by Greg Herren
“I had nothing to do with that.” Milo leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “And you still don’t have any proof that I had anything to do with Jacob’s murder.”
Sam shook his head. “No, but once they finish dusting the mallet for fingerprints, it should be relatively easy to put the murder weapon in the right hands. Even if you paid him to, which is what I would guess if I had to.”
“And why is that?”
“Because you don’t have the guts to do your own dirty work.”
Sam headed for the door, then turned back toward Milo. “By the way, here’s your phone.”
Sam tossed a cell phone on the desk. Instinctively, Milo reached for it, then drew back. He pulled an identical phone from his own pocket.
“Never turn your back on a private investigator. I switched them when I met you for coffee yesterday. I didn’t peg you as a guy who’d use such a cheap phone. Imagine my surprise to find you sent the texts to yourself.”
“I guess you think you’re pretty clever, huh, Page?”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know about that. But I do know you’re not as clever as you think.”
Before Milo could retort, the intercom buzzed. “Sir,” his receptionist said, “there’s a Detective Tarrant from the police department here to see you.”
Milo sighed. “Send him in, Kate.”
“Her, sir.”
Sam grinned. “Oh, she won’t like that.”
Sam walked out as Tarrant entered Milo’s office. Two uniforms waited in the reception area. Tarrant gave Sam the barest of nods, aiming a stony gaze at Milo.
Sam knew he wouldn’t get any credit from the police for helping solve either murder. He tried not to mind that. He’d already deposited Milo’s check, and Tarrant had his statement about Rick’s killing and his work for Milo. If he was lucky, she’d buy him a drink once it was wrapped up.
Meanwhile, he had to get home and feed his new cat.
The Thin Blue Line(s)
Max Reynolds
I didn’t expect to kill her. I had thought about it, sure. Who wouldn’t? Belinda Sondheim Walsh (and yes, she liked to let people think she was related to that Sondheim) was the most difficult writer I had ever dealt with in my fifteen years in the business since I’d landed here at—well, better I not mention where, given the circumstances—with my excessive number of useless literary degrees from superb colleges that had made my family proud, but put me in debt for life. And believe me, I’d dealt with some doozies among the writing class, especially some of the older poets I’d inherited when the ancient Mr. Edwin Godwin (a name straight out of Dickens that always made a fat Pickwick Papers–style giggle well up in my throat) had retired, saint that he must have been. Good Lord. I wonder how that poor man survived as long as he did. At least he had his cats. All seven named for (to my mind) barely readable poets. Poor man, poor cats.
But Belinda—she could have killed off even Godwin, although he’d dealt with her for a decade before I got her and it’s my theory she was the final nail in his coffin that forced him into retirement. Belinda (“You may call me Belinda. Really, dear. It’s okay.” As if she were literary royalty and I her lowly subject.) was one of those writers who thinks all her words are golden. Their own little Rosetta Stone to haute literature. Don’t change a thing. Not a letter, nor a comma. Don’t remove one of the endlessly misplaced semicolons because she single-handedly was going to bring back the semicolon to prominence. In one book, no less—or so it seemed as I was lying on my sofa with my favorite little nub of a blue pencil because I still edit like that—iPad, WordPad, notepad, be damned.
Yes, she informed me when I inherited her (along with the chorus of elderly poets), “I don’t get edited.” Like my job was suddenly redundant in the truest sense of the term. I remember sitting having drinks with Amelia Watson, my friend over at—well, no need to name names since it’s a revolving door in the world of the editorship—and slugging down two dirty martinis (or was it three?) in quick succession because only gin can take away the bad taste of a difficult author, that I was amazed no one had killed Miz Walsh yet.
And now she was dead.
But you need to understand why. She was really the killer, you see—she was butchering the language all over the place and yet, still thought her words were golden and untouchable. And when I say golden, I mean literally so. She expected her collected letters to end up not in one of the great little liberal arts colleges for which we are known nationwide, but to be in Fort Knox, big blocks of shimmery literary bullion or Troy ounces of genius.
Please.
And now there she was, lying on the floor in front of my desk, Auden’s letter opener that I had been given by my charming Great-Aunt Tillie (who was straight out of a Capote short story) when I first became an editor up to the hilt just below Belinda’s “I’m so perfectly thin as only the chicest of writers who aren’t naturally French can be” sternum.
God, I was glad she was dead.
Or maybe not. Because the satisfaction of the deed is never balanced by the unpleasantness of the cleanup.
Now, in addition to my beloved Auden via Great-Aunt Tillie’s letter opener, which I loved to use every day and which I regularly just fondled when I was thinking about what needed to be done next, in addition to that prized possession, I was also going to have to give up my gorgeous rug that had belonged to James Purdy (whose purloined paperbacks had helped teach me to be gay back in high school) that I had stayed up a whole weekend bidding for on eBay with God knows how many other gay men and literary obsessives.
Even dead, Belinda was causing me problems.
*
It’s never easy to say when a problem starts—in this case, Belinda Sondheim Walsh. And I am what we call in the literary trade an “unreliable narrator,” so make of it all what you will. But here’s how it seemed to me to have happened.
As I said, I inherited a lot of Mr. Godwin’s authors. Some of whom were indeed prized. But Belinda was not among those. She had that kind of fussy yet plaintive literary talent that was still, regrettably, in fashion. Her characters were wholly unlikable—Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth would have been proud—and her plotting was a little on the rambling side. It’s hard to know what had originally made her famous. Some thought her writing funny. Others said it was “smart” and had a “highly developed sense of irony”—I’m quoting here, naturally. She had, one reviewer noted, “her finger on the pulse of the familial zeitgeist.”
Maybe. But I was the one with my fingers on Auden’s letter opener.
If I could have been objective, which I could not be, as you will discover, I might have been able to see what critics liked about her. But then, they didn’t have to deal with her, did they?
And that was what led to the problems. See, Belinda was one of those writers who likes her hand held line by line, yet doesn’t want a word changed. Hell—not a semicolon changed. Listen to my every word, but do not comment. A dicey combo, if you ask me. Because I am an editor through and through, and when I hear a dangling modifier or a split infinitive or a pause where it doesn’t belong or a string of ever-more-florid adjectives or strained metaphors, my editing finger starts to itch.
The first day I met Belinda, I disliked her on sight. Now the rumors that all gay men hate women are nonsense, naturally. People do know this now, I’m sure, but I feel it must be restated. It’s actually trite but true that some of my best friends are women. Amelia and I are thick as the proverbial thieves, and Natalie Thompson and I have been friends since college where we met in a ghastly semiotics class we were both forced to take and suffered through together. And then there’s M.J. Collins—we used to share an apartment in the Bowery when we both landed here in the publishing capital of the world and of course could not afford the rents. She’s my middle-of-the-night-sobbing go-to friend for all seasons.
So, I like women well enough. I don’t want to sleep with them, however—and therein, pardon the pun, lay the problem.
&
nbsp; Mr. Godwin had not warned me about Belinda, but then Godwin was in his dotage, and if he’d ever had a sexual thought it was well before I was born and Belinda would not have been the one to bring it out in him, of that I am certain. I have a sneaking—and horrifying—suspicion that his interests lay in those below the age of reason and that he had sublimated all his dangerous Lewis Carroll–style proclivities into the language he loved as much as his cats.
But I digress, as they say in all the best nineteenth-century novels. I digress.
It’s not that Belinda wasn’t an attractive woman. She was, in that pinched, ultra-thin, studiously fashionably well-dressed, well-coiffed, well-manicured, and well-made-up kind of way. But my interests were decidedly different. Cam was my man of the moment—a long moment that was turning into way more than a moment—and I was smitten to the point of obsession with him. Cameron Walker was, first of all, British, and I have a thing for accents. Even stupid Brits sound smart—that accent does it every time. But beyond the accent, I am an unabashed Anglophile ever since that junior year abroad in which Natalie and I fucked our way through London, Oxford, Cambridge (oh, Cambridge!), and even a few weekends in Bath and Leeds, if you can imagine. Not together, of course—she liked tweedy men with tightly furled umbrellas and I liked a rather rougher trade in those days, E.M. Forster’s Maurice and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited having kinked up my early sexuality rather effectively. But my lust for the Brits never ebbed, even if I now preferred them suited as opposed to coveralled.
Anyway, back to Cam, my current drug of choice. We met at a literary event, naturally. He was tall and lanky in that British way, with the almost studied dark hair hanging into his eyes, and he was really right out of a promo page for Eton, except when he smiled he had good teeth; his mother being American, orthodontia had been de rigeur in his family.
I was representing my house; he, his. We shared amuse bouche and wine and he seemed as taken with me as I was with him and within a day—why did it take a whole day?—we were in his bed in his cramped but gorgeous Upper East Side apartment. And was it grand…and I don’t just mean his, uh, equipment, although that was indeed grand, as well.
So when Belinda was handed over to me, I was only a month in with Cam, but it was solid. We hadn’t said commitment per se, but we weren’t fucking anyone else, either, and neither of us seemed to want to, which was certainly unusual for me, if not for him. And we had more in common than we had ever expected: books, ambition, we both loved music of all kinds, and we had a raw sexual intensity together that had actually kept us texting throughout the days until we got to the nights. Plus, as Amelia, Natalie, and M.J. all told me—we looked great together.
It was almost cozy, how well things were going. We’d met just after Valentine’s Day and now it looked like we’d be having a first Christmas together with all the trimmings.
And then there was Belinda.
*
I realize now, as I am pacing back and forth in what used to be Mr. Edwin Godwin’s office here at—no, I won’t say; it’s such a small world, publishing—that Cameron is why I had to kill Belinda.
Let me say for the record that I am not bisexual. A lot of twenty- and thirty-somethings in New York and London are, of course. Playing the gender field has gotten excessively, even tediously popular. I’m not critical of that fence-jumping, but I have never been one of those. I like men and only men. Women are for friendship, men are for fucking. And it’s a hard and fast rule—no pun intended—I have that I don’t get involved, even briefly, with men who are testing the waters. I accidentally got a mad crush on a married man a few years back and it nearly killed me when he finally told me he was married and had three kids and an actual house in Connecticut. That was way too Cheever-esque for me. I practically asked for documentation of true gayness after that, even for a quick screw.
But Cam wasn’t bisexual. He had female friends, too—publishing is one of the only fields with more women than men—but he didn’t cross the fence sexually. So I felt safe. So very safe.
Until Belinda.
Yes, here’s the part where the self-proclaimed unreliable narrator becomes the self-proclaimed homosexual stereotype. Brace yourselves.
*
So there I was, sitting at my new desk, formerly the desk of Mr. Edwin Godwin, when Belinda Sondheim Walsh just breezed in on a cloud of Dior J’adore and sat herself in the odd little Queen Anne chair across from me that Godwin had thought an essential piece of literary paraphernalia.
“I’m Belinda Sondheim Walsh,” she stated in a voice that was set at a pitch I couldn’t quite place, but which I was certain might drive dogs mad. “You may call me Belinda. Really, dear. It’s okay.”
She crossed her legs with a studied elegance and tapped a finger on the edge of Mr. Edwin Godwin’s—now my—desk in a way that made me wish I had one of those hard birchwood pointers that the nuns used to crack across our fingers when I was back in elementary school, my class seeming to have been the last in which corporal punishment was still accepted.
I stood, instead, and came around my desk in the best, most officiously gay literary editor way I could imagine—Maxwell Perkins back from the dead and very gay—and offered her my well-kept metrosexual hand.
“I’m Anthony Perrone, your new editor. You may call me Tony. Did we have an appointment I was unaware of?”
She took my hand but did not shake it, rather laid her fingers in mine like an offering from a supplicant. Which she very definitely was not. I withdrew my hand in what I hoped was not too abrupt a fashion.
“Appointment?” That voice again. I shook my head just the slightest bit and walked back around to my chair and sat back down.
“I never made appointments with Edwin,” she continued. “I just came by when I needed him. That’s how it is, you know.” There was a smug, insider-y tone to her oddly pitched voice that set my teeth on edge and I stared for a moment at my computer screen to slake any of my immediate desires to find a weapon from amongst the things on my too cluttered desk. My eyes flitted to the letter opener and then left.
“Perhaps it was—and I have no doubt that you and Mr. Godwin have had a remarkably close relationship over the years, but while he had a kind of charming laxness in his dealings with authors,” and here I paused, because I could see she was shifting in her chair in that imperceptible way that cats do right before they spring at your face and you lose an eye, “regrettably, I cannot afford quite the same openness because we are now down an editor, and yet up authors. And I am, as you can see…” and here I turned slightly and did an extravagant flourish as I took in the stacks of manuscripts, galleys, ARCs, and other literary effluvia that was the compounded hoarder-ish conglomeration of both my own former cubicle and Godwin’s office of the past forty-eight years.
I sat back, somewhat pleased with my presentation of my plight.
Belinda was neither chastened nor amused.
“Well, you needn’t worry, Tony,” she said. Augh—that voice—and continued, “I don’t need editing, as Edwin can tell you. I just like a little”—here she searched for a word—“gentle prodding. You understand, dear. Something to get me moving in the right direction.”
Here she crossed and uncrossed her legs in the same way Sharon Stone had done in Basic Instinct, and I shifted my gaze just in case she was panty-less as La Stone had been. That was not an image I wanted in my head. Ever.
And yet, looking back, I am now sure she had been. Panty-less, I mean. And purposefully so. And wanting me not to just look but take that prodding comment to heart.
One hears a lot about cougars these days. And frankly, why shouldn’t women at the peak of their sexual arousal and probably acumen (youth is wasted on the young; one learns exactly what that means as one gets older) want to have a suitable bed mate with equivalent stamina and passion? I don’t fault them for that. But I’m not looking to be anyone’s not-quite-a-boy-anymore-at-thirty-five boy toy. Besides which, as I have already stated, I am not a
fence jumper. Ever. I don’t need to refer to myself as a man who sleeps with men. I am gay. Through and through. It’s intrinsic. That leg-crossing event did not affect me one iota except to make me want to find Miz Walsh a different editor, straightaway. Pun implied.
But Belinda took it into her head that I was indeed a fence jumper. Or that I should be, just for her. Especially for her. Which made working with her increasingly difficult until the fateful evening of the letter-opener incident, which, I suppose, would best be described as my first murder. Since The Ox-Bow Incident was already taken as a title and I hate being derivative.
So—Tony’s First Murder it was. Sounds like some ghoulish children’s picture book—and you can imagine the visual already, can’t you?
Here’s what happened:
I was supposed to work a little late that night in November, when it’s already fully dark before five in the afternoon, and then meet Cam and then we were going away for the weekend to my friend M.J.’s place in Connecticut, because no one who lives in New York can ever fully escape Cheever, no matter how hard we try. Don’t get me wrong—I love Cheever. I just didn’t ever want to be a character in a Cheever anything: short story, journal entry, novel. And yet, now here I was a Cheever anti-hero, fully fleshed in the office of, well, we established that the name doesn’t matter, but an esteemed and estimable publisher of more than a hundred years with a dead woman on my floor—on my rug—when I am supposed to be going to Connecticut for a hopefully very dirty weekend with the man who I am pretty sure is the love of my life.
What to do with the body? And what about my rug and letter-opener? I have read enough mysteries and seen enough episodes of CSI and Law & Order to know that it doesn’t take much of a misstep to get caught when one kills. Of course murder is always the first misstep, isn’t it? And I’ve fully made that little do-si-do. Thanks to Belinda.