Written Off

by E. J. Copperman

  “You sure you can’t stay?” my father asked. “I’m concerned about Rachel.” There is no greater hypocrite than the frightened parent.

  “Ben Preston will be here.” Duffy turned toward me. “Call him if you need him. Ben texted me and said he wasn’t going to Connecticut but would continue working the case from here.” And then, saying this time that he had to rush out, Duffy left, leaving the three of us with the better part of four sub sandwiches and a lot of trepidation.

  I’d had enough, I decided, of sitting around and waiting for something to happen. The hell with the publishing industry and its odd rules about not working on weekends (except writers, who work all the time). There were unprofessional ways of getting answers, and I was just pushed far enough to use them.

  “Fire up your laptop, Paula,” I said. “We’re making some calls to people who are probably enjoying their weekend.”

  Chapter 23

  It took some doing. Most of the websites for publishing companies, editors, agents, and even publicists directed the visitor to make contact either through e-mail or by calling the office switchboard, which would inevitably lead to a voice mail cul-de-sac on the weekend. So my initial attempts to start calling people who had known the murdered authors were a little slow.

  But Paula being the amiable model of efficiency was the key to the matter. She got out the actual paper phone books I’d forgotten I had for Manhattan and started looking up the home numbers of those who might still have a landline. Matching names to authors and then eliminating those who probably weren’t agents (“Dr. Lance K. Galbraith, Gastroenterology”) was a tedious business, but in the end and with the help of universal 411 to find some out-of-towners, we had a working list of six people from the four victims, which was a pretty good ratio. I live in fear that Paula will someday find a real job.

  We split up the list three ways only because Dad would not be denied. Paula and Dad used their cell phones while I reserved the right to stick to my corded landline, the only phone that never drops a call and has sound fidelity I can actually count on being clear enough to take accurate notes.

  I drew Sunny Maugham’s editor Carole Pembroke at Arlington House and the brother of Marion Benedict, the unpublished author from Farmingdale, because he was the only person who might have some idea of her work habits. I think Dad and Paula wanted to keep their own lists exclusive to professional contacts because personal ones would tend to be more emotional and therefore the conversations might be more unpleasant. In other words, they were taking the easier ones for themselves.

  I called Bob Benedict first, not because I was anxious about grilling someone who had recently lost a close relative to an unthinkable crime, but because he was more likely to be answering his phone on the weekend. And my luck, he answered almost immediately. I had to explain who I was, and since I really didn’t want to lie, that took some doing.

  “I’m the author of some crime novels, and I heard about the awful loss of your sister,” I began. “I’m so sorry to hear about it.”

  “Why are you calling?” Bob had the tone of someone whose dinner was being interrupted by a caller asking whether he was satisfied with his current cell phone service provider.

  Again, not lying was the priority, but not sounding like a nut was pretty high on the list as well. “I read about your sister in the newspaper, and as a fellow writer, I felt the loss. I was so shaken by the news that I felt I had to call and find out about her.” I hadn’t actually mentioned that A Confederacy of Dunces was published only because the author’s suicide sent his mother to publishers on a mission. So what I did say wasn’t all that loony. But then, my standards for crazy had been considerably shaken in the past week.

  There was a considerable gap in the conversation, and I got the strong impression that Bob was staring at the receiver and wondering who this dizzy, impolite woman calling him while he was still in mourning might be. “Why are you calling?” he repeated.

  It was clear my first answer had been insufficient. “Look,” I said, cards on the table, “I never knew your sister. I don’t know if she was a terrific writer or a lousy one. But I know that this killer is someone who is targeting female crime authors, and I have reason to believe I’m next on his list. So anything you can tell me about Marion would be a real help to me.”

  I held my breath for a moment while Bob considered. “Okay,” he said, but his voice had a tone that indicated he was weary of the whole thing and wished his sister would just stop being murdered so lunatics like me would stop calling him on a Sunday asking how they could avoid being next. “What do you want to know?”

  “How far had your sister gotten with her work?” I asked. If she had been in contact with an editor or agent coinciding with the ones Dad and Paula were calling or calling about, it was possible there was a connection and therefore a suspect would emerge. If not, I had a grand total of nothing.

  “She wrote some mystery books,” Bob said, as if Marion had been trying to jump to Mars from a standing position. “I read the first one, and it wasn’t all that great. She couldn’t spell, for one thing. I’m no expert, and I was finding typos all over the place.”

  Typos? Those can be fixed. “But was the story good?” I asked. “The characters?”

  “What am I, a book critic? It was one of those things where somebody who doesn’t really do that for a living runs around asking people about a murder and they just tell her anything she wants to know. Not my thing, but some people really love them, I guess.”

  I had to be more specific in my questioning. “Had she gotten any encouragement from people in the publishing business? Did she hear from editors, agents, that kind of thing?”

  “I really don’t know. Marion lived in Philly over a pizzeria. I live in Delaware. We didn’t talk more than once a month, maybe. We weren’t that close. She told me once, all proud, that she’d sent out her manuscript to a bunch of agents, but she never said if she heard back from any, which made me think she didn’t. After a while, she didn’t mention the books anymore. I was surprised the cops found a new one she was working on in a file on her hard drive.”

  “So she never mentioned a name, a publisher, an editor, nobody?”

  There was a sigh from the phone. “I just said she never mentioned the books anymore. Then some guy comes along and makes her choke on rejection slips I didn’t even know she had. So maybe I’m not the one to ask. Look, lady, the Orioles are in the sixth inning and it’s Sunday, all right? Nice talking to you.” He hung up, and I almost didn’t blame him or the sleeveless undershirt I pictured him wearing.

  No author ever gets to be published without a quantity of persistence, and after all I was the one whose life was probably in danger, so with that motivation in mind, I dialed the home number for Carole Pembroke, Sunny’s editor, who as it turned out lived in Morristown, on the train line. I asked if I could come over and discuss Sunny, and she said she understood my grief (which I was embarrassed about because this call was more about fear) and would be happy to see me. She gave me directions, which I didn’t write down because I have GPS.

  Dad wasn’t happy about me going alone but didn’t want to sit in the car in the midnineties heat while I talked to Carole, so he allowed for it. It didn’t take long to find her apartment, actually a loft in a converted school building; very trendy.

  Carole said she was surprised at the call, not because it was from an author she didn’t know on a day she wasn’t working, but because she’d forgotten she even had the landline. “I had to pick it up,” she said. “I haven’t used the thing in months, maybe years.”

  I started with the fact that I was the person who had discovered Sunny’s body in the closet.

  “My god that was awful,” she said, as if it had been her and not me who opened the closet door. “What a shock. And such a good writer, too. She sold a lot of books for us.” That, in the publishing business, is the definition of a good writer.

  “It’s a great loss,” I agreed, although my
criteria might have been different. “It’s very disturbing, and I’m trying to get some closure for myself. How long were you Sunny’s editor?”

  Carole made a show of thinking about it, hand to her chin. She wasn’t much of an actress—Sunny had been an asset to her, not a friend.

  “Oh, Julia and I went back to her first book, Death Gets a Pedicure,” she said, making sure that I was aware she knew Sunny by her given name and not the one she probably took at the publisher’s request. “She wrote such lovely deaths; it was truly a privilege to read her manuscripts.”

  I’d seen a piece of Sunny’s latest on her computer and thought it was extremely rough. “I imagine she went through a number of drafts,” I said. That wasn’t exactly a question, but it would elicit a response, and that was all I needed.

  “Not really,” Carole (whose birth certificate probably didn’t have the “e” on the end) answered. “I mean, she certainly took some editing, just like every other writer, but she was actually so well-tuned to the series that by the end, I rarely brought up a point that required much more than a quick polish. She was a real pro.” Her voice got a little dreamy. “It’s going to be hard to replace her.” But no doubt they would. If Sunny’s books had sold well enough, it might be possible to hire another writer to continue her series with Sunny’s name in huge type on the front and the other writer’s underneath in much smaller print.

  Should I ask if that was being considered? I could probably . . . No.

  Wait. The sample I’d seen on Sunny’s computer was full of typos and misspellings. But of course what Carole was talking about was editing a piece for content, not form. The publisher would have copy editors to take care of grammatical mistakes and Carole (and her peers) to handle story problems, timeline issues, character incongruities, and cases where the author (in the opinion of the publisher) has gone too far and will upset some readers. One thing they absolutely hate is upset readers.

  I guess that’s more than one thing. “One thing” and “readers” disagree in that sentence. Hopefully my copy editor will correct the mistake.

  “Was Sun . . . Julia at all difficult to deal with?” I went on. Maybe if she’d really pissed someone off royally, I could find a motive in this mess. But then I’d have to find the same one for the other three victims.

  Carole’s eyes got to the size of Oreo cookies, she was so amazed at the suggestion. “Oh no,” she said. “She was a dream. Always polite, always helpful. She took revisions with a smile, and I never heard anyone around here say anything at all negative about her.” Then she paused. “Why?”

  “I’m just asking questions,” I said. How could I say this honestly? “I’m trying to understand it for myself.”

  “Are you writing about it?”

  The question caught me by surprise. “No!” Perhaps that was a little too forceful. “No, I’d never do that. I’m just . . . I know you can’t make sense of it, but I guess as a crime writer, I need to understand the motive.” Not bad.

  Carole’s face and voice were suddenly chillier. “Well I can’t think of one person who ever said a bad word about Julia,” she said. “Is there anything else I can tell you?”

  I made a mental note to tell Adam not to submit anything to her for a while, until she forgot who I was. At least until Tuesday.

  The ride back to Adamstown seemed longer than the drive to Carole’s. Sunny was dead, and so was Julia. Finding out that her copy was considerably cleaner when it reached Carole’s desktop via e-mail really didn’t feel like much of a triumph.

  When I got home, the incredibly concerned crew I had at the house was nowhere to be seen, so I dragged myself into Paula’s office, but she wasn’t there. She heard me from the dining room and called over. “Rachel! Your dad and I are in here.” So I dragged myself there. Once you’re dragging already, where you drag is not as much a concern.

  They were sitting side by side with Paula’s laptop, which I believe contains every piece of information known to the human race, accessible by Paula simply through thought waves, between them.

  “We’re comparing notes,” she said. That seemed reasonable, so I sat down across from Paula. I didn’t need to see the screen; she would tell me anything of interest that showed up on it.

  “What have you got so far?” I asked.

  Dad scowled a little. “Not much,” he said.

  But Paula shook her head. “We have some things. We don’t know what they are yet, but I think there’s information here that will help us.”

  “It’s got to beat what I have,” I said. “All I found out was that Marion Benedict didn’t talk to her brother much and had too many typos in her work.” Oddly, that seemed to amuse Paula, but she didn’t say anything. “Sunny Maugham’s editor seems to think I’m trying to profit from her death, but at least she sent copy in that was a lot cleaner than what I saw in the file I read on her computer.”

  They looked at me, apparently waiting for the tons more information they were sure I had. I looked at them in anticipation of clues that were at least clues. All three of us were sorely disappointed.

  “There’s something there,” Paula said. She nudged Dad. “Tell Rachel what you found out.”

  “Not a whole lot,” he repeated, sighing a bit. “I spoke to Missy Hardaway’s publisher, Harrison Belechik. Seemed like a nice enough guy, but it took him a minute to remember who Missy was, since he has so many authors. You’d think the recently murdered one would be fresh in his mind.

  “Anyway, he says she queried him cold and sent him the manuscript when asked, and he just responded to it, so he published that one and one more before she died. Said she was ‘coming along’ as a novelist.”

  “What else did he remember about her?” I asked.

  Dad shook his head slowly. “Not that much. Said she didn’t understand punctuation too well, but she knew how to write emotion.”

  Paula, I noticed, was grinning a little more broadly. That meant she was about to spring something on us that we had overlooked and she hadn’t. Paula can be a little smug, but she earns it.

  I decided to play out the string. “What about the other person you talked to, Dad?”

  “Lance Galbraith. J. B. Randolph’s agent. I thought he would know maybe what Randolph’s real name was, at least. The cops obviously know, but they didn’t tell us. Maybe he’d be able to talk about her financial situation, whether anybody would kill her for money and kill the others just to make it less obvious.” Dad reads too many thrillers.

  “So what did he say?” I prodded him.

  “He didn’t answer. I left a message.”

  Not a huge revelation there. “Paula?” I asked. She was doing everything but raising her arm, propped up by her other hand, and shaking it. Nothing Paula enjoys quite so much as being the smartest girl in the class.

  “Well.” She sat up straight and glanced quickly at the laptop in front of her. “First, I got in touch with Marion Benedict’s boyfriend, a guy named Thad Claypool. He was distraught, as you might imagine.”

  “I didn’t even know Marion Benedict had a boyfriend,” I said. “Where’d you get that?”

  “Facebook. Seems like Marion—her real name was Nancy Pantuso, by the way—was spending far too much of her money, in Thad’s opinion, trying to get her books published. Then he said she had decided to self-publish and was spending all sorts of hard-earned funds on artists to design covers, ISBNs, formatting, and editing, which she farmed out.”

  “You think Thad was so annoyed by all this spending he decided to cram some rejection letters down Nancy’s throat just to prove a point?” I asked. “That’s kind of a harsh way to win an argument.”

  Paula checked out her computer notes a little more closely and pursed her lips. “No, I don’t suspect Thad. For one thing, he doesn’t appear to have any connection to the other three women at all. And he just strikes me as too gentle a type. He broke down in tears talking about Nancy.”

  Now I was getting a nagging feeling that there was a
pattern I was missing; it was just past the thought I was having at this moment and would no doubt be making contact at any minute. “Who was your other call?” I asked Paula.

  “Ah.” She put on a pair of glasses she uses for reading; took a quick glance at her notes, perhaps for effect (Paula never forgets anything); and pointed at me with a pencil. “I think this is where I started getting an idea.”

  I knew it. I sat back in my chair and folded my arms. “You’ve been holding out on us,” I said.

  Paula looked aghast. “I would never! It’s just that I’m not really sure. Duffy would say I don’t have enough facts to reach a conclusion.”

  “I’m not Duffy, and neither is he. What did you figure out?”

  She smiled. “I talked to Madlyn Beckwirth, who was J. B. Randolph’s editor, or as she put it, ‘the person who acquired her books for the publisher.’ Randolph’s real name was Claudia Skilowicz, and she had a real process, according to Madlyn, for getting a book ready. But she directed me to Claudia’s assistant, Betty Field, and she and I formed a bond.”

  “You talking about me behind my back again?”

  “I would never—!”

  “I’m kidding. What happened?”

  Paula huffed away her horror at the mock accusation I made and said, “Betty read all of Claudia’s first drafts,” she said. “She was the first reader, but far from the last. She said Claudia could barely spell, used apostrophes where they didn’t belong, and had never actually understood the difference between a clause and a phrase.”

  “So how did she get acquired by Madlyn Beckwirth and published?” Dad asked.

  “Well that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Paula stood up to make her point. “What’s the one thing that all four of the murdered authors have in common?”