Convicted (3 page)

“Kayla doesn't get along with her father's third wife. Mrs. Harding—my neighbor, I mean—Mrs. Gertrude Harding—doesn't like Mrs. Lina Harding. Gertrude was on a long cruise when the trouble came up about the stolen car. She believes her son would have paid for an attorney, but Lina talked him into ‘letting Kayla learn her lesson,' as Lina put it.”

“Is Mrs. Harding well-to-do?”

“She's not super-rich, but she does have some money. She likes nice things.”

“Mindy is Lina's only child?”

“Yes.”

“And Mr. Harding—is he well-off?”

“They do fine, as far as I know. Lina works, so there is extra income.”

“Where does she work?”

“In a doctor's office. She's an office manager or something like that. No medical degree.”

“Hmm. Do you have your neighbors' phone numbers?”

“Of course.”

Of course. “Would you please call Mrs. Lumfort and ask her if Lina works in the office of the doctor she went to see on Wednesday?”

A few minutes later, we had the answer. Yes. Same office. I was beginning to see that the “mature” person who rented the truck was described to me by her age—Lina was probably in her forties—and not her behavior.

“Next, Mrs. Redmond. Ask her to call Lola and try to discover if her hair appointment was changed from its usual time at the request of Lina or Mindy Harding.”

Mrs. Redmond was a little hard-of-hearing, so everyone in our building and the buildings on either side of ours heard Cokie's side of the conversation. Lydia came in to find out what was going on. Eventually we learned that Mindy had influenced the time of the appointment change.

Cokie stared at me wide-eyed after she hung up. “Oh my God.”

“What?”

“Lola's. I wonder what Mindy's hair looks like.”

We started laughing. Lydia probably thought we were losing it.

“How is Gertrude Harding's hearing?” I asked.

“Excellent,” Cokie answered.

“Call her, tell her about the singing clowns, and then ask her if she'll talk to me for a minute.”

She did so, and after the understandable time it took to get past the story of the musical number in the alley, she handed the phone to me.

“Mrs. Harding, I know I'm a complete stranger to you, and you probably think I'm too young to know anything, but it's really important that you take my advice.”

“Yes?” she said doubtfully.

“It's my belief that while a show was being put on to distract Cokie, something was taken from you. Some cash, perhaps, or more likely some jewelry, or something else that's valuable and portable. If you haven't discovered this for yourself, I'd bet you anything that either your daughter-in-law or Mindy—perhaps even your son—will ask you about some valuable object, you'll go to look for it, and it will be missing. My theory is that it is still in the house, and has been placed somewhere that will ensure that Kayla will be blamed. It may already be planted somewhere in her bedroom or in her purse or in her clothing.”

There was a long silence. About the time I decided she'd hung up on me and the dial tone just hadn't kicked in yet, she said, “As it happens, this morning I noticed that a diamond tennis bracelet is missing. And your advice?”

“Have you said anything to anyone other than me?”

“No.”

“Great. First, look for it now. It will be in Kayla's room, but she didn't steal it.”

“I'm sure she didn't. Why are you sure?”

“She wouldn't need clowns.”

“No, of course not.”

“You could set a trap for those who planned this, or at least amuse yourself when they try to reveal its hiding place. I don't have advice about that part. It's your family.”

“Sad but true.”

“I'm a little worried about you, Mrs. Harding. I think someone may covet your belongings, if you know what I mean, and greed can inspire worse things than false accusations or a clown show. Perhaps you might know an attorney or someone who could let the planners know that this didn't work, and that if anything happens to you—”

“Thank you for your concern, Miss Kelly. I'll think over my options. Tell Cokie I'll see her at the canasta game next week.”

I NEVER GOT THE DETAILS
about what Mrs. Gertrude Harding did from there, but I do know that within a few weeks, her son filed for a divorce from Lina, who did not contest it. She took Mindy with her when she moved to Florida. Cokie later told me that Kayla and her father were spending more time together.

I also learned that there had been a change in management at one of the rental company locations.

I eventually tracked down the clowns. In my freshman year of college I had dated a stage manager, and while that didn't last long, the friendships I'd made with other theater-arts majors had fared better. I asked a few of those friends to let me know if anyone had bragged about a strange gig that involved clown costumes, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and a rental van.

In about three days I had a list of names, and a couple of my actor friends arranged a meeting with them.

A few minutes' conversation made it clear that the clowns had no idea that they might have been accessories to a burglary, or potentially, even a murder. When I pointed this out, I could tell that for the near future, the alleys of Las Piernas were safe from other spontaneous musical productions. I also pointed out that they had frightened Cokie, and made her feel ridiculed.

“So what are you going to do about it?” the beefier of my actor friends asked them.

They shrugged and looked helplessly at me.

“She does a lot of stuff for the old people on her street. Maybe you could apologize, and then offer to help her do errands for them for a week or something.” I smiled. “If that happened, I might not give any names to the police or the rental company.”

That was 99.9 percent bluff on my part, but it worked. Apparently no one loves theater as much as a drama major.

NONE OF THIS EVER MADE
the papers. And as far as I know, the police didn't hear about it.

Cokie started a business to provide assistance and home care to seniors. She invited Lydia and me to her wedding. Aside from the bride and groom, Kayla Harding, and us, Cokie's parents were the youngest people there—she'd invited all her elderly friends. It was one of the coolest (and rowdiest) weddings ever.

Oh yes. She ended up marrying some clown.

H
arriet read the letter again. She wasn't sure why; each re-reading upset her as much if not more than the first.

“Once again, I must tell you that the ending of this story positively reeks,” Kitty Craig had written. “I can't imagine any reader believing Lord Harold Wiggins would choose this method of killing off his enemy, nor would any reader believe he could manage to mask the taste of antimony by mixing it into the braunschweiger. Rewrite.”

Harriet Bently had been writing the popular Lord Harold Wiggins series for ten years now. She knew exactly what dearest Harry (as only Harriet had liberty to call him) would choose to do in
any
given situation, even if her editor did not. After all, Harry had moved into Harriet's life—lock, stock and barrel. No, she didn't invite him to tea like a child's imaginary friend; but she thought of him constantly, and had grown comfortable with his presence in her life. Like any series character and his author, they had become quite attached to each other.

It was more than Kitty Craig's rude tone that upset her. Kitty was notorious in the publishing industry for her biting, sarcastic remarks; Harriet told herself (not entirely successfully) that she shouldn't take Kitty's insults personally. What upset Harriet was Kitty's disregard for Lord Harold Wiggins's intelligence. His trademark was to effect justice without costing the English taxpayers a farthing for an imprisonment or a trial; once Lord Wiggins knew who the guilty party was, he cleverly killed the villain. In this book, Lord Wiggins made sure the poisoner Monroe would never age another day by slipping him a lethal dose of antimony. Monroe was a villain of the first water, and certainly deserved the punishment Lord Wiggins meted out. Harriet couldn't help but feel proud of her protagonist.

Her previous editor, Linda Lucerne, had loved Lord Harold almost as much as she did. Linda never changed much more than a punctuation mark; Kitty used industrial strength black markers to X through pages of manuscript at a time. Pages that had taken hours of research, planning, writing, and rewriting before they were ever mailed to Shoehorn, Dunstreet and Matthews (known affectionately as SDM), the esteemed publishers of the Lord Harold Wiggins series.

Yes, Linda Lucerne had loved Harriet's style, and said so from the moment she accepted the first novel,
Lord Wiggins Makes Hay While the Sun Shines
. And make hay he did. Linda's faith was proved justified, and the success of
Makes Hay
was repeated in
Lord Wiggins Beards the Lion in His Den
and the next seven Lord Harold Wiggins books. Alas, Linda had suffered a heart attack just after the tenth book,
Lord Wiggins Throws Pearls Before Swine
, had been mailed off to SDM. Upon her recovery, she had opted for retirement from the publishing industry.

Harriet tried hard to remember a sin she might have committed that would have justified so mean a punishment as having Kitty Craig become her new editor.

She had known other writers who had suffered under Kitty's abuses. Upon learning that Kitty would be her editor, Harriet had complained long and loud to her agent. But Wendall had pointed out that Kitty had been personally chosen for Harriet by Mr. William Shoehorn III. He had also mentioned that unless she was willing to come up with a new main character, they had no hope of moving to another publishing house. SDM owned Lord Harold. Wendall urged her to be open-minded.

Harriet loved Lord Wiggins too much to forsake him, and so she had tried to follow Wendall's advice. Tried, that is, until she received her first editorial letter from Kitty Craig. A long list of changes were demanded, each demand phrased in abusive language. The one that bothered Harriet the most was the demand to change the ending:

“How absolutely boring! Monroe dies when he swallows lemonade laced with strychnine. Strychnine! That old saw? Is your imagination so limited? Formula writer though you are, I would hope you could come up with something a tad more original.”

Old saw indeed! Strychnine was a classic poison, she lamented, famous throughout detective fiction. But Kitty would hear none of it.

Harriet decided to be big about it; after all, she didn't want a reputation as the sort of writer who simply couldn't let go of a word she'd written. She was no rank amateur. She could bear the burden of criticism; being showered with the unwanted opinions of others was inevitable in her profession. And so she set herself to the painful task of revising the ending of
Pearls Before Swine
. That in turn meant that she had to revise a number of passages in the story, but she did not complain.

In fact, by the time she mailed off her new version, she was quite pleased with it. This time, Lord Wiggins offered Monroe a piece of chocolate cake chock-full of Catapres. It had been a bit tricky for dear Harry to obtain the drug, but she had managed it. Monroe had suffered heart failure thirty minutes after eating his dessert, allowing Lord Harold all the time in the world to leave the scene. It was certainly not as popular in fiction as strychnine, so Harriet thought Kitty might be contented.

Kitty hated it.

“You are going to have to do better than this. Catapres? Could you possibly devise anything more obscure? No reader is going to recognize this as a poison. Crimeny, it sounds like a resort that would appeal to people from the Bronx.”

Not being from New York, Harriet couldn't guess what Kitty meant by her last remark. She steamed and stewed for a while and then went back to work. Now it was a challenge.

In version three, Lord Harold arranged for Monroe to be bitten repeatedly by a Gila monster.

“What utter nonsense!” Kitty wrote. “How the heck does an English lord happen to have a twenty-inch Arizona desert lizard hanging about?”

Even Harriet had to admit that the Gila monster wasn't her best effort. She spent a little more time on version four. There might not be many Gila monsters roaming about the English countryside, but she knew that rhododendrons weren't so rare. And so it was that Lord Harold made tea from the deadly leaves, and served it with scones to the unsuspecting Monroe.

“Harriet, please. You are trying my patience. This is so unimaginative. If you want this to sell anywhere outside of the East Lansing Lawn and Garden Club, rewrite.”

Harriet wasn't even sure how she found the nerve to try a fifth time. She needed to publish annually to maintain the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed, and Kitty's demands were delaying the publication date of
Pearls Before Swine
. She had arranged to attend the annual Mystery World Awards Banquet, the Whodundunits. Her flight from Los Angeles to New York was booked, the hotel arrangements made. But now she wasn't sure she could face the inquires of her fellow authors; they were bound to notice that the next Lord Harold Wiggins book had not arrived on schedule.