Jane did not particularly love the water, but she found the draw of that pool overwhelming. It was so empty and beautiful and, she had a feeling, chronically unused. It went against her nature, finding something perfectly good and beautiful going to waste. It was not exactly the same as finding a handful of colorful tie-aprons with prints of ducks and geese on them, gingham checks, dancing vegetables, all folded in a drawer at a house sale, clean and forgotten. But it was related. If Jane didn’t buy those aprons, they would go unworn. If Jane didn’t take a swim, that pool would be wasted for another day. She helped herself to a black tank suit in the pool house, pleased that it fit, even more pleased that there was no full-length mirror. She had not put on a bathing suit in at least three years and she had no desire to do a then-and-now comparison. In fact, if she had thought about this impulse more than a minute, she wouldn’t have jumped into the water at all. Jane wasn’t a great swimmer, but she could manage a serviceable crawl, and cutting through the water now was the perfect antidote to last night’s minimal sleep. She would be invigorated for the whole day if she could resist lying down on a poolside chaise and closing her eyes when she got out.
“You didn’t rest for half an hour after eating,” said Tim from the doorway of the guesthouse.
Jane waved at him. Spoken like a satellite Nellie, who would surely see the dark side of swimming in a perfect pool on a beautiful sunny day.
Since she wasn’t in shape to do more, she decided that ten laps would be more than sufficient to stretch her limbs and clear her head. Something was wrong about Patrick Dryer’s book. Not the self-publishing part. That wasn’t so surprising. It was the novel itself. There was a hitch in the story. What was it? Jane thought if she moved her body, her brain would follow along and give her the information she knew she had, but could not assemble. On her last lap, she felt better than she had in days. She hadn’t realized how good it might feel to actually move. She lifted herself out of the pool and sat on the side where she had thrown an oversized towel. Draping it over her shoulders, she realized she was sitting in front of the table where Lou Piccolo had been sitting last night. She turned and faced the table, clean and empty except for the heavy ashtray, the same one, she supposed, that Lou had been using last night.
Jane tied the towel around her waist and sat down on one of the lounges. She would not close her eyes. She shook out her hair, grateful that Tim had suggested this shaggy style before they arrived in California. How long ago had that been? Her preparation day at the spa? At least a hundred years ago. The amazing thing about being drawn into a mystery was what it did to time and routine. Jane and Tim had only spent a few days in Los Angeles, and she felt as if Evanston and Kankakee were lifetimes away. Looking up at the blue sky, the clouds so perfect that they were surely painted on by the set designer, Jane felt an almost overwhelming sensation. She was being seduced. And it wasn’t just any one thing drawing her in. It was just promise, that old shape-shifter, promise. You want to be a movie star, this place can offer you the dream. You want success as a writer? You’ll be hammering out a script out by the pool in no time.
Patrick Dryer arrived here, his published novel in hand, and was seduced by the promise. He wrote a script and handed it over to someone he thought he could trust. Then, line by line, his ideas, his writings were drained from him. He was murdered in Pasadena, but his writing was killed much earlier. That book was workmanlike at best. How could he have dazzled Lou with all of the so-called brilliant material used by the B Room?
“What the heck are you doing out there?” yelled Tim. “You’re not used to that sun, you’ll fry.”
“What?” Jane asked, sitting straight up.
“You need sunblock, sweetie. I don’t know what’s gotten into you. Wearing a bathing suit, swimming, for God’s sake. You’re from Illinois, have you forgotten? We don’t go for dips in other peoples’ pools. We don’t even—”
“No, what did you say before?”
“I asked what you were doing sitting out here in the sun,” said Tim. “What’s wrong with you? Sunstroke already?”
“You said what the heck…” said Jane.
“Yeah, I meant what the fuck, but I’m trying to clean up my language since you told me that my godfather credentials with Nick would be revoked if I didn’t—”
“Everyone is in Patrick’s novel. In The D Room, he has a character to represent everyone in real life, everyone in the real-life B Room…” said Jane.
“Yeah?”
“Heck. Everyone except Heck.”
Jane asked Tim to get her another towel. She looked down at her legs and realized Tim was right. What was she thinking? A pale Illinois lass sitting out by a pool? In a bathing suit? For a moment California had her, but there is nothing like the lack of a suntan, that pasty doughy look of one’s own skin, to remind you of your roots.
“Henry Rule is not a player in Patrick’s book. Why not? He was part of the group when Patrick arrived here. Heck’s illness separated him from the group this year, but Patrick’s been hanging around out here for at least five years. If the novel is true, they’ve been bleeding him for at least five years.”
“Why do you keep saying that? About the novel being true?” asked Tim, throwing the towel on top of her.
Jane shook her head.
“It’s a novel, not a memoir,” said Tim. “I mean, he might have based it all on his life out here, but he didn’t write a Hollywood memoir or anything. You know, like Belinda St. Germaine. She came out here and got burned by people and wrote Hollywood Diary, and even though she probably exaggerates the stuff, she doesn’t pass it off as fiction. Maybe Dryer just took the B Room as a subject for fiction, then made stuff up.”
“No,” said Jane, standing up, wrapping one towel around her waist and draping the other one over her shoulders.
Jane walked into the guesthouse, motioning for Tim to follow. She picked up Patrick’s book from where she had left it on the table.
“It’s not made up and I can show you why,” said Jane. She opened to a page in the middle and began reading.
“Why do you need another rewrite of that script, Sam?” I asked, waving away some of his cigar smoke. It never ceased to amaze me that he insisted on smoking even when I told him it made me sick. One more strike against the bastard.
“The producer’s interested, he just wants to see if you’ve really got the stuff, you know?” Sam gave me an oily smile.
“I’ve got the stuff,” I told him. “I can give you three more drafts of this script if I need to, but I’m beginning to wonder why the producer doesn’t want to meet me.” I knew then that Sam was using me, but I wanted to see him squirm his way out of it again.
“That sucks,” said Tim.
“That isn’t even the worst of it,” said Jane. “He goes on for pages, having Sam make up phony reasons that Patrick can’t be brought to meetings. This is real. It’s terrible fiction, but it’s real, true-life dialogue. I was thinking, when I started reading this, about a fiction-writing class I took in college. Just because something’s copied from life doesn’t mean it rings true. It makes for bad fiction.” Jane held up the book. “And this, my friend, is bad fiction. And you know what bad fiction is, right?”
Tim shook his head, moving to make more coffee.
“Bad fiction is real life,” said Jane.
Jane didn’t know whether or not to credit the swimming with clearing her head, but she did now know why the novel was self-published. It was because Patrick couldn’t write anymore. The book was poorly written. He had either lost what talent he had or he was simply written out. If Patrick felt that Lou Piccolo and the B Room had drained him of his best work, it was understandable that he would snap. Jane wondered if all the threats and the harassment that Patrick had rained down on the B Room really constituted threats on their lives or if he was referring to his novel. Was he just threatening them because he knew they would recognize themselves in The D Room?
For the first time, Jane ha
d some real sense of Patrick’s desperation. Not only did he feel he was used and used up by the group, he actually still believed in the power of words. He thought he could hurt them with this. Jane looked at the book and began paging through it again. Where was Heck? Had Patrick left him out because Heck had already punished himself? Maybe he thought the dishonesty, the appropriation of his material pushed Heck over the edge, so Patrick would pardon him from an appearance in his tell-all book.
Jane turned to the chapter that introduced the writer who turned to pornographic films. Last night, Jane had skimmed the sections that dealt with this subplot, since she was only trying to find any facts about the D Room/B Room characters that might point directly to whoever killed Patrick. If it was Lou, and Lou died of a heart attack, the crime was solved and, to some, it would seem that punishment had been swift and clean. Instant karma.
It wasn’t a long chapter. The character Ben was hosting a party. Speaking in the very cadence of Jeb Gleason, Jane noted, Ben told a story about a friend of the group, a writer who had fallen on hard times. He had written an X-rated movie under a pen name, turned a quick profit, and had so much fun that he kept at it, found he had a knack for it. He was a prolific writer, but found that the better he was known in the porn circles, the less people wanted to know him in any other circles. Jane had thought last night, even skimming this section, that it was a cut above the rest of the novel. She had also remembered, incorrectly, that the character who wrote the X-rated movie was Alan or Fred. She must have been dozing through it. Now she realized the story of the inadvertent pornographer whom everyone had loved, then shunned, was written with compassion. Maybe, Jane thought, Patrick saw in him a comrade in arms, someone who couldn’t get credit for his legitimate work. Now, reading more carefully, Jane noted that the writer/narrator listened to Ben’s story with so much attention because he knew who he was talking about. The wayward writer was the narrator’s cousin—the relative who had introduced him to Sam Sag-ella and the rest of the D Room writers. The cousin’s name was Hank. How could she have missed that last night?
When a knock at the door roused Jane from her immersion in her second reading of The D Room, she looked up, noticed that she had a fresh cup of coffee by her side, but Tim was nowhere in sight. Assuming it was Jeb knocking at the door, feeling refreshed and celebratory since the two thorns in his side, Lou and Patrick, would no longer be around to disturb his own sweet scheme, she sat where she was and reluctantly called out for him to come in. It was, after all, his house.
Detective Oh, holding the giant book that he had borrowed from Jeb last night, nodded a good-morning to Jane.
“Perfect morning for a swim,” he said.
Jane opened her mouth, but knew that no words would form. Instead, her skull was filled with the wretched silent screaming of a fortysomething midwestern woman sitting at a kitchen table in a borrowed bathing suit.
“May I boil some water for tea?” asked Oh.
“I dnt…” Jane tried to say she didn’t know if there was tea, but only garbled sounds escaped.
“I bring my own,” Oh said, holding up a tea bag he had taken from his pocket. “I take no chances.”
He is pretending not to notice that I can’t speak and that I am about to burst into flames, Jane thought. Tim walked in, saw Jane trapped at the table, blushing red from scalp to toes, unable to get up and run because she was sitting at a vintage Formica table on a matching vinyl chair and when she rose, her bare legs would beg to stay where they were planted. Jane would have to peel herself off the chair. It was a scene Jane knew Tim must be finding hilarious, but Jane’s discomfort won him over—besides, she knew he’d make her pay later. Tim grabbed a robe out of the downstairs powder room and tossed it to her while he asked Oh how the rest of his night had gone.
“I read some interesting sections in the book I borrowed from Mr. Gleason,” said Oh. “Interesting enough to keep me awake most of the night. And you, Mr. Lowry?”
“No reading for me. I washed dishes with Bobbette and we gossiped about the folks in the big house,” said Tim.
Jane and Oh both looked at Tim expectantly.
“Nothing interesting,” said Tim. “Sorry.”
Jane had wrapped herself in the camel cashmere robe that Jeb provided for his houseguests, and found that as soon as she was covered and comfortable, her words and wits returned. She had a fleeting realization that this must be why bathing suit models were alleged to be bimbos, even though they probably had respectable IQs. It was impossible to speak while wearing a bathing suit. Realizing this was probably the only time she was going to feel any camaraderie with a swimsuit model, she allowed the thought to pass into oblivion.
“Patrick Dryer’s novel was revealing,” said Jane. “Poorly written enough to tell us a great deal.”
“Excuse me,” said Oh, looking at his watch. “I’m sorry to be rude, but I have to keep track of the time. I am meeting Claire at the hospital at noon.”
Jane tried to give her version of what the novel revealed as quickly as possible. She went over the characters and their real-life twins and the scam Sam/Lou had been running.
“I just found the most interesting part that I somehow missed last night. I thought Heck had been left out of the book because I glossed over a chapter about one more writer, a former member of the D Room named Hank. It’s got to be Heck,” said Jane.
“Does it say anything about him going off the deep end?” asked Tim.
Jane shook her head. “Unless there’s another section that I missed, this is it. There’s just a story about him writing some racy material for a party, a comedy roast or something, and it was so well received that he started writing X-rated parodies of television shows, actually getting some produced as softcore porn features. Remember the television show Thirtysome-thing? In the book, Hank writes a feature called 3-D Something and gets an actress he knows to star in it and it becomes a cult classic.”
“I don’t know the television show, but I understand the play on words,” said Oh. “May I see the cigar case you retrieved from the neighbor last night, Mrs. Wheel?”
“Nope,” said Tim, looking up from his BlackBerry. “No 3-D Something that I can find.”
“Fiction, Timmy. Patrick made up the movie name. Look up Henry Rule and see if you come up with anything, although I’m sure he would have done these under another name,” said Jane. She wrapped the cashmere around her more tightly, standing to get the cigar case for Oh. The robe felt incredible. She wondered how much Jeb might bill her for the cashmere if she stuck it in her suitcase.
Jane took the case out of the drawer where she had tucked it away last night. It was made of brown leather, fashioned to hold three cigars, the top molded to slide snugly into the bottom. She opened it and inhaled the aroma of tobacco and leather before handing it to Oh.
“You are an aficionada, Mrs. Wheel?” asked Oh, sitting down at the table. He took a pair of thin latex gloves from the pocket of his sport coat and carefully removed the two remaining cigars. He took out a magnifier and began examining one of the cigars. He first held it up to the light, then slowly rotated it in his hand as he carefully looked over the surface. After he was satisfied he had seen the entire outer wrapper, he picked up the second cigar and repeated the process.
“And you are checking for…?” asked Tim, looking up from his BlackBerry.
Jane, too, was fascinated by the precision with which Oh conducted his examination. She looked at the second cigar that he laid down next to the first, compared them as well as she could without touching them, then shook her head.
“I give up, too. What is it?”
“Last night I borrowed a book from Mr. Gleason’s library, the only one that had been removed from the shelf recently. It was a book on common poisons. Someone had left a marker on the page where nicotine poisoning was discussed. It occurred to me that Mr. Piccolo might have smoked a cigar that had been laced with an overdose of nicotine, which could have triggered a seizure, an arr
hythmia…” Oh let his voice trail off as he picked up the first cigar again. “But I don’t see any evidence of tampering. I was hoping that there might be a small puncture where a syringe might have been used to inject a concentrated dose.”
“Where do you buy an overdose of nicotine?” asked Tim.
“Grocery store, Mr. Lowry. A simple pack of cigarettes would do it, although probably easier with some chewing tobacco. One could soak ten cigarettes, say, in a glass of vodka, and extract enough nicotine to kill someone, particularly someone with any history of heart problems. I spoke to the police this morning and they told me Mr. Piccolo had an episode a few years ago, according to his medical records.”
“Cigarettes and vodka as murder weapons?” said Tim. “I like.”
“What makes you think that Lou Piccolo was murdered?” asked Jane.
Oh shrugged slightly. “So convenient. His friends accepted him as the murderer of Mr. Dryer, then he dies. Very neat. No one seemed terribly sad last night to learn of his death. Even his partner, Ms. Bixby, who had just been through a shock herself, seemed to take it all in stride. I wondered if, perhaps, a member or members of this B Room group might have scripted Mr. Piccolo’s death.”
“Would one loaded cigar be enough to kill someone?” asked Jane.
Oh nodded. “But I don’t think these two have been doctored. And I don’t know how someone could count on the good fortune of having Mr. Piccolo choose the one lethal cigar in his case.”
Jane asked to borrow Oh’s magnifier and leaned in to look at the cigars herself, careful not to touch them in case they did become evidence.
“I think now is when I’m supposed to say ‘aha,’ “ said Jane, holding up the magnifier.
“You’ve found an entry point?” asked Oh, surprised.
“I read the labels. These are Macanudos,” said Jane. “Lou preferred Padróns. He said Padróns were his favorite. Someone who knew him well enough to have access to his cigars would know which one to inject with the nicotine, which one he’d smoke first. If anyone was suspicious and checked the other cigars in his case, they wouldn’t find anything wrong with the Macanudos.”
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