Carolyn G. Hart Read Online Free Page B

humor in
The Circular Staircase
through Constance and Gwenyth Little, Craig Rice, Donald Westlake, Stuart M. Kaminsky, and Joyce Porter to Gregory Mcdonald’s triumphantly cocky and irreverent Fletch books. Another Sunday, Captain McElroy, or Capt. Mac as they called him, drew on his experiences as a former police chief to explain with stolid thoroughness how to avoid leaving fingerprints on almost any kind of surface. He was an unpublished author, but warmly welcomed by the group because of his expertise—he’d spent several years early in his career in the Miami Police’ Department. One thing he’d learned: In searching for a killer, try nearby cafes for descriptions of customers shortly after the murder. Killing makes people hungry.
    Until now, the Sunday evenings had been special and a lot of fun. Until last week, when Annie realized something odd and ugly was happening to her Sunday evenings. That night, Harriet Edelman had arrived early and made straight for the coffee bar at the back.
    “Give me some of that good Kona stuff.”
    Annie poured the dark, aromatic coffee into two white mugs and handed one to Harriet, whose battery of bracelets jangled musically as she took it. She stared down into the black coffee, then said savagely, “I swear to God, if you won’t screw an editor, you can’t get anywhere!”
    “Surely it’s not that bad. Besides, aren’t most editors women?”
    Harriet’s mouth twisted. “Maybe, but I still say you can’t get anywhere if you don’t have pull—and you’ve got a lot better chance if you live in Manhattan and know the bastards.” Her faded blond hair drooped across a high, domed forehead. Thick horn-rimmed glasses increased her owlishness. Oddly enough, Harriet wrote frothy mysteries which featured wryly funny heroes. Annie chalked it up as one of nature’s jokes.
    “Dropping sales, half-assed reviews, and if everything weren’t lousy enough,” Harriet continued bitterly, “some low-life wrote my editor and told her my last book had a stolen plot. Can you believe that?” Harriet’s voice rasped up into shrill outrage.
    “Oh, ignore it,” Annie soothed. “Didn’t someone once say there were only ten plots, and they’ve all been used?”
    Harriet wasn’t listening. Her sallow face glistened with anger. “Don’t think I don’t know who did it.”
    Annie looked at her with concern. The hatred in her voice was shocking, and horribly inappropriate against the snatches of conversation as the writers milled toward the tables in the coffee area.
    “Stick’s
his best. No doubt about that.”
    “No, no.
Switch
is tighter, tenser.”
    “I’ll tell you who has the most original mind in crime fiction today—Tom Perry, bar none.”
    “Don’t tell me you still read Dorothy Sayers?”
    Bullish voices, didactic, perhaps, but none with the frightening edge of desperation in Harriets.
    Harriet’s fingers dug into Annie’s arm. “If it really is him—if he did it, I’ll kill him.”
    Was it fate or irony or black humor that Elliot chose that moment to clap his hands for attention?
    Annie looked up sharply and broke free of Harriet’s grasp. What was Elliot up to? Emma was scheduled to speak tonight.
    The writers settled swiftly around the tables at the back of Death on Demand. Elliot stood near the coffee bar, the customary spot for the speaker. He clapped his hands again. “I know everyone’s eager to hear Emma tonight.”
    The Regulars looked obediently and expectantly toward Emma Clyde, whose fictional detective Marigold Rembrandt was second only to Miss Marple in readers’ affections and earned Emma an astounding seven figures a year. Plump, motherly, and utterly down-home, Emma always seemed slightly bewildered by her fame, but Annie noticed that her mind worked with the precision of an IBM PC
jr
.
    “No doubt Emma will be happy to share the secret of her enormous success,” Elliot continued unctuously. “You know, I really felt pretty uncomfortable