha property. I studied it unhappily.
I’d known Zag Samuels for a few years before we’d discussed the possibility of my buying his Chatsworth home. We had met through Sisters in Crime. We were around the same age and had instantly bonded over being the only two men in our local chapter writing cozy mysteries.
We weren’t buddies, but we had lunch now and again, and we usually drove to chapter meetings together. On two occasions, we’d roomed together at conferences, but not only was Zag a very loud snorer, he liked his hotel room kept ice-cold. I wasn’t crazy about sharing a room to begin with, so the bunkies thing hadn’t lasted long.
An additional strain to our friendship had come from the fact that for the first few years we were always in competition for the same awards. At first the division of prizes wins had been pretty even. He’d won the Anthony for Best First Novel, and I’d won the Edgar for Best First Novel by an American Author. I’d won the Agatha for Best First Novel, and he’d won the Lefty for Best Debut Mystery Novel.
And so it had gone. But after Zag’s agent convinced him to change publishing houses a couple of times, Sweetie MacFarland stopped bringing home prizes. I’d tried to convince him to drop his agent and go with Rachel, but the idea had not gone over well. Zag was loyal—and he also felt I had no business giving him advice when I hadn’t been publishing any longer than he had.
Maybe he’d had a point because his agent’s strategy of cranking out stories at a speed nearly unknown before the advent of Amazon paid off big-time. Though in my opinion the quality of the books had declined, Zag had done very well financially. So well, that he had decided to move uptown with his girlfriend Felicity, and had put his house on the market. The timing was great for me. I’d been looking to move out of my apartment, and I made an offer. A deal was struck.
But midway through escrow, tragedy occurred. Zag suffered a serious and debilitating stroke and had been hospitalized. After he’d left the hospital, he’d had to move in with his niece.
I had never seen him again.
Looking at his niece’s signature with the underlying note “power of attorney” beneath Pandora Pearce, I felt a stab of regret.
Initially, Zag had been too ill for visitors, but why had I never made any effort to see him once h
e was out of the hospital?
I had meant to, but time had passed, and I’d been busy with moving out and then moving in and writing three books a year and then meeting David, and then writing three more books after that and then David’s cheating, and then writing three more books and three more books after that and three more books after that… I had simply never gotten around to it—and then, eventually, I’d forgotten all about Zag.
No wonder David and I had gotten along so well. We were both heartless bastards.
Jeez. Well, hopefully, I had evolved over the years. I was trying. A lot of the time.
I went back to studying the Hiawatha deed.
You could never really know everything there was to know about a person. I didn’t need J.X. to tell me that. The Investigation Discovery channel was full of stories about innocent persons being done in by what they didn’t know about people they trusted. Just ask Lt. Joe Kenda. Come to think of it, Zag would have loved Lt. Joe. Though it was hard to picture Lt. Joe ever turning in his badge for cupcakes.
Even so.
Was Zag still around for the police to question?
I hoped so—hoped that he was still around—but from what I recalled, his prognosis had not been very hopeful.
My money was on the couple who had owned the house before him. The Coopersmiths. I still remembered some of Zag’s stories about them, though obviously any information I had would be hearsay. In fairness, it had been a forced sale, and the Coopersmiths had, understandably, not been happy. Their unhappiness had manifested in worrying ways. Zag claimed Felicity had actually witnessed Etta trying to poison a neighbor’s cat, and Zag had seen Tip dumping salt in the flowerbeds. Zag claimed they had carved out chunks of drywall throughout the house, placed dead fish inside, and sealed the walls up again.
So, yeah, I thought the Coopersmiths were candidates for the title of Homicidal Homeowners of the Year.
Detective Dean had not been interested, but was it maybe my civic duty to push harder? Or should I take J.X.’s advice and let the law run its course? If Dean and Quigley were able to interview Zag, he’d have plenty to tell them. Even if he had passed on to that prime real estate in the sky, his niece had probably heard some of his horror stories.
It was not my business. I was already poking into Dicky’s disappearance when I had no good reason.
At the same time, it couldn’t hurt to look. Right?
I typed Tip and Etta Coopersmith into the search bar—and sat blinking at the results.
Eviction notices, lawsuits, bankruptcies—
The phone rang, and I gasped.
I couldn’t help feeling kind of like a Peeping Tom, even though my motives were pure.
I reached for the handset without tearing my gaze from the alarming search results.
“Christopher!” Rachel squawked in my ear.
“Nothing to report yet, but—”
“Never mind that now. Wheaton & Woodhouse is asking us to submit a proposal.”
As the words filtered through my brain, I stopped staring at my monitor screen and sat back in my chair.
“What kind of proposal?”
“A book proposal. Surely it hasn’t been that long.”
“No, I just mean… Wheaton & Woodhouse? I thought we were with Millbrook House’s Prime Crime now.”
“Technically we are. But since you haven’t actually delivered anything to them, including a proposal—and since W&W controls the entire Miss Butterwith backlist—Millbrook is willing to release you.”
I’ll bet. I’ll bet they couldn’t wait to unload me.
“Okay,” I said cautiously. “But W&W dropped the series, so what kind of book proposal would they be looking for?” My heart leaped, and I stood up. “Do you mean for a Butterwith book?”
“Yes.”
“But I thought— You said—”
“Now that Satan—er, Steven Krass—is gone, wiser heads have prevailed. As you’ve pointed out, we’re coming up on Miss B.’s twentieth anniversary. Cozies are back in, especially series and especially—”
“Hold on. A year ago you told me the cozy was dead.”
“I didn’t say dead, Christopher. I said Cozy was suffering malaise.”
“I’m pretty sure you pronounced it dead.”
“Not at all. Cozy was in ICU. Cozy was receiving necessary medical attention. Happily, Cozy has survived and is on the mend. So that’s brilliant news. It’s especially brilliant news for you with your extensive backlist.”
“Three books a year for sixteen years!”
“Your math skills remain unparalleled. Better yet, because of the plethora of sleuthing yoga instructors, pet sitters, flower arrangers, witches, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, W&W anticipates a demand for old-school snoop sisters.”
“Snoop sisters?” I wondered uneasily if she was talking about a tie-in based on the 1970s mystery-comedy TV series on NBC. Was this what it had come to? Writing TV tie-in books?
“Old maids. Spinsters. Senior singletons.”
“Old maids? You aren’t allowed to say that anymore, Rachel.”
“The point, my dear Christopher, is that W&W is looking to make a deal.”
I said warily, “What kind of deal?”
“They want three more Miss Butterwiths. A holiday novella for this year—”
My knees gave at the words three more. I sat down again. Thank you, God. Thank you… Then I registered the rest of her sentence.
“This year? It’s already October. It’s the end of October. That’s even worse!”
“Oh, come, come. You can do a novella in a week if you have to.”
“In a-a week?”
“A holiday novella and two novels. One to be released in year nineteen and the final novel to be released in Miss B.’s anniversary year.”
My throat closed, and I couldn’t say anything for a moment.
Rachel wasn’t waiting for me anyway. She said smoothly, “You’ll be able to bring the series to a gracious and elegant end as befits Miss B. and Mr. Pinkerton.”
“I see that,” I managed.
“You’re pleased of course.”
I made a strangled sound.
“You’ll be still more pleased to hear W&W is planning to put the entire series into boxsets.”
“Are they? Is that— That’s a good thing, right?”
“Of course. And they have finally agreed to purchase the audio rights, the bastards.”
“For which books?”
“The entire series.”
“The entire…” I had to sit down. Wait. I was already sitting down. I lowered myself to the carpet, lay back, and stared at the ceiling with its bronze Corinthian medallion.
“Ask me how much,” Rachel demanded.
I asked faintly, “How much what?”
“How much they’re paying for audio rights.”
“How much are they paying for audio rights?”
She named a figure, and after a moment, I said, “Did I—did I hear that right?”
“You heard me.”
I closed my eyes, lest I actually, unmanfully burst into tears. I finally managed, “Rachel, how did you do that?”
“Negotiating audio rights is one of my superpowers,” she purred. “Until now, W&W has refused to even consider putting the series into audio. For that insult, They. Shall. Pay.”
I’m not sure she actually said for that insult, but she did snap out the words: They. Shall Pay, exactly like Colonel Saito in The Bridge Over the River Kwai barked out, You. Would. Die! I could almost picture her in a pristine kepi and glossy riding boots, facing down the quivering acquisition team at Wheaton & Woodhouse.
I whispered, “You are the best agent ever.”
“I know. So this is the deal. A four-book contract—”
“Wait. Four books? What’s the fourth book?”
“I’m getting to that. The fourth book is my anniversary present to you.”
“Anniversary? We haven’t even set the wedding da
te. I haven’t even asked him yet.”
“Christopher! I am speaking of our anniversary. It is not simply Miss Butterwith who is turning twenty. You and I will have been together twenty years as well.”
“My God. You’re right.”
“My gift to you is the fourth book. Wheaton & Woodhouse is contracting a standalone novel. It doesn’t matter what the book is, so long as it’s a work of mystery or suspense.”
“Rachel.” I had to stop.
Her tone softened ever so slightly. “You can complete the Butterwith series properly, and you can launch the next phase of your writing career. Assuming your true-crime book isn’t a bestseller.”
I laughed and knew she could hear how shaky it was.
“I’m not even sure how to thank you,” I began.
She said curtly, “Stop. You thanked me a year ago.”
“I did?”
“At the lodge. When you chose to continue our association despite certain revelations about my past.”
“Oh, but that was… Come on. Of course I wouldn’t…wasn’t going to terminate our relationship.”
“It would have been extremely foolish, and now you know why.”
“Yes.”
“I take it the deal meets with your approval?”
“God, yes.”
“And you’ll get to work on putting those proposals together?”
“I will. Yes.” I added huskily, “Thank you, Rachel. Truly.”
She gave a loud and watery sniff—and hung up.
Chapter Fourteen
“There’s something you should know about my father,” I said to J.X. as we walked from the parking structure across the street to Fog Harbor Fish House, where we were meeting my dad for dinner.
“He doesn’t know you’re gay?” J.X. guessed, putting his hand on my arm as a green Porsche tore out of the garage. “Watch this guy.”
I stepped back as the car roared past. “Huh? What? Yes, my dad knows I’m gay!”
J.X. raised his brows. “Okay. I did wonder, given the way you’ve stalled my meeting him. Meeting both your parents.”
“I haven’t stalled,” I said uncomfortably as we resumed walking. “It just hasn’t been…convenient.”
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