The dame studied Jack’s face, took another genteel sip. “I don’t believe men really tell bartenders anything.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because men don’t like to reveal their weaknesses to other men. In my experience, men are more likely to tell women what’s vexing them.”
“Vexing. Now there’s a two-dollar word. Barnard? Or Sarah Lawrence?”
“Vassar, actually.”
“That was number three on my list.”
“Come now, Mr. Shepard, I’m sure my higher education is not what’s vexing you.” This time it was her eyebrow arching, her own wry smile teasing.
“Tracked down a clipster running a con on a suit,” Jack found himself confessing. “Only the con turned out to be minor, fifty bucks even on a check-bouncing grift—and the clipster just a little old guy down on his luck after losing a legit job. The suit hires me. Easy for him, ’cause he’s sitting on wads of dough, but he got his ego bruised, you know, the kind who’s mortified to be smarted out of one dollar, let alone fifty—so he pulled some strings with his judicial buddies after I bring the old man in. Now gramps is gonna do hard time.”
“But this con man person was guilty of a crime, no?”
“The old guy was so scared he pulled a gut-ripper on me. Pathetic little switchblade. I had to rough him up to keep him from running. I didn’t like it.”
The dame took another long look at Jack’s acre of shoulders, his boxer’s nose, his muscular forearms. “It was your job, no?”
“Frail old guy. Did his bit in the first war. Gave up the con racket a decade ago—till his legit job let him down. Hard time in Sing-Sing. It’ll be the end for him.”
“That’s not your business, though. You did your job. You should be proud.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Jack poured another one, knocked it back. “So who’s your fly, honey? The one that got swatted?”
“My sister. And if you don’t help me, Mr. Shepard, the next fly that gets swatted will be me.”
CHAPTER 1
The Princess Ball
The girls I know do not like real life. When it roars in for a landing in their backyards, threatening to fly them from dance class to dorm room, beach chair to office, bar stool to altar, they race for the underground, looking for shelter. After all, why be neurotic when you can be numb?
—Angel Stark, Comfortably Numb
Quindicott, Rhode Island
Today
“ALL THE PLAYERS were in place. The lights were up, the stage was set for a tragedy worthy of the bard . . .”
Crisp paper rustled through the warm July air of Buy the Book’s Community Events room, a space so packed with people, the store’s modest air-conditioning unit had been rendered irrelevant. At the carved-oak podium, a slender young woman with long copper hair and triple-pierced ears had paused from her reading to slowly pour water into a glass. The audience, packed elbow to elbow, waited with reverent patience for the young author to sip her drink.
I, Mrs. Penelope Thornton-McClure, thirty-something widow, single mother, and co-owner of Buy the Book, leaned forward in my folding chair, joining my customers in their anticipation—an atmosphere of breathless expectation as artfully created as I’d ever seen.
After swallowing deliberately, Angel Stark gave a little smile. The daring, corset-laced bodice of her green and pink Betsy Johnson sundress alone could have held the room’s attention. But she’d come to my small Rhode Island town for a reading, not a fashion show, so she cleared her throat and finally returned her attention to the open book.
“No, perhaps good William is not the appropriate model for our tawdry little tale,” she read. “Perhaps the story of Bethany Banks’s final moments more mirrored one of those lurid Jacobean tragedies by John Webster, where the adulteress is punished by cruel torture and horrible death for her carnality. Of course, every tragedy, even a tawdry one, is unique. This tragedy, my tragedy, unfolded in a gilded beux arts mansion by the sea, under glittering lights that twinkled from high crystal chandeliers like a billion beckoning stars of the northeast. The Newport players were coifed and manicured young women and affluent and mannered young men. Like the cast of an A&E movie, they smiled and chatted as they waited in regal finery for the uncrowned, yet silently acknowledged, queen of our courtly crew to arrive.
“Before something could happen, really happen, Bethany Banks had to put in an appearance. That’s the way things worked—at the annual parties, the sorority, those weekends in the Hamptons or Cap Antilles. Bethany was our diva and our queen, our Simon Says . . .”
From the folding chair beside me, I heard a familiar tsktsk of disapproval. I frowned at the pale, slender man in tailored slacks, a crisp, white short-sleeve button-down, and bow tie.
“Simon Says?” he whispered when he saw my raised eyebrow. He shook his head in dismay. “Good lord.”
I sighed, not entirely surprised at Brainert’s critical reaction to Angel Stark’s prose. J. Brainert Parker (the J was for Jarvis, a first name to which he’d refused to answer since the age of six) was an assistant professor of English at nearby St. Francis College. In his thirties, well-read, acerbic, and gay, Brainert was one of Buy the Books’ most loyal customers—and one of my oldest friends. He never missed an opportunity to voice his opinions about the books I stocked or the authors I brought in for readings. In Angel Stark’s case, he’d dismissed her work the very day her publicist had phoned to accept my invitation to appear at Buy the Book.
I myself had been delighted that the author of the acclaimed best-selling memoirs of her years of depression, addictions, and therapy—and now a controversial true crime tale—would come to our quiet little town, and I immediately rolled out the welcome mat. But when Brainert Parker had heard the news, he’d been less than impressed.
“Angel Stark!” he’d cried. “You mean that silly girl who wrote Comfortably Numb. Every angst-ridden teenager in America had to have a copy, which made her the darling of the New York literary set for two afternoons in a row.”
“Lighten up, Professor,” I’d replied, feeling that as a bookstore owner I should stand up for the honor of any and all authors.
“Forgive me, but I’m speaking as an educator,” Brainert had informed me with a sigh. “It’s a genre now, you know, ‘Prozac-Girl-Interrupted-in-a-Bell-Jar,’ and I found nothing redeeming in her contribution to it or the influence of any of it on my impressionable, if not downright gullible, students. She has a lazy, self-indulgent style, glorifies antidepressant cocktails, and, in my opinion, the most disturbing ‘affliction’ she displayed in her story was her addiction to the letter ‘I.’ Whatever possessed you to ask her to appear at a mystery bookstore?”
There’d been no need for me to answer. My seventy-three-year-old aunt Sadie, and my partner in Buy the Book, had been locked and loaded.
“The subject of Ms. Stark’s new book is true crime,” Sadie had sharply informed Brainert as she polished the glasses that dangled on a chain around her neck. “It’s all about the Bethany Banks murder. Angel Stark was there, and apparently knew the victim quite well. I hear the book is a real tell-all. So why don’t you listen to my niece—and lighten up already on Ms. Stark.”
(What Sadie actually said was Miz Stahk. The “Roe Dyelin” accent can vary from light to heavy as you travel our state—the tiniest in the Union—but it’s murder to write out phonetically. To wit: Car, pasta, letter, and chowder would look more like cah, pahster, letta, and chowda. So, you’ll forgive my going with the conventional spellings here.)