Huckleberry Fiend by Julie Smith

you something else about Debay?”
    “After all that, I don’t see why not.”
    “Does he do business with Pamela Temby?”
    “I don’t know. I’ve never seen her around, though.”
    “How about a guy named Russell Kittrell?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    “Herb Wolf?”
    “Doesn’t ring a bell. But who knows? I don’t know all his clients.”
    “Doesn’t it strike you as a little pretentious to call them clients?”
    She laughed and I deemed the lunch a success— if you could make this one laugh, you’d done your good deed for the day.

CHAPTER 9
    Driving home, I reassessed the problem. My original assignment had been to find the owner of the manuscript. But my current one was to assuage Booker’s guilt by finding out who killed Beverly. The murderer, as I saw it, was one of four people— the original owner or one of the three potential buyers. At least I knew where to look for the last three. And until I met the Huckleberry Fiends, I’d made about all the polite inquiries I could. Now it was time for more direct action.
    I went inside, fed Spot and petted him awhile, getting up my nerve. Finally I called Sardis. “How’s the painting going?”
    “Great. I’m taking a break. Have you had lunch?”
    “Uh-huh. With a literary dark— as opposed to light. I need some help. Could you make a phone call for me?”
    “Your dialing finger’s broken?”
    “I need a woman’s touch.”
    “Come on up.”
    I did, and told her my plan— to have her phone Pamela Temby as Sarah Williams, crooked manuscript dealer. After she identified herself, the conversation— as reported— went like this:
    “Wonderful, dear. Are you ready to talk now?”
    “I think it’s time.”
    “Splendid. One thousand Alpine Glen. I’ll be home till four-thirty.”
    “And then,” said Sardis, “she hung up without even asking if it’s convenient. Which it isn’t.”
    “Gosh. Who knew she’d do that?”
    “I certainly didn’t, or I’d have never made the call. But no matter, it’s not your fault. You’ll go with me, won’t you?”
    “Are you kidding? She might be a murderer.”
    “Does that mean no or yes?”
    I didn’t dignify that with an answer.
    I might not have cared much for Jenny Swensen’s work, but I had a feeling I’d care even less for Pamela’s. Yet hundreds of thousands of book-buyers put me in the wrong. She was on top of the heap, and, fittingly, lived on top of the East Bay, on about an acre of land in something resembling an English stately home. I made a mental note to read one of her ten-pound opuscules— maybe I’d pick up some tips.
    The front door was a football field away, and every blade of grass appeared to have been hand-clipped. Yet smack in the middle of what might otherwise have been a croquet court was a mean-looking Harley under the loving attendance of a scruffy human. The grease monkey was tall, lanky, filthy, crowned with a spiky shock of purple hair, and female. She stood and put up a hand against the afternoon sun. “Welcome to Miniseries Manor. Is one of you Sarah Williams?”
    “I am,” said Sardis.
    “Mummy’s waiting.” She stuck out a tentative hand but, noting the condition of it, used her better judgment and plunged it into her shorts pocket. Her voice was husky and her manner masculine. “I’m Rosamund Temby, by the way.” Despite her punky hair and get-back vehicle, there was something about her that said, “Like me, like me.” She was oddly appealing.
    She led us into a parquet foyer roughly the size of my living room. “Mummy’s in the library.” We went through a living room that Architectural Digest would have doted on into a library out of the Musée de Cluny. Sun streamed through leaded-glass windows and French doors. Deep chairs, an antique desk, and more books than Rick Debay had in his store contrived an ecclesiastical effect, rather like that of a reading room in a Catholic college. Pamela Temby stood in Titian-haired splendor on an Oriental rug