Written Off

by E. J. Copperman

  That actually didn’t tell me much. It’s so much easier when you can decide what the clues will be ahead of time.

  “Do you believe him?” I asked.

  “I have no reason not to,” Duffy answered. “Yet.”

  We pulled up to a large, single-level home at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was gloriously tasteful, a relief in this neighborhood of alternating McMansions and older homes of ostentatious overindulgence. From the look of the house, I’d say it was built in the 1970s, and that made its grace and beauty even more remarkable. Most things built in the seventies look like the architect was on drugs. Because he probably was.

  It had a lovely circular drive with impeccable landscaping. A fountain, which appeared to be naturally fed, trickled quietly on the left. A scent of chlorine in the air suggested there was a swimming pool. On a day like today, that was a major plus.

  Who knew Sunny Maugham had been doing this well?

  “It’s not a bad little place,” I told Duffy, “when one is trying to be thrifty.”

  He got out of the car as I did and took it in without irony. That would teach me to write a guy without irony. “It’s valued at two-point-four million dollars,” he said.

  “I was joking, Duffy. Roll with it.”

  He didn’t answer. He walked to the front door—natural wood and polished to a mirror shine—pulling a key from his jacket pocket. Yes. It was ninety-six degrees out, and Duffy Madison was wearing a sports jacket. I was going sleeveless and wishing someone had invented personal air conditioning.

  Duffy opened the lock and then the door. We walked inside.

  There was something distinctly weird about being inside Sunny Maugham’s house without her knowledge. This was different than the bungalow in Ocean Grove, where Sunny had probably just gone to break the routine and have a swim in the Atlantic. This was her home. This was her private space. And she didn’t know I was there. I didn’t care for the vibe.

  It was not, as I had half expected in a place this size, imposing and museum-like. Like Sunny, the place was unpretentious. The room did have nicely polished hardwood floors, but its decorations were simple and unassuming. There was a small stuffed puppet of Oscar the Grouch on one of the sideboards.

  “What are we looking for?” I asked Duffy.

  “I’m looking for anything that might be different from the last time I was here,” Duffy answered. “I expect to find nothing of the sort. You are looking for anything that wouldn’t be immediately noticeable to a law enforcement officer but looks wrong to a writer of crime novels.”

  “I’m not going to find anything like that in the front room or the kitchen,” I noted.

  “No, you won’t. The office is toward the back, on the right. I’ll show you.”

  Duffy led me across the room and into a dining room that made me want to eat there every Sunday night. Homey, warm (well, hot today, but emotionally warm), and inviting, without the egotism that money often inspires. But we weren’t there long. I followed Duffy through the dining room and into the back room of the house, where Sunny wrote her books.

  It was the exact office I wanted to have when I grew up. It wasn’t perfectly neat; that would have put me off and irritated anyone else who walked in. A writer with a completely organized mind? Why not become an accountant and leave room for more of us crazy people?

  The computer on the desk (which had papers stacked semi-neatly on either side) was high-end but a few years old. The desk had actual writing surface, something mine completely lacked. And there was box of fine-tipped roller pens next to the stress ball, the reading glasses, and the voice recorder.

  Sunny’s workstation faced a wall. Behind and to the right were glass doors to the back deck, which was large, cedar, and friendly looking. I was starting to regret not being closer to Sunny.

  File cabinets sat on either side of the room. Wooden ones that looked like actual furniture and not some Office Max steel-with-wood-veneer special. The printer sat on one of them, light still on, waiting for the next installment in one of Sunny’s three (!) best-selling series.

  “What do you see?” Duffy asked quietly, as if we were in a library.

  “It’s organized, but not obsessively,” I said. “She can work without worrying about glare from the deck reflecting in her computer screen, but she can turn her chair toward the glass doors and look out on the backyard anytime she wants. The printer is close by, but not so close that she can’t pick up documents without getting out of her chair. She can write on the desk, again by turning the chair. But the keyboard is ergonomically placed and has a wrist rest on it to avoid carpal tunnel.”

  “Good,” Duffy said. “Keep going.”

  “Keep going? What do you expect me to see, a hologram of what happened when she was taken? That’s it.” I looked around the room again, fighting the growing feeling that it would be really good if I could work there instead of Sunny, because that was cruel and petty. There are times I’m not crazy about being in the same head as myself.

  “You see more; you just don’t know it yet.” Duffy was doing his best to speak with a soft, moderated tone, trying not to break the mood. He stood to one side, positioning himself away from me and in as innocuous a spot as he could find, under one of Sunny’s Agatha Awards (given out for best traditional mystery) on a shelf with some books from other authors.

  One of them was mine. Olly Olly Oxen Free. I immediately felt even worse about any thoughts I’d had about Sunny that weren’t warm and positive. I wondered if I should go over and autograph it for her and caught myself in that burst of ego, meaning now I was completely ashamed of myself.

  I walked to the exact center of the room and bore down to the task. I was going to find Sunny Maugham, and I’d do it before anybody else because I was determined and I had special talents. Duffy, or whoever he was, had said so himself.

  What was there? This looked like a very standard office, albeit a very nice one. It was, as I had noted, the very kind of space in which I wished I could work. That meant it was the kind of space in which many writers like me would have liked to create. So maybe I needed to experience it myself to see how it would drive on the real highway.

  Without asking Duffy, I walked to the desk and sat down on the swivel chair. Real leather. I have some ethical objections, but I had to admit that it felt really good. There was a strong possibility that I might take a nap at Sunny’s desk before I left the room.

  I swiveled toward the desk. The computer, which the police had no doubt examined within an inch of its life, was still turned on but in “sleep” mode. So I hit the S key (in honor of Sunny) and it came to life. The screen began to glow.

  There was no way I’d be able to interpret Sunny’s files. Also, I had no desire to see anything she hadn’t decided was ready for public consumption yet. That would be prying. I would shudder to think of anyone reading my work before I declared it ready. Her desktop was not terribly idiosyncratic; things were labeled “2nd Draft—Riches” and “First-Pass Pages—Cradle,” no doubt two upcoming manuscripts in various stages of editing.

  I want it stated for the record that I did not open Sunny’s hard drive or look at any personal files. I was here to try to find clues to her location, a reason someone would want to abduct her. But I did take a quick peek at one file: “1st Draft—Stand-alone,” just to get a glimpse of one page. I would not read for content, I decided, but for format and style of work.

  I didn’t learn anything except that Sunny couldn’t spell or punctuate. Her gift was for storytelling. I closed it quickly, feeling like a Peeping Tom.

  “There’s an e-mail she saved as a Word file,” I said to Duffy. “It’s from her agent, I think. I’m going to print it out.” The activity would give me an idea of how her office worked. Duffy had probably already seen the e-mail.

  When I hit “print,” however, I was rewarded with a message that the printer was out of paper. And there wasn’t any in her desk drawers.

  I stood up again. Okay, so this ho
me office wasn’t set up at all like mine, where everything could be seen mostly because it was never put away. I noticed a door cut into one wall, dark and unobtrusive. I walked toward it.

  Duffy noted where I was going and said, “That’s a supply closet.”

  “Exactly what I’m looking for,” I told him, and reached for the doorknob.

  Of all the things I’ve done in my life, I most wish I hadn’t reached for that doorknob and opened that door.

  It was a standard supply closet, small, with shelves on both sides and directly in front of me. A light went on overhead as the door opened; it must have had a motion detector that sensed when the door was open, an ergonomic touch I found very intelligent.

  Slumped on the floor of the closet was Sunny Maugham. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t seeing anything.

  She had a fountain pen sticking out of her neck.

  Chapter 16

  I’d never screamed in horror before. It doesn’t help.

  Duffy was at my side in an instant, gently pulling me by the upper arms away from the closet and directing my eyes away from the hideous sight inside. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Hang on. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Take care of it? That’s Sunny Maugham!” As if there had been any question at all about that point.

  “I know,” he said. “Let me call my office so we can do something about this.”

  I would have pointed out that it was clear there was nothing anyone could do to help Sunny, but hyperventilating makes it so difficult to speak coherently. I sat down in Sunny’s chair—feeling guilty about that, of all things—and put my head down, forcing myself to breathe more slowly than I wanted to.

  In the background, which meant that he was probably directly next to me but my mind was in another state entirely, I heard Duffy talking on his cell phone to someone or another, and the words “deceased,” “homicide,” and “immediately” were the only ones that got through to my foggy brain.

  Keeping my head down was helping. It wasn’t helping with the fact that Sunny Maugham, possibly the best-loved author on the mystery circuit, was lying dead less than ten feet from where I sat, clearly the victim of a terrible crime. I’d been asked repeatedly over the past two days to come to her house for a look around and had avoided it until this moment. Could I have prevented this by showing up sooner?

  I don’t remember much of the next fifteen minutes, except for Duffy, after he got off the phone, kneeling down on the floor next to where I sat, my head still hanging down, and trying to soothe me.

  “People are on their way,” he said. “They’ll help you. They’ll get you out of this room, out of this house. Do you feel like you could walk outside now? We can wait outside.”

  I just shook my head hard.

  “Okay,” Duffy crooned. “You can stay there. That’s fine. We’re going to do everything we can.”

  I felt cold and clammy. I felt the way I imagined Sunny felt. Let’s just say that I wasn’t handling it especially well, and that’s why I think Duffy’s next words were inspired less by his tremendous empathy—as I write him, he doesn’t score strongly in that area—and more out of a grim concern that if I couldn’t actually be removed and didn’t stop behaving like I was, there was a strong possibility I might throw up all over his crime scene.

  “I told the executive producer at Monarch Entertainment about your book, Little Boy Lost,” he said out of nowhere.

  Oddly, that had exactly the effect Duffy had no doubt desired. I focused, lifted my head, breathed normally, and looked at him. “How did you even know anyone in the movie business?” I asked.

  “Clearly, from one of the cases you did not make up,” Duffy explained. “I know Mr. Ventnor after having worked on a case that involved his company’s New York office. He recognized my name. I thought perhaps I could help.”

  “That was very nice of you.” Being in shock makes you sound like an idiot.

  “It was nothing at all,” Duffy said. “I hope it helped.”

  Before I could answer, there were people in the room. Other people. Some of them were in uniform. Some of them were not. One who was in uniform, though not a police officer’s, seemed to pay special attention to me and helped me get up and walk out of the room. When I instinctively turned to look into the closet, she made sure she blocked my view and said, “You don’t need to see that.”

  I wished I never had seen that, so she definitely had a point.

  The outside air, hot as it was, felt good. It smelled of whatever trees those were outside Sunny’s front door, and it felt real, not like the artificial environment air conditioning had created inside that awful room. I’d never want to work in a room like that one.

  The woman in the EMT uniform sat next to me on a bench outside Sunny’s house, talking while she took my blood pressure and pulse readings. I think she might have taken my temperature at one point, too. I’m pretty sure she did so with an oral thermometer.

  My mind wasn’t clearing, so when Ben Preston arrived at my side, I was surprised and confused. Ben took my hands and asked me what had happened. In retrospect, he must have gone inside before I’d been aware of him, talked to Duffy, and decided Ben was the best one to debrief me.

  It wasn’t as difficult as I’d anticipated to tell him what had happened. For one thing, Duffy had been in the room when I’d discovered Sunny’s . . . body . . . and could corroborate anything I said or even add details I had undoubtedly missed.

  There was also the fact that I really didn’t know anything other than what I’d seen in the closet, and that was more than enough.

  But when he asked me, gently, about how Sunny had looked, I had to think hard. You’d guess that such a sight would be seared into my retinas for life, but the mind has a way of removing the things that are especially horrible just to keep us going through the day. Unfortunately, that is not an especially useful brain function when a crime is being investigated. For Ben’s purposes, it would be better if I could remember every detail.

  “It was a black fountain pen,” I remember telling him. “It must have had one of those metal nibs on it, you know?” My mind began to let me remember what I’d seen, which was really somewhat cruel of it. Never had the term blissful ignorance been more apropos. Stupid mind, letting me remember.

  “I know,” Ben said with concern in his voice. “What else did you see in the closet?”

  I stared at him. “Wasn’t that enough?” I asked.

  “I mean, what other details did you notice? Maybe you saw something I didn’t. You write about murders. What clues did you see?” He was trying to get me to focus; I understood the technique. That doesn’t mean it didn’t still piss me off.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think.” Ben was getting less attractive by the second.

  “I am thinking.”

  “I know,” he said calmly. “But if you were writing that scene, what would you expect to see?”

  “What I saw. I’d never write that scene. I don’t write anything that bloody.” Duffy Madison, in my novels, solves missing persons cases. There isn’t always even a murder.

  “Was it bloody?” Ben asked.

  That got me, and I considered. “Come to think of it, no.”

  “You’re the mystery writer. What does that tell you?”

  My head was starting to clear a little. Ben was good at what he did. “She wasn’t killed in the closet; she was brought there from somewhere else, in the house or outside, and posed there for us—for me—to find.”

  “Very good. And that tells us something very useful about the guy behind all this. We didn’t necessarily know that in the other three cases. If he changed his method for this, that would be surprising. If he didn’t, well, that helps us with the other three.”

  I shook my head; it was still too much. “But Sunny’s dead,” I moaned, the words coming out of me with difficulty. “I didn’t come here yesterday because I was out with you, and I didn’t come here the night before because I thou
ght Duffy was creepy, and now Sunny’s dead.”

  Ben put an arm around my shoulder. “I know, and I wish it weren’t true,” he said. Cops usually go with, “I’m sorry for your loss,” but he was showing a little more sympathy (and versatility) than that. “But don’t for a minute think it would have made any difference if you’d shown up yesterday or the day before. There’s no chance she was dead that long. You would have found an empty house.”

  That shouldn’t have made me feel any better; Sunny was just as dead. But for some reason, Ben saying what he said had lifted the patina of guilt I’d been covered with since I opened the closet door. Okay, since I stopped screaming after opening the closet door.

  “Thanks,” I croaked. His arm stayed around my shoulder and squeezed it a little.

  “No charge,” he said. “Now, I have to get back inside. You okay out here?”

  I nodded. It was a lie, but it was what he needed me to do, and I did it. I was not okay and wasn’t going to be for some time, but I was strong enough that I didn’t need to keep Ben Preston from his work. He got up and walked inside.

  It was the twenty-first century and I was looking at more than seven seconds of downtime, so I checked my voice mail. I could have checked my e-mail, but a new message from my gruesome pen pal was the last thing I needed to see at that moment.

  There was a voice message from my agent. “Get in touch,” Adam Resnick said with a note of urgency in his voice. “It’s about Little Boy Lost.”

  Well, there’s psychological trauma and despair, but then there’s an encouraging call from your agent. I pressed Adam’s speed-dial button and waited.

  “Resnick, Resnick, and Johnson.”

  “Who are you kidding? You’re the only one in the office,” I chided.

  “Yeah,” Adam said. “But it looks so good on the stationery. Are you ready for some news?”