Murder Most Sweet

by Laura Jensen Walker

  Char’s eyes slid to the gray wig on the armrest console between us.

  “Oh.” I clapped the hot hairpiece back on my head, pulling down my visor mirror to make sure I looked more like Sophia in The Golden Girls than crazy Doc from Back to the Future.

  After the server left with our order for cheeseburgers, fries, and Cokes, we both began searching for the originator of the Silk Strangler. As I checked my phone, Char swiped through her iPad and began tapping away.

  “Gotcha!” Char crowed moments later. Turning her screen my way, she displayed the amateurish done-on-the-cheap website of a male writer.

  “Don Juan?” I said wryly. “Sounds like someone’s overcompensating.”

  “Keep reading.”

  I scanned the basic black-and-white site, which featured the author’s name at the top in bold Olde English seventy-two-point font. The text used the same Olde English font, but scaled down to twenty-four-point and dripping blood. I read aloud, “‘Don Juan is the popular author of several erotic horror novels, including The Seventh Street Slasher, The Poisoner and the Postman, and’”—my eyes flew up to meet Char’s—“‘The Silk Stocking Strangler.’ You got him! Well done, you.”

  “Check out the author photo.”

  The bad postage-stamp picture tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner of the webpage showed a washed-out man with thick jet-black hair—obviously a rug—of indeterminate age squinting at the camera. “So?” I said.

  “Enlarge it.”

  I spread my index and middle finger across the screen. Not so indeterminate. The man’s deeply lined face and creased forehead came into focus. He had to be in his mid to late sixties, easily. “Wow. Is that who I think it is?”

  “Yep,” Char said. “Ronald Simms, the one and only.”

  “Well, this is going to be quite an interesting afternoon.”

  As we ate our lunch and continued to check out Don Juan Ronald, we discovered that DonJuan39 (as if) frequented dating sites and mystery writers’ chat rooms. In one of those rooms, responding to a woman who’d said she thought Tavish Bentley’s Her Blood Weeps was his best book yet, he posed the question: “Would you still be a fan if the author you so admire turned out to be the silk strangler? Seems rather coincidental that two women within the orbit of a certain New York Times bestselling author died within the same week, in the same town—both strangled.”

  The Tavish fan angrily replied, “Those women were both strangled with scarves belonging to the scarf-wearing mystery author who lives in that SAME town. Talk about coincidental.” That sparked a firestorm, which soon blazed in earnest with mystery fans lining up, taking sides, and taking the fight to Twitter.

  “Well, at least we know where it all began,” Char said.

  “And where it’s going to end.” I drained my Coke and stood up. “Let’s do this.”

  “But I haven’t finished my pie,” she whined.

  “I thought you said you didn’t like it.”

  “No.” Char crammed the remainder of the pie in her mouth. “I said it couldn’t hold a candle to your chocolate-cream, but that doesn’t mean I should let it go to waste.”

  I shook my head. My best friend has never met a dessert she doesn’t like. The annoying thing is, as she always reminds Sharon and me, she has a great metabolism and never gains a pound. Her daily jogging helps.

  Back inside the car, I adjusted my knitted knockers and tugged my bra back down into proper position. Since I no longer have real boobs to hold the silky undergarment in place gravity-wise, my bra has a tendency to wander. Sometimes that baby rolls up like a window shade all the way to my shoulders. “Down, girls,” I told my yarn boobs. “I can’t afford to have you give my identity away.” After making sure everything was back in its proper place, I patted the gray wig on my head. “How do I look?” I asked Char.

  “Boring. Unmemorable. Invisible.”

  “Good. The last thing we need is for our self-published Don Juan author to recognize me like Darlene did.”

  Char gave a mock sigh. “It must be a curse being a celebrity.”

  “It is. I can hardly walk down the street without someone wanting my autograph.” I waved my hand in a sweeping dismissive gesture. “And the paparazzi? Don’t even get me started.”

  Actually, I cannot imagine anything worse than being rich and famous and leading a clubbing, jet-setting party life where strangers follow you around and you lose your privacy and any kind of normal existence. I’m a homebody. The only club I want to be part of is a book club. My idea of a party is having friends over for a home-cooked meal and playing Pictionary. Since leaving behind my cubicle-drone existence to follow my bliss, I am now quite happy living a quiet life in Lake Potawatomi writing my lighthearted mysteries, baking, gardening, and spending time with those I love, especially my sweet Gracie-girl. Lake Potawatomi has everything I need. Except kringle, and that’s just a few miles up the road.

  “What about me?” Char asked, breaking into my hometown reverie.

  “What about you what?”

  “How do I look?”

  I surveyed my best friend, taking in her long red hair freed from its usual workday ponytail, creamy skin sprinkled with freckles, ivory slacks, and emerald shirt that brought out the green of her eyes. “You look great. Ronald will be so busy trying to impress you that he won’t even realize he’s tipped his hand until we’re safely back home.”

  Driving the last few miles to Gary, we went over our plan a final time to make sure we were both on the same page. Ten minutes later we pulled into a tired strip mall off the main drag that included a shuttered used bookstore, dry cleaner’s, Chinese restaurant, and Ronald Simms’s small real estate office.

  “You ready?” I asked Char.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be. Let’s nail this bastard.”

  I grabbed my tote-bag prop and adopted my slouching posture as Char pushed open the glass door that read “Simms Realty—Where We Help You Find There’s No Place Like Home!”

  “Why hello there, ladies!” The man from the postage-stamp picture jumped up from his seat behind a large oak-laminate desk, sucked in his paunch, and hurried to greet us. “Come right in. Welcome to Gary.” His brown suit pants were shiny with age and his short-sleeved once-white button-down shirt had seen better days. Sticking out his hand to Char, he blinked and gave her a smarmy smile. “Ron Simms at your service.”

  While the real-estate agent focused on Char, I subtly checked him out. The onyx toupee had replaced his sandy comb-over from the newspaper photo, and judging from his constant blinking, he now wore contacts in place of his thick nerdy glasses.

  “Carol Johnson,” said Char, shaking his hand. The man barely came up to her eyebrows. “And this is my mother, Betty.”

  Ron’s hand lingered a moment too long in Char’s-slash-Carol’s, his blinking eyes never leaving her face, so I broke the spell. “Pleased to meet you,” I said, thrusting out my hand. Even slouching, I towered over him.

  Reluctantly Ron Simms relinquished my best friend’s hand and shook mine, hardly giving me a glance. Up close, his lined face revealed him to be more likely in his seventies than his sixties, which made his ill-fitting charcoal-briquettes-colored hairpiece even more ridiculous. Patting my gray hair, I suppressed a giggle as the thought flashed through my mind, Guess this is what you might call a meeting of the wigs.

  Char shot me a warning look behind Ron’s back as he ushered us over to two chairs in front of his desk. He offered coffee, but when I saw the omnipresent Mr. Coffee and the red plastic supermarket container, I declined.

  The Realtor resumed his seat behind his desk. His chair must have been on stilts, because he suddenly appeared much taller. “I understand you ladies live in Chicago at present and are considering a move here to Gary,” he said in a jolly salesman–type voice.

  “Yes,” Char said. “I work from home as a medical transcriptionist, and Mom, of course, is retired. We’re both fed up with all the noise and craziness of the big city�
�not to mention the crime—and want a more small-town feel, yet still with the advantages of living in a city.” She leaned toward Ron and continued in an animated tone, “I’ve read articles over the years about how Gary had a declining population with a lot of abandoned buildings and houses, but that the city’s been turning around lately and you can find older houses quite reasonably priced.”

  “That’s true, that’s true,” Ron said. “Our city on the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan has been undergoing a revitalization in the past couple years. There are plenty of lovely vintage properties available. Is it just the two of you?” he asked flirtatiously, staring hard at my pretend daughter. “Or is there a Mr. Johnson?”

  “There was, but he’s dead,” I said bluntly.

  Ron’s pasty face blotched red. “I’m sorry. I beg your pardon.”

  Char kicked my foot beneath the desk.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “My husband died years ago, and Carol here is divorced, so since both of us are now footloose and fancy-free—as fancy-free as this stupid arthritis allows me to be”—I grimaced and rubbed my knee—“we decided to pool our resources and get a nice place together.”

  He beamed. “Well, that sounds great. I have several houses available to show you. Tell me again exactly what you’re looking for, and I can narrow it down to meet your needs.”

  “At least a three-bedroom, two-bath, since I need a home office,” Carol/Char said. “Depending on the price, though, four bedrooms might be nice, wouldn’t you agree, Mother?”

  “Sure. That way I could have my own wing—bedroom, bath, and maybe a sitting room to entertain guests. When it gets right down to it, though, all I really care about is having my own bedroom and my own toilet.” I chuckled. “I get up several times a night to go the bathroom.” I winked at Ronald. “You know how it is when you get to be our age.”

  His already thin lips thinned even more.

  Oops. Better shut up and let Char do the talking. I waved my hand. “But I’m not fussy. I’ll let you two pick which houses we visit today.” I reached in my tote bag. “While you’re doing that, I’ll just sit here and read my book.” Curious to see if Ronald Simms’s reaction would mimic Jewel’s, I pulled out Her Blood Weeps as Ron took a drink of coffee.

  He made a garbled sound halfway between a choke and a splutter.

  “Are you okay?” Char asked solicitously, leaning toward him.

  “Fine,” he said in a strangled voice. His eyes blinked rapidly and his fingers tightened on his coffee cup, the knuckles white. “Just went down the wrong way.” His face splotched an angry red, and his scraggly sandy eyebrows drew together in a thunderous scowl beneath his coal-black rug. Ron coughed and slammed his cup on the desk.

  Forgetting my arthritis act, I jumped up and set Tavish’s book facedown on the laminate desk. “Here, let me get you some water.” As I filled a mug with water from the water cooler just out of his line of vision, I observed Ronald Simms unobtrusively. No longer coughing, he regarded the book on his desk with a venomous glare. His eyes darkened and his chest heaved. All at once, he reached out and gave the hardback book a vicious shove. It slid off the desk and fell to the ground with a heavy thud. The Realtor then shot out of his chair, rounded his desk, and delivered a swift kick to Tavish’s latest book. Then, to my astonishment, he proceeded to jump up and down on the best-selling novel, letting loose a stream of expletives in the process.

  “Hey,” Char-slash-Carol said, leaping up from her seat, “what are you doing? Stop that! Are you crazy? That’s my mother’s book.”

  I stared at the grown man turned toddler—and possible murderer—throwing a tantrum. Cautiously I approached with the glass of water. Ronald Simms looked up at me midfit, his eyes wide and wild, his breathing ragged. “I hate that sonofabitch,” he ranted. “He has everything. Everything. That should be me!” Spittle formed on the sides of his mouth, and his chest heaved with rage.

  “Calm down,” Char said. “You need to chill out before you have a heart attack or something.”

  He stared at her through blinking, unseeing eyes. “What?”

  “Deep breaths,” I said, adopting a mother-knows-best role. “You need to take a deep breath and then exhale.”

  He gulped a mouthful of air.

  “That’s it. Now exhale.”

  Ron blew out his breath. A fetid mix of coffee and cigarettes hit me full throttle.

  Stifling the urge to step back, I said calmly, “And again.”

  He inhaled another lungful of air and released it. More coffee-and-cigarette breath slapped me in the face, but his breathing returned to normal and his eyes lost their glassy appearance. He puffed out a sigh and stepped off the mangled book on the ground. “I’m sorry,” he said, running a shaking hand through his toupee, unwittingly causing it to list to one side. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  I extended the glass of water to him. “Drink this.”

  He glugged the water down, tantrum spent, and returned to his seat.

  Char sat back down in her chair and looked across the desk at the deflated real-estate agent. “You want to tell us what that was all about?”

  Ron sighed and recounted the plagiarism tale we had read in the paper, only with embellishment. “I wrote my story first,” he said. “It took me eight years to write.” Pulling a book off the credenza behind him, he held it up with pride. Petals Dripping With Blood, the lurid title screamed above a cluster of yellow roses garishly dripping bright-red blood over the body of a voluptuous woman in white. He proffered the book to Char, who accepted it gingerly. “I poured blood, sweat, and tears into this baby,” Ron said, “and then along comes Mr. Good-Looking Young Author with a British accent, and his book, using my idea, becomes a best seller. It’s not fair!” he whined, starting to get worked up again. “Money and looks always win out over the little guy like me.”

  To avert another tantrum and God only knew what else, since this might be Annabelle’s murderer, I nodded to the credenza behind him. “Are those more of your books? It looks like you’ve written several.”

  He nodded proudly. “Four published so far, and another one almost ready to go to the printer.” He lined up the remaining books in a row on his desk next to Petals Dripping With Blood: The Seventh Street Slasher, The Poisoner and the Postman, The Silk Stocking Strangler.

  “Wow,” Char said. “That’s impressive.” She lifted her thick red hair off her neck and twisted it to one side, where it draped across the front of her green top in striking contrast. “Do you come up with all the titles yourself, or does your publisher?”

  “I do,” Ron said, puffing out his chest as he blinked at my best friend’s voluminous tresses.

  “Very creative.” I picked up The Seventh Street Slasher and repressed a shudder at the cover, which showed yet another voluptuous woman in white dead on the ground, only this time with a massive man holding a knife over her dripping blood. “Great alliteration.”

  “Thank you.” Ron leaned forward. “I’ll tell you a little secret.” He smirked. “I’m not only the author, I’m the editor and publisher as well.”

  “Really?” I said, interjecting the requisite amount of admiration. “That’s amazing. You’re a one-stop shop. Sounds like a lot of work, though. How do you manage to do all that and sell houses too?”

  “When you love what you do, it’s not work.”

  Preach.

  Char casually picked up The Silk Stocking Strangler from his desk. “This sounds really familiar.” Her eyebrows met in a puzzled frown. “I’ve seen this title somewhere before, and recently, I think … but I don’t remember where. Online, maybe?”

  “Could be.” Ron got a cagey look in his ever-moving eyes. “I sell all my books online. That’s probably where you saw it.”

  Char/Carol tipped her head to the side, considering. “I don’t think so … it wasn’t on Amazon or anything … Wait! I know. I think it was a tweet somewhere.”

  “That’s possible,” he said, affe
cting a nonchalant tone. “People are always tweeting about books they like and recommending them to folks.”

  My pretend daughter shook her head. “I don’t think that was it.” She pulled out her smartphone. “Let me see if I can find it.”

  “I think we should get going and start looking at those houses you want to see,” Ron said, slipping back into professional Realtor mode. He stood up and waved the sales flyers he had printed for us. “There’s a few that are exactly what you’re looking for, including a couple of four-bedrooms that are a steal.” He blinked and released a knowing chuckle. “I think it might become a battle between mom and daughter over the one you pick.” Then he caught a glimpse of his crooked hairpiece in the wall mirror opposite his desk. His face flushed, but I acted as if I hadn’t noticed anything, busying myself by bending over and pretending to tie my shoe while surreptitiously watching Ron through my lowered lashes. He quickly raised his hand and tugged his rug back into place. “Shall we go, ladies?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Hang on,” Char said, her head still bent over her phone. “This will just take a minute.”

  “You might as well sit back down, Ron,” I said with a little laugh. “When Carol gets something stuck in her head, there’s no stopping her. It won’t take too long, though—she’s a whiz at finding things on that phone of hers.” I picked up the battered Her Blood Weeps and stuck it in my tote.

  Ron’s face flushed red. “I apologize for destroying your book, Betty; my behavior was inexcusable. I must have lost my mind there for a moment.”

  Is that what happened with Annabelle too? Or was that more deliberate?

  He pulled a twenty from his wallet and held it out to me. “This should cover it.”

  Really? When was the last time you were in a bookstore? I kept that thought to myself, though. Thanking him, I pocketed the twenty.

  Ron hurried over to his credenza and picked up a copy of Petals Dripping With Blood. Grabbing a pen, he scribbled something on the inside cover. Returning to me, his blinking eyes shining, he held out the book and said, “To fully make amends, here’s an autographed copy of my first novel. A first edition, no less.” He beamed.