The Ghost and Mrs. McClure Page 17

  “Filactic?” Bud Napp said. “Sounds Polish. I knew a Bob Matastic in the Marines. Nice guy. He was a Ukrainian, though.”

  “Filactic you said?” Seymour cried. “Anna Filactic?” He rubbed his forehead. “My God, Fiona, you’ve got to be kidding. Anaphylactic is not a woman. It’s a physical condition. Mrs. Franken was talking about anaphylactic shock!”

  Fiona stared blankly.

  “Don’t feel bad, sweetie,” said Brainert. “Ms. Filactic may not be ‘the other woman,’ but it is very useful information.”

  “Yes,” I said, “very useful. Timothy Brennan must have been allergic to something. Obviously, Deirdre believes anaphylactic shock triggered her father’s fatal attack.”

  “What is anaphylactic shock?” asked Sadie.

  “It’s a type of allergic reaction,” Seymour explained. “A sensitivity to some food or substance that causes the mucous membranes in the throat to swell and close up, thereby suffocating the victim. The most common cause is an allergy to nuts. Peanuts, especially.”

  “Oh, my, yes,” said Sadie. “Peanut allergies in children are very dangerous. I remember reading a tragic story of a child dying after eating a cookie with just a few pieces of peanut in it.”

  “They say even kissing someone who just ate a peanut butter sandwich can send someone with the condition into spasms,” said Seymour.

  “Holy cow!” Milner cried, turning to his wife. “I served my five-nut tarts that night!”

  Linda paled. “Honey,” she said, “there is no way they can pin it on you. You didn’t know!”

  “But that’s not a murder at all,” Sadie said. “That’s just a tragic accident.”

  These hicks are cracked. Brennan was clipped—planted by someone who knew him well enough to know how to make it look like an accident.

  I spoke up. “Calm down, both of you. Mr. Brennan didn’t eat a thing. He refused any and all food. Insisted on water only.”

  “And none too nicely,” Brainert noted. “Pen’s right. Brennan only drank bottled water. I watched him the whole time.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The only bottle he drank from was the one I picked out and handed him. That doesn’t make me look very good, does it?”

  “But the bottle you gave to Brennan was sealed. The plastic unbroken,” said Brainert.

  I nodded. “I opened it myself.”

  “There are many ways to contaminate a sealed container,” Seymour said. “I remember an old pulp story, published in the thirties, called A Vintage Murder. The narrator injects poison into a series of sealed wine bottles through the corks with a hypodermic needle.”

  “Enter the syringe,” said Brainert.

  “And remember that maniac in New York City a few years ago,” said Fiona, “he was injecting sealed water bottles with ammonia, right there on the grocery store shelves. It’s entirely possible—”

  “Probable,” said Brainert.

  “—that such a method was used to contaminate the water.”

  “If Brennan was allergic to nuts, a tiny squirt of peanut oil in his water would do the trick,” said Brainert.

  “Nut oil!” I cried. “Yes, of course . . .”

  The memory flooded back to me of waking up the night after Brennan’s death, the night I’d seen Jack in the shadows.

  You took a drink from the bottle, Jack reminded me. The one you half finished after Brennan’s death and put under the counter before the police came.

  And the drink I’d taken had reminded me of Milner’s pastry. Now I knew why. But who set the bottles aside for Brennan?

  “Linda, you’re the one who told me about the bottles set aside for Brennan—”

  “I didn’t do a thing!”

  “Calm down,” I said. “I know you didn’t. Someone told you they’d been set aside, right?”

  “That’s right, that’s right,” she said quickly.

  The Quibblers leaned slightly forward.

  “Well?” said Seymour. “Who told you? Spit it out.”

  “Deirdre.”

  The whole room erupted, as if Linda had just dropped the last piece into a jigsaw puzzle. But it wasn’t the right piece—and I knew it. Deirdre wouldn’t frame herself. Which meant someone else who was there that night had told Deirdre to tell Linda those bottles were set aside. Someone had saved that syringe for a reason: they’d meant to frame Deirdre all along.

  “But what if Deirdre is innocent?” I blurted. All eyes now turned in my direction. And they all looked skeptical.

  “Why in the world would you think that?” asked Seymour. “What’s your theory?”

  I told the Quibblers what had happened the night before. How both Shelby Cabot and Kenneth Franken turned up at Buy the Book long after closing time, and how I later followed them into the night. Of course, I left out all references to Jack’s ghost, along with any mention of Josh Bernstein finding a syringe in the bookstore’s women’s room.

  Privately, though, I made up my mind to track down Josh Bernstein and grill him like a raw T-bone. I told everyone what I’d heard—or thought I’d heard—when I’d eavesdropped on Shelby’s and Kenneth’s conversation under the streetlight. And I wrapped up my revelations with two conclusions:

  “I think that the ‘other woman’ Deirdre was referring to was none other than Salient House representative Shelby Cabot,” I said. “And, finally, I believe that it was Kenneth Franken, and not Timothy Brennan, who wrote Shield of Justice.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Things That Get Bumped in the Night

  I distrust a closed-mouth man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously, unless you keep in practice.

  —Casper Gutman (a.k.a. “The Fat Man”) to Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, 1929

  WHEN I DROPPED the bomb about Brennan’s alleged ghostwriter, I heard a few gasps—the loudest from longtime Brennan fan Milner Logan. Frankly, I didn’t know what shocked the Quibblers more: that Kenneth Franken carried on an affair with a publicity manager from his publishing house; or that he’d penned Timothy Brennan’s latest opus.

  Either way, I expected such a charge to be greeted with a certain amount of incredulity. And that’s why, before heading off to church with Aunt Sadie earlier today, I’d made a phone call to Brainert.

  Reading Timothy Brennan’s book the night before, not to mention having that odd dream, had started me thinking about the book itself. And when it came to solving a literary mystery, Brainert was my go-to guy. I nodded my head in his direction and he rose to his feet.

  “After Penelope tipped me off to her suspicions this morning, I went straight to the college library and checked out a copy of this.”

  He held up a hardcover book with yellowing pages. The white type on the black cover read The Neglected. A small frame of spot art below the title showed a man’s silhouette, lost in a crowd, and the author’s name: Kenneth Franken.

  “Franken was more than Deirdre’s wife and Timothy Brennan’s son-in-law. He was also an author in his own right—a failed one. Franken’s first novel was published in the early 1990s. The genre was ‘dysfunctional family drama,’ and it had been published by Salient House, back when they were an independently owned publisher and not part of a European media conglomerate. The cover copy states the author spent five years writing this novel, his literary debut.”

  Brainert passed the book around. When it got to me, I studied the back, which carried an author photo of the younger Kenneth Franken. At that time, he wore oversized horn-rimmed glasses—which he’d obviously traded for either contacts or laser surgery—and there were no silver temples yet in sight. He was just as model handsome, though, and the author was described as “an associate professor of English at New York University,” and a promising young voice “who was single and living in Manhattan.”

  “How did you find this?” Linda asked in obvious admiration.

  “I never forget a book,” boasted Brainert.
“If I never read it, I read about it. And if I didn’t read about it, then I saw the book in the store.”

  I passed the volume to Seymour.

  “Kenneth Franken’s literary debut was a bust,” Brainert continued. “His novel was greeted by tepid reviews and general indifference.”

  He reached into the shirt pocket of his pale blue button-down and drew out several three-by-five cards covered in tiny, cramped handwriting.

  “The New Yorker said The Neglected was ‘a flawed effort featuring a cast of uninteresting characters.’ ”

  “Ouch!” cried Seymour.

  “Publishers Weekly was kinder,” Brainert continued, squinting at his own handwriting. “They said, ‘Mr. Franken has a unique literary voice, and his novel contains some sharp observations, but too few to recommend this raw, freshman effort. . . . ’ ” Brainert shrugged. “So Kenneth Franken vanished from the literary scene as quickly as he appeared. But two years after the disappointing reception for The Neglected, we see the marriage of Kenneth Franken and Deirdre Brennan announced in The New York Times.

  “And here’s where it gets really interesting, because eighteen months after Kenneth Franken married Deirdre Brennan, the Jack Shield franchise—which had shown steady decline in sales and quality—was suddenly revived with the publication of three new Shield novels in quick succession. Each of these titles garnered rave reviews, as critics who’d grown bored with the series suddenly became enthusiastic fans again.”

  “Coincidence?” said Seymour.

  “I thought so,” Brainert replied. “And I didn’t believe Penelope, either, when she called me this morning and suggested that Kenneth Franken might be the real author of Shield of Justice.”

  Brainert sighed. “My skepticism vanished this afternoon when I read The Neglected.”

  The book made its way around our circle and back to Brainert. He tapped the volume with his index finger.

  “Now, remember that Franken’s first novel had a tiny print run and was read only in literary circles—which was darn lucky, because it’s obvious that Franken mined his failed first novel for characterizations, descriptions, and situations for use in the last three Jack Shield novels.”

  I heard more gasps and cries of denial. Milner Logan was practically apoplectic.

  “Calm down, Milner,” said Brainert. “It wouldn’t be the first time a popular writer had to turn to ghostwriters. Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, may not have written many of the novels attributed to him. And in the 1920s, struggling pulp wannabes like C. M. Eddy Jr. and Elizabeth Berkeley paid my ancestor H. P. Lovecraft to ghostwrite stories for them. Why, it’s even said that in his heyday, Jack London bought story ideas from Sinclair Lewis!”

  I smiled woodenly as I reminded myself that Brainert couldn’t help it. The tone of a know-it-all college professor talking to dimwitted freshmen just came naturally to him, especially when he was worked up about the subject.

  “Okay,” Milner said. “So the chronology works. Where’s your proof?”

  “I would never make such a bold claim without evidence to back it up,” Brainert said indignantly. “A close reading of The Neglected gave me all the proof I need.”

  Brainert shuffled through his notes. “For instance,” he said. “Jason Carmichael, the calculating villain in Shield of Night, bears more than a striking resemblance to Carmichael Fahl, the calculating father of the protagonist in The Neglected. Indeed, the two characters are described with nearly the same words.

  “Carmichael Fahl had ‘a shock of white hair and mud green eyes the color of a stagnant tarn’ and Jason Carmichael’s had ‘a shock of silver hair and mud green eyes the color of a stagnant pool.’ ”

  “What in hell’s a ‘tarn’?” asked Bud.

  “A small lake or pool,” said Seymour.

  “Oh. Same thing then, eh?”

  “Come on!” said Milner. “That’s just coincidence. It has to be.”

  “How about this?” Brainert replied. “Tandy Miller, the free-spirited artist from The Neglected, was transformed into Candy Tyler, the free-spirited music producer for Shield of Night. The two characters share similar biographies, both lived in Hell’s Kitchen flats described the same way, and they shared the same fates—both were beaten to death by their heroin-addicted boyfriends.”

  Milner was still shaking his head, but his conviction was on the wane.

  “And then there’s the suicidal bureaucrat Philip Breeland, who is transformed into the suicidal police commissioner Pete Land in Shield of Honor. Both characters even have wives named Maisy Donner!”

  Brainert looked at Milner. “How common is a name like Maisy Donner?”

  Brainert’s string of comparisons continued, until it was clear to everyone—including Milner—that Timothy Brennan hadn’t written those last three Shield novels, but hired his brand-new son-in-law to write them instead. And for his part, Kenneth Franken had splintered his old, failed literary work to provide the fuel.

  It worked, too. Those novels sold like gangbusters—each a hard/soft best-seller. New titles probably would have continued to sell—as long as they were ghostwritten by Franken. If only Brennan hadn’t announced that Shield of Justice was “his” final novel and that he was turning to nonfiction.

  “Follow the money and you find the motive,” said Seymour. “I still think it was Deirdre. She stood to inherit her father’s estate.”

  “Maybe not,” said Brainert. “There’s Bunny, Timothy’s third wife. I’m sure she’ll contest any will that doesn’t give her full control of the estate.”

  “That makes her a suspect, too,” said Milner.

  “Except she was nowhere near her husband or the bottled water,” said Fiona. “Remember, a murderer needs access as well as motive. Bunny was back in New York.”

  “She could have hired someone,” said Seymour. “A hit man from Planter’s Peanuts, maybe.”

  “Not funny,” said Sadie.

  “We’re forgetting something,” said Fiona. “What about Kenneth Franken? With Brennan out of the way, Franken could resume his ghostwriting career.”

  “Ghostwrite for a dead author?” said Milner. “That’s crazy!”

  “Not so,” Sadie replied. “V. C. Andrews has been dead for a decade, but somebody is writing new V. C. Andrews novels, because one is published every couple of years.”

  “Maybe they’re written by Anna Filactic,” quipped Seymour.

  I was pretty sure Fiona was headed down the wrong path again. If Kenneth Franken used the syringe to tamper with the bottled water, I could see why he had to get rid of the syringe. But why would he hide it in the women’s room? Jack had already pointed out to me that someone would easily notice a man going into the ladies’ room in a crowded bookstore.

  Then I remembered the way Kenneth Franken stormed off in search of his wife’s makeup case yesterday afternoon—a makeup case Deirdre claimed was lost in the women’s room! Could it be that Kenneth and Josh were working together, to kill Brennan and frame Deirdre?

  I dismissed that idea immediately. If Kenneth hid the syringe in the women’s room on the night of the murder, he could certainly have retrieved it when he and his wife returned the next day. And if he was the one who’d sent Josh Bernstein to retrieve it, then he could have told the young assistant where he’d hidden it and not forced Josh to search for it. And that’s exactly what Josh had to do—he’d had to search to find it.

  No. In my mind, Kenneth Franken was no more involved with the murder of his father-in-law than his wife was. Beyond that, I couldn’t prove a thing because right now, Josh Bernstein was the only key to unlocking the mystery.

  “Maybe the Staties have it right,” insisted Seymour. “The money trail leads right to Deirdre.”

  “Or Kenneth Franken,” Brainert countered. “With Brennan out of the way, he could have taken over the Shield series the same way Kingsley Amis took over the James Bond franchise after Ian Fleming passed away.”

  “Eeesh! I couldn�
�t finish Colonel Sun,” said Milner with a groan.

  “Oh, yeah. As if every one of those Fleming novels was a masterpiece!” Seymour shot back.

  “Boys! Let’s not turn this into a reading group!” Sadie cried.

  “Brainert did that already,” said Bud, chuckling.

  “Only to prove Penelope’s point about Kenneth,” Brainert shot back. “Look, Kenneth had a good motive for murder. Not only the franchise, but also the other woman. Didn’t Penelope say he’d been carrying on with that woman from the publishing house? Shelby? Well then, Franken had a motive to frame his wife for the crime as well.”

  The room was silent for a moment as everyone considered Brainert’s point. Fiona spoke first.

  “So you’re saying that Kenneth Franken might have killed his father-in-law, framed his wife for the murder, and is now poised to take over the literary estate and live happily ever after with his mistress? Why, that’s so devious. So cruel. So monstrous . . .”

  Then Fiona nodded with enthusiasm. “I like the way you think, Brainert.”

  Except for one thing, I thought to myself. A woman had to be involved in the murder in some way—because the syringe was hidden in the women’s room on the night of the crime. “Right, Jack?” I asked silently.

  Right as rain, doll.

  “That lets Deirdre off the hook, of course,” I quietly added, “because she wouldn’t frame herself—and the syringe turning up in her room was too pat, anyway.”

  On the money again, babe, said Jack. It’s a big, fat frame job with Deirdre posing pretty in the picture. But she doesn’t fit, and she didn’t do it.

  At that point, the Quibblers’ meeting degenerated into several private conversations and even a loud argument. Linda and Milner drifted over to me, Milner glancing at his watch.

  “We’re heading home,” he said. “We’ve decided to open up tomorrow, after all, which means four in the morning is our rise-and-shine time.”

  “What happened to your day off?” Sadie asked. “You never open on a Monday.”

  “We do now,” said Milner. “If tomorrow proves half as busy as today and yesterday, we’ll make a killing.”