Page 4 of Broken Bird (The Last Picks #4)

“You’d better start from the beginning,” I said as I took one of the tufted chairs in the den.

Mid-sniffle, Pippi froze, tissue pressed to her nose. “You’ll do it?”

“I’m considering—”

“Oh, Dashiell—” She stopped herself, dropped her hands to her lap, and beamed at me. “Dash! You’re not going to regret this.”

“That’s not ominous at all,” Fox said from the doorway.

I shot them a dark look.

“Do you realize what an opportunity this is?” Pippi said. “Not just the publicity—”

“Wait a minute,” I said.

“—and not even just the book. We’ll split the royalties seventy-thirty, of course.”

“Seventy-thirty?”

“And I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not ready to get into the merchandising yet, although we’ll have to talk about that sooner rather than later. For example, what about an entire line of products for aspiring writers, as a starting point? Oh my God, and another line for amateur sleuths. We’ll need a name—I’m thinking Masters of Murder , which is a nice little homage to Vivienne, wouldn’t you say? We’ll do notebooks, pens, pencils, hats. Is a magnifying glass overdone?”

“Oh my God,” Millie said—with what could only be, since this was Millie we were talking about, a genuine thrill. “You could do ACTION FIGURES!”

Pippi sat back in her seat, as though bowled over by this idea. Then she did a finger gun at Millie and said, “Hello, genius. Where did you come up with such a great idea?”

Millie glowed.

With thoughts of a Dashiell Dawson Dane action figure circling my head— Now with 60% more anxiety! Pick up Dash’s studio apartment (sold separately) so he can lie in bed all day! —I said, “That’s not really—”

“No, of course not,” Pippi said before I could finish. “You’re thinking what I’m thinking: we capitalize on it now, while it’s still hot. Podcast, vlog, blog, special-access patronage tiers.”

“Seventy-thirty,” Indira murmured.

“No,” I said.

“All right.” Pippi squinted at me. “I’ll go as low as sixty-forty, but—”

“No.”

“Dash, think about what I’m offering here: a built-in fan base, the wealth of my experience, my name .” She said the last as though it were the real treasure. “And while I appreciate that you bring your own…charm to the table—”

“In the first place,” I said, “you came to me for help, Pippi. Not the other way around. And second, I’m not doing any of this. Marshall might not have been my friend, but he was a human being, and it’s crass and, honestly, a bit ghoulish to try to profit off his death before he’s even cold in the ground.”

Pippi stared at me as though I were speaking another language. “But true crime is one of the fastest growing genres in the world.”

I rubbed my eyes. “The answer is no, Pippi. Not everything in this world is about money.”

Although, I can’t say I wasn’t a tiny bit tempted. Not by the action figures— Malibu Beach House Pippi Parker, with thermonuclear hair dryer included! —but by, well, the money. Even a little money. True, my time at Hemlock House had shaken some stories loose, and I’d managed to sell them. But short stories brought in a few hundred dollars each; the only reason I was surviving at Hemlock House was because I was burning through my (much reduced) savings. And, occasionally, my parents were helping me out. Which wasn’t a great look for a man. (Technically you’re a man after twenty-five, even if you still sleep in footie pajamas sometimes.) With a flash of despair, I thought maybe that explained Bobby’s change in behavior. (The fact that I was still reliant on my parents, not the footie pajamas—although come to think of it, the footie pajamas probably weren’t helping either.)

“You should show her that box of Cap’n Crunch where you keep all your receipts,” Fox said. “That’s rock-solid proof that not everything in life is about money.”

Keme mumbled something under his breath that sounded like, “You have got to be kidding me.”

“If you’re not interested,” Pippi said, “maybe we could draw up a few simple forms so that people wouldn’t bother you about the rights to the story down the road—”

“For heaven’s sake, Pippi,” Indira said.

“We can talk about it later.” Pippi pointed at Millie again. “But don’t blame me if I steal this marketing whiz out from under your nose.”

“Coffins,” Millie said. “With your face on the INSIDE!”

“Good God.” Pippi grabbed her memo book and scribbled frantically. “You’ve been hiding in plain sight, my dear.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’m going to gently tap the brakes on this crazy train. If we’re going to figure out what’s going on, then I need as much information as you can give me. Why are you the prime suspect? What reason do the police have to suspect you? I mean, are we even sure that it’s murder?”

“You saw him,” Pippi said. “It was definitely murder. Who wouldn’t want to kill that man?”

“That’s the kind of thing you might not want to say out loud,” Fox suggested. “Until this mess blows over, I mean.”

“The sheriff questioned me,” Pippi said. “At length. She wanted to know about my relationship with Marshall. She wanted to know all about the reading at the library—who organized it, why, etc. She asked me a million questions, all about where I’d been the last few days, who I’d talked to, that kind of thing.”

Trying to track Pippi’s movements, I thought. Which did make it sound like Pippi was a suspect. “That still doesn’t explain why the sheriff was interested in you.”

“Well.” Pippi fumbled with the memo book as a blush rose in her face. “I may have been, uh, indiscreet.”

A recorded voice began to speak, and all of us jumped. I whirled around to see Keme holding up his phone as Pippi’s voice played from the speaker.

“—someone ought to put that man out of his misery,” she was saying on the recording. “That would be a real public service, you know? He’s rude, he’s crude, he’s arrogant. He’s your typical chauvinist pig. And the world would be a better place without him. Honestly, I should kill him myself.”

“Where in the world did you get that?”

Keme shrugged and pushed his long, dark hair behind his ears. He had a seventeen-year-old’s barely hidden smugness.

“This says it was originally posted to her patronage site,” Indira said, glancing at Keme’s screen. “Really, Pippi?”

“Why would you say something like that?” I asked.

“Because of all those awful things he’s been saying.” Pippi’s face was bright red—or trying to be, under her makeup. “I didn’t mean I’d literally kill him. I was going to talk about putting him in one of my books, you know, ‘killing him’ by making him one of the murder victims. But then a reader tweeted another question, and I got sidetracked.”

Fox wore a bemused look. Indira’s expression was severe. Keme was still riding the high of outsmarting all of us. And Millie was searching for something on her phone—probably satin baseball jackets that said MASTERS OF MURDER, or a home detective kit with branded fingerprint powder, or a candle that smelled like Pippi’s attic.

I wanted to tell Pippi how stupid it was to say something like that in public, but the truth was, everyone had said something stupid like that before. And while Pippi had been—to use her word—indiscreet, especially in choosing to say those things when she knew she was being recorded, she’d probably also believed that, with her patrons-only all-access tier, or whatever the heck she called it, she wasn’t speaking publicly so much as…to her very dear friends.

“Okay,” I said, “but the sheriff has got to have some other reason for believing you killed Marshall. I mean, that’s not a great sound bite, but it’s not exactly evidence.”

Pippi clutched the memo book again. “I don’t know.” Then she leaned in and, in a stagily conspiratorial whisper, said, “But I know something the sheriff doesn’t.”

“Oh my God.”

“I do!”

“Pippi,” Indira said with some exasperation.

Keme looked like he was on the brink of rolling his eyes.

“And let me guess,” Fox said. “You decided not to tell anyone so that you could dramatically reveal it at, say, a press conference?”

Pippi sniffed. “I’m telling Dash, aren’t I? I’m telling all of you. And I don’t appreciate—”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Someone took Marshall’s manuscript.” When I didn’t react, Pippi added, “The one he was going to read from. His new book. Stephen noticed when he was picking up the water bottles.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “But the book’s already been published. I mean, I guess a devoted fan might have taken it.” Or, a little more macabre, someone who had realized the manuscript would be worth more after Marshall’s death.

“Not that one. Not Thunder Clap . His next book.”

“ Shadow Cargo ,” Millie said without looking up from her phone. “The one with Titus Brooks.”

We all exchanged looks.

“Millie,” I said, “want to explain that?”

She glanced at me and displayed her phone. “Well, I was trying to find out if Marshall had any coffins with his face on the inside—we don’t want to enter a saturated market—”

“We definitely don’t want to do that,” Fox murmured, and Indira swatted them on the arm.

“—and I kept getting all these results about Marshall’s book tour. Apparently, he’s been reading from Thunder Clap , and then he’s also been introducing people to his upcoming project. It’s a new series about merchant seaman Titus Brooks, who’s a security officer on a cargo ship. Oh, and they’re transporting COFFINS!”

That explained something (if only the ringing in my ears). Millie handed me her phone to show me a few stubby articles about Marshall’s book tour, and a quick search of Marshall’s reader group online suggested that everyone was abuzz with the promise of a new book—and, perhaps more importantly, a new character. Marshall’s best-selling series, Chase Thunder, had also been his only series. Until now.

As I handed the phone back to Millie, I said, “So, someone stole the manuscript for this new book?”

Pippi nodded. “We’ve got the inside track! I figure that we release the information in stages—we’ll tease listeners with a hint that we have a clue that police don’t. Then, in the second episode, we’ll tease it a little more—this was something incredibly valuable, something only Marshall and the killer had access to. And then in the third episode—”

“Would you keep an eye on these yahoos?” I asked Indira as I stood.

She nodded, and I got the impression that, among other careers where Indira would have excelled, she would have made a fantastic corrections officer.

“Wait,” Pippi said. “Where are you going?”

“To tell the sheriff.”

“No!”

But by then, I was already stepping out of the den. I made my way to the billiard room, shut the pocket doors, and dropped onto the chesterfield. I considered trying Bobby first, but I didn’t want to put him in the middle of this—the last thing I needed was to make Bobby’s boss mad at him. When I called the station, Deputy Dahlberg put me on hold. As I waited, I listened to what sounded like a whale-song rendition of the theme of Braveheart . It wasn’t that bad, actually.

“This is Sheriff Acosta.”

“Hi, Sheriff. It’s Dash.” Silence. “Dashiell Dawson Dane.” More silence. “From Hemlock House. And, uh, other places in town where we’ve seen each other.” And then, because sometimes I just. couldn’t. help myself. “Like that one time at the Cakery.”

With what sounded like tremendous patience, the sheriff said, “Hello, Dash.”

“Um, hi. So, I know you’re not going to like this, and I know we talked about, uh, my involvement, in, uh, certain situations.” I tried to take deep breaths as my vision fuzzed at the edges. “But, um, Pippi asked me, and it’s not like I wanted to, and I definitely wasn’t trying—”

“What happened with Pippi?”

So, I told her. And when I finished, I said, “I thought you should know about the manuscript. Well, and about Pippi wanting help.”

The sheriff’s silence stretched out: ten seconds, twenty, a minute. And then, stiffly, she said, “We didn’t know about the manuscript. Thank you.”

“It seemed important.”

“It might be.” Another pause came. “And I suppose you’re going to ask a few questions around town, see what you can turn up?”

“I don’t know. The last time we talked—”

I wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence. The last time we’d talked, the sheriff had…well, made me an offer sounds like something out of The Godfather . We’d come to an understanding, I suppose (although that didn’t sound much better). The sheriff had acknowledged that I’d helped in significant ways with several important investigations. She’d even gone so far as to suggest a more formal arrangement—as she’d not so subtly implied, since I insisted on sticking my neck out.

“All right,” Sheriff Acosta said, and she sounded tired. “I’m not going to lie: I’m having a hard time with this.”

“It’s not exactly my favorite thing either.”

For some reason, that made her laugh. “I’d love to see Bobby’s face when you try that one on him.” Before I could respond, she continued, “Look, I don’t like the idea of you poking around. But I also know that short of arresting you, I can’t stop you. And, as we discussed, you have…helped before.” She blew out a breath. “We don’t have much, Dash. I’d appreciate anything you can do.”

“Oh. Yes. I mean, sure. Absolutely.”

(I tried to stop, honest.)

“Safely,” the sheriff said.

“Of course.”

“Responsibly.”

“Definitely.”

“I don’t want you taking any risks. I don’t want you pretending to be a police officer. I’m going to make myself perfectly clear and tell you I don’t want you breaking any laws.”

“Sheriff Acosta!”

That made her laugh too, but a shorter laugh this time.

“There’s not much I can tell you yet. We’re treating Mr. Crowe’s death as suspicious until the district medical examiner comes back with a decision, but I can already tell you it’s going to be a homicide. I understand you saw him the night he died?”

“I was at the library.”

“So, you know how he was acting.”

“Like he was drunk.”

“He was drunk, I’m pretty sure, but we’re waiting for the tests to come back. We also found a prescription vial for diazepam. He’d gotten it filled last week, and it was empty.”

The furnace kicked on—barely more than a distant whump below me.

“You think he was poisoned. Not suicide? No, I guess not. If it had been suicide, he would have had his drink and his pills and crawled into bed.” I thought back to the night before. “He must have ingested the poison right before he came to the reading. He was still coherent when he arrived at the library, but I could tell something was off. Like I said, I thought he’d had too much to drink. I could see it getting worse, though, once he was on stage. Whatever it was, it hit him quickly.”

“Mixing benzodiazepines and alcohol will do that, but like I said, we’re still waiting on those tests. In the meantime, we treat every death as suspicious until there’s a reason not to.”

“Where does Pippi come into this? Aside from that stupid podcast, I mean.”

From the other end of the call came a heavy breath. “I think I’d better not answer that right now.”

“Oh. Right.”

“That’s not a comment on you, Dash.”

“No, I get it. I’m working for her. Helping her. However you want to say it. Do you really think she did it?”

All I got back was another of those conversational blips. “Like I said—” The sheriff’s voice was measured. “—I appreciate anything you can do.”

“Thanks, Sheriff.”

“Please be careful.”

After disconnecting, I headed back to the den. Under Keme’s supervision, Pippi and Millie were sketching out design ideas in the memo book—I thought I saw something that looked like either a superhero costume or underwear, and I decided I didn’t want to know. Fox had fallen asleep on the old chaise, and Indira had taken a book from the shelves and was reading.

“All right,” I said. “The sheriff didn’t know the manuscript was missing.”

“And poof,” Pippi said. “There goes our advantage.”

“That’s not how this works. It’s not a contest. It’s not a race. I agreed to help you because—” Nothing particularly palatable came to mind, so I said, “—we’re neighbors, but I’m not in the business of interfering with an investigation or obstructing justice. I’m turning anything I find over to the sheriff. Is that clear?”

“Don’t you see that this is a golden opportunity—”

“Pippi,” I said, with a little more snap to it than I expected.

“Yes, fine. Anything you find, you’ll turn over to the sheriff. I understand completely.”

I didn’t miss her careful phrasing, but I chose not to engage with it. Instead, I said, “If we’re going to find whoever killed Marshall, we need to figure out who had an opportunity, or who had motive, or both. That means learning more about him: his finances, his personal life, any legal troubles. I know Marshall is married, but I’ve never met his wife, so maybe that’s a place to start. My parents might know how to contact her.”

“No, no, no,” Pippi said. “You have to start with the evidence we already have. Follow the thread and all that.”

Follow the thread and all that wasn’t an investigative technique I’d come across in my research (Will Gower, Detective I, Hollywood Division), but all I said was “What evidence?”

“His assistant,” Pippi prompted. “Elodie. The one in that adorable outfit.”

This apparently meant the woman in the black stockings. “Well, that’s more of a lead than evidence—”

“They had a huge argument outside the library. I hate when my boys see adults act like that in public.”

An argument might explain the weird snippet I’d overheard Marshall say to his assistant—something about being grateful, although I couldn’t recall the exact words. “Did you hear what they were arguing about?”

“Of course not. I was too busy trying to get the boys inside. Stephen too; he’s such a gentle soul.”

I had a hard time believing that Pippi’s husband and grown sons couldn’t stand to overhear a spat in passing, but again, I let it go. “I suppose that’s something.”

“And his agent, Hayes. You noticed all that business with him, I’m sure.”

“Um, probably.”

Fox snorted—it wasn’t clear if this was a waking-up snort or if they’d been pretending to be asleep.

“But in case I didn’t,” I said. “Noticed what?”

“He left. As soon as Marshall started talking, he slipped out the back.”

There wasn’t anything illegal about that, obviously. He might have needed to get a drink of water. Maybe he’d needed a break after hearing Marshall’s reading so many times already. On the other hand, maybe it did mean something.

“All right,” I said. “That’s good to know.”

“What are we going to do now?” Pippi asked, scooting to the edge of her seat.

“ We aren’t going to do anything. I want to get a better idea of what was going on in Marshall’s life, so I’m going to start with the assistant.”

“They’re staying at the Rock On Inn,” Millie said and held up her phone. “Cheri-Ann has been posting about Marshall every five minutes.”

Cheri-Ann, the Rock On Inn’s owner and proprietor, was a lovely woman, but she did love to, uh, share on Facebook.

“Perfect,” Pippi said, snapping her memo book shut. “We’ll do good cop, bad cop.”

“Which one of you is going to be the bad cop?” Indira murmured.

Keme burst out laughing.

That seemed like an obvious one to me, since between Pippi and me, at least I didn’t look like I got my hair shellacked at the same place Darth Vader got his helmets. But I chose the more mature path and said, “You aren’t going with me. You’re going to call your agent and your editor and anyone else you can think of, and you’re going to ask them what they know about Marshall. Has he had a falling out with anyone recently? How are his books doing? What’s his personal life like? That kind of thing.”

“And I’ll find out what they’ve been doing since they got to town,” Millie announced.

Fox and Indira shared a look, and Indira said, “We’ll…supervise.”

I nodded. “Great.”

As I stood, Pippi said, “I really think I should go with you—”

“Nope. No way. Not a chance.” I inched backward toward the door as I spoke. “You’re the prime suspect, remember? We want you to stay out of the limelight, away from potential witnesses, all that stuff. Just make some calls, see what you can find out, and stay out of sight.”

“Uh, Dash?” Fox said. He glanced at Keme, who was still laughing (presumably at the prospect that anyone might mistake me for the bad cop). “If you’re going to the Rock On Inn, and you’re going to need someone to run interference with Cheri-Ann, might I suggest you take Keme?”

Keme stopped laughing and bolted upright to stare at us.

I was pretty sure I had the same look on my face.