The Novelist

*Dum dum*

MARGARET SANDERSON’S HOUSE
SOMEWHERE NICE IN THE COUNTRY
The Next Day

“I think this is it, here,” Goren said, pointing to an approaching mailbox with ‘George Elliot’ painted in neat letters on the side. They’d had to find her agent to get her address since it didn’t seem to be listed anywhere. Sanderson didn’t seem to have a phone number, either. Goren couldn’t blame her for the fake name on the mailbox; if people knew where she lived, she’d never get any peace from her fans.

Eames slowed the car down and pulled into the unpaved driveway. “Usually people pick a fake name of the same gender,” she mused, noting the mailbox as they drove passed.

Goren chuckled. “George Elliot was a woman. She couldn’t get published, though, until she wrote under a man’s name.” The driveway was long - it was almost a lane - and it turned at a sharp angle about halfway along, leading them behind a thick hedge to a small, two-story, country cottage. She parked and as they got out a blond collie dog hopped off the porch and came down the steps to greet them.

“Hey, boy,” Goren said, squatting down. He was so big that he still towered over the dog. He held a hand out for the animal to sniff, then patted his head. The dog wagged his tail as Goren looked at the tag on his collar. “Daisy,” he read. “So you’re a girl, huh?” The dog wagged her tail as he said her name.

“Not much of a guard dog,” Eames commented. “But this means that Sanderson’s probably pretty nice.” They’d been to enough places with pit bulls to appreciate a nice dog when they saw one. She and Goren walked up the steps and knocked on the old screen door. A gentle breeze blew passed them and rocked the porch swing. Goren knocked again and went to look at a big planter of flowers; someone really loved this place. No one came to the door.

“Someone has to be home,” Eames said, as she peered through the screen. “The inside door is wide open.”

Goren looked at the dog, who was still standing in the driveway. “Where is everybody, Daisy?” he asked the dog. “Find Margaret, Daisy.” Daisy wagged her tail and started to walk around the side of the house. Eames and Goren hurried after her. As they approached the rear of the house, they heard a familiar sound; typing.

The railing of the back porch blocked Eames view, but Goren was just tall enough to see over the top. A barefoot woman was lounging on a wicker couch with her back to him. Her hair was in a long braid that hung down her back and she wore a loose-fitting sweater over a Stanford University t-shirt. Goren noticed that her finger and toenails were perfectly painted, which told him that even though she was very casually dressed, she was still quite feminine and a little fussy about her appearance. There was a laptop on her knees and she was typing at a mile a minute. It sounded like a mouse’s machine gun. She had headphones on and was listening to MP3’s on laptop as she worked. She sat up a little and stretched before going back to her typing. Goren’s eyes scanned quickly over her slim body as her clothes pulled tight for a moment. She was curvier than Eames. He liked it.

Goren nodded to Eames and they walked the rest of the way around the porch and halfway up the steps before she saw them. The writer jumped out of her skin and let out a little squawk of surprise. She stood quickly and the end of her headphones popped out of her laptop, filling the air with the sounds of the Rolling Stones. She reached out to turn the volume down and her eyes scanned over her visitors from head to toe. Daisy went to her mistress and looked up to her face, not sure if she was going to have to bark at these new people or not.

“Sorry,” Goren said, his voice heavy with apology. He tried not to notice how lovely she looked in real life - a cop could get himself into a lot of trouble for letting his eyes go the wrong way, even once. He pulled back the edge of his jacket to show her his badge. Her eyes flickered slightly at the sight of his gun. Civilians were usually intrigued by the gun. “I’m really sorry that we startled you. Daisy led us back here when there was no answer at the front door. I’m Detective Robert Goren, this is Detective Alex Eames, NYPD.”

“That’s alright,” the writer said, patting Daisy’s head to reassure her that no one needed to be bitten today. Goren thought she looked more flustered than her dog. “Is there a problem?” she asked, sounding worried.

“No, no, nothing like that,” Goren said, understanding her concern. Cops only turned up at your door when someone was dead or about to get arrested. “We just wanted to talk to you about Joe Landers.”

“Oh,” the writer said, the concern flooding out of her. She suddenly remembered her manners and stepped forward with her hand out. “I’m sorry, you gave me a bit of a start there. I’m Margaret Sanderson. Call me Maggie.” She shook Eames’ hand and then Goren’s. His hand nearly covered hers. “Come on in, I was just about to make some fresh coffee.”

“That’d be great, thanks,” Eames said, smiling brightly as they followed her to the door. Eames was good at being friendly with women they needed to interview. Goren thought that he intimidated some of them with his size... a lot of women seemed to have dated a jerk at some point and they were a little nervous around a big man. He didn’t like it, but he couldn’t blame them... they didn’t know him from Adam and it was always better to err on the side of caution.

Sanderson held the door for Daisy and was going to let the detectives in first, but Goren reached a long arm passed her and gallantly held it for her to go in after Eames. Sanderson gave him a shy smile as she passed by him.

“She’s not used to being treated like a lady,” Goren noted, already starting to profile her.

“Is this about the plagiarism thing?” Sanderson sighed as she put the coffee pot on and set a cookie jar, sugar, cream, and some napkins on the table. Detective Goren’s voice had had a calming effect on her; it was so soothing.

The kitchen was very cutesy with lacy curtains and a bouquet of daisies. It smelled like cookies and Goren noted that the appliances were fairly new. The kitchen had been renovated very recently, but had been made to look old with the antique furnishings.

“Well, partly,” Eames said as she sat down at the table next to Goren. It had a million layers of paint on it, which revealed it’s age, but Goren liked it. It was homey. “We were wondering if you could tell us about it.”

Sanderson sat down opposite them and folded her hands on the table, noting how she still had to look up to talk to Goren. He had nice shoulders. “It’s not much of a story,” she snorted, showing that she was a true fiction writer. “A writer friend of mine sent me an e-mail, telling me that Joe had won an science fiction award but that the story was almost identical to one I’d had published in a small magazine when I was seventeen.” She got up to get some cups out of the china hutch in the corner. “It was one of the worst things I’ve ever written, and to be totally honest, I didn’t really want any attention drawn to it, but my agent raised hell when he found out.”

“You didn’t care that someone had ripped off your work, Ms. Sanderson - Maggie?” Goren said, cocking his head to one side. He would have been pretty pissed off if it had happened to him.

She smiled as he said her name in that same, gentle voice. It sounded nice. “It was just a short story that I hated,” she shrugged and looked off into the distance. “I didn’t like it and I didn’t want anyone to read it... I have a reputation to uphold. When I wrote it, I had a teenaged girl’s view of the world, know what I mean?” She smiled at him and he found himself smiling back, almost shyly.

“So your agent was mad?” Eames prompted.

“Yeah,” Maggie said, leaning on the counter for a moment as the coffee pot finished dripping. “He’s a firecracker. We sued and we won.” She poured three cups of coffee and sat down again. She looked at Goren sincerely. “Let me be a little clearer,” she said. Goren smiled; he liked direct people. “I was livid when I found out that he’d ripped me off,” she said, referring to what he’d said earlier. “But I thought about it for a while and decided that it would be better for my reputation if I just let it go. Don’t get me wrong, though. Joe and I are not friends anymore.”

“You were friends?” Goren said, adding some cream to his coffee. “Close friends?”

“Not especially,” Maggie said, blushing slightly. Daisy lay down on the floor by her feet. “I sort of knew him through a friend of a friend. We went to a book launch together once and made out in the stairwell, to be completely honest. He was a terrible kisser. It was like being attacked by a barracuda. I never went out with him again.” Maggie shrugged and stirred a little cream into her coffee.

“You’re very blunt,” Eames said, not hiding a smile.

“Well, it’s a crime to lie to the police, isn’t it?” Maggie asked, smiling back.

“Misleading an investigation?” Goren said, cocking his head to one side. “Yeah, we don’t really like that too much.”

“So you stopped going out with him because he was a bad kisser?” Eames asked, getting the writer back on track. This was one of the better interviews they’d done in a while. Maggie wasn’t hard to extract information from.

“Well, there was that, plus the fact that he was a hack,” Maggie chuckled. Her face clouded over a moment later. “And I guess I was... I don’t know... at the time my fiancee had just left me and I guess I was feeling a little...” she gestured, looking for the word.

“Lonely?” Goren supplied softly.

Maggie looked up to his face. “Yeah,” she said quietly. There was something about him that she liked... something about his manner. He seemed to understand her. She shook the thought from her head; he was a cop and he was used to talking to all kinds of people. He was just categorizing her and speaking to her according to some formula he’d worked out over the years.

“She went a little wild for a while after that asshole left, but she’s mellowed out so much now, that she hasn’t been on a date in a year!” a voice called from the front entryway. Goren could hear someone kicking off a pair of shoes. Maggie blushed and put her head in her hand.

“Could you please wait to see who might be here before you just blurt out horribly embarrassing details about my life?” she grumbled as a second woman strode into the room. Goren thought that Maggie looked cute with her face all flushed like that... for a second, he wondered what else would flush her face like that, but then he pushed the thought from his head. He didn’t need a conduct complain filed.

Goren turned to look at the newcomer. She was about the same age as Maggie and she looked like she’d just been out jogging. Her hair was blond and curly and yanked back in a messy bun.

“Bee, these are Detectives Goren and Eames,” Maggie said. “This is my friend, Belinda. She lives down the road.” Belinda’s face blanched as they showed her their badges. “Everything’s fine,” Maggie assured her friend. “They just wanted to ask me about Joe Landers.”

“Ugh, him?” Belinda snorted, as she went to fill a glass with cold water. “What’s that jerk done now?”

“Did you ever exchange words with him over the plagiarism or was it just left up to the courts?” Eames asked, not answering the question. She didn’t like this Belinda girl and she didn’t know quite why. She seemed kind of full of herself or something... Alex liked more modest people.

Maggie laughed out loud. “I didn’t have to say anything to him - the rest of the writing world did. There isn’t a writer in New York who will speak to him. And the publishing houses dropped him like a hot potato. Only the vanity presses will take him on. The whole thing ruined him.” She sighed and looked into her coffee. “And I didn’t want that. I’m not mean enough to wish for bad things to happen to people, even if I do write about it sometimes.”

“He had it coming!” Belinda snapped. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t ripped other writers off too!” She leaned on the counter, clearly angrier about the plagiarism than her friend had been.

Maggie leaned back in her chair and looked at the two detectives. Something wasn’t right. “Why are you really here?” she asked. “What do you care about some silly lawsuit that was settled years ago?”

Goren and Eames looked at each other for a moment; Maggie was good at playing hostess, but she was sharper than they’d given her credit for. “Joe’s head was bashed in with a typewriter two nights ago,” Goren said. “He’s dead.”