The Christie Caper - Carolyn Hart [51]
Annie’s hackles rose at that. As if there were only one kind of mystery. Realism? Private detectives as knights errant, tilting courageously against an evil and corrupt society? Ah, the male fantasy novel, full of swashbuckling blood and guts with liberal splashes of female bashing and bedding. (Translate barefoot and pregnant to backhanded and screwed.)
“Max, can you believe this!” and she pointed at the offending line. “About as close to real life as a Rambo movie. Do you want reality?” she demanded.
Max nodded obediently. He’d heard this diatribe before.
“Read Christie! There’s reality. Her characters are people everyone knows. Respectable people driven by lust and hatred and greed and dishonesty. That’s reality.” The fire in her eye was replaced abruptly by amusement. “I love it, the way some hard-boiled writers swagger around, as if they were the only true mystery writers. But ask any bookseller. Who sells? What sells? Christie sells. One billion books. They won’t sell a billion Hammett books in a thousand years!”
Her good humor restored, she resumed her reading:
Bledsoe married twice. First wife, Susan Figaro (m. 1973), divorced him 1975. No children. She is a flight attendant for Buena Vista Airlines and presently lives in Miami and flies the South American route. On layover now in Caracas. Hotel room didn’t answer. Married his second wife, Pamela Gerrard Davis, 1982. A divorcee with an eighteen-year-old son, Derek.
“Derek Davis,” she said aloud. “Max, that has to be the publicist with Hillman House. My God, Bledsoe’s his stepfather!”
“Former stepfather,” Max clarified.
Derek Davis, young and eager—until he saw Bledsoe. Davis had done nothing to help when Bledsoe careened down the hotel stairs in the throes of a panic attack.
Annie read on:
Pamela Bledsoe died of a fall in 1985. Reportedly lost her balance and fell down a flight of stone stairs on the patio of their borne in Stamford, Connecticut. She had been drinking heavily. The postmortem revealed a blood alcohol level of .12. As Pamela Gerrard, she had enjoyed a successful career as a women’s novelist with several novels (notably Farewell, My Love, Forever) reaching The New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list and selling in excess of 400,000 copies.
“I remember her,” Annie said abruptly. “I saw her on Good Morning America once. She had such a cheerful face.”
The memory sharpened in her mind. But the face that came clearly was Derek’s, roundish, snub-nosed, wide-spaced hazel eyes, a sprinkling of freckles. He was, as sons so often are, the image of his mother.
“A fatal fall,” Annie said thoughtfully.
On the surface the all-English dinner was a rousing success. Everyone was having a wonderful time, that was clear from the rapid chatter and bursts of laughter. The hotel had come through magnificently. Beneath the chandeliers, china and crystal glittered on shiny damask tablecloths. The food was perfect, succulent, and authentic: oyster soup, roast beef of Old England, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, curried chicken with rice, syllabub or tea, and, of course, a hearty serving at meal’s end of clotted cream and fresh strawberries or sherry trifle. Lady Gwendolyn enjoyed it so much, in fact, that spatters of the golden cream adorned the front of her pink-flowered lavender dress.
But, as she scraped the last microdot of cream from her dish, the old author swept the table with a troubled glance. “The brew is bubbling.”
Annie stiffened. Max frowned. Laurel bent forward in rapt attention, but Henny only half hid a yawn behind her napkin.
Lady Gwendolyn absently swiped her spoon again in her empty bowl.
Laurel murmured, “Banting, you know. I’d be so happy to give you mine. It’s quite untouched,” and she offered her dessert.
The old lady happily plunged her spoon into the full bowl. “I do abhor waste.” Not quite indistinctly, despite the deployment of her spoon heaped with golden cream, Lady Gwendolyn continued