A shocking crime of passion has Bakerhaven buzzing!
In Parnell Hall's Presumed Puzzled, the Puzzle Lady gets more than she bargained for when she’s hired to track down Paula Martindale’s straying husband. She finds him, all right—hacked to pieces on his living room rug, while his blood-drenched wife haunts the crime scene clutching a butcher knife.
It’s a tough spot for attractive young attorney Becky Baldwin. Paula is presumed innocent until proven guilty, but try to find one juror who’s going to think so.
It’s up to Cora to find the evidence to save the day. She has just two problems: She’s a witness for the prosecution, and every bit of evidence she finds in Paula’s favor, from crossword puzzles to Sudoku to alibi witnesses, tends to indicate that Cora herself is the killer!
Release date:
January 19, 2016
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
272
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“Of course you need a client,” Cora said. “You’re a lawyer. Lawyers need clients.”
Becky Baldwin shook her head. Her long blond hair fell in her face. That was the problem with looking like a supermodel. It sometimes got in the way of her practice. People assumed that anyone who looked like she’d be at home on a catwalk couldn’t know anything about the law. They would be wrong. Becky had a keen legal mind and a particularly adept courtroom manner. In choosing a lawyer, they could hardly do better. “No. I said, ‘client.’ Not ‘clients.’ ‘Client.’ Singular. As in one. As in any client at all.”
“You don’t have a client?”
“I haven’t had a client in weeks. I come into the office, I sit and stare at the wall.”
“You want me to find you a client?”
“Exactly.”
“Where do you expect me to find one?”
“Well, I wouldn’t try staring at the wall.” Becky tipped back in her desk chair. “You got it easy. You sit in your cozy office at home and make up a crossword puzzle for your daily column, which probably takes you a good forty-five minutes, then lay around all day counting your royalties from your book deals and watching the residuals from your TV ads roll in.”
Becky had that half right. Cora Felton was the Puzzle Lady, whose smiling face graced the nationally syndicated crossword column and who pitched Granville Grains breakfast cereal to schoolchildren in a series of TV commercials, but she didn’t spend forty-five minutes a day creating crossword puzzles. She actually didn’t spend any. Cora couldn’t construct a crossword puzzle if her life depended on it. Her niece, Sherry Carter, was the true Puzzle Lady and wrote Cora’s daily column. Of course, Becky didn’t know that. She was one of the few people who knew Cora couldn’t solve crossword puzzles but still thought she created them.
“I don’t know what I can do,” Cora said.
“Can’t you go out and kill someone? Then I can defend you from a murder rap.”
“I don’t think I’m gonna do that.”
“Why not? You’ve done it before.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I’ve defended you on a couple of murder raps.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t do them.”
“Right, and I got you off anyway. Which proves I can do it.”
“You got me off because I uncovered the guilty party.”
“Well, you had to. You were innocent.”
“Exactly.”
“No, not exactly. It would be a lot easier if you actually did it. We’ll know what all the facts are. Nothing will surprise us.”
“But I’ll be guilty.”
“So what? You’re presumed innocent. That’s the law. You can come into court in a blood-drenched pantsuit holding the severed head of the victim and the jurors have to presume that you’re innocent or they’re unacceptable and can’t sit on the jury.”
“I don’t have a pantsuit,” Cora said.
“Well, so much for that idea.”
“Becky, I don’t think you quite understand how this works. The lawyer gets a client. The client hires the attorney. Then the attorney hires the private investigator to go out and do the investigating. The attorney doesn’t hire the investigator to go out and bring her a client.”
“I don’t want to hire you to bring me a client. I can’t pay you. I can barely pay my rent, and the dump I live in is dirt cheap.”
“Becky, I sympathize, but I’m not going to kill anyone just because you need the work.”
“Spoilsport. All right, then, why don’t you get divorced?”
“I’m not married.”
“I’m broad-minded. I won’t hold that against you.”
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