by Dean James
“You want to read more of it?” The sheer incredulity in her voice almost gave me pause at the thought that I was going to be raising her hopes falsely. No doubt I was the first person in quite some time who actually wanted to read more of her horrible work.
I made the not terribly difficult decision to quash my finer feelings as I nodded. “If that wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
“Certainly not,” she said, her face lighting up with pleasure. “I’ll be right back.”
“Shall I come with you? No need for you to have to traipse back here.”
She was too excited at the thought of my reading more of her work to think about the oddity of my going with her, since my room was nearer the stairs than hers. She practically ran out of the room, and I made haste to follow her.
I was right on her heels as she paused to open her door. She stepped inside, putting one foot square in the middle of the folded paper lying on the floor. In her excitement she didn’t seem to have noticed it. I coughed and drew her attention to it.
Norah stared blankly down at the paper. “What’s this, I wonder.”
She stooped over to retrieve it, unfolding it as she straightened up. Her lips moved as she read the words. The color drained from her face.
She crumpled the paper in her hands and moved jerkily away from the door, toward one of the chairs in the room.
“What’s the matter, Miss Tattersall? Is it bad news of some kind?” I came and squatted beside her chair. “Is there anything I can do?”
Mutely she shook her head. I held out a hand toward the paper balled up in her fist. Her fingers tightened around it as she realized what I was trying to do.
“Nothing you need concern yourself with, Dr. Kirby-Jones,” she said, attempting a firm tone and failing.
“You look like you’ve had a shock, Miss Tattersall. Are you certain there isn’t something I can do for you?” I stood up, gazing down at her with an earnest expression of helpfulness on my face. “Perhaps I should ring for some hot tea?”
“No, just someone’s attempt at a joke,” she responded, her voice less tremulous.
“It’s a trifle close in here, don’t you think?” I said, striding away from her, toward one of the windows overlooking the terrace.
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
“Perhaps if we could open one of these windows,” I said, bracingly cheerful. “The fresh air would perk you up.”
She said nothing more, just continued to look at me oddly. I made an effort at opening one of the windows but gave up quickly. Then I turned to her, as if struck by a new notion. “Your window overlooks the terrace.”
“Yes,” she said, puzzled.
“You must have been here, looking down on the terrace, when you saw my assistant arguing with Miss Harper.”
As she stared at me, the color once again drained from her face. Her mouth opened and closed several times, but no sound came out.
“Was it from here that you saw them talking?” I said, coming to crouch beside her chair again.
She gazed into my face, and I could feel the fear emanating from her. “Yes, I suppose I must have been,” she finally said, though she did it unwillingly.
“Then perhaps you saw someone else talking to Miss Harper,” I said. “After, of course, Giles had left her?”
I made it a question. She licked her lips with her tongue, and her breath was coming in short gasps. “Did you see someone else, Miss Tattersall?”
She nodded.
“When?”
“Before.” She stumbled over the word. “Not after.” I frowned. This wasn’t going to help much, but I also thought she might be lying to me about the “before.”
“Who was it?” I asked.
She swallowed. “I can’t say.”
“You didn’t recognize the person?” My tone scoffed at the idea.
She just sat there and stared at me. She knew perfectly well whom she had seen, but she wasn’t going to tell me. Her hand tightened convulsively around the threatening note.
“Very well, Miss Tattersall,” I said, standing up. “But if you won’t talk to me, then you’d better go downstairs right now and talk to Detective Inspector Chase. You could be shielding the murderer.”
She drew back at that, her eyes blinking rapidly. “Don’t be foolish,” I said as gently as I could. “Are you certain you don’t want to confide in me?”
“No! I mean, yes!”
“So be it,” I said. Foolish, stubborn woman! She was well on her way to becoming corpse number two. “Think about what I said, about talking to the police. For your own safety, if nothing else.”
I got no further response from her, and so I went out the door, shutting it none too gently behind me.
Of all the aggravating, impossible, stubborn women! I shook my head over Norah Tattersall’s intransigent stupidity as I strode down the hall toward my room. Unless she told Robin what—or more important, whom—she had seen, and right away, she could be putting herself in danger. I wondered whom she was protecting.
One possible answer occurred to me as I thought quickly back over some of the events of the past two days. Might as well kill two birds, and all that
I paused near the end of the hallway and looked at the doors across the passageway from my own door, keeping in mind what Dingleby had told me. Then I stepped up to the door that I thought belonged to George Austen-Hare and knocked briskly.
“Who is it?” I heard him call.
“Kirby-Jones,” I responded.
I heard some shuffling about inside, and moments later the door opened. George stared at me, his face blank of expression.
“Could I speak with you for a moment, George?” I smiled disarmingly.
He shrugged and stood aside. Taking that as an invitation, I walked past him into the room. A quick glance around assured me that this chamber was just as appallingly decorated as my own, with an abundance of maroon velvet and gold trimmings.
George motioned toward a chair, one of a pair near one of the windows. I sat down, and he seated himself opposite me.
He still hadn’t spoken, and I took a quick moment to examine him. He didn’t seem at all frightened. Wary, if anything. I doubted he suspected me of being a murderer, but he didn’t quite trust me.
“I need your advice, George,” I said, attempting to look as if I might be at my wits’ end. I twisted my hands in dramatic fashion. “What am I going to do about Norah Tattersall?”
His eyes widened. “What d’ye mean, Simon? What’s Norah done now?”
I glanced away, as if I were embarrassed to look him straight in the eye. “It’s not so much what she’s done, George.” I pretended to take a deep breath, and I could feel his apprehension coming to the fore.
“What has she said?” George’s hands tightened on the arms of his chair.
“I thought I had better consult you, George,” I said, still not looking at him, “because, well, because you seem to have known her for quite some time. And also because Norah seems to be rather fond of you.” I did my best to load that one word with as much suggestive significance as I could.
I risked glancing at George’s face, and it was slowly suffusing with red. I was on to something here, as I had suspected I might be.
“I rather got the idea,” I continued, “that you and she had, um, well, that you had had a relation-ship that was, shall we say, a bit warm?”
“Blast the woman!” George said gruffly. “Can’t ever keep her business to herself, nor mine either!” That’s what a little fishing will get you, I thought in satisfaction. “Not everyone can be discreet, George,” I said sadly. “But I can assure you that I will be.”
He harrumphed at that “A feller makes mistakes sometimes, Simon, and demmed if they don’t come back to haunt him.”
“Like Norah?” I said in a jocular, man-of-the-world tone.
George nodded emphatically. “Man in my position gets approached all the time. Because of my books, you see. Women get the
idea that I’m like one of the heroes in my books. They just throw themselves at me sometimes.”
“And Norah did that, too?”
“Made no secret of it, first time I met her, a few years ago here at Kinsale House.” George snorted in derision. “Like a cat in season, she was. Took me a bit longer than it should have to see that she wanted me to help her with that blasted book of hers as much as anything.”
I shook my head in sympathy. “Amazing what some will try, just to get published, isn’t it?”
George shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Shouldn’t have gotten involved with her, no doubt about that. But she was so damned admiring, acted like I’d hung the moon and the stars, and all that rot!” The self-mockery in his voice was plain.
“It appears to me that she still has feelings for you, George.”
“She keeps pestering me,” George admitted, “even though I broke it off with her two years ago. And she keeps trotting out that manuscript, waving it at me.”
“I guess she hasn’t quite given up on you, George.” I winked at him, and he blushed. “Though I got the distinct impression you hadn’t let the grass grow under your feet, once she was out of the picture. If you know what I mean.” I grinned broadly.
The color drained from his face. “You shouldn’t listen to Norah, Simon. No telling what she’d say, if she’d a mind to.”
“Really, George?” I stared at him, my eyebrows quirked up. “Sounded rather plausible to me, I must say. Even though it might not look good for you.”
That was a stab in the dark, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
George stood up, radiating anger. “I didn’t kill that silly woman, no matter what Norah may have told you about my relationship with her!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
George might have taken it amiss if I patted myself on the back at this point, but I allowed myself a small smile of satisfaction. I had thought he might be the easiest to nudge, shall we say, into confiding in me, and it seemed as if I had read him correctly.
“No one’s accusing you of murdering her, George,” I said, and he began to relax. “Yet.”
His eyes widened as I added that last word. He began to babble so fast, I couldn’t make out what he was saying, and I held up a hand to shush him.
“I’m certain, George, that it can’t be as bad as all that. First, and simplest, just answer this: do you have an alibi for this afternoon, when someone killed her?”
Miserable, George shook his head “no.”
“I’ll bet you were here, in your room alone, weren’t you?” I asked. He nodded.
“Ah, that’s too bad, George,” I said with grave concern. “I’m just thrilled as I can be, let me tell you, that I was in plain sight of several people during the time when Ms. Harper managed to get herself killed.” I laughed in self-deprecation. “Otherwise, I know who’d be number one on the hit parade of suspects!”
George managed a weak smile at that sally before I continued. “But enough of my ill-placed humor, George. We should concentrate on exonerating you. ” He nodded, his head bobbing up and down like a Ping-Pong ball.
“Now, I didn’t get very many details from Norah,” I said. That much was certainly true, since Norah hadn’t given me any details of George’s affair with the late unlamented. “And you don’t have to share every little bit with me, George.” He smiled wanly at that. “But if we’re going to make sure you’re out of this, we have to sort out why you’d have wanted to murder her in the first place. Surely an affaire du coeur gone sour wouldn’t be enough reason?”
George pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket and began to mop his suddenly febrile brow with it. “Afraid it’s not that simple, Simon. Not that simple at all.”
“My dear George, whatever do you mean?” I leaned forward slightly in my chair, as if I were hanging on his every word. Which, naturally, I was, since I figured we were about to get to the really good dirt.
“Wasn’t an affair of the heart, so much as affair of the loins.” George uttered the words in tones of disgust, yet he couldn’t help the salaciously reminiscent smile hanging on his lips. “Woman was like a panther. Never satisfied, always wanting more.”
Then he looked embarrassed at having admitted that to me.
I laughed, deep from my chest. “But you were certainly man enough for her, I’m sure, George.” He preened a bit at that. He really fancied himself as a ladies’ man. And, for all I knew, he really was. He was famous, wealthy, and not totally devoid of attractions. Some women no doubt actually liked the garden-gnome type.
“How did you meet her, George?”
“Through Nina,” George said, his brow furrowing. “Had no idea at the time, naturally, that it was a put-up job between the two of them. Wanda was working for Nina, but I didn’t know that.”
I sat back in my chair, hands steepled, chin propped on forefingers. “Aha! I thought I saw the hand of Lady Machiavelli in all of this.”
George laughed, the first sound of pure amusement since I had come into his room. “Good name for the wench! Nina could have taught Signor Niccolo a thing or two.”
This wasn’t moving along quite as fast as I’d like, so I decided to nudge him into a higher gear. “So Wanda entrapped you in some kind of compromising situation, I take it?”
His face turned an alarming shade of red, and I was on the point of suggesting I ring for a shot of whiskey when his eyes stopped popping and his breathing slowed down to a near-normal rate again. “Told you she was never satisfied, right? Always wanted to be trying something new and different. ‘Adventurous,’ she called herself. Fool that I was, I went along with her.” He shuddered. “Though I suppose I ought to have known better.”
“And someone walked in on you?” I didn’t have to pretend to be mortified for his sake. He had clearly been led into a rather nasty trap.
“Not precisely,” George said, then took a deep breath before he could force himself to continue. “Someone taking a video of us without my knowledge.”
“Oh, dear,” I said. “And I suppose they—meaning Nina, chiefly, of course—threatened to embarrass you with it.”
George nodded miserably.
I could just imagine the headlines in the scandal sheets here, all about how the noted best-selling author of romantic fiction liked kinky sex. George would become a laughingstock. His sales would probably go through the roof, but he’d be too embarrassed to show his face in public again.
“Poor George,” I said in total and sincere sympathy. Until these past few days at Kinsale House, I had thought Nina possessed the usual share of ethics, but evidently I was wrong.
I was nevertheless puzzled about something. “Why, George? I mean, why would Nina go to these lengths to put a client in her control like this?”
“She’s power-mad,” George said. “The ultimate control freak. Wants you to do everything her way, and the better you sell, the more she wants out of you. Once she signs you, she doesn’t want to let you go.”
“She’s totally round the bend, isn’t she?” I said, my voice calm, but inside I was, I’ll admit, freaking out just a bit. I, of all people, couldn’t afford an agent like this. If she ever got an inkling of the truth about me, no telling what she’d try to do with the knowledge.
I might have to kill her myself.
No, I shouldn’t even joke about something like that. A vampire following the old ways might not hesitate to get rid of someone like Nina who posed such an obvious threat. But I had most definitely not chosen the old ways when I became a vampire. I was one of the new, kinder, gentler breed of vampires, happy with the little pills that made biting people on the neck and draining them of blood a relic of the past.
Enough of that; back to the matter at hand. I had manipulated George fairly easily into telling me what I wanted to know, at least as far as it concerned him and his potential motive for murder. But would he prove as easy to manipulate when it came to digging up dirt on his fellow suspects?
I flashed back on something Nina had done earlier, and that gave me an idea.
“Tell me, George, what was that earlier today, with Nina and Dexter Harbaugh and that bit about the spider?” I laughed. “I thought Dexter was going to jump out of his skin.”
George shifted uneasily in his chair, even while he attempted to hide a grin. “I really shouldn’t be telling you this, Simon. I really shouldn’t.” His mouth closed in a prim line, but he was simply waiting for me to encourage him.
“Come, now, George, you can’t stop now! There’s obviously a good story to be told.”
“Dexter would be simply livid if he knew I’d told you, so you must promise not to breathe a word of it. Not a word! ”
“Of course, George, I wouldn’t dream of it,” I assured him. “Except, naturally, if it turns out that Dexter is the murderer.”
“Fair enough, Simon, fair enough!” His mouth split in a huge grin. “Man’s terrified of spiders. Can you believe it?”
I had to laugh. “I figured as much. Nina wouldn’t have said what she did if she hadn’t known he’d react in that way.”
George nodded emphatically. “Yes! Not only spiders, Simon! Not just spiders. Dexter is afraid of the dark. Has to have a light on at night, or he can’t sleep.”
“Really?” I said. “How on earth did you find out that little bit of information?”
George flushed at the implication he thought he read in my words. “Had to share quarters at a conference with him once, years ago, before either of us became very well known. Insisted a light be left on all night. Got him to admit to me he was afraid of the dark.”
I threw back my head and laughed. “I can see the headlines now. ‘Tough-guy writer needs night light.’ The press would have a field day with that one, not to mention the bit about the spiders. No wonder he makes his heroes so tough.”
George nodded. “Exactly. Who’d buy the books if they thought the author was a nancy-boy?”
I shot him a look at that one, and to his credit, he flushed and muttered, “Sorry. Didn’t mean it like it sounded.”
I decided to overlook it and move on.