Closer than the Bones (14 page)

Robbie closed the door behind us, and I sat down in a chair across from the desk.

Attired more formally today in a suit and tie, Jack shook his head in bewilderment. “All I did was ask her a few questions about the nature of her physical problems. I was trying to rule her out as having the physical strength to stab the victim with the amount of force that was used, and you would have thought I had asked her for some intimate details of her relations with her husband. She flew off the handle at me, and, well, you heard what she said.”

“She certainly overreacted.” I grinned.

“Yeah,” Jack said, his mouth twisted in disgust.

“But it does make you wonder, though,” I said.

He nodded. “Yeah, from what I could see, the way she used that walker of hers, her upper body strength is pretty darned good. She could have done it, alright.”

I found I rather liked the idea of Alice Bertram as the killer. The woman was so thoroughly unpleasant, I wouldn’t mind seeing her hauled off to jail. Awfully petty of me, I know.

“But that’s not why you came to see me,” Jack said.

I shook my head. “No, there’s something I think you should know about.” I sketched for him my two conversations with Katie, but I didn’t tell him I suspected she had gone to talk to Brett Doran. I wasn’t ready to do that until I had talked to Brett first, on my own.

“You think she knows something she’s not telling?”

“I’m almost positive of it, now.”

Jack groaned. “So now I have a potential little blackmailer on my hands.” He sighed. “I’ll try talking to her. Maybe if I lean on her a little bit, I’ll get her to confide in me.”

“I hope so.” I grinned at him. “A handsome cop might stand a better chance getting her to crack than a nosy old-maid schoolteacher.”

He guffawed, and I heard a muffled snort from somewhere behind me. I had forgotten that Robbie was still in the room with us.

“I wonder what it was she saw?” Jack said after he stopped laughing. “Or who?”

“I’ve been thinking about it, and the best guess I have is that she must have seen someone coming in or out of the dining room after lunch. Someone with an opportunity to have taken the knife. The girls had to clear away from lunch, and she might have seen something when she went into the dining room.”

“Surely whoever it was, if there was anybody, would have seen her,” Jack objected.

I shook my head. “Not necessarily. As she was coming into the dining room from the kitchen, she could have glimpsed someone leaving through the main door. That person probably wouldn’t have seen her. Katie might not have given it much thought until later on, when she found out the murder weapon had been on the dining room table. She would know it wasn’t there when she came in to clear away, and she would figure whoever she had seen leaving the room had taken it. And why.”

“Makes sense.” Jack nodded. “But it’s almost too good to be true.”

“And it may be too good to be true,” I said, having an attack of conscience. “I may be reading more into this than there really is. She may not have seen anything, and I may have been badgering her for no reason.”

“Possibly,” Jack said, unconvinced. “I’ll still talk to her and hope for something. I could use a break like that, if only she’ll talk to me.”

“Getting leaned on from above?” I asked. His boss, the sheriff, was always sensitive to public opinion, and this case must be giving him heartburn, because of the family connection. Frankly I was surprised he hadn’t been here himself to reassure Miss McElroy that he’d take personal charge of the case. Evidently he had more sense than I’d given him credit for, because Jack was the best man for the job.

“And how! The sheriff and the chief deputy have already let me know they want this solved yesterday.” He grimaced. “Nothing less than I’d expect, given who’s involved. She may stay out of the public eye around here, but Miss McElroy is still what passes for royalty in this county.”

“Or should we be saying ‘Mrs. Phillips,”’ I said, half- mockingly.

“What do you mean?” Jack was puzzled.

I told him what I had discovered about the relationship between Mary Tucker McElroy and Morwell Phillips.

“Holy shit!” he said, then immediately looked embarrassed.

“It’s okay, Jack, I’ve heard worse,” I assured him. No matter how old they get, they never forget you were their teacher, once upon a time. I almost laughed at the expression on his face.

“Nobody’s mentioned that little fact to me before,” he said. “Not even the sheriff, and I’d think he knows.”

“Maybe he assumed everybody knows.”

Jack shrugged. “Maybe, but it’s downright peculiar, don’t you think?”

“Yes, but the more I’ve thought about it, I can understand why Miss McElroy continues to use her own name. After all, it’s a famous one in Mississippi. And, even though she comes from a generation for which it would have been scandalous not to take a husband’s name, I can see her doing it and letting the rest of the world think what it wanted to.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, “now that you mention it, so can I.” We shared a conspiratorial grin.

“Are you going to talk to Katie now?”

Jack shook his head. “She can wait a while. She’s not in any danger at the moment. As much as I’d like to find out what she knows, I’ve got a few other things on my plate at the moment. The chief deputy expects another report, so I’ll be heading back to town soon to check in with him. I can’t put him off because he and the sheriff have called a press conference for noon. The papers from Memphis and Jackson have sent reporters to cover this, and I think there’s even one from Atlanta. We’ve got to have something to tell them that’ll keep them off our backs for another day or two.” He sighed. “In the meantime, I’ve got a couple men here searching, trying to find that blasted manuscript.”

I felt a momentary twinge of guilt for not telling him about the scene I had witnessed at the summerhouse, but I still wanted to talk to Brett first. I’d do it while Jack was gone to town to talk to his superiors, and by the time he returned, I would have decided what to do, depending on what Brett had to say to me. I was hoping Brett would talk to Jack himself, if his conversation with Katie had something to do with the murder.

“I’ll see you later on, then,” I said, standing up. “You’ll be coming back here after the press conference?”

“Yep,” he said, standing with me. “The folks here are going to get sick of the sight of my face before this is all over with.” I preceded him out of the room. He moved up the hall toward the front door, giving instructions to Robbie. I ducked through the door into the back of the house and outside.

The heat was stifling in the late morning sun. Not a breath of air moved as I walked across the lawn toward the summerhouse. With some relief I stepped into the shade of the trees and onto the porch. I knocked at the door and listened.

“Just a minute!” a voice called—a voice sounding thoroughly annoyed.

“Oh,” Brett said blankly as he opened the door. “It’s you.” He offered a halfhearted smile of greeting.

“Sorry to intrude on you when you’re busy,” I said, “but I really do need to talk to you.” I sniffed at the air coming from inside the summerhouse. He wasn’t kidding when he said they’d have to air the place out for a week. The haze of cigar smoke was thick in the room behind him.

He shrugged. “It’s okay. I’m not really getting that much done anyway. Come on in.”

He stood aside for me to enter. As he shut the door, he flipped a switch, and two large ceiling fans whirred to life. In moments, the smoke began to dissipate, though the aroma lingered.

I examined the main room of the summerhouse with great interest. It was about twenty-five by twenty-five, a nice big space with lots of windows. Two of those windows held air-conditioning units, and the temperature was comfortable. There were couches and chairs spaced around the room, and off to one side stood a desk with a modern-looking office chair in front of it. On top of the desk sat Brett’s laptop and an ashtray with a smoking cigar in it. Bookshelves lined two walls, and I resisted the urge to examine them.

Brett retrieved his cigar and the ashtray from the desk and wandered over to a couch. “Do you mind if I finish this?” he asked.

“Not at all,” I said, making myself comfortable on the other end of the couch. “Not a bad place to work.”

“I can usually work pretty well here,” he said, emitting a plume of smoke into the air above his head. He motioned over the back of the couch with the hand holding his cigar. “See those doors back there? Through the left one is a tiny kitchen, and through the one on the right is a bedroom with a full bath.”

“It’s more like a guest cottage than a summerhouse,” I commented.

He nodded, waiting.

I decided I’d work my way up to the real purpose of my visit. “We haven’t had much chance to talk since last night,” I said. “I didn’t know Mr. Packer very well, and frankly I don’t think I would have wanted to. But for those of you who knew him, this must be a terrible shock.”

One eyebrow arched as Brett drew again on his cigar. He expelled the smoke before replying. “It’s a shock, all right, but it’s more of a shock that someone hadn’t killed the old bastard before now, frankly.”

“Why is that?” I refused to be offended by his tough-guy talk.

“He was a shark, pure and simple.”

“That’s in line with what you told me yesterday. Why don’t you elaborate a little more.”

“He preyed upon anyone he perceived as weak.”

“Including you?”

Brett nodded. “Including me. He was my first agent. He signed me when I was fresh out of college, convinced I was going to write the Great American Novel and win the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the Nobel Prize at one fell swoop. He saw me coming a mile away.”

“But you’re obviously very talented,” I said.

“Yeah, and that and a nickel won’t buy you a cup of coffee. Or one of these.” He brandished his cigar.

“He can’t have done all that badly by you, because you’ve been very successful. Hitting the bestseller list, a movie deal, articles in
People
magazine, the works.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t a good agent, like I told you yesterday,” Brett said, a touch of humor in his voice. “He knew what he was doing when it came to negotiating a contract. He just counted on a first-time author’s inexperience with contracts, and he took advantage of that fact.”

“How did he do that, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I feel pretty stupid, now, telling anybody about it, but you might as well know.” He looked disgusted with himself as he contemplated the ash on the end of his cigar. He deposited the ash in the ashtray before he continued. “I was completely naive about publishing. I’d never seen a publishing contract, and I had sure never seen an agency contract. He spoke to a group I belonged to, and he agreed to look over any manuscript that a member of the group submitted to him. I sent him mine, and after about three months, I got a letter from him, asking me to come to New York to see him. I had to hock something to get the plane fare, but I went.”

“Wasn’t that a bit odd, asking you to come all the way to New York?”

“Yeah, I realized that later. But what he wanted was to get me hooked, and I thought that if he wanted me to come all the way to New York to see him, I must be pretty darn special. He had a way of making you feel like that, that you were the most talented writer to come along in years. And I fell for it, like the idiot I was.”

“So what did he do?”

“He got me in his office in New York and presented me with an agency contract. He said he wanted to sign me because he was convinced that I was going to be the next Tom Wolfe and John Irving, all in one. He offered me expensive cigars and expensive liquor, and I had signed the contract before I knew what hit me.”

“Was it a bad contract?”

Brett shrugged. “It was standard, I found out later, with one exception. Most agents take a ten-percent commission, some fifteen, but then they don’t charge you for a lot of incidentals, like making copies of manuscripts, basic office expenses, things like that. Packer charged twenty percent, which he told me up front, but he said it was because he always got such large advances for his authors that he was worth it. Hell, what did I know? It sounded impressive to me, because he could be charming and persuasive when he wanted to be. Plus I was more than a bit drunk by the time we got to that part.”

“Couldn’t you have fired him?”

“I did, eventually,” he said. “But at first he really was doing a great job for me. He didn’t sell that first manuscript, but he sold the second one, and he got me a shitload of money for it.” He thought about what he had just said. “Sorry. Anyway, he got me so much money, at first I didn’t care that he was getting a hefty percentage of it.”

“But eventually you got tired of it and fired him.”

“Yeah,” he said as he stubbed out his cigar. “Like I told you yesterday.”

“I guess that means you didn’t have to deal with him at all, after that?”

Brett cocked his head to one side. “Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“He would still get income on the books he sold for me, as long as the books remained in print. If they went out of print, and the rights reverted to me, he was out of the picture.”

“But that hadn’t happened, had it?” Thinking of the phenomenal success of his first book, I could see that it galled him to know Packer had continued to reap the benefits from it.

“Nope.”

“But what about now that he’s dead? Does someone else inherit the agency?”

“Nope.” He almost bit off the word.

“Then that probably means your rights revert back to you.” He nodded.

That was a pretty darn good motive for murder, if he’d been angry enough with Packer and his shady dealings.

As if he’d read my mind, Brett said, albeit not very robustly, “It’s not worth murdering someone over.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but it’s suggestive.”

“Are you going to tell your buddy the cop about this?” He almost sounded jealous.

I tried not to smile as I replied. “No, I think you should be the one to tell him, if it’s necessary.”