Murder, She Did

by Gillian Roberts

  I believe that in providing my readership with exciting and interesting puzzlers, I have completed the terms of my contract and there is no reason for me to be subjected to those needy eyes, tedious stories, damp handshakes, and insincere conversations, let alone the planes and the dreadful people with whom one is forced to share them, the wretched food, the cold comforts of hotel rooms, the prattle of the hired drivers.

  The last publicist assigned to me was a nitwit who, just before she quit me mid-tour, said that I had a bad attitude and she’d rather plan Satan’s book tour than mine. This is patently ridiculous. I have the correct attitude. It is my job to write the books and the publisher’s job to sell them, and if selling means dragging from one city to the next like a migrant worker, answering the same questions the same way each time, then let him do it.

  But in my case, those indignities pale beside what inevitably awaits me, once I have dutifully delivered myself into the hands of The Media where generic TV, newspaper and radio interviewers—and too many booksellers—twinkle and say, as if the idea had just been invented, “And here we have The Other Jessica.”

  As if I were second-rate, an after-thought.

  The Other Jessica. How that rankles and how I detest the famous Jessica. I have killed her—thinly disguised—many times over in my books, and yet she continues to inflame my very soul. Why must I share my pitiable share of the limelight with her? She doesn’t drag her high heels across the country. I do. Why the jokes, the confusion? We have nothing in common except a not-astoundingly unusual first name and the fact that we are women of a similar age. Neither of us is a member of Gen X. Perhaps not even of Generation Y or even Z. But blending us together because of that is blatant ageism, an outrage.

  I understand that we also share the profession of mystery writing. Or, more accurately, I write. She claims to, pretends to, taps out a few words at the start of each show and that’s that. Frankly, when would she find time to write? She’s too busy rushing away from her lovely seaside town to visit one doomed friend after another. The Typhoid Mary of Murder. And why hasn’t anyone, anywhere, realized the obvious? Jessica Fletcher was never a writer. She’s a serial killer. How else would she pay the rent on oceanside real estate? Not with those single words or sentences as her output each week.

  It’s my parents’ fault. Their warped sensibilities put me in a situation where I had to rename myself. I was originally Olive. Well, you might say, so what? Sure, it’s the name of a bitter fruit that needs curing and salting before it’s edible. Not an inspired name, but the plus side is that no other mystery-writing Olive comes to mind. There’d be no duplication, no humiliating interviews, no prime time TV fiascos, no threats from publishers. But my parents named me Olive despite the family surname, and I emerged Olive Branch. “We named you for the symbol of peace,” they said. But as it worked out, they really named me Target A, the butt of schoolyard jokes. My taste for elaborate fantasies of murder began back then, on the schoolyard.

  In order to not put a fool’s name on a book’s title page, especially a murder mystery, I looked elsewhere and picked “Jessica” instead of something exotic and writerly, instead of a unique moniker no one shared. I had my reasons, but all the same, think of the alternate possibilities. I could have been Rapunzel, Cleopatra, Sassafras, Her Royal Highness. Anything at all.

  If I’d only chosen a name that would let me have my own identity, as if I were whole, singular, sufficient. I had the chance to become anyone and I chose “Jessica” because that’s who I’d wanted to be for the better part of the twelve years of public school. More precisely, dumb, gorgeous, popular Jessica Smith who, with her pert features and safe solid last name, laughed at my name, at me. Who never once included me in anything she and her friends did. Who stole the one and only boy who’d ever paid real attention to me, and did it without a backward glance, without caring particularly about him, and without caring at all about me.

  If I’d lived in another culture, I would have made a voodoo doll of her and pincushioned it, or put her under a curse. But all I could do, when given the opportunity, was steal her label, her name. I changed my attitude, my approach, my style. I became a Jessica and left the Smith to her. Branch was more interesting.

  I wasn’t prescient. I couldn’t predict that years later, well into my career, a middle-aged upstart from Cabot Cove would suddenly seize both the torch and my Jessica-hood.

  When the onerous Jessica connections began, I tried to change my name again, to drop the “Jessica” altogether, but my publisher squelched the idea. He said my readers would be confused.

  The truth is, they’re smart enough to have found me. I’m not the one who confuses them—the upstart is. Once, I saw someone in a bookstore pick up my newest mystery and say to her friend, “Darn. I think I’ve probably read this already, I’m such a fan.” And she then described the plot of the Other Jessica’s latest TV show. “To be honest, it wasn’t all that good,” she said, and she walked off while I stood there, fuming.

  But despite everything, here I was, bravely struggling on, landing fifty-three minutes late, my skirt wrinkled, my hair sagging, my spirits crushed. And it was only day six of the fourteen-day, thirteen-city tour I was condemned to complete. The show, and I, had to go on.

  I stood below the overhead storage, waiting for the mastodon in the seat next to mine to help me retrieve my luggage. He did not. Instead, he rubbed his funny bone and looked at me resentfully, and I was obliged to climb up on my empty seat and do it all myself. The bag hit me hard on the side of my head as it emerged from the bin. I gave it a push so that it crash-landed on Mr. Unhelpful, and when he groaned, I looked away. Served him right.

  By the time I left the plane, I had a bruise on the side of my face, a blouse pulled half out, a run in my stockings and a desperate need for a cigarette. I nearly slapped the flight attendant when she smiled and said “Buh-bye!”

  I found my escort, a smiling plump middle-aged woman, not at all well-preserved, waving the latest Jessica Branch. “Yes, yes,” I said. “Hello.” I waited for her to take my luggage. It took her quite a while to even notice it, she was so intent on me.

  I disliked her—make that loathed her—immediately. I have tried, for the sake of my writing, to comprehend such instantaneous aversions, but they remain mysterious. Perhaps they are as much a matter of chemistry as intense attractions are.

  It can be about associations, people say, but I couldn’t pinpoint this one. It wasn’t the rushed and sloppy look to her makeup and hair. It wasn’t her abysmal taste in clothes. Even when gigantic hoop earrings, pedal pushers, golden ballet slippers and V-necked sweater might have been in style, they would have been in poor style.

  It wasn’t any of those externals. I felt as if I were reacting to the way she held her lips, the flare of her nostrils, the hyped up energy in her voice and the shape of the fingers taking hold of my luggage.

  And all that was before she opened her mouth. “I recognize you from your jacket photo!” she burbled. “Some authors use ancient photos, or touched up ones, but you—you’re as pretty as your picture! I’m so excited to meet you—I’m such a fan!”

  She had toxic levels of perkiness and needed her system drained. The idea of being locked inside a car with this chatterbox for twenty-four hours made me tremble. I was sure my angry publisher had arranged to have this particular pest drive me as additional punishment.

  “I need a cigarette,” I said.

  Her eyes widened. “Not in here, although there’s a special lounge if you must—”

  “I’ll wait till I’m in the car,” I said.

  Her eyes widened still more. “Oh, gee, I hate to be picky about anything, but I’m really allergic, and I definitely have to keep my car smoke-free and—”

  I had submitted a list of my tour requirements headed specifically with “Smoking-friendly cars and drivers.” And in second place, “No talkative and/or perky escorts, please!” I looked at my itinerary. “You’re Estelle McCann?�
�� I asked.

  She waggled her head and giggled, as if that were the biggest joke ever. “Estelle is sick,” she said. “I’m filling in for her.”

  I was positive plans had been altered to further torment me. They’d given me a novice who would get lost, deliver me to appointments late and in desperate need for a smoke and wreak havoc with the schedule.

  “Hope you don’t mind about the cigarette thing,” she said. “I drive for Estelle a lot, but I wasn’t going to this time because I was just bushed.”

  Okay, so she wasn’t a novice. She was still repugnant.

  “The truth is, when Estelle said who needed picking up, I begged for the chance. You know why?”

  I shook my head, but I knew. I could taste what was coming, could feel it like metal shavings coursing through my blood stream.

  “Because I’m such a fan of your TV show!”

  I, of course, have no TV show. Except the one I stormed off of this morning. I might have had a TV show if That Jessica hadn’t gotten there first. But now, what was left for me to be? The Other Jessica’s Show?

  “You’re prettier than the actress who plays you, to tell you the truth.”

  Idiot. I was entrusting myself to a woman who couldn’t distinguish between the names Branch and Fletcher. Besides, it’s been my experience that people who repeatedly say “to tell you the truth” are inveterate liars.

  En route to the parking lot I learned that I also hated the tempo of her speech and the rhythm of her walk. I felt a nervous tremor, almost a small seizure, a physical condition I hadn’t felt since high school. Given the gut-flopping aversion her features inspired, their sickening familiarity, I realized that if she were seventy pounds lighter, forty years younger, if her hair weren’t bleached an unnatural strawberry blonde, she might look just like… “I know that your name isn’t Estelle,” I said, “but I don’t know what it is.” I had to know. It couldn’t be, I told myself. We were nowhere near the wretched town I’d lived in until the day after high school graduation. Nowhere near Jessica Smith.

  “Oh, gee, I’m sorry,” she said. “How rude of me! In such a rush to meet you, so excited, you know, I didn’t even—golly, you must think I’m a real—”

  “Your name?”

  “Oh, sorry again! It’s Cookie,” she said. “Cookie Meyers.”

  I was able to exhale. Nobody in my high school class had been named after baked goods.

  The hotel room was cramped and room service sluggish and next day my morning coffee arrived one minute before the concierge rang up to say my media escort was here.

  Today she wore long jet earrings better suited for an evening gown, tight black jeans and a frilly white blouse. It might have been a striking ensemble on a stunning twig of a young woman, but Cookie was more of a giant Redwood, and the effect was alarming.

  And then we were off, with Cookie’s overenergized voice drilling through my eardrum directly into the center of my brain. No matter my lack of response, she was determined to be both my driver and guide. I reminded her that this was a book, not sight-seeing tour, and she laughed and told me I was so hilarious no wonder I was such a success.

  She pointed out her favorite supermarket, the local high school—which had just won the regional basketball finals, mind you—the new highway overpass, the “best” department store in town. She was a compulsive pointer outer. “I want you to get your full dime’s worth,” she said. “Be here now and all that jazz. I feel so sorry for the people who whisk into town, do their interviews and whisk out. They miss so much!”

  Lucky me. I didn’t miss a single architectural, historical or social item. And that cloud still encircled her, that miasma that agitated me every time I saw or heard her. I was psychically allergic to her.

  “And this!” she said with a touch to my arm—“This is our brand new Civic Center. Isn’t it something? It took six entire years to build, what with union quarrels and zoning laws and over there is just my favorite Indian restaurant, to tell the truth. When I first moved here, that’d be during my first marriage to Mr. Stebbins—Hank Stebbins, the no-good—but that’s another story—there was absolutely nothing out there, but the development since then has been nothing short of…”

  She stored a quantity of stultifying noninformation. I suspected she swept up and hoarded the droppings of other people’s minds, the ideas and facts they discarded as worthless. This was a woman with nothing of value to offer.

  I closed my eyes, put my head against the window and tried to ignore her. My actions had no effect. I would have moved to the back seat, but it was covered with fabric and wallpaper sample books. There was barely room enough to stash my tour bag. Since her divorce from Mr. Meyers—her second or third divorce, by my calculations, she juggled several jobs. “No real career, the way you have,” she said. One of her several non-careers was as a decorator. Judging by the design sense ruling her wardrobe choices, I shuddered to think about the rooms she might put together.

  Silence apparently frightened her. She stuffed words into every airpocket. Words about the landscape, words about color-coordinating somebody’s family room. Even when I asked her to pull over so that I could have a cigarette, she herself also got out of the car, stood upwind of me, and continued her monologue, sprinkling it with anti-smoking warnings.

  Back in the car, I told her I was tired, and she nodded sympathetically and told me to rest up. She’d take care of everything. Which she did, via a monologue explaining where we were going and what the interviewer was like and what other jobs she’d had before this and where her son had gone to college and why smoking was bad for you.

  After I’d given up the attempt to rest, she flashed a smile and posed the inevitable question.

  “So. Tell me. Where do you get your ideas?” Her wide eyes were not on the road but on me.

  I pointed to the highway and she faced forward. Good thing, too, so she couldn’t see that she had just been labeled: IDEA.

  “I use the annoyances of life,” I said. “For example, if somebody drives me out of my mind—”

  “Oh, my!” she interrupted. “For a second there, you scared me. I thought you were saying you got your murderous ideas ‘if somebody drives you’! And here I am, the somebody driving you!”

  I settled into silent fantasies of how I’d do her in in my next novel.

  Midway through a lunch interview, during which Cookie blessedly took herself off somewhere, the reporter from the local newspaper told me—proudly, I swear it—that her profile was going to be called “The Other Jessica.”

  I got her back, though. I didn’t answer one question truthfully, starting with my birth, which I relocated to Sri Lanka and a mix between an exiled Russian princess and an Untouchable. I said I received my plots from voices I heard at séances. Let her look like a fool. I’d claim journalistic irresponsibility. I’d say she had been drinking straight through lunch.

  Where do I get my ideas? Places and moments like this. I planned how, in my next book, there’d be a ferret-faced reporter whose obituary, after her untimely and violent death, would have an insulting headline.

  She didn’t add to my general goodwill toward men, nor did another car-session with Cookie. More boring scenery explained, more stops for simpering interviews and signings.

  She brought me a dry and withered sandwich to eat en route to the final interview of the day, a stupid few minutes on a second-rate station on which the interviewer openly said he’d never heard of me at all—only of The Other Jessica, and he actually asked me questions about her.

  The only pleasure in this stop was that it was my last in this town. I would leave first thing tomorrow morning. Cold comfort, indeed, given that I still had two rides left with Cookie—the one back to my hotel and tomorrow’s ride to the airport. Cookie had assumed demonic shape in my mind, expanding with each of the accumulated insults and miseries of the past twenty-four hours in addition to her own nightmare-quality. I grabbed three fabric-sample books out of the backseat—they wer
e damned heavy, too—and pretended to be engrossed with the squares of cloth.

  My ploy failed.

  “I have this friend who writes,” she said. I knew she’d say that sooner or later. Everybody either had written a book, planned to do so “when they had the time” or had a friend who already had. And everybody thought I cared.

  “She’s written a mystery and the detective is a parrot.”

  And why should I be surprised that Cookie’s friend’s mystery was an even worse concept than the general run of stupid ideas?

  “Unusual, huh?” she said. “Of course there are human beings in it, too, but it’s the parrot who figures things out. And of course, she—it’s a female—I hear female detectives are hot—she can talk, so she can explain what she finds out—and she can fly, too! Think what an asset that is for getting out of trouble!”

  I said nothing, considering silence a kindness.

  “I thought you could give her some advice on how to market it and all. And don’t you think it’d make a great movie?”

  “It’s…I don’t know what to say.”

  “Overcome, huh? Great idea, isn’t it? Very high concept. And know what? The parrot’s name is Jessica!”

  Another Jessica. Just what the mystery world needed. Although this, of course, would never sell, and the least I could do was be properly grateful. “Homage, eh?” I said. “To…me? Or to…?” Of course, Cookie was the one who didn’t quite comprehend that there were two of us.

  Cookie had written the parrot-trash. I was so sure of it I didn’t need to ask.

  “I don’t get what you mean,” she said.

  “The name, Jessica. That’s after…”

  “Me!”

  She forgot that “a friend” had written the book. She’d also forgotten her own name. “I thought you were…you said your name was—”

  “Cookie. Sure. It’s like automatic now. It’s what people have called me for so long, since I left home, that I never even think about my real name, except in banks and things like that.”