Stuart Woods - Santa Fe Dead

“Ed?” Susannah called.

“She’s got a gun!” Eagle yelled, flattening himself against the outer wall of the house.

“Not anymore,” Susannah said. “You can come back in.”

Eagle peeked through the front door. The flower woman was lying, spread-eagled on her back, her chest pumping blood. Susannah still stood in a combat stance, holding the.45 that he kept in his bedside drawer.

“Who is she?” Susannah asked.

“I have no idea, except that she delivered a message.” He picked up the card from where he had dropped it and handed it to Susannah.

She glanced at it but kept the pistol pointed at the flower woman. “She’s still bleeding, so she must still be alive. You’d better call an ambulance and the police. Make that two ambulances; you’re bleeding like a stuck pig.”

Eagle put a hand to his ear and walked over to the flower woman, kicking her small pistol away from her. “She’s stopped bleeding,” he said, bending over and putting two fingers to her throat. “She’s dead.”

Susannah walked to the nearest phone, called 911, and spoke to the operator, then she went to the fridge in the kitchen and came back with some ice wrapped in a dish towel and applied it to Eagle’s ear.

“You’ve got a nice, clean notch there,” she said. “A battle scar in the Barbara wars.”

“Which are now, officially, over,” he said.

“That’s what you said five minutes ago,” she replied, kissing him. “I’m going to keep going around armed for a while.”

“So am I,” he said, putting an arm around her and leading her back to the bedroom. “We’d better dress for the police.”

“When they’re gone, I’ll start over with the eggs Benedict,” she said.

“When they’re gone, we’ll start over with everything,” Eagle replied.

LEE HIGHT SAT at her desk in Joe Wilen’s old office, drafting a document in connection with his charitable foundation. Margie, Joe’s old secretary and now Lee’s, walked into the room, holding a newspaper.

“Did you see this?” she asked, placing the San Francisco morning paper on her desk. She tapped a story at the bottom of the front page.

Lee looked up to see the headline:

WALTER KEELER’S WIDOW CONVICTED IN MEXICO

Acapulco (AP) Barbara Eagle Keeler, widow of Palo Alto billionaire Walter Keeler, was convicted today in an Acapulco court of three counts of attempted murder. In spite of a brigade of expensive Mexican lawyers, the testimony of the three victims, Cupie Dalton of Los Angeles, Vittorio (only one name) of Santa Fe, New Mexico, both private investigators, and Ernesto Rodríguez, the nephew of the chief of police of Acapulco, proved convincing to the all-male jury.

Mrs. Keeler’s attorneys moved for a stay of sentencing, pending appeal, but the judge rejected their motion and immediately sentenced her to a term of twenty-five years to life and ordered her to prison.

A two-attorney delegation from the Palo Alto district attorney’s office presented an extradition request and arrest warrant on one count of murder, that of Joe Wilen, a business associate of and attorney for Walter Keeler, but the judge told them they would have to wait at least twenty-five years to serve the papers.

A man, Jack Cato, who alleges that Mrs. Keeler hired him to kill Mr. Wilen, has been giving testimony in another murder trial in a Santa Fe, New Mexico, court, that of film producer, Donald Wells, who is charged with arranging the murders of his wife, a pharmaceuticals heiress, and her son.

The article continued inside the paper, but Lee stopped reading. “This is all I need,” she said. “Margie, I’ll dictate a letter to our bank, cutting off the woman’s monthly payments, then you get hold of a San Francisco realtor and put the apartment on the market. Tell them to clean out her clothes and personal belongings and give them to some charity.”

“Love to,” Margie replied, sitting down, steno pad in hand.

I am happy to hear from readers, but you should know that if you write to me in care of my publisher, three to six months will pass before I receive your letter, and when it finally arrives it will be one among many, and I will not be able to reply.

However, if you have access to the Internet, you may visit my website at www.stuartwoods.com, where there is a button for sending me e-mail. So far, I have been able to reply to all of my e-mail, and I will continue to try to do so.

If you send me an e-mail and do not receive a reply, it is because you are among an alarming number of people who have entered their e-mail address incorrectly in their mail software. I have many of my replies returned as undeliverable.

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Please do not send me your ideas for a book, as I have a policy of writing only what I myself invent. If you send me story ideas, I will immediately delete them without reading them. If you have a good idea for a book, write it yourself, but I will not be able to advise you on how to get it published. Buy a copy of Writer’s Market at any bookstore; that will tell you how.

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If you want to know if I will be signing books in your city, please visit my website, www.stuartwoods.com, where the tour schedule will be published a month or so in advance. If you wish me to do a book signing in your locality, ask your favorite bookseller to contact his Penguin representative or the Penguin publicity department with the request.

If you find typographical or editorial errors in my book and feel an irresistible urge to tell someone, please write to Rachel Kahan at Penguin’s address above. Do not e-mail your discoveries to me, as I will already have learned about them from others.

A list of my published works appears in the front of this book and on my website. All the novels are still in print in paperback and can be found at or ordered from any bookstore. If you wish to obtain hardcover copies of earlier novels or of the two nonfiction books, a good used-book store or one of the online bookstores can help you find them. Otherwise, you will have to go to a great many garage sales.