Murder at the Beach: Bouchercon 2014 Anthology

by Patricia Abbott

“No. But he plays the game the best.”

  “The game?”

  “Sure,” she said. “The game. All the same. Writing fiction, art, movies, business, Washington. And probably the cop world.”

  Handle understood. “You got that right.”

  The game....

  Beside Devereux was middle-aged Jeffery Starr, a former journalist, best known for a historical thriller about a plot to murder one of Hitler’s henchmen in 1930’s Germany.

  “Good book,” Tailor said. “Sold well overseas but didn’t last long on the charts here in America. I heard a story: When he was touring, he said, a bunch of readers in their teens and twenties would come up to him and asked him how he’d thought up that guy Hitler. ‘Epic bad guy, man,’ one had said. ‘Better than Freddy and Jason.’”

  “Not a joke?”

  “Sadly, no.”

  Sharp hadn’t written anything historical since.

  The next author at the table was Joan Wilson, a sexy, but twitchy, thirty-something with a centipede tattoo on her arm. She was a native Californian. She spent as much time blogging as she did writing fiction, sharing her vehemently anti-gluten, anti-fracking, anti-Keystone pipeline views with the world. In her novels she wrote a series about woman cop on the Central Coast, who was a kinesic—body language—expert. Rumors were she inundated popular TV crime show producers with emails and Tweets, accusing them of stealing her plot ideas. No lawsuits ensued, however.

  Next to her was Frederick James, a dapper man of about forty-five in suit and tie. Tailor explained to Handle that he wrote a series of espionage thrillers about a British superspy. His most recent book nearly went to the top of the Times of London bestseller list, but it was beaten by Joe Devereux’s latest by a mere eighty-seven copies.

  The last author was Edith Billingsley. She was in her late sixties or early seventies, slim, with carefully coifed white hair. She wrote a popular series of murder mysteries featuring a quirky young woman who lived in Manhattan, named Ruth Ursula Nancy Evans.

  “Her books’re in the cozy category. No explicit sex or violence. Her bad guys swear by saying, ‘Heavens!’ And they don’t kill people. They ‘dispatch’ them.”

  Handle nodded. “‘Dispatch.’ I like that. I should use it in a report. ‘A witness stated he saw Hector Gomez, of the M-13 gang, dispatch Alonzo Sanchez at three-thirty a.m. on Alvarado Street by firing ten .40 caliber rounds into his head.”

  Tailor smiled, an expression that faded as she regarded the older woman author, signing a devoted fan’s book. “Edith’s been nominated for the Tombstone seven times. Never won it.”

  Handle, who hadn’t been to a book signing before, was interested in the phenomenon. He noted that some authors shook fans’ hands heartily, some ignored the outstretched palms. Larry Sharp was a shaker, but he used antibacterial spray after each grip, which seemed a bit insulting. Some authors agreed to have pictures taken with the fans, others didn’t. Some signed all the books that fans bought, while others limited the signing to five or ten, or only the hardcover.

  The authors were, as a rule, friendly but reserved, even cautious, bordering on paranoid. Joe Devereux, for instance, firmly explained to a fan—a young man wearing a narrow-brimmed fedora—that he wasn’t able to accept the unpublished manuscript offered him.

  Tailor told him, “He wants Joe to give him a blurb—you know, a recommendation—so he can show it to publisher. But you can run into legal troubles doing that.”

  Handle watched the fan grimace and walk off unhappily.

  And he noted that Joan Wilson turned down an offer by a husband and wife—clearly people she’d never met—to “come on back to our trailer with us and doing some soakin’ in the hot tub.”

  Frederick James declined to sign a fan’s breasts with the same Sharpie he’d just used to inscribe her book. Handle noted that he could have written a whole paragraph on the offered cleavage before telling himself to look away.

  “Kind of a three-ring circus,” he observed.

  “Oh, it can be,” Tailor said.

  “Who’s gonna win that ugly award, you think?”

  “Oh, I know who it is. The committee chairs a friend of mine. But I’m not allowed to tell.”

  “I’m a cop.”

  “And you have the uniform to prove it.”

  “We’re good a keeping secrets.”

  She debated, he noted. Then in whisper: “It’s Devereux.”

  “Which, I sense, you’re not too happy with.”

  “Not really.”

  “All that game playing of his?”

  “Aw, he’s not so bad. Just, I was rooting for Billingsley. It was a close call, the votes. But Joe nosed her out by just one or two.”

  “There’s always next year,” Handle said. He shook her hand and wandered off to the book room to make a purchase or two then he headed out to his car for his dinner break.

  He returned an hour later and made the rounds. He conferred with the guards and checked video cameras. No al Qaeda cells seemed poised to punish infidels. No armed robbers were planning heists. No stalkers lurked.

  Which wasn’t to say that there were no issues that required his attention. How much trouble could they get into? Well, a fair amount, it seemed, especially now that the bar was open.

  A screaming domestic erupted when a wife learned that her author husband had carelessly said he’d liked the escort he’d had recently on tour. After Handle separated them, it turned out he wasn’t referring to a hooker; ‘escort’ was the term used to describe a media representative hired by publishing companies to accompany authors to and from book signings.

  One author was nabbed sneaking into the closed book room to rearrange the displays, putting his own books on top of his fellow authors’. An embarrassing, if noncriminal, offense.

  The most violent occurrence: A fist fight broke out when one author criticized another for referring in his book to a Glock pistol’s safety catch—the gun doesn’t have such a lever. The same thing happened ten minutes later with two other writers, this argument being about the proper use of “magazine” versus “clip” to hold ammunition in rifles. Handle reflected that the more essential argument about Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms was positively tame compared with the uncompromising passion about getting the facts concerning deadly weapons right.

  But these incidents and a half-dozen others were simply grist for every law enforcer, and Handle took care of them with stern humor, minimal intervention and no handcuffs.

  It was the murder that truly complicated his weekend.

  When the front desk clerk got a call near midnight, unintelligible but desperate gasps, she assumed the guest in room 305 needed a Heimlich intervention.

  Two young members of the bell staff sped to the room, ready to expel the offending olive or grape. They also brought along a defib, just in case.

  Opening the door with a master key, they stopped fast, looking down, both thinking: Damn good thing that resuscitation procedures no longer recommended mouth to mouth.

  The volume of effluence and vomit that had erupted from the guest was quite astonishing.

  A fast check, though, clearly revealed that no life-saving techniques should be employed.

  Joe Devereux wasn’t coming back from the dead.

  Jim Handle strode into the room, accompanied by the night manager.

  “My God...” the skinny, suited man gasped. “All that, from choking?”

  Handle regarded the rictus on the face, the fierce grip of the fists, the pale residue on the writer’s face, the cocoon posture. “Didn’t choke. He was poisoned.”

  “Oh. My. Well.” the manager said this while staring at the food cart on which sat half of the hamburger that the celebrity writer—soon to be more even famous, if considerably less productive—had been enjoying while he died.

  Handle leaned down and smelled the air near the victim’s mouth. Stood again. He said to the manager, “You can relax. Wasn’t your kitchen killed him. Pretty
sure he was poisoned intentionally.”

  “What?” the manager blurted.

  “I could smell—”

  One of the bellboys blurted, “The scent of almond. I saw that in NCIS-LA. Cyanide, right?”

  “Nope,” Handle replied. “The smell’s pear. Chloral hydrate. Probably concentrated, to cause death so fast.”

  “How’d you know that?” the manager wondered.

  “Research. The Jonestown massacre? The crazy cult leader, Jim Jones, used chloral hydrate, mixed with some other stuff, in the Kool-Aid to kill his whole village. Now, this room’s a crime scene. I want everybody out now.”

  Handle called the office to report the incident and asked CSU to get here pronto. He stationed a security guard outside Devereux’s room to seal it and then did some preliminary investigation. He returned back at the same time as the Sheriff’s Department crime scene unit.

  “Hey, Jim. You drew this one, hmm?” Scott Shreve, the lead forensic tech, and the deputy were good friends.

  “Didn’t so much draw it,” Handle explained, “as it fell into my lap.” He gave a synopsis of what he’d learned so far, and he and Shreve walked through the room, the tech photographing the scene from all angles. Shreve then leaned down and sniffed at the bottle of single-malt scotch on the desk. “Yep, like you said, chloral hydrate. Somebody spiked his whisky. And there, under the table, that glass? Looked like he dropped it after taking a slug or two.”

  Handle was looking around. “And that gift bag, the sort for bottles.”

  “So the killer brings the bottle over and gives him the present. The perp drinks something else, something safe, and Devereux downs the fatal whisky.”

  “I’d guess, more likely, the killer left it on the door handle and knocked and skedaddled.”

  Shreve added, “Bet he didn’t knock. Probably called from a lobby phone and told him he’d left a present. Anonymous. Pretended to be the bellman.”

  “Makes more sense,” Handle said. “And look at that. A gift card. Under the bag.”

  Shreve pulled on blue gloves and opened the gold-colored card, which had the words “You’re the Best!!!” printed on the front.

  “Blank inside.”

  “Never make it easy for us, do they?” Handle said. He’d learned the value of handwriting analysis in solving crimes.

  “Whatta you got?” said a firm voice behind them.

  Handle turned and found himself looking at chief of detectives Stan Mellers.

  “Stan.”

  “Jim, Scott. So?”

  Handle noted two TV reporters, lurking near the security guard holding back the crowd to the left. Cameras were pointed their way.

  In low voices, he and Shreve told Mellers about the author, the likely poison, delivered via anonymous gift.

  Mellers asked, “What about motive? He ruffle any feathers? Put his you know what where he shouldn’t?”

  “Nothing yet, Stan. Jumping out.”

  Mellers looked up and down the corridor, the guests, most dressed, some in bathrobes. Word had spread fast and it was crowded. He sent guards to keep them away from the scene.

  Handle and Mellers found themselves staring down at the body.

  “A shame about this,” Handle offered. “He was going to get that big award tomorrow.”

  “Award?”

  “That the conference gives out. Best book of the year, something like that.”

  After a moment: “Read one of his books,” the chief of detectives said. “Was okay. Had a big twist at the end. So. Let’s get to work.”

  The next morning, Jim Handle was back on security detail, though he found himself with little to do except tell the hundreds of attendees who asked that he didn’t know anything about the murder.

  This was Cop 101 about being reticent. He really didn’t know anything.

  He was amused at the number of people who came up to him with theories. Wouldn’t happen at an accountants’ or engineers’ convention. But most of these people made their living, or a part of it, at crime, so to speak. He nodded studiously and listened. But didn’t jot a single note.

  The hours dragged by. A pall had settled over the convention, thanks to the death, and Handle didn’t need to play schoolmarm, like he had the day before, with petulant or argumentative writers. Everybody was on good behavior.

  Afternoon turned to evening and he was pleased that the agent, Deborah Tailor, tracked him down and offered him a ticket for the banquet and award ceremony. Together, they headed into the cocktail reception, he still in his uniform, Tailor in a classy black number with an uneven hemline. Handle thought his wife would like it. The banquet hall lights shot a dozen colors off the sequins.

  “Don’t worry,” she said.

  “Wasn’t. Why?”

  “I’m not going to ask you about the case.”

  “Wouldn’t have anything to tell you anyway.” He was struck by the truth of his comment.

  The lights dimmed, announcing dinner, and they found their seats.

  “Not many people’ve gone home,” she noted. “You’d think after the murder, nobody would want to stay.”

  “No, that’d seem suspicious.”

  “You think the killer’s here?” her eyes danced around the room. His, too.

  “Wouldn’t be surprised.”

  She sipped a martini—Handle was having an on-duty iced tea—and asked, “You think it was a one-time murder? Or part of a serial killing thing?”

  “Happens I’ve made a study of serial killing. This isn’t one. That’s a very specific, and rare, psychosis and Devereux’s death doesn’t fit the profile. Besides, poison’s rarely a serial killer murder weapon; ruins the chance you can chow down on your victim....Oh, sorry, shouldn’t’ve brought up cannibalism at dinner.”

  Tailor creased her brow. “Don’t worry about my appetite. I haven’t eaten rubber chicken at a writers’ conference for ten years, and I’m not going to start now.”

  Handle laughed. They greeted the other attendees at the table. Everybody wanted to ask about the case, but nobody did. Handle sipped his tea and enjoyed the banter. Although Tailor had told him about the jealousy among the nominees, these folk—working class authors, midlist, he’d heard they were called—were amiable and easy going. Smart too.

  The food was as inedible as Tailor had predicted, though Handle was hungry and ate every last morsel of the chicken impersonator, along with the potatoes and the star of the event—the key lime pie. After, came some speeches and then the honoring of a lifetime achievement winner, whose comments would be a cure for insomniacs around the world.

  The awards ceremony went on as planned. It seemed that the by-laws, the director of the program explained to the audience, did not provide for posthumous awards, so it would go to the first runner up.

  The male and female presenters strode onto the stage and read from a sheet of paper—a writer’s conference teleprompter—while the pictures of the nominated authors and the jackets of their books flashed on a screen behind them.

  Finally the woman presenter tore open the envelope, paused with suitable drama and said, “And this year’s winner of the Tombstone is.... Edith Billingsley.”

  Everyone on their feet. Applause, cheers.

  The elderly woman walked to the stage, a picture of elegance in her long, layered deep-blue gown.

  Handle glanced at the other nominees. Larry Sharp, Joan Wilson and Frederick James all shared the identical expression: a goddamn-it-I-have-to-seem-happy smile bolted onto their faces.

  When the applause died down Billingsley gripped the award in one hand and pulled the microphone down to her mouth—she was only a little over five feet or so.

  “My Goodness,” she began, breathless. “My goodness. I hardly know what to say....” She gazed at the ceramic award. Then set it on the podium. She pulled off her pink, glittery reading glasses and said, “Before I thank those who have helped me along the way in my career as a writer, I must first give voice to the thoughts that are on
all our minds at the moment. The tragic loss of Joseph Devereux. I was thinking about his death and his contribution to our profession all day and I’d like to share with you some of my reflections.”

  She never got started, though. At that moment Chief of Detectives Stan Mellers stepped briskly from the wings, accompanied by a burly detective nicknamed the Hulk, and arrested Edith Billingsley for the murder of the man she was about to eulogize.

  A half hour later, after the author had been booked at headquarters, Stan Mellers was back, holding a press conference in a meeting room off the front hall of the convention center.

  There were many more reporters than before. Edith Billingsley’s arrest had been picked up by everybody from TMZ to CNN to the New York Times; YouTube benefited the most: Hundreds of smart phones had recorded the stage of honor being turned into a perp walk.

  Viral, big time.

  Mellers and his boss, county Sheriff Joaquin Del Rio, took to the podium. Del Rio was broad as a tree trunk, part Anglo, part Mexican with mahogany skin. He didn’t say much on the job and he didn’t say much now, leaving communication to his chief of detectives.

  Handle wasn’t on stage, which was fine with him. He wouldn’t have anything to say anyway. He sat beside Deborah Tailor. The room was packed. Handle noted the fire department rule, set forth on a wall sign, limiting occupancy to fifty. There had to be twice as many inside.

  Mellers looked over the cameras and the microphones and then the audience. He read from a prepared statement. “The Santa Rosa Sheriff’s Department today arrested Edith Billingsley, a resident of Ridgefield, Connecticut, for the murder of Joseph Devereux. We believe she removed the seal on a bottle of whisky, added poison, replaced the seal and then left it in a gift bag hanging from Devereux’s hotel room door. The whiskey was Glenmorangie, which Devereux has said was his favorite Scotch. The bottle and bag and a gift card contained traces of Ms. Billingsley’s cosmetics and hand cream, as well as strands of her hair and fibers from her clothes.”

  Scott Shreve’s team was really, really good.

  “We also discovered prints matching her shoes in the stairwell near Mr. Devereux’s room on the third floor. And a fingerprint of hers on the ground floor doorknob to that stairwell. Miss Billingsley’s room was on the tenth floor, and it’s extremely unlikely that a woman of her age would take the stairs to get her room, unless the elevators were broken, which they were not.