It took me several seconds before I said, “You wanted toworkwith Vivienne?”
“Of course I wanted to work with her,” Steven said.“We were a great team.I came in after she was already big, and that kind of transition can be rough on an author.But we hit the bestseller lists—God, I don’t even know how many times.She’s an incredible writer.Shewasan incredible writer.A talent you see once a generation.I know she was a bad person.I know she did terrible things.But that didn’t change the books.”
“She was your way back,” Bobby said.
“She didn’t see it like that.”Steven released his glass; his fingers trailed to the edge of the bar.“Things got heated.I was trying to make her understand.”He stopped again.“I shouldn’t have grabbed her.”
“What did you do then?”
“I drank until the bar closed.”
Bobby looked at me.
“We were talking to Margaux earlier,” I said.
Another of those flickers of surprise.And then his face locked down again.
“She mentioned you,” I said.
“You want to know who might want to kill Vivienne?You can put Margaux at the top of your list.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’ve still got a career.The last book Margaux sold?It was an origami how-to.Upper elementary.They sold about six hundred copies, last time I checked.”He delivered the final bit of the sentence with unmistakable satisfaction.
Bobby said, “Then why does Margaux think you might have had a reason to want to keep Vivienne silent?”
“That’s ridiculous.”But he grabbed his glass again, and his thumb worried the rim.“I told you: Vivienne was my way back.”
“Did Vivienne tell you that she knew she’d gotten one of the murders she’d solved wrong?”I asked.
One second.Two.Three.
“No,” Steven said.His cheeks were almost purple now.“That’s ridic—” He caught the repetition and changed it to “That’s insane.”
“Margaux says you called her and told her that Vivienne—”
“She’s lying.In the first place, that never happened.And in the second, if Viviennehadtold me something like that, I would have reported it to the police.”
“That’s interesting,” Bobby said, “because Margaux has a recording of that call.”
I’d never seen Bobby lie before.
It.was.terrifying.
He didn’t blink.He didn’t skip a beat.He had zero tells.
“All right—” Steven said.His breathing had moved up in his chest.His thumb slipped on the glass, and it skittered across the bar.Bourbon slapped onto the wood with a soft splash, and that brown-sugar smell rose up again.He stared at the mess for a moment and dried his hands on his jeans.“All right.All right, she might have—might have saidsomething.But it was about the Nightingale murders, and by that point—”
“No,” I said, sitting up straighter on my stool.“No, you said you came in after Vivienne was already a success.That means you didn’t work onThe Nightingale Murderswith her—that was her first big book.She wouldn’t have been talking to you about that; she would have told you about one of her later books, one of the ones you edited.”
It wasn’t necessarily true, but itfelttrue—electricity arcing between one truth and another.
Steven’s color dropped; he swayed on the stool, gray-faced except for a few red smears at his cheekbones.Then, shaking his head, he slid off his stool.
“Which book was she talking about?”I said.
“Mr.Block,” Bobby said.“You need to sit down.”
