A Romantic Way to Die Read online

  “You have to be kidding,” Jeanne said. “I can’t possibly be a suspect. I’m a respected literary agent.”

  Having read Henrietta’s manuscript, Rhodes was pretty sure that respected wasn’t the right word, not if Henrietta had been anywhere near the truth about Jeanne’s personality.

  “I’m not kidding,” he said. “I’m not trying to trample on your constitutional rights, but nobody’s going anywhere until I say so. You can go right on with your workshop if you want to, but you can’t go back to New York.”

  “I don’t see how we can go on with things,” Vernell said. “Not after what’s happened.”

  “That’s up to you,” Rhodes said. “But I’m going to want to talk to everyone about tonight. If you’ll go to your rooms, I’ll call you out one at a time.”

  Rhodes had long ago learned that eyewitnesses were the worst kind. Of all the people who had been at the dinner that evening, not a single one had noticed Terry Don’s leaving, nor had anyone seen who might have left with him. Or so they all claimed.

  Lorene Winslow swore that she hadn’t seen or talked to Terry Don all evening, but she did have a few things to say.

  “I wasn’t at Terry Don’s table,” she said. “Why don’t you ask Tom?”

  “Chatterton?” Rhodes said.

  “That’s right. Tom. Terry Don was at his table. If anyone knows where Terry Don went, Tom should.”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “That’s what he told you. But do you believe him?”

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “How much do you know about him and Vernell?”

  Rhodes knew nothing at all about Vernell and Chatterton. It was becoming apparent to him that he was a long way out of the mainstream of gossip in Clearview.

  “What should I know?” he asked.

  “Well, for one thing they were becoming an item.”

  Rhodes couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard any couple referred to as an item.

  “That’s how this whole writers’ workshop came about,” Lorene said. “Henrietta told me all about it.”

  “You and Henrietta must have been pretty good friends,” Rhodes said. “Since you were roommates and all.”

  Lorene brushed her improbable red hair back with one hand and tucked it behind her ear.

  “I’m not sure Henrietta had any friends,” she said. “Sometimes I think she went out of her way to make enemies.”

  “You’ve read the manuscript,” Rhodes said.

  “Good guess, Sheriff.”

  “But she seemed to like the character named Lorraine. She didn’t try to make an enemy of you.”

  “We knew each other for a long time. But that doesn’t mean we were friends.”

  “Did she talk to you about Terry Don?”

  “Sometimes. But we didn’t spend much time alone here at the workshop. So she didn’t reveal any of her girlish secrets.”

  “And she didn’t mention who might have been dropping by to see her last night?”

  “Not to me,” Lorene said. “I might have walked right in on them if I’d gone back to the room. Maybe she wouldn’t have died if I had. Too bad I was over talking to Claudia and Jan.”

  Rhodes noticed the reestablishment of Lorene’s alibi, but he didn’t remark on it. He just agreed with what she said and returned to what interested him.

  “What did Henrietta tell you about Chatterton and Vernell?”

  “That Vernell was using Tom to get this workshop put together. She couldn’t afford to pay the writers and the agent if she had to rent the campus facilities, so she started working on Tom. Vernell’s not bad-looking, you know, and before long, she had Tom convinced that he needed to host something here to get things off the ground. The publicity would be good for him, and she could guarantee the publicity.”

  “She’s going to get that, all right,” Rhodes said. “One murder was bad enough, but this one is going to bring in the big boys.”

  Lorene gave him a puzzled look.

  “The big boys?” she said.

  “The city papers,” Rhodes said. “And the TV crews. If Terry Don was as famous as I think he was, there’ll be trailers and satellite dishes all over this place by morning.”

  “He was as famous as you think he was,” Lorene said. “He was even about to get a TV commercial.”

  Rhodes hadn’t heard that, either.

  “Did Henrietta tell you that?” he asked.

  “No. Terry Don did. He was telling everybody. He thought it was going to be his stepping-stone to a series.”

  “What kind of series?”

  “He didn’t care. He would’ve settled for a guest shot on Xena.”

  Who could blame him? Rhodes thought. But he didn’t see why Vernell’s relationship with Chatterton would have had anything to do with Terry Don.

  “You read the manuscript, too, Sheriff. So you know what Terry Don was like.”

  “You mean—”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh,” Rhodes said.

  Vernell was irate that Lorene had mentioned her relationship with Chatterton.

  “That redheaded filly,” Vernell said. “As many husbands as she’s had, you’d think she wouldn’t criticize anybody else.”

  “Two,” Rhodes said. “That’s not many.”

  “Who cares? She even married the same man twice. And divorced him twice.”

  Rhodes admitted that was interesting if not excessive.

  “Would Terry Don have been jealous of you?” he asked.

  Verneil’s eyes flashed.

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “Well, knowing what Henrietta said about him in her manuscript, I thought he might have approached you.”

  “‘Approached.’ That’s one way of putting it.”

  “Did he?”

  “Did he what?”

  “Approach you?”

  “If he did, that’s my business. It certainly doesn’t have anything to do with his death, or with Henrietta’s for that matter.”

  “What about you and Chatterton?”

  “What goes on between Tom and me, if anything does, is private. It has nothing to do with anybody else.”

  Rhodes decided to let it go for the moment. Maybe it would come to something later on, maybe not. He would wait and see.

  Rhodes finished interviewing the women and went to the president’s house to see Chatterton. Chatterton didn’t mind talking about Vernell. He thought she was a lovely and creative woman.

  “I’m proud to be associated with her,” he said.

  “In more ways than one,” Rhodes added.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Chatterton said. “But you’re wrong. Vernell and I have a business relationship, and I owe her a great deal. If it hadn’t been for her, I might never have gotten this place off the ground.”

  “You’re going to get some bad publicity after what’s happened,” Rhodes told him.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard this line before, Sheriff. But I’ll repeat it anyway: there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

  “Being arrested for murder might be the exception.”

  Chatterton’s mouth didn’t quite drop open, but his eyes widened and his hands fluttered.

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

  “I mean that you might have killed Terry Don out of jealousy. Did you know he’d made sexual advances toward Vernell?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “It’s confidential,” Rhodes said.

  Chatterton’s face was slowly turning red.

  “It doesn’t matter who told you,” he said. “It’s a lie.”

  “I don’t think so, and I think you know better. And I think you have more than a business relationship with Vernell. The question is, did you see anyone go upstairs with Terry Don tonight?”

  “No. Why would I notice something like that?”

  “And you didn’t go up there with him yourself?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Sheriff.
”

  “Thanks for the advice,” Rhodes said.

  Rhodes sent Chatterton to the dormitory while he looked through Coslin’s room. His talk with Chatterton had given the sheriff a couple of things to think about.

  How far would a man go to get publicity for a struggling business venture? Rhodes was pretty sure that some men would kill for the kind of media coverage Chatterton’s campus would be receiving, and Chatterton had an additional motive: jealousy, one of the classics. Chatterton might claim that he was involved with Vernell only in business dealings, but his body language and facial expression said something different.

  The problem was that Chatterton and everyone else seemed to have been at the dormitory while the fight was going on. Rhodes thought back to what had happened. It was hard to remember who had been there when he arrived because of all the confusion. And he’d been flat on his face there for a while, not the best position to be in if you were trying to look at people’s faces. Feet, maybe, but not faces.

  Rhodes used Chatterton’s telephone and called Hack.

  “Have you heard anything from Buddy about the caterers?”

  “They don’t know a thing,” Hack said. “They just cleared the tables and left. They brought all the dishes back to town so they could wash ’em in the dishwashers, so they were out of there in ten or fifteen minutes after the meal was over with.”

  “Nobody heard anything?” Rhodes said.

  “Nothin’ out of the ordinary. If Terry Don fell out of that window while they were there, he fell real quietlike. I woulda yelled, myself. How about you?”

  “Me, too,” Rhodes said.

  17

  TERRY DON’S ROOM WAS NEAT AND ORDERLY. HIS SHIRTS AND pants were hung in the narrow closet, and sitting on the floor beneath them was a cloth duffel bag. In the room itself, there were no clothes flung on chair backs or lying on the floor. The bed was made, and there wasn’t a single wrinkle on the bedspread.

  There was a dresser against one wall and a low table beside the bed. An imitation Tiffany lamp sat on the table by a small clock radio. There was a book on top of the radio. Rhodes was amused to see that it was a mystery novel. Terry Don might like being a cover model for historical romances, but he wasn’t very loyal in his choice of reading material. The title of the book was Masquerade. Rhodes wondered if that was a clue, though he was pretty sure it wasn’t.

  There was also a round glass ashtray on the table. It had been emptied, but there were streaks of ash in the bottom.

  Rhodes looked in the wastebasket, but there were no cigarette butts. There was nothing else, either. The wastebasket had been emptied, if it had ever been used at all. Rhodes ran a finger across the bottom, but there was no trace of ash. He didn’t find anything in the room or in the suitcase to indicate that Terry Don was a smoker. There was nothing in the bathroom, either, except for the shaving kit, and that contained only an electric razor, a small bottle of designer shaving lotion, a comb, a brush, a toothbrush, and a tube of extrawhitening toothpaste.

  Rhodes came out of the bathroom and looked at the dresser. Sitting on top was a stack of paperback book covers. Rhodes walked over to the dresser and picked up the covers. He flipped through them and saw that they were all for historical romance novels. Every single one featured Terry Don on the cover. There was always a woman, too, but the focus was on Terry Don.

  On some of the covers his hair was a bit longer than others, and it wasn’t always exactly the same color. Sometimes the color of his eyes was changed, too, but on every cover a large expanse of his chest was exposed. Sometimes he was wearing a torn shirt, sometimes the shirt was simply unbuttoned, and sometimes he wasn’t wearing a shirt at all. None of the poses had much appeal for Rhodes, but he was sure they must have appealed to women. Otherwise Terry Don wouldn’t have had so much work. On the other hand, Rhodes thought, remembering what Henrietta had written, maybe he would have.

  Rhodes counted the covers. There were sixteen of them, and from the information printed on the backs, Rhodes gathered that all the books were recent. Some of them hadn’t even been published yet. Terry Don might not have achieved his ambition of appearing on the cover of every historical romance novel that came out, but Rhodes thought that he must have been getting close to it, unless there were a lot more romances being printed than Rhodes thought there were.

  Rhodes looked at the authors’ names. Serena Thayer was there, and so was Belinda Marshall. Rhodes wondered if Belinda had slept with Terry Don. He’d have to talk to her again.

  He put the covers back on top of the dresser and opened the top drawer. There was a tidy stack of underwear, or what Rhodes supposed was underwear. He was a Jockey shorts kind of guy himself, but he liked something that pretty much covered the territory. What Terry Don had worn would barely get the job done. And it came in different colors. Rhodes had never owned a pair of shorts that wasn’t white. Terry Don had been a lot more sporty.

  But not as far as his socks were concerned. There were a couple of pairs, both of them black, both of them made of thick cotton. Rhodes thought he’d seen a sock like that very recently.

  He closed the dresser drawer and went back to the closet. Picking up the duffel bag, he carried it to the bed, set it down, and opened it. As he’d suspected it might, it contained Terry Don’s laundry.

  It’s finally come to this, Rhodes thought as he dumped the rumpled clothing out on the bed. I’m literally going through somebody’s dirty laundry.

  Besides some more wildly colorful underwear and a shirt, there was another pair of black socks. Or Rhodes supposed it was a pair. There was a third sock, too, identical to the others. It would be almost impossible to say which two of the socks belonged together.

  Rhodes fumbled through the clothes, looking for the fourth sock. He didn’t find it, which was no surprise. He thought he knew where it was: in the evidence locker at the jail.

  On his way out of the house, Rhodes couldn’t resist having a look in Chatterton’s room, as well. Chatterton hadn’t given him permission, but Rhodes wasn’t worried. He wasn’t going to do a search, just glance around.

  Chatterton’s room was, if anything, even neater than Terry Don’s had been. Rhodes could have bounced a quarter on the bedspread if he’d wanted to, and if he’d had a quarter.

  Rhodes wasn’t surprised. Chatterton struck him as someone who’d keep things in their places, though Terry Don hadn’t. For just a second Rhodes was ashamed of himself for stereotyping Terry Don, but he got over it very quickly. He was probably just jealous of Terry Don’s pecs, which weren’t doing Terry Don much good anymore.

  There was one thing about Chatterton’s room that Rhodes hadn’t been expecting. In one corner, turned to face the bed, was a thirteen-inch color TV set sitting on a little TV stand on wheels. And there was a remote control on a nightstand by the bed. Apparently Chatterton had one rule for his guests and one for himself.

  Nothing unusual in that, Rhodes thought, and let himself out of the house.

  18

  RHODES WENT OVER TO THE MAIN BUILDING TO SEE IF RUTH had finished her investigation of the third floor. As he climbed the stairs, pointing the flashlight ahead of him, he heard her moving around on the floor above. The sounds were nothing like the creaking of the rafters that he’d heard earlier.

  The fluorescent lantern was sitting on a paint can, and it threw long shadows on the walls. Ruth was putting something in a bag when Rhodes asked how the investigation was coming along.

  “Just about done,” she said. “There wasn’t much to find, though.”

  “Fill me in.”

  “You can see a couple of places where somebody shuffled through the dust, but there aren’t any clear footprints. The dust is really disturbed under the window, but you and Chatterton probably had something to do with that when you were looking out earlier.”

  “We were careful,” Rhodes said, knowing that was true of himself. He wasn’t so sure of Chatterton, however. In fact, the more he thought about it, the mor
e he wondered about Chatterton, who wouldn’t stay where Rhodes told him to. Could he have been deliberately trying to mess up the crime scene?

  “Let’s say we didn’t mess things up,” he said. “What would you think happened?”

  “I’d say there were two people up here and that one of them pushed the other one through the window. It would’ve been easy. See how low the window ledge is?”

  Rhodes had already noticed. The ledge was no more than knee high. It would’ve been easy to push someone hard enough to make him lose his balance and topple backward, especially if the push came as a surprise.

  “Why would anyone be up here?” Rhodes asked.

  “That’s an easy one,” Ruth said. “They wanted somewhere to talk privately. This is about as private as you can get.”

  Rhodes agreed. It was private, but dusty. Even as he thought about the dust, Ruth sneezed. She pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped her nose.

  “The dust up here is pretty bad,” she said, jamming the tissue back in her pocket. “Or haven’t you noticed?”

  “I was just thinking about it, but dust doesn’t seem to bother me. What were you putting in the bag when I came up?”

  “Fibers from cloth of some kind,” Ruth said. “They were on the window glass.”

  She pointed to one of the jagged glass teeth still clinging to the frame.

  “Right there,” she said.

  “Could be from Terry Don’s shirt,” Rhodes said.

  “It probably is,” Ruth agreed. “On the other hand, maybe whoever pushed him couldn’t resist having a look.”

  “Right. We should be so lucky. Anything else?”

  “No. I’ll come back up here tomorrow and try again when the light’s coming through the windows. You never know what might turn up.”

  That was true, Rhodes thought. He was quite familiar with the idea that everyone at a crime scene left something behind and took something away. But he didn’t think anything more would turn up here than had turned up in Henrietta’s room.

  “You can go on home,” he told Ruth. “I’m going to stay for a while. Maybe something will come to me.”