Manuscript for Murder

A few days later, shortly after closing time, Maggie and I were rummaging through our closets retrieving the necessary summer attire for our sojourn in St. Barth when Astrid, who was making a valiant attempt to clean the bookstore, rang up to inform us that a cop was downstairs requesting the honor of our presence.

“What’s his name?” I enquired.

“Didn’t ask,” was her terse answer.

“What does he want?”

“Didn’t ask,” she replied.

Sometimes it's very exasperating that Astrid’s curiosity does not extend beyond the mop and pail. I said I'd send Maggie down right away.

“He was quite emphatic that he wanted to see both of you.”

Packing is one of my least-loved chores but a necessary evil if I want to find myself on an airplane, so when I get a full head of steam up, I don't like to be interrupted. Annoyed, I followed Maggie downstairs.

There, browsing the Dashiell Hammett collection in Mysteries and Thrillers was Mike Farmer, my occasional tennis partner and sort of friend, in a wary kind of way.

I came up behind him and gave him a light tap on the shoulder. “Don’t you see enough of this in real life?”

Without missing a beat, he replied, "Naw, my kid transferred to film school at NYU, and he's doing a paper on the films of Humphrey Bogart. It happens that the last one was The Maltese Falcon. I liked it so I thought I might read it."

I plucked it from his hands, opened the free endpaper and pointed to the price.

"Well, I'm not that anxious to read it."

"Go to Borders and get the paperback version," I suggested. I put the volume back in its place and said, "So to what do we owe the pleasure of this visit? Judging by the look on your face I'd hazard a guess that it's not about tennis."

He looked at Maggie and then at me. “You’d be right; this is business.”

Maggie came over, concerned. "Is it about Bill?" Bill was Maggie's father who, like Sally, was--or rather, still is--an active nonagenarian.

He gave us a blank look. “I thought Bill was in France.”

Maggie exhaled audibly. “Let’s go to the office,” she said.

Our office isn’t the tidiest of places since it also doubles as a storage room for orphan books, papers and all other manner of detritus that follows bookmen around. Mike shoved a few tomes to the side of one chair and sank into it. Maggie and I managed to find a couple of unoccupied spaces on the couch. Mike took out his notebook and flipped pages. We waited. He flipped a few more pages with his pencil.

I leaned forward. “So what’s going on?”

He didn’t look up from his notes. “I understand the two of you were acquainted with a Sally Bedford.”

We nodded. Maggie asked, “You knew Sally?”

He looked up. "Nope, never had the pleasure of meeting her." He was silent again, the tap, tap, tapping of his pencil against paper the only sound in the room.

“Your names appeared in a report in connection with her death. It said that you discovered her body.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Mind telling me what you were doing there?”

“Mind telling me what this is all about?”

Unruffled by my rudeness, he answered, “Whenever anyone dies unexpectedly or in unusual circumstances--”

Maggie interrupted, “Hardly unusual, she had a serious heart condition and suffered a heart attack.”

I felt a nervous twitch coming on.

He twirled the pencil around his fingers a few times, and then asked, “What was your connection to Sally Bedford?”

The bluntness of the inquiry made me cautious. "She brought in a manuscript for evaluation, and we agreed to look at it."

The tapping resumed. “That’s it?”

I gave him a bland smile. “That’s it. Now it’s your turn. Mrs. Bedford died of a heart attack, so why is her death of such interest to you?”

“Murder is always of interest to me.”

“I beg your pardon.”

"Murder Harry, murder, is always of interest to me," he repeated. He extracted a crushed package of cigarettes from his breast pocket, plucked one out that sagged precariously at its mid-section and tapped it against the packet, dislodging most of most of its cancer-causing contents on his lap.

Maggie stood up abruptly. “You can’t smoke in here Mike. In case you’ve forgotten, this is a bookstore and this is New York where all manner of vice including smoking is forbidden in public places.”

He peered at the cigarette and then at Maggie. "Don't worry, I quit. I just carry them around for something to occupy my hands. And no I haven't forgotten where I am and as far as I know, murder is still one of those vices prohibited by law, even in NYC."

I threw up my arms. “For heaven’s sake Mike, whose murder are we talking about?”

“Sally Bedford’s murder, that’s whose,” Mike snapped.

“Are you suggesting that Sally Bedford was murdered?”

“Oh, I’m not suggesting. I’m telling you as a fact she was,” he replied.

“But how?” Maggie blurted.

“Somebody gave her a nice big shot of epinephrine.”

Seeing the blank looks on our faces he added, “Adrenaline is its more common name. Stopped her heart dead in its track.”

“But how--? Maggie’s voice faltered.

“How did we find out? Except for a very observant paramedic we wouldn’t have. When they brought her to the morgue, he pointed out a smallish unusual white blister on the inside of her left arm to the medical examiner on duty. So the examiner took a closer look, didn’t like what he saw and decided to examine a bit of the subcutaneous tissue around the blister. He found adrenaline in the sample, which was unusual, and decided to do a full autopsy. Whoever stuck it in her must have gone through the vein, pulled back to get the needle into the vein and didn’t realize he was leaving a calling card. You can guess the rest. They discovered excessive amounts of the stuff in her. That’s when I entered the picture. The perpetrator obviously didn’t know she had a weak heart. It was the equivalent of taking a sledgehammer to knock off an ant.”

“So it was murder,” I muttered.

“I believe we have nicely squared the circle,” Mike said dryly.

“But who?” Maggie asked.

"That is the sixty-four dollar question, isn't it? I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on the matter."

“How would we know?”