by Declan Finn
Prada smirked, and his academic veneer was back, just mildly coated with sweat. “In which case, I can prove it. Because if I were truly the killer, you would have had records that I came back to my room after he was murdered.”
He shook his head. “Except for the ice bucket bracket.”
“The what?”
The Puppy side of the room started chuckling, already several steps ahead of Prada.
“Haven't you ever looked at your hotel room door at the Hilton?” Sean asked. “You don't have a door chain, you have a metal bracket that served the same fashion, you just flip it over onto the male piece on the door. There's a small metal plate against the door that lines up where the metal latch is. That plate is there to protect the door when someone flips the metal bar closed and they shut the door on it. It's a trick many guests use when they want to step away from the door for a minute without bringing their key. Or without making an entry that would be noted on computer records.”
Prada's eyes narrowed. “It's not enough for an arrest.”
“I don't have to arrest you, Johnny,” Sean explained. “I just have to destroy you. I like justice, you see. And well, what could be more just than doing to you what would have been done anyway?” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “After a more thorough search of the room, I found this. On it, is Jerry Friedman's last revenge. You see, Jerry was old, and tired, and his career rode hard upon the success of his Furballs. You could say he was one of the more overrated writers in science fiction history. In fact, there have been some here who have noted that he hasn't written anything of quality since then. So here he is, at the end of his life, and he has little to show for it, so he's going to want some additional cash, in order to enjoy his retirement. And you happened to have some extra kicking around, didn't you, Johnny? A $3.4-million book deal with ROT for ten years and 13 books.
“But that isn't exactly a good deal of money for a best-selling author, is it, Johnny? They're not even expecting a return much more than a quarter million for each book. ROT doesn't really put much faith in you, Johnny. At a point when they're worried about a massive boycott, why shell out that much money for someone of your miniscule talents? Unless it was a payoff.”
“For what?” Terry Smith-Smythe-Smits barked.
“That's easy,” Gary Castelo answered. “If I may, Mister Ryan?”
Sean stood aside and gestured for the author to take his best shot. “Knock yourself out, Gary.”
“Prada here sent his SMURF minions out to destroy our nominees during last year's ceremony. The Hubbles had been a block of ROT Books for years until we came along. If we were blocked by a slate of No Award voters, ROT could have a hope in hell of making it this year. The Hubbles may be one of the few things keeping ROT afloat. Johnny here did anything in his power to make sure that ROT kept that monopoly. Am I close, Johnny?”
“Add to that,” Sean continued, “one other thing. You're married, aren't you, Prada? Did Jerry also threaten to tell your wife you two were together?”
Everyone in the room went very still, and looked at Sean. Teapot and Daalman even looked up from their phones.
Prada blinked. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Real or imagined, just the threat of that must have sent you into sweats.” Sean raised the paper again. “He had you dead to rights, didn't he? He was willing to expose you and get a cut of your money.” He pointed the paper at Patti and Terry Smith-Smythe-Smits. “Couldn't tell them, could you? They'd do their best to cut you loose and deny even knowing you if that happened.”
Prada's eyes finally broke from Sean's glare. He looked around for anyone to come to his aid. Even Daalman and Teacup looked up from their iPhones long enough to give him a glare.
“You can't think I had anything to do with this.” He looked to his publishers and their minion. “You can't. I didn't kill Jerry. I loved Jerry.” He looked to Sean. “And you know I didn't kill Adler. I was in the banquet, along with everyone else.”
Sean smiled. “Yes, but I never said you killed Kendall Adler. And I never said you killed Yama Marshman, either. Those are different killers. But you killed Jerry Friedman, and if the cops can't prove it when they drill down on you”— Sean raised the paper again— “then I can get you on this. I don't need to throw you in jail, I just need to destroy you.”
Prada looked from Sean to the paper, his eyes wide with fear, and easily read desperation. “It wasn't true.”
“Which part? The kickbacks or your affair with Friedman?”
“Either—”
“Not good enough,” Sean barked sharply.
“He wanted money,” Prada said, talking as fast as his mind could generate the story. “He'd been molesting me for years. He's been molesting people for years—adult fans, young boys—I can prove it. I can prove all of it. Just check my home computer. I have all of the evidence there of everything he's done over time.”
“Then why didn't you counter-blackmail him?”
Prada scoffed. “You think he cared about allegations that are beyond the statute of limitations? No one would care. It's not like he was a Catholic priest. I had to kill him. I just couldn't take it anymore. He tried again that night, and I—I just had to kill him. I had to end it.”
Sean stared at him a moment, nodded, and looked over to Athena Marcowitz. “We got that?”
She waited a moment, listening into her earpiece. “Yes.”
“Good.” Sean crumpled up the paper into a ball with one hand. “Thank you, Mister Prada, you're done. Please report outside to the police.”
Prada watched the paper ball fly in an arc to a wastepaper basket. “I don't understand. Isn't that evidence?”
Sean grinned. “Why? There was nothing on it. Didn't say there was, was it? I just said it was Jerry's last revenge.”
Prada gaped. “But what about the sex—”
“Oh, I saw you and Friedman together. Little touches between the two of you. During your appearance at the Hubbles, you were doing it onstage. Here, you were doing it in public. You thought I didn't see it, did you?” Sean grinned. “I saw it all right, but the rest of the motive? It was all supposition until you confessed, and that's on record. Just in case you don't realize exactly how screwed you are? Jerry Friedman had been impotent for years, and his heart couldn't take Viagra. It would have been difficult for him to have raped you. Ever. Good luck with that at trial.”
Chapter 24: Hoodwinked
Prada blinked. Once, twice, then lunged out of his chair and went for Sean's throat. Sean sidestepped the move, and straight-armed him, dropping him to the floor. Sean kicked him over on his back, making sure that Prada was out before continuing. Jesse James smiled, opened his laptop, and started writing. Omar Gunderson stood, grabbed Prada, and dragged his sorry ass to the back of the room, so he could lie between Galadren and Boyle.
“Where was I?” Sean asked, seemingly confused. “Oh, yes, victim the second, Kendall Adler. Now this was a woman who was holding onto her job by her fingernails, on a good day. Let's face it, the bloody woman was going to alienate everybody at the rate she was going. Insulting authors she worked with? Insulting books published by her company? Insulting other professionals within the industry? To heck with losing her job at ROT, she was in danger of burning bridges within the publishing field.
“Now this one was more complicated, and yet the complexity made this one easier to solve, not harder. Electrostatic analysis of the floor showed us exactly what happened.”
“What do you mean?” Jesse James asked, finally looking up from his computer. “You realize that those things only work over floors that haven't been marched over by half the population of Atlanta. Even if it was just her carpet, that would require that everything in the room have almost perfect conditions for it.”
“You're right. But it did,” Sean answered. “The maid had a habit of vacuuming backwards on the way out the door. And since—well, a convention—you can tell that Ad
ler wasn't in the room until after the room was cleaned. From the time she left in the morning, until the time she returned to get dressed, once more when she was murdered.
“In this case, footprints revealed something odd—it looked like Kendall had walked into the room, to the balcony, and back to the door of her room. Strange, huh? Why would anyone do that? And of course, from there, there was a fight that wandered over parts of the room.
“Of course, we know that there will be big empty spaces in the room. And there will be one area that's one big scuff mark, since there was a fight, right there on the floor. But we do know that whoever attacked her had to have been behind her to start with, because she ended up being pushed into a wall just inside her door. Not a lot of room to maneuver when you're doing it in that little hallway there. There's the bathroom, the closet, then there's the open ground.”
“Hold it,” Terry objected. “I sent her upstairs to get my headache pills. No one could have known that Adler was going there. They must have been up there, lying in wait. There was no way to know when she was going to go into her room. I don't even know why she went into her room.”
Sean grinned. “Thanks for cutting to the point. You just lied. You said you left something in her room. And the only way someone could have known when Adler was going to show up in the room is if they arranged it … like you arranged it.”
Terry's eyes bugged out of her head. “Whaaat?”
“What you did was send Kendall to her room for something you claimed to have left there. You planned it. Those footprints from the balcony to the door? They weren't Adler's, but yours. You had the room next to hers, so it would have been easy to hop from your balcony to hers.”
“Ridiculous!” she bellowed.
Sean shook his head. “Nope. Not really. I noticed when we first met, you have really rough hands.”
“So what!” she barked like a rottweiler, only not as cuddly.
Sean smiled. “Have you kept up with a lot of your gymnastics from high school?”
Terry blanched, and Sean continued. “It wasn't hard to figure out. Back when I was a stuntman, half of the women I worked with had hands like yours. Spending half your life in high school on a balance beam will do that. It would also make it easy for you to slide in through the balcony windows. You then hopped from your balcony to hers, and entered through her balcony doors. I mean, who really takes the effort to lock those? It's not like anyone is going to break in through there, are they?” He smiled. “You walked into the room, straight for the door, opened the door for your hunchback Moshevsky over there. You had him sit in the closet for hours, waiting for him to make his move, for when Kendall Adler came back during the Banquet. He could kill her—in private—and give you an alibi, Terry Smith-Smythe-Smits.”
Terry Smith-Smythe-Smits blinked, noting that this was the first time that he had actually called her by name. But she rallied, and scoffed. “That presumes I needed an alibi. Or had a motive to kill her. I don't need or have either.”
“Ah, Terry, dear, you're just stupid. I'm not accusing you. I have you. You are finished. I have your footprints, in the room, and no one else with the ability to do it. You even used women's shoes and not boots this time, in hopes that no one would see that your shoes were different from hers, but we noted, madam. She wore a stiletto heel that night. You wore flats. That creates two different sets of prints on the floor.”
Patty Smith-Smythe-Smits rose, reaching behind him. The soft-spoken, weak one of the two publishers had his hand under his jacket as he said, “You can't talk to my wife like—”
Sean didn't even look at Patty. He used only his peripheral vision to deliver a side kick into the publisher's chest. Patty fell backwards, crashing on his ass. “Shut it, douchebag,” Sean told him. “You're on the hook for murder, especially if you were reaching for what I think you were.”
He focused his entire attention on Terry Smith-Smythe-Smits, as he leaned in close. “But you, madam, are screwed. When I figured out how it must have happened, I started wondering why would anyone kill their own employee? Certainly, Kendall Adler was a threat to ROT profits, and thus your job. But still, fire her ass and be done. Why not? How could you have not fired her?
“But like with Jerry Friedman, she had blackmail, didn't she? Different blackmail, certainly. And it was the fact that you and Fred Moshevsky decided to get cute.”
“Cute?” Moshevsky the hunchback asked. “We'f never done cute, have we, mythress?”
“To start with,” Sean continued, “I looked at the SWAT incidents Matt Kovach wrote up.”
“Which ones?” Kovach asked. “I've done so many.”
“Minions of the Puppy-Punters.” Sean broke eye contact with Terry Smith-Smythe-Smits to glance at Kovach. “Tell me again how you wrote it.”
The writer shrugged. “I just went out and wrote what I thought was funny.”
“Did you look up Terry Smith-Smythe-Smits or Fred Moshevsky here?”
Kovach shook his head. “Nope. Didn't know what they looked like. Didn't know what they sounded like, didn't know anything about them aside from what they've written online, and some of their public actions.”
“That's what I wondered,” Sean absently thought aloud. He looked back and forth, addressing everyone in the audience, both Puppy and Punter alike. “You see, everything in Tearful Puppies Bite Back was a parody. But it was also the key to everything.”
Kovach leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Oh? Really? What exactly did I do?”
Sean didn't answer directly, but continued addressing everyone. “You see, in the parody, everything and everybody was grossly exaggerated. Colonel Bradley didn't have bloodstained crosses on his front lawn. Jesse James' kids don't actually run around tackling SWAT teams. Cryomancer never had someone penetrate her house—she lives on an army base with her husband. Not even the Punters look exactly like how they do in his stories.”
Sean glared at the hunchback, Fred Moshevsky. “Except for him. He is exactly like the parody. Without looking up his appearance or how he talked, Kovach went out of his way to simply make an Igor ripoff, and that's exactly what you two delivered: Igor.” He looked at Moshevsky. “You screwed up in one major respect, Freddy: you couldn't remember where your hump should go. Every time I saw you, it was on a different shoulder, or right over your spine, down the center line.”
Sean stepped closer. “After that, it was a simple matter of siccing one of my people, Wilhelmina Goldberg, on you. She needed only a little time to look up some pics and audio of you online. But we finally found the proof that you're not a hunchback, have no lisp, and you don't have a limp. So we had perfectly straight footprints in the room, and you were able to move quick enough to go from one end of the Con to the next without being slowed by a limp. And it's a convention, it's perfect. Anyone who knows you and saw you around here, you could just say you were Cosplaying—maybe even playing yourself from Kovach's parody.
“From that point on, we knew one simple thing: you could have sat in Adler's closet without a problem. You weren't limited in your physical ability to strangle her. And you don't have an alibi. You were hoping we'd dismiss you because of a presumed disability. You thought that we'd look at your hunch, and know you couldn't have done it. Oops. Sorry, sucker. You're screwed.”
“Oh well,” Moshevsky said.
The minion of ROT Publishing rose from his chair, and shrugged off both the jacket and his hump. He caught the hump, and without any ado, swung for Sean.
Sean hopped backwards, over the body of Patty Smith-Smythe-Smits, letting the hump smack NKV Daalman right in the face. She tumbled backwards. Moshevsky raised the hump again, only to trip over Patty’s body. Sean stepped out of his way as he fell, and then simply stomped the back of his head.
Sean shrugged. “Where was I?”
“Motive,” Kovach said.
Sean nodded. “Oh, yes. Motive. That was something else I thought odd from Kovach's parody. No one made mention of one thing out of it
. There was a blatant accusation that ROT Books sicced Yama Marshman on the rest of the world of the Puppies. And you people would throw massive fits if the Puppies blinked funny, but you didn't say one word over the thought that Moshevsky contacted a psychopathic stalker like Yama Marshman to SWAT everybody on the Puppies side. I found that odd. And then, I remembered that there would have been two defenses Kovach had at his disposal.”
At that point, even Kovach blinked. “Aside from parody being covered as free speech? What are you talking about?”
“What would they have sued your for?”
“Libel, I guess,” Kovach said. “Though slander is also possible, especially if I did an audio version of it.”
“Exactly. And what's one major defense against that?”
Colonel Bradley laughed. “You mean intent to malign someone? Come on, the Supreme Court nearly made it impossible to sue someone for defamation of character decades ago. Not only do you have to prove it's false, you'd also have to prove that the person involved deliberately intended to malign the person in question. You can't prove what's in someone's head.”
Sean smiled. “Exactly.”
Gary Castelo blinked, and looked at Sean, then looked around to see if anyone knew what the hell he was talking about. “What exactly are you saying?”
“What would be worse for ROT Books? Kovach bitching about something in a satire—or suing him, and the discovery process that followed?”
Sean walked over to Moshevsky, dropped to one knee beside him, and reached into his pockets. He pulled out Moshevsky's cell phone, then pressed his thumb print to the cell phone. Moshevsky woke briefly, and fought, so Sean broke Moshevsky's thumb, then continued.
“You have missed 20 calls from Yama Marshman,” Sean read from the phone. He stood. “I'm sure if we start drilling down on Marshman's contacts at home, or find a burner phone, we'll find a lot of 911 calls on it. Or even better, we'll have the 911 operators compare notes with Marshman's voice mail message.” He smiled.
