by Jane Haddam
CHAPTER 10
I MET HAZEL GANZ going down in the elevator. I was too preoccupied to notice her at first—I was involved in an elaborate fantasy in which Amelia Samson sent her wrens like a flock of miniaturized pterodactyls to murder her best friend and her agent—but Hazel planted herself in front of me soon enough.
“They’re killing us,” she told me. “They’re killing us.”
“Who?” I took her literally.
“Editors.” Hazel waved vaguely at the elevator doors. “Publishers. Ninety titles a month this year. A hundred and eighty next year. How long do you think that’s going to last?”
“Oh well,” I said. “They’ve been talking about a market shakeout for the past two years. It hasn’t happened yet.”
“It will. What’s going to happen to us then? I’ve got two kids. I want to send them to college. I’m not ready to go back to getting chased around the instrument tray by Dr. Harold Shenshorn, D.D.S.”
“I don’t blame you,” I murmured.
“What would you know about it? Did you ever have to be a dental assistant? Of course not. Did you ever worry about where the money was coming from? Don’t be ridiculous. Just look at you.” The elevator doors opened on the lobby floor. “Fires of Love is going to fold,” Hazel Ganz said. “It’s got no guts.”
I waited until she disappeared into the opposite bank of elevators, the ones for the West Tower. Then I wandered across the lobby to the glass-enclosed, black-and-white plastic Calendar of Events, wondering if I really believed that Amelia’s flock of sharp-beaked wrens had murdered two people. I decided it was as good an explanation as any. The wrens seemed too timid to me, but Lydia Wentward seemed too drugged out, Janine Williams too fastidious, and Phoebe too solidly alibied (by me). Mary Allard was a distinct possibility, but I didn’t like the woman. If there was one thing I had learned from my intensive late-night reading of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, it was that the murderer was unlikely to be the character you liked least.
I had located the room for the Charlotte/First Novel Category meeting (Charlotte Brontë Award/Best First Novel in Paperback Category Romance), when I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard a high-pitched throat-clearing death rattle behind me. I turned and looked right into the faces of two escapees from Pink Flamingos.
There was a tall one and a short one. The tall one was very thin, with dyed blacker-than-black wiry hair to her shoulders, dead white foundation all over her face, and heavy rouge on both her cheeks and lips. The short one was very round, with straw blond hair tortured into two tiny mouse-ear pigtails. Both of them were smiling at me.
“Are you Jeri Andrews?” the tall one said. Her head wobbled back and forth as if it wasn’t tightly anchored on her neck.
“I’m both Jeri Andrews and Andrea Nicholas.” I worked to bring a smile to my face. If there is a commandment in romance writing, it is Honor Thy Fan. Everybody obeys it. Editors solicit and act upon the opinions of their readers about the future direction of their lines. Marketing directors throw reader parties in obscure cities, complete with free champagne and author appearances. Authors allow Romantic Times to publish the details of their private lives. There are no Emily Dickinsons or Thomas Pynchons in romance. The fans would never allow it.
These two were not only fans, but aspirants. They were both wearing blue heart-shaped badges marked “writer,” which is what the American Writers of Romance likes to call unpublished novelists. Published novelists are called “authors.”
“We thought so,” the short one said. She stared at me the way Lydia does when she’s put too much powder up her nose, but I didn’t think this woman’s problem was drugs. The idea that she was naturally this disconnected made me uneasy. It didn’t help that she was dressed in a white concoction of ribbons and bows, and wearing a white rose in her hair with a stem long enough to run through her teeth.
“It’s about Miss Simms,” the short one said. “The agent? The one who died?” She reached into her handbag, pulled out a fat, battered envelope, and thrust it into my stomach. “She said we were to give it to you. She called you some name—”
“Who did?”
“Miss Simms,” the tall one said. “She was going to be my agent. She read my novel and just loved it. She said I was very clear. Every time my character thought about something, I was always careful to put ‘she was thinking’ right there on the page.”
“Last Wednesday,” the short one said. “We went to Miss Simms’s office to pick up some material for Gamble here—”
“Gamble Daere,” the tall one said. “I thought it sounded distinctive. I didn’t want to have one of those names that sounded like all the other names.”
“The thing is,” the short one said, “it wasn’t material for Gamble. And when we opened it we found—” She blushed a deep, bright red. “Well, it’s private and it’s personal and it’s none of my business, if you ask me. So you take it. She told us to give it to you.”
“But you never would have thought it,” Gamble Daere said. “It just goes to show you you never know.”
“When did Julie tell you to give me this?” I asked. “She died Thursday.”
“She died Thursday night,” the short one said. “We talked to her Thursday morning. Thing is, we live upstate—”
“In Goshen,” the tall one said.
“So we couldn’t come down to her office and give it to her, not right away. So we called and asked if she wanted us to mail it to her, but she said definitely not. So we were bringing it to the funeral. She told us to look for you. She told us if we couldn’t find her at the funeral, we should look for a very tall, very blond woman probably dressed in pants.”
“They wouldn’t let us in,” the tall one sniffed. “We had to stand on the steps, and then not very far up the steps. There was a big line that went all around the block, and they kept us out there in the cold.”
The short one threw the tall one a look of long-suffering exasperation. Then she thrust the envelope into my stomach again.
“You take this,” she said. “We were supposed to deliver it to Miss Simms or give it to you to give to her. I don’t know what you’re going to do with it now she’s dead, but I don’t want the responsibility for it anymore.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do now she’s dead, either,” the tall one said. “Miss Simms was one of the few people in publishing willing to look beyond personal prejudice at real talent.” She fixed me with a knowing glare. “Everybody around here has friends,” she said ominously.
The short one pulled at the tall one’s beribboned sleeve. “We won’t bother you anymore,” she said, trying to push Gamble Daere into the background. “You take that and do what you think best with it.”
CHAPTER 11
“OH GOD,” JANINE SAID. “I’m sorry. I should have realized what was going on, but I was so caught up in that Allard woman’s nonsense, I was not on this planet. They didn’t destroy you, did they, dear?”
She stabbed her finger at the elevator button, managing to look worried and hurried at once. She also looked pleased, cat-swallowed-the-canary pleased, safe behind her wall of Belonging. She was like this whenever she met “outsiders,” no matter how often it happened over how long a period of time. It was as if her job as a romance editor was the equivalent of a position on the high school cheerleading squad. The mere fact of it guaranteed Difference. She could not be mistaken for one of the poor mortals out there.
I turned away from her and said, “Just a couple of fans. No problem.”
“Looks like they stuck you with a proposal.” She pointed to the envelope I was holding. I turned it over in my hand and then stuck it out of sight in my tote bag.
“Something like that,” I said. “I don’t mind.” I wanted to make a dash for the nearest ladies room to look the thing through in private, but I didn’t dare. Whatever Julie Simms wanted badly enough to give those two women a second interview would have to wait until I had a chance to lock myself in Phoebe’s suite.
What Julie intended to give them was no mystery. She had a standard “information kit for romance writers,” a formidable, pessimistic overview of the genre meant to scare the worst of them into some other line of work.
The elevator doors slid open and we stepped inside.
“What’s Mary doing to you now?” I asked Janine.
“She’s not doing it to me,” Janine said. “I’ve protested of course, but anyone would. What she’s done is gone to the Organizing Committee and claimed Julie was proposing her as her second for the Line Committee.”
“But Julie couldn’t stand the woman,” I said. The Line Committee translated as the Charlotte Brontë Award for Best Category Romance Line of the Year, and it was the most important committee at the conference. The winning line was allowed to display the picture of the little gold statue of Charlotte Brontë on all its books and in all its television advertising for the next year. Janine’s Fires of Love line had been nominated, as had Dell’s Candlelight Ecstasy and Simon and Schuster’s Silhouette Desire. These were the sexiest lines in the business, the ones old-time romance writers raged about when they accused “all those new people” of perpetrating “soft-core porn.” They weren’t soft-core porn, but they had more good parts per square inch than anything but.
“I’m not saying anyone’s taking her seriously,” Janine said. “No one wants her on the committee anyway. But it seems she has a letter from Julie, saying that if anything happens to Julie Simms…Well, you see what I mean.”
“Julie Simms wrote a letter telling the Organizing Committee what to do in case anything happened to her?”
Janine shrugged. “We’re going to have to turn it over to the police, of course. They’ve been crawling all over here since Thursday, and now it’s going to be worse.”
“It’s a little strange,” I said. “It sounds as if—”
“Oh, I know,” Janine said. “It sounds as if she knew she was going to die. But of course, that’s ridiculous. She was probably worried she’d get sick, and she wanted to be sure whoever took her place on the committee would do what she wanted. I suppose she thought Mary would be so grateful to be taken back into the fold, she’d have complete loyalty. Although how Julie could think something like that is beyond me.”
“She wouldn’t,” I said. “Mary Allard wouldn’t know loyalty from a hole in the wall.”
“That’s exactly what the rest of us think,” Janine said. “And we don’t know what we’re going to do with her this evening, because we’ve already picked Julie’s replacement. Not that I’m on the committee, of course, but they did ask me about you when your name came up, and—”
“I’m supposed to be sitting in Julie’s place on the Line Committee?”
Janine stared at the floor and fidgeted. “Well,” she said. “We all thought… it did seem, since the police insisted on harping on this ridiculous theory… we knew you couldn’t—”
“A kind of vote of confidence,” I suggested, wishing the people with my “best interests at heart” would leave me alone. One of the things that goes along with being a member of the Line Committee is an all-out attack by the editors in chief. Romance novels by the gross arrive in one’s mailbox. Posters of half-naked men and women staring intently into each other’s eyes pile up like copies of the Sunday Times during a sanitation workers’ strike. Steel-eyed clones of Sandra Dee corner you in restaurants and give speeches about the Necessity for Fairness and Objectivity, which will lead you to vote for…
“We thought it would be perfectly clear to everyone that we didn’t think you had anything to do with Julie’s death if we put you on the Line Committee,” Janine said. “And besides, you really are the best person for the job. I mean, it can’t be an editor with a line up for the award, and it can’t be Lydia, because Lydia has been flying since Myrra’s funeral. So.”
“Right,” I said.
“Don’t worry about anything,” Janine said. “You just come down to the meeting tonight and see what happens with Mary. If we have to honor her letter, we will, but then we’ll put you in Julie’s place on the Individual Series.”
The elevator doors slid open on seventeen and she stepped out. They were about to shut again when my hand shot out and caught them.
“Just a minute.” I blushed. I knew what I wanted to ask, but I didn’t know why I wanted to ask it. Janine was poised just outside the elevator door, looking studiedly curious. “It was something Hazel Ganz said,” I stammered. “About Fires of Love. And market shakeouts—”
“Oh, that.” Janine scratched the side of her nose. “We had a little trouble after Romantic Life. I mean, the first couple of months for Fires of Love—” She shrugged her shoulders. “I took care of that,” she said. “If there’s a market shakeout, we’re going to be the only line left. There’s never been anything like Fires of Love.”
“Right,” I said.
“Let me worry about that sort of thing,” she said. She gave me a little wave. “Back to the computers.”
If I was a real romance writer, like Phoebe, I would have put that “she said gaily.”
CHAPTER 12
“NUMBER EIGHTEEN. PASSION’S WHISPER by Leyla Johns.”
“Oh God.”
“That’s the one that takes place entirely in a sauna. After they’ve spent two solid weeks together in this sauna—I’m not kidding, they don’t do anything else—he makes his move and she faints.”
“And the hero’s name is Bryce Cannon. I’m not sure if she was misreading the news when she wrote it, or if she’s got some weird Freudian thing about guns.”
“Listen to this: ‘Amelia heard the knock on her door and jumped, startled, to her feet Telling herself to have courage, she concentrated on the sound of her steel-sharp heels as they crossed the red, blue, and gold mosaic of the entry-foyer floor, heading for the oaken door.’”
“Oh God.”
“Can’t we just discard the ones we know are impossible? We’ve got a hundred and twenty-two titles on that list.”
“What is that thing, anyway, a gothic?”
“Number nineteen. Flame of Desire, by Marianna Brand.”
“Oh please.”
I took the only empty seat at the table and looked over Hazel Ganz’s shoulder to see what was going on. Nineteen entries, nineteen “certainly nots” penciled into the margin of her voting card. Hazel looked fierce, fierce and disgusted and ready to give it all up for a life of professional assassination.
“Where do you stand on pseudonyms?” she asked, turning around in her chair to avoid the sight of Flame of Desire, a Fires of Love Book with a painting of a half-naked blonde with breasts three times too large for her frame being helped into a back bend by a tall, dark stranger on the cover.
“What do you mean?”
“You have to write under a pseudonym, right? And the company owns your pseudonym, so you can’t take it with you, right? I mean, if the publisher treats you like dirt, and you want to go to another company, you can’t take your pseudonym with you. So you aren’t anybody. You’ve got no leverage.”
“Right,” I said. “Romance writers should own their pseudonyms.”
“Romance writers should write under their own names,” Hazel said. “They can’t copyright your real name. Would John Irving write under a pseudonym? Would Norman Mailer? The way it is with us, we can’t build up any equity. They can do anything they want to us. They do anything they want to us.”
The chairman rapped her gavel for attention. I took advantage of the lull to grab a handful of heart-shaped valentine candies from the bowl in front of me. They were the kind with messages printed on them that turned to sand in your teeth.
“Please,” the chairman said. “We’re on number nineteen. Can we vote on number nineteen?”
“‘Oh, Roger, how can you believe I’m that kind of woman?’” someone squeaked.
“Please,” the chairman said. “This is just a nomination list. We have to have a nomination list for the cocktail party Sunday night.
That’s tomorrow, people.”
“We ought to restrict the damn list to four,” someone said.
“Then we’d never get out of here,” someone else said.
“Number twenty,” the chairman said. “Jewel of Desire, by Anastasia Smythe.”
“Listen to this.” Hazel Ganz was on her feet, waving the book in the air. “‘She felt the hard line of his muscular thighs as he pressed against her. His breath was hot and ragged in her ears as his hands roved over every inch of her body, probing her depths.’”
“My God,” the chairman said. “That’s practically pornography.”
“It’s the direction we should be going in,” Hazel Ganz insisted.
“We’ve already put two pieces of absolute crap on this list, for ridiculously sentimental reasons, which is exactly what all those people out there sneer at us for. We ought to put at least one title on the list that’s an example of the best romance can do.”
I didn’t think the best romance could do would ever appear in a category line. The publishers are afraid of losing the “instant identification” that makes them so much money, so author’s guidelines are too detailed, and formulas are too rigid. What results is usually an unsurprising mix of drivel and sentimentality, buoyed up by lengthy descriptions of the exact path his manhood travels to the core of her womanhood.
I knew a full-scale filibuster when I heard one, however. I sank in my chair, prepared to eat my way through valentine candies until it was over. I reached into my tote bag for my cigarettes and came out instead with Camille and the white envelope I’d picked up in the lobby. They came out together because Camille was chewing the envelope, having already destroyed the computer card for the payment of my electric bill. I decided this was basically my fault (would you like to be left at the bottom of a tote bag for half an hour?) and put both Camille and her toy on the table. Then I found my cigarettes and lit one, resolutely ignoring the disapproving glare of the little girl in pink and green makeup on my right. By then, Camille had given up the envelope and begun worrying the dish of valentine candies.