Murder Knows No Season

by Cathy Ace

  Martha Gray beamed at me with a knowing smile. ‘But I’m sure you know all that, dear – you’re a bright girl. Now, let’s get this coffee in to those people; we’re both thinking that one of them must be a murderer, but they all need some coffee.’

  As we worked together to get the coffee and all the accompanying necessaries from the kitchen to the Great Room I began to amend my first impressions of Martha Gray; I’d had her pegged as a vain and grasping woman, and Meg had characterized her as ‘being along for the ride’, but now I suspected she was, in fact, an astute woman, hiding her intelligence under a facade of fuss and fripperies. She’d been clever enough to give me a reason why someone other than she or her husband might have wanted Meg dead, as well as implying she herself had nothing to do with it; it wasn’t just the coffee and extra croissants that were going to be food for thought as we rejoined the group that morning, because I couldn’t help wondering what Martha’s own secret might be.

  The atmosphere amongst the group was strained, and it seemed everyone was trying to avoid making eye contact with everyone else; some were sitting, some standing, but no one, other than Peter and Sally Webber, were in close proximity to another person. I began to wonder if the Webbers were, in fact, joined at the hip, and could see I’d have problems trying to get each one alone. But then I reasoned that Sally had never known Meg, so it was highly unlikely she had anything to do with Meg’s death . . . unless she’d acted to protect her husband. The psychology was right – she treated him almost as a part of herself; if Peter was a part of her, she might act on his behalf to protect herself. It was worth considering. No, I couldn’t discount her as a suspect, after all.

  ‘Have we any more sugar, do you know, Cait? Or butter?’ Adrian was the only one in the room with a smile on his face.

  ‘I could look,’ I replied, trying to be helpful, but still feeling a tug in the pit of my stomach as my old heart-throb used my name.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ he replied, and the two of us headed to the kitchen. I was pretty certain that any extra butter would be in the fridge, so I looked there first, while he started opening cupboard doors, hunting down the sugar.

  ‘So how’s the investigation going, Cait?’ he asked conversationally, his head inside a cupboard, his voice sounding even more husky than it had the day before. I wondered if he smoked; I hadn’t seen him light up, as the house was strictly non-smoking, but maybe he’d ducked out for one when I hadn’t been in his company. I knew I couldn’t face the idea of venturing out into the snow for a quick puff, and was glad I packed my nicotine gum, which was soothing my addiction at that very moment.

  I decided to play along with the ‘casual conversation’ thing. ‘It’s moving along, I guess.’

  ‘I bet the Grays couldn’t wait to tell you everything Meg had told them about others here; they seem the type.’

  I decided to go for it. ‘I have the impression Meg shared what she knew about each person here with at least one other person; that could mean someone else is in danger.’

  Adrian looked thoughtful, then said, ‘I get your point. If the killer is determined to keep their secret, it could be dangerous for whoever it is who knows what the killer’s secret is – other than Meg.’ His voice was low, but I caught every syllable,

  ‘Exactly,’ I replied.

  ‘And it could become dangerous for you too, if the killer knows you’ve been told their secret. So why are you risking it, Cait? Why not just wait until the cops come, and let them sort it out?’

  He deserved a truthful answer.

  ‘There are nine of us here, Adrian. I know I didn’t do it—’

  ‘And neither did I,’ he interrupted with a smile. ‘But then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?’ His eyes twinkled wickedly.

  I smiled at him, delighted to be sharing such an intimate moment with the man I’d idolized for so many years. ‘Yes, you would,’ I agreed. ‘So let’s assume there are seven suspects left. If only one of those is guilty of murder, do you think it’s fair that six other people should have to tell their secrets to the cops, to protect themselves against suspicion? Don’t you think it would be better if we could get this sorted before the police arrive? Then everyone except the murderer will be able to decide about making their secret known.’

  Adrian nodded. ‘You’ve got a point. But I don’t have any secrets; when you’re as famous as I was, you don’t have anything in your life that the press hasn’t raked over a dozen times. Everyone who cares to check me out online can find out about my bad habits and my dirty little not-so-secrets. My life’s been an open book, whether I’ve wanted it that way or not.’

  ‘But not recently,’ I noted. ‘You’ve been out of the spotlight for years now – maybe Meg knew something from your more recent past?’

  ‘I don’t see how she could have done; first of all, there’s nothing to know, and secondly, she’d been out of my life since before I ever hit the spotlight. Sure, we kept in touch for a while after our divorce; it was a tough time for both of us, and, although we realized we couldn’t live together anymore, we weren’t totally done with each other when we split. We even got together occasionally for a night here, an afternoon there. I met her for coffee, once, after she’d taken up with that Dan guy. Can’t see what she saw in him myself, but she seemed to like spending afternoons with him in their little Greenwich Village apartment writing poems to each other. And she said he looked after her, and taught her a lot about cultural stuff. You know – art, the opera, classical music. Don’t get me wrong – I love all that stuff, but I saw nothing of that Meg. The Meg I was married to was one of the most hell-bent party girls I’d ever known. Great fun. Always the center of attention. We had some good times . . . and some not-so-good times, too. Maybe she was ready for some namby-pamby poet. But he doesn’t seem the type; I can’t picture him picnicking in Central Park, reading Greek to Meg . . . which was what she told me they did.’

  I could picture Dan doing that; I could also picture Dan the bombast treating Meg as some sort of project. It must have massaged his ego to always be with someone who knew less than him. But Meg was quick to learn – I knew that from our school days – and I had a feeling it wouldn’t have taken her long to catch up with Dan, whose ‘knowledge’ was, I suspected, voluminous rather than insightful.

  I watched Adrian bend and stretch, opening cupboard after cupboard. ‘So do you know someone else’s secret?’ I decided it was best to just flat out ask.

  He turned and smiled. His green eyes sparkled. ‘Maybe,’ he said, enigmatically. I was hooked. Of course. I tried not to appear coquettish as I leaned nonchalantly against one of the big, old, oak counters.

  ‘What do you mean, Mr O’Malley?’

  Don’t flirt – don’t flirt – married with lots of kids . . . not for you, flitted through my head.

  He said nothing.

  ‘Meg never told you anything specific about anyone?’ I had to press him; Adrian was clearly having a conversation with his conscience. I tried to help him along. ‘Anything I can find out might help. After all, we know what’s happened, and that it must be one of us who did it . . . so . . .’ I let the thought float across the kitchen toward him.

  ‘Peter Webber seems like a real nice guy – wouldn’t you say?’ he began. I nodded. He continued, ‘Meg loved him a great deal, you know. She’d never have divorced him, except that he gave her no choice. She’d lived what she told me was a perfect life with Peter; they worked hard, saved their money, bought a little house, and he was doing real well in the movies – moving up whatever the ranks are for lighting people. Then there was a car accident; he hit a little girl crossing the road, and drove off. He went to work on a movie being shot in New York, then stayed on for another movie, then another. Meg moved to New York to be with him, but she couldn’t re-make the life they’d had; the dead kid was like a ghost between them, she said. They drifted apart, then got divorced, and Meg ended up alone. She was pretty much in free fall when I met her. She was work
ing at a bar on Staten Island called Piffin’s, where I played; we matched each other’s wildness, and we clicked. Simple as that. No money, odd hours, but some great parties.’

  ‘So that’s Peter’s secret, eh?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. Pretty crappy. He was telling me last night that he and his wife do a lot of work with young kids through their church; I guess we all compensate in our own ways – all try to make our peace somehow. Maybe we even over-compensate.’

  I wondered how Peter’s standing in the community would change if he was found out to be a hit-and-run driver. Might he have killed Meg to keep his secret? What if Sally knew? What if she didn’t?

  ‘But you have no dark secrets, Adrian – is that right?’

  Once again, the globally famous eyes twinkled at me – and just at me.

  ‘That’s right, Professor Cait Morgan . . . not a one.’

  He produced a pack of sugar and filled the sugar bowl.

  ‘Better get back to the others, so you can try to squeeze a secret or two out of someone else, right?’ He grinned, wickedly, and I nodded. ‘I bet Dan James could tell you a thing or two; if he was Meg’s cultural mentor, she probably spilled her heart out to him. She was a mess when we split – we both were. She’d have been looking for someone to trust . . . maybe he was the one.’

  As we wandered back toward the Great Room Dan James came rushing toward us, a huge coffee stain across his shirt-front.

  ‘Look at this mess,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’ll never come out.’

  ‘Have you burned yourself?’ It was my first instinct.

  ‘No, I’m fine – it wasn’t that hot. You and Martha took so long to bring the coffee to us it was only lukewarm.’ Dan clearly couldn’t resist the temptation to criticize the efforts of another person; I could easily imagine him brow-beating a young student who adored him with a string of scathing criticisms of his writing efforts. I could cast him in that role easily enough . . . but as a killer?

  ‘Was it black coffee?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Dan James looked puzzled.

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. He didn’t look as though it were.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he snapped.

  ‘If you get the shirt off right away and bring it to me in the kitchen, I can get the stain out for you. That’s a cotton shirt, right?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Right then – so, quick as you can, get the shirt down to me here – I’ll get a kettle boiling.’

  Dan didn’t seem used to being told what to do, so he trotted off upstairs quite meekly. He returned to me in the kitchen within about five minutes, holding the stained shirt, and wearing another – exactly the same.

  ‘We’ll need a large bowl and this water, when it’s boiled,’ I announced as he offered me the soiled shirt. ‘Can you hunt about for the biggest mixing bowl in the place, please?’ I thought it best to be polite, and meek, with this man . . . if I wanted him to tell me anything, that was.

  Dan James was tall, so peering into the tops of cupboards was a much easier task for him than it had been for Adrian. I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever get out of the kitchen, but then told myself that at least this way I was able to get people away from the group.

  The image of a lioness looking for stragglers at the back of a herd of wildebeest popped into my head; Dan James didn’t look much like a straggling wildebeest . . . but that was how I had to think of him.

  ‘It’s terribly sad about Meg, isn’t it, Dan? I’m sure you must be very upset?’ He didn’t look upset – well, okay he did, but it seemed to be more about his shirt than about Meg. He was distracted when he answered.

  ‘What? Oh yes, a tragedy, a tragedy. A great loss to the world of popular fiction.’ He was huffing and puffing.

  ‘Not the literary community?’ I suspected that would rile him.

  ‘Oh no.’ He looked surprised – horrified, even. ‘I don’t think Meg would have envisaged herself as a member of our community. She wasn’t a literary writer – just a genre novelist.’ He obviously made a huge distinction between the two. ‘Meg wasn’t well versed in literature; she’d read the basics as a child and had a pretty good schooling, I suppose, but she wasn’t up to date at all. I taught her everything she knew, such as she had the capacity to retain my education . . . but you have to have the background to be able to use knowledge. My faculty prides itself on being able to spot and nurture raw talent – but, given that I teach at Harvard, we only attract those with the right backgrounds in the first place. Not that it works out well for every faculty, of course. Where is it you teach again?’

  ‘The University of Vancouver.’

  ‘Nice little place?’

  I nodded, biting my tongue, and biding my time . . . we were still waiting for the kettle to boil on the gas hob.

  ‘Don’t know it myself,’ he added, in a tone that spoke volumes about him, rather than my university.

  ‘We manage,’ was all I could muster, without embarking upon a pointless diatribe; I needed to find out what it was he knew about our fellow guests, not leap to the defense of my certainly imperfect, but nonetheless wonderful, place of work.

  ‘So do you think Joe did a good job for Meg as her agent?’ I asked. Dan had exclaimed earlier that he thought he might know what Meg had on Joe, so I thought I’d chance my arm.

  ‘Joe? Joe Gray? I suppose he did. They sold a lot of books together, and I suspect he did some very good deals for her when it came to the movies. He’s the type, after all.’

  ‘What do you mean – “the type”?’ I couldn’t let that one pass.

  ‘Oh you know – one of those hard-nosed, hard-hearted agent types who live for the deal and can’t see the wood for the trees. His partner was almost the exact opposite; he had a real eye for good work, not just some sort of popular pulp that would rake in the dollars by catering to the lowest common denominator in society.’

  I was intrigued – this was the first I’d heard about Joe Gray having a partner. ‘I didn’t know Joe had a partner,’ I said.

  ‘But of course he did,’ replied Dan James patronizingly, panting as he crouched to look into one of the lower cupboards. ‘Weiss & Gray – W & G – that’s the name of the agency. But Julius Weiss has been gone for a long time now. I think that’s what Meg meant about Joe when she said we all had a secret. A disgruntled writer came into the agency’s offices one day – they’d turned down his manuscript – and he shot Julius Weiss in the head, then he took himself off and jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. Joe was at some convention or book fair, or something, certainly he was out of New York at the time . . . and after Julius’s death he kept the agency name, but continued the business alone. He never took on another partner. The strange thing about it was that Joe was the one who’d declined the manuscript; Julius didn’t even know about its existence. The accepted version within literary circles was that it was Joe who was the murderous writer’s target, not Julius; the guy shot the wrong man . . . though no one ever knew if he’d known that or not. The writer left the rejected manuscript on the desk beside Julius’s dead body – covered in blood apparently – and do you know what Joe did?’

  I couldn’t imagine, but I was looking forward to finding out. I shook my head, which I knew was all the encouragement Dan James would need.

  ‘Joe published the book he’d originally declined under the name of an imprint he invented, surrounded it with a lurid promotional campaign, and made a fortune off it. He quite literally made money out of his partner’s death. That’s the sort of man he is. And I know this to be the absolute truth because I happened to have looked into the imprint in question, when casting about for a publisher for my own work. Joe kept his involvement with the publication of the book a secret; I don’t think that sort of action would go down very well amongst his fellow agents, do you?’

  I didn’t comment.

  ‘And this all happened, when?’ I asked, trying to work out how Meg might have known about it.

  ‘It was when I was s
till in my infancy as a writer – so, about twenty-five years ago. And Joe has never looked back since.’

  ‘And Meg would have found out about this because . . .’

  ‘Oh, I told her about it, of course. When I found out who she’d hired as her agent I felt I had to warn her. You can’t be too careful when you’re dealing with that type.’

  We were back to ‘types’ again; I thought about what Adrian had said earlier, and I decided to try another approach. Dan was, by now, stretching his stained shirt across the top of the giant mixing bowl he’d found, while I prepared to pour boiling water over it. He was, therefore, unable to ‘escape’.

  ‘Do you know anything more about Joe Gray? Or his wife?’ I began to pour the water across the stain. Dan answered me through the steam.

  ‘He just sort of appeared, apparently, with a pile of money, and bought his way into Julius Weiss’s business; Julius was the one who started it, back in the sixties. Joe came along in the early seventies and they worked together after that. I don’t know what he’d done before joining forces with Julius. Julius was highly respected; Joe has always been the sharp one. A lot of newer writers avoided W & G after Julius’s day; they wanted someone who could help them make great work, not just shift volume. And volume is what Joe is known for.’

  Dan’s insights were interesting. And the stain on his shirt was gradually disappearing too, which was a bonus . . . for him. As we stood there, heads together over a steaming bowl I could sense Dan had more to say. It didn’t seem within his character to be backwards in coming forward, and forward he came – at full tilt.

  ‘And his wife – Martha? That’s another thing. There was a rumor going about that she and the partner were . . . you know . . .’ He winked at me.

  I got the picture, and mouthed, ‘Ah’, knowingly.

  He carried on, gossiping with glee; he was really enjoying himself – I could imagine him at faculty cocktail parties, full of high-balls and spite. ‘There was some talk at the time of Julius’s death that Joe was having Martha watched – you know, by a private detective . . . all very cloak and dagger. And the word on the literary street is that Joe found out what they were up to, and that he and Julius were going to break up the business. Then Julius was shot, and all the business stayed with Joe. Quite handy for him, I’d say; I’m not sure how many of their writers would have made the choice to move with Joe. But Julius’s death meant they didn’t have a decision to make.’