Murder at the Book Group

by Maggie King

  “Carlene stole Trudy’s man too. But Trudy wasn’t at book group. She got married and is on her honeymoon as we speak.”

  Vince took notes when I told him Janet’s account of Carlene’s mysterious visitor on Monday evening, but he looked skeptical. “Or maybe Janet was the visitor.”

  I looked stunned. “Why—I never thought of that.” My skepticism skills were undeveloped.

  “She gave you a lot of vague details. I always wonder about these sightings.”

  “Lucy and I wondered if Carlene had reason to think that Annabel killed her husband; if so, Carlene might have gone in for a bit of blackmail herself.” When Vince looked doubtful, I said, “Hey, she could have heard all kinds of stuff when they were neighbors in the Fan.”

  “I do remember something—when Carlene consulted with me, she mentioned Annabel and her husband. She thought his unsolved murder would be a good idea for a future book.”

  A thought struck me so hard I wondered how my hat stayed on. “What—what if she decided to interview Annabel about it? And what if Annabel didn’t want Carlene to write about it and decided to nip that problem in the bud by killing her?” My words collided in my excitement.

  Vince allowed that it was a possibility but, not surprisingly, reminded me that we had no proof and there was little likelihood of getting any. He fell to reviewing his notes while I twisted my napkin into various shapes. I got up and looked at the flyers tacked to the walls: lost pets, music lessons, Bible study groups. I considered telling Vince about Helen and Carlene’s website disputes. It all sounded lame, but after a lightning-quick hemming and hawing session with myself, I decided to tell him anyway and went back to the table.

  When I finished, his look confirmed the lame judgment. He closed his notebook and put it on the table. “I wonder why your book group attracted so many people who had an axe to grind with Carlene.” When I didn’t respond to this provocative statement, he went on, “Annabel, Linda . . . maybe Kat and even Helen.”

  “Well, I’m glad you don’t include me with that bunch. Or Sarah. Or Art.”

  “I forgot about Sarah and Art. As for you, I don’t see you as a killer, Hazel. Oh, maybe in a moment of passion, but premeditated murder . . .” He shook his head. “Plus, I never felt there was any great feeling between you and Evan. I imagine he was the reason you moved to Richmond in the first place, but still.” I couldn’t think of a good enough comeback, so I finished my latte and tried to affect an allure that suited my noir persona.

  “Would you like to have dinner with me?”

  I waited a couple of beats before saying, “Sure.” Then Molly appeared in my mind, unbidden. Much as I wanted to ignore her, I knew I had to deal with the woman, the sooner the better. “But what about Molly?”

  “Molly?”

  “Yes, Molly. I thought you two were an item.”

  “Hardly. I think she’s a Nazi.”

  “A Nazi?”

  “Yes. She has some very authoritarian views. I introduced her to Bill Hall.”

  I laughed. “They might get along.” Bill Hall was one of Vince’s former police colleagues. Vince and I once tried to fix him up with Helen and she found him too conservative. Go figure.

  “So, how about that dinner?”

  With Molly out of the picture, I had no trouble agreeing. “Yes, I’d like that. When?”

  “Well, I guess next weekend. I’d like to see you tomorrow night, but don’t want to be asking at the last minute.”

  “Well . . .” I made a show of mentally reviewing a hectic social calendar. Should I play hard to get or at least challenging to get? Nah—we were too old for those games. “Let’s say tomorrow at seven.”

  “Seven, it is.”

  We looked at each other then quickly looked away. We could have been fifteen.

  “Vince, did I tell you about Carlene’s love fugitive idea?”

  “Love fugitive? You mentioned something along those lines the other night.”

  When I described Carlene’s plans for the third installment of her series, Vince asked, “Why didn’t she talk about this love fugitive idea at her signing?”

  “I think she recently came up with the idea. I wonder if something happened that made her come up with it. When she consulted with you, did she mention it?”

  “No.”

  I outlined my reasons for thinking that Carlene was hiding from someone or something, citing her author photo, sketchy biography, and general opaqueness as lending credence to my suspicions. “Then there’s the L.A. contingent: the fiancé, the stalker, the “doomed” love affair. Whether we’re talking about one person or three people is anyone’s guess. And that brings us back to Linda.”

  “Maybe someone in L.A. knows something. Or knows Linda.”

  I brightened at the opening Vince provided. I had omitted any mention of talking with Susie. Talking with book group people was one thing—as friends and witnesses it was natural for us to discuss Carlene’s death. But Susie was an outsider. Of course, Carlene’s L.A. friends—assuming there were any—would want to know of her death, so it was reasonable that I would try to contact someone out there. I decided to wait until Susie came through with something substantial before introducing her into any conversation with Vince. I made a show of having a sudden epiphany. “Yes, I could ask some people in L.A.”

  But my acting skills, such as they were, didn’t fool Vince. “I’m sure you’re already working your L.A. contacts,” he noted with a shrewd look.

  “Well, I know people who might have known Carlene. We did the same kind of work, you know. And the same people might have known Linda.”

  “Did you ever think the person Carlene was hiding from could be Linda?”

  I felt stunned. Linda already tied with Annabel for top place on my personal suspect list. But as for being the cause of Carlene being a love fugitive, no, I hadn’t even considered her.

  So sexist of me to assume that Carlene was hiding from a man.

  CHAPTER 15

  VINCE AND I EVENTUALLY left the murder subject and spent the rest of the afternoon sharing pastries and catching up on each other’s lives. When he dropped me off at home he kissed me, a simple kiss that promised more to come. Much more.

  I had a message from Lucy, champing at the bit to hear about my coffee date with Vince and demanding that I call her on her cell phone the minute I got her message. I wished Lucy would temper her enthusiasm about Vince until I felt on more solid ground with him. Then I laughed. I might as well wish time would stop.

  Naturally, she was delighted about my dinner plans. “I just knew Molly would turn out to be a nonproblem. It’s all falling into place, Hazel.” Then the fussing started: What did I plan to wear? The house needed a good cleaning. What about breakfast? Rolling my eyes, I assured her that I’d come up with something presentable to wear and that I’d devote some time to cleaning before the big event, emphasis on “some.” As for breakfast, we’d eat out. I wanted to talk about Carlene and, when finally allowed to do so, Lucy was intrigued by the idea of her being in hiding for all these years not from a man, but from a woman—specifically Linda.

  “That could mean that Linda searched for Carlene and found her. Which makes sense—if Carlene was hiding from Linda, then Linda was looking for Carlene. Not an easy task with Carlene’s frequent name changes.”

  I agreed. “Unless it was a coincidence that Linda showed up at the signing. But, if they did have an adversarial background, a coincidence is doubtful. Linda showing up at the signing of a first-time author whom she just happened to know in California and just happened to have thrown into a pool?”

  “I wish we knew Linda’s searching techniques so we could use the same ones to find her. There’s the Internet, there are private investigators, professional databases . . . but why would she go to all that trouble?”

  “And, like we said earlier, if Linda was up to no good the other night, she probably was using a phony name.” I groaned at the daunting obstacles in the cat-and-
mouse game with Linda.

  Lucy’s heaved a heavy sigh. “We need to put on our thinking caps.”

  “Are there enough thinking caps in the world for this task?” Needing a change of subject, I noticed a paperback on the counter. “What did you think of the Keys book?”

  “Oh, it’s dreadful. Carlene was right, it has no ending.”

  “I’m going to read it tonight.”

  “Don’t bother. It isn’t helpful as far as Carlene’s death is concerned.”

  Lucy said she had to go and meet her friend Maxine for an early dinner. When we hung up I thought an early dinner sounded like a good idea, so I fixed a salad sprinkled with Gorgonzola cheese. I needed a rest from all my talking of late and so relished the quiet that I didn’t even play music.

  I knew I should work on my writing, but Murder in the Keys was calling me. Despite Lucy’s negative review of the book and warning that it wouldn’t help to unravel the mystery of Carlene’s death, I curled up with the cats on the sofa in the morning room and opened the infamous tome.

  “DRIVEL. PURE DRIVEL!” I proclaimed as I tossed the book onto the floor. Carlene and Lucy were right in their assessment of the poorly written story, especially the nonending. The author, perhaps going for realism, left the murder a cold case. Someone needed to alert her that this was the fiction world and mystery readers wanted closure. Mercifully, the story was short and skimmable.

  I turned my thoughts to my main reason for reading the book by the author with the unpronounceable last name: seeking clues to Carlene’s demise, whether by her own hand or by another’s. Not coming up with a clue, I considered the cyanide theme that had permeated Carlene’s last evening on earth . . . cyanide in the book, cyanide as a major discussion topic, and cyanide in the tea. The fact that Carlene initiated the topic was natural enough since she’d just read about it. But the fact that cyanide killed her an hour later was too coincidental.

  Did someone come up with the spontaneous idea to kill Carlene based on that discussion alone? If so, that someone would have been carrying cyanide around, waiting for a chance to use it. I thought of the Nazi war criminals who kept cyanide at the ready in case they needed to expedite their earthly departure to avoid prosecution for their World War II crimes. That was twice in one day for the Nazi subject—I thought of Vince’s assessment of Molly’s ultraconservatism. I mentally scanned the group for Nazi tendencies, but thankfully came up with nothing. Helen and Sarah were conservative, but I thought—hoped—they drew the line at Nazism.

  I tabled the cyanide subject and turned my thoughts to Susie—had she forgotten about me? As if on cue, the phone rang.

  Without preamble, Susie said, “Hazel, I have a great source for you. Quite a few people recognized Carlene from her photo but couldn’t remember her name, just that Carlene Lundy didn’t sound right. But Jeanette Thacker worked with her at Soyars Publishing and says her name was, get this, Carlotta Gennis. How did she come up with that one? Anyway, Jeanette’s one of those people who knows everything about everyone. For some reason people confide in her even though she’s a blabbermouth who never forgets a thing.”

  I was sure Georgia had said that Carlene changed her name from Lundy to Gennis when she’d moved to Virginia. But apparently she used the Gennis name on the West Coast. Deciding that the name issue amounted to either my misunderstanding or Georgia misremembering, I put it aside and said, “Great! That’s exactly what I need, a blabbermouth with a long memory. Can I talk to her?”

  “Yes, she’s expecting your call. She’s home now.” I displaced Shammy from my lap, found an envelope on the kitchen counter, and took down Jeanette’s number. Susie said, “I need to warn you about Jeanette. She’s a bit—let’s just say she’s earthy.” In my experience, earthy was a euphemism for crude. “I know—I worked with her for a few years. So be prepared for a salty discussion. Anything new? How was the memorial service?”

  I told Susie about the service, about Janet’s report of Carlene’s pre–book group visitor, and Kat’s conversation with Hal. No doubt I was missing something.

  “So this is like Murder She Wrote. Lots of suspects. And the murderer is always the one you least suspect.”

  “Remember, Susie, this may be a suicide.”

  Susie snorted. “But you don’t believe that, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’ll let you go so you can catch Jeanette. And keep me posted.”

  “HI, JEANETTE, THIS is Hazel—”

  Jeanette cut to the chase. “So what’s this business about Carlotta or whatever she was calling herself these days?”

  “Carlene.”

  “She went by Carlotta when I knew her. She still looks pretty good—I guess I should say looked good. I’ll have to read this book of hers. Lots of sex?”

  It took me a second to realize that she was asking a question. “No, not really.” Not for the first time I wondered why Carlene had spared the sex in her book, in view of her lifestyle.

  “Humph. When I knew her she was quite the round-heeled woman.” Susie was right, this woman didn’t pull any punches. “You can’t imagine my surprise when I saw on her website that she was married. Carlotta married? To one man?”

  “One man,” I confirmed.

  “So, Hazel, Susie thinks I can help you. But first tell me how Carlotta—if you don’t mind, I’m just going to call her Carlotta, it’s easier. Anyway, how did she manage to get herself killed? Susie says suicide, but also says you don’t buy that idea.”

  “Well, I—”

  “The Carlotta I knew would never have committed suicide. The woman had no depth. You need depth to kill yourself. Tell me how you got mixed up in this. Friend of hers?”

  I gave Jeanette some background on me, Evan, “Carlotta,” and Carlotta’s suspicious death, with Jeanette making occasional exclamations of “Wow,” “Unbelievable,” and the like. When I finished my hellacious tale, I said, “So, tell me about the Carlene—sorry, Carlotta—that you knew.”

  “Well, the woman was just something else. Gorgeous. Bright. Hardworking. All the women envied her, especially when she regaled us with tales of her sexcapades.”

  “I can’t imagine her telling sex tales.” I described the reticent Carlotta I’d known.

  “She wasn’t reticent when she worked here, I can tell you that right now. I’ll never forget the desk incident. She and some guy did it on her desk during our company Christmas party. She told me this while I sat in her office working with her on a project—yuck! All I could imagine . . . well, you can imagine what I could imagine. And, get this, her fiancé was at the party.”

  The fiancé again. “Tell me about the fiancé.”

  “He was a hotshot lawyer. Spiffy-looking guy. He showed up at the party in a pinstripe suit and wingtips. He looked ready for the friggin’ Biltmore, but had to settle for Soyars’s lunchroom. The guy was a born-again Christian, didn’t believe in sex before marriage. If there are two things that didn’t go together, it was Carlotta and celibacy. But she said she was in love and wanted to honor his religious convictions. So she had a quickie with someone else. She wouldn’t say who. She claimed she was coming out of the ladies’ room and ran into this guy—” It was clear that Jeanette doubted Carlene’s claim. “—and got sidetracked. She was quite pleased with herself.” Jeanette stopped, perhaps to draw a breath.

  Her tale sounded like others I’d heard about Carlene over the past few days. The open Carlene, the Carlene who bragged of her exploits, staggered me. I guessed that her fugitive status had put a damper on the sharing of her illustrious love life—or on anything personal.

  “What did the fiancé do while all this was going on?”

  “How would I know? I guess he nursed his drink, waiting for his beloved to return from the ladies’ room with a powdered nose. Instead, she showed up with afterglow.”

  “So what happened with the fiancé? She didn’t marry him, did she?” I felt enormous sympathy for the hapless guy.

  “No, n
ot long after that party he broke off the engagement. She said he found out about an affair she’d had. ‘An affair?’ I’d asked. Funny thing was, she didn’t want to discuss the whole thing—suddenly she was, in your words, reticent. And shaken. Normally she had an easy-come, easy-go attitude about men. She left Soyars shortly after that and we lost touch. At some point I heard that she’d left the state.”

  “Well, let me tell you about this Linda. Maybe you know her.” I proceeded to describe Linda and her behavior at the signing, at the book group, and at the memorial service. For the sake of simplicity, I kept her name as Linda Thomas from Richmond and didn’t get into other names, other places. I was about to launch into the tale of the poolside dunking when Jeanette interrupted.

  “B.J.? She mentioned a B.J.?” I detected heightened interest in Jeanette’s voice and hoped it wasn’t a figment of my hopefulness. I noticed that she, like Lucy, heard “B.J.” when I’d said “P.J.” Maybe Ps and Bs did sound alike.

  “Does B.J. ring a bell?”

  “Kind of . . . There was this guy, Ben Miller, who worked with us at Soyars. By ‘us’ I mean Carlotta and me. I heard his wife call him Benjy. Although she could have been saying B.J.—hang on a second, someone’s at the door.”

  While I waited, I pondered the names. Benjy sounded like B.J. Like P.J. as well. Amid the din of an author signing, it was easy enough to hear variations. I felt like I was getting somewhere at last.

  When Jeanette returned, I asked, “Do you remember Ben’s middle name?”

  She snorted. “Middle name—are you serious?” Actually I was, and while I was not hopeful of an answer, this was no time to leave stones unturned. She went on, “Anyway, I was about to tell you that Ben had a weird-looking wife named Linda.”

  “Linda, huh?” I reminded myself that the world was full of Lindas. “Did you ever meet her?”

  “Yes, indeedy. At the very same Christmas party as the infamous desk incident.”