“Everything you say makes sense,” Julia said slowly. “But I would swear he was telling the truth when he said he didn’t have the manuscript or know where it was.”
Could she have been fooled? Maybe she was more gullible than she thought. She was proving to be wrong about many things she’d thought she understood about herself.
“Maybe he panicked and gave it to her to make her look guilty,” Austen said.
Julia’s nostrils flared in distaste. Could Jerome do something so despicable?
Her heart heaved with the answer. If he was a murderer, then yes, of course he could. Had she been duped so easily? Did she believe poets inhabited a higher order, above the fray of powerful emotions like ambition, jealousy, and hate? In fact a poet could burrow into deep feelings better than anyone. Jerome had every reason to hate Timson, and witnessing his cruelty to Eva could easily have been the final straw. Julia may have been blinded by Jerome’s suffering in the dark recesses of the Half-Shell, but now she could see a larger reason for his agony. If Austen’s theory was right, it suggested Jerome was what he’d seemed from the start—a cold and selfish man, a schemer, even a killer.
“That would explain why Eva’s hiding,” Austen went on, warming to his notion. “If she thinks she can’t trust anyone to believe her, she would send out passages focused on the boyfriend character, who sounds a lot like Jerome. She wants us to see that he’s the killer, not her.”
He poked his arms into his crumpled shirtsleeves and fastened the buttons. He loosened his trousers and began shoving in shirttails.
“Maybe,” Julia murmured, her mind still struggling as she fastened the strap of her shoe. Could she be sure? Alerting the police meant putting a noose around Jerome’s neck.
“You don’t think so? Makes perfect sense to me.”
Rationally, he was right. It did make sense. Julia could see it laid out neatly, all the things that pointed to Jerome as the murderer. So why did her brain not feel exultant, the past weeks’ cobwebs swept clean with fresh light? It only felt shrouded in a darkness more ominous than ever.
She heard herself whimper. “I can’t help feeling something’s not right. A week ago I would have leaped into your arms, deliriously happy we’d discovered this and figured out everything. Now I have trouble imagining the Jerome I saw last week could either murder a man or shift suspicion onto Eva. I know he’s proud and unpleasant, but I’m convinced they love each other. He’s terrified for her, not for himself. I believed him, Austen. I still do.”
“If he’s desperate, if his life depends on it, he’d believe his own lies. Then you’d believe them too.” He buttoned his trousers, then his cuffs.
“Maybe.” Julia straightened as a new thought began to glow, then blaze. “But there’s another reason I don’t think he stole her work. I saw a note she’d written. And something he said—he called her style clean and easy.”
She slapped at the desk. “I’m a bloody fool. I should have seen it right away. You read those pages. Would you call this prose clean and easy? No. Nowhere near. It’s elaborate, dramatic, even melodramatic. Eva didn’t write this.”
Austen sat down. He stared at Julia. “It’s the other way around? Eva stole Jerome’s manuscript?”
He rubbed his chin. His shadowy beard made a faint rasp under his palm. “That would mean we were right in the first place. If she stole Jerome’s novel, she has every reason to want us to think he killed Timson. But what a grim way to hide a secret. Getting a book published isn’t worth sending a fellow to the chair over.”
Julia stared at the floor, barely listening to him. Then she laughed. Tears started to her eyes as light finally dispelled the morass in her brain. “No, no. She didn’t steal it. She’s not trying to pin the murder on him. They planned this together.”
“What the—?”
“Jerome wrote the book, but Eva is pretending to be the author.”
Julia hobbled peg-leg around the office, pacing with only one shoe fastened. “It makes sense, the most perfect sense. Publishers don’t want what he prefers to write, and Eva’s a ready-made icon for the kind of Harlem Pablo’s wild to promote. I’m guessing they decided to give him the author and book he wants, one with big sales possibilities, and use the money to get away and start a new life together. I knew that’s what she wanted, but I never realized she wasn’t working alone.
“Come on. We have to talk to Jerome.” She scrambled to find her other shoe. “Eva’s been passing all along—as a writer.”
CHAPTER 30
They hurried down the six steps to the Half-Shell’s entrance. Eva’s secret didn’t explain why she would send out cryptic batches of manuscript, but Jerome might be able to.
The door was locked. Julia peered through its round porthole window into the shadowy club. An old man in baggy trousers stood about ten feet inside, leaning on a broom handle and lighting the mangled stub of a cigarette. She gave the doorknob a vigorous shake.
The old man started and shook his head. When she persisted, he sidled to the door. “Closed,” he said, or something like it, through a gargle of phlegm.
Julia pressed her face to the window and smiled with every sparkle she could manage on a gray, humid morning. “Please,” she mouthed, reaching into her handbag.
The old man shuffled closer. “Closed.”
“Our maid’s desperately ill, and her brother works inside,” Julia said into the grimy glass.
He fumbled at the lock and cracked open the door. “Can’t come in, miss. Closed.”
Julia leaned so close her nose would be mangled if the door shut. “Jervis Carter? We must talk to him. We’ll be quiet as lambs,
