by C. A. Larmer
Practically her own neighborhood, she thought, before ripping out the page and darting into her office to wedge it into a well-thumbed manila folder. Back in the lounge room, she quickly checked her reflection in the hall mirror (straightening the glasses, retrieving the hair) and then slammed the front door solidly behind her.
‘Urgh, fug orf!’ growled a foul smelling mass of brown rags on the pavement downstairs and the young woman diverted her eyes and breathed in through her mouth as she stepped around him and away. Checking that her bag was securely zipped, she dug her hands deep into her pockets and strode swiftly through Elizabeth Bay. If she picked up her pace she might just make it in time. Roxy took a hard right at the old police station, cutting past the fountain, through to Macleay Street and towards Kings Cross station. The city-bound train was late as usual and by the time Roxy reached Martin Place she was racing, up the grimy escalators, past the sullen stream of commuters and out onto Macquarie Street. Then across to Elizabeth Street, a quick glance around, a light change and a moment of calm before everything turned to pot.
In retrospect, Roxy would remember a definite hand print on the small of her back just moments before the bus tore past, but for now she was simply flying, her chin propelled forward, her arms flailing about as she tried to regain control. Somewhere along the way her glasses—her beautiful tortoiseshell glasses—also took off, rendering her blind. Somehow, miraculously, Roxy managed to break her fall, and landed in a huddle in the gutter, her face pressed hard against the cold cement, one arm twisted up beneath her. She moved the arm carefully, checking it wasn’t broken, and then struggled to her feet just as a large, grayish blob swooped down towards her.
‘You okay, love?’ the blob asked, helping her up. ‘That was bloody close, you nearly caught the bus to Bondi!’
Roxy nodded unconvincingly in his direction and made her way through the crowd to what she hoped was a wall. Ah yes, a low brick one. She leant against it, her cheek throbbing a little, and scrounged through her handbag for her emergency spectacles while the world whirled on around her. The glasses were an old set, gold and garish, but they would do. Pushing them onto her nose, she straightened her fringe down, dusted off her jeans and looked around again. Her tortoiseshell glasses were nowhere to be seen and the gray-suited man was walking slowly away, glancing back occasionally, wondering if his job was done. She waved him away and turned back in the direction from which she’d come, eager to find the stranger she’d glanced at a split second before she went flying. There was something suspicious about his eyes, the way they darted sideways the moment she looked at him. She suspected premeditation. Within minutes Roxy acknowledged defeat and turned back.
‘Damn it!’ she hissed beneath her breath, and made her way down a few more blocks to the next corner, then looked around before dashing along an alleyway and up to an unmarked door. She quickly stabbed in a code and watched as the door swung open, then entered, making sure it shut firmly behind her before ascending the stairwell two steps at a time until she reached an office marked Horowitz Media Management. Panting heavily, she let herself in.
‘Jesus, Roxy, you look like shit,’ Oliver Horowitz announced as she strode past reception and straight into his office.
‘Hello to you, too, Olie. Can I use your mirror?’
‘Yeah, go for it.’ He pointed one pudgy thumb towards the small bathroom in the corner of his office. She went in and surveyed the damage relieved to see just a small graze where her skin had made contact with the pavement. She splashed her unsettled expression away with some cold water and returned to the outer office where Oliver tossed her a towel. It had the word Nike printed across it.
‘So,’ she said, wiping her face before tossing it back and then dropping down into a scratchy sofa in front of his desk, ‘what’s up?’
‘Huh?’
‘Earth to Olie. You left a text message for me to get in here at 10. Pronto.’
‘I did?’ Roxy narrowed her eyes and waited for him to click. ‘I didn’t leave any message, Roxy. What is it with those glasses? Bit retro for you, eh?’
‘The chic ones died a death this morning. What do you mean you didn’t leave me a message?’
Oliver surrendered some papers to his desk and sat upright in his overstuffed, leather chair. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
‘Not sure yet.’ She dug about in her handbag for some lipstick. ‘Well, I’m here now, got anything for me?’
‘No I don’t. You in trouble, Roxy? Again?’
‘I’m never in trouble, you know that.’ Roxy brushed the lipstick across her bottom lip, painting it a matt red hue, and then flung it back into her bag as she rolled her lips together, spreading the color evenly. ‘Come on, Olie, darling,’ she continued, sea green eyes sparkling through provocatively wide eyelashes, ‘you have to have something for me. I can’t wear these dowdy specs for much longer.’
‘Oh, I dunno, they’re kinda growin’ on you.’
‘Olie.’
‘How’s the Musgrave biography going? Is everything okay?’
‘Fine, fine.’ Her eyes glazed over. ‘It’s not exactly riveting stuff.’
‘No? You don’t find church fundraisers intriguing?’
Roxy smirked back at him. Sydney socialite Beatrice Musgrave wanted her life story told and had approached the Horowitz Agency for a ghostwriter, someone with a gift for words who could help her construct her story into a half-decent ‘autobiography’. The deal with all of these jobs was simple: while Roxy never got any credit for the book (ghostwriters remain just that—a ghostly presence behind the scenes), she did get compensated sufficiently to squirrel some away and pay off the much-abused Visa card. And that’s the only kind of credit she cared about, at least while she had a mortgage to contend with.
Oliver had wasted no time calling his favorite ghostwriter, Roxy Parker, who’d been on his books now for many years. While the money was substantial—double what Roxy had ever been paid for ghostwriting before—the job, so far, was extraordinarily dull. She would have exchanged the cash for a little conspiracy in a heartbeat.
‘Not every story has to be about mystery and intrigue,’ he reminded her, doodling on some paper with a biro. ‘Anyway, I was thinking maybe I should just pass it on to Klaus.’
‘Ha! Don’t make me laugh!’
‘Don’t knock Klaus, he’s a good writer.’
‘Yeah, if you like your stories like his hair: thin on top.’
‘Well at least he doesn’t bring headaches into it.’
‘What headaches?’
Oliver stood up, his beer belly peeking through where several buttons on his ’50s-style bowling shirt were undone, and shuffled over to the office door.
‘Shazza! Where the hell are you?’
‘Awww, I’m here, boss, fixin’ the photocopier!’ came a hoarse smoker’s voice from the next room.
‘Good, get us a coupla coffees will ya!’
‘Milk and two sugars for me, thanks!’ Roxy called out and watched her agent as he wedged himself back into his chair. She wondered if he had once been a good looking man before a steady diet of doner kebabs and cold beer ruined him. Her agent was in his late 40s, single, a hard worker with a lopsided grin and a kind of roguish charm that forgave his sloppy looks and smart-ass ways. Roxy liked him. He called a spade a spade and that was a prerequisite in this business.
‘What headaches?’ she repeated, smiling innocently.
‘Oh, let me think, Roxy, sweetheart, what headaches? Oh maybe the time I sent you out to interview a band grieving their departed drummer and you came back with some cock ‘n’ bull story about the ex-girlfriend and how she might’ve done him in.’
‘It was a possibility.’
‘It was a self-administered drug overdose. He was a friggin’ junky. Full stop.’
‘Well, in any case, it made good reading for the Tele and you got your 15 percent. Anyway, that was ages ago. I’ve been good lately.’
‘That’s what I’m w
orried about.’ He eyed her for a moment and then asked, ‘Still keeping The Book of Death?’
Roxy shifted uneasily in her seat. ‘It’s not a book of death!’ She scoffed. ‘It’s a crime catalogue.’
‘Same difference.’
‘Hardly. Besides, it has a purpose.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘What’s the big deal, Oliver? All good writers file clippings away. You never know when you might need them.’
‘Do all writers focus only on crime articles? I swear, Roxy, it’s like you’re planning the perfect murder.’
She shrugged wishing the subject away and was saved by Oliver’s secretary who appeared at her side, two Horowitz Management mugs in her hands and a half-finished cigarette dangling from her mouth. Sharon was a middle-aged woman with short, spiky red hair and a penchant for extremely tight, brightly colored spandex that only worked to accentuate her scrawny, stick-thin form. But perhaps that was the idea.
‘Oh Sharon sweetheart,’ Oliver gushed as she thumped the mugs down. ‘What ever would I do without you?’
‘Hmph!’ she snorted back, offering Roxy a cheeky wink before moping out again, the fag still firmly in place.
‘Thanks, Sharon,’ Roxy sang after her. They eyed their coffees for a while and then Oliver stood up again and shuffled over to the door to close it. Roxy rolled her eyes in response.
‘Come on, I know something’s up.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, you get a strange message from me that I never left, then you get beat up—’
‘Hang on a minute—’
‘I can see the scratch, Roxy.’ She reached one hand up to her cheek instinctively, running her forefinger across the web-like mark.
‘Oh the cat did that.’
‘You don’t have a cat.’
‘And now you can see why.’
They sat back and sipped their drinks, Oliver shaking his head reprovingly, Roxy ignoring him as she glanced around the room. She wondered, as she always did, how he could get it so dusty. They were three floors up. Tatty posters of sci-fi films had been sticky-taped to the walls, and every possible bench was cluttered with assorted memorabilia from past events and publicity gimmicks. There was a teddy bear draped in an oversized T-shirt that read, ‘Mardi-grass 2001, Nimbin’, a mug shaped like the Opera House and a pair of 3D glasses with one lens missing. She connected eyes with a giant cardboard cut-out of a buxom blonde in a stretchy red dress with the words ‘Tina Passion–Writing passion into your life!’ scrawled across the bottom, and wondered as she often did, how she could possibly share an agent with one of the country’s corniest romance writers. Romance was always the last thing on her mind.
‘Okay, then,’ he relented. ‘I’ll see what else I can find for you. If I do find something, will you swap the Musgrave biography for it?’
‘Um, no, you don’t seem to get it. I want more work not less. Can’t stand it when I’m not busy, you know that. Besides, I’m a third of the way through the bio, why on earth would I stop now?’
‘Just a thought. Look, Roxy, be careful, alright? Enjoy the down time. Take a trip somewhere. Relax. Here,’ he fetched his iPhone and held it out to her. ‘Look it up on my dictionary app, it’s a useful word.’
She dismissed him with a wave, got to her feet and was halfway out the door when he called her back.
‘Why don’t you call one of your old contacts, that sexy Greek chick from Glossy for instance?’
‘Oh, you mean the one who never comes through? Pah!’
As it turns out, Maria Constantinople, the editor of one of the country’s top-selling women’s lifestyle magazines, had come through the day before, offering Roxy ‘a big one, baby, a big one!’ She was on her way to the Glossy offices now, she just didn’t believe it would amount to much. Roxy wrote a lot for Maria, mostly mundane articles about women’s health, relationships, money, anything Maria wanted, really. They were always fairly safe subjects, the kind of stories she’d written a hundred times before and would write a hundred times again. The only challenge was changing the heading, introduction and content sufficiently enough to confuse the readers into believing they hadn’t read the exact same thing just 12 months before. Pure trickery, of course, and not something she was particularly proud of, but, hey, it paid the bills. Well, it almost did. The worst part of the whole deal was that these articles were never very long, 1200 words at best. At 70c a word, it didn’t amount to much. She wasn’t about to go renovating the kitchen, let’s put it that way. Roxy longed to sink her teeth into something wordy, something original, something she wanted to read.
Yeah right, she thought, like that’s ever gonna happen. This was a briefing session with Glossy magazine, after all, not The New Yorker.
This time, however, Roxy couldn’t have been more wrong.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting, gorgeous,’ Maria boomed when, after 30 minutes chewing her lips in the lobby, Roxy was ushered through to the editor’s spacious corner office by her new assistant, Trevor.
‘Bit of a hunk, eh?’ the editor whispered, eyeing the young man up and down as he closed the glass doors behind them.
‘Yeah, I guess, if you’re a bloke.’
Maria’s thickly penciled eyebrows shot skyward. ‘You don’t reckon he’s gay do you?’
‘We’re in Sydney. He’s got the body of Adonis. I rest my case. So what have you got for me?’
Roxy was not a big fan of Maria Constantinople, and not just because of her lack of originality and depth. The woman was loud and brash, and prone to stomping her five-foot frame around like a rugby player, tossing expletives about as though they were superlatives and playing God over her quivering staff. But even that Roxy could have forgiven—Olie was hardly the Prime Minister of office politics, let’s face it—yet there was something else, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Perhaps it was the feeling that this editor would sell her out for a headline in a heartbeat.
Well into her 50s, Maria wore her thick, dyed auburn hair in long, wild curls, and plastered her face with a gelatinous coat of foundation, the type that implores you to play naughts and crosses with your nails.
‘Oh, I got a treat for you, Roxy,’ she said, clasping her bejeweled hands together, prayer-like in front, ‘and I need it done fast.’
‘No problem.’
‘Coffee?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Well then, let’s get straight to it.’ She reached for a file marked ‘Heather Jackson, Artist’ and flung it across her sparkly glass desk towards Roxy. ‘You’ve no doubt heard of this one. One of Australia’s top modern artists. She’s super private and, as far as the rumors go, a complete freakin’ cow. But I’ve scored an interview and I want you to do it.’
Roxy flipped through the file. A selection of old press clippings had been placed inside, along with a black and white print, autographed, and a tattered leaflet which read, ‘Sydney Art Gazette Annual Competition, 1989’.
‘Why me?’ Roxy asked, surprised.
‘Why not?’
‘Well, for starters, I know very little about art.’
‘So improvise.’
‘Why not use your art writer?’
Maria sighed heavily. ‘Because I’m giving you a bloody break. Do you want the job or not?’
‘Of course I do.’ Deep down, though, Roxy wondered what the woman was up to. She wasn’t in the habit of doing Roxy any favors. Besides, it wasn’t her style to commission the good stories out, especially when she had one of the best editorial teams in the country assembled right under her oily brown nose. Roxy smelt a rat, but didn’t push the matter further. Ten years as a freelance writer had taught her that. You just take the job and run.
‘That’s the spirit!’ Maria said as she adjusted a collection of gold chains that had lost themselves in her cleavage. ‘All the info you need’s in the folder. Thursday seems to work well for Heather. You give me a time and a place and I’ll set it all up. Too bloody easy if you ask m
e.’
They chatted for a bit longer before Maria started playing with her watch and, getting the hint, Roxy closed the folder and got to her feet. ‘I’ll give you a call this arvo to talk time and money.’
Maria pushed her eyebrows together. ‘What? You want some freakin’ dosh for this?’
Roxy just laughed as she saw herself out.
If you enjoyed this excerpt, look for Killer Twist at Amazon
Other books by C.A. Larmer
Ghostwriter Mysteries:
A Plot to Die For (Book 2)
Last Writes (Book 3)
Dying Words (Book 4)
Words Can Kill (Book 5)
A Note Before Dying (Book 6)
Plus:
The Agatha Christie Book Club
An Island Lost