Murder Most Conventional

by Verena Rose (ed)

  “No shit?” I say.

  “Quite,” he says.

  “But you can’t tell me the plot?”

  “No. You, like the rest of the world, will have to await the publication of Mirror Image by Jeremy Stone.”

  “You think I’d stoop so low as to steal your plot?”

  “How can I tell? You might promise not to now, but later . . . Ladies are such fickle and changeable creatures. As you know.”

  “We ladies say that to each other all the time,” I say, “though later we change our minds and say we aren’t.”

  “I rather wish I’d said that,” he observes archly.

  You will, Jeremy, you will, I think. But what I actually say is, “But can you at least reveal whether it has poison in it. Death by poison is rather your trademark.”

  “So it is,” he says. “I must say I do poison better than anyone since Agatha.”

  “Dear Agatha,” I say. Somebody else who needs no surname. “Yes, she was good. She knew her stuff all right. She had first-hand knowledge of many poisons, of course, having worked in a dispensary. But I’ve learned a great deal about poisons from your own books, Jeremy. If I ever wanted to kill somebody, all I would have to do is to open the appropriate volume and check the dosage. I must admit that I have occasionally stolen that from you—how to administer cyanide, for example—how somebody who has ingested cyanide dies. It’s not as quick as people think, is it?”

  “The victim experiences a certain amount of discomfort,” Jeremy concedes. “But if I say that two hundred milligrams of cyanide is enough to kill a man, then that’s the amount you should use—it would be wasteful to buy more. And if I say that death follows after a couple of minutes, then that’s how long it takes. Of course, if your readers believe that cyanide causes almost instantaneous death, and most people do, then you can run into difficulties telling them the truth. P. D. James got into terrible trouble when she had a motorbike reverse down a street. She was inundated with letters telling her that motorcycles have no reverse gear. It became a famous gaffe. Then a gentleman wrote to her and said, ‘about that motorbike—it can if it’s a Harley Davidson’.” Jeremy looks at me and chuckles. It is one of his anecdotes. That is the third or fourth time I’ve heard him tell it. He’s never told it quite as well as P. D. James originally told it herself.

  “Well, as a female, P. D. James could scarcely be expected to understand machinery,” I say.

  “Other than a vacuum cleaner,” he says.

  “Your wife must love your sense of humor,” I say. “She must be in stitches. Is she here, by the way?”

  “She never comes to conventions,” he says. “She says she’s heard all my stories before.”

  “Me, I can’t get enough of them,” I say.

  “You’re too kind,” he says.

  “So,” I say, “if you were to be poisoned tonight, which one would you choose?”

  “I’d rather not. I have a novel to write. I could not deprive the world of such a masterpiece. That would be too cruel.”

  “Have you actually started it yet?”

  “I tell my publisher I have,” he says with a smile. “And I’ve taken the advance.”

  “Okay, let’s say that you could write it by midnight and that the book is no longer an impediment. There’s nothing else, contractual or otherwise, to stop you dying if you wish to. You are free to be killed by the poison of your choice. What’s it to be?”

  Jeremy considers this carefully. “I’ve always thought,” he says, “that an overdose of heroin would be a perfectly good way to go.”

  Really? I think. Heroin?

  “Well, no problem about getting some of that in this city,” I say. “If you know the right people.”

  “I’m sure that there isn’t,” he says. “I probably passed half a dozen dealers on my way in from the station.”

  “At a minimum. I bet it’s as easy to buy as whisky. Do you fancy a drink later?”

  “I’m having dinner with my agent,” he says.

  “Oh, I don’t mean early evening,” I say.

  “In the bar?”

  “I thought we might go back to my room,” I say.

  He raises an eyebrow. “You seem to forget, Emma, that I’m a married man,” he says.

  “I forget nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all.”

  One of the many things that Jeremy clearly fancies himself to be is what once was called a ladies’ man—the sort of person who wore a silk cravat and lit your cigarette for you, one hand brushing your tit as he did it. He’d open the bedroom door for you as you both slid in, checking the corridor for possible witnesses. I suspect that Jeremy normally opens the bedroom door for slightly younger women. Well, I may be over forty now, but I’ve kept myself in good shape. Hell, I could pass for thirty-eight any day of the week. Jeremy is over sixty and has not checked his waist measurement for some time.

  “What’s your room number?” he asks.

  I tell him. He commits it to memory.

  “What time?” he asks.

  “Why don’t we say eleven?” I suggest. “Most people will have cleared off to bed by then. You won’t be missed in the bar. I won’t be missed in the bar or anywhere else.”

  He winks at me and sidles away to talk to one of his mates. One of his many mates. Jeremy, this year’s Guest of Honor.

  * * * *

  So what is this to be? Comedy or tragedy? Well, it’s crime, obviously. I have until eleven. I think I’ll take a stroll round the city. Maybe stock up on one or two things.

  * * * *

  At eleven on the dot, I hear a gentle tap at my door. I get up and open it. Jeremy is there, leering at me, slightly the worse for wear.

  I look theatrically to the right and left, then usher him in. He flops onto the bed, semirecumbent as if unsure whether the action will begin straight away or whether he will have to pay me a compliment or two first. Maybe I don’t sleep with guys who don’t praise my use of tragic irony. Lots of girls don’t.

  I take a glass and a bottle of whisky—a proper bottle of malt, not some minibar miniature of God knows what.

  “You remembered my little weakness,” he mumbles.

  “I shouldn’t have taken it for granted,” I say. “Perhaps I should have asked: what’s your poison, eh?”

  “Ha!” he says. “Very good!”

  I mix a drink for him carefully, my body shielding the precise proportions of the various ingredients from his sight.

  “I’ve added a little water,” I say. “Let me know if that’s strong enough for you. I bet you like it stronger than I do. As a man.”

  “And you?”

  “Water with a dash of whisky.”

  “What a waste of good malt.”

  “I have some work to do later. I’m chairing a panel.”

  “Last-minute nerves? Why don’t I do something to settle them? I’m good at that. You’ve never been on a panel with me, have you?”

  I have a moment of doubt. Is it right to do this if he has forgotten the original offense? Should I remind him what happened? So that, when this happens, he will understand. He will see why he deserves it. Is there any point in revenge if the victim of it has no idea why they are being punished? These are questions that might, in themselves, occupy a panel for the allotted forty minutes. But I really don’t have that sort of time to spare.

  “Drink up, Jeremy,” I say. “I’ll fix you another one.”

  “I’d like one exactly the same as the first,” he says.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “It will be precisely the same.”

  * * * *

  So, I repeat, neither comedy nor tragedy but just crime. I make him another drink, good and strong. I sit down on the bed beside him and watch him drink it.

  But . . . hold on one moment . . . you don’t think I am about to m
urder him, surely? I’m sorry, but you really have got hold of the wrong end of the stick if you believe I’d do that. It is true that, fifteen years before, he gave me an uncomfortable thirty minutes (plus questions from the audience). But I’ve done dozens of panels since then. Maybe hundreds if I counted carefully. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as my agent had insisted just before they closed the bar and threw us out. By my third panel I was well into my stride. I was soon being asked to chair them, and I knew how new panelists felt and how to get the very best out of them. You might say Jeremy made me the panel chair I am today. Anyway, it was scarcely as if he had mugged my grandmother or set fire to a bookshop or groomed somebody’s pet cat on the Internet for immoral purposes. Death by heroin would have been wrong on so many levels. Even if I knew what heroin looked like or where you found a dealer.

  And there are crimes other than murder. There’s theft, for example. That’s good, too.

  * * * *

  It must have been about three o’clock in the morning when I got the last of the plot of Mirror Image out of him. It was every bit as original as he had claimed. By then the whisky bottle was empty and he’d forgotten pretty much what had first drawn him to my room. I kissed him on the cheek and ejected him, politely but firmly, into the corridor. Then I sat down and spent an hour and a half making notes.

  I assume Jeremy made it back to his own room. He was at breakfast the following morning in a clean shirt. He looked at me cautiously, as if he half-remembered his indiscretions of the night before, but not much more than that. I waved back in a cheerful manner.

  “What time’s your panel?” he called across the room.

  “Sunday,” I said. And sailed on toward the man who made the nice omelettes.

  * * * *

  So, there you have it. Jeremy had the idea first, but he’s already admitted he hasn’t started writing the book. I reckon I can get my version out first—Mirror Image by Emma Littlewood. No, I’ll have to come up with a new title. I shall leave him that at least. It really will be my finest book to date. My breakthrough novel at last. Sales will be phenomenal. No more Little Miss Midlist. I’ll be invited to be Guest of Honor all over the English-speaking world.

  And if Jeremy wants to complain, let him first explain to his wife how I got the information out of him.

  Emma Littlewood. Remember the name. Shortly coming to a convention near you.

  BOSTON BOUILLABAISSE, by Nancy Brewka-Clark

  “I detest manga.” Deidre poked at the little book in its bright jacket like a small child shoving a bowl of pureed peas away. “Mash-ups, too.”

  “My dear woman, what on earth are you talking about?” Charles didn’t bother to stifle a sigh. “What in heaven’s name is mawngah? And why would one apply a kitchen utensil to it? And, above all, what does any of it have to do with poetry?”

  With a trembling finger Deidre pointed at the sticker on the little book’s cover. “If Yvonne Narbonne can win a prestigious prize writing nonsense like this, all of us are doomed.”

  “It depends on what you consider to be prestigious.” Charles smiled complacently. “I personally find it quite appropriate that her little tome has garnered a gold star. After all, it is a children’s book, is it not, written in some form of Japanese meter?”

  “No, it is not.” Deidre had agreed to represent the North American Guild of Published Poets at the Boston Booksellers’ Convention because she expected to see that star glittering on the cover of her latest book of sonnets. But Pistils of Death hadn’t even made the short list. “Manga is Japanese in origin, but let me assure you that’s the only thing it shares with haiku, tanka, waka, or kanshi.” Deidre dropped her voice even though no one had ventured within ten yards of their booth all morning. “This dreadful little book’s merely written in words of one and two syllables. It’s about cats and pirates and robots from outer space. Can you imagine?”

  “Must I?” Charles mumbled, caught in a yawn.

  “And the illustrations.” Deidre slid the book back toward her and flipped it open. “Simply ghastly.” She tapped the glossy page. “Look at this. Just look at it. It’s supposed to be a cat. Not exactly Sir John Tenniel’s Cheshire cat, is it, Charles?”

  “One must move with the times,” Charles said. “Shakespeare had the sonnet market covered almost half a millennium ago, or didn’t you know?”

  “That’s rich, coming from you,” Deidre snapped, only to regret it instantly. Charles Bitterwyn Blakely was a near-mythical figure in the poetry world. He’d won a Pulitzer in 1973 for a small book written exclusively in the Welsh Cyhydedd Hir style, sixteen lines composed of two sets of eight-line stanzas with two quatrains each of complex internal rhythms. The fact that he’d never published a line since had merely added to his cachet. “What I mean, Charles, is that Yvonne’s nonsense hardly requires the skill of your koor-heer-ded hee-hah.”

  “My dear lady, do forgive me, but may I remind you it is pronounced cuh-hee-ded heer,” he said, plucking at his snowy mustache.

  “Why, Charles, that’s what I said.” Deirdre blinked at him through her massive red and gold plastic Iris-Apfel-inspired glasses. “I distinctly said koor-heer-ded hee-hah.”

  “Why, yes, you did. Twice. But it’s incorrect. The Welsh language, my good woman, demands precisely . . . displacement of the glottal . . . in which the lips...”

  The longer the pompous windbag lectured, the more Deidre wished she’d brought along a little something to shut him up. Her sonnets about belladonna, blue passion flower, lily of the valley, rosary pea, jack-in-the-pulpit, moonseed, mandrake, bleeding heart, autumn crocus, and angel’s trumpet were the most haunting she’d ever written. To inspire her, she’d filled the bay window of her apartment with great green swaths of dieffenbachia, a common houseplant otherwise known as—ta-da!—dumb cane. Lethal in larger doses, just a bit of leaf rendered one speechless. Mute. Dumb.

  “So I shall say it once more. Cuh-hee-ded-heer. Not koor-heer-ded hee-hah.” Charles waggled a fat finger at her outraged face. “Not that you do it on purpose. You merely have a Bahstan accent.”

  “I don’t speak with an accent,” Deidre snapped.

  “Indeed.” Charles was staring at a stunning young blonde making her way toward them over the vast sea of black and red paisley all-weather carpet while towing a medium-sized black suitcase on wheels. “Who’s that?”

  “Don’t you recognize her?” With a sniff, Deidre flipped the little book over to display the colored photo. “Thar she blows.”

  “Hardly an apt cliché.” Charles stroked his mustache the way another man might pet his cat, although not if the creature looked like the illustration in the book beneath his nose. “I had no idea she was so young.”

  “She’s late,” Deidre spat. “She was supposed to relieve us an hour ago.”

  “She’s obviously just gotten off the plane,” Charles said. “A bit tousled but it becomes her.”

  “Jeans.” Deidre’s frown turned into an outright scowl. “And a T-shirt. Who does she think she is, a female Thom Gunn? Why doesn’t she just stick a cigarette behind her ear and call it a day?”

  “I doubt the girl’s ever heard of Thom Gunn,” Charles said with a touch of sadness, “nor read The Man with Night Sweats.”

  The two of them watched as Yvonne Narbonne stopped at first one booth and then another to exchange pleasantries, which often included hugs. “Friendly sort, isn’t she?” Charles observed.

  “People are such suck-ups,” Deirdre muttered. “Take away that award and see—”

  Deidre broke off as the younger poet loomed up before them. “Howdy, pardners! Yvonne Narbonne at y’all’s service. You must be Ms. Dunhall. I love your work.”

  Deidre’s gaze fell on the star. “That’s quite a compliment coming from the winner of the Longfellow Award.”

  “And I’ve learned so dang much from yours, Professor Bl
akely.” Yvonne widened her blue eyes. “I can’t tell you how many nights I just lie awake thinking of your masterpiece, ‘Being, Breath, Death,’ and wondering how you ever managed to pack so much meaning into those itty-bitty lines.”

  “It’s a matter of the scheme itself,” Charles said. “When one thoroughly immerses oneself in the process, i.e., first line consisting of syllable, syllable, syllable, syllable, and rhyming syllable, second line consisting of syllable, syllable, syllable, syllable, and second rhyming syllable, then third line the same, followed by syllable, syllable, syllable—”

  “I know,” Yvonne cooed. “It’s just, like, very, very cool. And that brings me to the next thang. Do y’all think I should change?”

  “Change what, exactly, my dear?” Charles asked.

  “My clothes.” Yvonne looked down at herself and then at their twin tweedy presences.

  “See, my little book has inspired a bunch of costumes. You can get ’em on Amazon. My agent got in touch with Johnny Depp’s agent and, wow, they got him to pose for Kyrol the Pirate King.”

  “Really?” Charles said. “Who posed for the cat?”

  When Yvonne was done hooting with laughter, drawing more attention to the poets’ booth than they’d achieved all weekend, she said, “Well, tomorrow’s the big day, anyway.”

  “For what?” Charles and Deidre asked in sync.

  “A bunch of us, I mean writers who have in-print and e-books out right now in Amazon’s top one hundred, are doing readin’s around the world. Each live event’ll be digitally recorded and uploaded so everybody can get literate in, like, sixty seconds.”

  “How marvelous.” Deidre’s fingers clenched painfully into fists beneath the table. “Why, you’ll sell thousands of books. Hundreds of thousands.”

  “Well, the thang is,” Yvonne said, “we’re not readin’ from our own works. This is really a benefit kind of thang to bring culture to kids in a way that doesn’t scare the little rug rats to death.” She drew a deep breath. “Li’l ole me was asked to read the works of Anne Bradstreet, Lucy Larcom, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.”