Death on Demand Read online

  The phone at the cash desk rang.

  Blast Max. He probably needed directions.

  Steeling herself, she stayed put.

  Would everybody come tonight?

  Her Sunday Night Specials, when the store was open only to writers, were popular. At least, they had been until now. Every Sunday evening, one of the Regulars provided an informal program. One Sunday, the Farleys, who wrote children’s mysteries, told the Regulars about Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who built a mansion high above the Hudson with her profits from the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books and several other series which first her father, then she, authored. The Stratemeyer syndicate had worked under nearly fifty pseudonyms and sold over one hundred million books. During one session, Harriet Edelman, whose own hero was infamously clever, traced the history of the comedy mystery from Mary Roberts Rinehart’s first injection of mild humor in The Circular Staircase through Constance and Gwenyth Little, Craig Rice, Donald Westlake, Stuart M. Kaminsky, and Joyce Porter to Gregory Mcdonald’s triumphantly cocky and irreverent Fletch books. Another Sunday, Captain McElroy, or Capt. Mac as they called him, drew on his experiences as a former police chief to explain with stolid thoroughness how to avoid leaving fingerprints on almost any kind of surface. He was an unpublished author, but warmly welcomed by the group because of his expertise—he’d spent several years early in his career in the Miami Police Department. One thing he’d learned: In searching for a kilter, try nearby cafes for descriptions of customers shortly after the murder. Killing makes people hungry.

  Until now, the Sunday evenings had been special and a lot of fun. Until last week, when Annie realized something odd and ugly was happening to her Sunday evenings. That night, Harriet Edelman had arrived early and made straight for the coffee bar at the back.

  “Give me some of that good Kona stuff.”

  Annie poured the dark, aromatic coffee into two white mugs and handed one to Harriet, whose battery of bracelets jangled musically as she took it. She stared down into the black coffee, then said savagely, “I swear to God, if you won’t screw an editor, you can’t get anywhere!”

  “Surely it’s not that bad. Besides, aren’t most editors women?”

  Harriet’s mouth twisted. “Maybe, but I still say you can’t get anywhere if you don’t have pull—and you’ve got a lot better chance if you live in Manhattan and know the bastards.” Her faded blond hair drooped across a high, domed forehead. Thick horn-rimmed glasses increased her owlishness. Oddly enough, Harriet wrote frothy mysteries which featured wryly funny heroes. Annie chalked it up as one of nature’s jokes.

  “Dropping sales, half-assed reviews, and if everything weren’t lousy enough,” Harriet continued bitterly, “some low-life wrote my editor and told her my last book had a stolen plot. Can you believe that?” Harriet’s voice rasped up into shrill outrage.

  “Oh, ignore it,” Annie soothed. “Didn’t someone once say there were only ten plots, and they’ve all been used?”

  Harriet wasn’t listening. Her sallow face glistened with anger. “Don’t think I don’t know who did it.”

  Annie looked at her with concern. The hatred in her voice was shocking, and horribly inappropriate against the snatches of conversation as the writers milled toward the tables in the coffee area.

  “Stick’s his best. No doubt about that.”

  “No, no. Switch is tighter, tenser.”

  “I’ll tell you who has the most original mind in crime fiction today—Tom Perry, bar none.”

  “Don’t tell me you still read Dorothy Savers?”

  Bullish voices, didactic, perhaps, but none with the frightening edge of desperation in Harriet’s.

  Harriet’s fingers dug into Annie’s arm. “If it really is him—if he did it, I’ll kill him.”

  Was it fate or irony or black humor that Elliot chose that moment to clap his hands for attention?

  Annie looked up sharply and broke free of Harriet’s grasp. What was Elliot up to? Emma was scheduled to speak tonight.

  The writers settled swiftly around the tables at the back of Death on Demand. Elliot stood near the coffee bar, the customary spot for the speaker. He clapped his hands again. “I know everyone’s eager to hear Emma tonight.”

  The Regulars looked obediently and expectantly toward Emma Clyde, whose fictional detective Marigold Rembrandt was second only to Miss Marple in readers’ affections and earned Emma an astounding seven figures a year. Plump, motherly, and utterly down-home, Emma always seemed slightly bewildered by her fame, but Annie noticed that her mind worked with the precision of an IBM PC jr.

  “No doubt Emma will be happy to share the secret of her enormous success,” Elliot continued unctuously. “You know, I really felt pretty uncomfortable when I realized I would be following her next week. However, I’ve given a lot of thought to the program I plan to present.”

  Ego, ego, Annie thought. Elliot can’t bear to spend a whole evening listening to another writer, so he’s going to horn in on Emma. She got ready to move forward and cut him off before he did any more damage.

  “I’ve been doing some investigating, some real investigating. You know, digging out those delicious little secrets people try so hard to hide.”

  “More true crime? Some shoplifter’s memoirs?” Fritz Hemphill’s thin voice was sardonic.

  Elliot’s head swiveled toward Fritz.

  Annie was reminded unpleasantly of a snake.

  Fritz wrote male adventure with blood, guts, and enough macho for a battalion of Green Berets.

  “Not a shoplifter. No, I have something much more special in mind. My publisher and I are convinced this will be a best-seller.”

  “Like Kiss a Stranger?” Fritz asked sarcastically.

  Oh, wow. Only Fritz would be courageous or crazy enough to say that aloud. Everyone knew Elliot’s last book was a bomb and had been remaindered six months after it came out. It was a true-crime book, a horrific description of a Hollywood starlet’s foolish and deadly passion for a hitchhiker.

  Someone snickered, probably Harriet.

  Elliot’s face darkened, but his voice remained pleasant.

  “No, this little volume will knock their socks off. You know how the public has this enormous appetite to know all about their idols? Dirty laundry and all? Well, I’ve decided to tell everybody the truth about a very special group. Don’t you agree it will make a hell of a book to tell all about some well-known writers? Mystery writers, that is.”

  The silence was absolute.

  “The real truth—all the gritty, nasty little secrets.” Elliot’s eyes glistened with malicious pleasure as he scanned the frozen faces of his listeners.

  “Sounds boring to me,” Emma said lightly, but her light blue eyes sparkled angrily. “Not enough sex appeal, Elliot.”

  “I can assure you, my dear, there will be plenty of sex.”

  That was last week. Everyone had stayed for Emma’s presentation, but they all scurried out afterward without the usual good-natured bickering and jousting. All week long Annie had procrastinated on deciding what—if anything—she could do to prevent tonight’s explosion.

  It was her shop. It was up to her.

  But, after all, these people were adults. They certainly didn’t need her to play Big Momma. They might even resent it.

  It was her store—and she resented Elliot using her evening to poke and gouge at her friends. Moreover, she wasn’t about to let him believe he’d cowed her with his threats to raise her rent.

  Okay. She would …

  Annie sat bolt upright in the cane chair and looked toward the central aisle. She couldn’t see it, of course, not from her comfortable bunging spot on this side of the diagonal bookshelves. She didn’t have to see the central aisle or into the coffee area to recognize that sound. When the back door to Death On Demand was pulled shut, a loose cupboard in the receiving room always snapped to with a sharp crack, like a .22 rifle.

  She reminded herself that it was Sunday morning, she was alone in he
r store, and the back door was locked. But she’d heard that sharp, unmistakable crack.

  Annie slipped to her feet, skirted the table, another cane chair, a floor lamp, and the clinging fronds of a fern. The central aisle was shadowy. Afraid she might attract another Mrs. Brawley, she hadn’t turned on the lights. She’d wanted peace and quiet to ponder her problems. So it was quite dim here in the center of the store. She could see a portion of the coffee area. It was utterly quiet, utterly still.

  She opened her mouth to call out, but there was something so heavy and ominous in the waiting silence that her throat closed.

  This is silly.

  But that cupboard had slammed shut. She’d heard it.

  Stealthily, feeling vaguely foolish, she edged down the central aisle, her eyes seeking out the shadowy corners, that dark splotch near the doorway to the delivery room.

  A sudden wave of panic swept over her. She remembered something Capt. Mac had said in his talk. “Listen to your instinct. If you ever feel, even for an instant, that something is wrong, dead wrong, run. Run and scream.”

  Terrific advice. Except she couldn’t scream. Her breath was bunched like a pineapple in her throat, and her legs wobbled.

  Annie turned toward the front of the store and crouched, like a track athlete waiting for the starter’s gun. Okay. As soon as she could force a deep breath, she was going to break and run for the front door and …

  Annie blew out the bulge of air in a whoosh and felt like a fool.

  She stood and walked a little unsteadily up the aisle and stopped to look into Agatha’s languorous green eyes.

  “You’d think I wrote mysteries, wouldn’t you, Agatha? What an imagination!” She scooped up the sleek black cat from her basket, which rested on top of the Christie section, and stroked her gleaming fur, knowing Agatha would tolerate the effrontery for only a moment. A predictably independent feline, Agatha never stayed in the same room with a stranger. In fact, with few exceptions, she fled to hide beneath her favorite fern the instant anyone entered the shop. Obviously no stranger had come into the storeroom. She’d probably imagined that noise. Perhaps it was the crack of a broken branch outside. In any event, it was time to stop behaving like a Barbara Michaels’ heroine.

  Agatha growled politely.

  Laughing partly from relief and partly from embarrassment, Annie put Agatha gently back on the shelf. Agatha, of course, jumped down. Everything was okay; it was just another Sunday morning. How absurd to imagine anyone would break into the shop. After all, there was absolutely no reason for anyone to break and enter. It wasn’t as though there would be cash in hand. She’d almost have to borrow money to buy lunch. The whole episode was just a product of her overly vivid imagination. Like reading My Cousin Rachel when she was fourteen and, for a doom-laden week, suspecting that Uncle Ambrose intended to do away with her.

  Nevertheless, she checked the back door. It was kicked. There was nothing to worry about. As for the evening, she would fix Elliot’s wagon. She would take the floor first and point out that the Sunday Night Specials were supposed to have programs beneficial to the writers, and she felt there was a lack of interest in Elliot’s program, and why didn’t they take a vote on it? That would put Elliot in his place, all right.

  The whistle was frankly admiring and subtly erotic.

  Annie didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t need to.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Dear Ms. Laurance, always so direct. I arrived on the ten-thirty ferry. Since there is only one ferry on Sunday morning, I was forced to count fiddler crabs while waiting. Fascinating creatures. When I reached your snug little island, I immediately rented a condo near the harbor and began my quest. I will confess I was surprised to find that the proprietress of Death On Demand is so slothful that she doesn’t open on Sundays, but I recalled that said proprietress is tiringly vigorous and deduced that she would probably be found on the beach, either jogging or swimming. How disappointed I am to find her stretched out on a beach towel with her face covered by the latest issue of Vogue.”

  Annie yanked the magazine aside, opened one eye, and squinted. “I just ran three miles on the beach. How did you know it was me?”

  “As has been said in perhaps another context, I would know that body anywhere.”

  She opened both eyes and laughed. He looked wonderful, of course. All six foot two inches of him. And she would know his body anywhere, every lean, muscular inch of it. To distract herself, she waved him down beside her.

  Max flipped out a blue-and-white striped Ralph Lauren towel and dropped down, spattering sand.

  “What took you three months?”

  He shoved a hand through his thick, tangly blond hair, and rolled over on his elbow to stare down with ink-blue eyes. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it was rude to ask direct questions?”

  She struggled to a sitting position and fished a sand-filmed bottle of Hawaiian Tropic from her beach bag. Studiously ignoring both Max’s body and his eyes, she began slapping the coconut-scented oil on her legs, overlooking his appreciative “m-mm.”

  “Why three months?” she repeated brusquely.

  “You didn’t call to tell me where you were.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  Annie looked up at him, and it was suddenly hard to breathe. “Dammit, Max, I was afraid you’d persuade me to come back to New York.”

  “Would that be so bad?”

  This side of Broward’s Rock faced out into the Atlantic. A clear, softly blue sky arched overhead. The air carried the pungent scents of salt water, tar, seaweed, and Annie’s coconut-scented suntan oil. The water stretched endlessly to the east, as richly green as pea soup; a gentle surf strummed a seven-mile length of oyster-gray sand. There was a sprinkling of sunbathers and swimmers scattered up and down the beach, enjoying the eighty-degree day, but no one was near them. This stretch of beach was all their own.

  “Max, it won’t work. You don’t work. Life is just a joke to you—a compendium of one-liners.”

  “So you’d like me better if I were earnest.” He frowned, then the corners of his mouth twitched. “Let’s see. What sufficiently important career could I pursue?” He leaned back on his elbows, staring pensively at the horizon.

  Annie fought down a disquieting desire to touch the mat of hair on his chest, glistening a light gold in the sunlight.

  Sitting bolt upright, he slapped his palm down and sand sprayed against her oiled legs. “I know. Annie, would you love me if I were a priest?”

  “Max!”

  He grinned. “Anglican, of course.”

  “Max.” She used both hands to shove him backward, but he caught her as he fell, and they rolled together in the sand.

  Max, who had helped brew the coffee, sniffed with theatrical appreciation when Annie poured him a mug. Lifting it to drink, he paused to look at the inscription in red cursive letters against the white background. “The Listening House. Do houses listen?”

  “That’s a title. If you looked on the bottom, you’d find the author’s name.”

  Obediently, he raised the mug high enough to see the bottom. “Mabel Seeley.”

  Annie waved her hand abstractedly toward the rows of mugs shelved behind the coffee bar as she filled the cream pitcher. “Each mug has the title of a book which is considered important in the history of mystery novels.” She put the cream pitcher beside the sugar bowl and reached for the corkscrew to open the bottles of sauvignon blanc.

  Max moved behind the coffee bar and called out an occasional name that attracted him. “The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Rasp, The Tragedy of Y, The Cape God Mystery, Rebecca, Home Sweet Homicide” He turned to look at her. “Where did you find these?”

  “Oh, I did them.”

  “In your little home kiln?”

  She laughed. “No, silly. I didn’t make them. I painted the titles.”

  “Annie, I learn something new about you all the time. It never occurred
to me that you could paint as well as act.”

  “I’m not exactly a threat to Van Gogh,” she pointed out crisply.

  He started to count the mugs stacked on the shelves behind the coffee bar but his attention soon strayed. “You haven’t read all those books, have you?”

  “Nope. But lots of them.”

  “A misspent youth, obviously.”

  “I suppose you were busy with Saint Augustine’s Confessions?”

  “Oh, in a manner of speaking. I suspect old Auggie would have been a Playboy man himself.”

  “The point is, he changed his ways.”

  “But not altogether for the better.”

  Since she wasn’t winning this exchange, she concentrated on completing the ham, salami, and cheese tray. Agatha twined expectantly around her ankle. Annie held down a piece of cheddar for her. “Cats aren’t supposed to eat cheese, silly.”

  Agatha demanded more, and, like a well-trained owner, Annie obliged.

  “How many do you expect?” Max asked.

  Among their other activities that afternoon, she’d told Max all about the Sunday evening sessions and Elliot Morgan. After all, it was something else to talk about besides Max’s disinclination to toil and her determination to treat life in the serious manner it deserved.

  She added them up, one finger after another.

  “Elliot himself, of course. Then there’s Emma Clyde. You know who she is. And the Farleys, Janis and Jeff. They write children’s mysteries. Their latest is The Secret of the Red Dragon. Harriet Edelman does those clever Harrison Macintosh books. Fritz Hemphill wrote Death in an Alley. His heroes are always sleazy and very, very tough. You know, the guy busts open the villain’s head with a tire tool, then gets beaned himself, slugs down some scotch, runs up a fire escape, and has sex on the tenth landing with a blonde he just met.”

  “That’s six.” Max paused teasingly. “Hey, maybe I could be an accountant.”

  Annie was dreading the coming session, but, somehow, that awareness couldn’t dampen the bubbly sense of fun she’d felt ever since Max dropped down onto the sand beside her. Now he stood looking at her ingenuously, his thick blond hair carefully combed and dampened, his face fresh from a shower, his white broadcloth shirt crisp, and she thought he looked wonderful standing by the coffee bar at Death On Demand.