“Any more news about the fire?” I asked him after introducing myself.
“No comment.”
“Do you know how it started yet?”
The trooper shrugged, but I had a feeling he and his colleagues wouldn’t have still been poking around there unless they suspected arson. I could not stop thinking about what I had heard inside Savoy’s Literary Treasures, of the threatening undercurrent in the voice of Andrew Wilde.
“Mind if I take a look around?” I asked.
“Yeah, I do. We had a couple of guys come in here right after the fire was dead, had to tell them it was a total loss. There was another guy digging around in what was left, but he got away from us.” He squinted at me. “Bunch of vultures.”
“You can say that again,” I said, not wanting to be included in his general condemnation of scavengers.
“And we don’t want any possible evidence destroyed,” he added.
“So you think it might be arson.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Do you think–”
“You might as well leave, lady,” he said. “There’s nothing to see. The place burned to the ground, and the undertakers already came to collect what was left of the body.”
“The undertakers?” I said absently.
“Got here right after the coroner came. Carstairs and Barbieri, that’s what it said on the card.”
I felt a chill. “Carstairs and Barbieri?”
“The undertakers.” The trooper was giving me a funny look. I hastily thanked him for his time, then got back into my car and drove away.
By the time I got home, newspapers and television had dropped the story, but the Internet had picked it up. There were plenty of rumors, because Arturo Savoy, according to the few people who knew him well, had gone out of his way to secure his cherished volumes; only a conflagration on a massive scale could have destroyed them. There was a story that an arsonist might have set the fire, and not careless campers as was first reported. A rumor popped up, on a website devoted to the writings of Mona Dart, that a partially burned copy of Small Comrade had been found in the ruins of Savoy’s summer house, with a title page that bore the handwritten words Number 3 of 50 copies along with a mark that looked a lot like a thumbprint. A blogger claimed to have been told by someone who had actually seen the damaged book that a date had also been written in on the title page, the date of Mona Dart’s death.
The Internet had always been rife with unsubstantiated rumors and crank theories. Anyone rational would have given little credence to the rumors about Small Comrade and the even wilder rumors about a copy of Dechen Thorsten’s book that had been salvaged from the ashes, another volume with a handwritten number and a thumbprint.
There was nothing to those stories, I told myself, yet I could not stop thinking of the conversation between Arturo Savoy and Andrew Wilde. And I also thought of the shop Todd Thorsten had recently opened in his funeral home, the opening of which I had covered for the Gazette, and of how pendants bearing the thumbprints of the dear departed had become one of Todd’s most requested items.
A story was coming to me, breaking through the edifice of my writer’s block. Out of habit, I began to make some notes:
A rare book dealer down on his luck and a literary agent greedy for more earnings from writers whose sales have declined concoct a scheme to produce a few true collectors’ items, numbered copies of an author’s last book with an impression of the author’s thumbprint made after his death. Or maybe it’s one of the book collectors who comes up with the idea and proposes it to the dealer; maybe the whole business has even been going on for a while, with this particular dealer and agent simply being the latest to latch on to what might be a long and secret tradition of creating posthumous collectors’ editions.
At any rate, after the sudden death of one of the agent’s most celebrated clients, the two arrange for the corpse to be buried in secret, so as not to attract mourners, and then they dig up the body later to get its thumbprint on their books. But the agent, realizing how risky this procedure is, decides to bring a mortician in on the scheme after the death of a second writer, so that the thumbprints can be acquired before interment. The dealer becomes upset with the agent, fearing that the mortician now has the means to blackmail them. At that point –
There were a number of places the story could go after that. Maybe the mortician would try to blackmail the agent. Perhaps an impatient collector starts demanding more special editions. Maybe the dealer tries to extricate himself from the whole business, and one of the other people involved decides that the dealer has to be eliminated before he blows their cover.
And maybe the dead writers aren’t just the victims of accidents, either. Maybe their deaths are only set up to look like accidents.
I stopped making notes and sat there, holding on to my notebook and pen, too afraid to move, wishing that I could believe that Andrew Wilde, no matter how greedy, wouldn’t stoop to such a scheme. But I had overheard enough to know that he could, that he already had been involved in digging up a body at least. Maybe he had also arranged for Carstairs and Barbieri to handle Arturo Savoy’s funeral.
I dreamed that night of burned blackened trees and the ruins of a house, of the small white bones and tiny rounded knuckles of thumbs scattered among the ashes of a fire.
Sometimes a lot of pressure is just what a writer needs to finish a piece of work. Inartistic as it sounds, a pressing deadline or the fear of a diminishing bank account can be just the lubricant that frees that story or those chapters and outline from a rusting unconscious, and knowing that you’re going to be handsomely paid, or paid anything at all, for your efforts is the ideal sweet carrot to accompany the whack of that stick.
I had plenty of pressure now. Once or twice a week, Andrew or his partner Del Murton called or emailed to ask me how my proposal was coming along and urge me to use the window of time I had before publication of The Connections to complete it. There was also the encouragement of knowing that Fran Morrese was likely to pony up a fat advance for my next book. And if that wasn’t enough to get me to the station and aboard the train, I would remember that Dechen Thorsten, Mona Dart, Willy Edwardson, and Joe Waldo Bender were being somewhat unproductive before their untimely deaths.
Maybe they had all died in accidents or of natural causes. Andrew Wilde’s greed didn’t necessarily make him a murderer. However grisly his quest for the thumbprints of dead writers was, I could understand, once my stomach stopped lurching, how he might have been drawn to profit from an unfortunate situation. But I could not stop constructing possible alternative scenarios in my mind. Someone might have tampered with the brakes of Mona Dart’s car, and she was known to be a bad driver. Willy Edwardson could have been easily tempted into a relapse. Every time Andrew called to ask about my next project, I kept hearing a whispered threat.
To the amusement of my landlord, who kept reminding me of Wilsey’s extremely low crime rate, I had a new security system installed in my apartment on the second floor of his Victorian house. My car had a complete checkup and overhaul at the garage, and I became a very careful driver. I stopped meeting people at bars for the occasional drink, unable to avoid thinking of how easy it would be for someone to slip something into my beverage without my noticing it.
And the dreams kept coming, of small bones lying in ashes, of a shadowy form hovering over a dead body and pressing its thumb against an open book, of an open grave and an arm hanging out of an opening in the side of the casket.
Andrew was greedy enough; I knew that from his dealings with publishers and the efforts he took to fill his cornucopia. He was also extravagant enough, with a Manhattan brownstone, a house in Connecticut, and an apartment in London, to require a good-sized cash flow. I wondered how long he would be willing to wait for a new source of limited thumbprinted editions.
None of this was helping me to overcome my writer’s block. My mind was all thumbs, losing its grip on promising material before I could e
ven set it down. The only notes I made were for fanciful scenarios involving the scheme Andrew Wilde and Arturo Savoy had apparently concocted. Perhaps Andrew had wanted to increase the number of thumbprinted editions, so as to pull in more money, and Arturo, knowing that this would only diminish the value of each book, had refused. I kept wondering why Arturo hadn’t been able to get out of his house ahead of the fire when everybody else had apparently had plenty of warning to do so. Maybe someone had made sure that he couldn’t; maybe Arturo’s murderer and the arsonist were the same person.
I had never really looked at my copies of all the paperwork Andrew had given me to sign. Now I forced myself to pore through them. A will was among the papers, filled with clauses listing my parents as my beneficiaries and directing an executor to arrange for my funeral, pay those expenses, and designating said executor as my heir in case my parents predeceased me, but the relevant clause stood out like a sore thumb:
I hereby nominate, constitute, and appoint as Executor under this my Last Will and Testament, my trusted agent and friend, Andrew Wilde.
I sat there, feeling numb, and stared at that sentence for a long time. It came to me then that Andrew had floated the idea of being my executor in one of our early conversations. I had a vague memory of him telling me that someone with experience in handling literary properties would be a far better choice for the job than family members who lacked any knowledge of the business. But I had been so busy daydreaming about fat advances, book tours, appearances on Oprah and the Today Show, and of happily tracking my standing from day to day among Amazon’s bestselling volumes, that I hadn’t paid much attention to Andrew’s concealed deviltry.
Maybe he was already laying his plans. If I handed him a lame proposal, or he began to think I was seriously blocked, that might be enough to seal my fate. Maybe he was only trying to decide which alternative offered the more profitable course of action, offing me now or waiting until The Connections was out. Getting rid of me earlier in the game might be preferable. A writer tragically dead, on the verge of her greatest success – I could almost approve of that as a good career move myself even if it did require my demise. Fran Morrese might bring all of my books back into print after that, maybe even in a boxed set.
I started making more notes:
The agent, knowing that the book dealer wants out, and afraid that he may betray him, pays him a visit, slips a large dose of a sedative into the dealer’s drink, makes sure he’s unconscious, then leaves the summer house, setting a fire as he goes.
Or perhaps the agent sends a dubious character of his acquaintance instead, a hit man he met while the gangster was trying to find a publisher for a memoir of his life in crime.
That would complicate the plot, but also add a colorful character to the cast, even if I would have to be careful not to let him run away with the story. I didn’t know if Andrew had such a person among his clients, but it was certainly possible that someone like that might have approached him, given that almost everybody these days thinks he has a book, or at least a book deal, inside him.
I stopped going anywhere after dark; the tree-lined streets of my neighborhood offered too many hiding places for potential assailants. A brusque email from Andrew arrived; its extreme brevity –“Well?” – indicated that he was losing patience with me.
And then Cormac O’Malley abruptly cashed in his chips, literally and figuratively.
The end came in Atlantic City, just after O’Malley had spent a night gambling at the Taj Mahal. His usual haunt was Las Vegas, but he had apparently been hitting Indian-owned casinos and the tables at Atlantic City during a book tour in the Northeast for Kevin’s Luck, a sequel to his lavishly praised and award-winning Kevin’s Game, in which the protagonist leaves a town almost exactly like Wilsey to shack up with a Native American croupier at a casino much like Foxwoods in Connecticut. Kevin’s Luck had garnered some good reviews, but also a couple of scathing attacks in the New York Review of Books and the Washington Post Book World that accused the author of repeating himself and implied that he had run out of material. The sales had been disappointing, too; a month after publication, the novel had yet to hit any of the bestseller lists.
That kind of bad luck might explain why O’Malley, after a decade and a half of famously riding the wagon, had sought solace in alcohol again; he had been seen drinking several large tumblers of what looked like whiskey at the Taj Mahal. All that booze might have been what caused him to slip in the bathroom of his hotel suite and fracture his skull on the marble edge of a sunken tub. And at seventy-two years of age, he could easily have lost his balance.
Reasonable enough assumptions, I told myself. No reason to leap to conclusions because Cormac O’Malley was yet another of Andrew’s clients. No reason to panic while reading that Carstairs and Barbieri would again be handling the funeral arrangements.
Cormac O’Malley would be buried in Wilsey, given its prominent place in his fiction. This had surprised some of his friends, who had assumed that his final resting place would be in his adopted home of Los Angeles. “I’ll see you at the funeral,” Andrew told me over the phone, but I already knew that I would have to be there.
St. Margaret Mary’s Church, where the Requiem Mass was held, was packed with writers, book critics, a couple of Hollywood semi-celebrities who had been gambling buddies of the deceased, and a number of Wilsey residents who might have escaped from the pages of O’Malley’s novels. The old woman with bright red hair and an unsuitably short black dress had to be the model for the lusty LaVerne Schildkraut, while that distinguished-looking gray-haired gentleman sporting a cravat was a dead ringer for Tommy “Trump Card” McCarthy.
I soon found myself unable to go on with this game of unlocking O’Malley’s romans à clef. The dead writer’s career had been in a downward spiral, and at his age, maybe he wouldn’t have been able to pull himself out of it. He had been one of Andrew’s clients; accidents did happen, but so could events that only looked like accidents. Maybe Andrew was greedier and more desperate than I thought. Maybe I could even read O’Malley’s fate as a threat to me, another writer from Wilsey who might be more profitable dead than alive.
Father Benedict, who with his broad red face and football player’s shoulders could have been the model for Father Rummell in Kevin’s Game, intoned the liturgy as an altar assistant rang a bell. The holy bell kept ringing in my mind as the people around me got up, sat down, knelt, then stood up again. Ka-ching, ka-ching, the bell seemed to say, oddly echoing the sound of an old-fashioned cash register, and I found myself looking toward my agent. Ka-ching, ka-ching, the bell repeated as Andrew bowed his head.
At the Peaceful Glade Memorial Park, a large black canopy with purple borders had been set up over the open grave, which looked like the last available spot among the tombstones and crypts of the O’Malley family plot. Andrew, I had to admit, might have been wise to secure the services of the undertaker Carstairs in acquiring thumbprints for his special limited editions before burial, whatever the risk. Given how rapidly cemeteries were running out of space these days, his next dead client might end up as ashes stored behind a plaque on a memorial wall.
That was where I might end up, and cremation would be a good way to get rid of any evidence that a death was anything but accidental or the result of natural causes.
Andrew sat under the canopy, with members of Cormac O’Malley’s family, his close friends, and those writers and critics who had been able to crowd themselves into seats or standing room near the grave. More mourners had gathered around the marble tomb that overlooked Cormac’s resting place and that housed Brendan and Bridget O’Malley, the progenitors of Wilsey’s O’Malley clan. I stood at the periphery of the mourners, between Joanne Montoya, who was covering the affair for the Gazette, and Todd Thorsten, at whose funeral parlor the viewing and wake had been held the night before. I had not been able to bring myself to go to the wake, knowing that I would have been staring at O’Malley’s hands, searching for clues. Todd had
told me once during an interview that sometimes the fingers had to be glued together if the arms were to be folded over the chest. I wondered if any ink spots on the thumbs would be visible.
The autumn air had grown colder. I shivered in my long black coat as I continued to make my mental notes:
A writer dies suddenly and unexpectedly, forcing the agent and his mortician accomplice to improvise, since they haven’t had time to prepare any volumes of their special editions for imprinting. They decide to bury the dead man in a cemetery where one of the agent’s previous clients and providers of thumbprints was buried, so that it will be easier to –
“See ya,” Joanne murmured to me as she snapped her notebook shut. Mourners were already wandering toward the waiting limousines and black-ribboned cars of the cortege. I nodded at Andrew as he approached.
“Good job on the wake,” Andrew said to Todd. “Too bad you weren’t there, Shanna.” His voice sounded menacing.
“Had a migraine,” I said quickly. “Guess I was more upset than I realized. Cormac O’Malley was one of the greats.”
“Too bad we didn’t have time to get a blurb from him for your novel.” Andrew shot me what looked like an especially hostile glare, but maybe I was imagining that.
I opened my mouth, about to say, “I know what you’re up to, Andrew. I know what happened with Dechen Thorsten and Mona Dart and Willy, and I’ve got my suspicions about Arturo Savoy, too. And if anything bad happens to me, I’ve got the whole story written down and it’ll automatically go off to the police, pronto.”
But I bit my lip and said nothing. All I really knew was that Andrew had hired somebody to dig up a grave and that he had arranged to put the thumbprints of dead writers on the title pages of books. Except for digging up a grave, I didn’t even know if any of that was illegal.
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