Death and the Lit Chick sm-2

by G. M. Malliet

Joan interpreted this correctly to mean Rachel's daughter was again having trouble with her legs. Varicose veins, most likely, from the three stone of extra weight she carried around since the twins arrived, but Joan would have stabbed herself with one of the tearoom's lovely pudding forks before saying so.

  "I see. You had to come down, did you?" she said.

  Rachel Twalley smiled. "Can I help it if they're the world's most beautiful-not to mention gifted and intelligent-grandchildren?" A waiter approached to verify they had enough hot water in the pot, then glided soundlessly away. Rachel looked around her at the white tablecloths and glittering glassware, sank further back in her plush chair, and sighed. This, indeed, was the life.

  "I'll be taking the train Thursday to Edinburgh," Joan said. "Should we arrange to travel together then?"

  Rachel shook her head.

  "Can't. I have to head back straightaway-even though most of the work for the conference is done. I'll never volunteer for this sort of thing again, I can tell you that. What with the program, registration, sponsorships, coordinating everything with the hotel-getting volunteers for all that is well nigh impossible these days. Then there's all the usual internecine squabbling. I should have known: The village fete last time took years off my life."

  "I wish you were staying with us at Dalmorton Castle," said Joan. "We could've treated ourselves to the mud cure, you and I."

  "I wish, too. I've always wanted to wallow in mud-in a manner of speaking. But I have to be on the ground at the Luxor, rallying the troops, who only lurch into action when someone is keeping an eye on them. I must say, it was jolly nice of your publisher to arrange all this for you. I've heard Dalmorton is such a lovely place."

  "It's all in lieu of bigger advances, you watch. I can't imagine why I'm included, to tell you the truth. Kimberlee Kalder is all that's on Lord Easterbrook's mind these days."

  "Humph," said Rachel. "I don't care if I never hear the name again."

  Joan smiled. "The cozy mystery is dead, haven't you heard?" She waved an imaginary (pink) flag. "Long live Chick Lit."

  "I tried to read that thing of hers," Rachel said, adding hastily, "I didn't buy it, never fear, I got it from the library. It was just absurd. Pink, and silly. 'Will he call, or won't he?' Romance via mobile and e-mail." She sniffed. "Not the way things were in my day. And what is it with the shoes, anyway? If I'd spent that kind of money on shoes my Harry'd have shown me the door tout de suite and no mistake, minister's wife or no. As for plot-the whole thing seemed more an excuse to skewer people she didn't like. Which seemed to be everyone."

  "But you read the whole thing," said Joan. It was a gentle question. Why shouldn't Rachel have read the whole thing? She'd have been nearly alone among the women-and many of the men-of the English-speaking nations had she not.

  Rachel, crinkling her face apologetically, admitted, "They are sort of like chocolates, those books. Actually, more like swallowing a box of licorice all-sorts. But I do try to move with the times. I don't exactly approve, mind."

  "Well, if there's one thing these books do prove," said Joan, "it's that men haven't improved one bit since we were girls."

  Rachel nodded somberly. "Have you met Kimberlee Kalder?"

  "Once."

  "Really? And what's she like?"

  Joan hesitated, toying with her butter knife. It went against her grain to disparage a fellow author. In the latest incident, Joan's American publisher had approached Kimberlee about writing a blurb for the back cover of Joan's latest book-since Joan had been instrumental in bringing Kimberlee to the attention of the Americans. But Kimberlee had flat-out refused. As the publisher reported later, Kimberlee's exact words were, "There's nothing in it for me, so why in hell should I?"

  "What is Kimberlee Kalder like, you ask?" Joan looked straight at Rachel. "Pure poison."

  VII

  Lord Easterbrook sat at his desk, staring at a spreadsheet on his monitor, scrolling back and forth with his computer mouse to read the numbers in the outer columns. He accidentally struck the wrong key and the whole thing disappeared. He let out a bellow that set the eighteenth-century glass rattling in the windowpanes.

  His youthful assistant, well-used to these technical emergencies, came rushing in-a pretty girl in her mid-twenties, dressed in black and white. A no-nonsense type whose crisp demeanor nicely kept Easterbrook's querulousness at bay. She'd become adept at coping whenever he threw his toys out of the pram. Now she deftly tapped at Easterbrook's keyboard until the vanished document reappeared.

  "Haven't I told you then?" she said. "Stay away from that delete key and you'll be fine."

  "I was never near the blasted delete key. Print the infernal thing out for me, will you? On good old-fashioned paper. Oh, and tell my wife I'll be late."

  "Yes, sir." And the young woman went to do as she was told. Her great-gran was the same way: She'd never quite resigned herself to any invention introduced since the telephone, and even that she thought was full of "rays," whatever that meant.

  Left alone five minutes later, Lord Easterbrook perused the rescued document, now safely consigned to paper. On the mend, he thought, on the mend. Like Scholastic before J. K. Rowling came along, his was a tiny press, its prestige and respectability owing more to longevity than anything like profitability. Who, after all, would expect to turn anything like a real profit on a house specializing in crime novels?

  Rumor had long had it in the City that Easterbrook simply kept Deadly Dagger Press on as a rich man's hobby. Like those fools knew anything, he thought. But then, Kimberlee Kalder had come along, rising from the submission pile like-well, like Venus rising from the sea. That his assistant, not he, had recognized the potential at once was something he often conveniently forgot. Thanks to Kimberlee, silly name and all, Dagger was, to continue the metaphor, afloat.

  Not that Easterbrook had ever actually read Kimberlee's book. The balance sheets were the only required reading on his night table.

  But what the deuce was taking the girl so long with the next manuscript? he wondered now. It's not as if she were writing Pride and Prejudice, for God's sake. The last time they'd spoken on the phone she'd been decidedly cagey about that. "Wasn't quite ready," she'd said. "A bit more of a rewrite on the end, I think," she'd said.

  It was balderdash, of course. She was out shopping for a new agent, and a new publisher, if the rumors from the publishing trenches were true. Which was why he'd had the sudden inspiration for this pre-conference gathering, and the little award to keep her happy. A chance to talk with her in person.

  The personal touch, yes, that's what was needed.

  He looked at the figures, mostly black now instead of red.

  Leave Dagger, would she, and break her contract? Well, we'd just see about that.

  If the personal touch didn't work, there were always other means.

  VIII

  In a beautiful flat high above the Thames, Magretta Sincock stared at the screen of her own computer with none of the complacency of Lord Easterbrook, just across the water in his counting house. She reread the e-mail several times, blinking in disbelief. Perhaps it was spam, a cruel hoax? But the return e-mail address indicated clearly enough it was from Ludwig's, her American publisher. And the body of the e-mail said clearly enough that regrettably, they would not be picking up the American rights to her next manuscript. But they wished her well in her future endeavors.

  Well, that at least was something, after thirty bloody years, thought Magretta. That well wishing certainly made all the difference.

  They were dropping her by e-mail. Not in person, saving someone the airfare to London. Not even with the minor expense of letterhead and airmail postage. They were dropping her. Her.

  After a very long while, Magretta got up from her desk and walked to the French doors of her aerie. Barely feeling the blast of cold, she stood looking down at the brown river, churning up a whitish foam as it eternally snaked its way through London. Anyone looking up from the ships below would have
thought they were seeing a large tropical bird perched on the balcony, bedecked in an array of green plumage. Magretta's large red crest of hair would have added to the illusion.

  The conference in Edinburgh, to which she had so been looking forward, she now viewed with dread. They would all know, all her fellow scribes, everyone connected with this wretched industry. Probably knew before she herself was sent that miserable e-mail, bad news traveling faster in the publishing world than in any other. She'd have to call her agent.

  But he should have called me. Jay must have known this was coming. This was all his fault. If he'd kept his mind on his job…

  Still, she had to go show the flag, since Lord Easterbrook had invited her. She at least could still count on her British publisher.

  Couldn't she?

  IX

  St. Germaine's had been in existence so long it was the one restaurant everyone in Cambridge, rich and poor alike, had heard of. The ruder the maitre d', the wider grew its fame, and the more wealthy patrons schemed and plotted to secure a reservation.

  There were exceptions to the reservation rules, but only the owner, Mr. Garoute, knew what they were. Solving the murder by poisoning of the restaurant's sous-chef and thus saving St. Germaine's from certain financial ruin was clearly top of his list. Mr. G. always, therefore, held a table open for DCI Arthur St. Just, knowing the unpredictable schedule of the Inspector, and he always greeted him with rapturous cries of joy-cries that would have astounded his business competitors, who only saw Mr. G.'s flintier side.

  It so happened today was St. Just's birthday, a fact he himself had nearly forgotten until his sister's birthday card arrived that morning, and which fact he found somewhat depressing once he'd been reminded. Dinner at Saint Germaine's was his effort to shake off the pall of being forty-three-a boring age with neither a here nor a there to it, he thought.

  To make matters rather worse and himself grumpier, his new Chief Constable, Brougham-her motto was, predictably, "A New Brougham Sweeps Clean," and she was given to using terms like "Crime Management," which set St. Just's teeth on edge-had conscripted him into giving a presentation in Edinburgh as part of her "Reach Out!" public relations campaign. He was to speak at a crime writers' conference, for God's sake, on the subject of police procedure. Rooms at the conference hotel already being sold out, his sergeant had booked him a room at Dalmorton Castle for the weekend. St. Just grinned, wondering how the Chief was going to like it if she saw that bill.

  Once St. Just had been settled behind a hastily assembled fortress of gleaming glassware, cutlery, table linens, and menus the size of Moses' tablets, he took a moment to survey his surroundings, peering about in the dark, candlelit room like a mole adjusting to daylight. As he was just emerging from his last case, which had lasted many hectic weeks, that was close to describing how he felt.

  Mr. G. always took into account St. Just's preference for an unobtrusive table away from the action, where he could sit and indulge his penchant for people watching.

  To his right: an animated young couple, perhaps celebrating some sentimental anniversary of a first meeting, the young man resplendent in what may have been his first suit, she beautiful in the way all twenty-somethings in love are beautiful, irradiated by the glow of first infatuation and a little too much makeup.

  To his left an older couple, perhaps in their late thirties, provided a contrast, a living tableau of aggrievedness, warning of the dangers that might lie ahead for the young lovers. The older pair sat in a sulking silence, their meal eaten mechanically, with little evidence of pleasure. Their thoughts might have been on absent lovers or the terms of their imminent divorce. Or even, thought the detective, on murder.

  At a far table in the opposite corner from his a woman sat, her head bent over a sheaf of papers as she waited for her companion. She made the occasional note in the margin of a page using a Montblanc fountain pen-St. Just could just make out the white six-pointed star on the cap. But by the time St. Just had finished his first course, she was still alone and he was growing alarmed. It was no way to treat a lady, for a lady she clearly was, and St. Just's sense of outrage at this cad-like behavior on the part of her missing companion almost could not be contained. St. Just generally disliked dining alone in public and rarely did so, which was why he was glad to have Mr. G.'s discreet little table at his disposal. Unthinkable then, for this woman to be treated so shabbily by a husband or companion.

  Still, the woman herself did not seem perturbed by this social disgrace, calmly setting aside her papers as her meal arrived, and only reverting to them again once her coffee had been brought. Most people, women especially, he felt, would have hidden behind a book the whole time, lacking the savoir faire to dine alone. He found her self-possession fascinating, and he began committing her details to memory for later rendering on his sketch pad. She was not a classic beauty, he decided. Still, it was hard not to stare at her. Maybe this was where all those years of surveillance training paid off, he thought wryly. But she did seem oblivious. Probably, she was used to being stared at.

  She looked the type of woman who had found her style years ago and kept it: long dark hair pulled back, with escaping tendrils feathering an oval face, darker brows framing somewhat hooded eyes, an apparent absence of makeup aside from deep red lipstick against translucent, marmoreal skin. He was to learn that she always wore long earrings that accentuated her long white neck; this evening the earrings were silver and spun like wind chimes whenever she moved.

  Her companion never arrived and she seemed in no hurry to leave. St. Just, wanting to extend the time he had to observe her (as he thought, unobtrusively), ordered a second coffee that would keep him awake into the wee hours, trying to recapture in his sketchbook the angles and planes of this lovely creature's profile.

  He would have been chagrined to know that while Portia De'Ath noted with amusement the tall, barrel-chested man staring at her with wounded eyes, she herself slept that night like a baby.

  PART II: UNITED STATES

  I

  "What is it now, Annabelle?"

  B. A. King, publicist and former literary agent, studied his new manicure, while reflecting on the problems of having a former lover as a client, especially a lover/client like Annabelle Pace. The chief problem was that there was never a decent out, not that decency was a quality B. A. prized too highly.

  "Don't use that tone with me," came a voice over the phone at a volume calibrated to shatter B. A.'s whiskey glass. "You've got me signing books in some godforsaken town no one ever heard of in a store no one can find. I drive around for two hours and when I finally get there, ten people show up and half of them thought they were there for Patricia Fucking Cornwell. The other shoppers skittered around me like I was harboring the Ebola virus. You call this a promotional tour?"

  B. A. sighed heavily. How many times? "It's not the readers here in New York you need to cultivate," he said patiently-for him. "It's the people in the heartland who never heard of you. Name recognition comes by increments. There is no such thing as overnight fame."

  "Tell that to Monica Lewinsky. I want you to cancel the rest of this tour. Whether you cancel it or not, I'm not showing up."

  "That will certainly add to the fund of goodwill you've been building up with the independent bookshops. Listen, Annabelle. You've only got two more days and then you have to get on a plane to Scotland anyway. If you think they haven't heard of you in Iowa, just imagine the reception you'll get in Scotland. But that's exactly the point of getting yourself out there. So you will become better known by the people who've never heard of you yet. Do you follow me?"

  Somewhat mollified, or rather, somewhat deeper into the wine bottle she'd ordered from room service, Annabelle said, a wheedling note in her voice: "You will be there, won't you? You did promise."

  "Of course, darling Annabelle. Your invitation to Easterbrook's little fling is something I'll be busy exploiting to the fullest. It's quite an honor he included you, you know. You're the only
American on the list. Well, apart from Tom Brackett and his wife. And, I suppose, Joan Elksworthy-she lives here now, even though she's from Scotland or somewhere."

  "Well, that's four of us, even if you don't count Kimberlee Kalder," said Annabelle. "She's half American, I've heard. In fact, I've been hearing too much about her lately. She must have one hell of a publicist."

  "Not at all, Annabelle. Some books sell by word of mouth."

  He felt somehow it would be wisest not to mention that his main-his only-interest in being in Scotland was the opportunity it afforded him to talk with Kimberlee and see if he couldn't woo her into his stable. Not that Annabelle wasn't perfectly aware of that. Yet another of the pitfalls of having a former lover as a client: She simply knew him too well.

  "What exactly is that supposed to mean? My books sell by word of mouth."

  He supposed she had a point: For grizzly autopsy scenes it was hard to beat Annabelle and her "plucky, zany, forensic-scientist sleuth," as Lord Easterbrook's marketing department would have it. And maybe the mistakes Annabelle rather famously made in writing about police and medical procedure caused the pros to snap up her latest for a good laugh.

  "What's that you say? We're losing the signal." A near impossibility, since he was on a land line, but hopefully she wouldn't recall that.

  "See you on Thursday, then," he shouted into the phone. "'Bye!"

  He hung up hastily, just in time to miss the next salvo.

  It was time to get rid of Annabelle, he decided. One way or the other.

  II

  Further down the coast, in Washington, D.C., warmed by a fire of pinon wood imported from the Southwest, Tom and Edith Brackett were discussing the upcoming conference over a scotch and soda (him) and an herbal tea (her).