Part 10 (1/2)

”Down, girl, and that's half a sandwich,” Maggie corrected, really not wanting that mental image burned into her mind. ”I only bought enough for the three of us. But, since you're willing to feed him, you can give him half of yours. I'll pile them all on a plate and you remember to only take half, okay? Oh, and he is cute,” Maggie said, lifting down plates from the cabinet.

”Cute? Cute? Suns.h.i.+ne, that's like saying the Grand Canyon at sunrise is cute. Is the Taj Mahal cute? No, cupcake-it's one of the freaking wonders of the world. And that man out there,” she said, pointing one long arm in the general direction of the living room, ”well, that man out there is the biggest, the blackest, the most killer man to ever draw breath. We clear now? You got that?”

Maggie giggled as she nodded her understanding, rather overjoyed to see someone else fl.u.s.tered besides her when it came to the men in or hoped to be in their lives. ”I'd say I'd gotten it in spades, but I don't know if that's a funny play on words between friends or if it will get my nose broken.”

J.P. seemed to consider this for a moment, and then said, ”No, it's funny. Just don't say it again, suns.h.i.+ne. And then you can tell me why you never told me Bruce McCrae is a friend of yours. That was cruel.”

”He isn't a friend, he's more of an acquaintance,” Maggie told her, spooning potato salad into a large bowl. She didn't like potato salad, but people seemed to serve this stuff at lunches. Then again, she really didn't do lunches. At least not lunches where you needed more than a paper napkin to hold your slice of pizza. She really had to grow up, if she was going to start having luncheons. ”He came to see me because he's upset about something, I think. I'm betting it's about poor Francis Oakes. Well, I'm not betting, because I already know it is. I just don't know exactly what he's upset about ... about Francis, that is.”

J.P. popped a potato chip into her mouth. ”Poor who? That was clear as mud, suns.h.i.+ne.”

Maggie explained as they loaded dishes and other paraphernalia onto a tray. ”So that's it. According to Steve, it was meant to look like suicide, but it was murder. The police just don't know why.”

”Well, maybe my soon-to-be honey out there has a few ideas on that one,” J.P. suggested, picking up the tray and heading for the living room once more. ”Here we go-who's hungry?”

Alex appeared next to Maggie's elbow and discreetly drew her over to the side of the room as J.P. and McCrae sat down at the table. ”I couldn't get any farther with him than polite chitchat. But he's probably here about Francis Oakes. Remember, we're not to know anything.”

”About the murder,” Maggie said, and then winced. ”d.a.m.n. I already told J.P. Oh, wait, she's my lawyer now, so that was privileged information, right? No, I suppose not. We'll just have to swear Bruce to secrecy, that's all.”

”McCrae? Not J.P.?”

Maggie looked toward the table, where J.P. was fluttering her eyelashes at the writer. ”It's probably too late for that one. She's about to tell him everything but her shoe size, and since I'm betting it's at least eleven, I don't blame her. Come on, we're being rude.”

”I believe we're safe with J.P.”

”Oh? What makes you say-you told her? While I was gone, you talked to her about Francis? Man, she is good-in the kitchen, she never let on that she already knew. Why did you tell her?”

”Simply idle conversation, my dear. Don't fret. Mr. McCrae,” Alex then said as he held out the third chair for Maggie, then sat down beside her, ”Maggie here tells me you knew Francis Oakes, the writer who died recently, is that right?”

McCrae nodded around a mouthful of potato salad.

”Suicide, or so they say. But I'm not so sure. It's the timing, see. So soon after I-well, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, aren't I?”

J.P. laid her hand on his arm. ”You just take your time, sugar.”

Maggie and Alex exchanged quick glances.

”Thanks, Jemima.”

Maggie and Alex exchanged quick glances again, and this time Maggie was grinning. The big bad lawyer's name was Jemima? All six feet of her? Maggie had wondered a time or two, but always decided that the J was for jugular, as in ”go for the.” What in h.e.l.l did the P stand for?

”I hate to push,” Alex said as J.P. and McCrae seemed to have gotten lost in each other's eyes, ”but I believe you said something about timing, Mr. McCrae?”

”Oh. Oh, yes, I did, didn't I,” McCrae said, looking at Alex, his smile sheepish. ”I nearly forgot why I came, although I'm so very glad I did, or I wouldn't have met Jemima. Oh, and please, call me Bruce, Alex.”

Maggie lost her appet.i.te. It wasn't that she thought J.P. was unattractive or anything like that but, well, she wasn't any Beyonce, either. Bruce, on the other hand, was an ebony Greek G.o.d. True, stranger things have happened. But have they happened so fast? Maggie didn't know what was going on ... she just didn't want to see her friend hurt, and J.P. was a friend, d.a.m.n it. You'd think the guy was lining up free legal service or something.

”You wanted to talk about Francis,” Maggie prodded, giving J.P. a gentle kick under the table, then rolling her eyes at her in a ”down, girl” look females usually understood.

J.P. spooned more potato salad onto McCrae's plate. Pitiful. Disillusioning. It was like she'd just learned that Martha Stewart ate frozen dinners over the sink.

”All right, it's like this. And Jemima, I'm sorry if this is upsetting-you too, Maggie-because this isn't exactly optimum lunchtime conversation. I, ah, I got this package in the mail the other day and ...”

”Yes, please do go on.” Now it was Alex nudging Maggie under the table, but she ignored him.

McCrae patted at his mouth with his napkin and pushed his chair away from the table, got to his feet. ”It was some idiot reader with a supposed grudge and too much time on his hands, that's what I figured. But then Sylvia Piedmonte called me out of the blue-you know her, Maggie?”

”No, I don't. Who is she?”

”You don't know her? Sylvia Piedmonte,” McCrae repeated in that annoying way people do when they darn well know they'd most certainly been heard the first time. ”She wrote Three Past Midnight and a half dozen other unfortunately forgettable mysteries for Kirk a long time ago-I don't remember who she's writing for now. In any event, I think she was sort of feeling me out, until she finally told me she and a couple other authors had gotten similar packages in the mail. Sylvia, Buzz Noonan, and Sylvia's good friend, Freddie Brandyce. Pretty much the same thing I got, and around the same time last week. She was calling around to other local writers she knew. She wanted to know if I got one, too. I guess we can't help it-looking for conspiracies everywhere. It must come with a writer's imagination.” He laid a hand on J.P.'s shoulder, gave it a squeeze. ”Forgive me, but it's not every day a person gets a dead rat in the mail.”

”O-kay,” Maggie said, putting down her own napkin, as playtime was certainly over now. ”Time to call Steve.”

”Wait a moment, if you please,” Alex told her, getting to his feet. ”Please, allow me a question, if you don't mind. Are you saying that you, and other writers in this area-you did say local, correct?-that you all received packages containing dead rats?”

”Yeah, that's exactly what I said,” McCrae told him.

”And not just the rats. There were vaguely threatening notes, too, inside the same packages.” He shook his head. ”Poems. I took the rat and the poem-the package, all of it-to the police station the same day I got it, and the sergeant at the desk told me to get the expletive-deleted rat out of his precinct house and only come back again if I got a box with a human finger in it or something, unless I wanted him to lock me up for public littering.” He smiled weakly at J.P. ”You have to love New York, right?”

”So what did you do with it-the rat and everything, I mean? It's all potential evidence, you know, and should have been preserved,” J.P. told him, at last acting like a lawyer and not some moonstruck teenage girl.

Bruce was no longer looking all that lover-like. ”Do with it? I certainly wasn't going to take the d.a.m.n thing home with me and have it bronzed.”

Alex chuckled quietly at that and Maggie threw him a questioning look, but he seemed to be avoiding her eyes.

”So-what did you do with it?” Maggie asked, just to cut the sudden tension between Bruce and J.P. That had been a short-lived love affair.

”I threw it in the first trash can I pa.s.sed and tried to forget about it. But then, when Sylvia called, I became more concerned. She'd already talked to Freddie, who, like Sylvia, had already tossed his rat in the garbage-just in case anyone was going to ask-and Buzz is in Africa, doing research. But his housekeeper told Sylvia that he had received a package that had an odor to it, so she'd thrown it out, unopened.”

”So there's no evidence of any of these rats? That's too bad,” J.P. said. ”Are you going to eat the other half of that sandwich?”

Bruce sat down again and put his hand on J.P.'s and gave it a squeeze. ”I'm sorry, Jemima, I was being abrupt. Please forgive me.”

”That's all right, sweetie,” J.P. purred, falling right back into goofy mode. ”And, please, go on. I don't want to miss a word.”

Maggie leaned over toward Alex and whispered, ”Pull up the pants legs, it's too late to save the shoes.”

Alex smiled at her. ”You're such a romantic, my dear.”

”Where was I? Oh, right. Buzz had to have gotten another rat, right? That made four rats, if anyone's counting. That was when I realized what Sylvia already knew, that there was a pattern here, and that was troubling. And all of us living here, in and around Manhattan. And then I read about Francis Oakes in the newspaper and ... and I began to wonder. We're all Toland Books authors, or at least we all were. I mean, h.e.l.l, the December royalties couldn't have been that bad, right? So I played our special writer's game of what if. What if Oakes had gotten a rat in the mail, like the rest of us? What if he'd killed himself over it? Worse, what if the rats are just warnings, and the next step is murder, with poor Francis being the first victim? h.e.l.l, Sylvia's already on a plane to California, to stay with her daughter, and Freddie took off for his cabin in Maine. Let me tell you, they're taking this seriously.”

”Because you told them about Francis Oakes, and your theory?”

”Of course I told them, Maggie. Why wouldn't I? And, yes, because I also told them about how the cop wouldn't take my rat seriously. In the paper, it was suspected suicide, not definitely suicide, so it would only be a bunch of fiction writers-all of us mystery writers at that-up against the fact that n.o.body had been hurt. So now I'm trying to find out how many others got packages, and warn them. Was everyone at Toland Books getting rats for Christmas this year? I know Bernie's a bit of a flake, but cripes! No, it has to be some kind of vendetta. Against mystery writers in general, maybe, or just against Toland Books authors-but something sure as h.e.l.l is going on.”

”A writer's fertile imagination,” Alex said. ”Fascinating how you all think in scenarios, and worst-case scenarios at that. I think I could safely say that Maggie here would have come to the same conclusions.”

J.P. looked at Maggie. ”You get a package, suns.h.i.+ne?”

”Nope. It's hard to believe, but maybe I've finally lucked out on something,” she told the attorney. ”Still,” she said, winking at Alex, ”we'll play, right? Alex here loves looking for clues. Don't you, Alex? We'll call Steve, fill him in, and then ask to tag along.”