Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

“Feelings as powerful as ours,” Kincaid intoned, “should not be confined to the backseat of a motor vehicle.”

“You always know the right thing to say, darling. Now here comes Lucy. Buzz off while I tell her what I have in mind.”

Like any writer, Desmond Wicklow had nothing much to recommend him other than his next idea. He put mousse on his black hair and parted it in the middle. His green eyes appeared sleepy behind gold-framed glasses which turned a rosy hue in outdoor light. He wore a grey Harris Tweed sports jacket with pale blue jeans and white tennis shoes.

“Want me to scarper so you can talk to Lucy?” he asked. After the butler departed with his tray of anchovy toast, Wicklow had taken his place. He downed his gin and tonic.

“Stay. You can help me persuade her.”

“To do what?”

“We’re ad-libbing, Desmond. The way actors do when they have to perform one of your scripts.”

Lucy Jellicoe arrived, like the fog, on little cat feet. She carried a glass in both hands and raised it frequently as she spoke, punctuating her words with imperceptible sips of what might have been vodka but was, in fact, tonic water. Lucy had always supplied the timid counterpoint to Margo’s flamboyance.

“There you are, Luce! Come and talk to me. Where have you been hiding?”

“It’s my party, I can hide if I want to.” Instead of sitting where her friend patted the settee cushion between herself and Desmond Wicklow, Lucy perched on a concrete mushoom. Her late parents, who died together in the crash of a skiers’ gondola in the Italian Alps, had been into garden gnomes, some as large as female Olympic gymnasts.

“I want you to do something for me, Luce. You know all about my trip to California next week.”

“Everybody does. We all hate you for it.”

“I want you to give me Kincaid.”

“He’s not my slave.”

“But you pay him. I don’t want to pay him. I just want to take him with me. To look after things. My clothes and travel arrangements and the occasional meal in the hotel room. Things.”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“I took the liberty. He wants me to clear it with you.” In the ensuing silence, Margo Fletcher reached out and squeezed the author’s cheek. “Say something, Desmond.”

“Yes. Very important Kincaid comes along. I’ll be occupied full-time with press interviews and screenings. Poor Margo, she can’t find her other shoe.”

“Very good, Des. What say you, your Luceness?”

“I’ll be all alone tending the shop.”

“Only for a week or so. We’ll be back before you know it.”

“No you won’t. You and Kincaid will jump on another airplane and fly off to Hawaii.”

“Now there’s an idea,” Margo said.

The Los Angeles flight was like many a play Margo and Kincaid had starred in — interesting at first but too long by half. “Alone at last,” Charles was able to say when the bellboy closed the hotel room door. He gave a nervous laugh. Kincaid had been a bank executive for many years before the bank merged and downsized. Thus wounded in spirit, he allowed himself to become a servant to a wealthy woman. Now he was finding it hard to become a man.

“Take me in your arms,” Margo said.

The butler did as he was told. Some time later he said apologetically, “Jet lag, I’m afraid.”

“You read me wrong, dear,” Margo said, leaving him on the chaise longue with an encouraging kiss on the cheek. At the drinks table by the window high above Sunset Boulevard she said, “All I want is for you to be a handsome, happy man taking me places where other women will see us and envy me.” She poured tiny bottles of whiskey into two glasses and carried them to where he sat looking at his hands placed on his knees. “If anything more should happen, all well and good. Cheers.”

“Happy times, darling.”

Margo tossed back her drink in one and set down the empty glass. When she could breathe again, she said, “Precisely my point. There may not be any happy times, for me, that is, unless I can do something about Desmond.”

“About Desmond Wicklow?”

“Do something to him, I should have said. Kill him, probably.”

“Kill Desmond? How?”

“How should I know?”

“But why?”

“To keep him from killing me.”

It was Kincaid’s turn to go to the window and open two more of the tiny bottles.

The Awards ceremony would take place at a venue called the Kodak Theatre. There would be acres of red carpet, semi-dressed actresses smiling all over their bodies, endless TV reporters saying the same thing to everybody. Margo had seen it on television and now she was here. It was all thanks to Desmond’s book. His writing of it had driven her wild because of the excessive time he spent with pen and notebook instead of paying attention to her. Her on-and-off affair with the writer had begun before the untimely death of ace pilot Corky Fletcher. Lately, it seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. Margo Fletcher’s needs were simple; she wanted everybody to anticipate her every wish and attend to it immediately.