“Understand what?”
“This poem. It was printed on a sheet of white paper. As soon as I saw it, I thought it might be important. And I knew the police would snatch it away immediately, as evidence. I wanted you to have a look at it. It may be a clue, but not the kind the police would see. So I memorized it.”
“You memorized it?”
“I’m a quick study. Ask any of my teachers. I wrote it all out while I was between police grillings and waiting for you to get here. Professor McDougall’s dust-jacket quotes had a sort of code to them. I thought maybe the message by the body was following his code too, though I didn’t have time to check it out completely. Isn’t that interesting?”
“Very. So are you going to let me see it after going to all this trouble?”
She passed it over, and Stephen glanced at it. “Unsigned?”
“Yes, just like you see it.”
Homage to Cosmo McDougall
Cosmo McDougall must have nine lives.
Here is somebody who socially thrives,
Who teaches his classes, and who writes his books,
Who’s so over achieving, it could be, cooks—
I don’t know anything he cannot do.
He can do that old as well as this new.
Can his left hand raise prose up to a great height
While he’s gloriously poetic with his right?
What inspirational muse nurses his fire,
My friends — this wit, this light versifier?
Every honor he deserves, no one will dispute—
For any who tries to will fail to refute.
His work will not die; it has even survived
My poetic efforts, so badly contrived.
Stephen and Vanessa were back in the Faculty Club two days later, waiting for Edie Yamamoto to join them. Stephen had been looking forward to doing his supersleuth act, but Vanessa’s mood was putting a bit of a damper on things.
“So why did she call you?” she asked.
“I don’t know, really, but when somebody in trouble wants your help, you go, right?”
“You have to watch that girl, Stephen.”
“Oh, I watch her every chance I get.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Why? You think she’s a murderer?”
After a long pause, Vanessa said, “No,” grudgingly.
Edie arrived and the atmosphere lightened a bit. They ordered more hurriedly than usual, and the librarian asked eagerly, “So what do you have to tell us, Stephen?”
“The late Professor McDougall, a guy who for most of his life disdained giving jacket quotes, suddenly started giving them. And I figured them out.”
Vanessa couldn’t resist a dig, but it came across good-humored. “You or your student protegee?”
“We figured them out independently.”
“Didn’t put your heads together?”
“No, dam it. Look, do you want to hear this or not?”
“I do,” said Edie, “unless I decide the subplot is more interesting.”
“It’s not.” He passed them a sheet of paper with McDougall’s blurbs for the novels by Callie Jackson, Gresham Turnbow, and Muriel Bates. “Now look at all these quotes carefully. See anything unusual about them?”
“Yes,” Vanessa said. “They’re God-awful.”
“And how is that unusual for jacket blurbs?”
“Because Cosmo is supposed to have written them.”
“You’re right,” said Edie. “I can’t believe he could write this awkwardly even if he did them in a hurry. ‘Literary genius goes about its matchless business’? That’s dreadful.”
Vanessa said, “Are you telling us Cosmo didn’t write these?”
“Oh, he wrote them, all right,” Stephen said. “A major publisher couldn’t put phony quotes from a bestselling author on a book and expect to get away with it. But there’s another reason they’re so bad.”
“Tell us.”
“Spot one more feature the quotes have in common and then I will.”
“They’re all exaggerated praise,” said Vanessa.
“Undeserved,” said Edie.
“More specific than that.”
Vanessa gave him a dirty look and studied the four quotes once more. Then she brightened for an instant, quickly darkened again when she remembered how much he was annoying her, and said, “It’s the numbers! There’s a number in each quote. Six, five, four.” She paused a moment. “They’re in descending order.”
Stephen shook his head. “The order has nothing to do with it. An accident of how I arranged them. But you’re right. It’s the numbers I’m referring to.”
“There’s a message in here somewhere,” Edie said, “like he did for Amos Bosworth’s book but better hidden.”
Stephen nodded. “His messages were concealed well enough to get past whoever edits the jacket blurbs but transparent enough that somebody would eventually figure them out, especially if you put several of them together as I did and saw what they have in common. I’m told by some publishing contacts that he insisted they use his quotes word for word as he wrote them or not at all.”
“So how do we crack the code?” Vanessa said.
“If my ‘student protégée can do it, so can you.”
Vanessa glared at him. She and Edie peered at the four quotes for a few moments, until a look of exasperated understanding crossed Vanessa’s face. “Of course. You take the number mentioned in the quote and then use that to know which words to highlight. In the first one, you take every sixth word.” She took out a teacher’s ever-ready red pencil and started to work. A minute later, she handed the list of quotes back to Stephen. The messages were as follows.
On Towers of Tinsel by Callie Jackson: “Come on give me a break.”
On Under the Gavel by Gresham Turnbow: “Disbar this guy immediately.”
On Love’s Choppy Seas by Muriel Bates: “About as erotic as a route canal.”
“They get better,” said Vanessa, “but they really aren’t all that clever. Or all that scathing for that matter.”
“What’s this fourth quote you listed?” Edie asked. “There’s no number in that.”
“Well, McDougall put a joke blurb on his own jacket,” Stephen said.
“It’s an anagram,” Edie said. “Malcolm Good, USC. Cosmo McDougall.”
“You got it. Now have a look at that poem that was found by the body. Apply the code to that.”
“ ‘Cosmo McDougall must have nine lives,’ ” Edie read. “So we take every ninth word.” A moment later, she had it. “It says, ‘Somebody who could do this to his friends deserves to die badly.’ And the murderer wrote this?”
“Yes, and not on the spur of the moment. The killer wrote that before coming to the conference and had it ready to spring on McDougall.”
“All very clever, Stephen and Edie,” Vanessa pointed out, “but it doesn’t tell us who killed Cosmo. The police haven’t made an arrest, have they?”
“Yes it does, and yes, they have,” Stephen said with outrageous casualness. “Better not mention that to anybody, though, till it’s generally reported. Putting together two clues, one from the jacket blurbs and the other something that came out at the symposium the night of the murder, convinced me I knew who did it, even though there wasn’t an ounce of proof that would hold up in a court of law. When I called Detective Ortiz to tell him who it was, I expected him to laugh, but instead he asked me how I knew. They’d arrived at the same conclusion after going through McDougall’s effects and following boring old police procedure. McDougall not only praised blackmailers, he was a blackmailer. One of the people he got here for the bestsellers’ conference was really called for another reason. Anger over being subtly ridiculed in a jacket blurb wasn’t really a motive for murder, but a secret that would ruin the murderer’s reputation and career was.”