Yeah, I know what Sophie said about keeping my distance from Zak. And okay, so she wasn’t wrong, but no way was I going to squander an opportunity like this. And just like when I had my “date” with Burke, we were in a commercial establishment with plenty of foot traffic. Plus we were under the watchful eye of a hundred-ten-year-old yogi. So, uh, safe, right?
He hesitated, so I said, “Come on, Zak, keep me company for a bit.”
Fortunately for me, he was too well brought up to refuse. “Okay, but just for a minute.” He sat next to me. “I’m on a deadline.”
The KrunchWorks website could wait. “I’m glad we ran into each other,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about you.”
This earned a wary look, as well it might. He probably thought I was coming on to him. Part of me wondered what would happen if I failed to disabuse him of that notion. Not that I was interested, but it was fun to speculate. There was no denying Zak Pryce was easy on the eyes.
I mentally debated how to work my way around to the Big Question, then recalled how well bald-faced lies had worked for me with Evie the day before. Why mess with success?
“So listen.” I glanced around and lowered my voice, for effect. We were far enough from Minnie to avoid being overheard. “I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but I like you and I thought you deserved to be warned.”
He frowned. “Warned about what?”
“Well, I’m friends with our police detectives here in Crystal Harbor,” I said. “Howie Werker and Cookie Kaplan. I know they spoke with you after Peaches’s body was found.”
“They spoke with all the neighbors,” he said. “It’s not like they singled me out.”
“Oh, I know that. It’s just that Howie and Cookie sometimes let things slip when we’re shooting the breeze, and...” I looked away, as if conflicted. “You know what? Forget I said anything. I really shouldn’t be telling you this. So how are the renovations going? Think you’ll be able to put the house on the market soon?”
He turned to face me squarely. “Never mind the house, Jane. What did you want to warn me about?”
I made a show of biting my lip and sighing. Finally I said, “Okay. They know you ghostwrote Peaches’s advice column.”
His expression never altered, but a slight flicker of his eyelids gave him away. “That’s preposterous. Her kind of writing and mine have nothing in common.”
“Yeah, you said that before, but Howie and Cookie know you wrote it.” I shrugged. “You seem like a nice guy. I just wanted to prepare you.”
He stared at me another few moments, then turned and directed his stony gaze out the front window. Finally he said, “It was that bastard at the magazine. The editor. Gordon. He must’ve told the cops.”
“Gordon knew you were writing Peaches’s column?” I said.
“Not while she was still alive,” he said. “The magazine had no idea she wasn’t writing it herself.”
“When did they find out?”
“After her body was discovered,” he said. “I immediately contacted Gordon and told him I’d been writing the column all along—I had my notes and drafts to prove it—and that I wanted to keep writing it.”
“Wouldn’t it be a little weird for a man to be writing under Peaches’s name?” I asked.
“Trust me,” he said, “I want nothing to do with ‘Peaches Preaches.’ The new advice column is called ‘Dear Dylan.’ It launched online three days ago and will appear in the print edition once it gains in popularity.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “You named the column after your dog. Cute.”
“Well, I certainly couldn’t use my real name,” he said. “The tone of ‘Dear Dylan’ is a hundred eighty degrees from the column I wrote for Peaches, but it’s still nothing I’d want associated with my literary work.”
Heaven forbid. “I have to ask if you have any specialized background that qualifies you to give personal advice to strangers,” I said. “Like a psych degree or whatever.”
Zak’s smile was more than a little condescending. “As if I need some official-looking piece of paper to do this. Do you have any idea what kind of observational skills it takes to tackle the kind of novel I’m writing? The sheer degree of empathy? You forget, Jane, I’m a lifelong student of the human condition.”
“Yeah, I, uh, forgot about the empathy thing.”
“It works the other way, too,” he said. “Writing this advice column—writing it the right way, that is, not Peaches’s way—is giving a boost to my book. It’s inspired me to add a character who’s an advice columnist. He suffers from ennui, always solving the problems of others while his own life is marked by apathy and stultifying torpor.”
Not unlike what I was experiencing at that very moment. “I’m curious as to how Peaches got that gig in the first place,” I said. “From what I understand, she was a terrible writer.”
“That’s true,” he said, “but she was a genius at self-promotion. She met Gordon at a party eleven years ago. He mentioned that the magazine was looking to start an advice column, and she said what a coincidence, I’m looking to write one. Which, of course, was BS, but he was taken with her lacerating wit and invited her to submit sample pieces.”
“Which she got you to write for her,” I said.
He nodded. “Gordon must’ve known what the public wanted, because ‘Peaches Preaches’ had tons of fans right from the start. I had no choice but to answer their letters in the most obnoxious way possible,” he said.
“As if Peaches herself were answering them,” I said. “What were the logistics? I mean, did you two email the letters to each other?”
“No, it was strictly old-school,” he said. “She was afraid of leaving an electronic paper trail. She’d decide which readers’ letters she wanted answered and leave copies of them in my mailbox. I’d leave the finished work in her mailbox. Then she’d retype it on her computer and submit it to the magazine.”
“I’m guessing she withheld payment until she was completely satisfied with your work,” I said.
Bingo. There was that telltale eyelid flicker. “That’s right.”
“I’m curious,” I said. “Did she pay you by the piece—you know, for every published letter—or was it by the hour, or what?”
The flicker turned into a tic. “By the piece,” he said.
“Oh. So for every ‘Peaches Preaches’ letter you answered,” I said, “she promised you all over again that she’d stick by the false alibi she and Carter provided you eleven years ago.”
He stiffened in alarm. “I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do, Zak. Peaches blackmailed you for eleven years. The deal went like this. She and Carter tell the cops you were at their place when you wife drowned in the bathtub, and in return, you write that horrible advice column for Peaches until death do you part. Did I leave anything out?”
Zak’s disdainful chuckle would have been more effective without the madly twitching eyelid. “That’s just... Wow, what a story. You should be the one writing novels, Jane. Peaches hired me to ghostwrite her column. As in she paid me money. And Peaches and Carter told the police I was at their place that day because I was at their place that day. I can’t imagine where you got this blackmail nonsense.”
“From Carter,” I said, and watched his forced grin fade. “Well, he told my detective friends and they told me.”
Yeah, I get that you can no longer keep track of the lies. I kinda lost count myself. But hey, they were for a good cause, right? I mean, cops are legally permitted to lie to suspects, so why not me?
Okay, I don’t really want to know why not me, so you can just keep that to yourself. Sheesh. Where was I?
Some of the color leeched out of Zak’s handsome face. “I—I don’t... I mean, he wouldn’t...”
“Carter cracked under questioning,” I said. “He was no match for the detectives. It happens all the time.”
Zak raked his fingers through his hair. If anything, hi
s fashionable do looked even more fashionable after being abused. “All those years writing that disgusting column, only to have that buffoon turn around and...” He shook his head as if struggling to comprehend his coconspirator’s betrayal.
“What happened that day, Zak?” I asked. “The day Stacey died.”
He took a deep breath. “I was home that day, writing. Around ten in the morning, Stacey told me she was going upstairs to take a bath. I didn’t pay much attention at the time. I tend to get totally absorbed in my story and sort of block everything else out.”
“Did Stacey have a job?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “She was an editorial assistant at a publishing house. I met her at a writers’ conference. It was a Friday, but she had the day off.”
“You told the detectives that Stacey sometimes abused prescription drugs,” I said.
He nodded, his expression grim. “They told me later that she had Xanax and alcohol in her system. She promised me she stopped, and I believed her. After she died, I kept replaying her words in my head, when she said she was going up to take a bath. I should’ve paid more attention. Was her speech slurred? Did her eyes look glassy? I never even looked up from the computer. I was too damn preoccupied.”
“When did it first occur to you that something was wrong?” I asked.
“It was hours later,” he said. “I’d been glued to my chair the whole time, working on my book. When I finally dragged myself away from it, I was stiff all over, not to mention famished. When I realized it was after two in the afternoon, I was annoyed that Stacey hadn’t come to get me for lunch. We’d planned to go out for sushi.”
“And then what?” I asked quietly, though I had no desire to hear it.
Zak looked older than his thirty-eight years, and immensely sad. “I found her... I found her in the tub. The water was cold. She was cold.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I ran for my phone and punched in nine-one-one, but I didn’t press Send. I knew the police would take one look and jump to the wrong conclusion.”
“That you killed her,” I said.
He nodded numbly. “Stacey was gone and there was nothing I could do about it. I kept thinking about spending the rest of my life in prison for something I didn’t do. I was shaking so hard, I couldn’t fill my lungs. The panic was... It was paralyzing.”
“How did Peaches and Carter get involved?” I asked.
“I had no idea what to do,” he said. “All I knew was that I needed help. I kind of stumbled out of the house, and I saw Carter across the street, sweeping his front porch. There was no one else around. He smiled and waved at me, but I must’ve looked like, well, like a zombie, because he dropped his broom and jogged over to me. I was kind of incoherent, I guess. He brought me into his house, and he and Peaches managed to get the story out of me.”
“But they didn’t call nine-one-one right away, did they?” I said.
He shook his head. “Peaches went over to my place to... to see for herself. It seemed to take forever, but she was probably gone a couple of minutes. When she came back, she was all business. I was to go back home and call it in, but first the three of us needed to get our story straight.”
“What did you think she meant by that?” I asked.
“I didn’t know at first,” he said. “I was just so relieved that someone else was taking charge and seemed to have a plan.”
“Was it like I said? You agreed to ghostwrite her new advice column, and in exchange, they told the cops you were with them all day?”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” he said. “It was blackmail, pure and simple. And I went along with it. The state I was in, I’d have agreed to practically anything that would keep me out of prison. What makes it worse is that I know Peaches and Carter thought I was guilty as hell. They thought I murdered my wife, and they still concocted this fake alibi. Well, Peaches did the concocting. She drilled Carter on the story until she was confident he had it down and wouldn’t mess up under questioning.”
“So you started writing her ‘Peaches Preaches’ column,” I said.
His features tightened in revulsion. “God, how I loathed it. I was kind of optimistic at first. Shows you how delusional I was.”
“Optimistic how?”
“I actually thought,” he said, “that if I made Peaches’s advice column as offensive as possible—nasty, mean-spirited, wholly devoid of any redeeming value—that it would die an ignoble death and I could stop writing it.”
“Instead, it became wildly popular.” I thought but didn’t say, So much for your vaunted knowledge of human nature.
“The only way I could bring myself to keep doing it,” he said, “was by forcing myself to forget that those were real people writing in for advice. Real people with real problems.”
“Real people like Ellen Fletcher,” I said. Where was all that empathy when Burke’s wife reached out for help?
He closed his eyes for a moment as the memory stabbed him. “Her letter had me worried. She might’ve been in real trouble. I told Peaches we needed to contact her, to find out what was going on. Peaches wouldn’t hear of it. She demanded that I write a truly outrageous response, one that would fire up her readership. If it stimulated controversy, so much the better.”
“I want you to know just how destructive that decision was,” I said. Without providing too much detail or revealing how I’d come by the information, I told him about Ellen Fletcher’s emotional problems and how his response to her plea for help had caused her to abandon a loving husband, a stable home life, and the medical support she needed.
I shared this with Zak despite the fact that I still didn’t know how much of Burke Fletcher’s story to believe. I had a point to make. Zak was not off the hook, no matter how much he tried to blame the malignant tone of “Peaches Preaches” on the woman who’d blackmailed him into writing it.
“If you got that information from her husband,” Zak said, “then take it with a grain of salt.”
“What do you mean?”
“Burke Fletcher’s a dangerous guy,” he said. “He threatened Peaches’s life. On the phone.”
I kind of knew that already. Burke had danced around the subject, but it was pretty clear he’d threatened her. “If he did,” I said, “maybe it’s because he was frustrated beyond reason by how much damage your so-called advice had done.”
“And maybe Ellen’s claims were true,” he said, “and Fletcher is an abusive husband. In any event, after he threatened Peaches, she told me it was my fault that she was in danger, even though she forced me to answer Ellen’s letter the way I did.”
“What did Peaches want?” I asked. “She must’ve wanted something.”
“She demanded I ghostwrite this self-help book she wanted to publish,” he said. “It would have the same trademark malignant tone as the letters, of course. Either I write the book or she goes back on our deal and tells the cops I admitted to killing Stacey.”
The threat had teeth, even if Stacey’s death had indeed been accidental and Zak had nothing to do with it. Howie Werker had harbored suspicions about the young widower’s guilt for eleven years. He’d probably love nothing more than to reopen the case.
“And there’s no statute of limitations on murder,” Zak added. “So she really had me over a barrel. I had to agree to it.”
“When did this conversation take place?” I asked.
“At the end of November.”
Right before Peaches went missing.
“I’m assuming the statute of limitations has run out on Peaches and Carter’s crime of providing a false alibi,” I said. “They can no longer be charged for that since it was so long ago. That is, Carter can no longer be charged.”
“Meanwhile,” he said, “if the cops find out about the self-help book, the pressure she put on me to write it, they’ll think I’m the one who killed her. I never should’ve told you about the book.”
“They already consider you a suspect,” I
lied, “because of how she blackmailed you for eleven years. They’re just waiting until they have enough evidence to charge you. For both murders.”
“Stacey’s death was an accident,” he snapped. “And I didn’t kill Peaches. Not that I didn’t fantasize about wringing her miserable neck, but I didn’t do it. That’s not who I am.”
Perhaps not, but at the very least, he was a guy who, on discovering his wife dead, made sure to cover his own sorry ass before calling 911. A guy who lied to the police. A guy who used his writing talent to demean and belittle the people who wrote in to Peaches, asking for help. My sympathy had limits.
“Then you have to go to the detectives,” I said. “Tell them exactly what happened the day Stacey died.”
“No matter what I do,” he said, “it’s going to look bad for me. The blackmail turns me into a prime suspect. Unless Peaches was blackmailing a bunch of other people that I don’t know about.”
Funny you should mention...
“And it wouldn’t hurt to take a lawyer with you,” I said.
He took a deep breath. “I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think too long, Zak,” I said. “Don’t wait until they bring you in. You need to get in front of this.”
15
Lusting in Her Heart
“I’M MIRANDA DANIELS and this is Ramrod News, where the truth comes to live free.”
Okay, I admit it, I was watching the pathetic not-really-news show, against my better judgment. I was curious about how the media was treating the murder investigation, and Ramrod News was, sad to say, an influential media outlet. Millions of viewers tuned in every evening to hear Miranda hold forth on the most titillating, controversial, and/or incendiary current events.
Ramrod News was the television equivalent of “Peaches Preaches”: inflammatory, mean-spirited entertainment catering to the lowest common denominator.
Sexy Beast and I were cozily ensconced on the family room’s enormous, horseshoe-shaped ivory leather sofa, which faced a flat-screen TV the size of Rhode Island. The sofa was made cozier still by plentiful accent pillows and throws in shades of rose, slate blue, and pale green. I had not chosen the sofa, the TV, or any of my house’s other insanely expensive furnishings. Everything was as Irene McAuliffe had left it since I certainly couldn’t afford to replace anything. Fortunately for me, Irene—or more likely, her decorator—had excellent taste.
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