Written Off

by E. J. Copperman

  This is what upscale New Jerseyans can afford when they want to own a home down the shore.

  The sergeant approached and looked at me, then at Duffy. “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “My assistant,” Duffy said with no hint of irony. Without me, there’d be no you, pal, and don’t you forget it. Now in my own head, I was starting to sound like his mother. “Ms. Goldman is here to catch anything I miss and to chronicle anything we see. I assume that’s all right.”

  The sergeant looked me up and down, which did not make me more comfortable. “If you say so,” he said. Then he looked at me. “Don’t touch anything.”

  Resisting the impulse to thank him for the vote of confidence, I nodded.

  “Come on,” Duffy said.

  I reached into my back pocket for a reporter’s notebook, which Duffy had undoubtedly seen. I always have something to write on in case an idea comes when it’s not convenient. I don’t own a smart phone, and I don’t much care for voice recorders; they are not as reliable as paper. Paper never runs out of battery power. In my side pocket was a pen, so I got that out as well.

  “Fire away, Duffy,” I said. He’d want to detail everything he saw that he considered relevant, and that meant everything. Luckily, I knew his method. I had invented his method.

  He walked to the center of the room, next to the card table, and began revolving, very slowly, to take in every area of the room. “No sign of a struggle. No blood on any surface. No overturned furniture. No broken glass in the kitchen. No indications that any large furniture or rugs have been removed.” I wrote down the list in my own shorthand, which only I would be able to decipher later. Good penmanship is not the same as writing well.

  Duffy often says that what an investigator doesn’t see is at least as important as what he does see. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it sounds good when I write it.

  “Why would someone have removed a rug?” the sergeant asked. I knew why, but I let Duffy have his moment.

  “It’s one of the safer ways to remove a body without being noticed,” he answered. “Quite often blood and DNA evidence go with the rug. Even a live victim being transported could be carried in a rug once sedated.”

  The sergeant looked impressed and maybe a little concerned.

  “What is in the room that’s relevant?” I asked Duffy, to get him going a little quicker. Even though I didn’t see any evidence of foul play—and it seemed Duffy didn’t, either—I wasn’t crazy about being here and wanted to begin the interminable journey back to Adamstown, where I was absolutely itching to get to those revisions.

  Duffy redirected his attention to the room. “The room is used mostly as a staging area for days at the beach,” he said. “There is an usual amount of sand near the back door where people would leave and return, and a line of sand from the back door to the folding chair by the card table indicates that it had been taken there after a trip to the beach. There is a futon near the back for those times when Ms. Bledsoe might want to spend the night. The kitchen does not appear to be fully stocked, although we will have to check the cabinets.” One of the officers, hearing that, immediately opened some doors and looked inside.

  “Nothing special,” he said. Duffy walked over to him to see for himself, but the cop kept talking. “Cereal boxes, some dishes, some spaghetti. Not much.”

  Duffy gave me a glance as he got a vantage point. “Enough food for one person who wasn’t planning to stay long or two who were only staying overnight,” he said, and watched me write it down. “Cooking implements for the most basic functions. Cleaning supplies under the sink, again very limited. Just kitchen surface wipes, dishwashing detergent, and glass cleaner. This was not set up to be a long-term residence for anyone.”

  “That’s not a huge surprise,” the sergeant said. “These are beach houses. People come down for weekends, mostly. If you’re using it as a summer rental, you’re probably in one of the bigger houses, renting an apartment.”

  “True,” Duffy noted. “But Ms. Bledsoe came down here on occasion for a purpose other than recreation. The only piece of furniture in the room that doesn’t have a coat of dust on it is the card table in the center, yet there are no dishes in the drainer. It’s unlikely Ms. Bledsoe, or anyone else, ate dinner here recently. No dust on the table means it was being used for some other purpose.”

  “It’s a card table,” the uniformed officer said with a hopeful voice. “Maybe she came down to play cards?”

  “With no garbage, no empty bottles or glasses obviously used, and no deck of cards anywhere, I would say not,” Duffy answered him. He wasn’t trying to dash the kid’s hopes of becoming a plainclothes detective anytime soon, but his tone probably had that effect anyway.

  “The table isn’t entirely dusted,” I pointed out. “Just the side by the one chair. There’s nothing on the other side at all except dust. And the seat of the chair has just about the same look to it, a little dust but not as much as everything else.”

  “So Ms. Bledsoe used the table, but not for eating, since that doesn’t seem to have happened here recently.” Duffy knew I was on to something, but he didn’t know what yet. To me, it seemed obvious.

  “This is Sunny’s writer’s retreat,” I told him. “She comes down here when she gets stuck, maybe, or just needs a change of scenery to keep the work coming. She uses that table, but she probably goes out for dinner instead of cooking. She wouldn’t want to take the time to cook dinner, and if she’s down here alone, there’s no reason to cook when there are plenty of restaurants in the area. Any excuse to get up from the table and move around is probably welcome. She works here. Probably not all the time because the house isn’t winterized, but she definitely works here.”

  Duffy smiled an enigmatic smile. The sergeant and the uniformed cop who had looked in the kitchen appeared perplexed by my explanation, but Duffy pointed at the table and waved his finger a bit.

  “There are no indications there were notes, paper files, index cards,” he said. “No scratches from paper clips, no pens or pencils, no note pads.”

  “Welcome to the computer age,” I said.

  “There is no desktop computer.”

  “Okay, welcome to the laptop computer age. I haven’t written anything out on paper for years. My desk doesn’t even have enough open space for me to consider writing on it. No flat surface that isn’t taken up with something. The only reason I think this isn’t Sunny’s primary workspace is that there’s no visible modem, no Wi-Fi server. There’s no printer. She only uses this place when she needs to be away from her usual office because she’s reached maximum density there.”

  “Writer’s block?” Duffy suggested.

  I waved a hand dismissively. “There’s no such thing. Writers made that up so they could procrastinate better. We love to make up excuses not to write, and we’re great at making things up. Writers are the best procrastinators on the planet.”

  “Still, no indication there ever were notes. Is that all on her laptop?” Duffy seemed genuinely intrigued by my explanation of the process; it was like he was asking me how he’d been born. I got a little nauseous but fought that feeling off.

  “Not necessarily. From what I can see, Sunny’s probably a pantser.”

  The two cops indulged in a shared look, and Duffy’s eyes widened a bit. “A pantser?” he asked.

  “Sure. There are two kinds of writers: plotters and pantsers. Plotters work out every detail before they ever commit a word to their hard drives. They outline. They take notes on the backs of napkins and pull them out of their pockets at the end of the night. They have charts and graphs and three-by-five file cards that tell them the whole story they’re about to write before they dare try to write it.

  “But pantsers fly by the seat of their pants. They start with a premise, maybe have a scene or two in their heads that will serve as landmarks along the way, and that’s it. They know who their characters are and what their stories are generally about, but they don’t have any ide
a what the connective tissue will be. How they get from point A to point Z is a complete mystery. For pantsers, that makes the writing process more fun, if something that difficult and painful can be considered fun.”

  “And you?” Duffy asked.

  “Pantser. From day one.”

  “You frown on those who plan ahead?” Duffy is meticulous and plodding; he rarely takes a wild chance. He was asking me for some sign of acceptance—or not.

  “No, of course not,” I assured him. “Writing’s too hard to exclude people whose style is not the same as mine. Whatever process works is the one people should use.”

  He grinned. “That’s very understanding of you,” he said.

  “But it doesn’t get us any closer to what happened here,” the sergeant pointed out, no doubt anxious for the writing seminar to be over. “It looks like the owner of the house was here pretty recently, but it doesn’t look like there’s any sign of a crime. If she’s missing now, she probably isn’t missing from here.”

  “I must disagree,” Duffy said. “Ms. Bledsoe was definitely taken from this bungalow.”

  “How do you figure?” The sergeant might not have been pleased with this civilian tutoring him on the fine points of crime investigation, and he certainly wasn’t crazy about the “assistant” to the consultant going on about the creative writing life.

  Duffy, unfortunately, was blind to the muffled disdain in the sergeant’s voice. “It’s simple. What led us into this house?”

  Oh, boy. He was going to hold a symposium. I instinctively backed up a step away from the sergeant, if for no other reason than to give him a visual separation between myself and Duffy, a quick “Hey, that’s him, not me” indicator.

  “You called our department and said that a missing woman might be found here,” the sergeant answered through thin lips. “And I’ll report that we didn’t find her.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking,” Duffy insisted, the tough-but-fair professor trying to point his clever-but-limited student back to the right path. “What gave us the impetus to enter the house?”

  I worried momentarily that the sergeant would stumble on the word “impetus,” but he went straight through. “When we called her cell phone, it rang inside this house,” he said, squinting as if the answer to the puzzle were far away and he couldn’t quite make out the lettering.

  “Exactly,” Duffy said. “Very good.” It was a miracle he didn’t try to feed the sergeant a liver treat. “And did we find the mobile?” There are times he uses words that make him sound British; that’s unintentional on my part. Sometimes I think he bleeds a little into Sherlock Holmes in my head. I should work harder on that.

  “Yeah,” the uniformed cop said, producing the phone in his latex-gloved hand. “It was right there on the floor next to the table.”

  “Excellent!” Duffy gushed. “You’re doing very well indeed.” You see what I mean about the British thing?

  “So how does that lead to her being taken from the house?” the sergeant wanted to know.

  “Ms. Bledsoe comes down here to work on her latest novel,” Duffy began. “She might be floundering at home and decides she needs a change of scene, or maybe she just wants to go to the beach. That doesn’t matter at this point.

  “Once she’s here, she encounters another person who might show some interest in her work or simply strike up a conversation at the beach or at dinner in a restaurant one night. A person dining out alone is not impossible but certainly not standard. It draws attention to her, and maybe she is happy for the company.”

  “You’re getting this from a cell phone on the floor?” the officer asked.

  “I’m not sure about the details,” Duffy said. “What I know is that Ms. Bledsoe and another person—because that folding chair must have been stored in the back of the house and then brought here for a guest, based on the trail of sand—came back here, and from here they made a very hasty exit. That, given the fact that her sister called the police concerned—because this is a serious break in Ms. Bledsoe’s routine—leads me to believe that she was taken.”

  “How does the cell phone lead to abduction?” I asked, finally. Somebody had to get him to the reveal or we’d be here all night, and I wanted to get home. To revise. No, really.

  “A writer without a cellular phone is unthinkable,” Duffy said. “To be out of touch with an editor, an agent, a publicist? Never. Am I correct about that?” he asked me.

  Considering that I’d talked to my agent today and had to e-mail my editor as soon as I got home, I nodded.

  “So she forgot her phone,” the sergeant said. “It happens to everybody.”

  “Yes, but then everybody comes back to get it,” Duffy said. “Ms. Bledsoe’s sister confirms there is no second cell number. That is the only phone she has. And since it’s still holding a charge enough that we could hear the ringing from outside the house, we can assume it has not been lying on the floor here for much more than a day, two on the outside.”

  “That means she’s not here,” the sergeant argued. “It doesn’t mean she’s been kidnapped.”

  “The phone was on the floor next to the table. It had been dropped there. And it was left there.”

  “So she dropped her phone on her way out the door,” the sergeant said.

  “Look at this house,” Duffy countered. “It’s not clean, but it’s neat. There isn’t one thing out of place. Everything, down to the last cereal spoon, has been put back in its designated spot. Everything except that cell phone, the one item Ms. Bledsoe would probably have been most cognizant of the whole time. No, the phone on the floor is very telling, sergeant. There’s no sign of a struggle, but that phone makes it kidnapping for me, and if that’s the case, I’m afraid we have very little time left to find Ms. Bledsoe.”

  Chapter 9

  “You were extremely helpful,” Duffy Madison told me. “I would not have been able to adequately evaluate the crime scene if you hadn’t been there. Thank you.”

  All this buttering up was taking place in the parking lot of the Bergen County office building, after another interminable trip, this time from Ocean Grove to Hackensack to pick up my car. Duffy had nattered on about the case in a monologue, almost nonstop, since we’d said our good-byes to the Ocean Grove police department and headed northwest to our—or my, at least—home county.

  I’d been taking notes, as he’d . . . is there a word that could make it sound like he didn’t actually order me to? Instructed, perhaps. Gentler, without actually being polite.

  The three murders of crime writers were perplexing at the very least, he’d said. They weren’t the same kind of writers. One, Missy Hardaway, lived in New Hampshire and wrote “cozies,” the kind of mystery that features no “bad” language, no graphic violence, and, above all, no explicit sex. (You can kill anyone you want—except the cat—but you can’t have your heroine shtup anybody or you’re toast.) She had published two books in trade paperback with a small publisher headquartered in Baltimore.

  The second dead writer, J. B. Randolph (I didn’t think any of these were their real names), wrote tough thrillers. The initials instead of a first name probably indicated that her publisher wanted readers to think the books were written by a man, or at least not to think about the author’s gender at all. Randolph had written seven books, all stand-alones. They’d managed some success, but she was hardly a household name.

  The third was Marion Benedict, a lab assistant and an unpublished writer who had created two e-book short stories on her own and was at work on her first full-length novel (the first two had not been purchased by a publisher, and she’d been talking about self-publishing), a police procedural about a beautiful but shy forensic lab technician, when she was found murdered.

  I did not get to ask Duffy how the women died because he literally never stopped talking during the ride, but he volunteered the information anyway somewhere around Exit 143B (Irvington/Hillside) on the Garden State Parkway. “Ms. Hardaway was found at her home in
Nashua, New Hampshire, with trauma to her head; she’d been hit from behind with a manual typewriter she kept in her writing room but did not use,” he said. I thought—but, again, didn’t get the chance to say—that no writer uses a typewriter anymore, and certainly not a manual one, so it had probably been a decoration—or an inspiration. Some people get a charge out of the good old days of writing. Give me a good word processor and the ability to cut and paste, and I’m a happy woman.

  “J. B. Randolph was electrocuted directly by current from her desktop computer,” Duffy went on as I scribbled. “She lived in Manhattan, Kansas, and had no connection to either of the other victims or Ms. Bledsoe, according to the research I’ve done and have been given by the other three police departments. If the women weren’t all crime writers, they would seem to have been chosen at random. Because they clearly weren’t random crimes, the motive must somehow be tied to the idea of writing crime fiction.”

  I knew Sunny Maugham’s reputation well enough to dismiss the idea of a jealous rival doing her in. She was generous to a fault with other writers, had been working with the same editor for decades without so much as a hint of friction, and was considered one of the truly nicest people in the business. If I hadn’t been so busy taking dictation from Duffy, I might have had a moment to be truly worried about possibly being in very severe danger.

  But on he went: “Marion Benedict was found in her home in Philadelphia. She rented an apartment over a pizzeria and wrote in her bedroom. Her death was perhaps the most gruesome of the three.”

  I considered asking him to let me off here, but we were still on the Parkway, and getting out to walk while other cars zipped by at eighty-five miles an hour could make me an even more gruesome statistic, so I took a breath and told myself simply to write the words I heard and not to think about their meaning.

  “She was found literally choked to death with printouts of rejection letters stuffed into her throat,” Duffy said. “She suffocated.”