Eight Perfect Murders(54)

The bigger question I had was how had Charlie targeted Pruitt in the first place. The only people who knew I was interested in him were Marty Kingship and Jillian Nguyen. Of course, Pruitt was related to Norman Chaney. And if Charlie had arranged for Chaney’s death, then he’d have a connection with Pruitt as well. I suddenly remembered the book, Little Fish, and that I’d left it here at the store. Emily was now back at her own desk, dealing with online orders probably, so I went to the register. Little Fish was there, where I’d left it. I realized how incriminating it was that I had a library copy of this book and decided that the least I could do was not leave it where it was.

“You had a visitor last night,” Brandon said.

I looked up. “Oh, yeah?”

“Brian Murray’s wife—is it Tess?—was here looking for you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Did she say what she wanted?”

“Nah. She said she was just dropping by because she hadn’t been for a while, but I could tell she was a little disappointed you weren’t here. She’s not usually in Boston, is she? Not when it’s freezing cold like this, right?”

“Brian broke his arm,” I said. “I saw them two nights ago, and apparently she now has to be here to help him with everything.”

“Oh, man, that’s hilarious,” Brandon said, although I wasn’t sure it really was.

I wasn’t too surprised that Tess had stopped by the store. She had been in the book business, after all, as a publicist. And I was sure she was tired of babysitting her husband. Still, I couldn’t help thinking about the way she’d hugged me good-bye after we had drinks at the Beacon Hill Hotel.

“She buy anything?” I asked.

“Nah. But she rearranged all the Brian Murrays for us.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said.

Before leaving I copied the complicated link for the Duckburg site onto a piece of paper, so I could check the site from my laptop at home. Then I grabbed Little Fish, told Brandon and Emily they might be on their own for a while, and headed home. Outside, tiny ice flakes of snow had begun to swirl in the air. Another storm—not a very big one—was threatening to arrive that night. I kept thinking of Tess Murray, how she’d come into the store. Had she seen my copy of Nick Pruitt’s book? And if she had, so what? Still, it bugged me.

I unlocked the outside door and climbed the stairs to my attic apartment. Inside, it was surprisingly cold, and I realized that I’d left the windows cracked, not something that I remembered doing at all. I shut them, then went immediately to my computer to check the Duckburg site. There was no response. I looked up Tess Murray. It occurred to me that I knew hardly anything about her besides the fact that she was the much younger wife of my business partner, and that she’d been a publicist when they first met. I found who I thought was her on a LinkedIn page, although there was no photograph. It listed one of the big publishing houses as a place of former employment, plus a business called Snyman Publicity, and I remembered that Snyman was her name before she changed it to Murray. Her current place of employment was the Treasure Chest on Longboat Key in Florida, the small jewelry store she now ran. I wondered if she’d quit the book business because of her association with Brian Murray. It had been a minor scandal when they’d gotten married, mostly because she’d broken up his marriage, but also because she was so much younger. And so much more attractive. The fact that they had been married for over ten years hadn’t changed anyone’s opinion that she was a gold digger.

I remembered a story I’d heard about her, probably from another local crime writer. This had been when Tess was still working as a publicist but had just started seeing Brian. She’d been at a cocktail party at Thrillerfest in New York City when someone made a disparaging remark about Brian, how he’d been mailing in his increasingly flimsy thrillers for years. It was not an untrue accusation, in my opinion, but apparently Tess slapped the person who had said it out loud, then stormed away. I remember that whoever had told me that story seemed to be telling it to show what a lunatic Tess was, but I’d heard it as a story that confirmed her essential love for Brian. I believed they had a good marriage.

I checked my phone to see if I had Tess Murray’s information on it. I did: both her email address and her cell number. I sent her a message:

Hey Tess, Malcolm here in case you don’t recognize the number. Heard you were in the store and asked after me. Let’s have dinner soon—the three of us. I’d love to catch up some more.



I turned my phone screen off after sending the message, but as soon as I set it down it buzzed, and there was a message from Tess: Yes!!! Come for dinner tomorrow night!!!

I wrote back telling her I’d love to come and asked her what time and what could I bring.

Seven and yourself!!! came the reply, so instantaneously that I wondered how she had time to even type the words. After the exclamation marks, she’d included a single red heart.

I went to the refrigerator to get a beer. I had some eggs and cheese and decided to make an omelet for dinner, even though I hadn’t felt any kind of hunger since seeing Pruitt’s body in the morning. I put a bunch of Michael Nyman CDs in my old CD player and listened to his score for The End of the Affair first. I made the omelet and ate half of it, then opened another beer. I went to my bookshelf and found the section where I kept my Brian Murray books. I had almost all of them. Definitely all the recent ones, because Brian had his book launch parties at Old Devils and he always inscribed a book for me. But I also had most of the old paperbacks, the early Ellis Fitzgerald novels that I’d started reading when I was about ten years old. I didn’t have to get those particular books from Annie’s Book Swap because my mom was an Ellis Fitzgerald fan and bought all the books herself. The early ones were really good, like funnier Ross MacDonald novels. And it was a fairly big deal back then that the detective was a female, and a tough, uncompromising one at that. Brian had told me several times that in the first draft of the first Ellis Fitzgerald novel, The Poison Tree, Ellis had been a man. His agent told him that the book was good but that it was a little familiar. He made Ellis a woman without changing anything else, and the book sold.