Mystery Writers of America Presents the Rich and the Dead

by Inc. Mystery Writers of America

  The tone made it clear that it was a request in form only.

  “Sure, of course.”

  “I’m assuming you heard about Donald Sadowsky?”

  The name sounded vaguely familiar, but Max couldn’t quite place it. “You know, I’m not sure.” Max’s mind continued to race, trying to think of anything he had been involved in that could possibly lead the FBI to contact him. Some of his college buddies sold a little weed, but that was years ago. Were any of those guys named Donald Sadowsky?

  The FBI agent sounded surprised, and his voice had a flat edge of disbelief. “You haven’t heard of Donald Sadowsky?”

  Max’s fingers sprang across his computer keyboard, typing the name into a search engine.

  Agent Keating sounded annoyed. “The mall shooting with the assault weapons? In New Jersey?”

  Max scanned the articles on his computer that popped up in connection with Donald Sadowsky and a few phrases jumped out at him: mass murderer, record killing, forty-two dead. This wasn’t about a college buddy with weed.

  Max’s mouth was so dry he could hardly speak. “Oh yeah, yeah, that guy. I did hear about that.”

  “Were you in contact with him?” Agent Keating asked.

  “No!” Max blurted out, feeling some inexplicable and vague sense of guilt.

  “Has he contacted you by mail?”

  Max surveyed his office that was awash in paper even with Edna’s tidiness. Every flat surface had papers or manuscripts stacked on it. The table next to the wall of weird easily had twenty to thirty manuscripts stacked precariously on it alone.

  “Wow, he may have. I’d have to check. I get hundreds of letters a week.”

  Agent Keating said, “I need you to search your office and see if he sent you anything at all.”

  A thought knocked the wind out of Max. “Is it poisoned? What’s that white powder stuff, and you breathe it, and then you drop dead?”

  Agent Keating offered coolly, “Anthrax?”

  “Oh my God, did he send me anthrax?”

  Agent Keating started to sound annoyed. “No, we aren’t concerned for your safety. Just look and see if you can find any correspondence from him.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “We have reason to believe that he corresponded with you. Actually, we don’t have any evidence you wrote back, but based on some notes we found in his home, we believe he sent you a package containing his manuscript.”

  “He wasn’t trying to kill me?”

  “No, he wanted you to sell his book.”

  Max sat back in his chair and took a few seconds for this to settle in.

  “Look, Sadowsky killed himself, and we have no reason to believe he wanted to hurt you. But the Behavioral Sciences Unit at Quantico—what you would probably call profilers—want to have a look at what he wrote. They have this idea his book could help them gain insight into the mind of a killer, that sort of thing. We can’t find a copy of his book anywhere in his home. No notes, no rough draft, no anything, so you might be our only chance. I’d appreciate if you could look for whatever writings he sent you and turn it over to us. Quietly, of course.”

  Max agreed, and after the phone call was over, he sank down into his chair. He felt a little dizzy.

  A madman had selected him for special attention. Insight into the mind of a psychopath was stuck somewhere among his piles of paper, sandwiched between stacks of manuscripts.

  He stared out across his office, feeling troubled and humbled all at the same time.

  After a few dark moments, he looked up and saw Edna watching him from the doorway, dabbing at her eyes with a newly moist handkerchief.

  “Max, my dear Max,” she croaked. “Why didn’t you let me know you were in trouble?” Then she whispered, looking around the room as if she expected it to be bugged, “In trouble with the FBI?”

  “Oh no, Edna. It’s not like that. It’s okay.” Edna still looked stricken. Max got up and led her to a comfortable chair in his office. As he helped her take a seat, she gripped his arm, leaned in close to his ear, and whispered, “I can help you hide the evidence. I know a place where stuff stays hidden.”

  “Edna,” Max said, looking at her with new eyes. “There is no evidence; everything is okay.”

  “Of course there’s no evidence,” Edna said in a conspicuously loud tone, one suitable for an FBI bug or the hard of hearing. Then her voice dropped to a whisper. “Before my Dudley passed, he knew people. He worked for certain people, if you catch my drift. Let me help you. I know a place where you could hide the stuff, whatever it is, before the FBI gets here.”

  Max felt a rush of affection for his bespectacled secretary. “Edna, the FBI isn’t investigating me, they are investigating this guy named Donald Sadowsky.”

  “The terrible man that’s all over the news?”

  “Yeah, that guy.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “The FBI says this madman may have sent us a manuscript.”

  “Oh my.” Edna sat next to him on the expensively upholstered love seat.

  The two of them sat in silence; the sound of traffic below was like the rushing of a distant river. Max glanced back at the computer screen, staring at Donald Sadowsky’s eerie DMV photo, an image that stared out from every news website he had checked. For a mass killer, Sadowsky looked the part. He had white blond hair that stood in uneven tufts around his scrawny face, and his washed-out blue eyes were lit up with a malevolent kind of amusement. The guy’s face was all over the Internet. Max looked at his face again and felt a shiver. No wonder the public was so fascinated by this guy.

  Then Max abruptly sat up and walked over to the wall of weird, knocking over one of the piles of manuscripts stacked on the floor next to his desk.

  “Max, what are you doing?”

  Max turned to Edna, looking a little sheepish. “The FBI wouldn’t be the only people that would want to get their hands on this book. I feel bad for what he did to all those people, but this manuscript could be worth a lot of money.”

  AN HOUR LATER, Max had Edna seated on the comfy chair next to the window, sorting through the stacks on top of the radiator, while Max was on the floor, piling and unpiling the manuscripts collecting dust underneath the table next to the wall of weird. Other than the sounds of New York street traffic five stories below, the shuffling of paper, and the occasional clank of the aged radiator, Edna and Max worked in silence.

  Then Max found it. A thick package wrapped in brown paper, with “D. Sadowsky” on a white return address sticker on the upper left-hand side.

  “Edna?” Max said, hoping she didn’t notice the tremble in his voice.

  He held the package gingerly, but it was heavy and he almost dropped it. She walked toward him to help.

  “No! Stay back. Who knows what that nutjob put in here.” Max shook it gingerly and let out a breath of relief when nothing rattled inside. “I don’t think there’s a letter bomb or anything in here, but just in case there’s anthrax, I want you to keep your distance. Go back to your desk. I’ll open it over here by the window.”

  Edna, her eyes wide, shuffled to her desk.

  “How about this, Max: I’ll dial the nine and the one and just put my finger over the one, and if something is wrong, you holler, okay?”

  “Okay, Edna,” Max said as he tugged on the folded flaps underneath the manuscript. After some gentle tugging, he slid the manuscript onto the radiator next to the window. It was a stack of almost three hundred printed pages. No white powder.

  Max’s breath burst out of his chest. He didn’t even realize he had been holding it. Edna peered at him around the doorframe, a bumpy arthritic finger poised over a button on her cordless phone.

  “Is everything okay, Max?”

  “Edna, we still got that champagne in the mini-fridge?”

  Edna nodded.

  “This is the novel of a madman, a mass killer, and quite possibly a future New York Times best-selling author.”

  Edna’s eyes
beamed from behind her bifocals, and a few minutes later, they toasted each other with champagne in clinking coffee mugs.

  They sat next to each other on the couch, both a little giddy but fascinated at what would be in the book.

  “Death Robots from the Secret Underside of the World,” Max said, reading the title page with reverence before he passed it to Edna. “Sounds interesting.”

  Max dove into the first page. The narrator, presumably named George (“Call me George” was the first line of the book), woke up in the morning and ate a breakfast of oatmeal. Max quickly read the first ten pages. No death robots. George worked in a toothpaste factory, and his daily routine was described in excruciating detail.

  Fifty pages further and still no death robots. Every few pages, George ate oatmeal for breakfast.

  An hour later, Max sighed. “He’s a little dry.”

  Edna shook her head decisively. “Dull as dirt. When the robots showed, I thought it would get exciting.” Edna sighed. “Who would have ever guessed the death robots were as boring as George?”

  “Who knew that I would be rooting for the death robots to kill George?”

  Max put down the manuscript and dropped his head. His fingers began massaging his temples.

  “Do you think this book would ever sell?” Edna asked.

  “It would get interest because of the whole morbid fascination the public has with Donald Sadowsky, but that would only go so far. As soon as an editor actually got a chapter into this thing, any hopes for a dream deal would be over.”

  “Maybe you could edit it? You are such a talented young man. You could rewrite it a little to make it less bad,” Edna said.

  “It’s terrible. Literary Ambien. The only people that could manage to read past the first chapter would be those FBI profilers.”

  Max shook his head. The dream of the big paycheck saving his trust fund literary lifestyle was growing dim. He was doomed to sell the talking-dog book and hope it covered the rent.

  Edna looked sad. “You work so hard. This Sadowsky guy is all over the TV, the magazines, and everywhere. People are obsessed. Think of all the fuzz this book would get. It could make you a bunch of money.”

  “Edna, I think you mean buzz. Yes, this book would get a lot of buzz, but that only carries you so far.” Max went over to his desk and pulled out a letter from the maybe pile. “This talking-dog novel might go somewhere; please write a letter to this guy and request a manuscript. Tomorrow, we mail the Sadowsky manuscript to the FBI.”

  Edna took the news without argument; her blue, rheumy eyes were pools of disappointment behind her thick glasses.

  Max decided to spend the night getting drunk.

  THE MAX BERGEN Literary Agency was a small operation: Max, Edna, and whatever college intern was foolish enough to work for him for free. The latest intern, Kimberly, was there the next morning when Max rolled in late and more than a little hungover. He was glad she was there. The phone was ringing off the hook, and Edna was nowhere to be seen.

  After she got off a phone call, she looked up at him. “Dude, you have like twenty-eight voice-mail messages. Don’t you ever check this thing?” Kimberly said, smacking on some gum.

  “I checked my messages last night, and I didn’t have any. It must be a mistake.”

  “No, dude, it’s twenty-eight messages, and for some reason, they think you are working with the Sadowsky guy, the one who offed all those people in Jersey. I thought the dude killed himself.”

  Kimberly handed Max the pages of messages, and Max recognized some familiar and surprising names. Where was this coming from? Publishers who hadn’t returned his calls in years had left friendly messages.

  “Sadowsky sent me a manuscript. It’s complicated. If anyone calls, just tell them I’m in an important meeting and I can’t be disturbed.”

  Edna walked in with an iced orange bundt cake and a triumphant smile. “Are you getting a buzz?” she asked Max coyly.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Max said, and he gently walked Edna into his office and closed the door so Kimberly couldn’t hear.

  “Edna, what did you do?”

  “I might have mentioned to three or fifteen of the people I know in publishing about your latest acquisition. I told some of the big gossips, so I knew the info would make the rounds fast!”

  “Edna, this is a disaster. I have all this interest in a manuscript that is not publishable.”

  “But now you have all the buzz. People will get excited about it.”

  “They’ll be excited until they actually read the thing; then they will be napping.”

  “Max, I know it’s bad, but—”

  “It’s worse than bad, it’s boring! If it was just bad writing, there is still hope to get it published, but boring writing is DOA.”

  Edna blinked at him.

  “DOA means ‘dead on arrival,’ Edna,” Max said, sighing. “Bad writing could potentially be published, but boring can’t. There’s nothing that can be done with this manuscript. I’m going to wait a day or two, then tell people that I was ethically obligated to turn it over to the FBI. Let people think that’s the reason why it won’t be published; maybe I can save a little face that way.”

  Max heard the phone ring again. Kimberly was already on the other line.

  Max rubbed his face. The hangover was fast warping into a migraine. “And now everybody in the world knows about the manuscript. This is going to be embarrassing.”

  Edna bit her lip and cut Max a generous slice of the bundt cake. She got up to go to the mini-fridge to pour him a glass of milk.

  Max’s voice was soft. “You know, the thing that drives me nuts is that, based on what this guy was, you’d expect some wild, violent, frenetic tale, but it’s just nothing. It’s completely flat. I mean, where’s this guy’s crazy? Where is the violence?”

  “You do get lots of crazy,” Edna added, handing him the glass of milk.

  Max forked a bite of the bundt cake, trying to ignore the growing sense of nausea.

  “You deserve this break; you’re a good boy.” Edna’s eyes surveyed the room, and she stared hard at the table bordering the wall of weird. “Nobody knows exactly what Sadowsky sent you, right?”

  “The FBI thinks I have the only copy.” Max’s eyes darted over to Edna, searching her face. She gave him a crooked smile, and soon he was thinking what she was thinking. “We could say something else is the Sadowsky manuscript. Something interesting, crazy violent, and what people think Sadowsky would write.”

  “The Devil’s Cupboard,” Edna whispered.

  The Devil’s Cupboard, written by Sigmund Cerletti, was a manuscript that occupied prime real estate on the table pushed up next to the wall of weird. A copy of it arrived on the eighth of the month, every month. It was a single-spaced manuscript with 8-point typeface and margins a millimeter from the paper’s edge, giving the impression that some feverish brain had crammed thousands and thousands of words on each page. Just the thought of slogging through the first page made him feel tired. But he had skimmed the manuscript, and the little he had seen of it scared the hell out of him. He had never read a manuscript so fascinated by the topics of entrails, gurgling blood, or crushed skulls. He put the bite of cake down. Just thinking about The Devil’s Cupboard had that effect on him.

  “Edna, why don’t you take a look at the first few pages and tell me what you think.”

  Edna looked down through her bifocals at the pages and finally lifted a page a few inches away from her face.

  “Oh, my,” she said, her mouth pursed in distaste. After a few more pages, she looked positively ill and a little faint.

  “It’s okay, Edna, I’ll take it.” Max gently lifted the pages out of her hand.

  Edna blew her nose into her handkerchief as she collected herself. “It’s so disturbed and twisted.”

  “So it’s a perfect Sadowsky book, right?” Max said, giving her arm a squeeze. After a deep breath, he looked at the manuscript again. It almost seemed as if the tiny lette
rs were vibrating with weirdness, twitching, winking, contracting as his eyes followed them on the page.

  “So should we start a big auction with the publishers?” Edna asked, starting to smile again.

  About fifteen minutes later, Max frowned and said, “Wait a second, how are we going to talk this crazy guy into letting us use his manuscript to pass it off as Sadowsky’s?”

  Edna shrugged. “This book will make lots of money. Most people like money.”

  “Yeah, but this guy is twisted, and if his main character is anything like him, he’s incredibly narcissistic. This guy’s ego would never let us pass off his book as Sadowsky’s.”

  “We can talk to him. I will convince him,” Edna said, her grandmother’s face still hopeful.

  “Yeah, just call a guy out of the blue and ask him if he’s up for a little literary fraud? Maybe show up at his door with a big check in hand. Where does this guy even live?”

  Edna hobbled over to the table to check the envelope’s return address.

  At that moment, Kimberly walked in without knocking, carrying an oversized bouquet of red roses from an editor who had previously never returned his calls.

  “Whoa, dude, look at what you got from the Neville Publishing House.”

  “Thanks, Kimberly. Edna, where does this guy live?”

  Edna looked uncertain about answering in front of Kimberly, but said softly, “His return address is from Atascadero, California.”

  Kimberly laughed. “Ah, is that manuscript from a crazy dude?”

  Max thought about the manuscript. “Well, yeah.”

  “That figures,” Kimberly said, walking off.

  “Wait, why? What figures?”

  “Atascadero has a big mental hospital. I grew up in Templeton, less than ten miles away. Half the town’s employed in the hospital. Well, I guess it’s kind of a prison, too. Like, if somebody kills somebody, but it’s because they are crazy or the voices told them to do it or something, that’s where they send them. It’s like the criminally insane or whatever.”

  Kimberly shrugged, dropped off some more mail, and walked out. Max and Edna didn’t say a word until she had closed the door on her way out.