Retool, p.12
Retool, page 12
part #12 of The Last Picks Series
It was the same sense I’d had when I’d seen her photo: that I recognized her. But now, seeing her in person, I knew it hadn’t been a passing glance, the coincidence of being at the same conference. This was the same woman who had stopped and stared at me and Vivienne during our brief—and only—conversation.
My stomach started to squirm, but when she glanced my way, I raised a hand.
“Mr. Donaldson?” she asked. A slight vertical line appeared between her eyebrows as her gaze morphed into a stare.
Without meaning to, I raised one hand to cover the bruising on my neck, but I kept my voice even as I said, “Whitney?” When she nodded, I added, “Please, have a seat.”
But she didn’t. Her hands tightened around the back of one of the chairs. “What’s going on? The Housekeeper’s Mistress had a single print run and barely sold a thousand copies. I’m having a hard time believing you want to turn it into a feature film.”
But—you’ll notice—she’d still come. Just in case. Hope is like that.
“I’m sorry for the deception,” I said. “I actually wanted to talk to you about Simona Wolf—”
Her face shuttered. She gave the chair a shove, so that it banged against the table. “You have got to be kidding me. Don’t you people ever give up? You have no right to tell any part of that story. And if you try, I’ll sue.”
Then she spun and started for the door.
“Ms. Smith—wait! Whitney!”
I caught up to her before she reached the exit. A few of the other patrons were staring: a young man watched, his phone forgotten in one hand; a woman with a child in a stroller had frozen, a spoonful of baby food hanging in midair; another woman had stopped in the middle of stirring her latte.
“Get out of my way,” Whitney said.
“Is everything okay?” the guy said.
“We’re good,” I said. “All good.” In a lower voice, I said, “I’m not going to do anything without your permission. I wanted to talk to you. There’s nobody else left to talk to.”
“Nobody needs to talk to anybody,” she said. “It happened a long time ago, and it was horrible, and there’s nothing to say about it.”
“Please,” I said. And then I played my trump card—the one I had waited to play, because I needed to see her face when I did it. “Forget what I said in my email. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I think whoever killed Robert Kessler killed Vivienne Carver and Steven Block.”
Shock.
Pure and total shock: wide, empty eyes, and then incomprehension slowly fragmenting into confusion, the labored effort to understand. Her cheeks reddened. And then tears welled in her eyes.
It might not have been real, but if it wasn’t, I didn’t know how to tell.
“Please,” I said again. “Even if you can only give me five minutes.”
She nodded and swallowed. “Let me—ah, let me get a coffee. Just a minute.”
I returned to my table—and to my marshmallow crème shaken espresso, which was exactly as delicious as it sounded, and which I was going to recommend to Tessa as an immediate addition to the menu at Chipper. At the counter, Whitney stumbled through her order, still blinking rapidly to keep tears from falling. When the barista asked her something—if she was okay, I guessed—she shook her head and then nodded and laughed. After paying, she waited while the barista prepared her coffee. It wasn’t until she had it in hand that she made her way over to me.
“So,” she said as she settled into the seat opposite me. The color was still high in her face. “You’re not trying to make a TV show about—about all of it?”
“Uh, no. Sorry. I didn’t know how else to get you to meet with me.”
“You could have tried asking.”
I could have. But then I wouldn’t have gotten to see her face.
“What do you want?” she asked. “Really?”
“My name is Dash Dane. I’m an author—”
“Oh God, I know who you are. I knew I’d seen you before. In the lobby, remember? When you were talking with Vivienne?”
I mean, seriously—was it everyone?
She took a sip of her coffee—which, from the label turned toward me, I discovered was a soymilk latte without sweetener. (Blech.) “I don’t understand. You think…what happened has something to do with Simona?”
“I do. In fact, I think it has everything to do with it.” I paused, trying to read her face, but it was still that superficial mixture of disbelief and tears. “Do you believe Simona killed Robert Kessler?”
She set her coffee down. And then she turned the cup in the circle of her hands. In a quiet voice, she said, “She was convicted.”
“But do you believe she did it?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. The great Vivienne Carver solved the mystery.”
“Whitney.”
She stilled. The soft rasp of the paper cup between her hands died away. At the billiard table, someone broke the next set of balls, and a woman laughed.
“No,” Whitney said—even more quietly now. “No, I never believed she did it.” Her gaze came up to me. “And that’s what I said at the trial.”
“But you were the one who provided the motive.”
“The motive?” Whitney made a little scoffing sound. “Simona never would have killed someone over bad reviews. Certainly not Robert.”
I frowned. “Then why did Vivienne assume she did it?”
Whitney laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “You’re the one who caught her, right? Didn’t she bang you on the head with a frying pan or something?”
“Uh, no. She got banged—”
Which, I realized in that moment, was not my favorite way to put it.
“So, you never went through something like this with her,” Whitney said. “An investigation. When she was the detective, I mean.”
I shook my head.
“It’s hard to explain.” Whitney turned the cup again, more carefully this time. “She was like a force of nature. She was so smart. So charming. So…sure of herself. And what made it all the more powerful was that you could see when she made a mistake, when she focused on the wrong person, when she realized she’d gotten something wrong and corrected course. It was like being inside one of her novels. That probably makes it sound like we were all having a psychotic break, but—but that’s how it was. I’ve never been through anything like it.” She paused to smile. “Of course, I’ve never been through any other murder investigations, so maybe they all have that same surreal quality to them. Like a fever dream.”
The creak of leather from the sofas. The woman talking to her baby. The smooth jazz fading out.
“I never believed Simona did it,” Whitney said again. “But Vivienne had a way of pulling on every thread, tracking down every rumor, poking and prodding into the darkest and most painful moments of everyone’s life. Margaux’s affairs. Block’s drunk driving arrest.”
“The reviews,” I said.
Whitney shook her head, but the gesture seemed directed at the fresh surge of tears.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Simona told me that she’d found out Robert was leaving those reviews. She was upset at the time, understandably; later, she begged me not to tell anyone. But Vivienne—sometimes it was like she was psychic. Like she already knew. She asked me, and the words started spilling out of me. And when it was done, I told her that Simona never could have hurt Robert. Simona never could have hurt anyone. She was such a good person. And she was so happy—her book, you know? And Robert was her hero—everything he’d done to make it happen. He’s the whole reason she ended up at Langstaff and Lock, you know. She called him her lifesaver.”
“I don’t understand. If that’s all true, then why did anyone believe Simona did it?”
Whitney gave that unhappy laugh again. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Simona and Robert had a public argument—I should call it a fight because it was so ugly.”
“About?”
“The book, of course. Simona’s work was…challenging. She wanted it to be challenging. Robert liked that, up to a point, but he also wanted a book that would sell. He’d paid a lot of money for the rights. It was a big gamble; when Simona pushed back on his edits, he started to worry that the gamble wouldn’t pay off.”
Something was wrong with that statement.
“What else?” I said.
Whitney looked down into her coffee again. “Simona was…missing.”
“What?”
“She disappeared. The night Robert died.” In answer to the question she must have seen on my face, Whitney explained, “We were sharing a hotel room. You have to understand, back then, Simona and I were both getting started. We had contracts, but our novels hadn’t come out yet. We’d been friends online for a while—it’s easier to be friends like that, you know? Less competitive. And when we both wanted to go to Snitches and Stitches, we decided to share a hotel room.”
“And she wasn’t in the room the night Robert was murdered.”
Whitney shook her head.
“Do you know where she was?”
Another slow shake of the head.
“Do you know what I don’t understand?” I asked. “Why would Robert tank Simona’s book? I mean, you said he took a huge risk acquiring those rights. To some extent, I imagine, his job was on the line. He must have wanted the book to perform well.”
Whitney released the cup of coffee. She sat back in her chair, arms folded across her chest. “I don’t know.”
“But you have an idea.”
She shook her head, but then, as though the words were being dragged out of her, she said, “People do things like that. They act out when they’re angry. It doesn’t always make sense.”
I waited.
“I don’t know,” she said again, but this time with a trace of weariness. “I’ve thought about it so many times over the years. Maybe he was frustrated that she wouldn’t take his feedback, and he thought he could scare her straight, so to speak. Or maybe he thought if he made the book a failure before it even came out, he wouldn’t be held responsible—an act of God, that kind of thing.”
“How did Simona find out he was the one doing it?”
“She didn’t say.”
“It didn’t come out at the trial?”
Whitney looked up then, her expression strange.
“What?” I asked.
“You haven’t read the book.”
“Uh, kind of working off a summary—”
She huffed a breath that was somewhere between amused and vexed. “Simona didn’t testify.”
“She didn’t testify at her own trial?”
Whitney shook her head.
“Why?”
Spreading her hands, Whitney shook her head again.
It wasn’t unheard of for defendants not to take the stand. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if it could be called uncommon. Sometimes, it was because the defense didn’t want to expose themselves to difficult questions. Sometimes it was because the defendant was, uh, problematic. And it certainly explained Simona’s lack of an alibi—she’d never given one. But I had a hard time imagining why Simona hadn’t seized the opportunity to explain, in her own words, all these troublesome questions that only she could answer.
Time for the surprise redirect.
“Whitney, how did you feel about Vivienne?”
“I hated her.”
And that jived with what I’d seen the first night of the conference, when Whitney had spotted us and looked like she wanted to attack Vivienne on the spot.
“So,” I said, “why did you sign up for a one-on-one with Vivienne?”
Color worked its way up Whitney’s cheeks. “I didn’t—” And then she stopped and gave a cracked laugh. “God, why am I lying? Yes, I signed up for a one-on-one with Vivienne. I don’t—I don’t know why. Not really. I’ve been angry at her for so long. And then, after I learned what she’d done—after everything that happened with you—I was able to let it go. It was like I forgot about her. And then I saw her on the list of authors attending the conference, and I lost my mind. I was going to—” But Whitney stopped again. Her breathing was rapid, and she touched her knuckles to her mouth before she finally said again, “I don’t know.”
Maybe she truly didn’t know. But, on the other hand, maybe she did. What would it feel like to come face to face with the woman you thought had, in effect, killed your friend?
“And where were you the night Vivienne was killed?”
“After I saw you in the lobby? I went up to my room.” She added a bitter smile. “Alone.”
So much for an alibi.
“Vivienne hated her, you know.”
The words startled me out of my thoughts, and when I glanced up, that strange expression had returned to Whitney’s face.
“Who?”
“Simona. Vivienne hated her.” When I didn’t say anything, Whitney continued, “Vivienne always had to be the best, you see. But by then, Vivienne was…well, she was established. She wasn’t the bright new thing anymore. She’d been around for, God, twenty years? In some ways, she was still at the top of her career. The TV show helped. And the true crime books. And it didn’t hurt that she was always running into old college friends and former neighbors and distant cousins, all of them getting caught up in murders that Vivienne had to solve. But tastes change. People want something new. And Vivienne was never able to break into the literary mystery—that circle of critics and tastemakers never accepted her.”
“And Simona was young and brilliant and—what did you call it? A bright new thing?”
“I don’t know why Vivienne cared,” Whitney said. “She had everything she wanted. But she couldn’t stand Simona; you could spot it from a mile away. She smiled, sure. She was polite—Vivienne was never rude. But you spent two seconds around them, and you were going to get frostbite. I think Vivienne was actually happy when the police arrested Simona.”
“Do you think Vivienne framed her?”
“I don’t—” She stopped and checked my face. “I don’t know. When you said this might be connected—I don’t know what I thought.”
“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted Robert Kessler dead? I mean, I got the bare bones—Steven had an argument with him, and Margaux found the body. But anybody else?”
“It wasn’t Steven,” Whitney said, shaking her head. “Steven and I met over drinks that night. We were discussing some edits he’d sent me.”
“I didn’t realize Steven was your editor.”
She offered that strange look again, like somehow I kept missing the obvious. “We were all tangled up in each other’s lives back then. That was before Langstoff and Lock dropped me.”
And now Steven was dead too.
She kept watching me. She didn’t move. She didn’t even seem to breathe. And I had that animal response to too much eye contact: the need to shrink down, run away, find somewhere to hide.
“You’re serious?” she asked. “When you say who else might have wanted Robert dead?”
I nodded.
“And you think this person might have killed Vivienne too?” She picked up her coffee and set it down again. “Oh my God. And Steven.”
“It’s possible.”
“Did you know,” Whitney said with a fresh wariness, “that the person who finds the victim is often the killer?”
Of course I knew that. I was a mystery writer. But I restrained myself to a nod, and then I said, “But Margaux didn’t have a motive—”
“Yes,” Whitney said. “She did.” Setting aside her coffee, she leaned over the table, and her voice dropped so low that I had to inch closer to hear her. “Robert was the one who convinced Vivienne she didn’t need an agent anymore.”
“Wait, what?”
“Vivienne was going to fire Margaux. She was going to get rid of her. Vivienne was smart. She was savvy. She knew the business inside and out. Why give fifteen or twenty percent of her money to somebody for doing the work Vivienne could do herself?”
It wasn’t that simple, I knew—some writers had the fantasy that they could build a career in traditional publishing without an agent, usually under the assumption that they would handle the contracts and negotiations themselves or through a lawyer. And a few of them did manage to make it work. But the reality was that most agents’ value lay not in the negotiations but in their contacts with editors at various publishing houses. And editors changed. They retired, or they quit, or they moved houses. Writers who didn’t use agents often found that they didn’t need an agent until they did—and it was too late.
Someone like Vivienne, though—with her clout and sales record—could have made it work. And twenty percent of the take would have been significant, especially, as I knew firsthand, when Vivienne’s personal finances had been much more precarious than the world had ever known.
“This didn’t—” I stopped. “Let me guess: that’s not in the book.”
“Of course not. Because who wrote it?” Leaning back, Whitney pulled her purse into her lap. She looked smaller than she had, her shoulders hunched as she glanced around the room. “Vivienne controlled the story from the beginning.”
Chapter 18
After Whitney left, I was stuck with cold coffee and even colder thoughts.
On top of that, the conversation had strained my throat; it had registered only distantly at the time, mostly because of the mixture of adrenaline and intense focus that kind of, uh, interview brought out. Now, though, it hurt in earnest—a dull, scratchy throbbing that was like the worst strep throat in the world combined with a bruise. I grabbed a bottle of water and an iced coffee and hoped they’d help.
I took my time making my way across campus. The late afternoon had clotted into a not-so-creamy scum of clouds, with darker ones moving in from the west. Rain again, and not far off. Maybe not a lot, but more of the steady drizzle that was the hallmark of the Pacific Northwest. Without the sunshine, the day was colder, and the breeze cut through my jacket and made long, rushing sounds that wiped out everything else. A few other figures scurried across campus—several of them exhibiting that Oregonian trait: a complete imperviousness to rain and damp. (I swear to God, Bobby could go out in a monsoon and come back in dry as a bone, but those of us from warmer climes soaked up water like we were sponges.) And while cold water and iced coffee did feel great on my throat, they weren’t exactly ideal on a day that was well on its way to becoming blustery.
