Unforced Error
Unforced Error
Unforced Error
A Rep and Melissa Pennyworth Mystery
Michael Bowen
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright © 2004 by Michael Bowen
First Edition 2004
Cover photograph by Harold J. Bowen: “Downtown Kansas City, Missouri from the Liberty Memorial, Looking North.”
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003115433
ISBN-10: 1-59058-109-1 Hardcover
ISBN-13: 978-1-61595-319-6 Epub
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Poisoned Pen Press
6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
This story is dedicated to Sara Armbruster Bowen, my beloved wife and the only person I know who is smarter than Melissa Seton Pennyworth.
Contents
Unforced Error is a work of fiction. The characters appearing in the story do not exist, and the events described did not take place. As a work of the author's imagination, and by way of emphasizing the fictional character of the story,
Unforced Error
takes certain liberties with local place names. For example, the author is well aware, from having spent many happy hours as a boy and young man there, that the principal library in Kansas City, Missouri, is the Kansas City Public Library, not the Jackson County Public Library. The latter name was used in an effort to make it as clear as possible that I am making this stuff up.
It may be helpful to readers not familiar with Kansas City to note one particularly striking characteristic of that municipality: geographically, it is very large. Its population of 435,000 or so is spread over 319 square miles. (Chicago's area, by contrast, is 228 square miles.) To put this in perspective, if Kansas City had the same population density as its cross-state sister city, St. Louis, it would be home to more than 2,000,000 souls. Hence, the city includes a great deal of open space, and it is possible to drive for a
long
time without leaving the city limits.
First degree murder is punishable by death in Missouri, even if the victim is an editor of romance novels.
When the body turned up Reppert G. Pennyworth would see three excellent reasons to mind his own business, starting there. The death penalty doesn't come up much in intellectual property work.
Rep later reflected philosophically on the futility of having three excellent reasons when you need four. But what could he do? Not only was the murder a tough break for the victim, but it interfered with the most interesting copyright issue Rep had seen in a long time.
Peter Damon had known since junior high who got girls like this. And it wasn't guys like him.
Violet eyes with a minxish glint worth half a Byron canto. Luminous smile. Ebony hair framing a dusty rose face whose casual perfection reminded him of Uffizzi canvases. Ample breasts that casually mocked the perfunctory effort of her silk blouse to appear demure. Your basic Peter Damon, with his bookish pallor, wispy, light brown hair already retreating from his forehead, oversized ears, and watery blue eyes unkindly magnified by the thick lenses of wire-frame glasses, couldn't even let himself imagine that a woman like this might be hitting on him.
He hadn't imagined anything of the kind when she'd asked to join him at what she claimed was the last available non-smoking table in the Lake Tahoe Holiday Inn Crown Plaza restaurant. He hadn't imagined it when she'd introduced herself as Lara Teasdale, had guessed correctly that he was here for the librarians' convention, and had explained that she'd come to teach Power Point presentations to rookie sales reps for Golden State Office Interiors. He
had
wished, for the only time in his life, that he were a rookie sales rep.
He hadn't even imagined it when she'd segued unsubtly from crosswords to hookers.
“Please don't let me keep you from your puzzle,” she said, nodding at the twice-folded
New York Times
beside his plate.
“It can wait,” Peter said hastily, capping his medium point blue Bic pen and stowing it in his caramel colored corduroy sport coat. “Civil War theme, no biggie. I guess crossword puzzles are an occupational cliché for librarians, aren't they?”
“Not necessarily. I'm just an MIS specialist, and words have always fascinated me. âHooker,' for example.”
“Excuse me?”
“You mentioned the Civil War and that reminded me. Wasn't that when the word âhooker' came into American slang?”
“Oh. Right. Because of all the, uh, er, camp followers with the Army of the Potomac while General Hooker was commanding it.”
“Exactly,” Teasdale said. “I love neat little
connections
like that. Like âjoysticks.' I remember seeing an 'eighties movie called
Joysticks
on video, and I'm like, am I the only one who gets this?”
“Probably not,” Peter said, feeling a crimson burn on the backs of his ears.
“I mean, they once called the throttles on airplanes âjoysticks' because of the phallic association.” She raised an eyebrow in polite interrogation, and Peter nodded: he knew what phallic associations were. “Then when video games appeared, they called the control rods âjoysticks' because they looked like the throttles on World War II fighters. Then someone making this B-movie teenage sex comedy revolving around video games thinks âjoysticks' is this incredibly clever double
entendre
, and all they're doing is going back to the original allusion.”
“Uh,
yeah
,” Peter said. “Er, hey, do you travel much for Golden State Office Interiors?”
“More than I'd like,” Teasdale sighed. “I could draw the basic floor-plan for every hotel chain in the country. It gets very lonely.”
“I guess it would.”
“Like tonight,” she added, catching his eyes and lowering her voice. “All I have to look forward to is
Sports Center
and a hot bath.”
That's
when Peter began to think the unthinkable. He caught himself holding his breath.
“That is,” she continued, “unless you'd like to come up and show me how fast you can finish that crossword puzzle while we see if PBS or the History Channel is showing something on the Civil War.”
Peter forced his lips into a shy smile and made himself meet Teasdale's gaze.
“You're the most beautiful woman I've ever talked to,” he said gently. “You're the sexiest woman I've ever seen. But my wife, Linda, means everything in the world to me. It would really hurt her if I were unfaithful. I just couldn't do that.”
He braced himself for a cold shower of bitchy petulance. He got a wistful smile instead as Teasdale rested her chin on interlaced fingers.
“Is Linda very lovely?” she asked.
“Very,” Peter said, meaning relative to the female universe the likes of him had any business thinking about. “She's lovely, and smart, and committed, and idealistic, and just a very together lady.”
“She's also something else,” Teasdale said. “She's very, very lucky. Please let me get the check.”
***
It was 7:26 p.m., Central Daylight time, when Linda Damon and the twelve million other people watching
Reality Check Live!
on Fox heard her husband describe her as lovely, smart, committed, idealistic, and very together. Though the night was warm, she pulled the sheet up to cover her breasts as she turned toward the other side of the bed and spoke.
“I think you'd better go now, Tommy.”
Fortunately, only a handful of the other reactions to Peter Damon's unintentionally public display of chastity need concern us.
An aide to Missouri state senator Wade Carlton, for example, thought it important enough to break into a meeting between Carlton and the director of the America's Petrochemical Future Political Education Fund with a Tivo of the segment and the results of twenty frenetic minutes of Googling.
“Librarian from Kansas City,” she explained as Carlton replayed the scene. “Civil War hobbyist. Obsessed with networking libraries and public schools interactively through the web. Presented a paper saying if we don't start getting libraries into kids' heads and kids' heads into libraries, we'll have an entire generation that can't identify Appomattox.”
“Where is he on petrochemical issues?” the director asked.
“Get two 'graphs on this into my speech for the Majority Values Conference and make them sing,” Carlton told the aide. “And have one of the interns find out what Appomattox is.”
***
Then there was Diane Klimchock, Peter's boss at the Central Branch of the Jackson County, Missouri Public Library.
“Caught your act on the telly,” she said into his hotel room voice-mail seconds after Fox's hidden camera had cut to a different attempted seduction. “Aces! Must chat soonest. Late tea sixish Sunday evening? Only a few hours after your return, I know, but pretty please? Ring me back.”
Klimchock issued this invitation not in plummy accents redolent of Belgravia but with an unmistakably American high plains twang, for she haled from Nebraska and had yet to see the Atlantic Ocean. Anglophilia and Anglomania had dominated her personality since her first exposure to
Wuthering Heights
, however, and English idioms dating from Evelyn Waugh forward permeated her conversation.
***
Two women in their early twenties sharing an apartment on Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles also watched Peter Damon's one-hundred seconds of fame with mild interest. The one with long, sexy blond hair was smoking clove, handling her cigarette the way Audrey Hepburn had in
Charade
. The one with short, sassy blond hair was leafing idly through typescript brad-clipped into a pasteboard binder.
“What's the title?” the first asked just before Peter came on.
“
Seven Days in May
,” her roomie answered. This wasn't a projected remake of the Kirk Douglas movie based on Fletcher Knebel's famous political thriller. In this permutation she'd be reading for the part of May Greene, first woman President of the United States, and she'd have more than a casual interest in the actors who'd be playing General Donald Day and his six brothers.
Reality Check Live!'s
cut to the Teasdale/Damon encounter drew the long-haired thespian's focus back to the screen. She shifted her smoking technique to Kathleen Turner in
Body Heat
, for she was a well-rounded student of the cinema. When Peter turned the proposition down, she brought her cigarette to the right side of her mouth and clinched it between her lips through a long, determined pull.
“Bet I nail him in one week,” she said.
“Just don't do it on spec,” her roommate advised.
***
And finally Melissa Seton Pennyworth, newly minted Ph.D in Literature, as it was still called at the proudly old-school university that had conferred her degree, had tuned in. She watched
Reality Check Live!
strictly in the interests of academic research, the way guys in the 'sixties used to leaf through
Playboy
for the interviews.
“Rep, look,” she called to her husband. “That's Linda Damon's husband. The guy you're going to see about your Civil War idea. ”
“Are you sure?” Rep asked, politely feigning interest as he glanced up from a brochure from Engineered Storage Products Company, manufacturer of Harvestore® silos.
“I'd know those ears anywhere. I was just checking Linda's phone number. I'm going to call her tomorrow to let her know what time to expect us when we get to Kansas City next week.”
“What a remarkable coincidence,” Rep said. And because this isn't a nineteenth-century gothic novel, no vague sense of foreboding nor tingling premonition of disaster spoiled his foray into the arcana of engineered bolts and Breather Bags®.