The Ghost and the Bogus Bestseller

by Cleo Coyle

  There was an IV tube inserted in his arm, and a bag of clear fluid dangled from the hook of an antique coat stand moved from the corner. Though Brainert was paint-free, the taint of turpentine still hovered around him—or was it me?

  “Paint also contains lead, mercury, cobalt, barium, and other heavy metals. The infusion of IV fluids will flush his system of poisons.”

  “Are you sure he’ll be okay?”

  “No paint got into Professor Parker’s mouth, lungs, or eyes. He would be in quite a bit of trouble had that occurred.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Force fluids. The IV will run for the next two hours, so don’t touch it. By this evening we’ll know if he’s suffered any side effects. We should be alert for blurred vision, swelling in the throat, difficulty swallowing, or mental confusion. If he exhibits none of those symptoms, I believe Professor Parker will be fine.”

  “What about a headache?” Brainert muttered weakly. “I have a doozy.”

  I followed Dr. Rubino to my friend’s side.

  “Nothing to be alarmed about,” the doctor assured Brainert as he took his pulse. Then, from his doctor’s bag, Dr. Rubino produced a vial of painkillers and ran off to fetch a glass of water.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like a Jackson Pollock, Pen.”

  Pollock? Isn’t that some kind of fish?

  Quiet, Jack.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” I asked.

  “A stupid, careless accident.”

  More like a deliberate act of attempted murder.

  “Give me the details, Brainert.”

  He took a deep breath. “I went to Napp Hardware and bought the paint I’d ordered. Sherwin-Williams Heartthrob.”

  “I remember.”

  “I waited for the green light at the crosswalk. I’d just stepped off the curb when I saw the van coming toward me, and I lurched backward in time to save myself. Unfortunately, the paint didn’t make it, so I very un-comically reenacted a scene from Charlie Chaplin.”

  “Did you see the driver?”

  Brainert shook his aching head. “I barely saw the van.”

  Dr. Rubino returned and fed Brainert two pills and lots of water. Though he had to leave for another emergency, he planned to return in a few hours.

  “Don’t worry, Doctor, I’ll stay with him,” I said.

  You better, Jack warned. Somebody has to make sure the button doesn’t get pushed on your pal.

  Once Rubino left, I sat beside Brainert.

  “Listen. I want you to consider something, but I don’t want you to think I’m crazy. Do you think it’s possible that someone was trying to kill you?”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake!”

  “Think about it. Emma Hudson claimed a connection to Shades of Leather and ended up dead. Kevin Ridgeway was killed, too, and you as much as admitted his involvement at Monday night’s Quibblers meeting. Now someone tried to run you down, and I think—”

  “Stop! You’re reading too many thrillers, and reading too much into everything!” Brainert squeezed his eyes shut and massaged his head. “Can we speak about this later? Go back to your shop, and I’ll—”

  “No! I promised the doctor I’d stay until he got back, and that’s what I’m going to do. Or would you prefer I called Seymour to come over and babysit in my place?”

  Brainert sighed. “Let me sleep until Rubino’s painkillers give me some relief? Then we can talk.”

  “Okay, get some rest.” I pulled the quilt up to his neck, tucked it tight around his body, and headed back to the kitchen. On the way, I noticed the door to his study was ajar. I pushed it open and entered, searching for a book to pass the time.

  The selection was vast, the room literally lined with bookshelves. The little bit of empty wall space was taken up by framed diplomas (three of them), old photographs of his now deceased family, even pictures of Seymour and me in our misspent youth.

  Defying the cliché about eccentric academics and their messy offices, Brainert’s work space was as tidy as a military school bunk. His laptop sat in the center of his desk, positioned like a contented cat between two sets of student papers—one stack corrected, the other waiting. And right behind the computer, I found six pristine copies of Shades of Leather.

  Hurriedly, I flipped to the copyright page of each book. Every one carried a little 1.

  “Jack, all of these copies are first printings!”

  What a co-co-coincidence.

  “And as you once pointed out, coincidence is as rare as rain in Reno.”

  CHAPTER 46

  True Confessions

  “Villains!” I shrieked. “Dissemble no more! I admit the deed!”

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” 1843

  “WAKE UP, KNUCKLEHEAD!” Seymour bellowed in his best Moe Howard imitation. “I hear you pulled a Three Stooges gag right in the middle of Cranberry Street!”

  Shocked out of a sound sleep, Brainert’s peaceful expression turned to one of horror at the sight of the postal uniform.

  “What are you doing here, Tarnish?”

  “I heard you were feeling low, so I thought I would cheer you up.”

  Brainert blinked, surprised. “Really?”

  “Nah. As Ricky Ricardo said to Lucy, ‘You got some ‘splainin’ to do!’”

  I stepped into Brainert’s line of sight, holding Shades of Leather.

  “Seymour and I would like you to explain why you have six copies of this, every one of them a first printing.”

  Brainert frowned, but his lips remained sealed.

  “Come on, Brainiac. Admit it. You wrote at least some of Shades of Leather. Remember what I said at the Quibblers meeting? The truth is, I went to my attic and dug out that old Xerox of your junior high story. Then I compared it to chapter 34. Lo and behold, you pulled a Raymond Chandler and plagiarized yourself.”

  “You actually kept a copy of my story?” Brainert asked, more touched than annoyed. “From when I was fifteen?”

  “Sure!”

  There was a moment of silence between the friends; it was a nice moment, which Seymour finally broke. “So, if you didn’t write Shades of Leather, I’ll eat my mailbag.”

  Brainert sat up, only to get tangled up in the IV tube. In a fit of pique, he tore the needle out of his arm.

  “Okay, you win! It’s clear you two won’t leave me alone until I confess. So, yes, I worked on Shades of Leather. But I certainly didn’t write it all.” Brainert wrapped the quilt tighter around his naked form. “Mostly, I shaped what was a chaotic manuscript into a coherent story.”

  “But why all the subterfuge?” Seymour’s voice was earnest. “Buddy, if I wrote a bestseller, I’d be announcing it through my ice cream truck speakers!”

  “That’s because you don’t have to worry about your academic reputation. Kevin and I do—that is, he did, before he died . . .” Brainert’s voice gave out, his face looking so forlorn that I nearly cried. “Anyway, I still have to protect my academic standing. Especially now. If it came out that I wrote that . . . drivel”—he shook his head—“even tenure wouldn’t save me. With a Bentley Prize winner on the faculty, and the administration demanding cuts, what would St. Francis want with a . . . a subliterary hack?”

  “How did this all come about?” I asked.

  “You really want to know, Pen?”

  “Hey, me, too!” Seymour waved his big hand.

  Brainert sighed with resignation. “All right. One of you make us a pot of tea, and I’ll tell you. We might as well get comfortable. It’s a story.”

  CHAPTER 47

  A Tale of Two Rewrites

  I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.

  —Patrick Dennis

  “A YEAR AND a half ago, Kevin told me he’d written t
he perfect potboiler . . .”

  Brainert paused to take a sip of the ginger-lemon tea I’d made us. Seymour passed on the tea, preferring a giant mug of hot cocoa with double whipped cream.

  “Did your friend write any fiction before this?” I asked.

  “Two political thrillers, which were rejected. That’s why he wanted my advice. He sent a formal proposal to an editor, and she was interested in reading the entire manuscript. Before he submitted, he wanted me to look it over and suggest any improvements.”

  “And you had mucho suggestions, am I right?” Seymour taunted.

  “Yes, mucho is putting it mildly. While the basic story was intriguing and salacious, the execution was dull, the prose turgid. Kevin had a habit of abandoning a scene, just as it was getting . . . interesting. I recommended added material—”

  Seymour raised an eyebrow. “What sort of added material?”

  “I suggested more, you know, exploits.”

  “You mean naughty bits?”

  “I merely suggested that Kevin should pull back the curtain. To capture the jaded imagination of the modern reader, the writing had to be more explicit.”

  “So, Kevin Ridgeway rewrote it?”

  “Alas, his second draft was no better than his first.”

  Seymour peered skeptically over his cocoa mug. “I can’t imagine you wrote the naughty stuff, Brainiac. You’re not exactly a playboy.”

  “This from a man who still eats Froot Loops for breakfast and didn’t have a steady girlfriend until he was thirty!”

  “I was saving myself. And what do Froot Loops have to do with sexual exploits?”

  “Let’s keep our focus! And try to behave.” I felt like I was chiding Spencer, but it worked, though both men assumed a sulking silence. I broke the deadlock with a firm question. “Brainert, answer me straight. If Ridgeway didn’t write the erotic scenes, who did?”

  “Pen, I’m sorry. I don’t have a clue.”

  Seymour threw up his hands. “How can you not know who put the smut in Shades?”

  Brainert explained, “About a week after Kevin handed in his second draft, he began giving me inserts. These were the erotic scenes. I knew they weren’t written by Kevin. The prose was polished, descriptive, sensual, and even emotional, with wonderful turns of phrase. Each scenario built on the one before it, heightening the erotic tension.”

  “And you have no clue where they came from?”

  Brainert sipped his tea in thought. “I can give you one clue. No, two. I remember when I complimented him on the new pages, Kevin said something about working a woman’s touch into the prose, and that’s what improved the book.”

  “Sure sounds like he got a woman to write for him,” Seymour said. “That confirms my own analysis of your third mystery author. I thought it was a woman all along.”

  I only knew of two women in Kevin Ridgeway’s life—and one was far too young to write, let alone read, parts of Shades of Leather.

  “Could his ex-wife be the mystery writer?” I pondered.

  “I don’t think so,” Brainert said.

  “Why?”

  “Because of clue number two: the way the inserts came to me. Kevin always gave me hard copies, which meant I had to type the pages into the manuscript myself.”

  “I don’t follow,” I said. “Why is that a clue?”

  “It means the author really wished to remain anonymous. There are lots of markers on an electronic file. And each batch came tucked inside an old-style St. Francis University folder, one that featured the logo with our original student union, before it burned down. That folder and that logo have not been around for twenty years—and they weren’t handed out to students, either. Only faculty members got them.”

  “How do you even know that?” Seymour asked. “You weren’t teaching twenty years ago.”

  “I saw a stack in Dean Pepper’s office, and I asked about them.”

  “So you think the mystery author is a female senior faculty member?”

  “That’s right, Pen. But there’s one more thing. I found a bunch of photocopies packed in with the final insert.”

  “Photocopies of what?” Seymour asked.

  “They appeared to be entries from a diary. A woman’s diary.”

  CHAPTER 48

  The Paper Chase

  I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read . . .

  —Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

  I WAS SHOCKED by Brainert’s revelation. The more he shared, the more I realized Shades of Leather was not fiction—or at least not all of it.

  “Are you sure the pages were from an actual woman’s diary?”

  Brainert nodded. “There were eleven pages of entries, all written in the same flowing cursive. The copies themselves were a copy of a copy that was old and faded. The basic contents of the diary entry were the same as the insert. It’s as if someone handed over the diary pages and instructed the author to dramatize, enhance, and embellish the scene for fiction.”

  “Which could have been the case with every insert,” I said. “Did you ask Professor Ridgeway about those photocopies?”

  “No. Midterms were coming, and the whole process had gone on far too long. I just wanted the project to end. I honestly thought nothing would come of it, but three months ago, Kevin handed me a bank draft for ten thousand dollars and those six copies of the first edition.”

  “Ten thousand dollars? Is that all?” Seymour burst out laughing. “You came cheap, Brainert, considering Shades has been on top of the hardcover bestseller lists for a month.”

  “It didn’t seem so at the time,” Brainert sniffed. “My theater required a wheelchair ramp to make the bathrooms code compliant, and the city council was threatening to shut us down. That check just about covered the cost of the installation—and that was enough for me.”

  The money wasn’t what concerned me. I still couldn’t get over the fact that Shades of Leather was based on a real woman’s diary.

  “Brainert, do you have any idea who wrote that diary?”

  “No, Pen, I have absolutely no idea.”

  “Do you still have those photocopies?”

  “I do. But they won’t help you.”

  “I’d like to see them anyway.”

  “Fine. Look in the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk. You should find them there, along with the vintage folders and hardcopies. But there are no names. No dates beyond the day of the week; no clue to the author’s identity.”

  “We’ll see about that!” I hurried to Brainert’s study.

  Minutes later, I was scanning the diary pages and handing them off to Seymour.

  “Ooh la la. I remember this scene! Proves the old adage that two’s company and three’s a party!”

  “And there is a date,” I cried. “The heading is Monday, and three paragraphs down the diarist writes that it’s the seventh day of June. We can approximate the year with a universal calendar!”

  “That’s something,” Brainert acknowledged. “But it won’t reveal much.”

  “There are a few more pages,” I said gamely, but I was beginning to lose hope. And then I saw it, two innocent little words.

  “Look! Right here!”

  Seymour squinted at the words next to my pointing finger. “Coffee milk?”

  “Yes! Coffee milk!”

  Brainert leaned over to read the passage with Seymour:

  I woke up and stretched my young body like a satisfied feline. Orgasms all night long. Coffee milk in the morning. I stir the Eclipse into the milk and it is oooh sooo groovy! It is an orgasm for my mouth. I made a glass for him. I take it to his bedroom. He yawns and stretches his long hard body. Like a cat looking for his cream, this is what I said. Here it is! Here is your cream! With my pink tongue, I licked my lips and am slowly un
buttoning my shirt . . .

  “Hubba-hubba!” Seymour cried. “Forget the coffee milk. I need a cold shower!”

  “Ugh,” Brainert cringed. “It’s a grammatical nightmare.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t you two see? Shades of Leather is set in New York City. Justine, the main character, was born and raised in Manhattan. But in these diary pages, the girl mentions coffee milk and she makes it with Eclipse—as in Eclipse coffee syrup! That’s a local Rhode Island brand, and I can tell you from experience, New Yorkers don’t know about Eclipse syrup, let alone coffee milk, not unless they grew up around here!”

  Brainert met my eyes. “You’re right, Pen. I missed that. Eclipse wouldn’t have been sold in New York stores. It appears you’ve found a connection to this region.”

  “Unless there’s some other explanation for why she has the syrup,” Seymour said. “Like maybe one of her lovers gave it to her. And what does a connection to this region actually get us? We still don’t know the identity of the other author, never mind the girl who wrote this diary. According to the Brain here, the only guy who might know got planted in Old Q.”

  As the three of us sat in silence, I recalled the last time I saw a bottle of Eclipse coffee syrup. It was on Emma Hudson’s counter the day I found her body.

  Emma’s ex-husband said she grew up in California, so why did she have the coffee syrup? Sure, she could have developed a taste for coffee milk. Or maybe she’d bought it to please a local friend—maybe the very friend who Mr. Brink mentioned. And could that friend have been the diarist of Shades of Leather? Or the third writer of the book? Or both? That would certainly explain how Emma Hudson’s old photo ended up on the book jacket.

  While I considered the big picture, I suddenly remembered something small. “Guys, I can think of one brain who might know the name of the mystery woman.”

  “Who?” asked the two like brother owls.

  “Waldo.”

  Brainert frowned. “Who’s Waldo?”