John Ames - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 5. Whole No. 783, November 2006

“I’m not. No charges are involved. Is your wife home?”

His mouth curled into a sneer. “You’re out of luck, shamus. She’s disporting herself abroad. We take separate vacations.”

Reno glanced past him. All he could see was a short hallway with a large Chinese vase on a teakwood base.

“I can’t invite you in,” Gray added. “I have company downstairs, and at the moment she’s in dishabille.”

“You pick odd times to read the paper.”

“Bottle it, Sloan. Unlike a lowly security guard, you don’t even have a badge.”

Reno spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I just have a few questions. Maybe you could help me?”

“Normally I’d just toss you, but I’m curious to know what Susan has done now. That woman can ride out any scandal, but I worry about the legal costs. Fire away.”

“I understand your wife used to be one of the judges for a local writing contest?”

“Writing contest? Hell, she paid a Tulane grad student to read that dreck.”

“Did she ever have dealings with a man named Peter D’Antoni?” Reno asked.

“She’s had dealings with plenty of men, so I can’t say no. First I’ve heard of him, though.”

“Has she ever employed a ghostwriter?”

“Possibly. She’s a lazy wench. If so, she kept it secret from me.”

Reno suddenly felt weary. James Gray’s sneering attitude boiled down to one word: whatever.

“Well,” he told Gray, “back to the salt mines. Thanks for your time.”

The second time Reno stopped by the Maitland residence, in the middle of the afternoon two days after his first visit, a young black woman with stiffly sculpted hair answered the door.

“May I speak with Mrs. Maitland?” he inquired. “My name is—”

“Hello, Mr. Sloan!” Samantha’s voice called from the hallway. “It’s all right, Yolanda, please let the gentleman in.”

The maid disappeared into the bowels of the big house while Samantha led him into the side parlor. She wore matching white khaki shirt and shorts and a rose-colored sun hat.

“I notice you didn’t answer the door yourself this time,” Reno observed as he sank into the soft leather chair. “Is there a secret hall porter, too?”

Her playful tone implied he was a naughty thing. “Did I ever once say I don’t employ a maid? She’s off at five P.M.”

A mechanical smile was the best he could muster.

“Was your visit with Susan Gray productive?” she asked.

“I didn’t talk to her.”

“You didn’t—? But why?”

“Because you were using her as a smoke screen to throw me off and buy a little time — maybe to leave the country.”

An ugly constriction of her mouth transformed her into another woman. “I should throw you out, but I confess I’m curious to hear your ‘evidence’ for such a conclusion.”

“To begin with, no one has ever confused my mug with Fabio’s. Yet you and Lydia both came on to me. And both of you were dressed to the nines to receive a lowly keyhole peeper.”

Her confidence was back. “What did you expect — a riding crop and handcuffs?”

“Both you and Lydia,” he pressed on, ignoring her, “were too willing, and quick, to see me. Nobody has to talk to a private dick, and in my experience it’s often the guilty parties who are most eager to cooperate and create the illusion of innocence.”

“This isn’t evidence!”

“Not in court, but it works for me. Another thing — within thirty seconds of meeting me, you described yourself as ‘paperwork rich but pocket poor.’ If that were true, you’d hardly parade the fact — especially as a writer with a public image to maintain.”

“Good luck proving anything in court,” she lashed out. “All this is so thin it’s not even circumstantial.”

“This is a bit more damning,” Reno replied, pulling a paperback titled Cypress Nights from a back pocket and flipping it open. “My ex is one of your biggest fans, she loaned this to me. Here’s what first caught my eye: ‘Hers was a more subtle, sloe-eyed beauty that left glowing retinal afterimages when he closed his eyes.’ ”

He looked up at her. “I figure he mailed all the tablets to you, but he must have copied one for proof. The first forty pages of Cypress Nights are almost verbatim from Pete’s composition book. His handwriting can be factually established, and it will do no good to say he copied it from your published book — forensics can date the drying of ink to within a few days.”

The lull after he fell silent became painful, then excruciating. The color ebbed from her face.

“Even if you manage to ruin my career by proving D’Antoni wrote some of my novel,” she finally replied, “it doesn’t prove I killed him.”

“No, but I suspect that gun making a bulge in the side of your handbag might. Amateur killers seldom bother to get rid of murder weapons. And before you try to douse my light, just a warning: Under my shirt there’s a .45 automatic in an armpit holster.”

A haggard slump of her shoulders was Samantha’s only visible response. When Reno fished the nickel-plated.38 snubby from her bag, she suddenly collapsed into a wing chair, her face bloodless.

“I tell people my husband and I are split up,” she said as if the words were being wrenched out of her. “In truth, he left me for an ‘actress’ in L.A. I was devastated, I couldn’t write, and I had just signed a three-book contract worth almost a half-million dollars. Lydia only showed me D’Antoni’s work — a sort of nudge. It was I who looked him up from the address on his submission.”

She sent Reno a pleading glance. “It was only meant as a desperate stopgap until I could get my muse back. I never expected such success. D’Antoni already had several entire novels, so I typed one into my computer and my editor raved over it. I bought two more — all three made the Times list.”

“I take it you paid him?”

She blushed to the roots of her hair. “Yes, but just barely enough to salve my conscience. He didn’t seem to value his work all that much, and I feared that paying him too much would, well, tip him off.”

“That’ll earn you jewels in heaven,” Reno barbed.

“My efforts didn’t matter. He became aware of the books’ success and got quite upset with me.”

“And instead of just brooming him, you had to kill him?”

“Yes,” she said emphatically. “It wasn’t the money, he didn’t care. He wanted recognition for his work. Even if he couldn’t have proved he wrote the books, I couldn’t risk being linked to such an... unromantic figure. And if he could prove authorship I would have been devastated financially — ghostwriters can be kept secret from readers, but never from editors. I would have been forced to pay every dollar back.”

Reno tapped the number of the Sixth District police headquarters into his cell. Before he sent the call he met Samantha’s eyes. “You may decide to fight this. But there’s a good chance Lydia will be charged in a conspiracy and turn state’s evidence, adding stronger motive to the forensics evidence. It’s a lead-pipe cinch that most juries will be hostile to a rich, prominent woman who grinds up a man as poor and maladjusted as Pete D’Antoni. Just remember: Plead guilty and there’s no jury.”

Reno sent the number. While the phone burred, he glanced outside through the parlor windows and watched the rapid onsweep of dark clouds. The mother of all storms was said to be gathering strength out in the Gulf and might even be drawing a bead on New Orleans. It’ll blow past us, Reno thought idly. They usually do.

Copyright © 2006 John Edward Ames