The Last Cheerleader. Meg O'Brien

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      Better to be on your own turf and in power, I’d decided. The last thing I needed was to be summoned by the police again, just to sit and repeat, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

      Besides, I had plans for the good detective. Before this night was over, Detective Dan Rucker was going to tell me everything he knew about all three murders.

      At home I changed into jeans and a T-shirt and took a cup of coffee down to the beach. Gulls came and settled near me, hoping I had food. They soon left, though, and went back to dipping up and down over the waves.

      It was seven o’clock and the sun had begun its downward slide toward the sea. The sky was blood-red from all the smog that had been blown west from what had, over the past few hours, become an unseasonable Santa Ana wind—hot, heavy and dangerous, blowing trees into houses and causing all kinds of havoc, according to the drive-time news.

      Here at the beach, though, it made the evening air balmy and gave us some of our best sunsets. The smog blows westward from inland when pushed by the Santa Anas—Devil Winds, as they’ve been called for years—and the setting sun filtered through the smog is incredibly beautiful.

      Too much of the Santa Anas, however, can make a person crazy in the head. When they go on for days I become irritable and off my feed. Some days I want to kill everything in sight—even my authors.

      Fortunately, that’s only a temporary aberration. I’d never really wished for any of my authors, including those three men, to be murdered. And now that they had been, where did that leave me? Grieving aside, that is.

      And I did grieve. Now that I had time to be alone, I grieved for Arnold and Tony, both of whom I had loved so unsuccessfully, and for Craig, who deserved better and almost got it. He had worked hard to sober up and stay that way, and from the manuscript I’d seen on his desk in the motel, he was doing good work. Unexpectedly good work, even though the topic had been done before.

      Why on earth would anyone want to kill him? Craig had been divorced for several years, and his ex, Julia, owned a successful antiques shop in New York City. Craig had told me Julia had never needed or asked for alimony.

      Was it the new book, then? If I’d had time to do more than scan the pages, would I have found that he had tremendously damaging information against someone important? Information that was only lightly fictionalized?

      But then the killer would surely have taken the manuscript with him.

      Unless Craig had been clever enough to put a floppy disk or CD-Rom in a safe-deposit box, or some other secret place.

      I sighed, drawing my knees up and leaning my chin on them, watching the neighbors walk by with their dogs or make their last run of the night. I usually made time each evening to run, but I hadn’t been able to lately. I did work out three times a week, and sometimes more. Working out gave me an endorphin high, and I felt afterward as if I could take on the world.

      Today, though, was different. Today I wanted to just sit in a funk and think about the state of my life.

      As Rucker had said, I’d been living here at Malibu for about two years—the same amount of time I’d been at my office in Century City. My house was tiny and a fixer-upper, but it still took more money to get into it than my father had made in his lifetime. My pop had been a streetcar conductor in San Francisco, and a good man. He supported my mom and me the best he could, and even though times were often tough, we never really went without. When I graduated from high school I left home, like most kids, for freedom from parental control—but also because I wanted to get a good job and give the poor guy a break. He died a year later, almost as if it was a relief to leave, once I was out of the house and settled on my own. Sometimes I feel guilty about taking away his motivation to go on. Other times, I must admit I’m proud to have done so much for myself, as young as I was.

      Not that I’ve always been thrilled with my career choice. The life of an agent, a manager, or any kind of broker, is unlike any other life I’ve known or even heard of. We spend our days walking a tightrope between editors and authors, trying to keep both of them happy with each other. Not always an easy task. A good agent, some believe, is the kind that’s feared by New York editors. Most editors, on the other hand, will tell you that they prefer agents who are “easy to work with.” Which sometimes means that those agents don’t get the best deals, because they haven’t got it in them to act like a shark with a friend.

      Those of us who are “sometime sharks” believe that the only way to win is to make a difficult editor so intimidated that she or he will give the author a good deal, with either money or extra perks. We do whatever it takes to come to an agreeable conclusion. And though bullying is not a good habit to get into, it becomes one sometimes, before we even know it. As natural as breathing.

      So yes, I’ve learned to negotiate, and I’ve been successful at it. When threatened, I always look at whatever skills I have to defend myself, and that’s what I did this afternoon. Detective Rucker had accepted my invitation even more quickly than I’d expected him to. He would come here for dinner thinking he could get something out of me, because surely I was the main suspect in all three deaths so far. He’d play his game. But more importantly, I’d play mine.

      If I didn’t want to end up arrested, I needed something to go on—information of some kind that would help me find out who the real killer was.

      “Nice place,” Dan Rucker said, whistling softly. The sun had gone below the horizon, but the sky was still streaked with bright red, and my white sofa, carpet and walls were all tinted pink. The gulls were now wheeling over the beach in droves, probably scoping out dead fish.

      “Look at that sunset,” Rucker said.

      “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

      He nodded, standing at the window with his back to me. “Mind if I go out on the deck?”

      “Be my guest, Detective. I’ll bring the wine out there.”

      I watched as he went onto the deck and sat at a patio table with four chairs. Putting his feet up on one chair, he seemed comfortable about making himself at home.

      Well, good. A couple of glasses of wine and he’d be even more ready to tell me what he knew.

      I took a cold bottle of Chardonnay out, along with appetizers I’d defrosted and nuked.

      “Any trouble getting here, with the traffic?” I asked.

      It seems like that’s the first question people ask when a guest walks in and they don’t know what else to say.

      “A little,” my guest answered, “but it’s thinned out pretty well by now.” He took a bite of a small cheese-and-ham tart and sighed. “Delicious. You’re a good cook.”

      “Thanks,” I said. “I’ve always been pretty handy with piecrust.”

      He looked at me intently and I had to look away.

      “Okay,” I said, flushing. “I got them at the store. You think I really had time to cook?”

      He smiled. “But you heated them up so well.”

      “I did, didn’t I? It’s a talent I have…heating things up.”

      “I’ll try to remember that,” he said, grinning.

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