Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 148, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 900 & 901, September/October 2016
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри, Эллин Стенли
- Год: 2016
- Язык: английский
- Год: Penny Publications
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 148, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 900 & 901, September/October 2016». Краткое содержание книги:
“Lead pipe?” asked Steinbock.
“The hotel gets into the spirit of the conference with its decorations,” she said. “They hung all the weapons from Clue on the railing there. Didn’t you notice?”
Steinbock walked across to the greenery, pushed aside a palm, and leaned over. Wired to the railing, directly above the lounge chairs in the bar below, was an assortment of oversized items: a tall plastic candlestick, a heavy lug wrench, a length of thick rope fashioned into a noose, large foam-board cutouts of a dagger and a revolver, and, yes, a three-foot-long section of pipe — replicas of all the weapons from Clue, just as he remembered from long-ago board games at his grandparents’ summer cottage.
And now that he was looking, he realized that the barmaid was dressed as a decidedly sexy Miss Scarlet. The reception desk was manned by Professor Plum, Mr. Green, and Miss White, while Colonel Mustard sat at the concierge desk. And come to think of it, hadn’t the manager who cleared this space for his use been wearing a teal-blue suit?
Of course.
Miss Peacock.
Miss Peacock was the one who called them shortly before ten. Avis Arthur was scheduled to moderate a panel of her four friends at nine and when she did not answer repeated calls to either her cell phone or her room, Morna Brown had convinced the maid on that hall to open her door. Ms. Arthur lay crumpled on the floor, strangled to death with the pink chiffon scarf she’d worn to dinner the night before. She had apparently died sometime between ten last night and two this morning.
There was no keeping the death quiet, even though Miss Peacock had sent the maid home with orders not to discuss what she’d seen. Today was the final day of this mystery conference and word had spread rapidly through the hotel, leaving Avis Arthur fans stunned. “But I brought eighteen of her books with me to get her to sign them,” wailed one, while tempers were running high in the book room because the dealers had immediately jacked up prices on all their autographed Avis Arthur novels, even the remaindered ones that she’d signed last year.
Organizers were scrambling to pay tribute to Ms. Arthur at the awards banquet that evening. Her Triple Threat series featured French-born triplets — a brother and two identical sisters — who ran a small-town catering service in upstate New York and solved murders that seemed to pop up in every job. Her increasingly slender plots had been padded out with elaborate dessert recipes, and tonight’s awards banquet would now feature her famous chocolate mousse buried under crème fraîche and drizzled with warm caramel sauce.
Seven members of the Triple Threat Fan Club had drawn up a grid and were busily collecting alibis from every attendee who had ever made a condescending remark about mixing murder with recipes. Their president tearfully promised Lieutenant Steinbock that they would share anything they learned. As some four hundred people from nine different states had signed up for this conference, Lieutenant Steinbock doubted they would come up with any solid leads. He just hoped that he and his team could do better before the conference ended and everyone scattered.
The steel pipe that dangled eight feet above one of the lounge chairs in the bar below was probably not lead, thought Steinbock as he hefted it, but it was certainly heavy enough to do grievous bodily harm had it fallen directly on someone.
“As it was,” said Morna Brown, “Dodie got a big lump when it bounced off the back of her chair and hit her on the head.”
The lobby and bar had been buzzing with the conference attendees, but a hush fell over the crowd when the two authors joined Steinbock amid the greenery at the railing above them.
“We thought it was an accident,” said Suzu Dunsel, parting the fronds of an overgrown fern. “The wire that was holding that pipe in place was just looped around the outside and the pipe slipped out of the loop. When they put it back, they ran the wire through the pipe.”
“We joked that Avis or Nanette had decided it was time to activate the pact, since they hadn’t come down to the bar yet,” said Morna.
“Pact?” asked Steinbock, as they stepped away from the railing and the conferencegoers below resumed their speculations.
“We were young and green and thought we were immortal,” said Dunsel, who appeared to be in her early seventies. Her straight white hair was sleekly styled and her jaw line was firm. She wore jeans, a homespun linen shirt, and sandals. Unlike Morna Brown, whose pudgy fingers flashed with diamonds, Suzu Dunsel had been a California hippie in her youth and, except for a hammered-silver toe ring, she was ringless. “As time went on, though, we noticed how some of the writers we admired were starting to lose it.”
“They stayed too long at the ball,” Morna Brown said bluntly. “Instead of retiring from the limelight, they kept on writing and their last books were so weak that they tarnished their earlier ones.”
“So the five of us made a pact to protect each other’s reputation,” said Suzu. “We promised that if that started happening, one of us would go and kill the one who was losing it.”
“It was a joke,” said Morna.
“Avis was losing it, though,” Suzu said. “Her last book was pretty awful. Half of it was nothing but recipes. Don’t look at me like that, Morna. You thought so too.”
Morna gave a reluctant nod. “Way too much foreshadowing and plot holes you could drive a Mack truck through.”
“So you think one of you four killed her?” asked Steinbock.
“No, of course not,” said Morna. “We’ve joked about it for years, in interviews and on panels, so our fans know about our pact.”
“And some of them really are fans,” said Suzu.
“Meaning?” said Steinbock.
“Fanatical,” she replied with a weary shake of her head. “They start thinking our characters are real and that they have a vested interest in whether or not we treat them well in our books. I killed off a major character two books back and I’m still getting hate mail from some of my fans.”
“I killed a cat in my last book,” said Morna, “and one of my readers threatened to come poison my dog.”
“Are they at this conference?” Steinbock asked.
Both women shrugged. “Who knows? They never sign their names.”
They started to turn from the railing when Morna Brown glanced toward the glass elevator that was descending to the lobby. “There’s Nanette and Dodie now!”
She waved to them and Steinbock saw a slender auburn-haired woman gesture in their direction to a shorter woman whose own once-red hair was now a rusty white.
Steinbock sent one of his team to escort them up to the open landing, which he was using for preliminary questioning. It took the officer several minutes because the two women were immediately besieged by fans holding out books to be signed. Eventually they disentangled themselves and started up the wide stairs. A portly man clutched an anthology of short stories and protested when the uniformed patrolman at the foot of the steps refused to let him pass.
With a swirl of colorful silk scarves, the shorter woman turned and in a clipped British accent said, “Do catch me later, ducks. We’re signing up here at two.”
“At three,” said the attractive auburn-haired writer with a roll of her eyes at Morna and Suzu. “And they’ve changed the place too, Dodie. Signings are in the green room now.”
“Where’s that?” the writer of British cozies asked, bewilderment in her face.
“Never mind, Dodie,” Morna Brown said. “We’ll show you.”
Steinbock was to learn that Dodie Cantrell was considered geographically challenged and couldn’t be trusted with directions or maps. Nor street numbers and addresses either, for that matter. In the early years before GPS and before publishers sent midlist female writers on publicity tours, the five of them had pooled their resources to hit all the bookstores in the Carolinas. Nanette Parker was driving, with Dodie beside her to read the map. They were almost to the Virginia border before the others in the car quit chattering and realized that Dodie had confused Wilmington, North Carolina with Wilmington, Delaware. After that, she was relegated to the backseat and never allowed to navigate again.