“Absolutely, Gresham,” said Callie Jackson.
Though the next young man in the questioners’ line was clearly impatient and Gillian Godfrey was beginning to look a bit nervous, Willy was not ready to relinquish the mike. “I’ve often wondered how sincere they are. I’ve wondered if somebody might be playing games with their jacket blurbs.”
In the audience, Stephen nudged Vanessa. “What does she know?” he said.
Bosworth was looking at McDougall poisonously but said nothing.
“You have an active imagination, young woman,” said Muriel Bates. “But who would do something like that? And what sort of game are you talking about?”
“Let’s say a writer wanted to subtly ridicule his or her fellow writers, putting the jacket blurbs in a sort of code that no one would notice from looking at one blurb but that someone might figure out if they looked at several of them together. Would any of you care to comment on that? How about you, Professor McDougall?”
Turnbow, Bates, and Jackson turned to McDougall with curiosity.
“Idea might work for fiction,” McDougall said, seeming unconcerned. “But it sounds a little far-fetched. You don’t want to be more specific, do you?”
“No, I don’t think I do,” Willy said. “But if any of you were to see me privately...” She finally relinquished the questioner’s mike with a mischievous smile, and the interest level of the proceedings dropped considerably.
Poems in Praise of Evil-Doers No. 11: The Blackmailer
Now let me start on the blackmailer’s art
By asking first, who is the worst?
The holder of secrets or the extorting one
Or the honest crime-fighter who spoils all the fun?
Criminous nature has nothing paler
Than a timid, reluctant blackmailer;
When it’s deserved by a doer of evil,
The mark is the cotton and I the boll weevil.
My life’s ethical record when I collect
From a snake? Morally correct!
And in heaven’s books, what could be lighter
Than bringing to book a substandard writer?
I know who you are and I know what you did,
And from bestselling heights you surely will skid!
If I don’t need the money, you may think me mad,
But even mad justice can bring down the bad!
It was three in the morning when Stephen Fenbush’s bedside telephone interrupted a particularly fascinating dream that he had forgotten completely by the time his hand found the receiver.
“Hello,” he said, suppressing a yawn.
“Is that Stephen Fenbush?”
“It is. I could ask you if you know what time it is, but you probably do. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
“Detective Ortiz. City police. Homicide. We’ve met before. You helped us out a little on that Anderson case.”
“So I did, but if you think I’m a gifted amateur sleuth who helps the police solve their difficult cases, I’m flattered, but believe me, I was just lucky.”
“Yes, sir. I agree. We want your help again but not to do our job for us. There was another murder on campus tonight, at that VIP guest building they have there. Qualen House?”
“I know it well.” In fact, it was where they were putting up the writers for the bestseller conference. “Who’s been murdered?”
“A faculty member, sir, man named Cosmo McDougall. We found a young woman student sitting by the body. She insists on talking to you.”
“Is her name by any chance Williametta Ames?”
“That’s her. How’d you know?”
“Lucky guess. Is she a suspect?”
“I can’t really say, but she was sitting by the body reading this weird poem off a piece of paper, making no effort to report the crime or get out of there. Her position could look better.”
“She didn’t kill anybody,” Stephen said.
“Well, whether she did or not, she’s not telling us everything she knows, and if she talks to you, she might.”
“How did McDougall die exactly?”
“Slowly. Stabbed with a knife from the Qualen House kitchen. Lots of blood.”
“Any clues?”
“Dying messages, you mean?” Ortiz said, a suggestion of irony in his tone.
“Well, Anderson did one. Sort of.”
“No such luck.”
“Still, McDougall left some clues before he was dying. Detective Ortiz, you’re going to be glad you called me.”
By the time Stephen got to Qualen House, the police were finished with Willy for the time being. They hadn’t charged her with anything, and while she was a little bit more subdued than usual, for somebody who’d been sitting in the Qualen House kitchen with a bleeding body reading something or other, she seemed remarkably calm.
“Thanks for bailing me out, Mr. Fenbush,” said Willy Ames.
“Bailing you out? You weren’t arrested and you weren’t in jail.”
“Thanks to your pull with the local police.”
“I don’t have any pull with the — why aren’t you more upset, anyway?”
“It’s deceptive,” Willy told him. “I recover fast, but before I went all girly, cried and everything. Shameful.”
“Willy, what the hell were you doing in the building, anyway?”
“I was invited. There was a post-program party, and I was invited.”
“By whom?”
“Professor Bosworth. He seemed to like what I said at the meeting.”
“Yeah, I guess he would.”
“I think I was the only student there who wasn’t walking around with hors d’oeuvre trays. Naturally, I was determined to take advantage of it, pick the brains of the bestselling writers. What an opportunity.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t murdered yourself. That stunt you pulled at the panel sounded like a threat.”
“No, I was just having fun, and it got me an invitation, didn’t it? Professor McDougall didn’t seem to mind, by the way. He thought it was funny, if anything, and he was very nice to me at the party. They all were.”
“Look, Willy, I know you’ve been over this with the police, but if you don’t mind—”
“Ask away. I want to help.”
“Why did you come to the kitchen?”
“It was like this. I was determined to stay as long as I could, not miss anything. Somehow, as the caterers packed up and left and the party was breaking up, nobody asked me to leave, so I didn’t. I hung out in the Qualen House library looking at the book collection. Then I wandered around exploring. It’s quite an interesting old building, and I thought I might run into one of the writers who were staying there.”
“All this creeping around in an old dark house didn’t seem dangerous to you?”
“Oh, you mean like the ingénue who walks into danger while everybody in the audience is saying, don’t, don’t. It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t thinking murder, and I wasn’t afraid of anybody. When I walked into the kitchen and saw him lying there in a pool of blood, I about freaked out.”
“Uh-huh. But you recovered quickly and apparently made no effort to report it to anybody.”
“I would have eventually. I mean, I would have raised the alarm immediately, but then I saw that poem lying near the body, and I had to look at it. Then a cleaning lady came through and found me and found the body and screamed and probably thought I did it. And when the cops came, I made a spectacle of myself, I have to admit, sobbing like a kid, but like I said—”
“You recover fast, got it.”
“All I wanted was to see you, Mr. Fenbush, because I thought you and you alone would understand.”