I pounded on their door until Gully finally cracked it open.
“What do you want?” she asked. I could barely hear her.
“I need to talk to Brody,” I said.
“He’s sick.”
“He’s drunk,” I said, “but that’s nothing new. I still need to talk to him. Or would you rather that I told the cops about the little scene that I witnessed at the Jade Tiger a few hours ago.”
“No, don’t do that!” she said. “All right, but keep it short, OK?”
Brody was propped up in front of the TV set, watching a guest chef trying to overcome the Italian Iron Chef—I forget his name—the plump one who always wore shorts. The secret ingredient was crickets.
He looked over at me. “Oh, it’s, uh, you,” he said.
“Yeah, it’s me again. You never did sign those books for us.”
“Maybe tomorrow. I’ll, uh, I’ll come by your table tomorrow.”
“So,” I said, “you have it!”
“Yes”—and then, realizing what he’d just said—“Uh, no! Uh, have what?”
“The book, I presume.”
“How, uh, how did you know?”
“Why else would you be dickering with Freddie the Cur? The only question I have is this: how did you get it?”
“What do you, uh, mean?” Brody asked.
“Well, if you killed Lissa for it, you know, I could understand. She was a nasty little woman. But….”
“I didn’t kill her! I didn’t.”
“Then you must have seen who did,” I said.
“It was, uh, it was your Margie,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“But, but, she was the last one to leave the room.”
“Then who was the first one?” I asked. “Obviously, you must have seen something, Brody. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be drinking yourself to death.”
He looked around the room until his eyes fixated on Foyle. “What do I, uh, say, Gully? What do I say?”
“Leave him alone!” she said, stepping forward and putting her arms around him. She cradled his head on her breasts. “He’s had quite enough. Can’t you see that he’s so scared that he’s cracking up? He’s afraid of Freddie and he’s afraid of the person he saw.
“Yes, there was someone else who visited Lissa last evening. He saw them leave, but he didn’t recognize who it was, or even get more than a glimpse of an outline—just enough to tell that somebody was there.”
“Then how did he wind up with the book?”
“She left it with him for safekeeping.”
“Lissa?” I asked.
“She figured that if she kept it in her room, it could easily be stolen from her. Brody was innocuous. Everyone knew he was flat broke. So, she offered to pay for his room and for all the booze he drank while he was here, if he kept the book safe. That was fine with him.”
“So, where is it now?”
“We, uh, gave it to that Lieutenant when he interviewed us earlier today.”
“And he bought your story?”
“It’s the truth.”
I looked straight into her cold, blue eyes. “Everyone lies,” I said. “Little kids aged two, they lie. Old men in their nineties, they lie. Priests lie, and so do cops and judges and pillars of society. Men and women and children and, I suspect, even hermaphrodites. They all lie. It’s just a question of when and how much and why.
“My bullshitometer just started ringing its fool head off, lady. I think you’re lying—I’m not sure about what, and I’m not certain what your motives are, but something here just doesn’t add up. I’m going to find out what it is, and when I do, we’ll know the real truth, won’t we?”
She didn’t flinch, didn’t move an inch. “Even you lie, you and that old lesbian bitch of yours. You don’t scare me. Brody’s done nothing wrong. I’ll give you a truth straight up, if you want one: you hurt him, and I’ll hurt you. Got it? Let this go. Just walk away.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “Margie’s a friend. She doesn’t deserve to be unjustly accused by the cops of something she didn’t do. I’ll keep on digging until I find the real dirt. And I don’t care whether you or Brody or anyone else gets nicked in the process.”
“Then to hell with you! To hell with you all!” she said.
“What’s, uh, the matter, Gully?” Brody asked.
“Nothing, my dear boy, nothing you need to worry yourself over. Your, uh, friend was just leaving.”
“Goodbye,” he said, “good luck!” He raised a bottle of beer in my direction.
That was the last time I ever saw him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“TEUFELSHAUS”
Saturday, March 26
“‘Take that!’ Sabatini said, lunging at his opponent, the nefarious Count Alger de Mandeville.
“Mandeville parried with the rare neuvième, and then lunged with the equally unusual seizième thrust, aimed at his enemy’s privateers.
“Il Signore del Castello Raffaele countered with the terrible Teufelshaus maneuver, which not only blocked Le Comte’s odd attack, but skewered him like a Viennese sausage on the end of his hard steel blade.
“‘I’ve always wanted to try that!’ Sabatini said to his quivering Quixote, now coughing out his life on the black-and-white marble tiles of Castle Dreadlock.
“‘I’ve…never…heard…of...such...a…thing,’ the dying count gasped.
“‘I read it in a book somewhere,’ Il Signore said, ‘Scélérate-Mouche!’
“‘The…Villainous…Fly?’ Mandeville died with a frown of perpetual puzzlement framing his florid face.
“‘Well, perhaps the accent…?’ The swordsman laughed out loud with a ‘ha, ha, ha’ of triumph—and then again—and again! For alas, it was very true that Sabatini was born with the gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad.”
—The Lord of the Castle,
by Don Pedro Pistón (1960)
It’s amazing how you can see things one way, and think you understand everything about a situation; and because you’ve misinterpreted or misread one small event, you get things completely wrong from the start. And then you continue down the wrong road until some strong shock jolts you wide awake again.
I thought myself another Sam Spade or Ellery Queen or even, mon ami, that bon homme detective, Hercule Poirot. I should have realized I was just another bookseller who’d read too many ’50s paperbacks down the years.
I wanted to talk to Freddie the Cur, but when I pounded on his door, also located on the dark side of the motel, there was no answer.
Kitty Gaylord and Cole Spayze popped out of their room, two doors down from Freddie’s, and ambled toward me. “You looking for Freddie?” Cole said.
“You know where he is?” I asked.
“He usually hangs out this time of night in the Drinkery” (the Royal Crest’s bar, next door to the Eatery).
Sure enough, I found him there plopped in the back of an oversized booth, slouched over a bloody Mary, like he was protecting it from being stolen.
“Whadya want?” he growled up at me.
“I saw your little run-in with Brody earlier this evening,” I said.
“So?”
“You seemed awfully, uh, anxious about something.”
“That drunken idiot,” Freddie said. “First he tells me he’s got something valuable that he wants to sell, and then when I meet him at the Tiger, he says he hasn’t got it now. So yeah, I was angry. Wasted my time, didn’t he?”
“What was that about a threat?”
He laughed, long and loud, a giant wheeze of a breeze that sounded like a dying vacuum cleaner.
“He accused me of unethical business practices,” Freddie said. “Yeah, right, like he was so above-board about everything he’s ever done. I mean, who really wrote The O-Man? Brody may have had a hand in it, but it doesn’t read like anything else he ever produced.”
“You saying he had a ghost writer?” I asked.
“I
know he had one,” the bookdealer said. “And when I mentioned that little fact to him, he got real holier-than-thou, and started telling me that he’d file a formal complaint about the way I’d handled some of his manuscripts. Well, they were pure crap, and yeah, they didn’t bring much, but Dameen’s not exactly a well-known name any longer, is he? He wouldn’t let me handle the real hot potato, the original typescript of his one bestseller—because that would reveal him to be a fraud.”
“Then who did write The O-Man?”
“That’s my secret,” Freddie said. “And then he turns around and says he has the book after all. I don’t even think he knew what he was saying by then.”
“Which book?” I asked.
“You know which book: I don’t have to tell you anything—you know it all. Now, let me finish my drink in peace.”
* * * * * * *
When I got back to my room, I was surprised to find Margie waiting for me. “You’re free!” I said, not being able to think of anything witty or even appropriate. I invited her in, and I sat on the bed while she took the only chair.
“Luvitti got me arraigned in Night Court, I pleaded ‘Not Guilty,’ and the judge set a bond I was able to meet. Thank the stars! I wouldn’t have wanted to spend the rest of the night in that god-awful place.
“Oh, what were you able to find out—anything?”
I gave her a brief rundown on my activities after she was arrested. “The problem is,” I said, “I haven’t gotten anywhere, not really, except that every question I ask seems to make the situation worse. I have no doubt that Freddie would kill for the right property, if he thought he could get away with it, I distrust Gully Foyle, and I don’t know what to think about Brody Dameen. He’s drunk half the time, but how much of that is fake?”
“You think they were talking about Castle Dred?” she asked.
“I don’t know, not for sure. Probably, but every so often, I wonder.”
“Do you think the cops have actually found anything to incriminate me—or anyone else?”
“Don’t know that, either. Pfisch is sure as hell not going to confide in someone like me. And while he may have arrested you, I wonder how much he’s actually got on you other than circumstantial evidence. I mean, did they find anything in your room?”
“Not that they told me about. They grilled me for an hour, that’s all, and said they had my fingerprints in Lissa’s room, on her furniture, on the door, and a few other places—but I’d already admitted being there. My attorney seems to think they’ve got nothing, really; I’m just convenient. He doubts that the case will actually go to trial unless they turn up something really awful.”
“Like the book.”
“Like the book,” she said. “But nobody actually seems to have the book, despite what everybody is saying. If they have it, why haven’t ‘they’ produced it?—and by they, I mean the cops, and Brody, and Gully, and Freddie—the lot of them. Where is it? Lissa apparently had the signed copy that first day, when she read out loud from the inscription: it sounded a lot like what I remembered my friend writing. But where did it go?”
“You know, I remember what she said, and the first words didn’t make much sense to me. ‘Look sharp!’?”
“Actually, that’s what convinced me it was the real thing,” Margie said. “See, it was all a joke. We’d made up these outlandish pen names for ourselves. I was Lucretia Sharpe, and she was Twilla Curtayne. And then wrote these two gothics, like what Ace was starting to produce, or like Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s novel, which we both loved passionately—and sent them off as individual submissions. Hers was called Castle Dred—the editor later added the fore-title. Mine was Teufelshaus or something like that.”
“Devil’s Manor,” I said.
“We thought we were very clever, very witty girls playing at being writers.”
“So, what happened to your book?”
“I, uh, I don’t remember,” she said.
I looked right at her, and I thought to myself, Aha!—you’ve just out-and-out lied to me, Margie, and I would really like to know why.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“THE AUTHORITY FILE”
Saturday, March 26
“If you really want to know anythin’ about me, probably the first thing would be where I was born and all that s***, and how I f***ed up my worthless parents’ lives by being born, and where I was edicated and what I lerned, etc., etc.; but if you really, really want to find that crap, you can look it up jus’ like any other rube, if you jus’ want to know the truth, in the Who’s Who or The Authority File. Jus’ don’t come askin’ me, ’cause I don’t know nothin’—and I don’t care neither.”
—The Catcher in the Outfield,
by Anonymous (1950)
Margie soon pleaded fatigue, and went next door to her room, while I decided to do some digging. I powered up my laptop computer, and did some on-line searches I should have tried earlier.
The first name I typed in was “Twilla Curtayne”—and there, of course, was The Secret of Castle Dred, which was mentioned on several websites, including one that tracked all the covers and stock numbers of the Ace paperback line. I found nothing else—and no other publications—listed under that name on the Net.
I also checked the Catalog of Copyright Entries, which was published by the U.S. Copyright Office. The Office itself only maintained an online database beginning in 1978, when the copyright law changed; but the old printed Catalog, which was in the public domain, had been scanned by Google, and was listed in alphabetical order in half-year segments.
Sure enough, I quickly found Ms. Curtayne, listed as a pseudonym of Wilhelmina Lamberth, with Castle Dred being copyrighted by Ace. I searched and searched and searched, but there was nothing else listed under the Curtayne name. Then I had an idea: I tried “Lamberth” instead.
In 1965 I found one entry for a W. Mina Lamberth, author of a gothic called Devilton published by Lancer Books under the pen name Lucrezia [sic] Sharpe. How very strange! Had Lamberth borrowed her friend’s pseudonym to use on books issued by another publisher? There was nothing else in the Catalog under Lamberth that seemed to fit this author.
So I tried searching “Sharpe,” and in 1966 found a reference from that name to Mina Maltese, author of the Lancer gothic, Terror at Scarborough House. I kept searching through the Catalog for at least another decade, until I was sure I’d located everything. She’d used the Sharpe name for the half-dozen gothics she wrote for Lancer, and also had penned a few other books in the same genre for Paperback Library as “Bettina Bosley.” Altogether, she’d published at least a dozen of these novels.
I continued my research by plugging the name Maltese into the database, but starting in 1969, the Catalog was filled with entries for a bunch of porn novels under that name—and I didn’t think from the subject matter that this could be the same writer.
In 1975 I found a strange entry for a gothic issued by Popular Library, Ned Pines’s old imprint—a writer named Lucina Sharp, pseudonym of M. M. Tolley, had penned a novel called The Widow of Templeton Moor. A second novel under the same pen name for the same imprint was called Dreadstone Manor. Could this be a coincidence?
I found a brief description of Dreadstone on an internet site devoted to the modern gothic, and the plot sounded roughly similar to that of Castle Dred. But then, many of the elements in these publications were very much alike, deliberately so, since that’s what the fans wanted. Curiously, the story line of Castle Dred was actually quite different from the later norm, when considered in that light.
I’d never actually seen any of Margie’s early books—at least, anything that she acknowledged as having written during her career as a paperback editor and writer. She usually dismissed her efforts during those years as not worthy of mention. I was aware of one later work she penned under her real name—a cookbook devoted to berries (huckleberries, blueberries, boysenberries, dingleberries, and such)—it was a moderate success.
Just for the hell of i
t, I looked up that book on the Copyright Office’s on-line database version of the Catalog, and found it registered there under “Margie Brittleback,” the name I’d known her by for at least two decades. I also checked the Library of Congress on-line catalog, and The Merry Berry Book was recorded under her real name.
I noticed a cross-reference to an “Authority File,” whatever that was, and clicked on the entry. The link took me to another catalog, which showed the author’s full name as Margaret M. Brittleback, born 1945.
The berry cookbook had been published just over a decade ago as a spiral-bound trade paperback. I tried searching the other pseudonym and real names used by Margie’s friend in the LC databases, but although several were listed as part of the library’s paperback collection, none of these books had received full cataloging, and the names on the title pages were not cross-referenced to any other moniker.
All of this was very strange. I wondered then if Margie’s tale of separation from her former girlfriend had actually been true. Maybe she was still part of her life in some way, and maybe that woman was present here at the paperback show.
But if she was, how would I find her?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I WAS JUST TAKING A WALK”
Sunday, March 27
“When Mr. Fredo Burgess of Bug Hollow announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventh birthday, there was much talk about his mental state in Bugganvillia.
“And when he disappeared following the piebald wizard’s gaudy appearance on February the 19th, folks wondered about his stability as well.
“A hundred years later, after many and numerous quasi-adventures that we shall not detail here, since they mostly didn’t amount to anything, Mr. Fredo walked into his old bungalow, now occupied by his cousin, Borgo, and announced, ‘Well, I’m back.’
“‘Where have you been?’ Borgo’s wife Buddleia asked.
“‘I was just taking a walk,’ Mr. Burgess said, and that was the end of it—at least for him—because they got an eviction order, and sent him packing—and good riddance too!”
The Paperback Show Murders Page 5