SMILING GNOME

Some things a private investigator learns the hard way: Never blow your retainer on a hot e-mail or social media tip. Never forget your cell phone can be monitored or tracked. And never, ever take a case involving a dead writer.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against writers. They’re a little flighty sometimes, but otherwise okay. It’s when they start spouting off about universal truths or other similar crap that I tune them right out. Maybe Shakespeare or Hemingway found those rare combinations of words that struck a timeless chord; but when you got right down to it, they were just peddling their wares. And except for Salman Rushdie or Papa’s self-inflicted cranial pizza recipe, no one ever held a gun to their heads for what they wrote.
Just try explaining that to the grieving relatives. No matter how much you tell them otherwise, every single one is convinced there was a conspiracy over something their loved ones wrote. You end up wasting time reading all their boring stories, searching for hidden truths that got them in a jam—when all along the evidence points straight to a drunken argument or the fact that he’d been boning the neighbor’s wife, just like the cops had said.
So when Melissa LaVoie called my cell phone and asked me to take the case involving her dead brother, the famous local writer, I did what I always do: I jumped at the chance. After all, I’m only peddling my own wares.
But if I’d known I’d be sleeping with a gun for the rest of my life, I might have done otherwise.

The morning after she called, we met Melissa LaVoie inside the dusty oven her brother used to call home. It had been three weeks since Robert Caldwell’s murder in his single story, blue-gray-sided suburban ranch home, and with the AC off and the windows locked, the August heat and humidity had made the air inside stale and oppressive. My assistant, Juan “Heartbeat” Taborda, and I helped her open the windows to the early morning breeze, and the house seemed to exhale as if it had been holding its breath, waiting for our arrival.
Melissa finished her Diet Coke and perched her hip on the living room windowsill. She wore a pink, sleeveless blouse already damp with perspiration, cut-off jeans, and sneakers smeared with grass stains. At first glance I’d placed her age around fifty, but on closer examination, though her fingertips were chapped from biting her nails to the quick, her hands were smooth and I realized she was at least ten years younger. The dark circles under her pale blue eyes and the hard lines around her mouth suggested she was more acquainted with setting her jaw in preparation for receiving bad news than with smiling, and it had aged her prematurely. She brushed a wisp of strawberry-blond hair away from her face, lit a cigarette, and used the empty can as her ashtray. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Stearne.”
“Jason, please.” I glanced around the tiny house. “Is everything how...?”
“I haven’t touched anything since the night he died.”
Caldwell’s living area was converted into a giant office, L-shaping around the kitchen. Melissa had already told me that the cops had taken his computer, monitor, keyboard, DVD and Blu-ray players, printer, and everything else that was attached to the computer, along with a plastic disc holder of CD-ROMs and flash drives he kept on his desk. Dust-shaped outlines of all the confiscated items covered his huge desk and surrounding shelves in what had once been the home’s dining room, while software manuals, a massive collection of CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays, and his stereo system filled shelves no bigger than shoulder-height in the living room. The only items higher were the thick window drapes, now open, and a framed, poster-sized rendition of the dust jacket to Caldwell’s famous novel And the Outermost Stars Flowed Somber.
I thought I knew all there was to know about our local celebrity. A private man whose first novel skyrocketed him to fame, who then disappeared off the radar screen for five years after Hollywood converted his masterpiece into one of the worst turkeys of all time, only to resurface as the headline in his obituary. So the wheelchair in the hallway came as a surprise.
“Childhood disease?”
“Car accident. It paralyzed Rob from the waist down. When the manufacturing firm where he worked as a software designer let him go because they didn’t have the necessary facilities to accommodate him, Rob sued and won a settlement big enough to take care of him for the rest of his life.”
She shifted uncomfortably as Juan examined the chair, and I suppressed a smile. Juan and I had been friends since middle school. Though a systems analyst and only two years my junior, Juan often dressed like a teenager, claiming the younger you looked, the more cutting-edge you were considered to be. Today he wore baggy black shorts, high-top sneakers, and a faded Jordan jersey, the only hint of his true age. His nickname came from a Smokey Robinson song, because all the girls fell for him in “One Heartbeat.” Maybe it was the age difference—or his cornrowed hair—but Melissa wasn’t having anything to do with him.
Juan fingered the hole in the leather backrest. “He was shot in the back.”
“The police think he was going for his gun in the bedroom when the intruder killed him. They claim it was a botched robbery, because his computer had crashed and some discs were taken.”
“That makes no sense. Even a random junkie would have grabbed something to sell.”
“That’s what I said. But they claim that the intruder probably got scared and ran after the gun went off, and the cops haven’t bothered to look any further since they managed to completely wipe Rob’s system after they restarted it. That’s why I called Marv Fleisher and he gave me your name, Jason. He said you did a lot of work for him and you’ve never let him down.”
Marv was a friend of the family who often hired me to investigate his pilfering employees, providing me with most of my meager income. I touched the space on Caldwell’s desk where his disc holder had been, thinking it was a crappy reason to die. I sneezed. Fingerprint dust covered everything, including his Hugo and Nebula awards, and a wooden model spaceship overlaid with a tiny grid pattern and the word “Nellie” printed on its side.
The dining room window overlooked a tiny garden. In the center of drought-withered impatiens and geraniums, a gnome statue stood atop a mountain of gray stones shaped like film canisters. The gnome’s pants were down at his ankles and his hands wrapped around the nozzle between his legs. When the hose was on, I could imagine Caldwell sitting at his desk, watching the water splash over the stones. The gnome’s head was turned sideways, looking in through the window, and he wore a mischievous grin as if we shared a private joke.
“Ironically, it was the trial that began Rob’s writing career,” Melissa was saying. “He wrote a story during the trial to hide his anger and boredom. It sold quickly, and that was it. He sold a few more before writing Somber.”
“What a great book!” Juan said. “A science fiction interpretation of Heart of Darkness. The title was a derivation of the last line in Conrad’s novel.”
Melissa’s mouth formed a small O, obviously impressed. Hell, I knew I was. Then she exhaled sharply, the smoke erupting thick and dark. “And Hollywood turned it into ‘The Monkees in Outer Space.’”
No argument there. While Juan and I occasionally rented a classic, it was more fun to get drunk and ridicule a bomb, and Hollywood wasn’t doing our livers any favors lately. As I recall, watching Star Runner, the adaptation of Somber, was one of our more hilarious nights.
“Rob always regretted letting Tennison talk him into selling the movie rights.”
“Tennison?”
“My ex-husband. He runs a talent agency, and he wrote the original screenplay for Somber.”
“I’ll bet that put a strain on your marriage.”
“Not as much as my catching him in bed with a male client.” My cheeks flushed, but Melissa merely shrugged. At least she didn’t say that’s show biz.
“Rob tried to avoid the usual Hollywood scams, like making sure he got a percentage of the gross, not profits. But the studio banned him from the set when they tired of his criticisms, and his agent approved the title change to mooch off those other franchises without Rob’s permission. Rob didn’t discover it until the night of the premiere.”
“He was pissed?”
“He went ballistic. Stormed out of the theater, refused all promotional appearances, fired his agent, and sued him and the studio. The studio counter-sued for breach of contract. That’s when things got nasty.”
Melissa chewed a fingernail. Her gaze turned inward, the weight of the last five years settling heavily on her shoulders. “It was like watching those insurance suits, you know? The big corporation prolonging the trial until the plaintiff can’t afford his legal bills anymore. Or dies.”
“Or is found floating in Norma Desmond’s swimming pool,” Juan said.
“Keeping with the Hollywood vernacular,” she agreed, smiling sadly. “Rob swore up and down that he never should have sold the movie rights, because Hollywood butchers novels.”
“Some of them are great,” I said.
“True. But for every one of those, there are a thousand other screw-ups. Unfortunately, Star Runner happened to be one of the worst.”
She ran a weary hand through her hair. “Then things went from bad to worse. Rob’s second novel was contracted for release simultaneously. A small press produced a signed, limited-edition hardcover, with the worldwide trade paperback scheduled for six months later. When the movie bombed, the publisher canceled the paperback deal, and even though the critics loved the second book, sales were weak for the hardcover. Rob set the novel up as an e-book and sold it and the limited-edition hardcover directly through his website, but it didn’t sell well. No one wanted anything to do with the guy they thought wrote Star Runner. Orders have picked up since his death, mostly collectors hoping to resell it on eBay, but there’s still a few boxes left in the garage.” She shook her head. “It almost broke him when he terminated the lawsuit.”
“Bankruptcy will do that.”
“You don’t understand. Rob never gave up. If someone pissed him off, he got even. Like with the manufacturer.” She sighed. “But this time he withdrew inside himself and his computers and that scared me more than anything. Tennison really tried to make it up to him by getting Rob Technical Advisor positions on some movies, where he’d answer a few questions and get paid decent money. I thought it was insulting, but Rob always took the money and spent it on his computer, saying it served them right.”
She took a long drag. “He called me the night he died, all excited because he’d finished a project. Said Tennison had dropped by earlier to offer another position, but he wouldn’t need them anymore. I thought he’d written a new novel and begged to read it, but all he said was, ‘You’ll see.’ And three hours later he was dead.”
Melissa crushed the cigarette into the can. “I think the police are full of shit. Rob’s life was worth more than a few discs and whatever was written on that computer.” She pulled a folded check from her back pocket and extended her hand. “I hope this retainer is enough for a licensed investigator.”
“I’m not licensed,” I said.
She hesitated, then handed me the check anyway. “Marv says you always come through. You won’t let me down, will you?”
I promised I wouldn’t. Over her shoulder I saw Juan shaking his head, and I knew I was in for another lecture later.
“The man sure liked his music,” Juan said, trying to lighten the mood. “That’s quite a collection of CDs.”
Melissa smiled. “He’s got even more on his iPod. Music inspired him when he wrote.”
Jason looked at the giant collection of movie and music discs. “Why didn’t he just stream them off the Internet?”
“Search me. I guess he liked having hardcopies.”
Juan pulled a CD from the shelf. “Dark Side of the Moon. I love when the clocks—hey!”
A CD slipped out of the liner sleeve and fell onto the carpet. Smiling Gnome was written on it with a black felt tip marker. I glanced at the garden statue.
“I don’t remember any album by that name,” Juan said.
We went through Caldwell’s collection finding six more similarly hidden discs, though none of the others bore any writing. By the time we’d finished, the fingerprint dust caked our sweat, and I was ready to leave.
“Do you think this has something to do with his murder?” Melissa asked.
“It certainly couldn’t hurt looking into it.”
“Then I’ve got something for you.” Melissa pulled her keys from her pocket and removed a flash drive from the chain, then handed it to me along with a slip of paper with Caldwell’s password written on it. “Rob had me keep these a secret in case something happened to him. After the cops crashed and wiped his computer as soon as they got it running again, I was afraid they would do the same with this. Please be careful. It’s the last thing I’ve got that might help find who did this.”
Outside, I slipped Juan the password, flash drive, and discs for him to examine while I took a trip downtown.

Tennison Talent, Inc. was located in a gray granite building next to an L stop in the Loop. Posters from recent low-budget films and direct-to-disc releases adorned the walls of Tennison’s office, while a row of filing cabinets blocked the windows in the back. Discarded copies of various entertainment magazines littered the waiting room chairs. A receptionist’s desk barricaded the path into an inner office from which an angry voice could be heard, and behind the desk sat a high-maintenance blonde with enough false fronts to make a set designer drool.
“I’m so glad you came!” she said, extending her hand. “Leave your headshots with me and we’ll give you a call. I just know you’ll be perfect for the part.”
“I need to speak with Mr. LaVoie privately.”
As her overly-bleached smile hardened into another dismissal, Tennison burst out of his office and threw a manila folder onto her desk. His hand slapped the phone headset mic away from his mouth. “Unbelievable! After all his bellyaching, Ethan blew off the shoot. The producer’s ready to tear me a new—”
He noticed me for the first time. “You! Can you act? Doesn’t matter.” He scribbled something on a yellow sticky pad and handed it to me. “Get over to Belmont and Broadway and tell Pruitt I sent you.”
“My name’s Jason Stearne. Ms. LaVoie hired me to look into her brother’s murder.”
Tennison’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling. He told his receptionist to find where that lowlife was passed out today and get him over to the set, then led me into his office, closed the door behind him, and dropped heavily into his chair. “I swear, some days it seems like every idiot is competing to see who can give me an ulcer or stroke first. So she really did it, huh?”
“Melissa doesn’t buy the robbery-murder scenario. He had all that computer and entertainment equipment, but nothing was stolen.”
“Except a few discs. Yeah, the police and I tried to tell her the guy probably panicked when the gun went off.” He ran a manicured hand through his short-cropped, dyed-auburn hair and scratched his neatly-trimmed beard. He wore an unbuttoned, brown leather vest over a long-sleeved, collarless white shirt that was rolled up to the elbows and buttoned at the throat, black jeans, and cowboy boots, and his ponytail hung down his back like the tail on a coonskin cap. The heavy scent of his cologne hung in the air as if he bathed in it.
“We found a couple more discs hidden in his CDs. Melissa thinks they might have something to do with his murder.”
Tennison shrugged. “She’s grasping at straws, but I’m not surprised. They were pretty close and she’s having a hard time dealing with it. I’ll give her a call later. Listen, can we cut to the chase? I’ve got a major crisis brewing here.”
“No problem. Melissa says you saw him that night.”
“I had an offer for a consulting position.”
“You did that often?”
“It was easy money for him. But yes,” he said, reading my expression, “he rattled my cage every time.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
He opened his hands. “Call it a guilty conscience. I guess I was trying to make up for Star Runner.”
I agreed it was pretty bad.
“And he never let me forget it. Did Melissa tell you Rob approved my original script?”
I shook my head. “So what happened?”
“What always happens. I thought I’d found my ticket to the big time. But the studio gave it to another writer for a rewrite, then to another and so on until it didn’t resemble the original story anymore. None of the other writers had read Somber or any of the previous scripts, but all were happy give me full screenwriting credit, leaving Rob to focus his frustrations on me.”
I looked away, not knowing how to respond, and noticed some of the posters. “Looks like you’ve done pretty well, though. The studios call you when they’re in town?”
Tennison snorted. “Not likely. Sure, I’ve got some connections, but I’m way down on the pecking list. Studios know where to look if they don’t already have a major player contracted. Steppenwolf, the Goodman, the Organic, or Second City get called if they want local talent. My agency provides bit parts and extras, wannabes hungry to get noticed. Most never amount to anything.”
My eye caught a familiar face in the background of an old poster. “Didn’t he just win an Oscar?”
“That greedy bastard. My diamond in the rough, the one with real talent. I nurtured him, groomed him, got him that role, his big break. Critics went nuts, and I figured I’d ride him to fame and fortune. But a Hollywood agent flashed the green and he was gone without looking back.”
Tennison leaned forward. “You catch his acceptance speech? I’m expecting a little gratitude, mention my name, send some business my way, but he doesn’t say boo. I’m forgotten like yesterday’s turd. All the bastard wanted was money.”
I bit my tongue. It wasn’t worth pointing out he’d seen the actor as his ticket to Easy Street. Or Caldwell too, for that matter.
The door burst open and the receptionist threw down the manila folder. “Ethan’s friends are playing dumb, and I’ve got a manicure in fifteen minutes. You find him.”
Tennison’s cheeks colored. “Someone works for you long enough, they think they own the place,” he explained weakly after she left. “Makes me wonder if she’s turning clients away before I can screen them.”
I decided not to clue him in.

That evening Juan brought over Chinese takeout and a six-pack of beer, financed, of course, by Melissa’s retainer. While I divvied our celebratory feast, Juan cranked up one of my playlists, and as the sounds of his favorite new indie band thundered into my cramped townhouse, a pounding arose on the other side of the kitchen wall.
Disgusted, Juan turned off the music. “That North Shore mother still living next door?” We sat at the kitchen table by my sliding glass doors that overlooked the retention pond filmed with algae and a backyard that was a minefield of dried goose droppings.
“She doesn’t want her precious son subjected to anything more stressful than classical or nineties new age.”
“Figure the kid will rebel when he’s a teenager?”
“Let’s hope. So what did you find on those discs?” I asked, spooning Mongolian beef over fried rice on a paper plate and popping open a beer.
“Well, for a guy who got royally screwed by Hollywood, he sure liked the movies.” Juan forked a garlic shrimp straight out of the white cardboard container. “Most are nothing but stored scenes burned from his DVD collection.”
“What about the one marked Smiling Gnome?”
“So far, it looks like a giant Paint program. Lots of tabs for colors, height, length, dark, and light. There’s a program for highlighting individual items on the screen, another that lets you orient and rotate whatever you want in any 3D direction, some computer graphics and editing, and others I haven’t figured out yet.”
“Strange.”
“Tell me about it. He’s even got one disc that’s a huge photo collection of everything you can imagine from cars to clothes to architecture and every kind of style and variation of each, like it’s some sort of online catalog he ordered from.” Juan shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m beginning to think the guy spent too much time inside.”
“What about the flash drive?”
“More of the same. I also found a file where he’d started to convert Somber to an e-book but had stopped about halfway through for some reason. And there are firewalls everywhere that will crash the whole system. I have to be really careful.”
“Well, keep looking. At least he didn’t put everything on the Cloud. There must be something important on there for him to suddenly abandon his masterpiece.”
“How’d you do?” Juan asked.
“Not much better. Tennison claims he tried to stay on Caldwell’s good side by providing him with consulting jobs. But no matter what he did, Caldwell never forgave him, as if the entire fiasco was Tennison’s fault.”
“You can’t really blame the guy. The movie stinks.”
“Unfortunately, it went beyond that. After visiting Tennison, I talked to a lady who owns an independent bookstore. She told me that continued publication with a particular house is often based on sales, and an author needs to meet their expectations.”
“What’s that got to do with Caldwell? He had a bestseller.”
“That made it worse. The publisher changed the title of Caldwell’s novel to Star Runner for a tie-in with the movie release, remember? The bookstore owner had a copy and showed me the tiny print on the copyright page that read ‘Previously published as And the Outermost Stars Flowed Somber.’”
“So?”
“So that meant the title everyone knew was considered out of print and unavailable as an e-book. And since the movie bombed, no one wanted to buy what they thought was its novelization. By booksellers’ and distributor’s standards, Caldwell’s second book—even though it was really the same novel—sold far less units than his first, and the publisher took a major hit on returns. So they canceled the paperback release of his true second novel, stopped additional print runs of the re-titled Somber, and dropped Caldwell from their author list.”
“Jesus.”
I nodded, my mind seeing the little gnome pissing on the stone film canisters in Caldwell’s garden. “Exactly. Hollywood not only butchered his masterpiece, it axed his literary career as well.”
“So all we’ve got is a lot of reasons for Caldwell to kill someone, but none to explain his murder.”
“Pretty much.”
“This sucks.” Juan threw his empty container, bouncing it off the wall into my open trashcan, and was immediately greeted with a knocking from next door. He screwed up his face. “Jase, when are you going to get a real office?”
I knew it was only his frustration talking, but I bristled just the same. “Everything’s copacetic.”
“Yeah, right. You almost lost the case when Melissa discovered you don’t have a license. When are you going to start taking your career seriously?”
I pushed away from the table and washed the silverware at the sink. Water splashed on an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the countertop nearby. We’d been over this territory a hundred times before and I wasn’t in the mood for it tonight.
But Juan persisted. “You’ve been out of college what, five, six years now? With a degree in criminal justice. It’s time to make a decision, man. You can’t expect Marv Fleischer to float you cases forever. You’ve got to show a little initiative for yourself.”
“Hey, I’m doing fine. I take a few pictures, follow people around, and report back to Marv. No big deal. It’s something to pay the bills until I figure out what I want to do with my life.”
“And what happens when you get caught? You’ve been lucky so far, but you’re not the biggest guy in the world. You’re not an ex-cop or veteran or bounty hunter—you’re just a kid from the suburbs. You going to scare the bad guys away with a goalie’s mask, Jason?”
“What’s your point?” I said, allowing my irritation to show. I’d long since tired of the jokes with my name.
“The point is you’ve been coasting along, treating your cases like hobbies. Face facts: It’s your job. And you’d better get serious and protect yourself, because there’s a hell of a lot of nasty people out there.”
I turned my back on him and sucked down my beer. Outside, geese honked as they landed beside the pond. As I stared into the living room at the furniture my parents left behind when they retired to Tucson, I realized Juan was right. He’d been raised by his divorced mother in a one-bedroom apartment with five other siblings, and I’d never known the hunger and desire that drove him to succeed. I’d always been comfortable and had never felt the need to pursue anything. But why did he have to choose the night of my first real case to remind me of my shortcomings?
Juan counted my faults on his fingertips. “You need a real office and a gun with a permit to carry one. Hell, you haven’t even cracked open the bottle of Jack yet. What kind of private eye are you? Maybe when you get a license you’ll get some decent looking clients, too.”
“I noticed that didn’t stop your flirting with Melissa.”
“Just keeping my talent in practice.” He clasped his hands behind his head. “You’ve seen the ladies giggle when they say my name. It’s like Smokey’s singing my theme song, because they all fall for me in one heartbeat.”
“Sure they’re not laughing at your endurance?”
The phone rang, saving me from whatever murderous thoughts flashed behind his eyes. I made a few notes, then told Melissa we’d be right there.
“Caldwell’s house was burglarized,” I said.

Violated was more accurate. There wasn’t a single item in Caldwell’s house that wasn’t trashed. Sofa and chair cushions had been ripped open and stuffing thrown about, beds overturned, drawers emptied, CDs and DVDs and their cases broken and tossed onto the carpeting like jagged shards of glass—even the framed poster of Somber had been slashed. Amid the wreckage Melissa sat at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette with shaking hands as she talked with the police.
“I received a couple more orders for Rob’s second book, so I came over to get another box out of the garage and found...” Melissa lowered her head and cried, unable to say anything more.
Tennison arrived a few minutes later. I could smell his cologne mixed with the day’s sweat the minute he walked in the door. His face turned ashen when he looked around.
“What happened?”
The police weren’t able to answer that any better than we were, and they left a short time later. We spent the next few hours cleaning up, mostly working in silence. Melissa sniffled and shook her head a lot, lost in her thoughts as if she couldn’t believe the indignities that continued to plague her brother. We loaded the remaining three boxes of Caldwell’s signed, limited-edition second novel into the trunk of her car and locked the door behind us.
It was after 1 a.m. by the time I got home. It had been a long day, and if I hadn’t been so tired I might not have needed the extra few seconds to register the heavy algae smell of the stagnant pond seeping in through the partially-open sliding glass door, or the shoe tread imprint in fresh goose crap on my kitchen floor, before the intruder slammed into me. The impact sent us crashing onto my coffee table, snapping the wooden legs beneath. I held my hands in front of my face and kicked and yelled, vaguely aware of a pounding on the other side of my kitchen wall.
He knocked my arms away and covered my mouth with his sweaty hands. “Cut the whining you little pissant and tell me where the discs are.” His body reeked of cigarettes and over-brewed coffee.
My fingers gouged his eyes, and as the man reared back and howled, I brought my feet up to his chest and shoved him away. I scrambled over the couch, but he recovered quickly and tackled me, sending us over the end table and shattering the lamp on the floor.
I knew I was fighting like a wuss—and that Juan would never let me hear the end of it—but the only way I could think to save myself was to make as much noise as possible. One piercing scream escaped my throat before the man’s fist slammed into the side of my head. I heard a couple more insistent knocks, then silence.
“Where are the discs?” My assailant’s bulky silver ring threatened to bore a hole through my skull. “Where are the goddamn discs?”
Sparks exploded in my eyes with every blow. I couldn’t tell if my ears were ringing or if sirens were approaching, but through the swelling around my eye, I saw the man cock his fist... and the next thing I knew I was being lifted into an ambulance.
I remember a bumpy ride and frantic white coats, bags of clear fluid, and hearing the word “concussion,” before my vision blurred and the darkness swallowed me again.

I spent several days in the hospital. Juan dropped by, asking, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” But I shooed him away, not wanting to risk my assailant finding out about him or the location of the discs. After my release I wrote instructions on a postcard for how we should meet and mailed it at the post office, then passed the next week in my townhouse not answering any calls except to talk with my parents or to reassure Melissa that I was fine.
The day of our meet I hopped a series of east- and westbound commuter trains, never disembarking at the destination I’d purchased the tickets for, hoping to lose anyone tailing me. Though I felt the hairs along the back of my neck rise several times, I was never able to spot anyone. I’d begun to feel pretty foolish by the time Juan picked me up, and I expected him to give me a hard time about all the cloak and dagger stuff. But he drove silently, his eyes constantly checking the mirrors and traffic around him. He never said a word until we were inside his house, when he aimed a digital camera at me and said, “Say cheese.”
“Huh?”
“Good enough.” He led me over to his computer station and we sat down. “You ever hear that old Hollywood joke about the starlet who was so dumb she slept with all the writers?” Juan asked, while he connected the camera to a USB port. “Well, it looks like Caldwell didn’t think it was so funny.”
He slid the disc labeled Smiling Gnome into the CD-ROM drive, and unmarked discs into auxiliary drives and his DVD player. “Caldwell took a lot of relatively common programs and combined them to interact in really cool ways. Watch.” He tapped a few keys. “Recognize this?”
On the screen a man in a gray pinstriped suit and hat examined a dry riverbed, then talked to a boy on a burro.
“Nicholson in Chinatown.”
“Good. Now you could download the scene onto your hard drive like you’re streaming a movie off the Internet. But then all you could do is watch it. What Caldwell did was burn the movie’s scene from the manufacturer’s DVD onto a separate disc. The older the DVD, the better. His new software decoded any anti-piracy protections in the original DVD and converted the scene into a program. Plus it let him store the original scene as a template in case he needed to return to the master if he didn’t like any changes.”
“Changes?”
Juan smiled. “That’s where the fun begins.” He hit PAUSE on the DVD player. “Remember how I thought Smiling Gnome was a giant Paint program? Well, that’s just what we’re going to do.”
He pulled up a menu on the side of the screen, then moved the mouse and a pad with a digital pen closer.
“First, let’s start with touch-ups like they do with supermodel photos.” Juan clicked the mouse, highlighting Nicholson’s image. “Say we want Jack to look heavier.” He tapped some keys, and on the screen, Nicholson ballooned. “Or not so clean-shaven.” He scratched the digital pen and a mustache sprouted. Except for the eyes, you could hardly recognize the actor.
I thought about all the dead movie stars popping up in commercials lately. “Aren’t there copyright laws about using a celebrity’s image?”
Juan waved my words away. “Don’t go there. Now remember the catalog disc? We’re going to borrow from that.” He tapped more keys and Nicholson’s suit changed to a Zoot suit, then a mortician’s outfit, and finally into a baseball uniform. I stopped trying to follow what keys he was hitting and concentrated on the screen.
“Or maybe Nicholson isn’t the impression you want to give.” My own image saying “Huh?” replaced Jack in the scene. Juan smiled. “Ever the insightful investigator. Then once you’ve got the main character figured out, you can work on the surrounding details.”
He turned the mouse and the camera angle rotated 180 degrees. “See the bridge? Say we want a mountain range instead. Or an alien city.” Juan changed the images as fast as he spoke.
“Let’s stay with the science fiction theme.” He moved the cursor and changed the soil to red, the boy and burro into an alien creature, and dressed me like an astronaut. “Or you could film any location you wanted and superimpose the images over that. You can also program in the shapes of objects by tracing a tiny grid pattern over them with a digital pen. With me so far?”
I nodded, remembering the grid pattern on the Nellie model in Caldwell’s house.
“Then it’s time to program in movements. You could keep the actor’s originals or make simple additions or deletions to that.” My screen image gave me the finger, grunting, “Huh? Huh? Huh?” Juan smirked, and I wondered if he’d been spending too much time inside as well.
“If you want changes, though,” he continued, “you’d have to film yourself with a digital camera, or program in the movements by attaching wires to yourself and acting out the scene. Or you could just program everything in like Pixar does, but that would be time consuming. And don’t forget to change the dialog and voice alterations.”
“Whatever.”
“Now here’s where digital rules. With film you’d have to change every single frame, but with Caldwell’s Smiling Gnome software you hit CHANGE ALL like on a spelling correction program, and it enters all your changes and burns the new scene onto a disc. Then you do it for as many different scenes as you need, link them together, add some AI to smooth the edges and blend it all together, dub in a soundtrack, and presto! Isn’t that the coolest thing you’ve ever seen?”
I must have looked like a first grader who’d listened to the Theory of Relativity, because Juan’s face fell.
“All right, let’s try it from another angle.” He inserted Caldwell’s flash drive into another USB port. “Remember how Star Runner began?”
I had to think a minute. We were pretty drunk that night. “A blond space cadet was trading sexual innuendoes with an android. You said she laughed like a donkey.”
Juan chuckled. “Yeah, the best part of the whole movie was when she realized, too late, that getting blown out the airlock meant a lot worse than having her makeup ruined.” He opened a file and hit PLAY. “Watch this.”
The screen darkened, then gradually grew lighter with stars. The camera angle panned across the galaxy until focusing on the horrific sight of a planet falling toward the event horizon of a rotating black hole. Energetic jets of particles emitted from the poles of the accretion disk as matter and gases from the nearby star were swept up by the black hole’s gravitational pull. The planet appeared to move slower above the event horizon as space and time were linked into a fourth dimension, and the light from the nearby star was bent and redshifted to infinite wavelength in the time delay.
Watching, I could almost feel the tidal forces on the inhabitants of the planet as they were drawn into the infinite—the panic, the chaos, the horror, the horror—until, when it seemed I couldn’t watch any longer, the camera angle shifted, showing the arrival of the starship Nellie on its mission to explore the black hole, the true heart of darkness in space.
A shiver ran up my spine. “That’s how Somber begins.”
“And what does that tell you?”
“He made his own movie. But why would anyone care about—Ow! What’d you hit me for?”
“Caldwell was a programmer. Make the leap, Kemosabe.”
I thought about Caldwell disappearing into his computers after Hollywood ruined his life, and Juan nodded enthusiastically as the understanding crept onto my face.
“He wrote a program that enables a writer to create his own movie.”
“Bingo. No more meddling by outside forces. You get exactly what the author wants.”
“But not every movie is based on a book,” I said. “Some writers only write screenplays.”
“Absolutely. But then the screenwriter runs into an actor who insists on a scene where he has to take his shirt off in fifty-below weather. Or the director who shoots his western with blacklights and neon and dresses the good guys in spandex. Then when the movie tanks, who gets blamed?”
“The writer.”
“And no more studio executives keeping all the profits while everyone else starves. So you get someone who’s put up with that crap just once, and how long after Smiling Gnome becomes available do you think he or she will buy a copy?”
“Couple of nanoseconds.”
“If that. And with all the DVD releases available, the templates for scenes are endless.”
“Whoever owns this could make a fortune selling the program to all the writers out there.”
“Or an even greater fortune selling it to studio execs who would suppress it.”
The implications were staggering when they finally hit me. “Caldwell’s program makes movie studios obsolete.”
I pictured Caldwell at his workstation the last five years, staring at the statue outside his window, seething over what they’d done to him and thinking about how he could get even, and I realized the gnome was pissing revenge, not anger. No wonder the little guy was smiling.
“As much as he might have liked that, I doubt it’d go that far,” Juan said. “Smiling Gnome would certainly make a dent, but the movie business is just too big. They’d always find someone hungry enough to write and the industry would adapt. Thing is, though, there are a lot of people involved who make an insane amount of money.”
“Sure. Actors, directors, producers—”
“No, I mean investors. Remember: this is a huge, global industry, and not all of the money is clean. Tinseltown has been known to launder money for disreputable characters.”
“You’re saying organized crime?” I thought about the thug who’d sent me to the hospital and the uneasy feeling I’d had on the trains.
“I’m just saying that there’s a lot of money being made here, and anything that threatens the flow would be a serious problem in their eyes. Maybe even something to be eliminated.”
“Providing a motive for Caldwell’s murder.”
“Exactly.”
We fell silent. Melissa would be glad to know that her brother hadn’t given up, after all. Unfortunately, his latest project also caused his death. I didn’t know if I liked how the other pieces were falling into place, either.
“Sounds like we’d better have another talk with our Hollywood connection,” I said, untucking my shirt and letting the tails hang low over my pants. “I’ll drive. But we need to make a stop first.”
#
We burst into Tennison’s office, catching him on the phone. “Your receptionist gets too many manicures.”
“What the hell?”
“We need to talk.” I grabbed his headset and threw it across the room, then pulled Caldwell’s gun from under my shirt and pointed it at him. “Now.”
“I don’t know—”
“Skip the crap and tell us about Caldwell’s movie program. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You figured out what he’d done when you dropped by.”
Tennison deflated, nodding. “I could see his computer screen through a crack in the drapes. But I didn’t say anything at first. We just talked about the advisor position.”
“When did you go back?”
“A few hours later. I got to thinking about the gold mine he’d created. I owe some people two hundred large in gambling debts, and I saw this as a way to get out from under it. So I told him we could use my connections to get rich.”
“And he didn’t go for it.”
Tennison darkened. “He started right in with all that crap about Star Runner and how I always ruin everything, and he wasn’t about to let me screw this up, too. That’s when I pulled my gun out to show him I was serious.”
“Where’d you get the gun?”
“It’s something I kept under the car seat for when we filmed in bad neighborhoods.”
“What’d he do when you threatened him?”
“He laughed in my face. Said go ahead, shoot, I’d probably miss anyway. Then he wheeled down the hallway, saying he’d show me what a real man’s gun looked like, and I got so angry I pointed the gun and...”
“Fired.”
Tennison sobbed into his hands.
“You shot him ’cuz he dissed you?” Juan said. I could hear the disappointment in his voice. So much for the Big Conspiracy.
His head popped up. “Dissed? He tormented me every chance he got.”
“What’d you do with the gun?” I asked, and Tennison gave me an Are you stupid? look. Of course he knew to ditch it. So I said, “What about the discs?”
“There was nothing on them. I gave the discs on Rob’s desk to the guy I owe the money to, thinking a program like that would pay off my debt. But it crashed his system and he got even more pissed at me. Then when I told him about the other discs you found, he said he wasn’t interested.”
I wasn’t so sure. I waved the gun at him. “Maybe you’d better tell us this guy’s name.”
“I can’t—”
The receptionist entered, complaining about something, and Tennison bolted from his seat. He shoved her toward us and ran out the door. She screamed and clawed, and by the time we got outside, Tennison had hopped on an L train that was already leaving the station.
Using my cell phone, Juan called Melissa for Tennison’s address while I drove frantically through the congested city streets, ignoring honks and middle fingers and Juan’s shouts to “Watch out!” as I realized my entire case was unraveling.
What was I thinking? None of the evidence I’d obtained was admissible in court, and I could hardly expect Tennison to willingly follow me to the police station. My lack of professionalism had screwed everything up, and panic gripped me when we ran through his condo’s open front door and discovered, amid the faint smell of over-brewed coffee and stale cigarettes, Tennison hanging by the neck from a support beam in his basement.

The call came two weeks later.
The cops arrived shortly after we found Tennison’s lifeless body, and though a neighbor confirmed she’d heard loud noises and called 911 before we arrived—and a suicide note was found on his computer—the officers confiscated Caldwell’s gun and tossed us in the lockup. We spent the night warding off the attentions of thirty poster examples of the need for birth control, and when the guards found us the next morning, badly bruised but with orifices and original stories intact, they let us go. The police department was only too happy to accept Tennison’s confession on his suicide note and close Caldwell’s file. Melissa posted our bond, and we were released into her care with a court date set for my carrying a weapon without a permit, the only charge they made stick.
We rode home in silence. When Melissa parked in front of my townhouse, she handed each of us a check and a beautiful, forest green, leather-bound book with gold leaf lettering, copies of Caldwell’s signed, limited-edition second novel.
“Rob would have wanted you to have them,” she said.
Juan was so thrilled he stuttered and stammered, any evidence of Mr. Smooth long gone. But I noticed her jaw tightened when she said her brother’s name. I wanted to say something to ease her pain, but the words caught in my throat and all I could do was thank her.
Juan dropped by a few days later. We went out for burgers, and while we ate in the car, I asked how everything was progressing and confessed my paranoid fears. In response, he pulled a nickel-plated Beretta from under his seat and put it in the empty burger bag at my feet. Not a day goes by now that that gun isn’t within reach.
It was a cool night with fall settling in as I sat on my couch finishing Caldwell’s second novel. It was an incredible book, even better than Somber, and it filled me with sadness to realize that I was one of the few people who would ever read it. Somehow that just didn’t seem right.
The phone rang when I closed the cover.
“Hello?” The line at the other end was silent. I repeated my greeting a few more times and was about to hang up when a computer-altered voice said, “Don’t.”
Goosebumps raced up my arms and shoulders. It was the call I’d been expecting, the one that confirmed my darkest fears.
My heart pounded and sweat flooded my palms so fast that I almost dropped the phone. Evenly, with a hint of fear, I said, “All the discs were destroyed,” just like Juan and I had practiced outside the burger stand. Then I waited, not saying another word, knowing I’d blow everything if I filled the silence with anything more.
Seven and a half minutes later, the line at the other end went dead.
Staggering into the kitchen, I cracked the seal on the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, poured two fingers and, with hands shaking so badly the glass clacked against my teeth, tossed it back. The whiskey trampolined off my queasy stomach and splattered into the sink. But some of the burning liquid penetrated my nerves, and my second attempt stayed down.
I cast a furtive glance around, wondering where the cameras were. It wasn’t lost on me that the call came the moment I finished reading the novel. They wanted me to know they were watching a scared, suburban boy who would never stand up against them.
At least, that’s what I wanted them to believe.
The beating had awoken anger inside me I’d never known existed. And though I believed Tennison killed Caldwell like he’d said, I knew we’d both been used by underworld connections that Tennison had gotten involved with, who drank bad coffee, smoked cigarettes, and planted bugs in beaten men’s townhouses, who could make a murder look like suicide, complete with a note, and know there was no way my suspicions could ever be proven.
I drank more of the whiskey, feeling the warmth spread through my body while I continued the trembling charade. In the hospital, I swore I’d never feel that helpless again. So after burgers, Juan and I had driven to a private investigator’s office to learn what I needed for my license and the paperwork to get the ball rolling. Juan had never looked so proud.
The whiskey fed the burning anger under my scared façade. I’d purposely destroyed fake discs in my living room so they could watch me doing it. But I was damned if I’d let Caldwell’s greatest work die with him. So while they watched me shake and shiver these last two weeks, delivering a performance of my own, Juan had set up a new website for Caldwell, where visitors could purchase and download the Smiling Gnome program, the fully-converted e-book for Somber and Caldwell’s movie version, as well as the limited-edition hardcover and e-book of his second novel, with all payments set up through PayPal and going directly to Melissa. He also set up accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, and a gazillion other social media outlets I’d never heard of, collecting thousands of friends and followers. When he launched the website tomorrow, Juan was going to hit the social media networks like a tsunami, and by the time Tennison’s killers discovered what had happened, so many people would have purchased the Smiling Gnome program or become aware of its existence that killing me was pointless.
At least... that’s what we hoped.
So let them watch all they want. I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.
The corners of my lips curled, and I raised the glass to hide my grin. In my mind I saw the little gnome outside Caldwell’s workstation, and I smiled at the private joke we shared:
Maybe the starlet who’d slept with the writers wasn’t so dumb, after all.

SMILING GNOME

Some things a private investigator learns the hard way: Never blow your retainer on a hot e-mail or social media tip. Never forget your cell phone can be monitored or tracked. And never, ever take a case involving a dead writer.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against writers. They’re a little flighty sometimes, but otherwise okay. It’s when they start spouting off about universal truths or other similar crap that I tune them right out. Maybe Shakespeare or Hemingway found those rare combinations of words that struck a timeless chord; but when you got right down to it, they were just peddling their wares. And except for Salman Rushdie or Papa’s self-inflicted cranial pizza recipe, no one ever held a gun to their heads for what they wrote.
Just try explaining that to the grieving relatives. No matter how much you tell them otherwise, every single one is convinced there was a conspiracy over something their loved ones wrote. You end up wasting time reading all their boring stories, searching for hidden truths that got them in a jam—when all along the evidence points straight to a drunken argument or the fact that he’d been boning the neighbor’s wife, just like the cops had said.
So when Melissa LaVoie called my cell phone and asked me to take the case involving her dead brother, the famous local writer, I did what I always do: I jumped at the chance. After all, I’m only peddling my own wares.
But if I’d known I’d be sleeping with a gun for the rest of my life, I might have done otherwise.

The morning after she called, we met Melissa LaVoie inside the dusty oven her brother used to call home. It had been three weeks since Robert Caldwell’s murder in his single story, blue-gray-sided suburban ranch home, and with the AC off and the windows locked, the August heat and humidity had made the air inside stale and oppressive. My assistant, Juan “Heartbeat” Taborda, and I helped her open the windows to the early morning breeze, and the house seemed to exhale as if it had been holding its breath, waiting for our arrival.
Melissa finished her Diet Coke and perched her hip on the living room windowsill. She wore a pink, sleeveless blouse already damp with perspiration, cut-off jeans, and sneakers smeared with grass stains. At first glance I’d placed her age around fifty, but on closer examination, though her fingertips were chapped from biting her nails to the quick, her hands were smooth and I realized she was at least ten years younger. The dark circles under her pale blue eyes and the hard lines around her mouth suggested she was more acquainted with setting her jaw in preparation for receiving bad news than with smiling, and it had aged her prematurely. She brushed a wisp of strawberry-blond hair away from her face, lit a cigarette, and used the empty can as her ashtray. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Stearne.”
“Jason, please.” I glanced around the tiny house. “Is everything how...?”
“I haven’t touched anything since the night he died.”
Caldwell’s living area was converted into a giant office, L-shaping around the kitchen. Melissa had already told me that the cops had taken his computer, monitor, keyboard, DVD and Blu-ray players, printer, and everything else that was attached to the computer, along with a plastic disc holder of CD-ROMs and flash drives he kept on his desk. Dust-shaped outlines of all the confiscated items covered his huge desk and surrounding shelves in what had once been the home’s dining room, while software manuals, a massive collection of CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays, and his stereo system filled shelves no bigger than shoulder-height in the living room. The only items higher were the thick window drapes, now open, and a framed, poster-sized rendition of the dust jacket to Caldwell’s famous novel And the Outermost Stars Flowed Somber.
I thought I knew all there was to know about our local celebrity. A private man whose first novel skyrocketed him to fame, who then disappeared off the radar screen for five years after Hollywood converted his masterpiece into one of the worst turkeys of all time, only to resurface as the headline in his obituary. So the wheelchair in the hallway came as a surprise.
“Childhood disease?”
“Car accident. It paralyzed Rob from the waist down. When the manufacturing firm where he worked as a software designer let him go because they didn’t have the necessary facilities to accommodate him, Rob sued and won a settlement big enough to take care of him for the rest of his life.”
She shifted uncomfortably as Juan examined the chair, and I suppressed a smile. Juan and I had been friends since middle school. Though a systems analyst and only two years my junior, Juan often dressed like a teenager, claiming the younger you looked, the more cutting-edge you were considered to be. Today he wore baggy black shorts, high-top sneakers, and a faded Jordan jersey, the only hint of his true age. His nickname came from a Smokey Robinson song, because all the girls fell for him in “One Heartbeat.” Maybe it was the age difference—or his cornrowed hair—but Melissa wasn’t having anything to do with him.
Juan fingered the hole in the leather backrest. “He was shot in the back.”
“The police think he was going for his gun in the bedroom when the intruder killed him. They claim it was a botched robbery, because his computer had crashed and some discs were taken.”
“That makes no sense. Even a random junkie would have grabbed something to sell.”
“That’s what I said. But they claim that the intruder probably got scared and ran after the gun went off, and the cops haven’t bothered to look any further since they managed to completely wipe Rob’s system after they restarted it. That’s why I called Marv Fleisher and he gave me your name, Jason. He said you did a lot of work for him and you’ve never let him down.”
Marv was a friend of the family who often hired me to investigate his pilfering employees, providing me with most of my meager income. I touched the space on Caldwell’s desk where his disc holder had been, thinking it was a crappy reason to die. I sneezed. Fingerprint dust covered everything, including his Hugo and Nebula awards, and a wooden model spaceship overlaid with a tiny grid pattern and the word “Nellie” printed on its side.
The dining room window overlooked a tiny garden. In the center of drought-withered impatiens and geraniums, a gnome statue stood atop a mountain of gray stones shaped like film canisters. The gnome’s pants were down at his ankles and his hands wrapped around the nozzle between his legs. When the hose was on, I could imagine Caldwell sitting at his desk, watching the water splash over the stones. The gnome’s head was turned sideways, looking in through the window, and he wore a mischievous grin as if we shared a private joke.
“Ironically, it was the trial that began Rob’s writing career,” Melissa was saying. “He wrote a story during the trial to hide his anger and boredom. It sold quickly, and that was it. He sold a few more before writing Somber.”
“What a great book!” Juan said. “A science fiction interpretation of Heart of Darkness. The title was a derivation of the last line in Conrad’s novel.”
Melissa’s mouth formed a small O, obviously impressed. Hell, I knew I was. Then she exhaled sharply, the smoke erupting thick and dark. “And Hollywood turned it into ‘The Monkees in Outer Space.’”
No argument there. While Juan and I occasionally rented a classic, it was more fun to get drunk and ridicule a bomb, and Hollywood wasn’t doing our livers any favors lately. As I recall, watching Star Runner, the adaptation of Somber, was one of our more hilarious nights.
“Rob always regretted letting Tennison talk him into selling the movie rights.”
“Tennison?”
“My ex-husband. He runs a talent agency, and he wrote the original screenplay for Somber.”
“I’ll bet that put a strain on your marriage.”
“Not as much as my catching him in bed with a male client.” My cheeks flushed, but Melissa merely shrugged. At least she didn’t say that’s show biz.
“Rob tried to avoid the usual Hollywood scams, like making sure he got a percentage of the gross, not profits. But the studio banned him from the set when they tired of his criticisms, and his agent approved the title change to mooch off those other franchises without Rob’s permission. Rob didn’t discover it until the night of the premiere.”
“He was pissed?”
“He went ballistic. Stormed out of the theater, refused all promotional appearances, fired his agent, and sued him and the studio. The studio counter-sued for breach of contract. That’s when things got nasty.”
Melissa chewed a fingernail. Her gaze turned inward, the weight of the last five years settling heavily on her shoulders. “It was like watching those insurance suits, you know? The big corporation prolonging the trial until the plaintiff can’t afford his legal bills anymore. Or dies.”
“Or is found floating in Norma Desmond’s swimming pool,” Juan said.
“Keeping with the Hollywood vernacular,” she agreed, smiling sadly. “Rob swore up and down that he never should have sold the movie rights, because Hollywood butchers novels.”
“Some of them are great,” I said.
“True. But for every one of those, there are a thousand other screw-ups. Unfortunately, Star Runner happened to be one of the worst.”
She ran a weary hand through her hair. “Then things went from bad to worse. Rob’s second novel was contracted for release simultaneously. A small press produced a signed, limited-edition hardcover, with the worldwide trade paperback scheduled for six months later. When the movie bombed, the publisher canceled the paperback deal, and even though the critics loved the second book, sales were weak for the hardcover. Rob set the novel up as an e-book and sold it and the limited-edition hardcover directly through his website, but it didn’t sell well. No one wanted anything to do with the guy they thought wrote Star Runner. Orders have picked up since his death, mostly collectors hoping to resell it on eBay, but there’s still a few boxes left in the garage.” She shook her head. “It almost broke him when he terminated the lawsuit.”
“Bankruptcy will do that.”
“You don’t understand. Rob never gave up. If someone pissed him off, he got even. Like with the manufacturer.” She sighed. “But this time he withdrew inside himself and his computers and that scared me more than anything. Tennison really tried to make it up to him by getting Rob Technical Advisor positions on some movies, where he’d answer a few questions and get paid decent money. I thought it was insulting, but Rob always took the money and spent it on his computer, saying it served them right.”
She took a long drag. “He called me the night he died, all excited because he’d finished a project. Said Tennison had dropped by earlier to offer another position, but he wouldn’t need them anymore. I thought he’d written a new novel and begged to read it, but all he said was, ‘You’ll see.’ And three hours later he was dead.”
Melissa crushed the cigarette into the can. “I think the police are full of shit. Rob’s life was worth more than a few discs and whatever was written on that computer.” She pulled a folded check from her back pocket and extended her hand. “I hope this retainer is enough for a licensed investigator.”
“I’m not licensed,” I said.
She hesitated, then handed me the check anyway. “Marv says you always come through. You won’t let me down, will you?”
I promised I wouldn’t. Over her shoulder I saw Juan shaking his head, and I knew I was in for another lecture later.
“The man sure liked his music,” Juan said, trying to lighten the mood. “That’s quite a collection of CDs.”
Melissa smiled. “He’s got even more on his iPod. Music inspired him when he wrote.”
Jason looked at the giant collection of movie and music discs. “Why didn’t he just stream them off the Internet?”
“Search me. I guess he liked having hardcopies.”
Juan pulled a CD from the shelf. “Dark Side of the Moon. I love when the clocks—hey!”
A CD slipped out of the liner sleeve and fell onto the carpet. Smiling Gnome was written on it with a black felt tip marker. I glanced at the garden statue.
“I don’t remember any album by that name,” Juan said.
We went through Caldwell’s collection finding six more similarly hidden discs, though none of the others bore any writing. By the time we’d finished, the fingerprint dust caked our sweat, and I was ready to leave.
“Do you think this has something to do with his murder?” Melissa asked.
“It certainly couldn’t hurt looking into it.”
“Then I’ve got something for you.” Melissa pulled her keys from her pocket and removed a flash drive from the chain, then handed it to me along with a slip of paper with Caldwell’s password written on it. “Rob had me keep these a secret in case something happened to him. After the cops crashed and wiped his computer as soon as they got it running again, I was afraid they would do the same with this. Please be careful. It’s the last thing I’ve got that might help find who did this.”
Outside, I slipped Juan the password, flash drive, and discs for him to examine while I took a trip downtown.

Tennison Talent, Inc. was located in a gray granite building next to an L stop in the Loop. Posters from recent low-budget films and direct-to-disc releases adorned the walls of Tennison’s office, while a row of filing cabinets blocked the windows in the back. Discarded copies of various entertainment magazines littered the waiting room chairs. A receptionist’s desk barricaded the path into an inner office from which an angry voice could be heard, and behind the desk sat a high-maintenance blonde with enough false fronts to make a set designer drool.
“I’m so glad you came!” she said, extending her hand. “Leave your headshots with me and we’ll give you a call. I just know you’ll be perfect for the part.”
“I need to speak with Mr. LaVoie privately.”
As her overly-bleached smile hardened into another dismissal, Tennison burst out of his office and threw a manila folder onto her desk. His hand slapped the phone headset mic away from his mouth. “Unbelievable! After all his bellyaching, Ethan blew off the shoot. The producer’s ready to tear me a new—”
He noticed me for the first time. “You! Can you act? Doesn’t matter.” He scribbled something on a yellow sticky pad and handed it to me. “Get over to Belmont and Broadway and tell Pruitt I sent you.”
“My name’s Jason Stearne. Ms. LaVoie hired me to look into her brother’s murder.”
Tennison’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling. He told his receptionist to find where that lowlife was passed out today and get him over to the set, then led me into his office, closed the door behind him, and dropped heavily into his chair. “I swear, some days it seems like every idiot is competing to see who can give me an ulcer or stroke first. So she really did it, huh?”
“Melissa doesn’t buy the robbery-murder scenario. He had all that computer and entertainment equipment, but nothing was stolen.”
“Except a few discs. Yeah, the police and I tried to tell her the guy probably panicked when the gun went off.” He ran a manicured hand through his short-cropped, dyed-auburn hair and scratched his neatly-trimmed beard. He wore an unbuttoned, brown leather vest over a long-sleeved, collarless white shirt that was rolled up to the elbows and buttoned at the throat, black jeans, and cowboy boots, and his ponytail hung down his back like the tail on a coonskin cap. The heavy scent of his cologne hung in the air as if he bathed in it.
“We found a couple more discs hidden in his CDs. Melissa thinks they might have something to do with his murder.”
Tennison shrugged. “She’s grasping at straws, but I’m not surprised. They were pretty close and she’s having a hard time dealing with it. I’ll give her a call later. Listen, can we cut to the chase? I’ve got a major crisis brewing here.”
“No problem. Melissa says you saw him that night.”
“I had an offer for a consulting position.”
“You did that often?”
“It was easy money for him. But yes,” he said, reading my expression, “he rattled my cage every time.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
He opened his hands. “Call it a guilty conscience. I guess I was trying to make up for Star Runner.”
I agreed it was pretty bad.
“And he never let me forget it. Did Melissa tell you Rob approved my original script?”
I shook my head. “So what happened?”
“What always happens. I thought I’d found my ticket to the big time. But the studio gave it to another writer for a rewrite, then to another and so on until it didn’t resemble the original story anymore. None of the other writers had read Somber or any of the previous scripts, but all were happy give me full screenwriting credit, leaving Rob to focus his frustrations on me.”
I looked away, not knowing how to respond, and noticed some of the posters. “Looks like you’ve done pretty well, though. The studios call you when they’re in town?”
Tennison snorted. “Not likely. Sure, I’ve got some connections, but I’m way down on the pecking list. Studios know where to look if they don’t already have a major player contracted. Steppenwolf, the Goodman, the Organic, or Second City get called if they want local talent. My agency provides bit parts and extras, wannabes hungry to get noticed. Most never amount to anything.”
My eye caught a familiar face in the background of an old poster. “Didn’t he just win an Oscar?”
“That greedy bastard. My diamond in the rough, the one with real talent. I nurtured him, groomed him, got him that role, his big break. Critics went nuts, and I figured I’d ride him to fame and fortune. But a Hollywood agent flashed the green and he was gone without looking back.”
Tennison leaned forward. “You catch his acceptance speech? I’m expecting a little gratitude, mention my name, send some business my way, but he doesn’t say boo. I’m forgotten like yesterday’s turd. All the bastard wanted was money.”
I bit my tongue. It wasn’t worth pointing out he’d seen the actor as his ticket to Easy Street. Or Caldwell too, for that matter.
The door burst open and the receptionist threw down the manila folder. “Ethan’s friends are playing dumb, and I’ve got a manicure in fifteen minutes. You find him.”
Tennison’s cheeks colored. “Someone works for you long enough, they think they own the place,” he explained weakly after she left. “Makes me wonder if she’s turning clients away before I can screen them.”
I decided not to clue him in.

That evening Juan brought over Chinese takeout and a six-pack of beer, financed, of course, by Melissa’s retainer. While I divvied our celebratory feast, Juan cranked up one of my playlists, and as the sounds of his favorite new indie band thundered into my cramped townhouse, a pounding arose on the other side of the kitchen wall.
Disgusted, Juan turned off the music. “That North Shore mother still living next door?” We sat at the kitchen table by my sliding glass doors that overlooked the retention pond filmed with algae and a backyard that was a minefield of dried goose droppings.
“She doesn’t want her precious son subjected to anything more stressful than classical or nineties new age.”
“Figure the kid will rebel when he’s a teenager?”
“Let’s hope. So what did you find on those discs?” I asked, spooning Mongolian beef over fried rice on a paper plate and popping open a beer.
“Well, for a guy who got royally screwed by Hollywood, he sure liked the movies.” Juan forked a garlic shrimp straight out of the white cardboard container. “Most are nothing but stored scenes burned from his DVD collection.”
“What about the one marked Smiling Gnome?”
“So far, it looks like a giant Paint program. Lots of tabs for colors, height, length, dark, and light. There’s a program for highlighting individual items on the screen, another that lets you orient and rotate whatever you want in any 3D direction, some computer graphics and editing, and others I haven’t figured out yet.”
“Strange.”
“Tell me about it. He’s even got one disc that’s a huge photo collection of everything you can imagine from cars to clothes to architecture and every kind of style and variation of each, like it’s some sort of online catalog he ordered from.” Juan shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m beginning to think the guy spent too much time inside.”
“What about the flash drive?”
“More of the same. I also found a file where he’d started to convert Somber to an e-book but had stopped about halfway through for some reason. And there are firewalls everywhere that will crash the whole system. I have to be really careful.”
“Well, keep looking. At least he didn’t put everything on the Cloud. There must be something important on there for him to suddenly abandon his masterpiece.”
“How’d you do?” Juan asked.
“Not much better. Tennison claims he tried to stay on Caldwell’s good side by providing him with consulting jobs. But no matter what he did, Caldwell never forgave him, as if the entire fiasco was Tennison’s fault.”
“You can’t really blame the guy. The movie stinks.”
“Unfortunately, it went beyond that. After visiting Tennison, I talked to a lady who owns an independent bookstore. She told me that continued publication with a particular house is often based on sales, and an author needs to meet their expectations.”
“What’s that got to do with Caldwell? He had a bestseller.”
“That made it worse. The publisher changed the title of Caldwell’s novel to Star Runner for a tie-in with the movie release, remember? The bookstore owner had a copy and showed me the tiny print on the copyright page that read ‘Previously published as And the Outermost Stars Flowed Somber.’”
“So?”
“So that meant the title everyone knew was considered out of print and unavailable as an e-book. And since the movie bombed, no one wanted to buy what they thought was its novelization. By booksellers’ and distributor’s standards, Caldwell’s second book—even though it was really the same novel—sold far less units than his first, and the publisher took a major hit on returns. So they canceled the paperback release of his true second novel, stopped additional print runs of the re-titled Somber, and dropped Caldwell from their author list.”
“Jesus.”
I nodded, my mind seeing the little gnome pissing on the stone film canisters in Caldwell’s garden. “Exactly. Hollywood not only butchered his masterpiece, it axed his literary career as well.”
“So all we’ve got is a lot of reasons for Caldwell to kill someone, but none to explain his murder.”
“Pretty much.”
“This sucks.” Juan threw his empty container, bouncing it off the wall into my open trashcan, and was immediately greeted with a knocking from next door. He screwed up his face. “Jase, when are you going to get a real office?”
I knew it was only his frustration talking, but I bristled just the same. “Everything’s copacetic.”
“Yeah, right. You almost lost the case when Melissa discovered you don’t have a license. When are you going to start taking your career seriously?”
I pushed away from the table and washed the silverware at the sink. Water splashed on an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the countertop nearby. We’d been over this territory a hundred times before and I wasn’t in the mood for it tonight.
But Juan persisted. “You’ve been out of college what, five, six years now? With a degree in criminal justice. It’s time to make a decision, man. You can’t expect Marv Fleischer to float you cases forever. You’ve got to show a little initiative for yourself.”
“Hey, I’m doing fine. I take a few pictures, follow people around, and report back to Marv. No big deal. It’s something to pay the bills until I figure out what I want to do with my life.”
“And what happens when you get caught? You’ve been lucky so far, but you’re not the biggest guy in the world. You’re not an ex-cop or veteran or bounty hunter—you’re just a kid from the suburbs. You going to scare the bad guys away with a goalie’s mask, Jason?”
“What’s your point?” I said, allowing my irritation to show. I’d long since tired of the jokes with my name.
“The point is you’ve been coasting along, treating your cases like hobbies. Face facts: It’s your job. And you’d better get serious and protect yourself, because there’s a hell of a lot of nasty people out there.”
I turned my back on him and sucked down my beer. Outside, geese honked as they landed beside the pond. As I stared into the living room at the furniture my parents left behind when they retired to Tucson, I realized Juan was right. He’d been raised by his divorced mother in a one-bedroom apartment with five other siblings, and I’d never known the hunger and desire that drove him to succeed. I’d always been comfortable and had never felt the need to pursue anything. But why did he have to choose the night of my first real case to remind me of my shortcomings?
Juan counted my faults on his fingertips. “You need a real office and a gun with a permit to carry one. Hell, you haven’t even cracked open the bottle of Jack yet. What kind of private eye are you? Maybe when you get a license you’ll get some decent looking clients, too.”
“I noticed that didn’t stop your flirting with Melissa.”
“Just keeping my talent in practice.” He clasped his hands behind his head. “You’ve seen the ladies giggle when they say my name. It’s like Smokey’s singing my theme song, because they all fall for me in one heartbeat.”
“Sure they’re not laughing at your endurance?”
The phone rang, saving me from whatever murderous thoughts flashed behind his eyes. I made a few notes, then told Melissa we’d be right there.
“Caldwell’s house was burglarized,” I said.

Violated was more accurate. There wasn’t a single item in Caldwell’s house that wasn’t trashed. Sofa and chair cushions had been ripped open and stuffing thrown about, beds overturned, drawers emptied, CDs and DVDs and their cases broken and tossed onto the carpeting like jagged shards of glass—even the framed poster of Somber had been slashed. Amid the wreckage Melissa sat at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette with shaking hands as she talked with the police.
“I received a couple more orders for Rob’s second book, so I came over to get another box out of the garage and found...” Melissa lowered her head and cried, unable to say anything more.
Tennison arrived a few minutes later. I could smell his cologne mixed with the day’s sweat the minute he walked in the door. His face turned ashen when he looked around.
“What happened?”
The police weren’t able to answer that any better than we were, and they left a short time later. We spent the next few hours cleaning up, mostly working in silence. Melissa sniffled and shook her head a lot, lost in her thoughts as if she couldn’t believe the indignities that continued to plague her brother. We loaded the remaining three boxes of Caldwell’s signed, limited-edition second novel into the trunk of her car and locked the door behind us.
It was after 1 a.m. by the time I got home. It had been a long day, and if I hadn’t been so tired I might not have needed the extra few seconds to register the heavy algae smell of the stagnant pond seeping in through the partially-open sliding glass door, or the shoe tread imprint in fresh goose crap on my kitchen floor, before the intruder slammed into me. The impact sent us crashing onto my coffee table, snapping the wooden legs beneath. I held my hands in front of my face and kicked and yelled, vaguely aware of a pounding on the other side of my kitchen wall.
He knocked my arms away and covered my mouth with his sweaty hands. “Cut the whining you little pissant and tell me where the discs are.” His body reeked of cigarettes and over-brewed coffee.
My fingers gouged his eyes, and as the man reared back and howled, I brought my feet up to his chest and shoved him away. I scrambled over the couch, but he recovered quickly and tackled me, sending us over the end table and shattering the lamp on the floor.
I knew I was fighting like a wuss—and that Juan would never let me hear the end of it—but the only way I could think to save myself was to make as much noise as possible. One piercing scream escaped my throat before the man’s fist slammed into the side of my head. I heard a couple more insistent knocks, then silence.
“Where are the discs?” My assailant’s bulky silver ring threatened to bore a hole through my skull. “Where are the goddamn discs?”
Sparks exploded in my eyes with every blow. I couldn’t tell if my ears were ringing or if sirens were approaching, but through the swelling around my eye, I saw the man cock his fist... and the next thing I knew I was being lifted into an ambulance.
I remember a bumpy ride and frantic white coats, bags of clear fluid, and hearing the word “concussion,” before my vision blurred and the darkness swallowed me again.

I spent several days in the hospital. Juan dropped by, asking, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” But I shooed him away, not wanting to risk my assailant finding out about him or the location of the discs. After my release I wrote instructions on a postcard for how we should meet and mailed it at the post office, then passed the next week in my townhouse not answering any calls except to talk with my parents or to reassure Melissa that I was fine.
The day of our meet I hopped a series of east- and westbound commuter trains, never disembarking at the destination I’d purchased the tickets for, hoping to lose anyone tailing me. Though I felt the hairs along the back of my neck rise several times, I was never able to spot anyone. I’d begun to feel pretty foolish by the time Juan picked me up, and I expected him to give me a hard time about all the cloak and dagger stuff. But he drove silently, his eyes constantly checking the mirrors and traffic around him. He never said a word until we were inside his house, when he aimed a digital camera at me and said, “Say cheese.”
“Huh?”
“Good enough.” He led me over to his computer station and we sat down. “You ever hear that old Hollywood joke about the starlet who was so dumb she slept with all the writers?” Juan asked, while he connected the camera to a USB port. “Well, it looks like Caldwell didn’t think it was so funny.”
He slid the disc labeled Smiling Gnome into the CD-ROM drive, and unmarked discs into auxiliary drives and his DVD player. “Caldwell took a lot of relatively common programs and combined them to interact in really cool ways. Watch.” He tapped a few keys. “Recognize this?”
On the screen a man in a gray pinstriped suit and hat examined a dry riverbed, then talked to a boy on a burro.
“Nicholson in Chinatown.”
“Good. Now you could download the scene onto your hard drive like you’re streaming a movie off the Internet. But then all you could do is watch it. What Caldwell did was burn the movie’s scene from the manufacturer’s DVD onto a separate disc. The older the DVD, the better. His new software decoded any anti-piracy protections in the original DVD and converted the scene into a program. Plus it let him store the original scene as a template in case he needed to return to the master if he didn’t like any changes.”
“Changes?”
Juan smiled. “That’s where the fun begins.” He hit PAUSE on the DVD player. “Remember how I thought Smiling Gnome was a giant Paint program? Well, that’s just what we’re going to do.”
He pulled up a menu on the side of the screen, then moved the mouse and a pad with a digital pen closer.
“First, let’s start with touch-ups like they do with supermodel photos.” Juan clicked the mouse, highlighting Nicholson’s image. “Say we want Jack to look heavier.” He tapped some keys, and on the screen, Nicholson ballooned. “Or not so clean-shaven.” He scratched the digital pen and a mustache sprouted. Except for the eyes, you could hardly recognize the actor.
I thought about all the dead movie stars popping up in commercials lately. “Aren’t there copyright laws about using a celebrity’s image?”
Juan waved my words away. “Don’t go there. Now remember the catalog disc? We’re going to borrow from that.” He tapped more keys and Nicholson’s suit changed to a Zoot suit, then a mortician’s outfit, and finally into a baseball uniform. I stopped trying to follow what keys he was hitting and concentrated on the screen.
“Or maybe Nicholson isn’t the impression you want to give.” My own image saying “Huh?” replaced Jack in the scene. Juan smiled. “Ever the insightful investigator. Then once you’ve got the main character figured out, you can work on the surrounding details.”
He turned the mouse and the camera angle rotated 180 degrees. “See the bridge? Say we want a mountain range instead. Or an alien city.” Juan changed the images as fast as he spoke.
“Let’s stay with the science fiction theme.” He moved the cursor and changed the soil to red, the boy and burro into an alien creature, and dressed me like an astronaut. “Or you could film any location you wanted and superimpose the images over that. You can also program in the shapes of objects by tracing a tiny grid pattern over them with a digital pen. With me so far?”
I nodded, remembering the grid pattern on the Nellie model in Caldwell’s house.
“Then it’s time to program in movements. You could keep the actor’s originals or make simple additions or deletions to that.” My screen image gave me the finger, grunting, “Huh? Huh? Huh?” Juan smirked, and I wondered if he’d been spending too much time inside as well.
“If you want changes, though,” he continued, “you’d have to film yourself with a digital camera, or program in the movements by attaching wires to yourself and acting out the scene. Or you could just program everything in like Pixar does, but that would be time consuming. And don’t forget to change the dialog and voice alterations.”
“Whatever.”
“Now here’s where digital rules. With film you’d have to change every single frame, but with Caldwell’s Smiling Gnome software you hit CHANGE ALL like on a spelling correction program, and it enters all your changes and burns the new scene onto a disc. Then you do it for as many different scenes as you need, link them together, add some AI to smooth the edges and blend it all together, dub in a soundtrack, and presto! Isn’t that the coolest thing you’ve ever seen?”
I must have looked like a first grader who’d listened to the Theory of Relativity, because Juan’s face fell.
“All right, let’s try it from another angle.” He inserted Caldwell’s flash drive into another USB port. “Remember how Star Runner began?”
I had to think a minute. We were pretty drunk that night. “A blond space cadet was trading sexual innuendoes with an android. You said she laughed like a donkey.”
Juan chuckled. “Yeah, the best part of the whole movie was when she realized, too late, that getting blown out the airlock meant a lot worse than having her makeup ruined.” He opened a file and hit PLAY. “Watch this.”
The screen darkened, then gradually grew lighter with stars. The camera angle panned across the galaxy until focusing on the horrific sight of a planet falling toward the event horizon of a rotating black hole. Energetic jets of particles emitted from the poles of the accretion disk as matter and gases from the nearby star were swept up by the black hole’s gravitational pull. The planet appeared to move slower above the event horizon as space and time were linked into a fourth dimension, and the light from the nearby star was bent and redshifted to infinite wavelength in the time delay.
Watching, I could almost feel the tidal forces on the inhabitants of the planet as they were drawn into the infinite—the panic, the chaos, the horror, the horror—until, when it seemed I couldn’t watch any longer, the camera angle shifted, showing the arrival of the starship Nellie on its mission to explore the black hole, the true heart of darkness in space.
A shiver ran up my spine. “That’s how Somber begins.”
“And what does that tell you?”
“He made his own movie. But why would anyone care about—Ow! What’d you hit me for?”
“Caldwell was a programmer. Make the leap, Kemosabe.”
I thought about Caldwell disappearing into his computers after Hollywood ruined his life, and Juan nodded enthusiastically as the understanding crept onto my face.
“He wrote a program that enables a writer to create his own movie.”
“Bingo. No more meddling by outside forces. You get exactly what the author wants.”
“But not every movie is based on a book,” I said. “Some writers only write screenplays.”
“Absolutely. But then the screenwriter runs into an actor who insists on a scene where he has to take his shirt off in fifty-below weather. Or the director who shoots his western with blacklights and neon and dresses the good guys in spandex. Then when the movie tanks, who gets blamed?”
“The writer.”
“And no more studio executives keeping all the profits while everyone else starves. So you get someone who’s put up with that crap just once, and how long after Smiling Gnome becomes available do you think he or she will buy a copy?”
“Couple of nanoseconds.”
“If that. And with all the DVD releases available, the templates for scenes are endless.”
“Whoever owns this could make a fortune selling the program to all the writers out there.”
“Or an even greater fortune selling it to studio execs who would suppress it.”
The implications were staggering when they finally hit me. “Caldwell’s program makes movie studios obsolete.”
I pictured Caldwell at his workstation the last five years, staring at the statue outside his window, seething over what they’d done to him and thinking about how he could get even, and I realized the gnome was pissing revenge, not anger. No wonder the little guy was smiling.
“As much as he might have liked that, I doubt it’d go that far,” Juan said. “Smiling Gnome would certainly make a dent, but the movie business is just too big. They’d always find someone hungry enough to write and the industry would adapt. Thing is, though, there are a lot of people involved who make an insane amount of money.”
“Sure. Actors, directors, producers—”
“No, I mean investors. Remember: this is a huge, global industry, and not all of the money is clean. Tinseltown has been known to launder money for disreputable characters.”
“You’re saying organized crime?” I thought about the thug who’d sent me to the hospital and the uneasy feeling I’d had on the trains.
“I’m just saying that there’s a lot of money being made here, and anything that threatens the flow would be a serious problem in their eyes. Maybe even something to be eliminated.”
“Providing a motive for Caldwell’s murder.”
“Exactly.”
We fell silent. Melissa would be glad to know that her brother hadn’t given up, after all. Unfortunately, his latest project also caused his death. I didn’t know if I liked how the other pieces were falling into place, either.
“Sounds like we’d better have another talk with our Hollywood connection,” I said, untucking my shirt and letting the tails hang low over my pants. “I’ll drive. But we need to make a stop first.”
#
We burst into Tennison’s office, catching him on the phone. “Your receptionist gets too many manicures.”
“What the hell?”
“We need to talk.” I grabbed his headset and threw it across the room, then pulled Caldwell’s gun from under my shirt and pointed it at him. “Now.”
“I don’t know—”
“Skip the crap and tell us about Caldwell’s movie program. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You figured out what he’d done when you dropped by.”
Tennison deflated, nodding. “I could see his computer screen through a crack in the drapes. But I didn’t say anything at first. We just talked about the advisor position.”
“When did you go back?”
“A few hours later. I got to thinking about the gold mine he’d created. I owe some people two hundred large in gambling debts, and I saw this as a way to get out from under it. So I told him we could use my connections to get rich.”
“And he didn’t go for it.”
Tennison darkened. “He started right in with all that crap about Star Runner and how I always ruin everything, and he wasn’t about to let me screw this up, too. That’s when I pulled my gun out to show him I was serious.”
“Where’d you get the gun?”
“It’s something I kept under the car seat for when we filmed in bad neighborhoods.”
“What’d he do when you threatened him?”
“He laughed in my face. Said go ahead, shoot, I’d probably miss anyway. Then he wheeled down the hallway, saying he’d show me what a real man’s gun looked like, and I got so angry I pointed the gun and...”
“Fired.”
Tennison sobbed into his hands.
“You shot him ’cuz he dissed you?” Juan said. I could hear the disappointment in his voice. So much for the Big Conspiracy.
His head popped up. “Dissed? He tormented me every chance he got.”
“What’d you do with the gun?” I asked, and Tennison gave me an Are you stupid? look. Of course he knew to ditch it. So I said, “What about the discs?”
“There was nothing on them. I gave the discs on Rob’s desk to the guy I owe the money to, thinking a program like that would pay off my debt. But it crashed his system and he got even more pissed at me. Then when I told him about the other discs you found, he said he wasn’t interested.”
I wasn’t so sure. I waved the gun at him. “Maybe you’d better tell us this guy’s name.”
“I can’t—”
The receptionist entered, complaining about something, and Tennison bolted from his seat. He shoved her toward us and ran out the door. She screamed and clawed, and by the time we got outside, Tennison had hopped on an L train that was already leaving the station.
Using my cell phone, Juan called Melissa for Tennison’s address while I drove frantically through the congested city streets, ignoring honks and middle fingers and Juan’s shouts to “Watch out!” as I realized my entire case was unraveling.
What was I thinking? None of the evidence I’d obtained was admissible in court, and I could hardly expect Tennison to willingly follow me to the police station. My lack of professionalism had screwed everything up, and panic gripped me when we ran through his condo’s open front door and discovered, amid the faint smell of over-brewed coffee and stale cigarettes, Tennison hanging by the neck from a support beam in his basement.

The call came two weeks later.
The cops arrived shortly after we found Tennison’s lifeless body, and though a neighbor confirmed she’d heard loud noises and called 911 before we arrived—and a suicide note was found on his computer—the officers confiscated Caldwell’s gun and tossed us in the lockup. We spent the night warding off the attentions of thirty poster examples of the need for birth control, and when the guards found us the next morning, badly bruised but with orifices and original stories intact, they let us go. The police department was only too happy to accept Tennison’s confession on his suicide note and close Caldwell’s file. Melissa posted our bond, and we were released into her care with a court date set for my carrying a weapon without a permit, the only charge they made stick.
We rode home in silence. When Melissa parked in front of my townhouse, she handed each of us a check and a beautiful, forest green, leather-bound book with gold leaf lettering, copies of Caldwell’s signed, limited-edition second novel.
“Rob would have wanted you to have them,” she said.
Juan was so thrilled he stuttered and stammered, any evidence of Mr. Smooth long gone. But I noticed her jaw tightened when she said her brother’s name. I wanted to say something to ease her pain, but the words caught in my throat and all I could do was thank her.
Juan dropped by a few days later. We went out for burgers, and while we ate in the car, I asked how everything was progressing and confessed my paranoid fears. In response, he pulled a nickel-plated Beretta from under his seat and put it in the empty burger bag at my feet. Not a day goes by now that that gun isn’t within reach.
It was a cool night with fall settling in as I sat on my couch finishing Caldwell’s second novel. It was an incredible book, even better than Somber, and it filled me with sadness to realize that I was one of the few people who would ever read it. Somehow that just didn’t seem right.
The phone rang when I closed the cover.
“Hello?” The line at the other end was silent. I repeated my greeting a few more times and was about to hang up when a computer-altered voice said, “Don’t.”
Goosebumps raced up my arms and shoulders. It was the call I’d been expecting, the one that confirmed my darkest fears.
My heart pounded and sweat flooded my palms so fast that I almost dropped the phone. Evenly, with a hint of fear, I said, “All the discs were destroyed,” just like Juan and I had practiced outside the burger stand. Then I waited, not saying another word, knowing I’d blow everything if I filled the silence with anything more.
Seven and a half minutes later, the line at the other end went dead.
Staggering into the kitchen, I cracked the seal on the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, poured two fingers and, with hands shaking so badly the glass clacked against my teeth, tossed it back. The whiskey trampolined off my queasy stomach and splattered into the sink. But some of the burning liquid penetrated my nerves, and my second attempt stayed down.
I cast a furtive glance around, wondering where the cameras were. It wasn’t lost on me that the call came the moment I finished reading the novel. They wanted me to know they were watching a scared, suburban boy who would never stand up against them.
At least, that’s what I wanted them to believe.
The beating had awoken anger inside me I’d never known existed. And though I believed Tennison killed Caldwell like he’d said, I knew we’d both been used by underworld connections that Tennison had gotten involved with, who drank bad coffee, smoked cigarettes, and planted bugs in beaten men’s townhouses, who could make a murder look like suicide, complete with a note, and know there was no way my suspicions could ever be proven.
I drank more of the whiskey, feeling the warmth spread through my body while I continued the trembling charade. In the hospital, I swore I’d never feel that helpless again. So after burgers, Juan and I had driven to a private investigator’s office to learn what I needed for my license and the paperwork to get the ball rolling. Juan had never looked so proud.
The whiskey fed the burning anger under my scared façade. I’d purposely destroyed fake discs in my living room so they could watch me doing it. But I was damned if I’d let Caldwell’s greatest work die with him. So while they watched me shake and shiver these last two weeks, delivering a performance of my own, Juan had set up a new website for Caldwell, where visitors could purchase and download the Smiling Gnome program, the fully-converted e-book for Somber and Caldwell’s movie version, as well as the limited-edition hardcover and e-book of his second novel, with all payments set up through PayPal and going directly to Melissa. He also set up accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, and a gazillion other social media outlets I’d never heard of, collecting thousands of friends and followers. When he launched the website tomorrow, Juan was going to hit the social media networks like a tsunami, and by the time Tennison’s killers discovered what had happened, so many people would have purchased the Smiling Gnome program or become aware of its existence that killing me was pointless.
At least... that’s what we hoped.
So let them watch all they want. I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.
The corners of my lips curled, and I raised the glass to hide my grin. In my mind I saw the little gnome outside Caldwell’s workstation, and I smiled at the private joke we shared:
Maybe the starlet who’d slept with the writers wasn’t so dumb, after all.