Али Брэндон - Double Booked For Death

“Pretty cool,” Jake muttered, while Darla nodded her agreement.

Reese grinned a little, like a kid figuring out a new trick. “It’s like when you have a lamp on in your house, and you look out the window at night. You can see everything behind you—and even yourself—reflected in the glass, so it kind of looks like you and your room are outside on the street.”

“Exactly,” Morris said with an approving smile. “The lighting is crucial, as is the black backdrop on this side. It’s a simple enough effect, but very powerful if the audience is in the mood to believe.”

And it seemed that all of them had been in that mood, Darla told herself, remembering the chill she’d felt at her first sight of the ghost. Probably, Morris had tinkered with the air-conditioning down there, too, and had lit the cigarette to further trigger the connection to Valerie.

Reese remained behind at the theater awhile longer, while Darla and Jake made their good-byes and returned to the brownstone. It was after midnight by the time the taxi they’d commandeered at Darla’s insistence left them off on the curb. As she stepped out onto the sidewalk, Darla noticed in surprise that the Valerie shrine with its guttered candles and dead flowers had been cleared away sometime during their absence, leaving the sidewalk bare once more.

Jake followed her gaze and nodded.

“Our sanitation department at work,” she observed. Then, noting Darla’s troubled expression, she added, “Don’t feel bad, kid. That mound of flowers couldn’t have stayed here forever, you know.”

“I know. It just seems a shame that all those poems and letters and tributes that Valerie’s fans left for her ended up in the back of a trash truck.”

“Actually, I think Mary Ann gathered all those things up this morning. She thought the family might want them, so she was going to package up everything and give it to you to forward.”

“I’m sure Morris and his parents will appreciate that,” Darla agreed, relieved and yet feeling a bit guilty that she hadn’t thought of doing the same thing.

They parted after agreeing to meet back at Darla’s apartment when Reese finished at the theater and stopped by to update them on the situation. Yawning, Darla went upstairs to change out of her theater clothing. Hamlet was waiting for her, his expression disapproving.

“Sorry, boy, we were chasing down ghosts and murderers,” she explained, earning a spit and a hiss from Mr. Anxious Parent Cat for her trouble.

Once snuggly attired in sweats, she flipped on her computer and did her official scan of the store. Everything appeared in order, so she left the screen up and turned on her favorite all-news television station. Within a few minutes of watching, she discovered that word of Hillary’s arrest had already hit the media.

“And in breaking news,” the jowly broadcaster proclaimed, “a twenty-nine-year-old New York City woman has been arrested in what is now considered to be the murder of bestselling author Valerie Baylor last week.”

Snippets of video from the autographing rolled as he described what little the police had released to this point. Darla was glad for Morris’s sake that, at least for the moment, no reference was made to Mavis or ghosts. And a fleeting shot of Hillary doing the perp walk made Darla smile in grim satisfaction.

A knock sounded at her door a few minutes later. It was Jake and Reese, the former having exchanged her chic leopard-print dress for a pair of sweats and a T-shirt like Darla’s, and the latter wearing his usual leather motorcycle jacket and bearing a chilled bottle of sparkling wine.

“Hey, I had it in the fridge and thought we should celebrate,” he said, popping the cork before Darla even had a chance to chase down the proper glasses. Then, with a mock disappointed look, he added, “Of course, I’d been planning on drinking with a couple of hot broads, and not two kids ready for a pajama party.”

Jake gave him a friendly punch in the shoulder, though a smiling Darla wasn’t sure if it was for the “hot broad” comment or the pajama party reference. Once she returned with glassware and the surprisingly good champagne had been poured, Darla offered up a little toast toward the ceiling.

“To Valerie.”

“To Valerie,” her friends echoed and raised their glasses, as well.

“I guess she wasn’t quite the witch she pretended to be,” Darla observed after they’d settled on the horsehair sofa, displacing a miffed Hamlet in the process. “But the way she treated Mavis at the autographing . . .”

“Pretty much an act,” Reese said. “Morris and I had another informal chat after you two left. Apparently, the whole Valerie-as-diva thing was a put-on. They figured it was best to have the public Valerie Baylor be something of a bitch. That way, if a fan or an interviewer asked her a question about the books that she couldn’t answer, she could blow them off, and people would figure that’s just how she was. It also helped protect Mavis. They were afraid if the two of them got too chatty together, it would call attention to her, er, him. And that was what Morris was trying to avoid from the start. Social anxiety disorder is what he said it’s called.”

“Jeez, you’d think the guy was rich enough to afford counseling, or at least a bottle of antidepressants,” Jake broke in.

Darla gave her friend a disapproving glance. “It’s not always that easy. I once worked with a woman who refused to go out to lunch with the rest of the department. We all thought she was a snob. Then one day she told me she just was afraid to eat in front of anyone, couldn’t swallow a bite if anyone was looking at her. I’m sure Morris does the best he can.”

Jake appeared unconvinced, but she dropped the subject of the author’s brother for the equally confusing motivation surrounding Hillary.

“Her, I don’t get, either,” she said of the agent. “Wasn’t killing off Valerie basically killing off her golden goose?”

“Not necessarily,” Darla answered. “If Valerie’s death really had been an accident—or if Morris had thought it was—Hillary could have cut a deal with Morris directly. They could have said that Valerie had a couple of finished manuscripts sitting around and then put them out posthumously under her name. And once everyone got used to her being dead, Morris could have officially been authorized by the estate to keep writing under her name. It’s been done with a lot of authors before.”

Then another thought occurred to her, and she sat up straight in her seat.

“Lizzie’s manuscript!” she exclaimed, drawing looks of surprise from the other two. “Jake, remember in the basement how Hillary claimed that Valerie had stolen other authors’ books, and that she couldn’t even write a shopping list? It sounded like maybe other people had the same thing happen to them that Lizzie said had happened to her. So Lizzie probably was in the right, even though she tried proving it the wrong way.”

“You think?” Jake said with a snort. Then, turning serious again, she said, “But I still don’t understand why Hillary hated Valerie so much. The way she was carrying on, it sounded like something personal between them.”

She turned to Reese, who shrugged and said, “That’ll probably come out in the trial. I can make a couple of guesses, but that’s all they’d be. It’s not like a cop show on television, where the perp spills her guts as soon as she’s arrested. You should know that better than anyone, Martelli.”

“Yeah, so I like my murders tied up in nice red ribbons. So sue me.”

Darla gave her friend a commiserating look. She liked things tied up in nice red ribbons, too. She’d also read somewhere that greed was the number one motive for murder, closely followed by fear and jealousy and rage. All of them seemed likely reasons for the agent to have snapped. But perhaps it was something even more basic. Maybe Hillary, suffering from paranoia because of her drug use, had felt betrayed on a personal level when she learned Valerie was not who she had claimed to be and had felt compelled somehow to punish the woman.