Bell, Book, and Scandal jj-14

by Jill Churchill

  "Really? That is interesting."

  They both gathered up their papers and shook hands. Melody said, "You do realize I'm not promising anything. The marketing people sometimes take a great dislike to something an editor likes enormously, and they have more clout than editors do."

  "That's another thing I've learned here," Jane said. "I'm so glad I came to this conference and glad, too, to have met you."

  Jane had spent quite a long time with Melody Johnson, and when she went in search of Shelley, Shelley reminded her that Chester Griffith's ten-thirty talk started in only five minutes. This was one seminar Jane had really wanted to hear. He was the bookseller that Felicity had told them about who knew virtually everything about

  women mystery writers and liked their work better than hard-boiled men's books.

  "You can tell me all about your interview with Ms. Johnson after the talk. I want to hear it, too," Shelley said.

  They hurried to find good seats close to the front. The speech was, indeed, fascinating. Chester not only could quote from almost every book he'd ever read, but he'd also learned what Jane had learned: Do your research and don't bore listeners and readers by telling them what they already know.

  Jane and Shelley both took copious notes. He mentioned several authors he highly recommended that neither woman had read. It would mean one more trip to the booksellers' room, specifically to Mr. Griffith's booth before it was out of those books.

  Jane whispered to Shelley, "The account of my interview will have to wait while we buy some of these books he's talked about."

  "You're sure that's okay with you? I don't want you to forget to repeat every word Ms. Johnson told you," Shelley whispered back.

  "I haven't forgotten anything. I probably won't put it in the right order though."

  When the talk was over, they nearly ran to the booksellers' room. Mr. Griffith did have a few old copies of the out-of-print books as well as new ones he'd talked about, and they snatched them and held on to them until he could return to sell them.

  "I vaguely remember reading and liking Dorothy Simpson's and Gwendoline Butler's books with the British detectives long ago. But I need to catch up on their later work. I just forget, somehow, to look under B and S in the bookstores, I guess. I'm so glad he mentioned them."

  "I want to try out Deborah Crombie. I liked what he said about her work. I don't think I've ever read one of hers," Shelley came back.

  When Mr. Griffith returned to his booth, they both thanked him for his suggestions, then took another heavy hit on their credit cards.

  "Let's take these up to the suite and then have lunch so you can tell me about your interview. We have time before Mel's presentation," Shelley suggested. "Then we can go back to dipping into our new stash of books."

  Fourteen

  Jane didn't really expect Mel to tell the audience much more than he had already told her about his work. She was attending in a supportive role, providing him with a friend and lover in the audience. She was surprised, however, at how much she learned about investigation of the scene of the crime. This was a genuinely enlightening talk and drew a great many more attendees than she'd seen in the other room. People were standing at the sides of the room and sitting in the middle of the center aisle.

  All of them, including Jane, were taking notes. It was a good thing she and Shelley had come early and found seats in the front row. Jane was so proud of him she couldn't stop grinning. It was a new impression of him — as a public speaker who was so skilled.

  However, he did go on for just a bit too long about how it was all too easy these days to acquire thin latex gloves to conceal fingerprints.

  Every hardware store, beauty supply shop, and paint store provided them.

  Then he admitted that the occasional really stupid criminal sometimes disposed of them near the scene after committing the crime. When that happened, the gloves could be carefully turned inside out to reveal the prints.

  "But it doesn't happen often enough," he added with a dazzling smile, then went right into a discussion of fiber matches.

  After he was done with the speech, at least twenty attendees, mostly older women, lined up to ask him specific questions. Jane and Shelley stayed in their seats until he'd answered all of them.

  "You were great!" Jane said when everyone had left, and she gave him a big hug. "I had no idea what a good speaker you are, and how good you look at a podium."

  "It's all part of my job," he said modestly.

  "No. Lots of people in law enforcement know what you know. Not many of them can present it as well," Jane insisted.

  "Thanks," he said, looking slightly embarrassed at this sudden gush of praise.

  "What are you doing for the rest of the day?" Shelley asked him. "Are you going to attend any of the other sessions?"

  "Nope. Fictional crime isn't really my interest," he admitted. "The few novels I've read have glaring mistakes that drive me crazy.

  That's why we send officers out to explain to the public how sophisticated and technical the process really is these days. Besides, I'm giving the talk about forensics I was supposed to do in the first place."

  "Have you heard anything else about Zac?" Jane asked.

  "Just that he's conscious. No apparent brain damage."

  "That's good," Jane replied. "But does he know what happened to him?"

  "Not a clue, if you'll forgive the phrase. I'm told he remembers that he needed to do something at his home, which is apparently fairly close. Nothing after that."

  "Will he remember later, do you think?" Shelley asked.

  "I'm not qualified to answer that, as you both know. Sometimes a blow to the head only creates temporary amnesia. Sometimes it's permanent. I'm not a doctor and don't play one on TV."

  "Wait just one more minute, Mel," Jane said, closing her eyes, hoping she could remember the fleeting, and now missing, question she wanted to ask Mel about Zac. She still couldn't pull it from the back of her brain. She knew it was there somewhere, if only she could dredge it up.

  "Never mind. I've lost the thought again," Jane said.

  Mel was obviously becoming impatient, if not downright cranky, about being held up to discuss

  116 Jill Churchill

  an attack that he'd already said several times wasn't his case.

  Jane said too cheerfully, "You could collect a bunch more accolades if you'd hang out in the lobby for a while."

  "What was that about?" Shelley asked when Mel had gone.

  "What?"

  "You acted as if you had a question to ask him."

  "I thought I did. But I couldn't remember what the question was. I felt for a second there that it was about to bubble up when Mel finished. It passed fleetingly through my mind yesterday, but I can't seem to be able to bring it back. I think it might have been important."

  "Any way I can help?" Shelley asked.

  "No. It's a Frederic Remington thing."

  "What on earth does that mean?"

  "You know. When you're trying desperately to remember someone's name? And when you give up, it comes to you out of the blue a couple of days later and just springs out at you."

  "This happens to you often?" Shelley said with a worried look.

  "It happens to everybody, I thought. I've seen you suddenly come out with a word you'd been searching your mind for. Last time it happened, it was 'ontology,' whatever that is. Remember saying it to yourself in the middle of a conversation about petunias?"

  Shelley had the grace to admit it. "I guess I see what you mean. Sort of. And it was dahlias, not petunias."

  "What are we doing the rest of the day?" Jane asked.

  "Shopping until Mel's next session?"

  Jane replied, "I'm shopped out and you know how surly I can become when I reach that point. There's a mystery trivia contest in the next session. Want to sit in on it with me?"

  "No, thanks. I haven't read half the mysteries you have. I don't go places where I'm bound to feel stupid," Shelley sai
d. "Isn't there some sort of awards party tonight? And a dinner we paid for in our fees?"

  "If I'm remembering right, it's just a snack-anddrink thing. I wish one of us had brought along the schedule. The registration booth is closed temporarily, and the only way to get one is to steal someone else's. Why don't you go up to the suite and find one and make our plans for the rest of the conference? We're both free now to do whatever we want. Although I'd really rather leave and go home and work on my book after Mel's second talk."

  "Jane, don't say that. Not only have you paid for the whole conference, there might still be things you can learn that will be useful."

  "Maybe you're right," Jane admitted. "I'll stick it out." She added wistfully, "I just wish I could remember…"

  "Stop working at remembering whatever it was. Your subconscious won't be forced to disgorge it until it's ready. Think about something else. Like dahlias."

  The mystery trivia contest was fun and clever. It was run by Chester Griffith, the bookseller who knew so much about virtually every book he'd ever read. Jane had so much enjoyed his earlier presentation and was looking forward to this one.

  At first it was easy. He'd recite a short paragraph from a mystery novel. The first person to raise his or her hand would be allowed to answer. The contest was on the honor system.

  The first two questions contained the name of the sleuth. You received one point for identifying the author right. If you knew the title of the book, you earned an extra ten points. If you also knew the first date of publication, you'd tally up another twenty points. Almost all of the participants knew who the author was on the first question. It was Ngaio Marsh because Griffith chose a paragraph that mentioned Roderick Alleyn. Even Jane knew that one. Another half dozen, including Jane, knew which book it was from, "Black as He's Painted."

  Only one participant guessed the right publishing year, and she was an attractive, though somewhat overweight, young woman at the very back of the room. Several guessed the decade. Jane failed utterly on this part, though she thought itwas probably in the fifties because it involved a black African friend Alleyn had been in school with and was surprisingly politically correct for the time it was written.

  The next question was easy as well. Miss Marple was named in the paragraph, and Jane knew it was the first Agatha Christie book to feature Miss Marple but couldn't remember the title, though she remembered quite a bit of the plot.

  Again, the young woman at the back of the room had the name of the author, the name of the book, and only missed the publication date by one year. Many of the participants also remembered the title.

  The third quote was a little bit harder. It didn't mention the sleuth's name, but gave his sidekick's name instead. Many of them knew the author immediately. Even Jane, and only because she'd dipped into one of the Dorothy Simpson books she'd purchased the day before. The sidekick was Mike Lineman, Luke Thanet's assistant.

  Nobody except the young woman at the back of the room knew which title it was, and even she didn't come up with a date of publication.

  The quotes became progressively harder and harder to identify. Every now and then one happened to come from one of the participants' very favorite mystery, and a few of them gained on the young woman's score.

  Jane eventually gave up trying to guess when it came down to mention of minor continuing characters, like the usual pathologist in the series. She was awfully glad that Shelley had taken a pass on coming to this event. Shelley would have been completely at sea and mad as the dickens about it.

  By the end of the forty-five-minute session, the quotes were so obscure that practically nobody had any answers. Even the young woman who'd started out so brilliantly was stymied by a few of the last questions. But she did win the contest. Chester Griffith presented her with a rare mystery of Wilkie Collins's and asked her to introduce herself. Jane vaguely recognized the book, which had been in a glass cabinet in the booksellers' room and labeled for sale for over a hundred dollars.

  "I'm LaLane Jones. I teach a writing class in a college here in town on the history of the mystery genre and the science fiction genre."

  There were groans from the rest of the audience and a few good-natured remarks about this not being fair. LaLane Jones admitted it with a laugh.

  Jane thought about her as she went back to the suite. As much as Jane herself enjoyed mysteries, she had no desire to be an expert on them the way Ms. Jones did. She wondered if Ms. Jones, as young and attractive as she was, had a real life. She hoped so.

  But doubted it.

  This made Jane a bit sad, and she tried to cheerherself back up by thinking how nice it had been that neither the dreadful Vernetta nor Gaylord had bothered to attend.

  That, at least, was a valuable perk. Maybe they'd even gone home.

  Fifteen

  Mel's second speech was even better than the first because he'd had plenty of time to prepare it. After it was done, his cell phone rang again and he took the call, then told Jane that he was leaving the hotel without staying the second night.

  "That call didn't have something to do with Zac, did it?" Jane asked.

  "No. It's a simple shoplifting a few doors down from here. I'm back on duty."

  On the one hand, Jane hated to see him go. On the other hand, she was hoping that there would still be something interesting to learn if she stuck out the rest of the conference.

  Unfortunately, the Strausmanns hadn't gone home. At the snack supper Vernetta was dressed as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and Gaylord was adorned with sheets of aluminum foil, pasted together with duct tape, being the Tin Man.

  "They should be locked up in some institution," Shelley said. "At least Vernetta should. Gaylord

  made the mistake of sitting down and has already split the back of his pants and looks deeply embarrassed. Poor man. Those are some flashy undies he's wearing."

  "Rich man, you mean," Jane said. "He's going to live in his wife's mansion and drive a Mercedes. He might even buy a flock of them in every color. Letting himself be made a fool in public isn't such a high price to pay."

  "I'll bet he becomes fed up with it soon," Shelley predicted. "I'd bet good money that he runs off with a shy, blonde, seventeen-year-old anorexic bimbo within a year. Maybe two years. He'll probably be allowed to keep ownership of half the house and all of the cars."

  "Do you really think so?"

  "I can but hope," Shelley said. "Let's go to a real dinner. I can't bear to be in the same room with these people."

  "Okay by me," Jane said. As they were heading for the nicest of the hotel restaurants, she said, "I don't understand it. Vernetta doesn't even know how to speak English. And I'd guess she has no idea how to spell anything over four letters long. She's so utterly ignorant about human nature. Except her own, of course. How could she possibly write a good novel? It seems to me that making up characters that seem real, especially if they're nothing like the writer who creates them, is the essence of fiction."

  "That's exactly what I've been wondering. Iwonder if it simply has a lot of really good sex scenes."

  "Shelley!" Jane exclaimed. "Do you really suppose so?"

  Shelley shrugged. "Who could guess? Maybe we should look it up if it's still somewhere on the Internet."

  "I don't think I could stand to read it," Jane said. "Good sex scenes or not. Come to think of it, we don't even know where to look. I've never heard what it's titled. I wonder if Felicity knows. She hasn't read it but she said some of her friends had attempted to wade through it. Anyway, since it's been sold to a real publisher, it's probably been removed from the site, wouldn't you imagine?"

  "Maybe so. I think this obsession with costumes means something," Shelley speculated. "Like what?"

  "Maybe she has a fabulous imagination hidden under her horrible public personality?"

  "She's simply an obsessive show-off. Her imagination only runs to crummy costumes," Jane claimed.

  As they entered the dining room, Jane spotted someone way back in th
e corner waving to them. "There's Felicity. She seems to be inviting us to join her."

  They told the waiter to take them to her table. "What's up?" Jane asked, afraid it was just a friendly wave, not an actual invitation, when she

  noticed that Felicity had an old book open on the table.

  "Nothing much. It's just too dark in here to read this tiny print, and I'd rather visit with you two. I haven't even ordered anything but a drink yet. You were just in time."

  "We didn't see you at the snack party," Jane said. "I figured Vernetta might turn up."

  They regaled Felicity with the Dorothy and Tin Man description. "He'd already burst out of his costume and was wearing really fancy underwear," Jane said.

  "No!" Felicity said with a vulgar laugh. She closed her book — an ancient Mary Stewart paperback — and set it beside her at the edge of the table, and it promptly fell to the floor.

  "Let me pick it up for you," Jane said.

  "No, I can grab it," Felicity said. She leaned over, still laughing, and remained unseen for an unusually long time. She finally came back upright with the book in one hand and several loose pages of it in the other.

  "Glue's gone. I'll put the pages in order later." "That's it!" Jane exclaimed so loudly that several people looked around at her.

  "What is?" Shelley asked.

  "Old paperbacks often have pages that come loose," Jane said, lowering her voice. "That's why Zac was holding one when he was attacked. That's what I've been meaning to ask Mel about all this time.""Why?" Shelley inquired.