Dying to Get Published (3 page)

"You're not really a caterer, are you?" he asked.

She stopped and stared at him. "Of course, I am," she stated emphatically before returning to the tiny sandwiches. "Why did you say that?"

"It seems to me this is probably the last place you'd like to be right now."

"Did you consider it might be the company and not the job?"

He laughed. "Could be, but that plastic smile you sport when you're serving is a giveaway. You're far too easy to read."

"And I suppose you're an expert on reading people."

"It's my job."

"You don't say."

"The best skill an investigative reporter can have is being able to tell when someone is telling the truth."

"Then see if you can decipher this: I've got work to do, and I'd really rather you'd just leave."

"Sure. That one is easy: you're telling me that you find me incredibly attractive, and you'd love to have dinner with me Friday night."

She looked him up and down and sighed. "Why do I feel like I just stepped into an enormous wad of bubble gum?"

Chapter 5

"A gun? You're planning to kill that woman with a gun? How mundane!" Leigh Ann pouted like a child who had been denied a lollipop. "How could you do that to us, Jennifer? Half the fun of coming to this writing group every Monday night is finding out how you're going to rub out your next victim." She pushed her brunette locks behind her ears, stuffed a handful of pretzels into her mouth, and settled her petite frame onto the overstuffed sofa.

"Oh, I don't know. I come to see how your bad-boy hero is going to seduce your virginal young heroine—yet again," Jennifer countered.

"You just don't appreciate the romance in life," Leigh Ann complained. "Relationships are what living is all about, but then I guess you—"

"This gun thing—it's just not your style, Jen," Teri chimed in, stretching out her long, coffee-colored legs in front of her on the floor, grabbing her ankles and doing little, dancerlike bobs. "You're one lady who comes up with some wild ways to die! Like that poison fish—and in a bubble bath, too. After I read that chapter, I put away all my bath products except for the oils. Oils would kill something like that, wouldn't they?"

"The arsenic in the toothpaste—that was the best," April declared. "I thought Maxie was never going to figure that one out. And when the murderer slipped a tube into her bathroom and she almost brushed her teeth with it, I practically died!

"And stop that infernal bobbing, Teri. I think you do it just to annoy me." April patted her rounded stomach. She was in the fifth month of her second pregnancy and already over her weight-gain limit.

Teri drew her head up from her knees and folded herself into a round ball up against the foot of the sofa. "Sorry." She threw a contrite look at April. At twenty-four, Teri saw motherhood as some far distant, mystical experience to be revered, but experienced in some other lifetime.

Jennifer looked at the three women and tried to decide if they were dedicated writers or eccentric twenty-somethings who had somehow got lost in the space-time continuum. 

Monique cleared her throat, and everybody turned toward the maple rocking chair that served as her throne.

"Jennifer has come to us with a plotting problem. She's not writing to please you or to come up with yet another clever way to bump off her latest victim. She is trying to devise a plot that will sell, and personally, I think a gun might have more appeal than poison fish or toothpaste. Tell us what you have in mind, Jennifer. It's refreshing that you're soliciting advice in the outline stage for once—before you've set Maxie off on some… unique adventure."

Jennifer didn't exactly hate Monique, but a plot about a dead, one-book, holier-than-thou author was involuntarily forming in her mind.

"Say a man decides to kill a woman," Jennifer said aloud, "and he decides to use a gun."

"But a gun?" Teri whined. "Get real, Jen." Her body was now twisted into something resembling one of the pretzels Leigh Ann continued to eat.

"You use guns all the time in your books, Teri," Jennifer reminded her. "In that chapter you read us last week, Yasmine Simone had a gun secreted in that ruffle eyelet pillow on her bed."

"That's because I write romantic suspense, and my characters have to be prepared. Besides, guns are sex—y. Don't let anybody tell you any different."

"I'll say," April murmured. "When Yasmine and her man even think about danger, they hop into the sack."

"Sex is life-affirming." Leigh Ann sighed between bites. "But you haven't answered Teri's question, Jen."

"A gun is easier to control than a knife, less risky than poison, and less messy than explosives."

"But you're in control of the story," April insisted. "When Whacky the Duck wandered into that construction site that Mama Duck had told him to stay away from, I knew he'd be all right because I wrote in Barkley the Dog to protect him.
We're
the creators, Jen. We control what happens in our plots. And pass me those damn pretzels."

Leigh Ann scooped up the bowl and took it to April, setting it on top of her rounded stomach. "If you'd let that duck get eaten by Johnny the Junkyard Dog, kids would learn to listen to their mothers."

An exasperated intake of air from the direction of the rocker silenced the group. Leigh Ann quietly took her place on the sofa.

"You were saying, Jennifer?" Monique said.

"I want to write something more reality-based, something that might even happen. That poison toothpaste stuff doesn't occur in real life, product tampering aside."

"Give us a scenario," Monique ordered.

"Say the victim is an influential businesswoman living in one of those plush, high-rise, security buildings in Atlanta. You know, the kind with a doorman—the works."

"First your murderer's got to get past the muscle," Teri declared.

Monique threw her a withering stare.

"No problem. He can pose as a delivery man with a basket of fruit," Leigh Ann suggested.

"What if they won't let the murderer take it up to her door?" Jennifer asked. "Some places won't, you know."

"A fumigator—how about that?" Teri threw in.

"The doorman would call the tenant and maybe the extermination company to check."

"Insurance."

"What are you babbling about now?" Leigh Ann asked April.

"It's simple. With so many lawsuits going on these days, all the murderer has to do is pretend to be an insurance investigator. He convinces the building staff that he wants access to an upstairs window—maybe in a stairwell or an empty apartment—while he observes the building across the street," April explained. "The building where some jerk works or lives depending on what you decide to put across the street. The murderer says he wants to catch on film this creep who says his back is hurt or he can't walk doing some kind of strenuous activity."

"Only he's not really watching for some person defrauding the insurance company," Jennifer said.

"No way, girl!" Teri exclaimed. "He's spending his time casing the place and figuring out how to get into this woman's apartment."

"And the doorman becomes familiar with this person to the point he lets him come and go without suspicion," Leigh Ann added.

"But he does it in disguise—wig, facial hair, bulky clothes, whatever," Teri suggested.

April supplied the finishing touch: "And he watches the victim's apartment until he knows the woman's habits and finds a way to slip in and do the deed."

"That might work," Jennifer declared. A tingle began in her toes and crept unwillingly up her whole body. She'd have to wait until a week from Wednesday to make her trip to Atlanta. (Dee Dee had scheduled a baby shower and two wedding rehearsal dinners in the interim.) But she could wait, especially now that she knew just how she would gain admittance to Penney Richmond's apartment building.

Chapter 6

The most lavish dinner on earth would hardly be compensation for suffering through a Friday evening with some guy she barely knew asking questions like "What was your major?" or "What kind of music do you like?" and "How do you make those vegetables into those flowers?"

Jennifer looked at her watch. Seven forty-five. Mr. Sam Culpepper was already fifteen minutes late. Maybe she'd be lucky and he wouldn't show.

Jennifer hated dating. Once she'd threatened to copy an 8x10 sheet with answers to the twenty most boring date questions and hand it out at her front door before a man even got his foot across her threshold. Why did a guy need to know her favorite color on a first date? Was he going to buy her a Jag or order new furniture for her living-room? Besides, her color preference changed day to day, and, when she was in a particularly ugly mood, hour to hour.

She sighed and dabbed at her cheek with a brush covered with peach blush as she looked at her face in the bathroom mirror. Her hair was pulled up and pinned in a twist and her bangs bowed becomingly over her forehead. Wispy curls draped the sides of her face.

She tugged at the side of her black, sheath dress. She was losing weight again, and she needed every ounce. Her almost nonexistent curves were disappearing, and she couldn't afford another wardrobe in a smaller size. It happened every time she got caught up in writing a book. She'd forget to eat—and sometimes to sleep—coming abruptly out of her creative stupor to find the clock reading three A.M.

Why had she agreed to go out with this guy, anyway? She had no interest in him whatsoever. She could tell that easily enough from their encounter at the reception. He was brash,
presumptuous, and impertinent.

Well, no problem. She'd give him one hellish date, and then she'd never hear from him again. It was easier than letting him become infatuated with his self-created image of her and having to wade through flowers and chocolates and love notes begging her to have his child.

Sorry Jaimie. This one wasn't daddy material. She'd know it when
he
came along. In her novels she had frequently recounted the unmistakable signs of true love—even with her heroine up to her hips in corpses. In her books, the heroes always knew just what to do, to say, to—

The door bell sounded. She checked her mascara one last time, brushed away a wayward lash, grabbed up her bag and shawl, and rushed to the front door.

She threw it open and there stood… an eight-year-old boy wearing a striped T-shirt and jeans, holding one long-stemmed white rose. "This man… this man, he gave me some money and asked me to, um, he asked me to come up here and ring your bell." His voice rose at the end of the sentence as though asking a question.

"Yes," Jennifer said impatiently.

"This man… this man wanted you to…"

Jennifer swallowed all the words that were trying to crawl out of her mouth. "Exactly where
is
this man?" she asked as calmly as she could.

"This man… he was downstairs… in his car… in front of our building…"

She snatched the rose from the child's hand and tossed it inside the door. "Thank you," she said through clenched teeth. If Sam Culpepper thought for one minute that she was going to dash down to his car without his even bothering to climb the stairs…

She rummaged in her bag until she unearthed two one-dollar bills. "Here, you take this and you tell
'
this man
'
—"

"You can tell him yourself," Sam said, coming up the hall. "Sorry I'm a few minutes late. No spaces were open in front. Somebody must be having a party. I circled the lot three times, but I still had to park all the way around back. I sent my friend up to let you know I was here, but I'd be a few minutes late. Did he explain?"

Jennifer looked from the boy's grinning face to Sam's and down to the bouquet of white roses he was holding. Was this Sam?  He hadn't looked this handsome the day of the wedding. He was taller than she remembered, and his curly dark hair was slicked back with a few sexy stray strands escaping to brush the top of his right eyebrow. And his eyes were a deep, dark blue.

She shook her head. "He was trying to say something, but I wasn't quite sure what."

"Did he give you the rose?"

The rose? Where had she put the damn rose? Oh, that's right, she remembered. "Of course, he did. I laid it inside the door so I could look in my purse for a tip." She scooped it up and held it so Sam wouldn't notice the damaged petal that threatened to fall off.

She turned toward the boy. "Thank you…"

"My name's… my name's… Eddie."

"Thank you, Eddie. You can go home now."

"Whoa. Wait just a minute. I borrowed this young fella from his mother, and she made me promise to see him back downstairs. Are you ready?"

Paternalistic. Nice touch. "Yes," she said, clutching her bag and shawl in her right hand, the rose in her left.

"You might want to put these in water before we take off," he suggested, handing her the bouquet.