Murder, Mystery, and Magic. John Burke
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1955, 1956, 2011 by John Burke
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For my son,
David Burke,
Who carries on the traditions
Of a true fantasy fan.
AGENT’S CUT
My secretary has always been very good at fending off importunate authors hoping to bluff their way into my office clutching armfuls of typescript for which they were sure I could negotiate a profitable deal with some distinguished publisher. But just before lunchtime this one incredible day she put her head round the door looking pale and worried, unsure of how she ought to have coped.
“David, there are two…two men here to see you.”
“I’m sure you can give them a thorough vetting, Maisie, before—”
“They’re policemen.”
They were in fact two plainclothes officers: a Detective Inspector Emerson and a detective constable whose mumbled introduction escaped me.
“Mr. David Milburn?”
“The name’s on our plate by the door.”
It was a silly, nervous thing to say, with no reason for being nervous. We surely weren’t going to be accused of handling pornography or terrorist propaganda?
“Your agency represents Mr. Crispin Brooke?”
“It does.”
“When did you last see Mr. Brooke?”
“I had drinks with him and his wife last evening. Why? Is anything wrong?”
“You said with Mr. Brooke and his wife?”
“Yes. We were celebrating acceptance of his latest novel.”
“That’s odd.”
“What’s odd? It’s quite common for old friends to get together when a deal’s been pulled off.”
“Of course. You were friends as well as business acquaintances?”
The sun was warm on the window, but somehow a chill draught had begun fingering its way into the room.
“Of course we were. I mean, we are.”
The detective inspector smiled a very disturbing smile, as if he had caught me but in some damaging admission.
He said: “So you are not aware that Mr. Brooke died last night?”
It was not just a draught now, but a freezing pain in the guts. I could hardly breathe. “Died?”
“And you must have been the last person to see him alive.”
“No, that’s not so. Gemma—Mrs. Brooke—she must have been the last one. After she had dropped me off and gone back—”
“Dropped you off, Mr. Milburn?”
I stammered out a sympathetic tale of Crispin having perhaps had too much to drink, so that I decided to leave early and his wife had driven me home and then must obviously have hurried back to see how he was.
Detective Inspector Emerson took his time, as if savouring something in his mouth, chewing on it and liking the taste better and better, yet at the same time frowning at something far from tasteful.
“But that’s rather odd, Mr. Milburn,” he said at last. “Because Mrs. Brooke assures us she wasn’t at home yesterday. She was spending the night with a friend, and knew nothing about her husband’s death until she went home this morning. And then notified us. It was a great shock to her.”
* * * *
I had been Crispin Brooke’s literary agent for five years, and his wife’s lover for three weeks, when she began to confide her worries about him.
“He’s so depressed. Moaning all the time.”
She sounded cheesed off rather than sympathetic. Gemma was a languid woman with an oddly flat, passionless voice. This chill was one of the exciting things about her. It was a perpetual challenge to try and stimulate that exquisite yet unresponsive body. When she did respond, she went through all the right motions; yet one had the feeling that somewhere within that flawless ivory flesh, behind those slack and languorous lips, she was in danger of yawning.
I had not so far been so tactless as to ask how she got on with her husband. After all, he was my client and we were supposed to be friends. But presumably she wouldn’t have come to bed with me if she hadn’t found him lacking.
Crispin’s career had in fact been going downhill for quite a time now. Publishers had lost interest in his work. There were new names; new fancies; new voices squealing in the Groucho Club, new reviewers with backs to be scratched; and Crispin wasn’t one of this clique.
It was a warm afternoon, and Gemma was lying back with a thin trickle of sweat glistening between her breasts. “We’ve got to do something,” she persisted. “I can’t take much more of his miseries.”
I would rather have talked about something else, or drowsed for a while before we had the second bout. Mixing business with pleasure—particularly when it was her husband’s business—did seem in bad taste. But I supposed we’d have to tackle this question sooner or later.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I do my best. But he’s out of fashion.”
“He writes just as well as ever, doesn’t he?” That level tone might have been taken to mean that she never bothered to read any of his work, and was asking only out of curiosity.
“Publishers have changed. The market has changed.”
“I don’t believe most readers want this modern rubbish. Every book jacket nowadays might as well have a photograph of the author’s navel on it. That’s all they ever seem to contemplate.”
I heaved myself up on one elbow and contemplated her navel; and then the rest of her. She wasn’t all that many years younger than Crispin, but her skin and shape were those of an unravished teenager. Perhaps until recent weeks she hadn’t been ravished all that often: although she never spoke about it, I was beginning to suspect that Crispin wasn’t terribly active between the sheets.
Or maybe she couldn’t be bothered to encourage him. The icy calculation in her eyes and her movements might put many a man off. I should count myself lucky she had decided to indulge in some variations with me.
Odd, for a man of action like Crispin to be inactive in this one field of operations?
After leaving the SAS he had made his name with tough adventure stories.
For a long time they were tough enough and controversial enough to satisfy the public. But as time went on he had used up all this authentic background material, and his imagination wasn’t inventive enough to save his fiction from contrivance and repetition. And when he attempted to introduce a bit of obligatory sex into his stories, it came out laughable.
I looked down into that disconcertingly cool face and said: “Is this why you’ve been coming to bed with me? Simply to coax me into fiddling things somehow for your husband? To get me under your thumb?”
She smiled her listless smile. “Not just my thumb.” She pushed my arm away and rolled over on top of me. Her eyes were closed—in bliss, or sheer indifference?
We forgot about Crispin for a few minutes. At least, I did. But the moment we had finished, and she had uttered that half-contemptuous laugh with which she always rounded off a coupling—insulting in a way, yet provoking a vow that next time I’d make her gasp rather than laugh—she murmured in my ear: “I mean it. We really do have to do something about him. Otherwise I’ll finish up pushing him off a bridge or something.”
It was nearly time for me to get back to my office and for Gemma