“He had to die. It was so easy. I carried the piranhas in an insulated bag, much like the ones old women use to go to the market.” He jabbed again, and warmed to his topic. Caroline’s pulse beat against her eardrums.
“I rested the bag on a stone at the edge of the fountain.” Paolo continued. “The policeman on duty often comes to my restaurant, and we chatted a minute. Then I pointed to a teenaged tourist.”
Jab.
“Taking off her shoes to climb into the fountain.”
Jab.
“The policeman ran to shoo her, and I dumped the fish. Easy.”
He continued to thrust the knife with rhythmic strokes. She needed something to deflect the blade. Paolo made another lunge around a corner of the island. She grabbed the fish’s sword and planted her feet firmly in a fighter’s stance.
Like the Ancient Mariner, Paolo continued his tale. “Those windows in the gallery form a little alcove behind the curtains. I called Giorgio over to look at the fish below. One shove and out he went.”
Paolo jabbed again, but Caroline blocked his knife with the swordfish sword.
“I must have pushed the curtain open when I fled,” he said. “Otherwise it would have been tourists who saw the body first and not you.”
Paolo raised his left arm high. As he began a downward strike, Caroline thrust upward with her fishy weapon, piercing the flesh of his bicep. He howled and dropped the knife.
At that moment, Nino and Aldo barged into the kitchen. Blood dripped from Paolo’s arm, and once more he spewed obscenities and spittle. Caroline laid the swordfish sword on the counter. Her heart thumped against her ribcage, and she looked at Nino.
“After Edoardo’s murder last year,” she said, “I thought all chefs faced danger. Now, it’s the chef who’s the murderer.”
Aldo restrained the belligerent Paolo and radioed for assistance. To Nino he said, “Bring Caroline to the Questura in an hour. She’ll have to make a denuncia.” A sergeant handcuffed Paolo and led him away. A stream of expletives hovered in the air behind him.
Together Nino and Caroline walked to the Trevi. He silently handed her a small coin. She descended the steps and the mist cooled her face. She gazed for a moment at the benevolent seahorse and its Triton blowing gently into a conch. Then she turned her back on the fountain, raised her right arm and tossed the coin over her left shoulder, uttering a small prayer.
__________
Patricia Winton writes and reads, cooks and eats in Rome. She fell in love with the Bobbsey Twins at eight and has been hooked on mysteries since. She’s been a college instructor, food writer, cooking teacher, book seller, politico, perfume purveyor, pencil sharpener, and both a bean counter and server. Visit her at www.patriciawinton.com.
SASE, by Karen Pullen
Headachy, constipated, and guilt-ridden: a morning like every other. On the table, a ragged stack of paper: early drafts, comments from beta reader, vacation ideas folder (as if), bills awaiting payment. The cat is napping next to the dead printer. Dead. The writer is a deadbeat parent, at a dead end, brain in deadlock, approaching deadline.
The writer needs a break and browses Facebook. Reheats cold coffee. Picks nose, sits, stares at screen. Cannot go on like this. Nevermore, quoth the raven. How to quit, that is the question. According to the lawyer, the writer cannot quit: child support, IRS, contract, lawsuit. Over-priced lawyer. How does he justify $285 an hour? Loathes lawyer. Feels used. Loathes publisher, agent, editor, ex-spouse. Each wants a piece but pie plate is empty. Wants to be happy. What would make me happy? Easy. An alternate existence. The writer envisions a stone cottage on the coast of Maine, cat dozing by blazing fire, a plate of fried trout, champagne. Weight of obligations has crushed the writer’s spirit and creativity but not will. The writer Googles “arsenic.”
* * * *
The famous literary agent awakens to synchronized ice picks jabbing into her skull. Her mouth is full of old carpet and her guts are as tremulous as Jell-O. She screws her eyes shut but the skull stabs and internal quivering don’t stop so she creeps to the bathroom for a BC powder, her favorite hangover treatment. There, top shelf, one envelope left. She drops it into water and sips the fizzy concoction slowly. She gags a little but it stays down.
I will never have another drink as long as I live. She can’t remember the last time she felt this sick; forty-five is too old to chug White Russians. It was a fun boozy evening with her ex-husband, still her best friend. She divorced him after he confessed his penchant for dressing in chiffon, heels and lipstick—and dating men—but he was still the most fun ever. They drank Pernod over ice at his apartment, then Rob Roys and Cab with dinner; so far so good, all under control, until the drinks at the club where her ex-husband’s new friend Stan was performing. She isn’t a music critic, but she formed an opinion of the new friend anyway—too much vamping and attitude to cover up his off-key crooning. Nonetheless she and her ex-husband applauded enthusiastically, and after his set, Stan joined them. He was an electric jazzy guy, a writer of gay sci fi erotica, and she remembers laughing too much at his stories. Her ex-husband ordered them all White Russians. The drink was delicious, like coffee ice cream. She ordered another one, and perhaps a third. She doesn’t remember the trip back to her apartment. Her ex-husband must have put her in a cab.
The BC powder does its work and she begins to feel better. She makes coffee and takes a mug into the far end of her living room, stopping to feed the tank of betas. They dart to the top as she drops in a pinch of fish food. Snails have taken over the tank and it needs cleaning, but she can’t abide the smell. It will wait until tomorrow.
Along the wall is the Pile; a stack of thousands of query letters and manuscripts. Each day’s mail brings fifty letters or so, almost twice as many as she can process on a good day. Which today is not.
Two hours later the famous literary agent has made her way through seventeen envelopes. She has stuffed and licked fifteen SASEs, thirteen with form rejection letters and two with a request for a partial. Two queries didn’t include an SASE—those she throws away.
At noon she gets dressed and leaves the apartment. She has projects to pitch to a senior fiction editor from The Press over lunch. She’ll just have a salad because she still feels queasy. And no alcohol.
The famous literary agent makes it as far as the mail box. As she slips the letters into the slot, she’s gripped by a sharp cramp in her gut. Her legs turn to jelly, the world spins, and she collapses to the sidewalk. A pimply kid in baggy jeans and a Mets ball cap leans over her. “You OK?” She moans, helpless, as he slides her wallet out of her purse and jogs down the street. She’s never had a hangover this bad. I am never going to drink again.
And she never does.
* * * *
The senior fiction editor of The Press removes the lid from the purple box containing Magical Fire, Quincy Quaid’s latest manuscript, its pages emitting the faint bug spray fumes of the author’s perfume. For the past thirteen years it has been the senior fiction editor’s job to turn Quincy’s sludgy prose into readable books. She knows what she’ll find: untethered participles, extraneous talky characters, confusing POV shifts. She scans page one. The word “actually” leaps out at her. She actually, really hates that word. She makes a purple dot in the margin.
Quincy Quaid’s books are virtual heaving seas of emotion: longing, despair, lust, pain, humiliation, joy. Writing-wise, Quincy has slacked off in recent years, each new manuscript a half-ream of clichéd descriptions, flat characters and unresolved plot threads. Whole passages are copied from earlier books, as though her readers won’t remember. But of course they will; they are eagle-eyed spotters of lazy writing and sloppy editing. Obsessed fans have created Quincy Quaid websites where they post the mistakes and errors the senior fiction editor has overlooked, relatively few for over a hundred books but nonetheless embarrassing.
The senior fiction editor sighs and looks at her watch. Thirty minutes to lunch; enough time to reject a batch of qu
eries, a mindless activity that will give her the illusion that she is, actually, working. She pushes aside the purple box and starts opening envelopes. By noon, three dozen SASEs are stuffed with a photocopied rejection letter, licked, sealed, and dropped into the mail slot. She sets aside the non-fiction queries to give to her boss, the publisher of The Press (and ex-husband of a famous literary agent) and then wanders down the hall to the break room. Some generous soul has sent a gift box of fruit. She selects a pear and bites into it. Crisp, juicy, an almost citrusy flavor. Very good.
Feeling refreshed, the senior fiction editor pours herself a cup of decaf and walks back to her office to tackle Magical Fire. She sits down and picks up the purple felt-tip pen. The first time through she always reads for story, making dots in the margin as errors catch her attention. Dot, dot, dot. Rachelle, an innkeeper, encounters Damon, a sexy brooding ghost who time-transports her to his Wales castle and the year 833. The senior fiction editor scans Chapter 2 several times; something is missing. Rachelle zips back to the ninth century whenever Damon summons her. But why does Damon pick her, out of all the women available to him throughout the span of human history? Oh God, this is going to be a real slog. She feels a little nauseated. Nine more years until retirement, she thinks. Maybe earlier if I cut back, move somewhere cheaper, someplace warm. Lower taxes. She turns on her computer and begins to search real estate prices in Raleigh. Suddenly, saliva fills her mouth and she retches. A godawful cramp seizes her gut and she feels faint and clammy. Quite ill, then even worse, actually.
* * * *
The publisher slides his feet into the pair of red Marabou slip-ons, women’s size 14, that he keeps hidden under his desk. He waggles his toes, feeling the feathers brush against his instep. The shoes calm him. They are a source of solace in difficult times, a bit of contentment. He isn’t hung over, exactly, just exhausted; after they left the club last night, and he sent his ex-wife home, he spent the rest of the night trying to appease his new friend Stan, the club performer, who was turning out to be a jealous control freak, threatening suicide if the publisher doesn’t end it with his ex-wife for good. The publisher’s sour love life is a perfect book-end to the seemingly inevitable demise of The Press, sinking like the Titanic punctured by an iceberg of relentlessly bad sales.
Is it time to find a therapist, someone to listen empathetically? A therapist might be able to help him prioritize, give him some action verbs, such as “vanish.” Jumping from a cruise ship might be easy to fake; they hardly ever recover the body, do they? He could buy a balcony room on a ten-day cruise, drink mai-tais for a week, and then disappear. Leave a note in case no one notices he’s missing, then hide out in the life boats or under a buffet table; there must be lots of good hiding places on those twelve-story floating cities. Stroll off the ship in Cozumel and never look back.
He gingerly rolls his head from left to right, bothered by a persistent ache in his neck. He tries to focus on the quarterly sales report. The Press’s historical romance titles only broke even; it’s impossible to compete with Harlequin, Random and Penguin in that category. Erotica did better; smutty sells. Quincy Quaid’s revenues were a bit down, he notices, swallowing hard. If it weren’t for her four books a year, The Press would have closed down years ago. Problem is, Quincy’s advances deplete their capital, and where once he could borrow to keep the business running, now the banks act like every day is Sunday. If banks quit loaning money, how do they keep their buildings heated and all those vice-presidents paid? Oh, that’s right—lifeblood-sucking extortionate credit card fees. The Cozumel cruise could go onto his Master Card, hee hee, soak up the last dollar of his credit limit.
Sighing deeply, the publisher speed-dials his ex-wife. He’ll have to meet with her (without telling his new friend Stan) and renegotiate Quincy’s contract. No one answers, so he leaves a message.
He picks up a handful of non-fiction query letters. The Press has a psychology “how-to” imprint, mostly books about codependency, of the “women-who-love-(fill in the blank)” variety. They published a blockbuster five years ago when sex addiction became such a, ahem, hot topic, and since then the publisher has read the best non-fiction queries, looking for the next big book. Alas, none of these is it. He slips a standard rejection into each of the SASEs and seals them.
His stomach growls. He never eats breakfast. It’s a waste of good calories, better used on something tasty, something to lift his mood, like chocolate or smoked salmon. He takes off the slippers and walks down the hall to the break room for some coffee. He sees the pears but the publisher avoids fruit unless it’s baked in a pie. He pours himself a cup of coffee, adds cream and takes a sip; it tastes metallic and he feels a bit shivery all of a sudden. Then dizziness tips his world sideways and clobbers him to the gritty floor. He groans loudly, clutching his chest, feeling his heart pound like an off-balance washer in spin cycle.
Not long after, his worries about Stan’s jealousy and The Press’s finances become, in effect, irrelevant.
* * * *
Thanks to the Internet, within hours the news sweeps over the publishing community like a tsunami: a famous literary agent, a senior fiction editor, and a publisher have died from apparent poisoning. The literary agent’s clients frantically dig out their contracts looking for a death clause (there isn’t one). The editor’s friends blog tearful eulogies recalling their common love of scrap booking and Chihuahuas. The publisher’s death seals the suspicion that the entire industry is under siege from terrorists.
Then the rumor spreads: the three victims ingested arsenic from the glue of a self-addressed stamped envelope. Traces of the poisoned glue have been found on their tongues. Hundreds of fragile agent-author relationships dissolve from mistrust. Paranoid editors view each query like a live grenade. Interns refuse to lick, ever again. The more astute writers run out and buy self-sealing self-addressed stamped envelopes, or SSSASEs, to improve their chances in the slush pile.
* * * *
NYPD Detective Mike McIntyre is assigned to investigate the three homicides. He scans the lab report on the doctored envelopes, which have been returned, “address unknown,” to their three (dead) senders. Their sticky edges were laden with arsenic trioxide.
Mike begins with the apartment of the famous literary agent. He pulls aside the yellow tape and surveys her living room. The first thing he notices is the mountain of unanswered mail. He imagines his own query letter is buried in there somewhere. He wrote a police procedural, a story of gangs, drugs, and corruption á la Joseph Wambaugh. He spent three years writing and revising, then another year fruitlessly looking for an agent before abandoning his dream of early retirement and a beach house in the Outer Banks. He knows he queried the famous literary agent but doesn’t think she responded. He sniffs in disapproval, knowing each letter represents a person who’d reached out to the famous literary agent in vain, begging for a kind word of validation. The mountain of letters represents a pile of broken dreams and broken hearts. A pile of suspects? Did a writer commit this murder?
Mike sifts, reads, and speculates that highly offended writers would come in three flavors: ignored, rejected, and mistreated. He calls for assistance and a uniformed cop shows up; together they go through every scrap of paper in the pile, logging names and addresses.
Next, he sorts through her project files. Mike recognizes the name of her star client, Quincy Quaid, author of over a hundred romance novels, many of them best-sellers. Quaid’s folders fill an entire file drawer, with contracts for foreign rights and movie options and even merchandise deals. Whew, lookee that: a promotions budget that exceeds his detective’s salary. Nice. He shoves the folder back into the cabinet and goes out to pay a visit to the offices of The Press.
* * * *
“Everyone’s been murdered, how do you think I feel?” The Press’s only remaining employee—an editorial assistant—wears excessive eyeliner and a silver stud in her slightly inflamed upper lip. A tattoo of a dolphin leaps out of her cleavage.
She leans onto one curvy haunch as she paints her nails a shiny black, probably not in mourning. “Going back how long?”
He shrugs. “Ten years?”
She waves her talons in the air to dry them, then turns to her computer and begins typing, the clicks of her fingernails hitting the keys like corn popping. “My question is, like, will I get a paycheck this week? Cause I have, like, bills. And I haven’t been paid in a month.” The printer spits out three pages, and she hands them to Mike.
“Who would want to cause . . .” (he almost says “like”) “. . . harm to The Press?”
She pushes silky hair behind her curled-shell-like ears and taps the stud in her lip. It looks painful. “Omigod. It was high drama around here 24-7. New boyfriends, old boyfriends, bill collectors, banks cutting us off, writers wanting their money. Better than a soap opera. But murder? I don’t think so.”
Mike scans the list of Press authors. Three of them are also clients of the famous literary agent.
* * * *
Quincy Quaid’s apartment smells like Raid and cat. The source of the latter odor, a yellow kitty with fur as fluffy as a dandelion, drapes itself at Mike’s feet and begins a rumbly purring as he rubs its head. Quincy Quaid is a delicate petite woman with a writhing mass of blonde hair, too much make-up, and a fluttering manner.
“You’re a big strapping fellow, aren’t you? My, yes, nothing wussy about you. You may call me Quincy.” She gives his knee a flirtatious squeeze but he senses that her heart isn’t in it; her face is ashen, her eyes bloodshot.
“It’s almost as though your career was a target,” he says.
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