The Christie Caper - Carolyn Hart [50]
“Oh, God,” Annie murmured.
Max slipped his arm around her shoulders.
She looked up at him with haunted eyes. “No wonder,” she said simply. “Oh, Max, how can people be so dreadful?”
“Violence always has a long history,” he said soberly.
Annie laid the sheaf down. “I thought if we found out enough about him, we might find a way to reach him. But he’s been angry for a long, long time.” A twisted, scarred man. Was that why he was so intent on destroying the reverence so many millions feel for Christie? Or was it simply a matter of money? … a lot of money …
The living and the dead. What mattered? Who mattered?
Neil Bledsoe, alive with all the possibilities and glories that life could offer.
Agatha Christie, dead and gone, but living still in the minds and hearts of her readers.
Annie picked up the sheets and determinedly began to read:
On an east coast tour, Juliette left Neil with her brother, Frederick, and his wife, Kathryn. Juliette never came back for her son. Frederick Honeycutt was a small-town lawyer in Connecticut, earnest, serious, successful. Kathryn was his secretary. They were prosperous, decent, respectable, and totally unable to deal with the teenaged Neil, who alternated between outbursts of high energy and episodes of malevolence. Neil was a bright, quick student, but teachers and classmates alike feared his vicious sarcasm and outbursts of fierce hostility. He sought out challenge and seemed impervious to fear. On a dare, he once drove his motorcycle to 110 miles an hour. A scar on his left forearm was the result of a knife fight in college, reputedly over a gambling debt. Attended Berkeley on a scholarship at the height of the sixties. Degree in journalism. Counterculture reporter for various tabloids in the early seventies. As the greening of America turned brown, he moved into publishing. Made a fortune in the late seventies with a magazine aimed at mercenaries, Have Gun, Will Travel. A friend from Berkeley days, Wallace Mercer, said, “I swear I don’t get Neil. So there aren’t any hippies anymore. But he was damn near a Weatherman in the sixties. So how could he peddle guns to right-wing killers? I asked him and he laughed and said you might as well be dead as cling to dead ideas. He said everything’s corrupt, both the Left and the Right, and at least the Right can pay for what it wants.” Gambling got him in trouble again, in the early eighties. He bet a quarter million on the black at Vegas and it came up red. Had to sell Have Gun, Will Travel in 1981 to pay it off. Had no choice, pay up or die. Word on the street had it that he was in deep again, had a deadline to meet.
Annie reached over, edged the pen out of Max’s pocket, and circled deadline.
But it seemed so futile. She almost put the papers down. What was the point in knowing more about Bledsoe? No appeal to his better nature or to his commitment as a critic to truth in publishing would have any effect. Not with this man.
But the sheets held the same riveting fascination as a James Ellroy novel. How dark could a life be?
She found her place:
Bledsoe has made the circuit in publishing since his sale of Have Gun, Will Travel, working briefly as an agent with Masters and Wright [Margo Wright? Annie would check], as an editor with Hillman House, as a bookseller