Chapter 10 #2
“At first, nothing. Then, the lawsuits. It’s one of the rare times being attached to one of these international conglomerates has paid off; I don’t even think I’ve been named.”
“But you were fired?” Bobby said.
“Not fired, no. According to the lawyers I met with, firing might have been taken as an admission of guilt. Instead, I’ve been…
mothballed, let’s say. I go to work. Occasionally, they give me something to do—the last one was a celebrity cookbook that was ninety pages long, all juices.
The rest of the time, I sit there, perched on top of the bloated carcass of my career. ”
(Okay, he was definitely an editor—talk about figurative language.)
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That must be hard, to be cut off from the work you love.”
He raised the fresh glass in a silent toast.
“What happened when you saw Vivienne again?” Bobby asked.
Steven froze with the glass to his lips. Then he drank and set the glass on the bar. “You heard about yesterday.”
“What happened yesterday?” Bobby asked.
“If you already heard, we don’t need to go into it.”
“Why don’t you tell us what happened?”
(God, Bobby was such a cop, and I was totally here for it.)
“I didn’t hurt her,” he said. And then he laughed and raised his hand to his cheek. “If anything, she got me.”
Bobby didn’t say anything.
(He was way too good at this; if I ever had to keep a secret from him, I was going to run away to Canada.)
“I know what you’re thinking,” Steven said.
“I hated her for ruining my career. Yes. I did. But here’s the thing about being an editor.
You work with a lot of jerks. Authors have big egos.
Many of them don’t have a lot of social graces.
And, at the end of the day, what we’re doing is business, and you wouldn’t believe how thin-skinned they can be.
I don’t like a lot of my writers—” He hesitated.
“I didn’t like a lot of my writers. But I still worked with them.
And I knew a good book even when the writer in question was a handful. ”
It took me several seconds before I said, “You wanted to work with Vivienne?”
“Of course I wanted to work with her,” Steven said.
“We were a great team. I came in after she was already big, and that kind of transition can be rough on an author. But we hit the bestseller lists—God, I don’t even know how many times.
She’s an incredible writer. She was an incredible writer.
A talent you see once a generation. I know she was a bad person.
I know she did terrible things. But that didn’t change the books. ”
“She was your way back,” Bobby said.
“She didn’t see it like that.” Steven released his glass; his fingers trailed to the edge of the bar. “Things got heated. I was trying to make her understand.” He stopped again. “I shouldn’t have grabbed her.”
“What did you do then?”
“I drank until the bar closed.”
Bobby looked at me.
“We were talking to Margaux earlier,” I said.
Another of those flickers of surprise. And then his face locked down again.
“She mentioned you,” I said.
“You want to know who might want to kill Vivienne? You can put Margaux at the top of your list.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’ve still got a career. The last book Margaux sold? It was an origami how-to. Upper elementary. They sold about six hundred copies, last time I checked.” He delivered the final bit of the sentence with unmistakable satisfaction.
Bobby said, “Then why does Margaux think you might have had a reason to want to keep Vivienne silent?”
“That’s ridiculous.” But he grabbed his glass again, and his thumb worried the rim. “I told you: Vivienne was my way back.”
“Did Vivienne tell you that she knew she’d gotten one of the murders she’d solved wrong?” I asked.
One second. Two. Three.
“No,” Steven said. His cheeks were almost purple now. “That’s ridic—” He caught the repetition and changed it to “That’s insane.”
“Margaux says you called her and told her that Vivienne—”
“She’s lying. In the first place, that never happened. And in the second, if Vivienne had told me something like that, I would have reported it to the police.”
“That’s interesting,” Bobby said, “because Margaux has a recording of that call.”
I’d never seen Bobby lie before.
It. was. terrifying.
He didn’t blink. He didn’t skip a beat. He had zero tells.
“All right—” Steven said. His breathing had moved up in his chest. His thumb slipped on the glass, and it skittered across the bar.
Bourbon slapped onto the wood with a soft splash, and that brown-sugar smell rose up again.
He stared at the mess for a moment and dried his hands on his jeans.
“All right. All right, she might have—might have said something. But it was about the Nightingale murders, and by that point—”
“No,” I said, sitting up straighter on my stool.
“No, you said you came in after Vivienne was already a success. That means you didn’t work on The Nightingale Murders with her—that was her first big book.
She wouldn’t have been talking to you about that; she would have told you about one of her later books, one of the ones you edited. ”
It wasn’t necessarily true, but it felt true—electricity arcing between one truth and another.
Steven’s color dropped; he swayed on the stool, gray-faced except for a few red smears at his cheekbones. Then, shaking his head, he slid off his stool.
“Which book was she talking about?” I said.
“Mr. Block,” Bobby said. “You need to sit down.”
“What did she get wrong?” I said.
“No comment,” Steven mumbled, still shaking his head. He dropped his shoulder to force his way between us. “Leave me alone.”
I slid off the stool, but Bobby held out a hand. “He’s too wound up. Let him go; we’ll hit him again after he’s had a chance to stew.”
“Bobby, that’s diabolical.”
He shrugged, but his eyes tracked Steven as he left the bar, and he turned to follow him through the windows: Steven a bent, huddled figure, as though he were fighting against a headwind. And then he passed out of sight.
“Don’t look now,” Bobby muttered, “but I think we’re on Candid Camera.”
It took a lot of willpower not to start rubbernecking.
“South corner behind us,” Bobby said. “You can see him in the mirror.”
Since I had no idea which direction was south, I checked both corners.
And there was Julian, recording us on his phone.
“What in the world?” I said.
“Great question.”
“Should I talk to him—” I began to ask, but my phone buzzed.
I checked it and saw a number I didn’t recognize. I showed it to Bobby, who said, “Answer it.”
(This is why I keep him around.)
“Dash,” Thatcher said, and his voice was strange. Wrong. The words tumbled out too fast. “Someone attacked Charlie.”