Dying to Get Published (16 page)

Jennifer sank back against the wall. Where the heck was Dee Dee? She'd called her more than three hours ago. How long did it take to scare up a thousand dollars on a Saturday and get herself to Atlanta, anyway?

She sighed and let her eyes drift shut. Sam. If only she'd stayed with him at her apartment instead of forging ahead with her crazy plan. If only she'd recognized her feelings for him sooner. She would have, too, if it hadn't been for her outrageous ambition. Well, maybe she would have. She'd like to think she would have. If only she could be content with a normal life like everybody else. If only…

"Where'd you go?" a voice asked, the words drifting slowly into her consciousness.

"Sam," she murmured softly, turning her head to find a more comfortable position against the cinder-block wall. Sam had a wonderful, soothing voice, a voice that could lull her into thinking everything would be all right. A voice she could listen to….

"Where'd you go?" the voice asked again, this time suspiciously like a real, earthly, male voice.

Jennifer opened her eyes. It was Sam all right, and he was staring so intently at her she felt like she'd been doused with a bucket of ice water. She sat up, glad to have the bars between them.

"Sam?" she asked tentatively. "How did—"

"Dee Dee called me and asked me to get over here. You've got her scared half out of her mind. Her husband is out, and she didn't want to bring her little girl up here."

If Dee Dee couldn't come, why hadn't she just said so or called somebody—anybody—else? How could she deliver Jennifer into the hands of… of the very irritated man she'd drugged and left sleeping in her bed, a man who, at the moment, looked far too angry to be confused with a knight in shining armor.

"Are you ready to get out of here?"

Jennifer nodded numbly.

Sweeney and a police officer walked up behind Sam. The officer unlocked the cell and pulled open the door.

"You can go for now, but don't go far. I'll be in touch," Sweeney promised.

"What the hell were you thinking?" Sam asked as he eased his Honda onto I-75 south.

"Obviously I wasn't thinking, okay?" Jennifer slumped farther into the leather of the bucket seat, wishing she were anywhere else. Well, not anywhere. Sam's car was a step up from the jail cell. Too bad he went with it.

"Did you kill that woman?"

She stared at him with an open mouth. "I can't believe you felt you had to ask me that question. How
could
you?"

"How could
I
? How could
I
?"

At the moment, she wasn't up to a pronoun war. She turned and burrowed down in the seat's upholstery. She was exhausted, and she was scared. She closed her eyes and prayed that everything would go away—beginning with Sam.

She felt the car slow and opened her eyes to see that he had pulled onto the off ramp at a rest area.

He cut the motor and turned to her. "Talk to me, Jennifer," he said gently.

So he was changing tactics. He'd dropped the rough, tell-me-or-else attitude and was now trying the you-can-trust-me routine. As if she hadn't majored in psychology, not to mention being an expert on the good-cop, bad-cop routine. Hah! But she was trapped, too far out of Atlanta to walk back, and miles from Macon. There wasn't any getting away now. She took a deep breath and turned to face him.

"What do
you
think?" she asked, her chin stuck out.

"I think you're almost crazy enough to kill someone, but not quite. But you were up to something last night and I want to know what. And I want to know what you put in that wine you gave me. I woke up feeling queasy and barely made it to the bathroom before I got sick. By the way, that mutt of yours kept jumping into and out of the bathtub, making it ring like some death knell. Didn't help my head, either."

"Muffy has a habit of doing that when she's upset. Usually she stays out of the powder room unless I lock her in there or I'm sick or she's sick or—"

Sam let out a heavy sigh. "This Penelope Richmond—she was that woman at Steve Moore's party, the one who had you seeing red, the woman in teal."

Jennifer nodded.

"A literary agent?"

Again she nodded.

"You didn't kill her because of something she said to you that night, did you?"

Jennifer shook her head.

"Just checking. The police can place you at her apartment building close to the time of the murder. They searched your place and found some kind of outfit that the doorman identified."

"You must have good friends at the police department."

"I do. I have to in my business. But they can't place you inside, at least not yet."

"That's because I wasn't there. I never got in. I never even tried." Her voice cracked and a small tear traced a path down her cheek.

"What's this all about?" Sam asked quietly. He reached over and took her hand in his.

"It's all Oprah's fault," she blurted, the tears flowing freely now for the first time. "She had this woman on her show who had written this book…" and she told Sam the whole story from beginning to end, leaving out only a few irrelevant, personal details about him.

"And you planned that whole scene last night with me at your apartment because…"

"I wanted to see if a man would believe he had spent the night making love to a woman even if he woke up in the morning and couldn't remember anything. I needed to know if he would think the woman had been there with him all night. That's what the evening was supposed to be, but that's not how it turned out."

"Because I woke up and left."

"No, you idiot, because of what happened between us." Jennifer groaned and wiped her face with the back of her hand. "I know how stupid this all sounds. I'm totally neurotic and hopelessly out of touch with my feelings. Haven't you figured that out yet?"

"The neurotic part had not eluded me."

She turned away and looked out the car window. "I actually had thought about killing Penney Richmond, and now I'm being punished for it. You have every right to throw me out of your car right now. I don't blame you for believing I killed her," she said softly.

She felt herself being pulled backward, turned and then folded into Sam's arms, cradled firmly against his chest, the emergency brake sticking painfully into her abdomen.

And then she heard him start to chuckle and then to laugh. How could he? She tried to pull away, but he held her tight against him.

"Ah, Jennifer. You couldn't have killed that woman if she'd cocked the gun for you, pinned a bull's-eye over her heart, and begged you to shoot her."

He stroked her hair, and she relaxed as best she could, considering the brake.

"Part of your crazy scheme worked perfectly," he said. "The part to make you the prime suspect. We've got our work cut out for us. Unless we find out who the murderer is, there's a real possibility you're going to be spending the next twenty years of your life in jail."

Chapter 25

The tears were gone, and the adrenaline—the good kind—had kicked in big-time. Jennifer's mind was as sharp as she ever dreamed Maxie Malone's could be, at least on a Saturday night after spending most of the day in jail. So why, with a super dose of sleuthing hormones racing through her, didn't she have a clue how to start solving the puzzle of Penney Richmond's death?

A murderer—the bad kind, the kind who actually killed people—was loose out there somewhere, and she was being blamed. And it looked as though the police would be content to let her fry. She couldn't blame them. After all, she'd planned it that way, planned that the police would have no choice but to see her as their only suspect. Success. Why did it have to be so selective?

Jennifer stared at the blank tablet that lay on her dining table. Two sharpened number-two pencils lay idle beside it. This was as hard as staring at the first, blank page of a novel, hoping something, anything, would somehow magically appear, like lemon-juice writing brought near a flame.

Muffy shifted near her feet and rested her chin possessively on the toe of Jennifer's shoe. Since she'd come home, Muffy hadn't let her get more than a few feet away.

"Drink this," Sam ordered, coming in from the kitchen nook and plopping down a big mug of steaming coffee.

She grabbed it up and took a big swallow, burning off most of her taste buds in one fell swoop.

"Careful. It's hot," Sam warned.

She nodded, her tongue swelling. She was not about to complain. Sam had come to her rescue, brought her home, and fed her a cheese omelet. This could be true love.

She liked the way he looked, rather domestic with his tie off, his sleeves rolled up, and a dusting of toast flakes dotting his white shirt.

"Come up with anything yet?"

"Only that Penney Richmond received more threats than the ones I sent. They all came in envelopes with Macon postmarks."

"Then our murderer is right here," Sam concluded.

Jennifer screwed up her face and took another scalding gulp of coffee. "Not necessarily.
I
made threats but
I
didn't kill her."

"You have… unusual thought processes."

Jennifer shrugged. It didn't matter. She had to follow the threats. They were the only lead she had.

"I don't know how the police think I could have written those other notes."

"Did they present them before the judge when you were charged?"

Jennifer nodded. "The whole M.O. was different: printed, not handwritten, on plain paper, sent through the mail, and the wording… the wording was so unimaginative."

"What'd they say? Do you remember?"

"Somethin
g like, 'You know what you did.
How can you sleep at night? You'll never hurt anyone else again.' B-movie stuff like that. A whole different style from Marcus's classic, Poe-esque ramblings."

Sam yawned. "Right. So where do we start?"

Suddenly it seemed so obvious. No wonder Sherlock Holmes kept Dr. Watson around to ask the questions, to force an answer. And the answer was as logical as any synopsis she'd ever put together. Maxie Malone always started her investigations by running down the victim's associates and by visiting the crime scene.

"Two places: Steve Moore's guest list for his party and O'Hara's Tara. I assume most of Penney's Macon clients would have been invited."

"That's assuming it was a client that killed her."

"I'm not assuming anything, but I'm sure most of them had motive, and we've got to start somewhere."

"And the apartment building?"

"I wasn't the only one at O'Hara's Tara that night. The place was teeming with people, and one of them had to be the murderer, unless Penney got wind of my plan and committed suicide just to frame me. She wasn't a very nice person, you know."

"So I've been told. How do we get a copy of Moore's guest list?"

"It's got to be in his office. I'm sure Edith was involved in planning the party. Moore couldn't tie his shoelaces by himself."

"You can't go back to Channel 14. Sunday's paper will carry an article about your arrest. By the way, you do have a good publicity photo, don't you? If not, we'll have to lift one from your high school yearbook."

Betrayal had a name, and it was Sam Culpepper. "
We?
Tell me you didn't—"

"The
Telegraph
can't ignore a story like this one, you know that. But I did some fairly clever damage control. I led off with a paragraph about your writing—"

"You 'led off'?"

Anger was not an appropriate reaction. Jennifer kept telling herself that, but the shudder that threatened to radiate from her gut wasn't asking for intellectual approval.

Suddenly her brain intervened with a scary flash of realization. Just as she'd anticipated in her demented, murderous planning stage, she was going to get some publicity out of Penney Richmond's murder. That publicity, thanks to her connection with Sam, was going to center around an aspiring novelist, not a caterer. And if she helped him, she just might come out of this mess with some part of her reputation intact. Not that anyone had heard of her, but she'd been brought up to believe she could survive almost anything as long as she kept her dignity.

"I'll get you that photo before you leave. I had it taken last year when an editor almost bought the first Maxie Malone book. I keep it in what I call my hope chest, along with a bio and some possible blurbs for book jackets. You can have those, too, if you want."

"I do. Now, how are we going to get into Moore's office?"

"Moore and Allen were using a temp company before he hired me. I overheard Edith on the phone with them the day I was hired. What if a rep calls Monday morning saying a replacement is on the way over?"

"Not the wig again."

Jennifer tried to stick out her swollen tongue. "Are you kidding? The police kept it as evidence. I'll send Teri. She's off Mondays, and she's great with computers."