Rejection: Publishing Murder Mystery (Lou Drake Mysteries) (7 page)

A look passed between the two men that spoke of secrets long buried and best kept that way.

Collins shrugged. “What are you worried about? It’s been years and we’ve never had any problems.”

Andrade was shaking his head before Collins even finished speaking. “And we have to keep it that way, which means we don’t need extra people poking around.”

“Hell Cap, no one but Drake could put two and two together anyway, and he’s sure as shit not gonna be investigating anything.”

Andrade went completely still and just stared at Collins.

“What?” Collins said.

“I can’t believe I did that.”

“Did what?”

“Put Drake in with the one person who has access to every case file in the station.”

Collins looked confused. “Who?”

“Serena, woman who works in the cage.”

Collins grinned and shook his head. “Damn, you surely took your paranoid pill this morning. Drake is hidden away good and proper, and in a few months he’ll be gone.”

“Not good enough,” Andrade said with a stubborn look on his face. “I want you to make sure that bitch isn’t sticking her nose in where it doesn’t belong.”

“How do I—”

“Just do it, okay?”

Collins held his hands up, palms facing the Captain. “All right,” he said. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll lean on the Coroner and tell them we need answers yesterday. Meantime, I’ll brief the squad on the murders. Hopefully we’ll find out two different psychos were behind them.”

The Captain gave him a skeptical look. “Whatever, just get on it.”

Collins nodded and left the office.

Andrade leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Christ,” he said to the empty room. He found himself wishing he could turn these two murders over to his best investigator, like he always used to when he wanted a fast result. Unfortunately that person was sitting in the cage, wasting away the last few months of his career. The Captain barked out an ironic laugh.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

DRAKE SAT AT his kitchen table trying to work up the courage to open the box sitting in front of him. His portable heater droned away near his feet. Despite their size, both he and Robin felt the cold keenly and had a difficult time keeping warm. When they slept together they were like Eskimos beneath piles of bearskins.

This was the first sunshine the box had seen for ten years. It had long resided in the bottom of a drawer, sulking in the dark, the contents yellowing with age. On late nights when sleep eluded him, Drake often thought of the box and felt bad, like he had abandoned it. He wondered if this was a bit like women felt after giving up a baby for adoption.

He took a deep breath and opened the top. Inside was a thick stack of rejection letters held together with a black metal clip at one corner. He riffled through them, remembering the many times he had plucked the self-addressed stamped envelops from his mailbox only to see the all-too-familiar messages. “Our agency is not accepting new authors at this time,” the letters would say, or more succinctly, “This book is not for me.”

Drake set aside the letters and lifted out the bulky manuscript. The title was centered on the front page: MORTAL WHISPERS. He turned to page one and began to read. By the end of the second chapter he was already forming ideas about how he would revise the manuscript if he were to re-write it today.

“Okay,” he whispered. “I can do this.”

From the top shelf of his closet Drake pulled down his electric typewriter and plugged it in. The beast hummed quietly, beckoning to him. He reached out and hit a single key. The Daisy wheel leapt from its long slumber and clacked against the empty barrel.

He rolled a fresh sheet of bond paper into the machine. A growing sense of urgency rolled through him as he placed his fingers on the keys. Then the phone rang. It was Robin.

“Hi honey,” she said. “I’m on break so I thought I’d check in and see what you’re doing.”

“Just sitting down to do some writing.”

“Really? Good for you.”

“Yeah, well, I have a new idea and I figured, what the hell. I need something to do after I hang up my badge. Might as well start this weekend.”

“Lucky you. I’ll probably be the Sweetum’s Doughnuts assistant manager for the rest of my life.”

“Tell you what, maybe this’ll turn out to be a bestseller and then I can take you away from all that.”

“Is that a proposal?”

“Gotta go,” he said with a laugh. “See you tomorrow.”

It was a strange game they played. She repeatedly steered conversations around to her bleak future, and he repeatedly promised to save her from her plight. Then came her inevitable question.

Drake often wondered why she bothered with a guy like him. He asked her once and she got angry. With hands on hips and a red face she unleashed a barrage of threatening pop psychology and told him never to ask that question again.

“You’re a good man and I love you,” she said.

Drake thought of her as a hopeless optimist, waiting for the day when he would magically emerge from his downtrodden state.

He returned to the typewriter and checked that the margins were set. Then he awkwardly typed a mindless series of words. Drake felt a sense of growing elation with each snap of the eager ball and the shifting movement of the paper. The simple act of putting words on paper seemed to make him feel less empty. He could feel a smile starting to creep into the edges of his mouth, and he loved it.

He looked over the copies of the case files Serena had given him. The margins were filled with notes he had scribbled while reviewing the reports, including a story outline scratched on the back of one page. He ripped the test page out of the machine, rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter and created a new title page.

TORN JUSTICE

BY

LEWIS HENRY DRAKE

He stared at the words for a second, and then with shaking hands he pulled the cover page from the typewriter and faced a fresh blank page.

Take the chance, he told himself. Trust your gut. Just write. Write anything as long as it feels like yours. No matter if it is brilliant or total crap, just write and let go of the results.

He thought back to what his old high school composition teacher had told him. Thinking and composition do not go hand in hand. True writing comes from the heart. Create first, edit later. That’s what she always stressed.

The typewriter seemed to respond of its own accord as his fingers flashed. Drake felt driven as he poured out page after page about the rainy night he and Dodd got the call. Dodd’s screams from the wet pavement found their way onto the page, as did the eerie light emanating from the open door up the metal stairs. He described the smell of death, the dark alley, and the desperation he felt when he crouched next to his injured partner. Drake wrote about shock and personal misery, fear and the knowledge that this night could end a career.

Drake’s fingers cramped at one in the morning, so he stopped and read through the pages. The writing was rough, yes, but damn it felt good.

In high school he had been praised for his skill, even had a teacher suggest that he should consider writing for a living. After graduation he looked to law enforcement, though, just as his father and grandfather had done before him. Still, the words were always in him. They came through in his impeccable arrest reports, and later in the reports he wrote as a detective. More than once he was asked to write press releases and promotional copy for his union local.

The memories took him back to when he first thought of writing a book. He had read a Joseph Wambaugh interview, in which the writer mentioned he would be at the San Diego State University Writer’s Conference. Drake attended and managed to corner Wambaugh for fifteen glorious minutes where they talked about being cops and writing.

That same day Drake bought the electric typewriter from a pawnshop. Though his wife scoffed, he was diligent about his efforts and six months later he had completed a first draft. Several friends read it and liked the story. He pulled a thousand dollars out of savings to have the manuscript professionally edited, and educated himself on how to submit a book for publication.

With that effort came the fantasies of publication, money and notoriety. But when Drake shopped the manuscript around he discovered that the publishing industry was profoundly disinterested. After thirty rejections Drake began to lose hope. His wife thought the whole thing was foolish. She told him they didn’t have the money, nor he the time, to be writing books he could not sell. After a hundred rejections he began to believe her.

“Face it honey,” she said. “Why would anyone publish a book you wrote? It’s not like you’re a celebrity.”

So Drake had stuffed the manuscript and rejection letters in the box and dropped the bundle into the drawer. He tried to forget about it, but like a wound that would not quite heal, the book called to him on late, sleepless nights.

Now he was finally doing something about it.

“Okay,” Drake said aloud and yawned. “Time to stop worrying about the past and just go to bed.”

Sleep came easily and he dreamed of murder.

* * *

Collins stopped by Kathy Morey’s office just after lunch to pick up the autopsy reports she had promised him. Kathy was athletic, had dirty blond hair, and stood five feet eight, or a little taller in the heels she was wearing today. Collins was immediately struck by her somber expression, which was in stark contrast to the upbeat smile with which she had greeted him on the previous occasions they had met.

She passed Collins two envelopes containing the reports and said, “Detective, these are beyond inhuman, like Jack-the-Ripper evil.”

Collins nodded. “I know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Do you have any idea who did this yet?”

“Not really.” He held up the two envelopes. “I’m hoping for some ideas from these.”

Morey looked skeptical. “I hope they help, but I didn’t see anything in the autopsy that would point to a particular type of person doing the killing.”

“Could it have been done by a doctor, or somebody with medical training?”

Morey thought that over before she answered. “I’d say more like somebody with a careful hand and the time to make a point. Thank God these people were out of it when this was done to them.”

“But one was drugged and the other stunned. Did the work on the two bodies strike you as probably being done by the same person?”

“Hard to say. It could be, but the damage to the two bodies was incredibly different. From what I know about serial killers, they tend to have a particular modus operandi that stays the same for all of their victims. That’s generally the basis of their drive to kill. And these bodies were not traumatized in a rage.” She shook her head. “This case doesn’t seem to fit the typical patterns.”

That statement stayed with Collins all afternoon and was still whispering in his mind as he read over the reports at home, late in the evening.

A drive to kill. What was the killer’s motive? Anger? Revenge? Insanity? Or were there two killers, each with their own reasons? The word that kept appearing in Morey’s reports was methodical. The more he pondered it the more he felt he was nowhere close to an answer.

Collins set aside his cold coffee and rubbed his temples. The only commonality he had been able to uncover between Petre and Orland was their sideline as literary agents. To sell books you had to have writer clients, which seemed to be plentiful to say the least. After plowing through website after website Collins was starting to get a sense of how writers and agents interact. Clearly an overabundance of wannabe writers were trying to get a piece of an ever-shrinking pie of publishing opportunities, and an ever growing number of agents were available to help — for a cut of the pie, of course.

More than that, apparently not all agents were trustworthy. Collins found one site that listed thousands of agents, affiliated with as many agencies, and a small review after each name. Some were very clear; HIGHLY NOT RECOMMENDED! It seemed the publishing game was filled with con men just waiting to bilk vain writers out of a few bucks. Another message was constant; REAL AGENTS DO NOT CHARGE FEES! But Collins suspected there were a fair number of writers who ignored the warning. P.T. Barnum had been right. There was a sucker born every minute.

Unfortunately this research brought Collins no closer to narrowing down who the killer or killers might be. There had to be thousands and thousands of writers in New York alone, millions in the whole country. The more he tried to fit the two murders together, the less he believed the agent connection was viable. And if not, he was leaning toward two killers rather than one.

After all, the gloved handprints and footprints were sloppy intentional dupes at the cab driver’s place, whereas the Petre scene was careful and clean. Even though the two methods of death were both brutal, they were also dramatically different. There were no taunting clues, no obvious telltale signatures, no clever try and catch me calling cards.

“Shit,” he said to the early morning and decided to let it rest. He’d had too much coffee and his head was overfull with thoughts and theories. Collins took a pill and watched the late news until he fell asleep with the television on.