My writers group is wonderfully diverse, each of us with a style and an interest all our own. There were historical authors, romance authors, culinary authors, and so on. Gregory Smithers never wrote anything but mystery stories, which was why it seemed both ironic but somehow very appropriate that when we entered the meeting room that evening, we found Greg lying face down on the large conference table. He wasn’t moving.
“What in the world happened to him?” asked the romance author, Penelope Pierpont.
“He died,” I suggested.
“I can see that,” said Mrs. Pierpont, “but what happened to him?”
The group and I agreed that we should probably call off our meeting, at least till the police showed up. But while we were waiting, we noticed the red, large-caliber bullet hole in his nock.
“There’s the culprit,” I said pointing at the bullet hole, but the others weren’t particularly amused. Most of our group were totally quiet and perhaps traumatized, but Jennifer Allstone, the cutest member of the group and the author of a number of well-received children’s novels, immediately jumped in. “Isn’t it amazing that Greg wrote so many mysteries in which a body suddenly turned up, and now he could be the corpse in one of his books?”
Spenser Cartwright, the author of historical fiction, looked at Jennifer with something like righteous indignation “How can you possibly make fun at a time like this?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said, “In an era of disease, pestilence, war, and destruction, why should that particularly upset you? And anyway, I think we can all agree that our writings should reflect the realities we write about, so, to me, Greg’s demise seems entirely à propos.”
Spenser and a few others looked singularly displeased, but Jennifer smiled. “A propos is not precisely the phrase I would use. How about ‘illustrative?’”
Before the police could arrive, three of the writers scurried out as quickly as possible, but I was pleased to have been partly supported by Jennifer, so I invited her out to join me for coffee at the restaurant across from the Library.
“I’m sorry to make fun of what is a painfully obvious disaster,” I said, “but I just think that an author who makes his living drooling over corpses should not be unduly bothered when he becomes one himself.”
“OK, so you think his end was quite fitting. Well, what would be an appropriate ending for Penelope Pierpont: to be so swept away by a lover that she dies in a spasm of orgasmic ecstasy?”
“That would be quite nice, really. But no, I doubt whether we will ever again see so fitting a finale. And considering the comic masterpieces that I create, I suppose that my ending would be to fill up with my own jokes and die laughing.”
I walked home that night and didn’t think anything of the evening except how pretty Jennifer looked, so I confess I was pleased when she called me the next day; but her trembling voice wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for.
“Did you read the paper today?”
“No, Jennifer, even though I’m a writer, I gave up on print media a long time ago.”
“Well listen to this: Theophilus Dryden was found dead this morning.”
“Dryden? The aging poet with the big head? He always wrote those archaic poems in iambic pentameter. Who in the world would want to kill him?”
“Iambic Pentameter is right. His skull was bashed in ten times.”
“One for each beat for his poetry. He’s lucky he didn’t write in iambic hexameter: that would be two more beats.”
“Stop it! You can make a joke out of anything, but this isn’t funny.”
“I know,” I said, this time with some measure of compassion. “But you’ve got to admit that all this is really weird. Is there someone out there who hates literature? Or could it be someone in our own group?”
Jennifer was beginning to sound very serious. “I’d really like to talk to you. I’m feeling very … scared.”
Jenny and I had dated a few times, when the meetings first began, but then it was all pretty professional: What are you writing now? How can I ever get published? That sort of thing. But this time was different, and I immediately saw myself as her knight in shining armor, coming to her rescue. “Sure,” I said, “let’s have dinner at the Old Blarney Stone Bar ‘n Grill.”
“So,” I said after we had ordered, “you think that a sworn enemy of the literary arts is about to bump us off?”
“I don’t know. I mean, who would want to kill Theophilus Dryden? He’ s as old as his verse forms. What do we know about him, and what kind of a name is Theophilus, anyway? Could it be some kind of pen name? Could he be hiding his real name?”
“Well, Jennifer, you are the last person in the world to question someone’s pen name: most of your children’s stories are written under the name Doctor Fudge.”
“Oh, I know. When I wrote my first little book about Wiggly the Pig, my editor said that Jennifer Allstone sounded like one of my straight-laced New England ancestors, and he insisted that I change my name to something more … child-friendly.”
“And children, of course, love to go to the doctor.”
“Well, it stuck, and now I’m stuck with it. When I’ve gone to my one or two book signings, I am Dr. Fudge or I am no one. The kids say they love me.”
“It’s that you’re so damn cute. But I can assure you that this literary crime drama has had its last act.”
Jenny began to seem calmer, so we finished eating and then I walked her back home.
“Put my number in your cell phone,” I said as I hugged her goodnight. “If you start to feel jittery, just give me a call and I’ll be there.”
* * *
But I confess that this whole episode had gotten to me too: eight regular members of our writers group, and two of them had already been bumped off.
So I called Jenny the next day and came up with a plan to see whether all our writers were being killed.
“Look,” I said, “if there is one member of our group who can defy the odds and stay alive no matter what, it’s Hershel Schechter.”
“The President of Schechter Meats? The novelist laureate of the common man? “
“Yeah. He writes all those stories about growing up in the most impoverished section of Newark, even as he presides over the contents of his meat locker. You should see those huge sides of beef hanging there: maybe they inspire him to write about the grungier sides of life.”
Jenny and I agreed that if someone was setting about killing us, Hershel’s meat locker would be the safest place to be.
We entered the meat-processing plant after seven; it seemed that all the minimum-wage workers had gone home. “The meat locker is over here,” I said to Jennifer, who seemed very skittish about all this.
Sure enough, hanging from a row of meat hooks were rather impressive sides of beef. We counted one, two, three … and when we reached number four, there, hanging from a meat hook, was Hershel Schechter himself.
Jenny froze, and I guess I was trying to make light of the situation because I intoned in a deep, sepulchral voice: “He died, as he lived, with his meats.”
Jenny answered, more in horror than in reverence: “Amen.”
Things were becoming more and more scary and we were running out of writers, so Jenny insisted that we seek refuge in Penelope Pierpont’s home. It was a magnificent fourteen-bedroom mansion in the finest part of town, and Jenny was certain we would be safe there. I quite agreed: “If the killer tried to find our friend Penelope, he would get lost in the bedrooms and bathrooms and closets and never find his way out.”
Mrs. Pierpont greeted us with the curled upper lip that she showed to all our writings and grudgingly invited us in. She ordered Henri, her sommelier, to go down to her hugely impressive wine cellar and bring up a bottle of Chateau Lafitte 1938, rosé. “Send it to the kitchen on the dumbwaiter,” she intoned, apparently not wishing to dirty her dress if the bottle was even remotely dusty.
“I take it,” she said, “that you two are concerned about the murders of our literary friends.”
“Concerned?” I shouted out. “How about scared shitless?”
Seeing how appalled Penelope was by my reply and trying to smooth things over, Jenny said: “What he means is that we are both really saddened by the deaths of some wonderful writers and we are indeed worried about our own safety.”
Mrs. Pierpont looked at us with her accustomed scorn. “You need not worry, my dear. You are perfectly safe here.
“But I hear the dumbwaiter coming up. I’m sure that a glass of Chateau Lafitte will calm you nerves,”
The dumbwaiter stopped at the kitchen, the door opened, and Henri’s dead body fell out of the device and onto the kitchen floor. The wine bottle, which had previously been teetering on the edge of the dumbwaiter, followed him and crashed on the floor as well.
“What a tragic waste of a vintage wine,” observed Mrs. Pierpont compassionately.
This was all to much, and Jennifer insisted that we go back to my place. “You want to spend the night? “ I asked hopefully.
“You think?” she said.
“But Jenny,” I replied, trying to be as encouraging as possible, “this time the murderer, whoever he is, has failed in his mission. He appears to have set out to kill the members of our writers group, but the sommelier was not one of our writers, Mrs. Pierpont is.”
Jenny was even more scared: “That guy was a writer: he once wrote a pamphlet about the Great Vineyards of Carteret. He said that the tangy taste of the wines came from the Linden oil refineries near-by.”
“OK,” I said, “so maybe he deserved to be bumped off. But I think we are safe because …”
Jenny put her arms around me and said: “Hold me. Just hold me!”
And I thought: “If we’ve got to be in a scene from Murder Incorporated, at least there are some nice fringe benefits.”
When we got to my apartment, Jenny insisted on calling the police; but all she got was a message saying that the entire eight-man police force of our town of East Totowa had gone to a four-day, all-expenses-paid seminar in West Totowa. The subject of the seminar, Jenny was told, was Rapid-Response Times by police.
“Rapid-Response? Considering that no policemen have shown up to check out the dead bodies, I hope those guys pay very close attention to the speakers.”
Jenny was trembling and finally I poured each of us a glass of wine. We held each other really tight, and then one thing led to another …
* * *
The next morning I didn’t want to get up. I really, really didn’t want to get up. But as it happened, the phone rang at 6:30. Jenny practically jumped out of her skin and screamed: ”It’s a fire alarm!”
“No, it’s not,” I said, still half-asleep. “It’s the phone, but it has a really nasty ring.”
“What time is it? Who could be calling you this early?”
I reached for the phone and answered it. The culprit who interrupted what had been a perfectly lovely night was Spencer Cartwright, the noted author of historical fiction.
“You must come over here!” he almost shrieked. “I don’t want to be killed so I think I’ve found a way to protect myself.”
Frankly, I didn’t want to visit with him, I wanted to stay with Jenny and have a long, soulful breakfast. But knowing that Jenny was probably as scared as Spencer, I said OK. We dressed very quickly, and then we journeyed over to the great man’s home.
Actually it was very small, but Spencer had somehow managed to fill it with every type of weapon known to the Middle Ages. What startled Jenny and me when we were let in by Spencer’s manservant was that Spencer had fitted himself with a complete suit of armor, one that probably doubled his weight. His face was entirely covered by a closed visor so that we could barely hear his voice.
He led us into the backyard where there was a rather large, rather deep swimming pool. “His moat,” I whispered to Jenny. And I added: “If his armor can’t protect the guy, nothing can.”
Spencer walked toward us, but apparently someone had left a large, wrought-iron chamber pot on the walk because he didn’t see it, stumbled over it, and fell rather dramatically into the pool. He flailed about in the water, trying to get his helmet off, but he couldn’t. His manservant and I tried to lift him out of the water but he and the armor were so heavy that we couldn’t succeed. Spencer’s muffled screams could be heard, but he couldn’t escape from his armor and began sinking to the bottom of the pool. Eventually air bubbles started to issue forth from what was proving to be his Iron Mask. Jenny and I watched in horror as he slowly sank away into the history he loved so well.
“One more defunct writer,” I said. “The way things have been going of late, probably nothing could have saved him.”
Jenny was beside herself, but when she had calmed down, she said: “You know, Matilda Tupper has taken me under her wing.”
“Matilda, the cookbook author?”
“Yes. She always said that if I ever needed to talk, I should call her up. I really need her to talk to her now.”
Considering that I was very concerned about Jenny’s survival and my own, I agreed to visit Ms. Tupper that morning. It sounded promising because this very knowledgeable chef and author had a podcast that very morning and I was pretty certain that no one could bump her off when she was broadcasting her culinary insights to the world.
We entered her home and the podcast was already in progress. When she saw us, she gently put her finger to her lips, beckoning us to be quiet. The masterpiece she was working on that morning was a multiple-layer cake, about as rich and fattening as one could want. And with every layer that she added, she would scoop up a piece, tasting it with a happy, self-satisfied smirk.
The finishing touch, she announced, was a large sugar-frosted maraschino cherry, which she removed from her open cupboard. Suddenly I had a very bad feeling about that, and I rushed toward Matilda, crying out “Don’t eat that cherry!” But the gourmet chef, oblivious to my warning, put the cherry in her mouth, munched on it and swallowed it, after which she had the most horrifying look on her face and she collapsed onto floor, dead.
“I know too much glucose isn’t good for you,” I said,” but this is ridiculous.”
Jenny and I just stood there, staring at each other. Finally Jenny said, very starkly: “You and I are the only ones alive. One of us caused all of this. One of us is the killer.”
Jenny put her hand in her purse and pulled out a small, delicate, but undoubtedly effective handgun. “The police aren’t around and I just knew I would need this.
“You said you would protect me, you made love to me, but you are here and all the other writers are gone. It’s got to be you!”
“Jennifer, honey,” I said, “in case you haven’t noticed, all our late authors were killed in a way relating to their writings. So given my comic writings, if you wanted to kill me, you wouldn’t just pull out a gun, you’d whip out a clown’s gun, pull the trigger, and a little flag would come out that says ‘Bang!’”
I moved quickly over to her and grabbed the gun away, and I said: “And given your children’s stories, if I wanted to kill you, the gun I’d be packing would be made entirely of chocolate.
“But I don’t think ether of us is the bad guy here because we aren’t the only survivors. Penelope Pierpont wasn’t murdered, her pamphlet-writing flunkey was. So I think we should pay one final visit to dear Penelope.”
“You think she’s the one?”
“Yes,” I said, “she probably has enough money to hire an army of assassins. She’s the one.”
* * *
We arrived at the Pierpont mansion in the late afternoon. The front door was unlocked, and there were no servants to show us in.
Sitting in her magnificently appointed living room, propped up in a sofa at the far end of the room, was Penelope Pierpont. She looked … sickly, exactly the way she looked when she was reading one of her works and we weren’t taking it very well. Exactly the way she looked if we didn’t like her writing and she appeared ready to have a heart attack.
Penelope was shocked to see us, but she finally composed herself enough to say: “Come closer, my dears.”
“Mrs. Pierpont,” Jenny said with much trepidation, “the two of us were wondering … were wondering …”
Totally ignoring Jennifer, Mrs. Pierpont said: “I had hoped that you two would join our literary colleagues in my Death Valley of published authors — they were grossly unworthy published authors. You know: I was never published, and I hate all of you. I had hoped — I had prayed — that if you two were terrified enough, you would liquidate each other.”
“I’m dreadfully sorry to disappoint you,” I said, “but we’ve grown very fond of each other and we really didn’t want to do your lackeys’ dirty work.
“And where are they — all the people who have been taking this town apart?”
Mrs. Pierpont took a deep breath and said: “I’m dying — I’m dying of mortification, unpublished until the end. I sent them all to the Unemployment Office to get their next position. I do so hope that it proves as homicidal as this one so they can hone all their new-found skills.”
“Mrs. Pierpont,” I said, “I’m sorry about how you’re taking al of this: it looks like you will soon be joining our other friends. But I still don’t understand the carnage you’ve caused. You have always written touching, romantic, sensitive romance novels: you could almost have been another Charlotte Brontë. How could you have wreaked vengeance on so many other authors?”
Mrs. Pierpont started to gasp and she could scarcely continue, but finally she said in as full-throated a way as she could: “This century is not the century of Charlotte Brontë or of any other writer of delicate fiction. This is the century of brutality, drug addition, cretinous politicians, mass murder, and worst of all, obnoxious rap music. How could my writing ever be published?”
Those words appeared to be Mrs. Pierpont’s peroration because she suddenly clutched her throat, looked horribly pale, and fell over, dead.
I smirked, and I said to Jenny: “I think the Brontë sisters would have admired her exit, don’t you?”
Jenny was appalled. “How can you possibly joke at a time like this? We’ve just lost the last of a great group of writers. Will the police ever show up?”
“I doubt it: remember the seminar. Maybe it was Penelope who paid to send them there — just to get them out of the way.”
Jenny stared at me for a long time, and then she shrugged. “I guess we might as well go back to the Blarney Stone Bar ‘n Grill and try to drown our sorrows. No use waiting around here.”
“OK,” I said. “Downing a few pints will probably help me recover from the last few days.”
“That’s your drink. Do you think they can make a decent cosmopolitan?”
“They can try.”
As we walked slowly back, I reached for Jenny’s hand. “You know,” I said, “our entire writers group now consists of just you and me. That’s OK, but it would be nice to have at least a few other writers.
“There’s a Zoom group out of Princeton that I’ve heard about. Should we give them a try?”
“Why not?” said Jenny. “It couldn’t be any more deadly than this one.”
Cheiten is a long-time Princeton resident and author of plays, short stories, and poems.
