Chapter 17 #2
“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.”