The Agency

by Ally O'Brien

  If I sound cavalier and sarcastic, there’s a reason for it. I’m innocent. I never slept with Lowell, I never went to his apartment, and I certainly never helped him play a game of hangman’s fellatio. I didn’t do a damn thing, so when Hadley tells me he found my fingerprints in Lowell’s apartment, I know he’s lying. Rule number one: Never believe a word that comes out of a cop’s mouth.

  I told him all that before he could start with his questions. Hadley just sat there while I protested. You’re wrong. I was never there. No way you found my fingerprints. And then something occurred to me.

  “How’d you get my fingerprints anyway?” I asked.

  Hadley shrugged, as if it were so easy it was hardly worth telling me how he did it. “Remember that woman in the park who asked you for directions? She was one of mine.”

  “Her map was sticky,” I remembered.

  “So we had a very nice fingerprint sample,” Hadley said, a tiny smug smile under his mustache.

  “Okay,” I told him. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I was never in Lowell’s apartment.”

  Hadley sighed loudly. The kind of sigh that says you’re a liar and you know it and I know it, so why keep playing games? Except I wasn’t lying.

  “There were two glasses of wine on the coffee table,” Hadley told me. “One had Lowell’s prints on it. The other had yours.”

  “No way.”

  “I can show you the lab report if you’d like.”

  I thought about saying yes, but I don’t read enough Jeffery Deaver novels to understand all this stuff. I tried to make sense of this. Either he was lying, or I was being set up.

  “Look, Inspector, I was never there, but I’ve drunk a lot of wine in my life, so maybe someone put it there. And, besides, would I be stupid enough to leave my fingerprints sitting there for you to find?”

  “You’d be surprised how stupid people can be.”

  Well, that’s true.

  “So, what, I panicked while giving him a midair blow job?” I asked. “Is that what you think? He kicked the bucket, and I ran?”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “No.”

  “Are you saying it was an accident?”

  “I’m saying I wasn’t there.”

  “It’s funny you should mention oral sex,” Hadley said. “Exactly how did you know that Mr. Bardwright had been receiving oral sex prior to his death?”

  Shit!

  “It was a figure of speech,” I said.

  “Like the corset and high heels joke? That was just a figure of speech, too?”

  I felt my face getting hot. “Yes.”

  “Interesting,” Hadley said. Then he added, “Tell me about your dealings with the Santelli Agency in Milan.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I believe there were allegations that you were rigging deals for Italian publishing rights and getting kickbacks,” Hadley said. “This was about two months ago.”

  “Yes, and it was bullshit,” I snapped. “Complete crap.”

  And it was. An Italian publisher in Rome raised a stink when he lost three deals in a row to a competitor, and Leonardo Santelli and I got caught in a nasty war of accusations and threats between the two archrivals. Sally had warned me about these guys, but I hadn’t listened. You shouldn’t get caught between two pit bulls in a fight, and you never want to land in the middle of an Italian blood feud. These guys fight dirty. Filing pointless lawsuits. Buying off each other’s corrupt politicians. Sleeping with each other’s mistresses.

  I told Hadley all about it.

  “How was it resolved?” he asked.

  “I finally said a pox on both your houses. I don’t deal with either of them anymore.”

  “Did Mr. Bardwright know about the allegation of kickbacks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he speak to you about it?”

  “Yes, of course. I told him what I told you. There was no truth to it. It was complete fabrication.”

  “So the matter was closed?”

  “Yes.”

  Hadley nodded. “Why would Mr. Bardwright have an e-mail about this issue open on the laptop computer in his home office?”

  “What?”

  “He had an e-mail about you and the alleged Italian kickbacks on his machine. It was on the screen when we booted it up.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. We put that issue to bed weeks ago.”

  “If the allegation of kickbacks were true, what would that mean for your reputation in the industry? It would be devastating, wouldn’t it?”

  “The allegations weren’t true,” I told him.

  “If they were true, or if people thought they were true, that would give Mr. Bardwright rather a lot of leverage over you, I should think.”

  “They weren’t true,” I repeated.

  “Would you sleep with your boss to keep something like that quiet? Is that worthy of blackmail?”

  “Fuck you,” I snapped.

  This was probably the point where he expected me to break down and sob and confess. Except I had nothing to confess. Well, not about Lowell, anyway. My list of sins would keep a priest busy for hours, but murder, kickbacks, and erotic asphyxia are not among them.

  Hadley smoothed his thinning gray hair. He sipped his god-awful coffee and slowly turned pages in a file folder on his desk. He had an aura of serene calm. I hate people who are calm. If you don’t wear your heart on your sleeve, I’m not sure you’re really alive.

  “Remember that dress you said you lost at the cleaners?” Hadley asked. “The one you wore to the Christmas party where Lowell had his arm around your waist in that photograph in the Bookseller?”

  “Yes,” I repeated. “What about it?”

  “We found it in Lowell’s closet.”

  “Get the fuck out of here!” I said in a voice that was way too loud. I’m not averse to the F word, but you can tell I’m riled if I use it twice in less than a minute.

  Once again, Hadley ignored my outburst. “This, again, is interesting, because you say you’ve never been in his apartment.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “So your dress and your fingerprints went there without you?” Hadley asked.

  “You did not find that dress. You are lying to me, Inspector, and I’m tired of it. Quit trying to play head games with me.”

  He passed me a photo of the dress without saying a word. It was definitely mine. I thought about asking to get it back, because I missed that dress, and I was really pissed that the cleaners had lost it. But I figured I would be pushing my luck.

  “Okay, someone is setting me up,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Really. That was when it hit me. This wasn’t a game. This was dead serious, and Lowell was the one who was dead. Someone had killed him, and whoever did it wanted me to take the fall. Someone had given me a motive and put in a lot of effort to make it appear that I was inside Lowell’s apartment. I realized that Hadley was right. Lowell ran an agency that made deals worth millions of pounds. For some people, that was worth killing over.

  I could think of only one person who would stand to gain from this kind of conspiracy. Cosima.

  Cosima, who had bought her way into Lowell’s agency and was tired of waiting for him to step down. Cosima, who had plans of world domination that didn’t mesh with Lowell’s laissez-faire attitude of keeping the agency just the way it had been for forty years.

  Cosima, who said she would bury me if I dared to leave Bardwright and go out on my own.

  Maybe her threat was more real than I imagined.

  I realized I was sitting there like a deer frozen on the highway, about to get flattened by a lorry, and Hadley was watching me.

  “Who would want to set you up?” he asked me.

  Just tell him, I thought to myself. Give him Cosima’s name. Except if I knew Cosima, she had covered her tracks from here to Canterbury, and she had probably already told Hadley to expect that I would poin
t the finger in her direction. And who knows, maybe I was wrong.

  But I wasn’t wrong. Not a chance.

  “I have no idea, but I’ve told you the truth, Inspector. I was never in Lowell’s apartment.” I tried to sound sincere. I hope I pulled it off.

  “The strange thing is, I believe you,” Hadley said.

  “You do?”

  “I do.”

  I felt a surge of relief, but I reminded myself of rule number one: Never believe anything the police tell you.

  “There’s a way we can clear this up,” Hadley continued.

  “Oh?” I was suspicious.

  “Give us a DNA sample.”

  “DNA? Why?”

  “We found DNA in Mr. Bardwright’s apartment. We’d like to compare it to yours.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “Well, no offense, Inspector, but if someone was able to plant a wineglass with my fingerprints and a stolen dress, why couldn’t they find a way to plant my DNA, too?”

  Hadley’s lips curled into something like a smile again. “This DNA would have been exceptionally difficult to plant.”

  “Oh?”

  “It was saliva.”

  Okay, well, I didn’t know how Cosima would have gotten her claws on my saliva, unless she followed me on a jog through the park and caught me when I swallowed wrong and had to spit. Even so.

  “You can get saliva from lots of places, can’t you?” I asked.

  “The issue is more where we found the saliva,” Hadley told me.

  “Where was that?”

  “On Mr. Bardwright’s penis,” he said.

  Thank God I wasn’t drinking coffee. I would have spit it out. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I was never in Lowell’s apartment, and I never had my lips around his dick, I’ll tell you that.” I’m not at all averse to oral sex, but Lowell? God, no.

  “So let us sample your DNA,” Hadley said.

  “How do you do that? Do I pee in a cup or something?”

  “Nothing like that. It’s a simple matter of a cotton swab on the inside of your mouth.”

  “Will you buy me dinner first?” I asked.

  Hadley actually smiled.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure. Swab away.”

  I knew I was going to tell my father about all this tonight, and he was probably going to tell me I had made some serious mistakes. It wouldn’t be the first time he had told me that, and it wouldn’t be the first time he was right.

  I was still innocent, but I wasn’t feeling very cavalier anymore.

  24

  I FINALLY MADE IT to my office in the middle of Friday afternoon. I was seriously sleep deprived. I read once that sleep is a major physiological and psychological function in many if not all mammals, and the more you run away from it, the more it catches up with you. Even so, I had miles to go before I could sleep. More miles than I even realized at the time, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

  My day, which had started out poorly, did not get better in the office. The first voice mail message on my phone was from Felicia Castro.

  “Don’t think you’ve won, you cunt,” she told me. I could hear the clinking of glasses and party conversations in the background, and so I figured she was still at the Waverly when she left me the message. “I talked to Tom. I told him what a lying bitch you are. I told him what a piece of shit the book is. I told him not to waste his time. He’s going to throw it away.”

  Click.

  Felicia sounded angry and drunk. I hoped that she was just messing with me and that she wouldn’t risk her relationship with Cruise by arguing over Singularity. If you’re a smart manager, you drop it when your client overrules you. Even so, Felicia hates me, and I’ve begun to realize that people who hate me do so with unusual ferocity. So I was depressed to think that she might really have found a way to get Tom to ignore the book.

  I wasn’t sure now whether to tell Oliver and get his hopes up by giving him the story about Cruise. I decided not to call him right away.

  Big mistake.

  The next message was from Dorothy. She wanted an update. I called her back, and for the first time, I was pleased when she didn’t answer and there was no way for me to leave a message. What could I tell her? Dorothy, it’s Tess. Say, there’s no way you might have plagiarized that million-selling book of yours, is there? Call me. No, I wasn’t eager to ask my best client if she was a fraud. I still thought the Milton manuscript was a fake, but I was seriously out of my league and needed help. It was time to bring in the cavalry. I called a copyright lawyer I know at an intellectual property boutique and told him we needed to meet. Soon.

  Next I called my father. Suggested dinner. He’s part journalist, part politician, which means he never gives away any secrets in his voice. He said yes without letting me hear a hint of surprise or disapproval, but he knows I never call unless I have a problem. I hung up, feeling guilty, as if I had nicked a candy bar from the corner store. I’m thirty-six and felt like I was nine. My father could give Donald Trump pangs of self-doubt.

  I looked up and saw Emma in my doorway. Her long bare legs reminded me of New York skyscrapers. She had one pencil behind her ear, sticking out from a sea of red curls, and another pencil in her mouth like a dog bone.

  “We’re already hearing back on Duopoly,” Emma told me. She didn’t have the look of someone who was about to announce a six-figure offer.

  “Let me guess.”

  “No, no, no, and no. Sorry.”

  “Fuckers,” I snapped. She gave me the names of the editors who had sent their regrets, none of which surprised me. We still had four queries out, but I wasn’t holding my breath. People think if you sell your first book, publishers beat a path to your door to buy the next one. Not so much. If the first book is a bomb, you’re damaged goods, and people shun you like a coworker with the flu. It’s hard enough selling a debut, because publishers worry that it won’t sell. It’s worse after a flop, because they know it won’t sell.

  “How was New York?” she asked.

  I told Emma about meeting Tom Cruise with Evan, and her freckles did a little dance. “Tess, that’s wonderful! What a lucky break!”

  “Maybe,” I said, looking glum.

  “Come on, this is what you were hoping for.”

  “The odds just went from a million to none to a million to one. Let’s not book a trip to LA just yet.”

  “Still.”

  “Yeah, it’s good news, but Felicia swears she’ll rip the book out of Tom’s hands.”

  “She won’t. She wouldn’t dare. Even a bitch like her. Have you talked to Oliver?”

  “Not yet. I’m not sure I want to get his hopes up.”

  Emma closed the door and cast a suspicious glance through the window. She leaned over my desk, giving me a view of her cleavage that Guy would have killed for. When she hits forty and her breasts head for the floor, it will sound like twin meteors striking the earth. “The word is out,” she whispered.

  “The agency?”

  “Yes, everyone knows.”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “Everyone. All the agents and secretaries keep stopping by my desk and asking for details. I think a lot of them would like to go with you.”

  “Well, don’t say anything, okay?”

  “No, of course not.” Emma chewed her lower lip and studied my face. “Are you having second thoughts?”

  “Some.” I explained the situation with Dorothy and David Milton, and Emma was aghast.

  “Dorothy? No way. This guy must be a crook.”

  “I agree with you, but crooks sometimes get away with the loot.”

  “This is terrible.”

  “It sucks, that’s for sure,” I agreed.

  “But does that really change everything? Does that mean you’re not going to resign on Monday?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to think about it over the weekend. I’m not sure I want to bolt with this cloud over Dorothy.”


  Emma looked genuinely distressed. “Cosima will make your life miserable if you stay.”

  “She’ll make my life miserable if I leave, so I’m screwed either way,” I said.

  I didn’t tell her about Nicholas Hadley or about my suspicions that Cosima had gone so far as to help Lowell make an orgasmic exit to the afterlife. Not that I think the saliva on Lowell’s mushroom really belonged to Cosima herself. I knew from Darcy that Cosima viewed sex as the kind of activity best left to monkeys and cabinet ministers. (Like there’s a difference, my father would say.) No, Cosima would sooner let a veterinarian’s thermometer inside her mouth as a man’s dick. If she really was the mastermind behind this scheme, she’d hired someone else to do the dirty work for her.

  I had a fleeting thought that my own life might be in danger. It’s hard to take something like that seriously, but then again, Lowell’s dead. It made me wonder what bizarre and painful manner of death she might plan for me. After all, one case of erotic asphyxia can seem like carelessness, but two would certainly raise suspicions. Poison would be better. Stick arsenic in a champagne truffle, and I’d eat it even if I knew it was there.

  “So what are you going to do?” Emma asked.

  “Talk to my father. Talk to a lawyer. Rally the troops. No matter what I do, though, this thing feels like it’s going to hang on for months, and I don’t really want to close a new deal for Dorothy with some con artist trying to get his hands on her money.”

  “I’m sorry, Tess.”

  “Thank you, darling. Don’t frown, I’ll figure out something. Oh, say, do you remember that box of old crap I gave you last year to put in storage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get it back for me, will you? I’d like to go through it this weekend.”

  “Sure. What’s in it?”

  “Probably nothing.”

  When Dorothy’s original agent died, Dorothy sent me all the woman’s files and written materials from the early years of Dorothy’s literary career. The box sat in the corner behind my desk for years, serving as a footrest and occasional plant stand, until Emma insisted on cleaning out the hurricane zone that is my office. There was nothing in the box of great value. It was mostly copies of old contracts and correspondence, but since it dated back to the days when Dorothy was first selling The Bamboo Garden, I thought there might be a clue that would help me prove that David Milton was a fraud. It was wishful thinking, but I needed a place to start.