She and Felicity Horsey-Smythe were sitting rather close together on the single bed with glasses in their hands. A half-empty bottle of vodka stood on the night table beside them.
Dee and I perched on the armchair and declined to share the vodka.
Felicity said, “Lulu and I were just talking about what happened today.”
“It was a real shock,” Lulu said. She sounded pretty drunk. Her topknot was slightly askew, and her scarves twisted and jumbled around her neck. “Olga was a nice kid. She was going to write an article on Raisa Gorbachev for the next issue of Trash Out.”
“I told Lulu it would be more understandable if somebody had maybe been trying to kill her.” Felicity laughed shrilly and took another gulp of vodka.
“Why do you say that?” I asked innocently. “To me it would seem just the opposite. If someone killed Lulu, it would mean they were probably on the cover of Trash Out. Then it would be purely a question of narrowing the suspects down. Why would anyone famous take a chance like that?”
“They probably would if they thought they could get away with it,” Lulu muttered, pouring herself another drink. “I’ve had death threats, you know.”
“Who here would you think most likely?” Dee asked. “I mean, if we pretended it was you, not Olga, who was the target.”
A strange look passed over Lulu’s face. “I’ve been wondering that myself. I have lots of enemies here.”
“You should have thought about this when you started your journal,” Felicity giggled. She’d taken off her hat, and her streaked blonde hair stood up wildly.
“I did think about it.” Lulu’s moroseness seemed to be growing in direct proportion to Felicity’s vodka-induced gaiety. “But I wanted to go ahead. It was something I’d thought for a long time: investigating the fault lines in certain women’s strength, exposing the pretensions and predilections behind the famous masks. A lot of people have said that wasn’t fair, that these women didn’t become famous on purpose, that it was their work that was important, not their personalities. I say that’s garbage. No one becomes famous without wanting on some level to be famous. None of the women who’ve been on the cover is famous for her ideas alone. She’s partly famous because she’s got charisma or a beautiful face or because she’s got ins with the right people or she’s outrageous. She’s famous precisely because she’s a hypocrite, espousing one thing publicly, another privately, writing books or making speeches about feminism and sisterhood and screwing over any individual woman who stands in her way. To me that’s not feminism, and women deserve to know what their heroines are really like.”
“But what about Simone Jefferson?” Dee broke in, perhaps unwisely. “I’ve met her, and she’s really nice.”
“What about Simone?” Lulu said. “She’s never been on the cover.”
Felicity leapt in. “Well then, according to your theory, Cassandra, she’d be a good suspect, just because she wouldn’t be suspected.”
“She’d only be a good suspect if Lulu was planning to put her on the cover. But you’re not, are you, Lulu?”
Lulu said nothing. She emptied her glass and stared very hard at the opposite wall. Finally she muttered, “I’ve got to get some sleep.”
Dee and I stood up obediently. Felicity stayed right where she was.
“Well,” said Dee, when we were back out in the corridor. “I thought Mrs. Horsey-Smythe was married.”
“I’m sure she’s just researching her next lesbian novel,” I said comfortingly.
The next morning at breakfast we happened to stand behind Darcy Joanne again. She was asking for scrambled tofu and herb tea. “Well then, what about yogurt? What about all those Ukrainians who live to be 105 and only eat yogurt?”
Sighing, she took her plate of fried eggs and said, “Really incredible what happened yesterday, don’t you think? I’m thinking of bringing out Olga’s poems. They’d probably sell really well now.”
“That’s morbid,” said Dee.
“That’s publishing,” Darcy replied. “You don’t have to think about that stuff up in Canada. We do.”
“Doesn’t it seem odd that it happened in front of Lulu’s stand?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Darcy. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say Lulu had engineered it for publicity. She’s in real financial trouble—that’s the rumor. I don’t know how she could afford to come here.”
“But I thought Trash Out was a huge success.”
“It had novelty value,” Darcy said. “But that’s worn off. People are saying that it sounds the same every month. And nobody but feminists are interested in the dirt on other feminists. But Lulu put a lot of money into it. I guess her loans are probably coming due. Cash-flow problems—that’s the polite term for imminent bankruptcy.” And Darcy drifted off to join her Californian friends.
“Yeah, I know she has me in mind for her cover,” said Simone, almost in resignation. We’d caught up with her in the courtyard outside the exhibit hall. “But what can you do? Better Lulu trashing me out than Ishmael Reed. At least Lulu doesn’t pretend to be the voice of injured black manhood.”
“But what can she dig up on you?” Dee asked. I wanted to warn her that this was a potential murderer we were dealing with, but Dee rushed on, “I love your work. And your life has seemed so straightforward. I mean, at least in that article I read in Time magazine. You went to college, graduate school, and then published a novel.”
Simone smiled. “Nobody’s life is that straightforward. Everybody does little deals, makes little trade-offs, has skeletons in the closet. Mine are no worse than anybody else’s, but I have them. For instance, I’m a lesbian, but I’m not out to a lot of people, and I don’t write about lesbian characters. That’s how I want it at the moment; that’s how I can do my best work at the moment. But Lulu’s bound to make that the focus. I’m angry, but I’m prepared.”
Simone’s face was a calm mask. I couldn’t really tell what she was feeling and thinking.
“It’s terrible about Olga, isn’t it?” I said.
But Simone just nodded.
“Either Simone’s a liar or we’ve got the wrong suspect. And she didn’t look upset about Olga at all.”
Dee and I were back at her stand, surrounded by hordes of Russians. If anything, Olga’s death had increased the attendance at the book fair, and there was an especially large crowd around TRESH OOT.
“Maybe we should give up,” said Dee. “The Soviets probably killed Olga. And if they didn’t they’ll have to figure out who did.”
“Rubbish,” I said. “What does the KGB know about feminism? They have no idea it’s a greater threat to world stability than capitalism. No, there must be a connection somewhere—to the idea that Simone is somehow involved and the rumor that Lulu’s losing money on Trash Out.”
Fifteen minutes later I had broken into Lulu’s room at the Vladivostok People’s Hotel. I realized how little I knew about her as I leafed through a box of back issues of Trash Out and rooted in a suitcase full of scarves and black underwear. There must be a clue here somewhere, but I was damned if I knew what it was or where to find it.
I heard footsteps in the corridor and hastily crawled under the bed. While I held my breath, the footsteps continued down the hall and disappeared. I scrambled out again. But my eye had been caught by a crumpled piece of paper in between the bed and the night stand. It looked as if it had been thrown there in a fit of anger. I smoothed it out and read:
POISON PEN
Some authors are sensitive about their secrets. I found that out the hard way during the most recent international feminist book fair in Vladivostok when Simone Jefferson tried to poison me with a quantity of strychnine placed on the tip of my pen. Like many people, Simone had noticed that I’m in the habit of sucking my pen when I’m thinking. So she substituted one that had poison in order to shut me up. The only reason I’m here today is that there was only enough of the substance to make me really ill, not enough to kill me. Otherwise I would h
ave been murdered in cold blood in the very midst of the book fair, while selling this journal.
Lulu went on to detail the means by which Simone was caught. The bottle of rat poison in her hotel room. Her fingerprints on the pen. “All because,” Lulu wrote, “Simone was afraid I was going to finally expose the secret she’d hidden for so long. Her lesbianism.”
Again I heard footsteps in the corridor, but this time I wasn’t fast enough. I was on my hands and knees by the bed when Lulu came in. She immediately spotted the paper in my hand.
“I didn’t mean to kill Olga,” she said, edging toward me while she kept the door well blocked. “Nobody can accuse me of premeditated murder. That editorial is proof. The poison was meant for me. That’s not a crime, is it?”
“No,” I said. “Not if you really meant to commit suicide. But you miscalculated the dose; you only thought you’d get ill and that Simone would be blamed. It was a big risk to take, Lulu. And Olga took the consequences.”
I couldn’t see any way around her body to the door.
“No one’s going to know,” she said, coming closer to me. “I’ve still got some strychnine here and, as we both know, it doesn’t take much.”
“I’ve always thought,” I said calmly, “that all those scarves were a big fashion mistake.” I grabbed the ends of one of them and started twisting.
The door behind her burst open.
“KGB!” said Felicity Horsey-Smythe playfully, and then gasped. “Oh my, Cassandra dear, whatever are you doing to poor Lulu? She looks as if she can’t breathe very well like that.”
“Be a good girl, Felicity,” I said, still keeping a firm grip on Lulu, “and call the police, dear.”
A half hour later Simone had retrieved the bottle of rat poison Lulu had planted in her room, and we’d presented it together with Lulu’s editorial to the Soviet police. I had no idea what would happen to Lulu now; whether she’d be tried and punished, sent to Siberia, or locked up in the Lubyanka. Whatever her punishment, I suspected it would be milder than what some of Lulu’s victims would have meted out if they’d had the chance.
Still, I suppose some good did come out of it all. Felicity Horsey-Smythe had a wonderful subject for her next novel, and Darcy Joanne said she’d publish it in the States. They signed a contract at the Vladivostok Airport and agreed to move quickly on the project. They did want, after all, to get the book out in time for the next international feminist book fair.
“Tierra del Fuego!” said Dee when I told her. “I can hardly wait.”
Buy The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman Now!
About the Author
Barbara Wilson is the pen name under which Barbara Sjoholm has published the Cassandra Reilly Mysteries and the Pam Nilsen Mysteries. Gaudí Afternoon, of the Cassandra Reilly series, won a Lambda Literary Award and a Crime Writers’ Association Award, and was made into a film by the same name. Like her detective Cassandra Reilly, Sjoholm is a translator, but of Norwegian and Danish books. In addition to her fiction and the memoir Blue Windows, Sjoholm is the author of the travel books The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea, Incognito Street, and The Palace of the Snow Queen. Her essays have appeared in the American Scholar, Harvard Review, the New York Times, Smithsonian, and Slate, among other publications.
For more about Barbara Sjoholm, please visit www.barbarasjoholm.com.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1994 by Barbara Wilson
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
978-1-4804-5518-4
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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THE CASSANDRA REILLY
MYSTERIES
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Trouble in Transylvania Page 27