Murder Mystery Report, October 2005

By Robison Wells

October Conference has come and gone. Along with our many conference traditions, such as watching the morning session in our pajamas and feeling the burning pangs of a guilty conscience, I also participated in the second annual Covenant Communications Murder Mystery Dinner.

Last year's dinner was fun, but had the inherent flaws of a never-been-attempted event. This year the kinks were ironed out, and the results were fantastic.

The basic idea was this: Covenant chose twelve authors who had released mysteries or suspense novels in the last several months. A villian was chosen from each book and assigned to an author -- I was playing the character of Colonel Barrett from Sian Bessey's Uprising in Samoa; Jeff Downs (author of Standoff) played Felix Hazard from Wake Me When It's Over. Throughout the evening dinner guests watched for clues, and kept notes ala the board game Clue (for example, Felix Hazard did it in the ballroom with the golf club...)

Before the dinner we had a long, crowded book signing, with all of the authors lined up at a big table. I was put on the very far end next to Lynn Gardner (author of the Gem series: Topaz and Terrorists, Diamonds and Dynamite, Fool's Gold and Foie Gras, etc.) and it was the closest to celebrity that I have ever been. Some giddy fan gushed about she'd based her vacation around finding all the locations in one of Gardner's books. Another fan said that she was getting married in the Idaho Falls temple, because that's where the heroine of the Gem Series was wed. And then the fans reluctantly left Lynn Gardner's place and moved to mine and said "Uh... so you write books, too, I guess?"

These events are great for writers, who seldom get to meet. We all shake hands and tell each other that we love each other's work, and that we really intend to read their latest if we just weren't so doggone busy. So everyone told me that they hear my books are just hilarious, and I told them that theirs are intriguing/mysterious/romantic/witty. It's kind of a dance we authors do.

While all of this was going on, my wife was inside the hotel ballroom, shmoozing with the other guests seated at our table. In addition to performing, I'd been asked to create a centerpiece for my book, and then to sit at that theme table. My table art consisted of mountains of fake money, a briefcase, and the ruby ring from my daughter's Snow White Sparkle Princess Barbie. I was pretty proud of the arrangement until I saw that other authors had centerpieces with flashing lights and fountains and dry ice. My investment at the ninety nine cent store ($5.94 worth of play money) didn't seem quite so neat anymore.

But then the game was on! Kerry Blair, who, I failed to mention, wrote the entire mystery and was attempting to organize all of the gabby authors, issued us all our weapons and lined us up to enter the ballroom. Melissa Stockdale, who appeared vastly less stressed than last year, introduced us as we marched into the room. Pun-filled scripts were read, and we all pretended that we were not anti-social, darkness-loving writers, but, instead, great improv actors. For some it worked better than others. I myself, who would live in a sensory deprivation chamber if I could get away with it, was not exactly winning any Oscars. Still, authors like Michelle Ashman Bell and Jeffery Savage seemed to be completely in their element.

When we finally got introduced, Count Cadavero (who had invited us all to his villa for dinner) keeled over dead. I believe that he died prematurely -- it was at the same time the narrator was announcing Sian Bessey, acclaimed LDS author, had been killed in the powder room. So, while the Count was writhing on the floor, the narrator pushed on with the script about the Sian, and didn't appear to notice the poisoned Count. Even so, things got straightened out as we realized we had not one, but TWO murders to solve. Count Cadavero was picked up off the floor and delivered to his table, so that his animated corpse could enjoy the meal. The dinner consisted of salad, lasagna and breadsticks, all of which was tasty, and most of which was impossible to eat -- as part of my costume I applied a really enormous handlebar mustache. I have no idea how people with those things ever eat. I think I ought to grow one as a diet technique.

After dinner all the authors headed back up to the front of the room -- it was time for the viewing of our dear departed Count Cadavero. One by one we paid our last respects, dropping a few clues here and there, and then I was asked to deliver the euology. Kerry Blair had asked me to write it several weeks before the event, but said that I should just make everything up -- I knew next to nothing about the Count or even Colonel Barrett, my own character. (I must give props to my peeps, as it were -- my brother Dan helped tremendously with the writing.) The following is the eulogy in its entirety:

"Antonio Cadavero was my nephew by birth, the son of my estranged sister, Constance, whom I haven’t seen since she joined the Argentinean Navy oh those many years ago.

It was a cold November day when Tony walked into my life, reeking of pickles and limping in that funny way he always did when he met new people. He limped into my store—I was managing a Radio Shack at the time—and asked if I knew how to spell “eponymous.” I think we all know why.

Those who knew Tony knew him as many things: a career soldier, a sous chef, a ballerina, and the lamppost on the corner by the bank. Yet it was as a veterinarian that he performed his greatest service to mankind, and for which we owe him a great debt—the final sum I know not, as the long-term effects of his work have yet to be calculated, but as we go about our lives with cars that work and toilets that flush and vending machines that are very nearly always stocked, I hope we can say a quiet thank you to Tony for all of his hard work and innovation. Say what you will about the training methods of modern psychology—there is no substitute for good old-fashioned surgery.

It was my great privilege to spend many summers on Tony’s ranch in Vietnam, sipping watermelon Kool-Aid and listening to the distant cries of wild monkeys and caribou. Those were magical times, tinted now with the amber glow of nostalgia and the bitter taste of untimely death. Tony often said that you can never know a man until he dies, and in that sense I know him better today than I have since the accident that claimed his life those many years ago. He is a quiet man, a simple man, a man frequently found lying down, often accompanied by screams and, eventually, investigations. Let no one say that he was not a man of his word, or of anyone else’s.

Never one to turn a blind eye to the needy, or lift a crippled leg to the poor, Tony was often seen walking the streets at night, a loaf of bread tucked under each arm and a handful of nickels in the pocket of his striped trousers. He was beloved by all who benefited from his lifelong generosity, and he cherished the quiet moments of service he offered to the Daughters of the American Revolution, the University of Toledo School of Pharmacology, and his dear friends in the Irish Republican Army.

Looking back on the past, there’s a danger of getting bogged down in the suffocating mud of regrets, stung by the nagging bees of remorse, and made drowsy by the pillowy softness of “what-might-have-beens.” Yes—despite being both an active philanthropist and a closet philatelist—Tony could never fully purge the guilt that clung to him, that cloying, gnawing, maddening pain that rotted his heart and tortured his soul. It’s no accident that he chose these words, in a living will performed ten years ago by Inuit throat-singers, to be carved on his gravestone—the same lyrics he often sung softly to himself as he stared longingly across the Strait of Juan De Fuca, from the deck of his three-man sailboat the Considerate Kate:

“Now I'm not bragging babe, so don't put me down,
But I've got the fastest set of wheels in town.
If something comes up to me, he don't even try,
’Cause if she had a set of wings, man, I know she could fly.
She's my Little Deuce Coupe—
You don't know what I got.”

Tony, if you’re listening, I think I speak for everyone when I say that you’re our little deuce coup. And you don’t know what we got.

Thank you."

After the eulogy, Jeffrey Savage read the will, wherein I was bequeathed the head of a mountain goat. A cheesecake dessert was consumed, and the master dectective solved the case. It appears that the Count was the victim of innocent food poisoning, brought on by the poor cooking of Michele Ashman Bell (I can't remember the character's name). And Sian Bessey was killed by Harrison Mead, an Elvis impersonator from Kerry Blair's Mummy's the Word. But the Count paid Harrison to do it. I'll bet you didn't see that coming.

And then we headed back out to the foyer to sign more books, and I had to give up my seat so a girl could have her picture taken with Lynn Gardner. what did I care? It's not like I was signing anything.

Anyway, kudos go to Kerry Blair and Melissa Stockdale for all their hard work. It was really a great night. And now I'll never need to read a Lynn Gardner book -- I've heard the plots of all of them, over and over.