"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? Sunshine, 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, sunshine. 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, sunshine."
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, sunshine?"
"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."
"That"s the second time you mentioned a Steve. Who"s Steve?" McCrae asked, leaning his elbows on the table, which J.P. seemed to take as an invitation to rub his back. "Another writer?"
"No, he"s a New York City police homicide lieutenant. We"ve worked together before, on other cases," Maggie told him, feeling some pride as she spoke, whether that pride was in Steve or in the fact that she "worked" with him, she was not anxious to consider at the moment. "Not only that, but he was just here a while ago, to ask if I knew Francis, because he"s been a.s.signed as primary on the case." With Alex"s eyes on her, but pretending not to notice that, she confided, writer to writer, "You were right, Bruce. Francis was murdered."
McCrae sat back, and then slammed a fist on the tabletop, rattling the plates. "I knew it!"
"Not that he was supposed to know it," Alex said in an undertone as he dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. "I do believe now is the moment you"re to swear him to secrecy, my dear."
Maggie shrugged. Alex was jealous, that"s all. He liked to be the big guy, the guy in charge. The great Regency sleuth. Yeah, well, tough beans. "Bruce can help, Alex," she told him as he handed her a plate and motioned that she should follow him into the kitchen. "Think about it," she said as she loaded the plates into the dishwasher. "Bruce writes mysteries. I write mysteries. Jemima is an ex-cop turned top-notch defense attorney. You"re a ... well, you"re nosy. Put us all together, and we make a pretty decent team. Steve could do worse than to have us on the case. And, hey, for once I"m not a part of the case. Thank G.o.d. I mean, think of the novelty of it, just for starters. I love being on the outside looking in-because I sure wouldn"t want to think that I could be the target of some nutcase with a rat supply."
"Yes, about that," Alex said, taking hold of her shoulder as she started to return to the living room, as leaving those two lovebirds alone wasn"t in her plans for the afternoon. "I think we should discuss that particular conclusion a bit more."
Maggie turned to him. Slowly. Looking up at him through her mascaraed lashes. "No. Oh, no. You"re not going to tell me that-"
"Maggie? Alex? You"d better get in here!"
"She sounds upset," Alex said, motioning for Maggie to lead the way.
Maggie didn"t move. "I got one, didn"t I? I got my own personal rat-and you can take that one any way you want to." Her mind was ticking over in double time. "My bra. You grabbed that package out of my hands so fast I-that"s why, right? You thought it was another rat? Or maybe something even worse? And that"s why you"ve been sticking to me since-since we got home! You"ve known since then?"
"Maggie! It"s Sterling. He doesn"t look so good."
Alex was out of the kitchen before Maggie could fully digest J.P."s last words, because her mind was too full with the humiliating idea that Alex had taken her to bed last night, stayed with her last night, because he was worried about her.
No! She wouldn"t think that way. Too Stupid To Live heroines thought that way in bad romances, and the author then spent three hundred pages trying to get the hero and heroine to for crying out loud, talk to each other. She was not a TSTL heroine, d.a.m.n it. Alex had not taken her to bed. She"d walked there, on her own, knowing what she was doing, what they both were doing-succ.u.mbing to the inevitable.
But that didn"t mean she wasn"t going to kill him, first chance she got!
"Maggie! Bring water and towels!"
"Oh, s.h.i.t-Sterling?" Maggie flew into action at Alex"s command, grabbing a clean kitchen towel and running for the living room, only to stop when she saw Sterling sitting on one of the couches, looking like he"d been run over by a truck. Several times.
His wig and beard were hanging askew, his bell-tipped Santa hat clutched in both his hands. There was black street dirt all over him, as if he"d been rolling around in a slushy gutter, and the right shoulder seam had been ripped open. He had the beginnings of a black eye and his bottom lip was split.
And he was smiling.
"Sterling? Honey, what happened to you?" Maggie asked, pressing the towel to his lip.
"Nothing too terrible, actually. I was accosted on my way home," he told her, taking the towel from her and dabbing at his own lip. "But I prevailed, and very little the worse for wear."
The door flew open and Socks skidded into the room, fairly breathless. "He all right? I"ve got his chimney safe downstairs, but I couldn"t come up with him because Mr. Bolton in Six-B needed me to-wow, he"s going to have a shiner, isn"t he? Well, maybe not-but that eye isn"t going to win him any beauty contests. Who"d mug Santa?"
"I lost my bell, Maggie," Sterling told her, slowly pulling off his wig and the connected beard. "But it did make a formidable weapon, I will say that. They didn"t get any of my silver."
"You should have given it to them, Sterling," Maggie told him, looking at his rapidly bruising cheekbone. "They could have had weapons. Knives. Guns. Didn"t anyone try to help you?"
"It"s New York, Little Mary Sunshine, remember? A good mugging is like street theater to most people," J.P. said, gathering up her purse and jacket. "Bruce? You ready to go, sugar?"
Alex had been very quiet, Maggie realized. She knew that particular silence-it was the one that did not bode well for whoever had attacked his friend if the Viscount Saint Just found him. "Alex? Shouldn"t they stay?"
"I think we know all we need to know from them at the moment, my dear," he answered dismissingly as he continued to look at Sterling. "Bruce? I believe you"ll be hearing from Left-tenant Wendell by this evening. Please tell him everything you"ve told us. And do take care, mind how you go."
J.P. slipped her arm though McCrae"s. "Oh, don"t worry about that, handsome. He won"t be alone."
"I"ve got to have a talk with that woman about the concept of playing hard to get," Maggie said as Alex helped Sterling to his feet. "Do you hurt anywhere, Sterling? Do you want to go to the emergency room? Alex, don"t you think we should take him to the emergency room, get him checked out?"
"Certainly," he agreed. "Are you in need of medical treatment, Sterling?"
"No, thank you very much, and all of that," Santa Sterling said, heading for the door. "I think a good soak will be enough. But what of my lovely uniform, Saint Just? It"s fairly well ruined, isn"t it?"
"That doesn"t matter, Sterling," Maggie told him sternly, "because you"re not going back out there again. It"s too dangerous, if this could have happened in the middle of the day, with people all around."
"Oh, no, Maggie, I must do my duty," Sterling told her. "I gave my word, and the little children are depending on me."
"Ah, sweetheart, I know, but-"
"He"ll be fine, Maggie," Alex told her, opening the door for his friend. "You just go strip out of that ruined suit, Sterling, and I"ll be there directly to run you a tub."
"You"re going to run his tub for him? The great Viscount Saint Just?" Maggie asked as the door closed behind Sterling. "To quote a line from some cartoon-Fractured Fairy Tales, I think-"Now there"s something you don"t see every day, Chauncey." "
Alex smiled thinly. "I do ask, from time to time, that you develop Clarence"s character more fully, in the hope he might one day join us here. The complete gentleman"s gentleman. How I miss him."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Maggie said, waving away that old argument-as if she could plan having one of her characters poof into her life ... their lives. "I mean it, Alex. Sterling isn"t going back out there."
"He would be greatly disappointed if we were to deny him the pleasure," Alex pointed out. "But not to worry your head about such things. I already have an idea."
Maggie held out her hands in a cla.s.sic "whoa" gesture. "No. I know what that means. You"re planning to find whoever mugged Sterling and ... and cane them, or something ... make their guts into garters ... whatever. And that"s not happening. We"ve had this discussion, Alex, and you can"t do that, remember? That"s called taking the law into your own hands, and we frown on that here in the real world. I ... I won"t allow it."
Alex smiled in a very kind, maddeningly condescending sort of way. "Maggie. My dearest girl. It would be impossible for me to locate a few random thugs in this large metropolis. I would have absolutely no idea where to begin."
"You promise?"
"I promise. Now, if you"ll please excuse me, I need to run Sterling"s bath, and then make a few calls."
"Oh yeah?" Maggie said, walking after him. "Who to? To whom? h.e.l.l-who are you calling?"
"Why, Vernon and George, of course. It has occurred to me that they will make exemplary bodyguards. Is it street smarts? Yes, I believe that"s the term. Vernon and George should have them in abundance, don"t you think? Or, to put it another way-it takes one to know one? If there are suspicious characters wandering about, eyeing Sterling and intent on anything nefarious, those two exemplary young gentlemen will quickly send them about their business, don"t you think?"
"You"re kidding. You"re going to have them guarding Sterling? They"d scare everyone away and Sterling wouldn"t make a cent."
Alex stopped, seemed to ponder this for a moment. "Yes, I see your point. George would do well enough, but Vernon could prove a problem."
"People nicknamed Snake often do prove to be problems," Maggie pointed out, trying not to smile.
"Yes. I"ll have to think on that. In the meantime, if you would please get in touch with the good left-tenant? I do believe it"s time we all spoke again. In fact, I believe it would be easier, and very possibly better for us, if he meets Bruce McCrae here as well. For some time this evening-if the good left-tenant is free, that is. We probably should speak to him about your rat."
"You got that in one! And, just to put us both on the record here, you"re lucky I"m speaking to you at all. Hiding the rat from me like that. The more I think about it, the madder I get. What were you thinking?"