Reno got a good look at her in the afternoon sunlight. She was an attractive mid-forties, with honey-blond hair and lovely arching eyebrows. She wore a cool sleeveless dress of crème de menthe silk.
“It’s probably just a fishing trip,” he admitted. “I’ve been hired to look into the death — murder, I should say — of Peter D’Antoni, a longtime French Quarter resident.”
“Murder? And am I a suspect?” There was a teasing lilt in her voice. “That’s delicious.”
Reno ignored her lame remark. “You’ve heard of Mr. D’Antoni?” he essayed again.
“Not that I recall. Has someone suggested otherwise?”
“I understand that, a few years ago, he submitted some romance fiction to you as an entry for a writing contest.”
“Perhaps he did,” Lydia replied. “These contests are sponsored by local chapters of our national group, and open to anyone. The number of submissions is staggering.”
“Just curious: What happens to them after they’re read?”
“If a stamped envelope is enclosed, we send them back. If not, I shred them.”
“I suppose that not many men submit.”
“Of course not. Bear in mind it’s not a genre most men can master — or would want to.”
Reno kept his voice carefully neutral. “But if that atypical man had strong talent, and a woman were to submit his work, she could hold the keys to the mint, right?”
“I do believe you’re fencing with me, Mr. Sloan. I was hoping we might get along — you make an exciting first impression. Now you’re spoiling it.”
“I can’t help my manners. My father taught me that politeness is a form of weakness.”
Her laugh was pleasantly musical. “See why most men can’t master the romance genre? But you can’t be seriously suggesting that I — what? Stole this deceased gentleman’s writing and sold it as my own?”
“I’m not even hinting at it,” he assured her. “Just fishing. You wouldn’t need to sell it as your own. You were an attorney; you could easily create a persona to cash checks and so forth.”
She gave him a pitying look. “What about the inevitable phone calls from New York editors, many of whom know me and my voice? What about the jacket photo and local interviews? You’re out of your element, Mr. Sloan.”
Reno wasn’t sure if that odd contortion of her mouth was meant as a smile. If so, it wilted at his next remark. “All of those problems you just mentioned would evaporate, right, if one of your published authors submitted the work as her own?”
Until that moment Lydia Collins had treated his visit as the cocktails-and-gossip hour. Now, however, her face closed like a vault door. When she replied, her nuance of tone was colder than the words. “I trust you can find your own way out?”
Reno headed down St. Charles toward the Quarter, braking for the noontime gaggle streaming into Audubon Park. He wasn’t at all confident he was on the right track — like a sloppy scientific theory, his suspicion of Lydia Collins raised more questions than it answered.
He ate lunch in an oyster house on Bienville, reading more from D’Antoni’s composition book and contrasting it to a bestselling romance novel he’d picked up at a drugstore. The unpublished fragment, in his uninformed opinion, left the bestseller in the dust.
He retraced his route along St. Charles, again wondering if going with his first lead was hampering this case. The lack of any other leads seemed like a mountain in his path. Justin Breaux was still in the mix — a Bourbon Street bartender could clear five hundred a night in tips, but why spend more than half that on a gumshoe’s fee to possibly solve the murder of a mere acquaintance?
Since his divorce three years earlier Reno had rented the left half of a clinker-built shotgun duplex on Cherokee Street, half hidden in a lush riot of banana plants. A few moments on the Internet turned up a Web site for the Collins Literary Agency. Several of her more prominent local writers were named, and Reno took special interest in a Garden District resident named Samantha Maitland. Based on the amount of copy devoted to her, she was one of Lydia’s divas.
Not only was Samantha Maitland listed in the Uptown Directory, she readily agreed to speak with Reno that evening. That sparked his curiosity — he expected Lydia would have called her local clients by now and declared him toxic waste to be avoided.
The writer lived on Harmony Street in the Garden District, a roomy pink stucco with a facade of Spanish tile. Reno eased into the drive, chunks of white marble gnashing under the Jeep’s tires. He parked and followed a cobblestone walkway around to the front porch. The yard lights were generous, and his eyes swept over the immaculate beds of African violets and gardenias, the lawn trimmed as taut as the green baize surface of a card table.
He crossed a marble-flagged vestibule and pressed the smooth nacre button of the doorbell, hearing atonal chimes sound within. Again self-doubt assailed him — it seemed absurd, surrounded by all these accouterments of wealth and upbringing, to associate Uptown mansions with the dingy little walk-up on Bourbon.
The door swung open, and Reno was caught flat-footed — instead of a maid in crisp linen, the woman smiling at him wore a white flounce-bottom skirt and matching jacket, open-toed pumps, and delicate gold butterfly earrings. She was a seraph-faced beauty in her early thirties, with liquid brown eyes and ginger hair coiled in a tight Psyche knot.
“You must be Reno Sloan,” she greeted him. “But I was so hoping you’d be wearing a snappy fedora with a rakish brim. I’ve always wanted to say to a real private eye, ‘What’s the grift, hawkshaw?’”
Reno threw back his head and laughed. “Well, you just did, Miss Maitland.”
“Technically it’s Mrs.,” she corrected him as she led Reno down an oak-floored hall. “My husband and I are separated. A mésalliance, as they say. By the way — I noticed your surprise when I answered the door myself. You see, according to my agent, I’m paperwork rich but pocket poor.”
She led him into a parlor off the hallway. Sheer curtains and brocade overdrapes covered the windows, and needlework tapestries done in fine Elizabethan tent stitch adorned the walls.
“As a matter of fact, I spoke with Lydia Collins earlier today,” Reno remarked. “Not about you, of course.”
“Oh? You two spoke about the man you mentioned to me on the phone — Peter D’Antoni?”
Reno nodded. She waved him into a comfortable leather chair and settled herself on a loveseat in the embrasure of a window.
“I’m sorry he was murdered,” she said, “but I’m sure I never met the man.”
He nodded again. “I didn’t think so. Mainly, I hoped to solicit your expert opinion on some writing — romance writing.”
He started to rise so he could give her the composition book in his left hand. But she stole a march on him, crossing to his chair, taking the book, and flumping down onto a velvet hassock a few feet away, one hand smoothing her skirt. After reading perhaps ten pages she looked up at Reno, eyes bright with roiled emotions. “This is simply superb. I’ve had twelve romances published, three of them bestsellers, and this makes me jealous. Is the author local?”
“He was. Pete D’Antoni evidently wrote this. And it’s possible he entered this, or other samples of his work, in the local romance writing contest.”
“Oh my... so that’s why you spoke with Lydia?”
“Yeah.” Samantha made no effort to leave the nearby hassock, and her proximity made Reno feel a tight bubble rising in his chest. “I wanted her to read this, too, but I managed to insult her and she tossed me.”