DEADLY INK


My name is Maxi Poole. I'm a television reporter/anchor at Channel Six in Los Angeles. My boss, managing editor Pete Capra, has sent me down here to Parsippany, New Jersey, to cover a high-profile murder at the famous Deadly Ink Mystery Conference.

Oddly coincidental, you say, a murder at a murder-mystery conference. But think about it. Here's a gathering of world-renowned sleuths, all of whom would certainly know how to off a vic and get away with it. And don't think for a minute that New Jersey bounty hunter Stephanie Plum wouldn't absolutely love to knock off longtime reigning mystery queen Kinsey Millhone. Huh? And wouldn't silent man-of-steel Joe Pike pant to put a hollow point through the head of verbose Dr. Alex Delaware? You know it.
But that's not what happened. That'd be too easy. What happened is that the adorable Patti Petticote was found dead â€" murdered, in fact â€" after last night's big "Weakest Link at Deadly Ink" party. It was not pretty. She turned up facedown in the punch bowl. Presumed drowned.

Patti Petticote is, or I should say was, a brand-new sleuth on the mystery scene. She was a professional Rollerblader who was heading up the effort to make blading an Olympic event, and on the side she was an amateur sleuth who, like the Mounties, always got her man. And she did it all on glitter-pink Rollerblades. Oh, and she was in her twenties, was tall and leggy with long red hair, and had a body to die for and the hot clothes to go with it. As quintessentially perfect as any Lisa Scottoline heroine.
And now she's dead, before she really got rolling. No pun intended. The wires were calling it murder. Makes sense. I mean, she couldn't have been that drunk, could she? Of course, at Deadly Ink I suppose it's possible. But I don't think so. Patti Petticote wouldn't be caught dead falling into a punch bowl. I mean, she was one cool gen-X kinda doll.

Anyway, after coming alarmingly close to getting killed myself on a homicide investigation at the Hollywood sign last week, I happened to be on a much-needed vacation visiting my parents in New York when I got the call from my boss, Pete Capra. "Get down to that mystery writers conference in New Jersey," he said, "and bring me back a story. And I don't mean a paperback."

Now, Pete knows what a mystery buff I am. So before ringing off, he found it necessary to add, "And listen, Maxi, don't waste time simpering at the feet of those famous mystery authors at the conference."
Cell phone to my ear, I was already on my laptop scanning www.deadlyink.com on the Web. "Omigod!" I screeched into the phone. "Michael Connolly's gonna be there!"

"Don't even think about it," my boss snarled. "Tomorrow's the last day of the conference. At sundown, the whole crazy lot of those ink-stained gonzos will be out of there, and then we got no visuals."

Now, my job is to cover stories, not to solve crimes. But sometimes I get lucky. And sometimes I almost get dead. But not this time, I fervently hope â€" I'm a New Yorker, as I said, and my family would never forgive me if I died in New Jersey.

I'd borrowed my dad's Range Rover and made the early-morning drive from Manhattan to the Jersey side while it was still dark, before morning rush hour traffic clogged the streets and bridges and tunnels. The freelance cameraman I'd hired through the local station, Sam Sorrel, was waiting for me in front of the conference venue, the legendary Parsippany Sheraton. My instructions to Sorrel were simple: "Just stick with me, and shoot everything that moves."

We made our way to the ballroom, where last night's festivities had been held. According to AP speculation, the murder happened sometime after the party had wound down and everyone had retired to their rooms. The wires reported that the last known group to leave the hall â€" four true-crime authors, not one of them any too sober, they'd admitted â€" had volunteered to the detectives that they were sure the ballroom was empty when they'd left it at around midnight.

Today's activities were to start with a seven-thirty editors' breakfast, then on to a full day of workshops and author panels. It was just after seven now, and the only people in the room besides us were white-coated men and women busily setting up the tables for breakfast.

At the front of the ballroom we approached a long buffet table covered with rumpled white linen. The tablecloth, soiled as it was with food stains, crumbs, half-eaten sandwiches and such, obviously hadn't been refreshed since the night before, yet the help were ignoring it. The reason soon became apparent. At just about dead center was what had to be the killer punch bowl, which was oddly surrounded by a strip of yellow crime-scene tape.

The huge bowl was dingy and ringed with dirty napkins, punch cups, and other detritus from the night before. On close inspection, I could see that the punch bowl was actually plastic. Not even crystal. God, what an ignominious way for poor Patti Petticote to go.

I peered inside the thing, where the bottom remained full of murky red-orange liquid with rusty lemon slices and a few limp-looking cantaloupe balls floating on the cloudy surface. I took note of the various discolorations on the table covering: big, splotchy red stains, which must have been punch spilled over when poor Patti plopped into the bowl. Some greasy patches of what could have been chip dip. A few spatters reminiscent of salsa, perhaps. And... what was this? Three large, irregularly shaped black stains that screeched Rorschach.

On reflection I thought, Why not ink stains? After all, the bulk of this crowd were writers, weren't they?
While Sorrel shot the bowl, I stepped back to get some perspective. This was the crime scene? Not even the whole room? Or at least the whole damn banquet table? If I could believe the yellow tape, the pitiful crime scene consisted of just this tacky old plastic punch bowl. How sad for Patti Petticote. Nobody deserved that, even if she did have perfectly even white teeth and the body of Businesswoman Barbie.

Breakfasters started trickling into the ballroom, moving somewhat guardedly, talking among themselves in hushed tones. Word of the murder had quickly shot through the conference â€" you don't keep a thing like this secret from a hotel full of mystery mavens. Given that, I'd have thought they would all be making a beeline up here to have a look at the crime scene, but then I spied a uniformed police officer at the entry doors who must have been warning the attendees to stay away from the evidence.
The cop spotted me just as I saw him, so I wasn't surprised when he immediately headed our way. He was tall, tight, and toned, with a formidable square jaw and a blue-gray brush cut. When he reached me, I read "Officer Randall Roarke" on his name tag.

Before he could order me and my cameraman away from the scene, I jumped right in. "Officer Roarke," I began, presenting my news credentials, "I'm Maxi Poole from Channel Six in the L.A. area, where the murdered Ms. Petticote was from. Can you fill me in on what happened here last night?"

"Hey, I hearda you," Roarke said. "Aren't you that reporter who fell off the middle of the Y in the Hollywood sign last week?"

"The same," I reluctantly admitted, absently rubbing an elbow that had been rather badly bruised when I'd hit the ground. Luckily, in June in Southern California the rolling terrain beneath the famous sign is overgrown with deciduous wildflowers, weeds, and bramble that cushioned my fall. Unluckily, upon landing I fatally ripped my designer suit jacket on the steel tripod of a cowboy shooter from Channel Two. He, of course, wouldn't stop rolling even long enough to ask if I'd been hurt, competition being fierce among local television newsies in La-La Land. When the flying weight of my body jiggled his live shot he just yelled, "Damn," and I ruined a Giorgio Armani suit that had cost me a week's pay. See, an Armani skirt happens to be useless to me without the jacket. Between covering stories, I co-anchor the station's nightly Six O'clock News, during which program I could be naked from the waist down for all anyone would know â€" the viewers just see the jacket. But that's another story.

People were filing into the room, and the waitstaff had begun serving breakfast at the tables. While Officer Roarke was reciting to me what I already knew about the murder, my eyes wandered over to one unmitigated hunk of a buffed-out guy with dark curly hair, sitting alone. I recognized him immediately: Nicholas Sparks, the best-selling author who was raking in zillions with his weepy, feel-good novels. Staggeringly good-looking, I mentally noted. Well, what woman wouldn't?

Then I noticed a blotchy black stain on the right side of his "striped collared shirt," as he would call that particular article of clothing in his own books. Hmmm. Looked like an ink stain to me. But then, I mused, wasn't he the guy who was always penning weepy missives â€" a message in a bottle, a history in a notebook, all those love letters from Ecuador? And you don't write that kind of exotica with a ballpoint. Still, the dark ink smudge looked a lot like the ones staining the tablecloth next to the murder weapon â€" I mean next to the punch bowl.

I watched as a fan approached his table and presented him with a book. Sparks took a black and gold Montblanc fountain pen the size of a cigar out of the pocket of his aforementioned collared shirt. My gaze followed the fluid movement of his hand as he traced the letters of his name with a flourish on what I assumed was the title page, when out of the corner of my ear I heard Roarke saying, "...a bullet hole through her head."

"Huh?" I asked in my professional interview style. "What bullet hole?"

"Right about here," he said, pointing to his own forehead an inch or so above the spot between his eyes. "Big one. Looked like a .38."

I didn't even want to think about that bullet hole messing up poor Patti Petticote's perfect face, not to mention causing her lustrous henna head to fill up with day-old punch. But she hadn't drowned after all, as the wires had speculated. Apparently she'd been shot in the head, then dunked.
"Did you see the body?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah. I caught the squeal. And now I'm protecting the crime scene."

"Um... and this punch bowl is the crime scene?"

"That's right."

"Why not the whole ballroom?"

"If I taped up the room, where were they supposed to feed this crowd, in the parking lot?"

"Good point," I said. "Did they recover the gun?"

"You'll have to ask the detectives that," offered Officer Roarke.

"And they would be...?"

"Dick and Jane. Parsippany's only dicks. And a helluva team they are," he said with more than a little pride. "Detectives Richard North Patterson and Jane Eyre."

"North Patterson!" I threw out. "Like the mystery writer?"

"Pure coincidence, and Janie's nothing like that sappy heroine. But she did give out copies of the book for Christmas presents. Autographed."

I looked at him, incredulous. "By Charlotte BrontÃ"?"

"No, no," he said as if I were stretching his patience. "You know â€" Jane Eyre from Jane Eyre."

I thanked Roarke and turned to the room. I recognized a few well-known writers scattered among the early birds who had arrived while I was talking to Roarke. I stopped my perusal and stared. There was hot new author David Rosenfelt, sitting alone at a corner table. Did I have just half a minute to go over there and beg him for his autograph on a bookmark or something?

Mustering resolve, I resisted the urge. I had work to do. I looked up to see a man and woman approaching. I knew they had to be the Parsippany dicks. Well, one Dick, and Jane. After introductions by Roarke, Eyre and North Patterson actually seemed delighted to talk to me. Jane Eyre boasted that the pair had a hundred-percent solve record. "Wow, that's some score," I marveled. "How many cases?"
"One," she said. "Three years ago."

"A booster," North Patterson elaborated. "Igby's Hardware. The creep is doing three to five in Riverfront," he said proudly. Evidently these two didn't get to talk to reporters much.

"What about Petticote?" I asked. "Did you recover the gun?"

"Nope. No gun, no bullets, except the one that's probably still in her head," North Patterson said. "We'll get that at the autopsy."

"Shame. Such a pretty young thing," Eyre put in sadly.

"Have you canvassed the conference?" I asked.

"Gonna do that now," from North Patterson. "We wanted to give 'em a chance to get some breakfast in them."

"Nice of you," I remarked. I'd never heard of detectives being so generous to the perp pool. They definitely do things different in Parsippany. The murderer was probably even now tucking into a short stack with bacon.

"About those ink stains," Eyre said to her partner then. "Think it was a writer?"

"Plausible, given this happens to be a writers conference," N.P. returned.

The two padded off to interview suspects, while Sorrel shot the crowd and I hovered around the crime scene. A writer. A frustrated writer. Was Patti Petticote a threat? To whom? Seemed unlikely, since before I was assigned to this story I'd never even heard of her, and I do know the mystery genre, if I say so myself. I went over and sat at an empty table by the wall to think about this.

I was trying to make sense out of the ink stains, and the writers who might have motive and means, when a short, slight, beaten-down-looking man with Woody Allen spectacles and a bad orange comb-over materialized at my table and pulled out a chair. "Mind if I sit down?" he asked, dropping into the seat before I could answer. "You're reporter Maxi Poole, aren't you?"

"How did you know?" I asked, since this was not my coast.

"I'm from L.A. Caught your dive off the Hollywood sign," he said.

"Not on my station, you didn't," I objected peevishly.

"No â€" on every other station."

I needed to change the subject. "Did you know Patti Petticote?" I asked.

"Know her? I created her." I detected a sudden welling up behind the tortoiseshell frames.

"Oh! And you are...?

"Dashiell Chandler. It's a pen name. My real name is Raymond Hammett."

"It is not," I said.

"No, but it makes a good personal story, don't you think?"

Fearing that he would launch into his personal story, I quickly got back to the matter at hand. "Tell me about Patti," I said.

He gazed out into the middle distance and for a minute I thought I'd lost him. "My Patti was special," he finally said. A tear materialized and ran a jagged course over a craggy cheek. Dabbing at it with the sleeve of his cheap brown and yellow houndstooth sports coat, he asked me if I'd found out anything.
"Not really," I lamented with him. "Do you have any idea who would do this?"

The wet eyes hardened. "A writer, of course," he said. "But not just any writer. A writer who uses a fountain pen. And there aren't many of those left."

I was about to mention Nicholas Sparks and the fat Montblanc, when Chandler leveled his gaze at me and said conspiratorially, "Let me tell you what I think."

I said nothing, waiting for him to fill the silence.

He went on. "It had to be a man. A woman wouldn't shoot another woman in the head. Too aggressive. And the guy had to have a fountain pen on his person. A pen that leaks. My take is he shot her, Patti keeled over into the punch bowl, and the recoil flipped his fountain pen onto the table. That's the only way a leaky pen could've made such a mess. I hardly think those unsightly ink stains could have been leaked all over the linen by some writer just hanging by the food table autographing books." Showing off his mystery writer-honed powers of deduction.

"Interesting," was all I said.

At that he bent closer to me, and when he did, a gleaming antique Parker Big Red dropped out of his pocket, and when it hit the table its aged top popped off, the threads most likely completely worn down, and it emitted a gush of jet-black ink onto the tablecloth. We both stared at the ink stain, saying nothing for a long time.

"You killed her," I finally whispered.

"I loved her," he said.

When I didn't respond, he tugged off his glasses and started to whimper softly.

"Tell me," I urged, knowing he had to. Knowing that was the reason he'd sat down with me.

"I made her young, beautiful. I dressed her like Britney Spears. I gave her jewelry, a fake fur coat, a silver Corvette. But it was never enough. With her, it was always get me, gimme, fly me, buy me. She drained me of every buck I had. Thank God for this complimentary breakfast â€" I just scarfed down three helpings of scrambled eggs and links, and I've got a blueberry muffin in my pocket. And it's not as if Patti brought in any money...."

I'd surreptitiously reached into my tote and pulled out my porous crocheted string purse, reached inside it, and flipped on my tape recorder. I felt a confession coming on.

"What about her novels?" I asked, when he'd trailed off. "Didn't they bring in revenue?"

"There was only one," he said mournfully. "'The Patti Perils'. I self-published. It only sold eighty-six copies. I had to remainder it after a month. She never forgave me for that. Said I didn't do enough to promote her. We had a big fight last night"

"In this room," I put in knowingly. "By the punch bowl...."

"She got thirsty," he said.

I caught the eye of Jane Eyre and waved her over. North Patterson tagged behind. "Sit down," I said quietly when they reached our table.

I skipped the introductions. They'd have been lost on Chandler, who was blubbering now. "She called me a big fat loser," he sniveled. "I'm not fat."

North Patterson was getting the picture. "Where's the gun, son?" he ventured.

"I... it... Right here," Chandler said, digging a red plastic gun out of the pocket of his cargo pants.
"But... that's just a toy gun," Jane Eyre said to him.

"Well, she was just a fictional character," Dashiell Chandler countered logically.

The detectives looked at each other and nodded. They couldn't argue with that.

"And there's no statute on the books in the state of New Jersey that says it's against the law for an author to kill his own character," North Patterson put in.

"I warned her," Chandler intoned, narrowing his eyes. "I said, ‘Patti, I brought you in, and I'll take you out.' She laughed at me. ‘You wouldn't dare,' she mocked. ‘I'm all you got.'"

"So you shot her," finished Eyre soberly.

"With that gun," added North Patterson, pointing to the murder weapon.

"Another solve," I said admiringly.

"We're still batting a thousand," N.P. boasted with a smile.

"So... am I free to go?" asked Chandler.

"Sure," said the Parsippany detectives in unison, and they took turns shaking his hand. I gave Sam Sorrel my card, told him to send his bill to Channel Six News in L.A., and tossed his tape into my tote.
Then Dashiell Chandler reached into an inside jacket pocket, brought out a book, and handed it to me. "I want you to have this, Maxi," he said. "You've made me feel better about everything."

The cover proclaimed it to be a Patti Petticote mystery. I tried to look grateful. I mean, for about fifty cents I could have snagged one of these on the remainders shelf in the dealers' room. This turkey wasn't going to pay its rent in my suitcase flying back to L.A.

Chandler seemed to read my mind. "It's a collector's item," he protested. "In thirty, forty years it's gonna be worth something, you'll see. It's the only Patti Petticote mystery in existence."

"Aren't you going to write more of them?" I asked, just to be saying something in an awkward situation.
He shot me a look like I was playing with half a deck. "How can I?" he said. "She's dead."

With that, Dashiell Chandler got up from the table and rolled off. I hadn't noticed before he sat down, but he was wearing glitter-pink Rollerblades.