Manuscript for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

“It’s probably nothing.”

  “Not if you bothered to mention it.”

  “The flash drive contained a book. But Rudd was hoping for something else when he swiped it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Information he needed to prove his royalties were being skimmed.”

  “I never even heard of the guy.”

  “A sad and unfortunate condition of time and readers having passed the man by.”

  Artie weighed the substance of that. “And he still believed somebody at the publisher was stealing his money, when there probably wasn’t any money to steal? That doesn’t sound like a rational man.”

  “How about a drunken one, Artie? It was probably the booze doing his thinking for him.”

  Artie didn’t look convinced of that. “Stop there. You’ve already given me a possible motive for Thomas Rudd’s murder.”

  I went back to the obvious connection he had made. “Lane Barfield wouldn’t know how to turn on the gas, never mind ignite it. And there was no reason for him to kill Rudd a second time.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “That his career had already preceded him to the grave.”

  Chapter Four

  I took the opportunity to divert my mind a bit, maybe head over to my apartment to drop off the manuscript Lane Barfield had asked me to read. Everybody had been looking for the next Da Vinci Code for years, just like they’d been looking for the next Valley of the Dolls back in the sixties. Publishers are always chasing the next trend. The only big bestseller not subject to a huge bidding war was the Bible.

  Being in dire financial straits would have sent Thomas Rudd scouring for money wherever he could find it. Living in a rent-controlled apartment still meant he had to pay the rent. With his diminished royalties and lack of advances for new books, and with no family to speak of that held him in any regard at all, Rudd may have turned to shady sources for cash. So I called Lieutenant Artie Gelber and asked him to do a deeper dive into Thomas Rudd’s situation to see if there was a way to determine whether he’d been surviving from money off the street. CIs, confidential informants, loved working for Artie because he always treated them with respect and was true to his word when he promised them something.

  “This could take some time,” he warned me.

  “I’ll give you the rest of the afternoon.”

  “So now you’re my boss?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “What’s so funny, Jessica?” Artie asked me.

  “That’s the same thing Mort Metzger always says to me.”

  “I was thinking of applying for the sheriff’s job in Cabot Cove, when Mort retires. It would be nice not to deal with exploding apartment buildings and murdered authors.”

  “Well, Artie,” I told him, “that depends on the day.”

  I’d called Artie from a coffee shop that was going to be open for only a few more minutes, now that the lunchtime rush had died down. I ordered a tea and a blueberry muffin, which I picked at after lifting the manuscript of The Affair from the tote bag Lane Barfield had given me and placing it atop the table. It was heavy enough to rattle the dish, and I decided against removing the rubber bands to better scan the opening pages. It was rare indeed for a publisher like Lane Barfield to land such a book, and I was happy for him, even as I wondered why the author named Benjamin Tally had gone in that direction. Normally, books like this are sold at auction to the highest bidder, who invariably has the kind of deep pockets needed to front an advance stretching into seven figures.

  Lane had never been that kind of publisher; he was cut more from the same cloth as the legendary Bennett Cerf or even Max Perkins, since he had started as an editor and remained one of the best in the business. He was always about the books and the authors, which explained why he had spoken with such pride that morning about coming upon Thomas Rudd’s work in the proverbial slush pile. It also explained how much the similarly proverbial end of Rudd’s career must have affected him. He had discovered Rudd and built him into a well-respected, solid-selling name, and truth be told, I think Lane had enjoyed his books far more than he did mine.

  Still loath to risk pulling off the rubber bands holding the more than eight hundred manuscript pages together, I peeled back the title page of The Affair to see what came next. No dedication or acknowledgments yet—no epigraph, either—Benjamin Tally jumping right into the prologue:

  I’m going to die tonight, maybe in five minutes, maybe in five hours. Inevitable. All of it my fault for not doing what I should have when the chance was there.

  It’s gone now.

  It’s all gone now.

  I looked in the mirror at the bruises on my face, saw them clearly even though the light was off. Had I locked the door?

  What’s the difference?

  It didn’t matter.

  That opening made me wonder if The Affair might not be my cup of tea. It seemed a bit too hard-boiled to suit my tastes, but the noir-like style was definitely alluring to the point where I could see myself crafting a decent blurb—the writer’s catchphrase for an endorsement or paragraph-long love letter—for Lane Barfield. I’d always been hesitant to ask for blurbs myself, while never failing to answer a request made of me for one. The challenge came when I really didn’t like a certain book but felt obligated to find something good to say about it anyway. After all, I’d been in that position once and knew how much up-and-coming writers valued such things. If they respected me enough to ask for a blurb, how could I disappoint them, other than to beg off on the feigned excuse that I was too busy?

  I resolved to read more when I got back to my apartment across town, enough at least to give Lane Barfield some semblance of the thoughts he’d asked for. I could tell he could use some affirmation, given all he had clearly staked on this manuscript by an utterly unknown author. After all Lane had done for me over the years, I resolved to give him something he could hang his hat on, even if I had to utilize some creative wordplay to manage that task.

  After all he had done for me . . .

  Had Thomas Rudd been right, though? Was Barfield really stealing from him, me, maybe all of the authors housed under his imprint?

  I could have just shrugged Rudd’s comments off, but they amounted to a mystery and I could never resist trying to solve any mystery.

  I was so lost in that thought I almost didn’t hear my phone ringing, alerted to it by the fact that my pocketbook was vibrating. I managed to answer it just before the call went to voice mail.

  “Can you stop by my office, Jessica?” Herb Mason asked me.

  “When?”

  “How about now, as in right away?”

  * * *

  • • •

  “I can’t be sure about this,” Herb said after closing behind him the door to the windowless office and taking a seat at his desk.

  I took the same chair I had earlier in the day, realizing the only thing that passed for life in the office was a pair of plants that must be artificial, given the lack of light. Herb’s face was grave, more, it seemed, from fatigue than from worry. At seventy-five, he looked like the project I had dumped in his lap had exhausted him.

  He forced a smile before resuming. “Guess it will be up to Miss Marple to determine that,” he said, using his pet name for me.

  “She’s a lot older than me,” I told him, referring to Agatha Christie’s female version of Hercule Poirot. “And I’m a widow, while she never married. But pretend I’m her and tell me what you found.”

  He pushed his chair closer to his desk, so his legs disappeared beneath the steel. “As I was saying, I may have found some, well, oddities, inconsistencies, in your royalty statements for the past three years.”

  “Thomas Rudd was right?” I said, having clung to the hope that my trusty accountant would’ve found nothing amiss at all.

  “Bear with
me on this. How familiar are you with digital subscription programs?”

  “Not very, to tell you the truth.”

  “They basically entitle anyone who pays around ten bucks per month to download as many books onto their Kindle or comparable device as they wish,” Herb explained, “even if they never get around to reading them.”

  “Well, I get paid when they buy the book, not when they read it,” I quipped.

  “That’s where things begin to get complicated here, because in the case of these programs, that’s not entirely true.”

  “It isn’t?”

  Herb shook his head. “Theoretically, you get paid by the page.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Someone downloads a J. B. Fletcher title for free. If he or she never looks at it again, you get nothing. If they read the whole thing, you get close to your regular split. And for anything in the middle, you get paid on a prorated basis.”

  “For example . . . ,” I prodded.

  “If they read a page, maybe you get a penny. If they read a fifth of the book, maybe you get a quarter. The digital sites have never been entirely specific about their calculations, and not all traditional publishers make their titles available; in fact, Lane Barfield’s is the only imprint in the building that’s part of the program.”

  I nodded. “Part of the deal he struck with the parent company that allowed him to maintain control. You find that strange, Herb?”

  “I find it convenient. How long did Thomas Rudd claim this alleged theft of his royalties had been going on?”

  “He didn’t, not specifically anyway.”

  Herb Mason’s expression was matter-of-fact, the fatigue vanishing from his features as he plunged deeper into the world of numbers, where he was most comfortable. “Then say three years, back to the start of the program. I obviously don’t have access to Rudd’s statements, and you’re the only author I still handle. But the firm I’m housed in here handles several, and they allowed me a peek at their statements for comparison purposes only.”

  “Okay.”

  Herb’s eyes found mine. “I discovered some discrepancies between your statements and those of these other authors.”

  “Like what?”

  “The numbers, the percentages, don’t match. These digital sales sites don’t furnish specific figures, so the evidence is strictly anecdotal, but if I had to guess, I’d say your statements are coming up short in the area of fifteen hundred dollars per statement.”

  I did the math in my head, easy enough even for someone who’d yet to master balancing her checkbook. “Two statements per year for three years would mean nine thousand dollars.”

  “You must’ve been an accountant in a past life.”

  “Enough to know there’s a lot I could’ve done with that amount of money.”

  “How many authors does Lane Barfield publish? How many books make up his imprint’s backlist?” Herb asked, that “backlist” referring to authors’ older titles, often readily available only in digital format these days.

  I couldn’t even begin to estimate the number. He’d been a publisher for thirty years, and I’d been with him for almost that long. His offer hadn’t been the biggest I’d received, but his conviction and passion more than made up for that, and he presented convincing arguments that he could build my career in a way no other publisher could. So I signed with Lane and never regretted it for a minute. He was always way ahead of the curve, including with contracts, since from the beginning his were structured to give him control of a host of rights that included digital. That meant that unlike others in the industry, his authors couldn’t poach their backlists from him and place the digital editions elsewhere. I expected very few, if any, of Lane’s authors were bothered by that, given Lane’s unfaltering dedication to their work, as his loyalty to them was returned in kind. I don’t think I’d ever heard a negative word spoken about him.

  Until now.

  “I must not have been an accountant in a past life, Herb,” I corrected, “because the math of that is impossible for me to calculate.”

  “Not just you. I took a gander on Amazon, for one, trying to get a count of how many of Barfield’s backlist titles are included in Kindle Unlimited. I stopped at a thousand.”

  “Wow.”

  “I said stopped at a thousand,” Herb reiterated. “And there’s something else to consider that stuck out, Jessica. A great number of those books were written by authors who are now deceased, and it appears Lane Barfield had acquired a number of their older titles, in addition to publishing their more recent ones. I don’t have to tell you what that means.”

  “Those authors’ royalties become part of their estate, and what heirs, unfamiliar with publishing, would bother to notice a discrepancy?”

  “Exactly.” He nodded.

  “Now for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

  “One of my favorite television shows of all time,” he reflected, “even though I don’t think I ever got the question right.”

  “You’re dating yourself,” I told him.

  “I’m almost eighty, Jessica. Who else am I supposed to date?”

  “So, my question,” I said, after chuckling, “is how much in authors’ royalties might Lane Barfield have stolen?”

  “Ballpark figure?”

  “Ballpark figure.”

  “Between six and seven million dollars,” Herb said.

  * * *

  • • •

  I couldn’t shake that figure from my mind. The more I thought about it, the more the pieces fell together, as much as I hated the assembled puzzle.

  Thomas Rudd’s drunken, fanciful claims.

  Now supported in theory by both the anomalies in my royalty statements compared to other authors’ and the anomaly of a traditional publisher offering his backlist titles on an unlimited platform.

  Explaining why Lane had insisted on control.

  So he would be free to use fuzzy math to skim off the top of the royalties of his authors’ backlists, books long published and often nearly as long forgotten.

  To the tune of millions of dollars.

  As I rode in the back of a cab to my apartment, the tote bag containing The Affair occupying the seat next to me, my thoughts veered to an oft-reported story that never failed to baffle me. How some simple bookkeeper, bank clerk, teller, or other employee had managed to steal an absurdly large amount of money, stretching into six or even low seven figures, over an equally absurd duration of time. Why hadn’t they just quit while they were ahead?

  I know in their minds that’s what they’d intended. It would be just a onetime thing, they’d tell themselves. It was so easy to get away with, though, it became a second-time thing, and then a third. Before they knew it, they’d lost count of how many times they’d done something they’d honestly intended to do only once. Like an addiction, a fix, part of their normal routine. If they hadn’t been caught the first time or the next ninety-eight, why would they be caught on the hundredth?

  Except they always did get caught at some point.

  Maybe Lane Barfield had started out stealing only from the titles of his deceased authors. Then maybe he’d expanded the practice to include authors who’d left him for other houses. And, finally, he’d added the likes of Thomas Rudd and me. None of Rudd’s more recent titles had sold much at all, but his older ones still had value and earned enough on a regular basis for him to at least afford his rent most months and put food on the table and whiskey in the liquor cabinet.

  More if Lane Barfield hadn’t been stealing from him.

  “Here we are, ma’am.”

  The cabdriver’s voice shook me from my trance, and I realized he’d pulled up in front of my apartment building on the East Side. I added a generous tip to the amount on the meter and climbed out, struggling to tug the tote bag containing The Affa
ir with me.

  “You need some help?” he offered.

  Boy, do I ever, I almost quipped but just thanked him instead, my thoughts veering to a more serious matter indeed.

  I had to confront a true friend with the knowledge that he was very likely stealing from me.

  Chapter Five

  I’d hoped to dig further into the manuscript that night but couldn’t get past the first page, couldn’t watch television, and finally couldn’t sleep. Herb Mason’s findings, though totally unproven, had rattled me. We want to believe that if you go about your life treating people right and doing the right thing, you’ll be treated in kind. The mere possibility that a trusted friend for so many years might well have stolen from me was utterly unthinkable.

  Writers live in a bubble of their own making, a fantastical existence where we spend an inordinate amount of time in worlds of our own creation where reality enters in only when we allow it to. The fact that we might be treated unfairly, that the world we trusted with childlike innocence would cheat us, was as difficult to fathom as the thought of writers ourselves being capable of the evil perpetuated by the villains we create.

  I remember hearing an interview with a horror author during which he was asked, “Why do you write about things that go bump in the night?”

  “Because things really do go bump in the night,” was the author’s reply.

  As a mystery author, I had pondered virtually every crime imaginable for potential plot points in this book or that. And yet I found being a victim of a crime myself, fraud in this case, to be more unsettling than the plots of any of my own books.

  Go figure.

  Part of me wanted to head back home to Cabot Cove tomorrow and sort this out in more familiar surroundings before confronting Lane Barfield. I thought about retaining the services of private detective Harry McGraw to do some more digging and find me the firm proof Herb Mason had stopped short of discovering. I wanted to sit with Seth Hazlitt and, especially, Mort Metzger at Mara’s Luncheonette in the center of town to get their thoughts on what I should do. Then again, given his new John Wayne persona, Mort might head to Manhattan to exact justice himself.