Written and Done
"They say sex sells," Esther Vallone intoned as she stood at the podium to accept a lifetime achievement award. "That may be true, but as my writing career clearly illustrates, murder sells a hell of a lot better."
There was an eruption of applause throughout the auditorium, and many of the attendees at the ceremony rose from their seats in a standing ovation. It was quite an occasion for the literary world. Fellow writers, editors, agents and publishers from around the globe had gathered to honor an industry icon, a woman whose mystery novels surpassed Agatha Christie's in sales.
After concluding her speech, the maven of murder mystery stood patiently, decked out in her Givenchy gown, waiting for the applause to die down. She was eventually escorted off stage by an usher, and Armando Rossi, the master of ceremonies—an A-list Hollywood actor who costarred in movie adaptations of seven of Vallone's books—stepped forward to deliver his closing comments.
Once in the wings, out of the sight of her adoring public, Esther flopped down in her wheelchair. The ninety-two-year-old author, although mentally every bit as agile as she was at nineteen, felt the strain of her years weigh upon her physically.
"I'm exhausted," she told her chauffeur, Jose Juarez. "Take me home."
Given the busy Saturday night traffic in the city, it would be a long drive to her suburban house. Thankfully, the back seat of the limousine was comfortable—it ought to be at the price she paid for it! Money, though, was no object to Esther, one of the wealthiest women in America. That was not always the case. She had grown up in a lower-middle-class household. Her father worked in a warehouse, and her mother had a part-time job in a candy store. Every million she earned she owed to her own hard work and imagination.
More than an hour after leaving the event, Jose drove up the long driveway that led to Esther's Georgian mansion, one of four houses the writer owned. He pulled up to the front door, turned off the engine, got out of the car and opened the rear door for his passenger.
"We're here, Miss Vallone," he announced, waking his employer who had dozed off in the back seat. "Would you like me to get your wheelchair for you?"
"No, thank you, Jose. I think I can make it under my own steam if I use the walker."
When the writer entered the front door, she felt the familiar swell of pride at the house's grandeur. She had spent a considerable sum on restoring the former home of one of America's early patriots. Except for the modern kitchen appliances and the fixtures in the bathrooms, the house was decorated with period furnishings to give people the feeling of stepping back in time. Even the recently added elevator, hidden behind the façade of a hall closet door, did not detract from the eighteenth-century charm.
The antique grandfather's clock chimed the eleventh hour as she crossed the foyer and entered the elevator. No wonder she was so tired. Not only did she have a busy day, but it was past her ten o'clock bedtime as well. Normally, she read for an hour before falling asleep, but after a quick shower, she climbed into her four-poster bed and pulled the covers up to her neck.
Reaching for the light switch, Esther saw the Wedgwood trinket box beside her telephone on her night table. Inside the blue Jasperware container were the engagement rings and matching wedding bands from her first three marriages, her late mother's crucifix on a gold chain and an amber good-luck charm. Both the trinket box and its contents had been at her bedside for over half a century.
Once the bedroom light was turned off, the writer's memory took her back to a day in 1967. She was in New Orleans, writing her book Death in the French Quarter. It was an emotionally trying time for the bestselling author. Just two months before moving into a hotel on Canal Street, her divorce from her third husband had been finalized. Even more traumatic, she was about to turn forty.
On that milestone birthday, the author sat alone in a noisy, smoke-filled bar on Bourbon Street. With jazz music blaring in the background, she ordered herself a drink.
Here's to the big four zero, she thought, lifting the hurricane in a toast to herself. Hell, I can do this. I've already survived the Great Depression, the Second World War and three disastrous marriages. I can handle middle age.
As Esther downed her drink, a woman took the seat beside her.
"Happy birthday," the dark, exotic beauty said in a low, husky voice with a pronounced Haitian accent.
"How did you know it was my birthday?" Esther asked with surprise.
"I have many gifts; clairvoyance is but one of them."
Ah! Here it comes, the skeptical author thought, suspecting the woman was looking to make a quick buck.
"What else can you tell about me? And how much will it cost?"
The woman's brown eyes peered into Esther's blue ones, her intense gaze leaving the writer feeling naked and vulnerable.
"I don't need your money."
If the woman's attire was any indication, her words must be true. Not only were her stylish clothes from a Paris fashion house, but she also wore Tiffany diamond earrings and a Rolex watch.
"My name is Fabiola Toussaint. Let me buy you another drink to celebrate your birthday."
"Normally, I quit at one, but tonight—what the hell!"
"It isn't every day a woman turns forty. Don't look so surprised that I know your age. I told you I'm clairvoyant."
"Forty," Esther repeated as though she were speaking of a terminal illness. "When I was a kid, I used to think forty was old."
"I won't patronize you by reminding you that you're as young as you feel," Fabiola said. "Or say that you're not getting older, you're getting better."
"Thank you. I detest those trite old clichés."
"What shall we drink to then?" the Haitian asked, picking up her own glass. "A long life?"
"I'd like to think I'll live to a ripe old age, but who knows?"
"I do. You'll live at least another fifty years."
"Yeah, sure I will."
"Here is a charm that will ensure a long life."
Fabiola reached into her Gucci bag and took out an orange stone roughly the size of a cherry and put it into the writer's hand. Esther examined the charm in her palm, staring into the mysterious center of the semitransparent stone."
"It's warm to the touch. What is it?"
"Amber. The ancient Greeks thought it contained the essence of life."
"Look, I appreciate the gesture, but I don't believe in ...."
"Take it. What have you got to lose?"
"That's true. What am I to do with it?"
"When you feel your time is about to come," Fabiola instructed, "hold it in your hand and say, over and over again, 'As I command, it shall be done.' It will keep death away."
"I don't see how it ...."
"Just keep repeating the mantra, and you will."
Although Esther Vallone did not believe for one moment the small piece of amber could prevent her death, she had kept it beside her bed for fifty-two years.
* * *
After eight hours of sleep, Esther woke, only slightly less tired than she had been the night before. As was her long-standing custom, after showering and dressing, she went into her writing room and sat at her desk. Tori Gallo, the old woman's maid, soon followed with a cup of coffee and two slices of toasted rye bread, topped with melted butter. While eating her light breakfast, she read over the pages she had written the previous day. The last of her coffee finished, Esther put her hands on the home row of her computer keyboard. Within moments, they began their dance, tapping out words and sentences with a steady rhythm. These became paragraphs and then pages.
The protagonist in all of Esther's novels was Kiki Medford, one of the world's most recognizable fictional sleuths. Set in the 1920s, a decade when women were cutting their hair, raising their hems and stepping out from behind the shadows of men, the books reflected the excitement and excess of the Jazz Age and often journeyed into the seedy underworld of gangsters, bootleggers and corrupt politicians.
In her debut appearance in the novel South Side Homicide, Kiki Katt, a Broadway showgirl abandons her career and leaves New York to marry Clint Medford, a handsome Chicago gumshoe. Not long after the wedding, Clint, a scrupulously honest detective, is killed by a crooked Chicago cop on the mob's payroll. After solving her husband's murder, the grieving widow decides to remain in the Windy City and take over his private investigation agency.
For more than fifty years, Esther had immersed herself in the world of Prohibition, bathtub gin, speakeasies, art deco, the Ford Model T, the Charleston and dance marathons. Often incorporating real individuals from Charles "Lucky" Lindbergh to Charles "Lucky" Luciano, including Babe Ruth, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charlie Chaplin, Josephine Baker and Jack Dempsey into her plots, the award-winning mystery writer made the Twenties roar again for millions of readers. Although she had no memory of those years herself, since she was not born until 1927, the author treated the decade of the 1920s as her personal playground. And as she grew older and life's experiences began to take their toll on her, it became her refuge.
The latest book, Guilty as Sin, was roughly one-third completed. (As with the previous fifteen books written during the twilight of her life, Esther wondered if she would live long enough to see it completed.) While most of her plots were set in Chicago, there were a dozen or so—including the previously mentioned Death in the French Quarter—that took place in other locales. Kiki Medford, like many fictional detectives from Hercule Poirot to Jessica Fletcher, was a lightning rod for murder: wherever she went, dead bodies turned up. In Guilty as Sin, the flapper sleuth travels to Hollywood where she is asked to help solve the murder of a young starlet who dies while attending a drug-fueled party thrown by the studio's top box-office-grossing male star.
Esther had just completed writing a scene where Kiki is to meet John Barrymore for lunch in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel when a wave of dizziness swept over her. Moments later, she broke out in a cold sweat.
I hope I'm not coming down with something.
Even though she had received her flu shot, she could not rule out the possibility of being stricken with the illness. Not wanting to take any chances at her age, she finished the paragraph she was writing with the line, "You must be Kiki Medford," he said. "I'm John Barrymore." Then she saved her file, turned off her computer and headed upstairs to her bedroom. After taking a shot of NyQuil, she donned her flannel pajamas and crawled beneath the covers.
The elderly writer closed her eyes and began to drift off. Suddenly, she felt pressure in her chest and found it difficult to breathe.
Oh, no! she thought when she felt the first agonizing pain in her chest.
When she reached for the phone to call 911, another pain raced down her arm. Her hand closed on the Wedgwood trinket box instead. Gasping for breath, she took hold of the amber charm inside it.
What is it I'm supposed to chant? she wondered, fearing that all hope of medical intervention was gone.
Esther searched her memory for Fabiola Toussaint's words, but all that came to mind were the lines of Yul Brynner as Rameses in The Ten Commandments.
"So let it be written. So let it be done," she said, frantically squeezing the piece of amber. "So let it be written. So let it be done. So let it be written."
One last excruciating pain took the writer's breath away.
* * *
"So let it be done."
When Esther Vallone's eyes fluttered open, her surroundings were obscured by a mental fog. It slowly lifted, and she realized she was lying in a bed but not her own. The memory of her recent physical discomfort made her wonder if she was in a hospital room. She looked around. There was no heart monitor, no medical equipment of any kind, just a dresser, a desk, a chair and a suitcase.
I'm in a hotel.
When she rose from the bed, she noticed a marked change in her health. There was no chest pain or difficulty in breathing and not even the usual aches that accompanied old age.
"I haven't felt this good in ...."
The reflection in the mirror above the dresser shocked her into silence. The face looking back at her was one she had never seen but one she had described in countless times. The strawberry blond hair was cut in a short bob. There was mascara above her green eyes, rouge on her creamy complexion and red lipstick on her pouty lips.
Esther's eyes went to her wrist. Her Cartier watch had been replaced by a Longines. It was half past eleven. People often experience déjà vu, a feeling of already having experienced a given situation. In this case, the author clearly remembered looking at the watch at that exact moment. She also knew beyond any doubt that when she opened the suitcase, she would find a sleeveless, lavender drop waist dress.
Twenty-five minutes later she exited the elevator and entered the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
"Ah, Miss Medford," the front desk clerk called, confirming the writer's suspicion as to her new identity. "You look lovely."
She glanced at her watch again. In five minutes, John Barrymore would walk through the front door to take her to lunch. The ninety-two-year-old woman knew with complete certainty everything that was going to happen because she had written it all in her manuscript: the Beverly Hills Hotel, the lavender dress, the Longines watch, the front desk clerk and John Barrymore.
So let it be written. So let it be done, she thought.
Somehow, she had succeeded in writing herself into her latest novel, Guilty as Sin.
Surprisingly punctual, the actor often referred to as the Great Profile arrived exactly at noon. As she had described in the pages of her book, the clock of the church on the corner began chiming twelve as he crossed the lobby toward the attractive private detective.
"You must be Kiki Medford," he said. "I'm John Barrymore."
Her hand went out to shake his, but it never made contact. When the church bell fell silent, both the actor and the desk clerk vanished.
"What happened? Where are ...?"
The answer came to her in a matter of moments: she had reached the stopping point in her novel Guilty as Sin. Esther had turned off the computer just minutes after John Barrymore arrived at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
So let it be written. So let it be done. But it obviously can't be done if it hasn't been written. I have to pick up the novel where I left off.
In 1920s Hollywood, there were no computers, but there were typewriters.
"The hotel must have an office. There might be a typewriter there."
As she walked down a narrow hallway, at the back of the lobby, she heard the unmistakable click-clack of typewriter keys striking a platen. She opened the door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and saw a man sitting at a Remington, his back to her.
"Hello, Esther," he said. "Long time no see."
The stranger's greeting both disturbed and surprised her. Although he had called her by her real name, he had not seen her face.
"How do you know who I am?"
The typing stopped, and the man turned toward her. The face was just as she had described it in her first book.
"Clint Medford!" she exclaimed in awe.
"In the flesh."
"But you're dead!"
"You should know. After all, you're the one who killed me."
"That's not true. Officer Doby Knapp killed you."
"Knapp pulled the trigger, but you put the gun in his hand."
"This is absurd!" she cried. "You're not real. You're nothing but a fictional character."
"As are you—now. You're one of us, Esther. Unfortunately for you, though, our roles are reversed. I'm the one sitting at a keyboard. Funny, isn't it? With a couple of words or sentences, I can kill you as easily as you killed me."
Fictional character or not, the fear she felt was real.
"But I can bring you back," Esther said in desperation. "I can write into my novel that you were never really killed, that you were in the witness protection program. I'm not sure if it existed back in the Twenties, but what the hell! Just let me use the typewriter."
"I'm afraid I can't do that," he said. "You see, you're a killer many times over. I intend to see that justice is served."
Clint turned back to the Remington and resumed typing.
The youthful Kiki Medford façade began to fade away, and Esther Vallone could feel herself age.
I have to find another typewriter! she thought and ran from the office.
The scene she encountered in the lobby made her shriek with terror. All the characters she had killed off in her novels had been brought to life, in a manner of speaking. Technically, they were all dead: shot, stabbed, garroted, strangled, poisoned, incinerated, beaten and tortured. She recognized the gruesome bodies, from Alfie Sneden in Dead Reckoning (her second novel) to Myrtle Gilbey, the victim in the unfinished Guilty as Sin. Most shocking of all, leaning on the wall near the elevator door, was the body of Fabiola Toussaint, the dark, exotic beauty she had killed off in Death in the French Quarter. It was the Haitian who had given her the piece of amber in a bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
Wanting to escape the sight of the carnage, Esther decided to flee to the sanctuary of her hotel room. By the time she got to the third floor, her strawberry blond hair was snowy white and her skin was papery thin, wrinkled and spotted with age. Her strength waning, the mystery writer could barely push open the door. Inside, sitting at the desk, was Clint Medford. Esther did not ask how he got there. Why bother? Nothing made sense in the alternate reality in which she was trapped.
A wave of dizziness swept over her as she watched the Chicago-born private detective write on a sheet of hotel stationery with a fountain pen. She managed to make it to the bed just as the painful pressure in her chest took her breath away.
* * *
Tori Gallo was listening to Brad Paisley on her iPod as she vacuumed the living room carpet. When the song came to an end, she turned off the power to the Dyson and pulled the plug out of the wall. Seeing that it was ten after twelve, she went up to the second-floor master bedroom to see if her employer wanted something to eat.
"Miss Vallone?" she called and knocked gently on the door. "Would you like me to bring you your lunch?"
There was no reply, so she opened the door a crack.
"Miss Vallone? Are you awake?"
As she approached the bed, she saw the writer, lying on her back, her eyes wide open. An orange stone, roughly the size of a cherry, lay on the bed beside her hand.
"Miss Vallone?"
Esther did not appear to be breathing, so Tori picked up her arm and checked for a pulse. The maid was not too upset when she realized her employer was dead. The old woman had lived to ninety-two, after all.
As Tori picked up the phone to call the doctor, she saw a piece of paper lying on the night table. Despite the age of the brittle, yellowed sheet, she had no difficulty reading the note written in longhand on Beverly Hills Hotel stationery: So let it be written. So let it be done.
Salem was quite the dancer back in the Twenties, but that was two lives ago!
