Slash and Burn

by Valerie Bronwen

  “I thought it might be fun to have Jeremy show up at her and Kyle’s panel today.” His eyes glittered. “I thought it might make for some stimulating discussion—not your usual ‘where do you get your ideas’ stuff. The look on her face when she saw Jeremy would have more than worth the price of his plane ticket.”

  “You are such a bitch.” Dani shook her head, but her tone was admiring. “That would have been brilliant.”

  Jerry graciously tilted his head in her direction. “Thank you. It would have been some pretty amazing theater, if I do say so myself.”

  “When did Jeremy get into town?” I reached into my purse for my phone.

  Jerry gave me an odd look. “Why do you ask?”

  “Why did you answer my question with another question?” I glanced over at the hostess table. They were still standing there. I fiddled with my phone, holding it under the table, swearing at myself. I am not good at technology and have never claimed to be. I avoided getting a smartphone for years, and I basically knew how to use a couple of the programs on my computers that I needed. Everything else was a mystery to me, but when I’d gotten my smartphone, the guy at the store had set me up with some kind of weird wireless “cloud” thing that was apparently something amazing. He’d explained it to me, but I hadn’t really grasped much of anything he’d said other than I theoretically would no longer need to carry flash drives with me—every device I owned would be able to access the information available on the others as long as they were turned on.

  So I should be able to access the photos Demi had taken with my phone.

  “He flew in on Thursday morning,” Jerry was saying. “One of his buddies from college lives in Gulfport, and he stayed over there until today. His friend brought him over, and I met him in the lobby.”

  “Do you think he killed Antinous?” Dani asked.

  I touched the icon the guy in the store told me would allow me to access my computer files with my phone, then looked up. “I don’t know if he did or he didn’t. I was just curious.” If the look on her face was any indication, she didn’t believe me. “I’m not trying to solve anything, okay?” I glanced down and saw that several icons had popped up on the phone screen. I touched the one with the label My Laptop, and the little wheel started spinning. “I’m more than happy to leave that to the police.” I smiled at Dani. “Or you, Dani.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  I turned back to Jerry. “And let me guess—not only were you going to surprise her with Antinous, you were going to have Anne Howard there, too—to complete the ambush?”

  Jerry smiled back at me. “Guilty as charged.” He shrugged. “The best-laid plans of mice and men.”

  She would have been utterly humiliated, I thought, and despite everything I knew about her, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her.

  Then again, if you’re going to be so nasty and hateful when you’re at a keyboard in the safety of your own home, you should be prepared to have to defend yourself and your behavior in public. I hate people who grow a pair when they’re behind a keyboard. I don’t say anything on the Internet that I wouldn’t say in person. “So, what now? The three of you are going to have a little lunch meeting? What’s the point, now that she’s dead? What are you up to, Jerry?”

  “Kyle keeps pretending he didn’t know anything about her deception,” he replied with a scowl. “I don’t believe him, and I’m sure Jeremy and I can get him to admit it.”

  “Why don’t you join us?” I asked. “That way it won’t look so much like an ambush. Besides, Dani is a TV reporter. I’m betting he’d love to get on TV.” Dani shot me a grateful—and surprised—look. “We can have the waitress hold our entrees until yours are ready.” I was already waving at our waitress.

  A smile spread slowly across Jerry’s face, and his right eyebrow went up. “Sure. Let me tell the hostess. Are you game, Dani?”

  “Oh, yes.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a digital recorder. “Let’s do this.”

  Jerry got up and walked back over to the hostess stand as our waitress came back to our table. I explained to her the change in dining plans, and she nodded. “I’ll let the kitchen know,” she said.

  After she left, Dani grabbed my hand on the table. “Thank you for that. I really want to get them both on camera—Jerry not so much—but between you, and them, we should be able to get the whole story! What a great exclusive! Hopefully we can get this all done in time for the evening news tomorrow night.” She pulled out her phone and started tapping away on the screen.

  While she was busy with her phone, I scrolled through the pictures Demi had taken. It was still impossible to tell who the man on the gallery was—the face was too well hidden, or just out of the shot—but the body? Maybe I could recognize him from the body.

  I looked up as the hostess led the three men to our table. “Would you ladies follow me to another table?”

  I got up, but Dani was still fiddling with her phone.

  I bit my lower lip. I’d forgotten how dedicated she was to her career. Memory is a funny thing—for years, I’d been so completely focused on her betrayal while I was dealing with the deaths of my immediate family that it had slipped my mind that we’d had problems before all of that started. “Dani?” I said.

  She didn’t even look up as she kept typing away on her phone, but she did stand up and grab her purse.

  “Dani, Tracy, this is Kyle Bennett and Jeremy Mikulak. Guys, Dani and Tracy,” Jerry said, and we all murmured hellos before following the hostess to another, larger booth in another section of the restaurant.

  The guys picked up their menus and Dani kept playing with her phone.

  As I watched her thumbs flying over her screen, I remembered an argument we’d had several weeks before the accident that killed my parents. Dani had always been ambitious, which was one of the character traits of hers I really liked—well, at least at first. I wanted her to be successful. I wanted her to become the best damned television news reporter on the planet, to be honest. If she wanted to become the evening news anchor at one of the major networks or one of the cable channels, I would be right there at her side being as supportive as I could be. But then I began noticing little things that, by themselves, didn’t bother me but overall added up to a particularly unpleasant picture of the woman I’d chosen to share my life with. Dani often missed my book signings and readings, claiming she was working on a story. That was fine—but whenever I had to miss something important to her because I was on deadline or really needed to get papers graded, she got angry with me and it almost always wound up with a fight if I didn’t give in and do what she wanted. Often, I wouldn’t even know she wasn’t going to make an event of mine until she didn’t actually show up there—and I got into the habit of making excuses for her: “Oh, she gets so nervous and tense for me that it becomes more stressful for me” or “Sorry, Dani’s working on a story and not sure if she can make it, but she’s going to try” so people wouldn’t feel sorry for me. It had become so habitual that I did it without thinking.

  Of course, it took Jerry to point this out to me. It was after a book signing at Garden District Books for either the third or fourth Laura Lassitter, and we were sitting on the porch at the Columns on St. Charles, watching as the daylight faded into twilight. “Why does Dani never come to any of your signings?” he asked, licking some salt off the rim of his margarita on the rocks. “It looks funny—and don’t give me any of those bullshit excuses you fob everyone else off with. It’s me, Jerry, you’re talking to.”

  “She’s working on a story,” I replied, taking a sip from my heavenly Cosmo.

  He made one of his patented faces at me—this one was “I said save the bullshit for someone else.” “You know what I think? I think Dani has to be the center of attention, and she’s not at your signings because she can’t stand you getting all the attention instead of her, so she blows them off.” He leaned back in his chair, a very smug look on his face. “And that should bo
ther you. You’re supposedly in a mutually beneficial relationship. You love and support her in her work. The least she can fucking do is show up at your signings to make an effort at supporting you.”

  That night, I mentioned this to her, just in passing—and it led to one of the nastiest fights of our time together. Dani was a master at turning things around, and somehow after the smoke cleared I found myself apologizing to her, just to bring it to a close so I could go to bed and get some sleep. But I’d spent the night staring at the ceiling, wondering why I always had to apologize, why she would never admit to being wrong under any circumstance, and why I didn’t deserve better out of life than a partner who seemed to resent any success I might have.

  The next morning, I was angry with myself for obsessing and for being so unsupportive of her. Jerry didn’t like her, so he was hardly objective, after all.

  But when my parents were killed to kick off what I would eventually start referring to as the Time of Troubles, Jerry’s words came back to haunt me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that argument. The resentments I’d been suppressing for years kept coming back to the surface every single time Dani wasn’t there for me when I needed her—which was every time I needed her. As I schlepped over to the north shore to take my brother Michael to his doctor’s appointments or to make sure he was taking his medications, lugging a laptop around with me everywhere so I could grade or work on my book or just to stay connected to a world outside this horrible world of misery I’d somehow slipped into that had no apparent end in sight, I wondered why I was having to do it alone. I wondered why she wasn’t being emotionally supportive, why it was so hard for her to empathize with me and understand that sometimes I just needed nothing more than to vent or be held while I cried. I wondered why she couldn’t help with some of the household chores, why there was never any food in the house unless I went to the grocery store, why the dirty clothes piled up in the laundry room, and why she never seemed to be around whenever I needed her.

  Sometimes just a sympathetic hand on my shoulder when I was slumped over my laptop at the kitchen table would have been enough, would have meant the world to me, would have given me some strength from our relationship to draw from.

  But she was too self-involved to even give me that little.

  I glanced at her while the guys looked over the menus. She looked up from her phone and smiled at me. I forced myself to smile back at her, and she went back to her phone.

  What had she said to me? That I’d shut her out, and that was why she’d turned to another woman?

  I bit my lower lip. Bullshit. That was bullshit. She’d always been selfish. Always. What I’d been going through was too much for her to deal with, so she’d turned her back on me. She then used what I was going through to justify her shitty behavior.

  The bottom line was, really, what kind of a person cheats on their partner in that situation?

  The kind of person I didn’t want to be involved with.

  Then again, she’d been through her own ordeal with Mary Digby dying.

  Had she been there for her? Or had she closed herself off, found someone else to mess around with?

  I hated myself for even wondering.

  After the guys had ordered and the waitress had taken their menus away, I looked across the table at Jeremy Mikulak. Here goes nothing, I thought. “So, Jeremy, I have to ask—and I’m sure you must be really sick of being asked this—why did you agree to be the front man for Diana Browning? Surely she didn’t have enough money to really make it worth your while?”

  He hesitated for a moment. “It really sounds stupid now. I can’t believe I was so dumb.” Jeremy’s face colored a little bit, and he looked down at his hands. He was good-looking, I supposed, if you were into men, with the short buzz cut, the green eyes, and the olive skin. I could tell from the creases in his cheeks that he had dimples when he smiled, and I could tell he had a worked-out physique, despite the baggy black T-shirt he was wearing. He was shorter than Kyle, who was maybe an inch or so shorter than me, so I figured that put Jeremy at maybe five-five—on a tall day with shoes on. His forearms were perfectly smooth, waxed clean of any recalcitrant body hair. He took a deep breath. “I was a dancer,” he mumbled so quietly I could barely hear him over the hubbub in the restaurant. He glanced over at Jerry. “I was in college and dancing to pay the bills, you know how it is.” He looked up again and spread his arms expressively in a what-else-was-I-supposed-to-do gesture.

  Of course I knew from Jerry that “dancing” actually translated into “I was a stripper in gay bars.”

  Not that there was anything wrong with that—I could think of many worse ways to make money, and at least dancing for tips in your underwear wasn’t against the law.

  “And one night, this guy came up to me and put a twenty in my boots,” he went on. “That really got my attention—you know guys don’t give you that kind of money without…without, well, you know.” He blushed even more deeply. “So, this guy didn’t want anything for it, you know, just wanted to talk to me. So I went over to a corner of the bar and he gives me his business card. He worked for this publishing company called Belvedere Books—”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Belvedere? As in Apollo Belvedere? Honestly.

  “And they needed a good-looking guy to use for pictures for one of the authors. It was a woman author writing about gay men, and they needed a guy to pose for pictures and stuff they could use for her author pictures, for their website, and for the book covers and stuff. He offered me a thousand bucks to pose for the pictures, and a thousand bucks is a thousand bucks, so I said yes.” He took a deep breath. “If I knew then what I know now.”

  “It wasn’t as bad as that,” Kyle said, squirming a bit in his seat.

  “Shut up, Kyle, and let him finish.” Jerry said it pleasantly enough, but there was just enough of a menacing undertone to his voice that Kyle shut up instantly. “Go on, Jeremy. Tell them what you told me.”

  “I didn’t see any harm in it,” he went on, a bit hesitantly. “Modeling is modeling, and the money was good, you know? And I wanted to be a writer—that’s why I was going to school, to learn how to be a writer, and I figured, maybe if I get hooked up with this publisher maybe they’ll give me a shot when I was ready? An in’s an in, right? And my teachers always said that part of getting published was luck…sometimes you had to make connections, and this was a connection, right? So I took his card and gave him a call the next day. He had me come in and they made me an offer.”

  I realized I was clutching and twisting at my napkin with a death grip, and placed it on my lap. As a teacher and an author, nothing makes me angrier than con artists who prey on the dreams of those who are too naïve to know any better—especially when it comes to publishing. It was far too easy for me to look at someone like Jeremy and think, That could have happened to me.

  “What was the offer?” I asked as Kyle continued to squirm in his seat.

  “It was very simple. They would pay me a thousand dollars to pose for the pictures, and I signed an agreement.” Jeremy took a deep breath. “Yes, I was stupid. I didn’t read the agreement first.” He glared at Kyle. “The agreement I signed also said I agreed to make public appearances as Antinous Renault, give interviews if necessary, sign books, do readings, all of it. It also had a confidentiality clause—if I violated the agreement, I was financially liable for damages.” He shrugged. “So I posed for the pictures. It wasn’t my first time in front of a camera—I’d done some modeling, too, in addition to the dancing—”

  “Porn?” This was from Dani. I gave her a dirty look for interrupting—what difference did it make if he’d done porn? She refused to meet my eyes.

  He nodded. “Yes, I did some porn. A couple of videos, all shot over one weekend. Does that matter?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “So, what happened next?”

  “The guy from the publisher—his name was Melvin Shannon—put me in touch with the woman I was fronting fo
r, said she could help me with my writing. She was really nice—I only knew her as Antinous, that was her email address and how she signed her emails to me—and told me I had some raw ability, but needed some polishing.” His face colored. “So, she kept giving me advice and having me send my stuff to her. And I was making the appearances, like I agreed to.”

  “Did it never occur to you that people were getting to know you as Antinous, and that might cause problems when you published your own stuff?” Dani asked.

  He nodded. “I asked Melvin about it, but he told me it wasn’t a big deal, no one really paid that much attention to things like that, and I could always say Antinous was a pseudonym.”

  He looked so miserable I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.

  “But then you’d be associated with her work for the rest of your career,” Jerry replied, giving Kyle a sidelong glance, “and why would you want that hanging over your head?”

  “She was a good writer!” Kyle finally spoke. “She was!”

  “I was wondering if you’d lost the power of speech,” I said acidly. “So, where exactly do you fit into this miserable story of…oh, I don’t even know what you’d call it.” I waved a hand. “A con job?”

  “Ah, yes, Kyle’s role in all of this,” Jerry said in a tone that someone who didn’t know him might take as a friendly one. I knew him too well to think that. “You see, many moons ago, ladies, Kyle started his own publishing company because no one would publish his work, right, Kyle?” He remained mute, his lips pressed tightly together, and nodded. “Melvin Shannon went belly-up; Belvedere went bankrupt and he skipped out, owing a lot of people money. Kyle had done some freelance editing work for Belvedere, and since he already had a publishing company, and here were all these authors whose books just went out of print or weren’t going to be published, so he picked out the ones he thought would make the most money for him—and Antinous was one of them.”