Free The Gravedigger's Ball by Solomon Jones

you?”
    Ellison took another sip of his martini. “We were in the midst of a divorce, Detective. At least, I was. She wanted to fight to keep the marriage intact so she wouldn’t have to pay.”
    “So you stood to gain financially from the divorce?” Coletti asked.
    Ellison looked at him. “I suspect you already know the answer to that, so let’s cut to the chase, shall we? My wife was rich and I’m her sole surviving relative. In your eyes, that makes me a suspect, right?”
    Coletti smiled in spite of himself. He appreciated Ellison’s bluntness, if not his attitude. “There are a lot of things other than the money that make you a suspect, Mr. Bailey, including the fact that you were trying to divorce your wife.”
    “Lots of people have marital problems, Detective. There’s nothing unique about that.”
    “But it’s unique for a man with no steady source of income to be married to a billionaire.”
    “Yes, aren’t I the lucky one?” Ellison asked sarcastically.
    Coletti’s cell phone buzzed, and he took it out and looked at the message. It was the e-mail Clarissa had sent out announcing Lenore’s visit. The cemetery manager had finally forwarded it, as promised. There were five addresses in the “to” line. Four of them had names attached. One of them didn’t.
    Ellison took another sip of his martini. “Is everything all right, Detective?” he asked. “Do you need to make a call?”
    Coletti’s instincts told him not to share the e-mail with Ellison. He quickly put the phone away. “No, I don’t need to make any calls,” he said. “But I do need to know a little more about your relationship with your wife. How did the two of you meet?”
    “We met five years ago at the Borrowers Ball,” Ellison said. “It’s a black-tie gala to benefit the Free Library of Philadelphia.”
    “And you were on the guest list?”
    “Yes,” Ellison said, taking another sip of his drink. “I once wrote a book on the history of Mayan civilization, and somehow, through serendipity or dumb luck or whatever you want to call it, my book became a Hollywood film. The genius who directed it decided to make the movie without dialogue. It flopped, and after that, no one would touch any of my books with a ten-foot pole. I was forever relegated to being a featured author at literary events, and it didn’t take me long to go broke.”
    “You sound bitter.”
    “On the contrary,” Ellison said. “I’m grateful that the library invited me. I felt like I’d turned the tables on Cinderella, and for once, the prince got to be the one to crash the ball.”
    Coletti smiled at Ellison’s sardonic wit.
    “Clarissa was at my table that night,” Ellison continued. “She took a liking to me. And when I told her I was working on a novel about a nineteenth-century writer who’s involved in a murder, she was actually rather intrigued. A few weeks later, she invited me over to, um … look at her etchings. She showed me hers, I showed her mine, and six months later, we were married.”
    “I see,” Coletti said. “If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you, Mr. Bailey?”
    “I’m eight years Clarissa’s junior. She was fifty-five when we met. I was forty-seven. It was quite the scandal on the society page. Still is.”
    Coletti looked around at the trappings of wealth that surrounded them. “Scandal or not, banging old broads for a living pays well, doesn’t it?”
    “I beg your pardon?” Ellison said sharply.
    Coletti stood up and walked over to the chair where Ellison Bailey was sitting. “You said you wanted to cut to the chase, Mr. Bailey, so let’s do that. Clarissa wasn’t the first older woman to take care of you, was she? There was the woman you lived with in California who sued after you ran through her fortune. Then there’s the woman you lived with in Florida who sued after you drained the bank accounts the two of you shared. But they were lucky, weren’t they? They didn’t end up dead.”
    “I