Mystery Writer's Mysteries Box Set 1-3 Page 11

  I knew better, but I zapped leftover coffee in the microwave. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep that night anyway, if the last couple of days were any indication. I tasted it, grimaced, and rinsed my cup.

  The newspaper crosswords beckoned me as a welcome diversion from my ineffective sleuthing. I’d added as many suspects as I’d crossed off and had even more questions than when I started. One step forward, fourteen steps back.

  Maybe if I ignored my investigation, it would be like when you try to remember the name of some song that ear-wormed into your subconscious. No matter what you do, you can’t conjure up anything but two lines of the chorus. And those might not even be right. So you forget about the stupid song and start washing dishes, mindlessly scrubbing a pan you should have soaked, when all of a sudden the title, singer, and all three verses pop right into your brain and off your lips like a miraculous karaoke visitation.

  Could happen.

  I dumped the newspapers out of their plastic tubes and onto the table. I junked the ads and sports sections—since football season was over—and made a neat pile for recycling. I set aside the sections I wanted. I decided to make a new pot of coffee and try to enjoy what used to be my ritual. But it seemed a ritual from some other life.

  I stared into the coffee container. Barely enough grounds for half a pot. It’s a bush-league sort of coffee fanatic who runs out of coffee. Lame. While the tiny pot brewed, I organized the sections into the order I wanted to read them—first Tuesday’s, then today’s.

  I loved everything about the newspaper. The comics, the often poorly edited articles, the unintentionally funny headlines, the crazy letters to the editor. But mostly I loved the ritual. I’d been reading newspapers since before I could read. My parents subscribed and, like clockwork, the daily landed on our driveway and I’d race out so I could be first to read the comics. I never failed to find one that amused me, and before I was twelve, I probably cut out a hundred of my favorite full-color ones from the Sunday editions.

  It was a true love affair I had with newsprint, and I didn’t understand why so many people eschewed it for bits and bytes. Sure, online editions have news that’s actually up-to-the-minute, and sure, you could seek out more detailed coverage of the events you were interested in, and sure, your news wasn’t curated by some lonely editor in the middle of the night.

  But only a newspaper smelled and felt like a newspaper. Every whiff and crinkle sent me straight back to sitting on Dad’s lap. He held the broadsheet in front of us, encircling us like a shield. I felt safe in our paper fort, despite some of the photographs and words he tried to hide from view.

  When I was very little, he’d read the comics to me. After I could pick out certain words, I’d point and “read” to him. As I got older, we’d discuss the actual news of the day, analyzing quoted sources and content rather than, like I saw so much today, the distillation of complicated content into pithy, not-quite-accurate Facebook memes. Every Monday in fifth grade we had to bring in articles clipped from the paper for Current Events. I wondered how kids did that today, when so many people didn’t subscribe to any newspaper. Surely fifth graders still discussed current events.

  The coffee finished brewing and I poured myself a cup. Much tastier than the zapped version. I glanced longingly at the banana bread and the cookies that would go so well right now. I squinched my eyes and tried to remove the walnuts from the treats using only the mighty power of my desire. I opened my eyes to learn that my powers were nonexistent. At least as far as deleting walnuts was concerned. I presumed my crossword skills remained intact.

  I decided to skim through the news, then get busy on those crossword puzzles, my true love.

  The first section combined world, national, and Colorado news. Ferry disaster in India. Women and girls kidnapped in Africa. Politicians misbehaving. Mountain snowpack totals. LoDo shootings. Roundup of new craft breweries.

  Quickly turning the pages, I stopped short at page five. Melinda’s photo stared back at me. The headline read, Death of Denver Literary Agent. I read the short article, tears stinging my eyes as I learned of her early career and current philanthropic work, which I’d never known about. She was on the Board of Directors for many local charities and nonprofits, but the one that jumped out at me was the Children’s Hospital. As far as I knew, Melinda didn’t like kids. Never expressed any interest in them, nor had any in her life. But maybe I didn’t know. Maybe she had a niece or nephew with a medical issue. My hand fluttered to my chest. Maybe she’d had a child who had died. I contemplated that for a moment, racking my brain for any mention she’d made of a child. Nothing came to mind. Then why the Children’s Hospital? I hated to think the worst of her, but how could volunteering to serve on a hospital board help her in any way? A literary agent wouldn’t be trying to drum up business there; that Venn diagram didn’t seem to intersect at all. Could it have anything to do with her murder?

  I read the article from the beginning, slower, with this in mind, but nothing clicked for me. I took a deep breath at the end of the article. “The investigation continues.”

  The accompanying sidebar article showed a photo of Melinda’s crumpled car. It looked like it was taken at an impound lot, even though they reported that the accident had happened in her neighborhood. Mystery Deepens in Agent’s Murder. The reporter used vague language like “it’s been reported” and “unconfirmed sources” but told a compelling story about Melinda’s accident. It ended with, “Anonymous police sources confirm their investigation continues but admit they’ve never seen an accident quite like this.”

  Holding my breath, I rummaged through the stack for today’s paper and stared at page two.

  In all of literary history, there have been only four acceptable types of author photos. One, informal, while staring at a computer keyboard or perhaps reading a book. Two, the author gazing steadily at the camera, either smiling or serious depending on their genre. Three, with some sort of hobby or pet, also informal.

  And mine, plastered all over my website and social media, and on the back of every one of my book covers. Arms crossed, looking bemused while leaning against a photogenic brick wall.

  The one I stared at now, taking up three column-inches on page two of today’s Denver Post.

  Local Author Questioned in Agent’s Death. My beloved newspaper had betrayed me.

  Twelve

  Local Author Questioned in Agent’s Death

  By Jonathan Crier, The Denver Post

  Sources confirm local mystery author Charlemagne Russo has been questioned by Denver Police in conjunction with Melinda Walter’s death on Monday. Walter, found dead in her car under mysterious circumstances, had been Russo’s literary agent for nearly seven years, securing publishing contracts for such books as Ashes to Ashes, Fragments of Fear, and Pursued to Death.

  It has been reported there was an ongoing disagreement instigated by Russo over possible questionable accounting practices on the part of Walter or of Penn & Powell Publishing, or both, resulting in a serious decrease of royalties to Russo. Unnamed sources claim Russo was reportedly furious over a substantial drop in income and the purported cover-up of financial information.

  Penn & Powell state through a spokesman they are shocked and saddened by these events and allegations and will cooperate fully with the authorities in their investigation.

  Russo refused to comment when contacted.

  Refused to comment? Nobody ever called. I thought back to the missed calls I’d deleted. Wouldn’t—I looked at the byline—Jonathan Crier have left a message if he was so desperate to speak with me?

  Jonathan Crier. Seriously? Writing for the newspaper with a name like that? I couldn’t decide if it was destiny or irony.

  Should I call him? To yell? To set the record straight? I hadn’t refused to comment. And how did he know about the royalties? I pressed my palms to my eyes. He’d made me look so suspicious.

  I called my brother. “Lance, did you read the paper today?”

&
nbsp; “No.”

  I filled him in. “What should I do? Do you know this guy? Should I call him? Didn’t he make me sound guilty?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, good.” I let out a whoosh of air. “I was hoping it was just my imagination. Wait. No, what?”

  Lance paused. “No, you shouldn’t call him.” Another pause. “Reporters are tricky.”

  “In general, or do you know this guy?”

  “I’m at work. I gotta go.” He was gone.

  Even for Lance, that was an odd conversation. What wasn’t he telling me? Was he one of the unnamed sources? It was easy enough to find out I was one of Melinda’s clients, but who else knew about the royalties? I groaned. My entire critique group.

  Once again, the only way to set the record straight was to find Melinda’s killer. No tiny print retraction buried where nobody ever noticed would do. Online, this bogus story would live forever uncorrected in the cyberspace archives, like the ridiculous story about vaccinations causing autism that kept circling the planet years after it was debunked by scientists. Or the one alleging that brown recluse spider eggs used to fill Beanie Babies in the 1990s were starting to hatch. Or the regular rumor around Denver that our beloved theme restaurant, Bonita Fajita, was closing. Personally, I thought that seemed like the perfect marketing ploy. Every time it happened there was a ton of local buzz and everyone raced down there for unlimited sopaipillas and to watch the cliff divers. Kind of genius if you ask me, as long as Snopes didn’t get wind of it.

  When I was being questioned, Detective Campbell had mentioned Snopes, too. How would I get Snopes to prove my innocence? Oh, who was I kidding. Clearly, if my Facebook feed was any indication, nobody checked Snopes. Not often enough anyway, and never about such juicy stories. People believe what they want to believe, no matter how far-fetched. All I could do was fight for truth, justice, and the American way. Like Superman, but without any of the power.

  I picked up my mug, uncovering the newspaper’s masthead and tagline: Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire.

  Voice. My readers always mentioned how much they liked my writing voice. Writing is my medium, after all. I can be persuasive and eloquent there. I had to talk to that reporter. But not on the phone.

  I logged into my email. So many messages. Most from the Contact Me page on my website. I clicked on the most recent one. The subject line read, “Melinda Walter.”

  “I always wondered how you got such creative ways of murdering the victims in your books. Now I know you practice them.”

  I gasped and deleted it with a trembling hand.

  I read three more in the same vein. Dammit. Worse than I’d thought. I scrolled through all the emails to see if there were any names I recognized. About three-quarters of the way down, I saw that “Jonathan Crier” had emailed me through my website twice that morning. I scrolled some more. And on Tuesday. And even Monday evening.

  Why hadn’t he left a voicemail? Even just to say, “I emailed you.” Better yet, “I’m going to run a story that’s going to make you sound awfully suspicious regarding the mercury poisoning of your agent.”

  Wait. The article didn’t say anything about finding mercury in Melinda’s car. None of them did. That information wasn’t out to the public yet. That meant only me, Lance, Ozzi, Q, my critique group, and my beta readers knew about the actual cause of death. Everyone but my beta readers knew about the royalties. Had someone been talking? I composed the perfect 219-word email, outlining with intelligent reasoning what I wanted to say. I could have used twelve words: “I didn’t kill Melinda and quit saying I did, you big meanie.” I hit send and my phone rang immediately. I glanced at it. Unknown number. As I stared, the voicemail message lit up. I listened to it. “It’s Jonathan Crier. Call me.”

  “Don’t want to,” I said to it.

  I went back to my email messages and deleted all of them. Maybe there were some supportive ones in there, but I sure didn’t want to wade through the others to find out.

  As I stared at the screen, Jonathan Crier responded to my 219 words: I just want to hear your side of the story. No way do I think you had anything to do with her death.

  “Then why did you write it that way, you slimy hellhound?” I yelled at my keyboard.

  My finger trembled over the delete button. I’d said everything I wanted to say to him.

  Another email from him popped up. We can talk totally off the record. Please call.

  Off the record. A reporter’s solemn vow. Reporters went to jail to protect their sources. It’s an unbreakable bond. Their Hippocratic Oath. Their swearing on the Bible. Their Boy Scout Pledge.

  I called him.

  Thirteen

  “You promise this is off the record? I won’t see anything in the paper about our conversation?”

  “I can say ‘anonymous sources’ or ‘sources close to Ms. Russo’ if you like,” Jonathan Crier said.

  “What I’d like is for you to—never mind.” I took a breath. “I don’t have anything to tell you except that I had nothing to do with any of this. The reason I called is to find out who you’ve talked to and what they told you.”

  “I can’t tell you that, Ms. Russo.”

  While I considered my next question, I heard the juniper bushes under my kitchen window scrape against the wall again. Peter O’Drool must have cornered another rabbit. I refocused on the phone call. Peter could wait.

  “What if I asked you about certain people and you just say yes or no. Or if you can’t even do that, maybe you cough once for yes, and twice for no. Like Queue Quaid. Did you talk to Q? Cough once for no, and twice for yes. Or was it the other way around?”

  He laughed in a good-natured way that immediately made me suspicious. “There’s no need to go all Deep-Throat-in-a-parking-garage, Ms. Russo. Yes, of course I spoke with Ms. Quaid. She was Ms. Walter’s assistant.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “Now that’s a secret. But let me ask you a couple of questions. What’s all this about embezzlement?”

  “What the hell? Embezzlement?”

  “My investigation has revealed that you’ve publicly accused Ms. Walter of stealing—or at least hiding—royalties owed you by your publisher. How much money are we talking about?”

  “None! Melinda wasn’t stealing from me!” Have I used language like that in public? I drew a blank. “Who told you that?”

  “Can’t tell you. But it’s not that hard for me to find income statements. Public records are a wonderful invention.”

  “Who told you I said Melinda was stealing from me?”

  “Ms. Russo, I’m very good at my job. Suffice it to say, I’ve spoken with everyone you know and everyone who knew Ms. Walter. Now, was the amount of these royalties large enough to warrant murdering your agent?”

  I felt all the blood rush to my head. My mild hand tremor turned into a full-body vibration, like I was sitting on, holding, and brushing my teeth with industrial jackhammers. Lance was right. Reporters were tricky. Why in the world had I called him? If I said, “No, the amount wasn’t large,” he’d write that I’d murdered her for not much of a reason. And if I said yes ...

  “I didn’t kill Melinda.” I pulled the phone from my ear, then brought it back. “And that’s ON the record.” This was one of the few times I longed for a sturdy landline I could slam down. Hanging up with attitude was simply not satisfactory on cellphones.

  I put my head between my knees and tried not to barf. The whooshing in my brain slowed enough that I didn’t think I’d faint in the next few minutes. I raised my head and slumped in my chair. I still vibrated, but it seemed with less horsepower.

  Staring at my phone, I wondered who to call. Who could help me? Who would tell me what they told the reporter? And whether they told the police the same thing? But if the police suspected me, they’d have been here by now, wouldn’t they? That’s what happened on TV, anyway. Every murder was solved in an hour, less twenty-two minutes for commercials.

  Life wasn�
��t like TV, though, was it? Bad guys didn’t always go to jail. People rarely broke out into song or tap dance numbers. Conversations weren’t perfectly witty and accompanied by a laugh track. If Elmer Fudd wasn’t a cartoon character, surely he’d have blown the stuffing out of that wascally wabbit by now.

  Rabbit. I glanced toward the kitchen window, wondering if Peter was still outside. I stuffed my feet in my boots and pulled on a coat.

  I kept to the sidewalk again, calling as I walked. “Peter … you out here?” I thought I heard rustling and stopped to listen, trying to determine its location. I walked a few more steps and saw footprints in the snow leading from the dry sidewalk over the decorative fence. Guilt flooded me as I pictured Barb or Don struggling over the fence to get Peter. I cleared the corner of the building and saw the juniper bush straight ahead. But I only saw tiny pawprints there.

  I scanned the snow around the bushes. Just some straight pawprint paths, like doggy arrows shot into the junipers. No human footprints going toward the bush. My eyes studied the snowy expanse from the juniper bushes to where I stood on the sidewalk.

  The footprints in the snow near the sidewalk didn’t go toward the bushes. They stopped at my patio. A chill that had nothing to do with the weather raced down my spine. My feet were rooted to the sidewalk, my eyes following the tracks. Someone had tromped to my patio and stepped over the wrought-iron fence that surrounded it. It was one thing to step over the decorative fencing that ran along the sidewalk, but this was a much higher fence, almost a wall. With a start I realized they had peeked in the sliding door—maybe even tried to open it. Then I noticed more prints leading away from the edge of the patio, hugging the wall all the way to my kitchen window.

  As I stared, trying to wrap my brain around someone peering in the corners of both my patio door and my kitchen window, a car alarm shrieked. I performed a clunky pirouette in mid-air and raced toward the apartment stairs. Chest heaving, I banged on Don and Barb’s door.