Edited Out Page 25

  “How come you’re leaving tonight?” Walt wanted to know as we shuffled down the hall, me dragging my wheeled bag, Duffy carrying Ben’s. Duffy was watching Walt carefully, either suspecting him of something or merely storing his personality away for future consideration. Duffy collects people in his head.

  “We want to get home,” I told him because it was the truth. “I need to get some writing done.” I wasn’t sure the Duffy Madison adventure in my head could compare with the Duffy Madison adventure I’d just had, but I had to send my editor something, so it would be a thousand words after I got home no matter what the time. A regimen is a regimen.

  Besides, I’m always terrified that if I take a day off, I’ll never write again, and then I would have to get a real job. The very thought makes me break out in a cold sweat.

  “Are you gonna write about this?” Walt asked. People always think you just take stuff from your life and put it into your writing, which indicates they think we have much more exciting lives than we do. Of course, lately I’d found that the opposite was true: I’d created something in my writing who insisted he was now standing in front of me, and my life had been considerably too exciting by half ever since. Maybe I was doing this whole author thing the wrong way.

  “No, Walt. I’m making something up entirely. It’s what I do.” I probably sounded too weary to talk to a loyal reader. I always try to be nice and upbeat for them, but this had been one hell of a day.

  “I get that,” he said in a voice that indicated he didn’t get it at all. “Um, can I ask you a question?” He seemed to be directing his words to Duffy, who stopped as we reached the elevator. I pushed the button. I’m a button pusher.

  “You may,” Duffy said.

  Walt’s eyes narrowed a little. “Did you . . . did you think . . . was I ever a suspect?” I got the impression he really hoped in his heart of hearts that Duffy had thought he was a murderous mastermind capable of incredible violence and brilliant subterfuge.

  “No,” Duffy said.

  “Oh. Um . . . good. I’m glad to hear it.” Walt wasn’t the least bit glad to hear it coming from his favorite investigator, but Duffy doesn’t lie. Especially to people he has deemed of little consequence.

  “You didn’t kill anybody, did you, Walt?” Ben asked as the doors opened. He got on the elevator first because he was going to take up the most room. For a guy with a broken foot, he seemed in better spirits than everybody else. He hadn’t been on that bridge. I shivered thinking about it.

  “No! Of course not!” Walt’s taking the question seriously provided Ben with a sly smile. It was a little bit mean, but he was on painkillers.

  We were all on the elevator, and the doors were closing when it occurred to me that someone should call poor Rod Wilkerson and tell him his client was going to be a little late. Like twenty years to life without parole.

  “Well then, don’t worry about it,” Ben told him. Walt didn’t smile, but he didn’t apologize for anything he hadn’t done, so I assumed that was progress. We dropped off our keys at the desk despite there being no need to do so. Duffy made us.

  Walt seemed so woeful that I tried to assure him we were okay before the four of us made it to the car. “It was very nice meeting and working with you,” I told him.

  “Working with me?” For the first time since he’d arrived at the hotel room door, Walt made eye contact with me.

  “Certainly.” We walked out into the cool night air and toward my car in the parking lot. I was glad Duffy didn’t have luggage. I wasn’t sure it would fit. The Prius c gets amazing gas mileage at the price of having virtually no cargo space. Walt’s vintage MG, battered though it was, probably would fit more stuff.

  I opened the hatch and put my bag, the larger one, inside. Duffy dropped Ben’s little overnight bag next to it, and voila, the space was filled. I closed up the hatch for fear that another car’s trunk might come by and tease mine until it cried.

  Duffy smiled and held out a hand to Walt. “We couldn’t have done it without you.” No doubt he was thinking that we couldn’t have been captured and almost killed without Walt’s invaluable service, but that would be unfair as well. In truth, Walt had steered us in some right directions.

  If I had been writing this story, this would probably be the moment when Walt revealed himself to be the evil mastermind behind both murders and threaten us all, but he shook Duffy’s hand and thanked him far too much. I kissed him on the cheek, which seemed to both delight and embarrass him, and we said our farewells. Just as I was about to straighten up again, he whispered, “I’m your biggest fan.” Which seemed sort of obvious by now. I kissed him again, and we piled into the car, Ben in back so he could stretch out the bad leg.

  As I was helping him into the back seat, he looked at me significantly and said very quietly, “I’m telling Petrosky that Duffy was wrongly accused,” he said. “He’ll be reinstated on the consultant list.” Before I could answer, Duffy was in the passenger seat and within earshot. I got in and started up the car.

  We were barely on the road for ten minutes before Ben started to snore.

  Duffy and I were silent for some time. I don’t know if we were simply tired or if we were both thinking over all that had happened the past few days. Personally, I was already making revisions in the story I’d been writing and considered changing the guy at the bottom of the ditch to a guy discovered on the top branch of a tree. It seemed like a way to change my luck, and there were possibilities for a really interesting cover.

  Just about the time we reached the Tappan Zee Bridge and all its charming uncertainty, Duffy broke the silence by quietly saying, “I received a text from Nelson Sanders. Sgt. Dougherty has been arrested for accepting graft and altering evidence. There never were fingerprints on the gun, not even Barry’s. He just altered a report from the forensics department to make it seem that way. The charges against me have been dropped.”

  “I can’t say that’s a huge surprise.” There were not many cars on the bridge this time of night, but I felt a little tingle in my stomach. I hoped I wasn’t developing a lifelong fear of bridges.

  “Also, the North Bergen medical examiner has confirmed that the body they found in the ditch was that of Damien Mosley. But he had not been shot. Apparently, Barry fired at him and missed, hitting the tree as we saw in the photographs. But Damien must have jumped at the sound, fell, and landed hard on the rocks at the bottom.”

  “Poor Damien,” I said. “Guy couldn’t catch a break.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “First, the woman he loved didn’t love him back, and then his friend shoots at him and makes him fall to his death.”

  Duffy took a moment. “You left out the part where he got so angry at that woman that he deliberately shot and killed her.”

  “You have a point.”

  There was another long silence, although Duffy seemed to be working up his nerve about something; he cleared his throat twice and coughed once. It was either his way of gathering courage, or he had an infection I hoped was not airborne.

  “I didn’t mean it, you know.”

  No, I didn’t know. “You didn’t mean it? Mean what?”

  “What I said on the footbridge, when I was trying to convince you to ‘shoot’ me.” He mimed the quotes, which I could see only through peripheral vision. Driving at night doesn’t worry me, but it does require a little more concentration. “About having no meaning in my life and just wanting it to be over. I didn’t mean a word of that. I am quite content with the life I have.”

  That was the most introspective I’d ever heard him get about himself in one sitting, so I absorbed and processed it for a moment. “I’m glad to hear it,” I said finally. Even I didn’t know what I meant by that. Was I glad that Duffy had never been Damien Mosley? Did I secretly wish the mystery of his existence had been solved so I could go back to thinking only about the Duffy I’d made up on my own?

  “You don’t sound especially glad,” he said without judgmen
t in his tone. “Are you still being perplexed by my presence?”

  How do you answer that? “I’m still puzzled by it,” I tried. “How do you explain the fact that you’re listed in the Poughkeepsie High School yearbook the same year as all the people we met up there? How can you reconcile the idea that you’re a grown man in his thirties who thinks he’s only been alive for five years?”

  “I can’t,” Duffy answered slowly, explaining it to someone less intelligent than himself. “But I have made my peace with the fact that I can’t.” He paused for a moment. “Do you still want me to go away and never come back?” He sounded like a small boy asking a friend if she was still a friend.

  “No. My problems writing are my problems. I know you’re there. Even if you don’t show up at my door, I’ll have you in my head. Maybe I have to give you another name mentally so I can write Duffy Madison when I have to.”

  “Daniel Monahan,” he suggested. He smiled, and so did I.

  “Duffy,” I said, “I want you to know I didn’t really want to shoot you at all.” I thought that had to be put out there.

  He actually laughed. “I never thought so.”

  “I mean, that was about the worst moment I’ve ever had. I don’t want you to . . .” I couldn’t even say it.

  “Neither do I, and I didn’t on the bridge, either. Let’s say no more about it.”

  Duffy really had accepted himself for what he believed he was. Maybe I had to do the same. I arrived at my house at two in the morning and read over what I’d written so far. To my amazement, it wasn’t bad at all. I added the thousand words without any of the angst I’d been feeling lately and slept well and deeply until eleven the next morning.

  It was a scheduled lunch-with-Brian day, so I showered and dressed and was about to head for the car when my phone buzzed. There was a text from Paula.

  Susannah Hong called back. Then a smiley face emoji.

  Acknowledgments

  Rachel Goldman seems to have brought Duffy Madison to life quite by accident, but believe me, it’s not that easy. I get a lot of help in bringing Duffy (and Rachel and the gang) to you, and you can trust me that each and every person who worked on this book is indispensable. Maybe even me.

  Thanks to Josh Getzler and the astonishing team at HSG Agency for bringing my strange imaginations to the right people every single time and for caring and for being good friends and for exploding every negative stereotype assigned to agents. There wouldn’t be an E. J. Copperman without them, I can tell you.

  You wouldn’t ever have seen this book or heard of Duffy without the wonderful people at Crooked Lane Books: Matt Martz, Sarah Poppe, Heather Boak, and Dana Kaye, especially. It’s nice to work with people who see books as something other than numbers on a ledger report. Although making the occasional dollar isn’t a bad thing, either.

  Thanks to Louis Malcangi for the cover design of Written Off, along with Robert Crawford for the cover illustration and Jennifer Manzone for book design. I send impersonal computer files; they make it look like a book. Kudos, guys.

  I must take a moment to acknowledge the wonderful work done by the staff at Audible for the audiobook versions of Duffy’s adventures. Amanda Ronconi, who brings all the characters to life, does a mind-blowing job living and breathing for all the oddballs I create, and she makes me believe it when I listen. Which I do.

  The crime fiction community has been remarkably open and welcoming to me for some years now. Authors are a strange bunch, but you can’t find better company anywhere. I’ve made many friends, and that’s better than anything. But the readers are the best of all—you all should be decorated with distinguished service medals and sent boxes of chocolates on your birthdays. Suffice it to say, this author is awfully grateful to anyone who reads these books.

  See, it’s a solitary life, writing. Except you get to deal with all these lovely people.

  E. J. Copperman

  Deepest New Jersey

  October 2016