Mint Julep Murder (19 page)

Max, of course, chose grilled salmon ribbons.

The food in the hotel restaurant was not only superb, but, despite the crush of Festival attendees, the service was splendid.

When the waitress brought the hors d’ oeuvres, Annie reached over and speared one of Max’s salmon ribbons, swiping it through the dill sauce.
Mmmm. Mmmm.
“Okay,” she said briskly and quite firmly, although she didn’t meet his eyes. “I’m stirring the pot.” She kept her voice light and positive as she described her proposed venture into publishing.

Max didn’t let her finish. “Annie, that’s crazy!”

She refused to be put on the defensive. “Max, I had to do something! Detective Wheeler won’t listen to me.”

“So you set yourself up to be the next victim!” His face was stern. “I’ll talk to Wheeler, get permission for you to get out of here.”

“For starters, I don’t drink bourbon.” Annie knew that begged the question, so she continued hurriedly, “And I’ll be around people all day,” which hadn’t helped Hazlitt, so she talked even faster, “and at night I’ll be safe with you.” She resisted clasping a hand to her heart and calling out, “My hero!” Even Max’s sense of humor had its limits. “Besides, the murderer’s not going to be dumb enough to simply take it for granted that I know something dangerous to him. Or her. I wouldn’t try something that hokey.” Annie said this piously, then continued her departure from the truth. “That wasn’t why I did it. I did it because”—a little voice in her head murmured—
because Leah Kirby made you mad.
—“Because,” she said firmly, “I figured I could use the threat of publicity to get some information. And it worked! Emma Clyde’s going to go around the Festival with me this afternoon and we’ll talk to people and get the real skinny on the Medallion winners. I’ll get more inside stuff than Wheeler—even if he’s looking—could come up with in months. Emma knows
everybody.”

Max wasn’t mollified. “Annie, look at me.”

Reluctantly, she met his gaze.

“You march right around the Festival and tell each Medallion winner you’ve changed your mind.”

“No.” Surely that was a hint of sour cream in the cakes?

He sighed. “At the very least, promise me you won’t—
under any circumstances—go off alone with any of those people.”

“Cross my heart.”

“Annie, for God’s sake!”

She laughed. “I mean it. I won’t. And I won’t eat or drink anything you haven’t tasted first.”

Their entrees arrived, fresh snapper for Max, oyster pie with mushrooms for Annie. She gravely waited for him to take the first bite of her lunch, then with gusto plunged her fork into the baked dish.

Max squeezed lemon on his snapper. “Annie, seriously, you must be careful. Kenneth’s murderer is as cold and cruel as killers come.”

Annie looked at her husband thoughtfully. Max was right, of course. Because it was almost certain Kenneth’s killer was at that cocktail party and saw the hideous result of those drops of nicotine. And watched without an apparent qualm.

Of course, they couldn’t be absolutely sure of that. It seemed clear now that the bottle of whiskey had been poisoned between ten o’clock in the morning and Willie Hazlitt’s return to the suite at three. So, the poisoner need not have been present.

All the Medallion winners were there.

If one of them was the poisoner, he or she certainly would have been present.

An absence would have been noted.

Annie tried to remember the faces of the Medallion winners at the cocktail party.

Leah Kirby had been deep in conversation with her blond friend. Leah was pleased about something. And not, Annie thought, pleased in a nice way. There was an unmistakable air of smugness in her good humor.

Missy Sinclair was slyly watchful, amused.

Alan Blake—Annie frowned—Alan Blake was furious. He’d been talking to someone, and he was scowling. Not the way to charm booksellers or readers.

Jimmy Jay Crabtree, his face arrogant and self-congratulatory, was spewing out his usual invective.

Emma Clyde was self-possessed and amused as she looked speculatively at their host just after discussing methods of murder. Surely that was nothing more than a deadly coincidence!

Unfortunately, Annie hadn’t looked at the authors after Kenneth downed that fatal drink.

Except for Emma, of course. Emma’s face was composed as she moved toward the stricken man. Solemn. Not unaffected. And she had come forward. She need not have.

But Emma was never reluctant to take charge.

Would she have done so, if she were the poisoner?

Perhaps.

As for the rest of the authors, Annie was too caught up in the horror of the moment to notice their reactions.

She certainly had seen Willie, his face stricken with panic and helplessness, every vestige of his charm and easy humor erased.

“Max, that’s what we have to find out. Which one of them is utterly cold and cruel.” She put down her fork, reached for her purse, and lifted out a notepad. “All right, here are the people who could most easily have poisoned the bottle of bourbon.” She wrote the names of the five Medallion winners and Willie Hazlitt. To be complete, she added:

She paused. “Max, the woman who took that box out of the suite. She could have poisoned the bourbon.”

Annie wrote down:

Then, with a swoop, she put X’s by the last five entries, and at the bottom of the page an asterisk with the notation:
X indicates no discernible motive.

She paused, tapped the pen on the table, then printed a title:

Annie handed the sheet to Max.

He pointed to the entry on Alan Blake. “Why the question marks?”

“I don’t have any sense of who Blake is. He’s good-looking and he knows it. He’s got a great smile and a smooth voice. He writes romantic stuff about a sensitive guy who knows how to make a woman feel special. Of course, the guy—he’s named Burke or Clint or Travis—anyway Burke/Clint/Travis makes Susan/Jane/Esther feel special, then he fades into the distance, sadly downcast that their love can’t last, but he must move on and leave her to fulfill her obligations. Burke/Clint/Travis wears khakis and running shoes and smokes a pipe and makes soulful observations about Life.”

“Do I detect a lack of enthusiasm?”

“You might. For all I know, Blake believes every word of it. But I don’t think so. He was awfully short on charm when I talked to him this morning.” And she’d not felt exactly scared, but darned uncomfortable when he’d pressed her to say what she knew. “He figured out really quick that the police were after me—and he thought it was funny in a slimy kind of way. That’s what I think about him. He’s slime.”

“But you went ahead and left him a note about the book proposal?”

Annie shrugged. “I’ll be honest. I don’t think it will bother him a bit.” She whisked through the papers in her folder, checked the paragraph on “Lake Allen” in Kenneth’s proposal. Hollywood. She wished she’d seen this before she’d talked to Blake. But the afternoon wasn’t over.

“… trying to find out more about Jimmy Jay’s secretary,” Max explained. “She won’t talk about the car wreck that killed that little girl. Crabtree’s always a jerk. He loves being a jerk. Why didn’t he dump his secretary when she caused him trouble? You know it caused trouble with his insurance company. But he kept her on. Why?”

Annie was pretty sure she could answer that one. “I’ll bet she’s one sexy broad.”

“Could be,” Max agreed. “Anyway, I’m working on that.”

“Hi, Annie, Max.”

They looked up. Max stood and shook hands with Frank Saulter.

“Hi, Chief.” Annie glowed. “Thanks. Thanks for coming.”

“Oh, sure.” Saulter sat down and glanced around the dining room. His weathered face had the hard-to-read composure cops acquire. His dark eyes moved slowly. They didn’t miss anything. “Pretty fancy hotel. You can bet they want this cleared up quick.” He faced them. “Have you talked to the manager?”

“I will,” Max promised. “What’s the temperature at the sheriff’s department, Frank?”

“Strictly between us?”

They both nodded.

“Puzzled. They’ve got Annie’s prints on the glass that held the poison. And, so far, Annie’s the only person they’ve come up with who’d fussed with Hazlitt. At least, fussed with him around here. They’re digging around, trying to find a closer connection between Annie and Hazlitt.”

“They won’t.” Annie was impatient. “Frank, are they
doing anything about the authors, the ones Kenneth was going to write about?”

“Oh, yeah. But not because of that.” His tone dismissed the importance of the novel. “They’re on the list because they had access to the Hazlitt suite during the day.”

At least she wasn’t the only suspect, even if she headed the list.

The very short list. Barring Unknown, of course. Annie didn’t consider Unknown to be a great possibility. Max was too careful and thorough to have missed anyone with a serious reason to do away with Kenneth. As for the blond woman who took the box, they’d have to find her.

But Annie was betting on one of the Famous Five. Or …

“Frank, what’s the dope on Willie Hazlitt?”

The Broward’s Rock police chief nodded when a waitress inquired if he wanted coffee. He waved away a menu. With the steaming cup in hand, he frowned at Annie. “No good. Been in trouble of one kind or another from the time he was a kid. Stole a car when he was fifteen. Suspended sentence. Claimed it was a prank. Ever since, mostly stuff just this side of crooked. Kicked out of college for cheating. Accused of stealing jewelry from this rich gal in Boca Raton, charges dropped. Woman said she gave him the jewelry, told her husband it was stolen. Some question whether he was involved in some shady insurance claims in Florida, but nothing came of it. His latest almost landed him in jail, though. He was milking this old lady out of money to invest. The family dropped it when Kenneth paid them off. That’s what brought Willie back to Atlanta.”

Max gave Annie an I-told-you-so look.

She shrugged. “Nothing violent in any of it. Long on charm.” She knew she was smiling indulgently and suspected that was always Willie’s effect on those of her sex. “Short on character, that’s Willie.”

Frank added another packet of sugar to his coffee. “Wheeler says Willie could have pushed Kenneth off his sailboat anytime. Dandy little accident. Why poison him
here in front of a crowd of witnesses? Hell of a lot of trouble, and he’s one of the suspects.”

Max was dogged. “Sure, that’s a natural assumption. But if Willie did it, it was brilliant to have it happen here. A push off a sailboat? Somebody could question that, given Willie’s history. Here there are lots of suspects and nobody can be positive who did it. The only hard evidence is against Annie, but there’s not enough to charge her. Unless something breaks, this will go down as the famous murder at the Festival. The famous unsolved murder.”

Annie strode briskly through the holiday crowds. It was another May-perfect day, a cloudless sky, a gentle sea breeze, the soothing warmth of the spring sun.

Kenneth Hazlitt’s murder might be uppermost in the minds of a few, but it hadn’t affected the temper of the festival-goers. Smiling faces—

“Hey, hey, you, hey,
bitch!”
With a guttural growl, Jimmy Jay Crabtree planted himself directly in her path. “Listen, I’ve been looking for you. You stay the goddamn hell out of my room.” The words were carefully enunciated. Too carefully.

Annie looked at his flushed face. He reeked of whiskey. “Back off, buddy. I’ve never set foot in your room. Go have your DTs somewhere else.”

He glowered at her, but something—uncertainty? fear?—flickered deep in those dulled eyes.

“Wait a minute, hey, wait a minute. You telling me you didn’t get—didn’t go through my stuff? It wasn’t you?” His tone still blustered, but now there was an edge of panic. “It wasn’t you?”

“Right the first time. I’d rather paw through a sack of rattlesnakes than touch anything of yours. You can put it in the bank, buddy.”

“Christ.”

He no longer looked at Annie.

He gave a swift, hunted glance around them and started to brush past her.

“Hey,
you
wait a minute,” she ordered. “You’re drunk. It’s just past lunch, and you’re drunk.”

His eyes jerked back to her, dull, glazed, blank.

“That’s why you didn’t fire your secretary.
You
drove the car that killed the little girl. And
you
were drunk when you ran her down. Weren’t you?”

“Car.” He took a ragged breath. “What car, bitch? I don’t know squat about any car.” And then he pushed past her.

Every chair was taken and people stood twenty deep. Annie wormed her way around to one side until she had a clear view of Emma Clyde and her fellow panelists. Annie checked her program. Two authors she didn’t know.

“… one expert suggests as many as two out of every five accidents may not be accidents at all.” The speaker had a fleshy moon face, a genial expression, and a cheery voice. “Most suspect, of course, are drownings, falls, and …”

Annie checked her watch. At least another ten minutes. She inched a few feet away, found a driftwood trunk, and sat down. Really, she would have to remember to compliment Blue Benedict. The outdoor panels were a stroke of genius. Certainly it provided a backdrop unlike that at any other book festival.

Annie opened her folder.