Written Off

by E. J. Copperman

  Assuming I wasn’t busy being abducted, I would have a decent amount of time on my hands. “I have revisions, and I’m a little behind,” I said, “but I’ll make time whenever I have to. What do you think is going to happen?”

  “I think I’m going to call him back and tell him we’re available,” Adam gushed. “Any times to definitely avoid?”

  I considered. Given the impending danger of kidnapping and murder, it seemed best to stay home when the sun was down. “Just not at night,” I said. “I’ll be in the rest of the time. Call me and let me know when I have to be in the city.”

  We commiserated about our ridiculous excitement level for a while, I told Adam I’d be sending him a revised manuscript soon, and we hung up. I felt it best to leave out the part where I was letting the character in my novel read and offer tips before I’d send the book out. The first rule of negotiating a movie contract: never let your agent think you need to be sent to somewhere you can’t do harm to yourself or others.

  I was about to call Dad when Duffy walked into the office. I looked for Ben behind him, but Duffy was alone. “I can drive you home now,” he said. “If you’d like to leave.”

  Feeling like Daddy had once again come to take me away from this boring day, I gathered up my stuff (basically my phone and my bag) and followed Duffy out of the room.

  “Where’s Ben?” I asked. “Doesn’t he want his office back?”

  “He’s still being briefed by the FBI agent,” Duffy said with a tiny hint of contempt in his voice. “I have been deemed unnecessary.”

  We had reached the elevator before I understood what that meant. “You mean they’re not including you in the investigation?” I asked.

  Duffy seemed very interested in the floor. “That’s correct. I am no longer consulting on this case.”

  * * *

  He seemed so downtrodden about his demotion, or expulsion, or whatever that I tried to think of ways to distract him as he drove me home. “You started to say something you thought I needed to change.”

  Duffy’s eyes stayed fixed on the road, and for a moment, he didn’t seem to hear me. “Change?”

  “In the manuscript. You said there was one thing that didn’t work. It would be a great help to me if you could remember what that was so I can fix it.” Okay, so I was buttering him up a little. The next time someone you created feels down and you try to raise his spirits, let’s see what you do.

  “Ah. Yes. It was the ending.”

  I waited. Nothing. “The ending?”

  “Yes. Where I, that is, he finds the young woman being buried alive based on the pattern of the mower in the field.”

  “Yes, I’ve read the ending; I know what happens. What’s wrong with it?” Hey, there are all sorts of ways to make a person feel better. I was experimenting with one that preserved my integrity as a writer, and maybe a little bit of my ego.

  “It doesn’t make sense, but that’s not the problem.” He was speeding a little, and that was uncharacteristic for this version of Duffy; he was on edge.

  “Yes, it’s a problem. What do you mean, it doesn’t make sense?”

  “The kidnapper buried his victim in an open field, where a groundskeeper mows regularly? And the only mark two days after digging a grave is that the grass is mowed differently? Otherwise it’s perfect? None of that is consistent with landscaping practice.”

  Dammit! He was right. So I naturally invited another blow to my now-fragile writer’s sensibility. “What was the character thing? What did the character do that you wouldn’t do?”

  “He got involved in digging the woman out himself. I would know that there was a possibility I could do more harm than good, that I might cause pressure on the wooden box in which she was being held and actually crush her under my weight and that of the uniformed officers.”

  “So how would you have gotten her out?” Now he had me talking like he was real.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have let it get to that moment to begin with. You have Duffy overlook the fact that the kidnapper is the young woman’s professor at college because he is a friend of the detective ‘Duffy’ works with. I wouldn’t let emotion get in the way.”

  I looked at him; he was without expression but gripping the wheel tighter than I’d seen him before. “You’ve told me what you wouldn’t do. What would you do in that situation?”

  There was a pause while he thought. “Assuming there was a way that the disturbance in the turf could be made relatively invisible, which is unlikely, I would try to determine where I would bury a coffin if I didn’t want it to be found. I would consider the area where I could dig without being seen and the area with the lowest number of rocks and roots, so away from trees if possible. And once I determined where the most likely spot would be, I would dig opposite that site.”

  “Opposite?” Now I was the straight man.

  “A criminal that clever would never use the most likely spot,” Duffy said, as if it were obvious.

  “So the way to catch the guy is to think of what he should do and then do the opposite of that?” How could that be right? The man was blowing my entire third act out of the water and appeared to be speaking in some alternate version of English in order to do it.

  Duffy’s smile was sad, like he’d realized that the pupil he was teaching wasn’t all that bright. “Not exactly,” he said. “But you’re the creative one, aren’t you? You’ll figure it out.”

  Thanks a heap, Duffy.

  Best to get off the subject and see about keeping myself alive. That really was the priority, I decided. “Duffy, what can I do to best protect myself?”

  His eyelids fluttered a tiny bit; I was watching. It’s something I’ve given him to indicate anxiety without being obvious about it. That didn’t make me feel better, either. “If Special Agent Rafferty is correct, you are in no special danger,” he said in as unconvincing a voice as I’d heard him use. “You should simply make sure your doors are locked at all times and be wary of any strangers who approach you.”

  “Like you approached me?” I asked.

  No trace of irony, again. “Under the present circumstances, yes, if we were meeting for the first time, you would be well advised to be careful about me. Stay in public areas with anyone you meet and never follow another person into a dark area like an alley or a hallway without anyone else present.”

  “You don’t think Agent Rafferty is right, do you?” I asked.

  “Special Agent Rafferty,” he corrected.

  This time my eyelids fluttered, because that was an irritating response. You give characters some of your own traits because in the heat of a moment you’re creating, you have no one else upon whom to model a reaction. “Fine. Special Agent Rafferty. You think she’s going in the wrong direction, and I really am next on the killer’s list. You think that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Duffy Madison said. “I do.”

  That took me a moment to digest. Not that I hadn’t been operating under the assumption that I was in a lot of trouble for a few days now. Indeed, I hadn’t bought the load of sanctimonious crap Rafferty had been selling in the meeting, either. And I hadn’t gained a whole lot of confidence in her when she’d fired Duffy from the case. But hearing Duffy say it was a punch to the gut. I took in some air and let it out slowly.

  “What . . .” My voice was raspy; I cleared my throat. I made a mental note to use that for a character struck with bad news. “What should I do?” I asked.

  “Perhaps you should ask the special agent.” He’d been stung by his dismissal.

  “I don’t trust the special agent,” I said. “I trust you.”

  A tiny smile, so small as to be almost imperceptible, flickered across Duffy’s lips. “You should do all the things I just said you should do, and you should probably hire some private security.”

  “I don’t have that kind of money,” I told him.

  “An author with a successful book series?” Duffy sounded honestly surprised.

  “Makes just a
bout enough to not have to take a day job to pay the rent,” I said. I don’t know why people think midlist authors like me are paid like steroid-infused outfielders.

  “Even on a short-term basis, you can’t afford a bodyguard?” he asked.

  “Would one guy make that much difference?” I countered. “I don’t have any experience in this kind of thing, except when I can manipulate the situation to be exactly what I need.”

  Duffy thought, never turning his head. But he did stretch his neck a bit. “In all candor, one bodyguard against the criminal we seek would probably not be very helpful, but he would be better than nothing.”

  “What about you?” I suggested. “You seem to be between gigs at the moment.”

  “Perhaps I am more valuable to you doing what I know how to do,” he said. “I’m not especially useful in physical situations; I do better with mental exercises than push-ups.”

  That had a little more information in it than a casual listener might have caught. “You don’t plan to stop investigating, do you?” I asked.

  Duffy looked very determined. “No,” he said.

  Chapter 21

  Adam Resnick, so excited he was working weekends, had called me Sunday afternoon with the news that Glenn Waterman had arrived from Los Angeles and taken up residence at a trendy downtown hotel in Manhattan. His office would call me to confirm a time and place for our Monday meeting, Adam had said, and then I should call him because Adam would not be at the meeting. Normally the call would go through the agent, but Adam said Waterman’s assistant (nobody has a secretary anymore) insisted I be contacted directly. I balanced being professionally excited with being personally terrified. Excited won, but it was a photo finish.

  Ben Preston had shown up at my door two hours after Duffy had left. Before he left, Duffy had personally checked every room himself (including the basement because Duffy was not as big a coward as me) and declared the place kidnapper free. Ben said the meeting with Rafferty had gone on another hour and a half, and in all that time, Rafferty had said a grand total of nothing that he considered useful, except for reiterating at least seven more times that she was in charge and he wasn’t. Perhaps “useful” was the wrong word.

  I’d offered to order in food—the last thing I wanted to do was cook—but Ben said he wanted to do some more work, looking into the convenience store video with a tech expert who might be able to clarify the image better. At the door, I think he was debating whether to try to kiss me, then decided it was better to appear professional to reassure me and left.

  Wrong choice, Ben.

  Brian Coltrane had called to tell me he wouldn’t be calling for a couple of days because Cathy was annoyed with him for spending too much time with me. I felt that mentioning the increased probability of my being murdered would be considered passive-aggressive and told him I’d be here when he called again. Then I wondered if I would.

  Finally, Paula had called, a real rarity for a Sunday, to tell me she believed she was close to discovering whether Duffy had used another name before four years ago.

  “Where are you getting that from?” I asked.

  “No fair telling,” she answered, which made me wonder why she’d called to begin with.

  Duffy Madison, bless him, did not call. He was the only one who either realized that I needed some alone time or was so absorbed in his own thoughts that inquiring about my status just never occurred to him. I was betting on the latter.

  So after all the phone calls were done and the e-mails (nope, not one with any serious threats attached, except a message that encouraged me to “enhance” my “manhood”) were read, I was ready to do some serious revisions. But first, perhaps a break from the tension. You’ve Got Mail on the Blu-ray player. That sounded about right: a fun movie about e-mail.

  I brewed myself an iced coffee with a splash of chocolate syrup (Ben Preston had ruined me—he’d be responsible for the weight I gained now), positioned myself optimally on the sofa, slipped the disc into the proper electronic device, and armed myself with a remote control that had more buttons than the navigation console on the QEII.

  I was just about to hit the play button when the doorbell rang.

  After scraping myself off the ceiling, I threw on a pair of shorts and a fairly respectable top (had I forgotten to mention being in pajamas until the early afternoon?) and crept with great trepidation toward my front door. I had a strong aversion to looking through the peephole; I had somehow now convinced myself that just seeing the person I dreaded could mean my immediate demise. Nobody said I was rational; I’m a writer.

  Pulling a move from the TSTL playbook, I attached the chain on the front door and took a deep breath before opening it enough to see who was waiting to do me in on my front step.

  “What are you doing opening the door without checking first?” my father demanded. “I could have been a homicidal maniac.”

  That was what I supposed to do after I got home last night: call Dad.

  I let him in, noting with some horror the size of the rolling suitcase he’d brought with him. “You don’t really need to stay, Dad,” I attempted. “You can see I’m all right.”

  “Yeah, but then you won’t call again, and I’ll be forced to drive down here again. Nope, I’m staying.” He rolled the Chrysler Building into my living room and looked around. “You’ve redecorated.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that you could have called me?” I asked. “I would have told you I was okay and spared you the drive. And the packing. That must have been a lot of packing.”

  “I threw a few things in a bag. Is my room all set for me?”

  Groaning inwardly, I set Dad up in my guest room and forgot about visiting with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Dad did a perimeter search of his own, the third in a day, and found the same lack of intruders that Duffy and I had both discovered.

  We sat on the sofa in the living room, and Dad, looking more concerned than when I’d come back from my prom at eight the next morning, asked me for an update, which I gave him. “So who are the suspects so far?” he asked.

  “There aren’t any I know about,” I told him. “But the FBI generally doesn’t call me with every new development.”

  “Well, you can’t wait for the feds,” he said, shaking his head at the very idea. “Who would you look at for this crime? You write crime novels.”

  “I write fiction, Dad. The criminals all do what I want them to so they can get caught.”

  But the look on his face would broach no such dodge. “Okay,” I said. “If I were thinking about it—”

  “I can’t imagine how you’d be thinking about anything else.”

  I let that go. “The attacks have all been about writing,” I went on. “One woman was hit with a typewriter, one electrocuted with her laptop, one suffocated with rejection letters, and Sunny was stabbed with a fountain pen.”

  “So where does that take you?” Dad was leading me in a direction that he had no doubt already traveled.

  “It’s business, not pleasure. There isn’t going to be an angry ex-husband anywhere because these four women were unrelated. There isn’t going to be a monetary motive because not all of them were successful, and even Sunny wasn’t in Stephen King territory. It’s something about crime writing specifically.”

  Dad looked like a proud teacher. In fact, he looked like Duffy when I had made a similar breakthrough. It was really starting to annoy me. “Okay, that seems right. So who would be mad enough at four crime novelists to kidnap and kill all of them?”

  I closed my eyes to think and to get the idea of Dad and Duffy melding into one person out of my head. “It could be a lot of people. An aspiring author who thinks the writers were blocking his way to fame and fortune. A rival author who thinks they stole some ideas. They didn’t have the same editors, publishers, or agents. One of them didn’t have an agent at all. So that’s a dead end. A book critic who really hates crime novels. A man who’s tired of women writing stories about people like him getting caught
after making stupid mistakes. It could be anybody.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing I packed for more than one night,” my father said when I was done.

  That didn’t sound good. “Why?”

  “Because it sounds like we have a lot of people to talk to.”

  * * *

  Paula volunteered (after I asked her) to come in on a Sunday. It was sweet of her. She reminded me, too, that working on the weekend was double time. That was less sweet but deserved.

  She began by finding out who had represented each of the authors who had been taken and killed, and for the ones who had publishing contracts, who had acquired and edited their work. That would have taken me three hours but took Paula seven minutes. It would have been quicker, but she had never met my father before and spent two minutes getting acquainted.

  Missy Hardaway, the author of the cozy mysteries, had represented herself in negotiations with Ballmer Press, the Baltimore-based publishing company, which was a three-person operation whose owner, Harrison Belechik, was also the editor, Paula told me.

  J. B. Randolph had been published by Criterion, one of the medium-sized houses in New York City. Her editor was Madlyn Beckwirth, the publisher’s specialist in crime fiction, and her agent was Lance Galbraith, one of nine agents working out of an office in SoHo, Artistic Reps Ltd.

  Marion Benedict, who had lived in Farmingdale but was never published, had no agent nor an editor, which made that line of investigation seem stupid on reflection. On further reflection, however, came the idea that we really didn’t have anything else to try. That fueled our thoughts, or mine, anyway. I can’t tell you what Dad or Paula was thinking.

  Sunny Maugham, I already knew, was represented by Mandy Westen, and her editor was Carole Pembroke at Arlington House. The police and the feds already had that information, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I was pretty sure it was still legal to call an agent on the phone.

  Paula had also furnished me with contact information for the agents and editors, which wouldn’t be useful until the next day. Finding someone in the publishing business on a Sunday is roughly as likely as being hit by lightning while picking up your Powerball winnings. At your wedding.