The Christie Caper - Carolyn Hart [85]
“Bledsoe sent out the letters in your name? How could that work? If the authors sent checks, wouldn’t they have come to you?”
“I tracked down the receptionist. She said Neil told her to intercept letters from certain people, that I had asked him to take care of those inquiries. It never occurred to her to question it, and by the time I wised up enough to hunt for some answers, he’d already gotten her sacked.” A bright flush suffused the agent’s cheeks. “He forged my name, cashed the checks. I got through to Bob finally. He didn’t believe me.” The hurt was naked in her voice, all these years later. “Bob said nobody would go to that kind of effort just to cause someone else trouble. Bob was killed in a car wreck six months later. He died thinking the young girl he’d treated like a daughter had cheated him and made his agency look cheap.” She cleared her throat. “So, yes, I know what a bastard Neil is.” She looked at Annie levelly. “Neil will lie, cheat, steal, connive, whatever it takes, to help himself.”
Annie was quite willing to believe all evil of Neil Bledsoe. “But at least you got away from him when you left the agency.”
“Did I? Can anyone ever be free of someone like Neil, as long as he’s alive to ruin lives?” Her eyes glittered “I suppose I’ve just made myself suspect number one.” She looked, just for an instant, quite capable of murder, her face hard, her hands clenched.
Annie thought of the tattered brown diary and briefly shook her head.
The agent relaxed slightly. “But God knows I’m not the only one here who loathes Neil. Poor Victoria Shaw and Nathan Hillman and Derek Davis.”
Annie waited.
The words seemed dredged from deep inside Margo. “Neil might as well have picked up a gun and shot Bryan Shaw and Pamela Gerrard.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes,” Margo said, almost dreamily, “I think Neil takes a sheer, perverse delight in evil, that it attracts him the way a woman does, that there’s the same element of lust and exploitation. He despises goodness; he sees it as weak, effeminate. There could be no worse judgment in his mind.” Margo lifted her coffee cup, then put it down without taking a sip. “Bryan Shaw was my best client. Almost the only client I had when I started out on my own. I had never expected to be on my own. I’d made no provision for it. When Bob kicked me out, I was so stunned, I didn’t even try to take any of my authors with me. Bryan called, wanted to know what happened. I told him. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I think about Bryan and wonder if he would still be alive and published if he hadn’t come with me. You see, Neil left the agency for Hillman House. He replaced Bryan’s editor just as I turned in Bryan’s latest book. Oh, God, why did Neil do it?”
“Turn down Shaw’s last manuscript?”
Margo lifted her cup, drank the cold coffee. “Turning it down wasn’t the problem. If he’d just turned it down, I could have sold it somewhere else. No, it’s worse than that. I sent it around. Word gets out quickly when a name author is available. This is a small community, you know. We know each other. People talk. And I had no reason to be secretive about where I’d sent Bryan’s book. Actually, I talked it up, wanted everyone to know a superb talent was available. So Neil listened, then he had lunch with those editors, and in the course of gossip let it be known, oh so confidentially, that Bryan’s sales were down. Way down. That pre-orders for his last book had been embarrassing. So, nobody wanted Bryan. There’s nothing