“What about him?”
“If I’d listened to him, I’d have been a lot better off.”
“Why?What did he say?”
“And if you want a suspect, you ought to talk to him.They argued in the bar yesterday; Steven was holding court there, as he always does.Everyone saw it.Steven grabbed her, and Vivienne slapped him.”
“What?When?”
But Margaux ignored the question.“He called one night after you—after Vivienne was arrested.Late.Very late.Even for Steven, and he’s a night-owl.And he was drunk, also strange—Steven likes a drink, but he knows how to hold his liquor.He was in a panic.He kept talking about a book, another of Vivienne’s true crimes—and before you ask, I don’t know which one.”Spreading those finely manicured nails against the tabletop, fingers tensed again, Margaux said, “He said Vivienne told him she’d gotten the wrong person.”
Chapter 10
Margaux refused to answer any more questions, so Bobby and I finally gave up and beat a retreat from the ballroom.
I did, though, overhear the beginning of the pitch from the woman who’d been waiting so patiently behind us.Tuna the Cat (a Bombay) solved crimes by sitting inside various box-shaped things.(In the first book, it was a coffin, where Tuna discovered a vital clue.)
Honestly, I would read the heck out of that.
Bobby and I emerged from the chaos of the ballroom, but the hallway was only slightly less congested, so we moved toward the front of the conference center until we found a spot free from people: a stretch along the wall of windows, looking out on Arcadia’s campus and the creek.It was barely noon, and the promise of the early morning had been more than fulfilled with the crisp autumn sunlight, the clear skies, and the still beauty of green lawns and bright-leaved trees.
The interior of the conference center was less soothingly pastoral.A few yards away, a woman was sitting on the floor, doing one of those adult coloring books while bellowing into her Bluetooth headset a play-by-play of everything (and everyone) she’d seen at the conference.Across from us, a man was distributing foil-wrapped sandwiches, whose key ingredients (to judge by the smell, anyway) seemed to be canned salmon and mayo.And one person, dressed in a leather skirt and a chainmail top, had fallen asleep under the water fountain (echoes of Fox).
“Are they like a cat?”I said.“Is it warmer down there?”
“What?”Bobby asked.
“Nothing.So, Margaux.”
“She didn’t like it when you asked for her alibi.”
“I noticed that too.”(Okay, it would have been hardnotto notice.) “After that, she got cagey, right?But if she had something to hide, why talk to us at all?Why not send us on our not-so-merry way?”
Bobby frowned.“A lot of people involved in a crime will talk to police because they’re afraid it will be suspicious if they don’t.If she had something to do with Vivienne’s death, she might have believed that talking to us was a good way to make herself seemnotlike a suspect.”
“Then why not make up an alibi?Why not say she went back to her hotel room?”
“Good question.”
“Do you think she was telling the truth?”I asked.“That story at the end about this guy, Steven?”
“It’s worth checking out.It definitely sounds like there was bad blood, and I don’t like the physical aspect of their confrontation.Someone who gets physical once is liable to do so again.”
“And someone killed Vivienne by bashing her head in,” I said glumly.
“He’d have a motive to want her dead: silence.Yes, he’d already told Margaux—but he was drunk, and he might not remember.If word got out that he knew Vivienne had gotten someone wrongfully convicted, well, that’s a much bigger deal.It would have repercussions for his career.There’d be legal considerations.”
“Or Vivienne might have been blackmailing him,” I said.“I wouldn’t put it past her.”
Bobby nodded.
“So, Steven?”I said.“Start at the bar?”
“Like a real detective,” Bobby said with a grin.
The conference center bar—yes, it’s a thing, and yes, even on a college campus—was located at the far end of the building.The location gave it a separate entrance, so that faculty and age-appropriate students could patronize the bar even if they weren’t attending an event in the building.It had parquet floors, patterned rugs in muted tones, and modular, modern seating that combined brass and velvet in colors that an interior designer had probably called camel and raspberry.Pendant lights would make the space atmospheric at night, but right now, sunlight poured in through the windows.Most of the seating was taken with con attendees—as I mentioned, writers have a certain look, including the woman who had about a million unicorn stickers on her MacBook, and a man whose shirt said I SHOULD BE WRITING.But a quick glance at Steven Block’s LinkedIn page identified him as the man sitting alone at the bar.White, in his fifties, he had a square jaw and brown hair salted with gray at the temples.He wore a suede jacket, a rumpled button-up, and jeans, and his ankle boots managed to turn the outfit into hip instead of I-forgot-hotels-have-irons.
“Mr.Block?”
