by Lev Raphael
“Did she have enemies?” Valley asked.
“Of course not! She was so loved.”
I could see Valley wasn’t buying that.
“But you and she had a fight, an argument of some kind, right? Before the reception.”
Vivianne shrugged. “When you love, it is easy to hate.”
Valley was silent, waiting for her to add something more, but Vivianne clearly had nothing she wanted to say.
“So if she was loved, then she was hated, right?”
Vivianne eyed him coolly, but Valley didn’t give up. “What was the argument about?”
“Who can say?”
“I’m told it was very heated.”
“Of course.” She smiled. “It was, as you say, an argument. One raises ones voice to make oneself heard.” She seemed to enjoy deflecting him, and she wasn’t doing anything to hide her enjoyment.
“You don’t remember what you said?”
“There was no time to take notes, I’m afraid.”
I tried not to laugh and turned away when Vivianne glanced my way and muttered in French, “Quelle barbe!” What a drag!
Looking frustrated, Valley told her she could go. She thanked him, nodded at me, and made her slow way out of the room.
When Vivianne was gone, Valley turned to me. “No enemies? None?”
“Bullshit. People hated Chloe.”
“Did you hate her?”
“I didn’t know her. But other people did.”
“Like who? And how do you know?”
I felt trapped and tried to squirm out of it. “Chloe’s got a bad reputation for screwing people over on her way up. That kind of thing gets around, so you hear about it, even though you don’t have specifics.”
“Right.”
Priscilla was next, and she was more distraught than I’d ever seen her, eyes red and unfocused, hands clenching and unclenching. Her black sweater dress and boots made her look even paler.
“Why did you say that you didn’t do it when Chloe DeVore’s body was discovered? Do what?”
“Kill her,” Priscilla whispered.
“Kill her? What made you think it was murder?”
Priscilla shrugged helplessly. “She was dead. I just—”
“Why would people think you had a reason to murder her?”
I was amazed at what followed.
“I hated her,” Priscilla said forthrightly, but her eyes wandered. “I hated her more than I’ve ever hated anyone. I loathed her.”
Valley took that in greedily.
“She’s been my nemesis,” Priscilla continued without prompting. “She’s had the success I wanted, but she doesn’t deserve it. And she’s at tacked me in print.”
“You’re a writer?”
Priscilla nodded. “Mysteries.”
Valley looked like that one word made him wonder if he could take Priscilla seriously. Or was I misreading him?
“So you were jealous of Chloe DeVore?”
Priscilla said, “Absolutely. Just like the cliché: insanely jealous. But I didn’t kill her. I couldn’t have.”
“Why not? You’re bigger than she was. It wouldn’t be hard.”
Now Priscilla fixed him with her gorgeous dark eyes. “I couldn’t have done it because I wasn’t anywhere near that corridor. I went right down the hall to the auditorium just like everyone else. And how could I murder someone with all those people around?”
“Good point,” Valley said. Then he leaned forward so that his face was very close to hers. “But if she was murdered, somebody killed her with all those people around.”
Priscilla slumped, seeming to cave in on herself as she realized that he was right. I thought of mysteries I’d read where murderers had taken great risks. It was daring, but it wasn’t impossible, given the animosity between the two Wharton groups. I’m sure the conferees were paying more attention to their ill will for each other than to what was happening down a dark corridor under repair in a building none of them were familiar with.
“Unless someone was with you every minute, and can swear to that—” Valley left the sentence hanging there as he moved back. He then asked Priscilla who else hated Chloe.
“Everyone, I guess. I’ve never met anyone who liked her.”
“What about that French woman?” I wondered if Valley couldn’t remember how to pronounce Vivianne’s name.
Priscilla rallied. “Vivianne felt sorry for her, that’s all. It wasn’t love, it was pity.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s obvious.” Priscilla rubbed at her eyes. “It was obvious, I mean.”
Valley considered that, then told Priscilla he’d want to talk to her tomorrow after the Medical Examiner’s report, and she trailed out of there like a schoolgirl expelled for cheating on an exam.
Valley stood up, clapped his hands, rubbed them together as if facing a roaring fire, and seemed ready to call it a night.
“Wait,” I said. “There were other people at the reception who acted weird when Chloe arrived. The keynote speakers, Devon Davenport and Grace-Dawn Vaughan. And Davenport took a long time to get from the reception to the auditorium.” I also told him how Crane Taylor and Gustaf Carmichael had behaved, one leaving the room, the other raising his glass in mocking salute.
Valley sent for them all.
Devon Davenport arrived first, with Grace-Dawn Vaughan on his arm, looking very proprietary. They were a very odd couple, him grizzled, arrogant, and dressed so conservatively, her looking like a slightly moth-eaten hippie. Davenport seemed unaccountably flustered. Maybe he’d had too much to drink by now.
“Why don’t you make all those ghouls go home?” he demanded, pointing out to the hallway. “Vampires. It’s a fucking zoo out there.”
Davenport had been loitering out there too, I thought.
As with Joanne Gillian, Valley ignored the fussing and went right to what he wanted to know. “Did you have a reason to dislike Chloe DeVore?”
“I hate all authors—or most of them. They’re scum!”
“Was she better than most? Or worse?”
“She’s dead,” Davenport rumbled. “Who the fuck cares?”
Valley snapped his fingers right in front of Davenport’s nose. It was so unexpected, Davenport jerked back with a little yelp.
“I care,” Valley said calmly. “And you better care, because I am conducting an investigation here and this is serious. You’re not in New York. You’re on my turf and I’m not putting up with your bullshit.”
Davenport gobbled a bit, but said nothing.
“Now. What did you know about Chloe DeVore?”
“Just what everyone in the business knows. Nothing special.”
Grace-Dawn looked down, and I was sure she knew that Davenport was lying.
“The memoir,” I said.
Davenport glared at me.
Valley asked, “What memoir?”
I explained that Chloe was working on a sensational memoir and a lot of publishers were interested.
Valley turned to Davenport, who gave me a particularly ugly look. “Is that true? And where do you fit in?”
“It’s true, but it wasn’t any sweat off my balls who published her memoir.”
Valley persisted with Davenport, but all he got was more canned abuse about writers’ iniquities. Grace-Dawn Vaughan was more open about her feelings when Valley tried her.
“DeVore was a viper. She satirized me in her novel Brevity many years ago and I’ve never forgiven her.”
“That was you?” I asked, remembering the nasty portrait in that book of a showy, dumb writer called Ann-Marie Tyree.
Grace-Dawn preened a little, enjoying the attention.
“How much contact did you have with her?” Valley asked.
“None. Not until this conference, that is.”
“Did she know how angry you were about being satirized?”
Grace-Dawn hesitated. “I didn’t keep it a secret. She probably heard about it from one au
thor or another.”
“Where were you between the time of the reception and the time the body was found?”
“In the auditorium, I presume. Giving my speech.”
“And you?” he asked Davenport.
“I gave a speech,” Davenport threw off.
“But he was late,” I blurted, earning a nasty stare.
Valley waited for Davenport to explain himself, but he just said, “Don’t remember where I was every minute.”
Valley said sharply, “You’d better remember,” and then he dismissed them both after a few more listless questions.
Crane Taylor was the next to face Valley. In his late forties, wan and beady-eyed, Taylor made an instant bad impression on Valley. Taylor was the kind of nose-in-the-air academic who gives teaching a bad name: arrogant and dismissive.
Crossing his thin legs in a parody of gentlemanliness, he was as belligerent in his own way as Devon Davenport had been. Everything about him, from his well-cropped beard to his shiny loafers, seemed showy and aggressive: Look how sharp I am.
“What’s your problem with the dead woman?”
“I detest writers who act like celebrities. I’m a scholar. That’s why I didn’t want to be in the same room as Chloe DeVore. She stinks.”
Valley shook his head.
Taylor said, “It’s true.”
“You always walk out of a room if someone doesn’t meet your standards?”
Taylor smirked. “Not always. Sometimes I stay, out of morbid curiosity. But Chloe was beyond the pale.”
“Why’s that?”
“She was going to publish a trashy memoir.”
“You read it?”
Taylor frowned, “No, but—”
“Then how’d you know it’s so bad?”
“I know Chloe. Her work, that is. What else could it be?”
I thought this was an exaggeration. Grace-Dawn Vaughan was a writer of trash; Chloe’s work didn’t have enough sincerity to be truly awful.
“So it was just a question of taste for you,” Valley tried.
“Not just. Taste and discrimination aren’t anything minor.” Taylor sounded as if he was lecturing a dim acolyte.
Valley pounced. “You really hated her, didn’t you?”
“No!” Taylor’s denial didn’t seem at all authentic, and that was so obvious, he wilted.
“If you’re lying, and you’re involved in her death—”
Taylor almost blubbered, “I haven’t done anything!”
I couldn’t believe his sudden shift from hauteur to vulnerability.
Disgusted, or perhaps pleased that he’d broken Taylor down so quickly, Valley dismissed him. “What a prick,” he muttered when Taylor was gone.
“Amen to that,” I said, wondering why Chloe’s memoir would matter so much to Crane Taylor, and why he seemed to think her as terrible a writer as Grace-Dawn.
Gustaf Carmichael was the next person Valley interviewed. Carmichael gave me the creeps. He was that new academic type: the “punk” professor with big gold earrings in each ear, tightly trimmed goatee, and shaved head. I expected him to blather on about Derrida and Foucault when Valley asked him why he’d raised his glass to Chloe.
His answer was smooth. “I wanted to honor the triumph of sleaze.”
“Say what?”
“Her memoir. She was going to be all over TV, People, the whole shmear.”
“How’d you know that?”
“It’s inevitable these days.”
“And you read her book?”
“I don’t think anyone’s read it yet.”
“You’ve got a lot of attitude about a book you haven’t seen.”
“Detective.” Carmichael grinned. “Detective, I just have a lot of attitude.” He was so pleased with himself I had the urge to smack him. I caught Valley’s eye and he seemed to feel the same way.
A uniformed officer interrupted to tell Valley that they were all done at the crime scene, the body was being removed, and the Medical Examiner would be meeting them at the morgue.
Valley thanked him, and wearily dismissed Gustaf Carmichael, who seemed annoyed. “That’s all you had to ask me? Everyone else was in here longer.”
Valley eyed him up and down. “If you’re feeling left out, I suppose we could arrest you and keep you in jail overnight. Would that do?”
Carmichael blushed and departed. When he was gone, Valley asked if there was anything else I could tell him. I thought a moment, and then remembered that Verity Gallup and Van Deegan Jones hadn’t been on the scene when the body was discovered. I explained to Valley who they were. Was their absence suspicious?
“Did they interact with Chloe DeVore at any time? Talk to her, or whatever?”
“No. But they seemed very angry that she was here.” Remembering their faces at the reception, I wondered if anger was the right word. They seemed more disgusted or aggrieved.
It was after midnight, but Valley nodded and asked for the two Wharton organization presidents to be brought in.
They entered with all the bonhomie of two escaped chain gang prisoners still manacled to each other’s legs. Gallup and Jones both seemed to be pretending the other didn’t exist, and they sat down with a seat between them.
Valley gaped a little at Gallup. She was such a knockout that I half expected him to ask her what she was doing in a dump like this.
Valley did ask where they’d been when Chloe’s body was discovered.
Jones sniffily glanced at Gallup, clearly waiting for her to go first. But she was silent, as if hoping to mortify Jones in his attempt to be polite. I suppose she wanted to show up the bankruptcy of such a gesture when they were not even remotely interested in treating each other with civility.
“I don’t recall,” Jones said sharply.
“I don’t either,” Gallup said with exaggerated calm, smoothing the inch-long hair above her ears with both hands. The gesture made her large breasts bobble, and Valley’s eyes widened. Verity abruptly pulled her jacket closed. She kept her own eyes forward, as did Jones. Watching them, I thought they were like petulant little kids who’d been separated after fighting in the sandbox. It was so undignified I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t.
Valley moved on. “I hear neither of you liked the deceased.”
“Never met her,” Jones shot. Then he jerked a thumb at Verity. “She probably loved the woman.”
Gallup rounded on him, eyes flashing. “What?”
“Chloe DeVore,” he said as spitefully as if the name were a curse, “was the kind of dreary, overrated writer you feminists love to make outrageous claims for, wasn’t she? You’re desperate to create this myth of unacknowledged talent. Now that she’s dead you can launch a damned revival.” It was so brutal and cold even Valley looked shocked. I know I was.
Jones was also completely off-base about Chloe. She had never been unrecognized in her lifetime.
“I hated her!” Verity shrieked. She looked around at our startled faces, deeply embarrassed. “Not her. I hated the kind of writing she did. It was empty and pretentious. She had no real style, no sense of irony, no vision.”
All of which Edith Wharton had, I thought, and in spades.
Van Deegan Jones frowned, as if he couldn’t believe his rival was telling the truth. But what amazed me was that the two of them even had opinions of Chloe DeVore’s work. Most academics are stuck in their own specialties and don’t read widely. Yet Jones and Gallup knew Chloe’s work—another sign of how she had established herself as a literary writer.
“It kills me to see writers like her get so much support from the publishing world,” Gallup went on. “It’s just tokenism.”
Valley looked a bit out of his depth. “Hey,” he said, “can we keep to the subject? There’s a dead woman out there. Now, what do you know about her?”
They both professed to having never met Chloe before tonight.
“Then why were you so pissed off she was here?”
Jones looked down at hi
s lap. Gallup raised her chin a little defiantly.
“If either one of you is hiding anything, and this turns into a murder case—” Valley left the sentence unfinished.
Jones snorted, unimpressed by the threat. Verity Gallup surveyed Valley quite coolly, equally self-possessed.
Then they both suddenly looked at me, as if daring me to explain Chloe’s presence at the conference.
I quailed. “I didn’t invite Chloe! She just registered.”
“Forget Chloe,” Jones said. “What about that Grace-Dawn Vaughn? Whose idea was that?”
“How could you permit such a performance?” Verity snapped.
Jones nodded agreement, then caught himself.
Verity lashed out at me. “Grace-Dawn Vaughn was pathetic. The kind of sentimental, mawkish writer who tranquilizes women and blinds them to the brutal realities of their lives. Opium to keep them mindless, powerless slaves.”
“She was lively,” I said.
“Oh, cut the pseudo-Marxist bull,” Jones snapped at Verity, and for a moment I thought she was going to lunge at him from her chair, but Valley interrupted.
“That’s it for tonight.” He impatiently dismissed Gallup and Jones, and when they’d left, he told me he might need my advice and information about all these “fruitcakes” as the case unfolded. “If there is a case. But stay out of the investigation! I’m assigning two other detectives to help me out. I don’t want any interference.”
Of course, I said I would mind my own business.
As we headed out of the room, Valley added, “I’m curious about something. Do you think it’s a good idea for someone like you to be heading up this kind of conference?”
“That,” I said, “is the smartest question you’ve asked all night.”
6
OUTSIDE THE SEMINAR room, I was chilled by the yellow police tape stretched across the entrance to the corridor, even thougChloe’s body had been removed. Almost everyone had gone now and the brightly lit building seemed ghostly.
I breathed in and out a few times, wondering what was next.
“Dr. Hoffman! Hi!”