Jaine Austen 1 - This Pen for Hire by Laura Levine

into a spot and parked my car myself. Then I got out and headed over to where Devon was standing with the two other valets, both handsome young Mexican guys.
    One of them started to punch me a parking ticket.
    “No!” I stopped him. “I’m not going to the restaurant; I’m here to talk to Mr. MacRae.”
    Devon stared at me blankly, no sign of recognition in his eyes.
    “We met the other day at Stacy’s funeral,” I prompted.
    “Oh, right,” he said, clearly embarrassed that I’d seen him hauled away by The Vale of Peace security guards.
    “Can we talk? In private?”
    “Sure.”
    We walked over to my Corolla. I was trying to decide what profession to assume (lawyer? reporter? police detective?) when Devon made up my mind for me.
    “Wait a minute. Now I remember you. You were standing next to me at the gravesite, weren’t you?”
    “Right.”
    “You must be the newspaper reporter.”
    “How did you know?”
    “Zane told me.”
    “Zane?”
    “The girl with the purple hair.”
    “Oh, right. Zane.”
    “She said you worked for The New York Times. ”
    “Mmm,” I said, technically not lying.
    I halfway expected him to take out a flyer for a play he was starring in. But thankfully, he didn’t.
    “I hope you won’t write about that crazy scene at the cemetery. I don’t know what came over me.” He shook his head, tears welling in his eyes. “I was just so crazy about Stacy. I guess I went a little nuts.”
    “Do you really think Andy Bruckner killed her?”
    “Who knows?” he shrugged. “I think he’s capable of it. Or at least, he’s capable of hiring someone to do it.”
    Aha. So my hit-man theory wasn’t so far off base, after all.
    “But that’s not what I meant when I said if it hadn’t been for Andy, Stacy would still be alive today.”
    “What did you mean?”
    “Just that if she hadn’t broken up with me, we’d be living together by now, in a place of our own, and she never would have agreed to go out with that lunatic they arrested.”
    “I’m not so sure that the guy they arrested really killed Stacy. I’ve interviewed him, and he seems pretty harmless.”
    “Stacy needed someone to take care of her.”
    Yeah, right. Like Hells Angels need training wheels.
    “Stacy was careless. She didn’t watch out for herself. Like that time with the peanut oil.”
    “Peanut oil?”
    “Stacy was allergic to peanuts. Actually, she was allergic to lots of stuff. Peanuts. Strawberries. Pollen. Perfume. But the worst was peanuts. Just one peanut could make her violently ill. Every time she ate out, she had to ask the waiter if the food was cooked in peanut oil. I can’t tell you how many times she’d forget to ask.
    “Then one night, after she dumped me, she went out with Andy to a Thai restaurant. She forgot to ask about the peanut oil. The next thing you know, she was in the emergency room.”
    He ran his fingers through his mop of dark hair. “If she’d been with me, that never would’ve happened. I would’ve remembered. They pumped her stomach and kept her in the hospital overnight. Do you think Andy stayed with her? No way. The bum left her there, all by herself, and went running back to his wife. Stacy called me the next day and asked me to come and get her. She asked me. Not Andy. Doesn’t that mean that I was the one she really loved?”
    He looked at me pleadingly, desperate for the answer he wanted to hear.
    “Sure,” I obliged. “I bet she really did love you.”
    His eyes shone with gratitude.
    “I know this is painful for you, Devon, but aside from Andy, can you think of anybody else who might have killed Stacy?”
    “Heck, no. Everybody loved her.”
    Right. Another keen observer in the Love-Is-Blind Department.
    “Anyhow,” he said, somewhat uncomfortably, “you’re not going to write about what happened yesterday, are you? I’m up for a part in a soap, and I can’t afford any bad press right now.”
    “No, I can honestly say I won’t be writing about