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She looked up.
“Do you like your job?”
Asha fumbled for words. “Yes . . . I . . . of course . . . I’m sorry.”
“Then don’t ever disrespect me like that again.”
She tried to say something else but I gave her a stop signal and retreated to my office.
Both Keith and Paul were in meetings, and I was too shaken and out of control to debate the minstrel cover without losing my temper or participate in the conference call, so I closed the door and tidied up my work space.
By noon, I had rearranged my 100-plus books. They were now lined up neatly in alphabetical order on two white pine bookshelves. It was time to clean the mess that was my desk. I had removed the stapler, paper clip holder, and Scotch tape dispenser before realizing that some sort of weird dust had come off on my hands.
15
TAPPED?
The police had obviously dusted my office for fingerprints. Again, I lifted the receiver. Paul was still in a meeting. Keith was on his other line. I told his secretary that I would hold until he was free no matter how long it took.
I rocked back and forth in my ergonomically correct executive chair with my eyes closed, imagining Detective Marcus Gilchrist poking his sausage-like fingers around in the papers on my desk.
Had the computer department given the police my access code so they could read my e-mail? I chuckled at the thought. There were no homicidal thoughts in my computer files. Only endless e-mails to Victor Bell, over the past year, much of which had gone unanswered.
Given all the ruckus going on about Annabelle’s death, Victor would probably come to Black Pack next Friday. Why did I still want Victor after the vulgar e-mail he’d sent me? A therapist would say I was suffering from low self-esteem, but who knows? Maybe he and I are soul mates and we’ll just have to work all this out in another life.
I had just started mentally searching my wardrobe for an outfit he hadn’t seen when Keith Williams barked into the phone.
“What’s the problem, Jackie?”
He sounded annoyed and I was about to reprimand him for his abrupt manner when I remembered that I couldn’t afford his services and how lucky I was to have him on the line. I told him about my conversation with Leigh Dafoe and the powder in my office which I thought was fingerprint dust.
“Jackie, I want you to calm down. The police are just doing their job. They have to try and match all the prints inside the house to people that the victim knew. Anyway, they expect to find your prints—we’ve admitted that you were there twice in forty-eight hours. So, what is the problem?”
I felt slightly ridiculous but there was one point left. “Craig is down the hall in Leigh Dafoe’s office. She hinted this morning that if I don’t talk to them, I’ll lose my job. Can you come over here?”
“Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can. What I need you to do in the meantime is relax and go about your business as normally as possible. That means you should buy and sell books, talk to your colleagues about anything except this case, and try not to look anxious. Okay?”
“That detective may have put all kinds of strange thoughts in Craig’s head. What if he says something terrible like ‘Jackie, why did you kill my wife?’ ”
Keith’s voice turned hard. “Did you hear what you just said on a company phone that may be tapped? Just for the record, did you kill Craig Murray’s wife?”
“No, I did not.”
“Then I suggest that you hunker down and do what Welburn Books is paying you to do.”
I felt utterly stupid. “I’m sorry.”
“No problem. I’ll see you in about half an hour.”
There was a click and Keith Williams was gone.
Even though I was a nervous wreck, I still needed to settle the cover feud. Normally, editors do not have any control over what their author’s cover will look like, but due to Annabelle’s insistence, Helen, the art director, had to get my approval on the covers that were aimed at African-American readers. When I saw the direction that the artists were taking for Willow Van Silver’s latest romance novel, I hit the roof. It was one of those cartoony-looking covers with the usual screaming primary colors.
I took the cover with me down to Helen’s office and knocked on her door. She looked up and gave me a faint smile which turned to a Thin Pink Line when she caught sight of the sketch in my hand.
“Good morning, Jackie.”
“Hello,” I answered pleasantly. “May I sit down?”
