by Jane Haddam
“Now,” I said. “Back to the point. It was perfectly simple—”
Nick groaned. “If it was perfectly simple, you wouldn’t have Martinez on the verge of suicide.”
“But it was,” I said. “It was perfectly simple.” I reached for the papers I had been writing on during dinner. “Look. What did we all know about Fires of Love?”
“It had a hundred-million-dollar year.”
“And nobody could understand why,” I said. “Amelia kept saying it didn’t make sense, and I didn’t listen to her. In fact, almost nobody liked that line. Even Hazel Ganz voted against every Fires of Love book at the First Novel meeting, and she writes for Fires of Love.”
“So?” Nick said. “I thought publishing people were notorious for not knowing a good thing when they saw it.”
“Sure they are,” I said. “But in this case, it wasn’t an editor in some obscure publishing company saying something wouldn’t work. It was Amelia Samson, who doesn’t know much about writing, but does know more about marketing than Burger King and McDonald’s put together. And she was right. Fires of Love didn’t do one thing some other line didn’t do better. And that in a field well beyond the saturation point when Fires of Love started.
“Now look at this. Romantic Life, Farret’s last line before Fires of Love did so badly the brass was threatening to fire everybody and shut down romance operations altogether. Fires of Love didn’t do too well the first month it was out, either. Then all of a sudden, it turned into a smash. And Myrra got suspicious.
“The thing is, she had to have seen those figures at the beginning of April. She’d see the advances. She was on that Advisory Board. I think in the beginning she thought it was just Amelia or Lydia or even Phoebe hyping the bookstore sales. Go out to Omaha, as Phoebe put it, and instead of saying you sold at one bookstore, say you sold at three. Make out a couple of extra cards, pay the difference for a couple of hundred books yourself. Phoebe and Lydia and Amelia could have done it financially. So could Julie.”
“But why would anyone want to?” Nick complained.
“Everybody had a reason,” Phoebe said quickly. “I might have needed my first category to be a success, because all my other books are successes, and I wouldn’t want to look a failure. Amelia’s been slipping in sales for a while. She can’t get used to the sex scenes. Lydia’s been slipping, too. There isn’t as much call for bodice rippers as there used to be.”
“And Julie had clients to protect,” I went on. “When you get to Janine and Marty Caine, things get a little more sinister. Then it has to be major fraud.
“And it was, but not of the kind you’d expect. Janine wasn’t trying to make money, she was just trying to keep her job. She’d already been responsible for the biggest, most expensive failure in publishing. Her only options were to make a success out of Fires of Love or leave Farret. And she’d never get as good a position again.
“So. What she did was to fix the computer system. When you punched in a code for Myrra or Julie or Phoebe, you got a perfectly accurate report on books sold where, when, and how. When you punched executive office code, or Janine’s personal code, or Marty’s, you got the inflated figures. The head of the accounting department got inflated figures, with money shaved from other divisions. The peon in the contracts office who made out the checks and the middle management flunky who had to okay them got accurate figures. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, it would have taken years to figure it out. I figured most of it out and Marty Caine had to explain it to me.”
“Did Marty Caine figure it out beforehand?” Phoebe asked. “He didn’t seem—surprised.”
“I don’t think he was,” I said. “He kept giving us hints, too, you know. He kept telling us there were problems. And he kept telling us Janine knew how to handle the problems. But Marty Caine wasn’t a danger to Janine. He had the same problems she did.
“Myrra, on the other hand, was a real disaster. As soon as she smelled something wrong, she started digging. And digging. And digging. And when Myrra started digging, she found things. I think Janine must have realized there wasn’t much time.”
“How did she get that old woman out to Riverside Park at two-thirty in the morning?” Nick asked.
“She called up and said she was Pay,” Phoebe said. “She did the same thing to me, the night Leslie Ashe was stabbed. She probably said she was Pay and in trouble and please bring the keys, and Myrra—”
“Those keys.” Nick sounded as if he was being stabbed himself. “The keys that weren’t supposed to exist. You could have told Martinez about those keys in the first place, you know. It would have saved me two days at the 20th Precinct.”
“It didn’t seem important at the time,” I said. “And besides, Janine didn’t take the keys to get into my apartment, she took them to get into Myrra’s apartment.” I looked around the room. “This apartment. You know what I mean. Anyway, Janine being Janine being Janine, and not wanting to get caught too soon, took Esmeralda to the pound. That kept the dog from going right back to Myrra’s apartment and alarming the doorman. She kept most of Myrra’s jewelry, but she left one earring on Esmeralda’s collar. I don’t think she knew what to do with the necklace, so she sent it to the Jewels of Love Committee.
“Now, the afternoon of Myrra’s funeral, Julie walked up to her and said Hazel Ganz was complaining her book wasn’t making enough money. Janine freaked. She hadn’t been able to get into Myrra’s apartment. Julie was one of the few people on earth who would be able to tell what was going wrong with the executive reports. The last thing Janine wanted was to have Julie go over Hazel’s statements item by item, then sit on the Line Committee and go over those executive reports. And Janine had to submit those executive reports to the committee. She needed them to counterbalance the reports of the booksellers, which were largely negative.
“Janine either called Julie and said she was me, or said she was herself and speaking for me, and asked Julie to come to my apartment. She probably said she was me, because she’d want to cover herself. And it had to be my apartment, because she wanted to link Myrra and Julie, if she had to. She didn’t expect Myrra to leave me the apartment. She thought someone might have overheard her call on the night of Myrra’s death.
“Anyway, she used Myrra’s keys to get into my apartment. Julie came in, she stabbed her, put Myrra’s earring in her purse, then turned off all the lights and locked up. Then she used that penlight thing and drew the bolt from the outside. It wasn’t hard to do, you know. It’s not a very strong electric magnet, but my bolt is nothing more than one of those little notched things. And I tried it this afternoon—”
“On the guest bathroom,” Phoebe sighed. “We got it locked. We just couldn’t get it open again.”
“You know, Marty suspected that part, too. That penlight thing is part of a game the marketing guys have set up in the hall at Farret. They make discs move like flying saucers. And they’re right out in the hall across from Janine’s office. I saw them playing it the day after Julie’s murder.
“Anyway, the bolt kept Barbara from coming in and finding the body, which kept me from having an alibi, which is what Janine wanted. I think I’m going to give up telling Barbara stories in public. At any rate, I was too fast. I got Carlos and had the place broken into right away. The times were wrong.
“In the meantime, however, Janine was covering herself. She took the knife, which she didn’t need any longer—or she thought she didn’t—and brought it over to Julie’s apartment building sometime early on the morning after the second murder. Jaimie Hallman found it there the next morning. He was afraid he’d be suspected, so he started trying to give it to me. He figured—I don’t know what he figured. But the police certainly didn’t want to listen to him.
“Now, on Saturday, Janine got a shock. She knew Mary Allard smelled a fish in the whole Fires of Love operation, but she wasn’t worried about it. Mary Allard talked to booksellers. She kept a close eye on her line and everyone else�
��s. But nobody ever listened to her. Ever since that audit, she’d been a pariah.
“Then Mary Allard turned up with a letter from Julie asking to put her on the Line Committee. I think Julie knew a lot more than she was letting on, you know. That business about ‘if anything happens to me’ makes me squirm.
“Now Janine really had a problem. Mary wanted nothing more than to catch one of what she called the ‘pink and greens’ in something dishonest. And she had to know Fires of Love wasn’t doing as well as Janine said it was. Janine had Leslie Ashe, too. Leslie was hauling around a copy of Myrra’s royalty reports, trying to find a way to get a look at those printouts.
“Saturday night Leslie asked to go up to the suite and get copies of some of Myrra’s books. Janine called Phoebe, said she was me, and made an appointment to meet at the Farret hospitality suite at six-thirty. When Leslie left the table, Janine took a hotel kitchen knife, followed her, waited till she got in the door on five, and then started stabbing. She didn’t have a lot of time, and she didn’t do a very good job. It didn’t matter. She didn’t need to kill Leslie, anyway, just deflect her until after the conference.
“She did have to kill Mary, however. And she had to implicate me thoroughly. You know, all that Sunday, every time I saw Janine, something else turned up in my tote bag. The keys. The real murder knife.”
“How did she get the knife back?” Nick said. “I thought Jaimie Hallman had it and lost it.”
“She stole it from him in the elevator when he was coming to Phoebe’s suite. It was a nice touch, but it didn’t matter. She could have used any knife.
“Anyway, she kept dropping things in my bag. She dropped the knife in there during the preliminaries at the reception. Camille hated it. She hated it. I had to take her out of there and put her in my pocket. I thought it was just that Janine had bumped into me and upset the cat. I didn’t find the knife until later.
“I found the knife while I was trying to sober Phoebe up. I took it out of my bag and put it on the couch. Janine found it on the couch and took it back.
“Then she really did something smart. She didn’t ask Mary to meet her. She took a wad of computer printouts from her purse—not the real ones, mind you—and pretended to be trying to get rid of it. Mary followed her. Of course Mary followed her.”
“Across the stage,” Phoebe said.
“Exactly. I saw Mary. I took off after Mary. Janine heard the commotion and started to run. Mary took off after Janine. I don’t know how Janine got Mary up the staircase, but she did. I got to the staircase half a minute after Janine escaped.”
“And this is supposed to be simple,” Nick said. “You give me a headache.”
I looked at the light and shadow cast by the candles. I would have to do something about furniture. I would have to do it soon. Myrra’s furniture would be sold to set up a trust to pay the maintenance fees on the apartment—probably until the year 3000—but in the meantime I could afford a little Danish modern. Or Upper West Side antique. At least a bed.
“Where’s Camille?” I yawned.
“In the fondue,” Phoebe said.
I looked into the fondue pot. A furry black head ducked just below the rim, licking paws covered with chocolate.
“Damn,” I said. “This morning she was trying to sit in a can of tuna fish. I must have given her a complex.”
“You’ll have to get her out of there and clean her up,” Phoebe said.
“She’ll clean herself up,” Nick said. “Somebody open another bottle of wine.”
I passed him the wine and told him to open it himself. I was thinking about Myrra’s apartment, now mine, with its six walk-in closets and full pantry and overhead storage spaces. That place rattled in the night. Things moved.
I took the wine from Nick and opened it myself. Maybe, if I could get them drunk enough, they would agree to camp out with me for the night.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Patience McKenna Mysteries
ONE
MURDER IS ONLY THE beginning. No matter how final it seems when it happens—no matter how drastically you feel it’s Changed Everything—for innocent bystanders, murder is only a prelude to a protracted bureaucratic nightmare that promises to outlast eternity.
I came to Writing Enterprises for the first time on the last day of the trial in what the newspapers insisted on calling the Agenworth case. It wasn’t the Agenworth case. No one had ever been arrested for the murder of Myrra Agenworth, and no one ever would be. Myrra Agenworth’s murderer had been arrested and tried and convicted of the murder of someone else. That was going to have to satisfy everyone.
I was due at Writing Enterprises at three-thirty, and I was late. I’d gone to Center Street to hear sentence pronounced. Myrra had been my friend. I had had something—some people said too much—to do with catching her murderer. I thought hearing sentence pronounced would be some kind of closure.
I was wrong. Maybe there is no closure in situations of this kind. Maybe there is, but I didn’t want to find it. All I know is, going down to that courthouse accomplished exactly three things: it started the guilt machine working again; it allowed me to be cornered by newspaper reporters for the five millionth time; and it made me late at Writing Enterprises. The guilt was the worst of it, and the best. At that time of my life, I was hanging onto guilt like a sky diver hangs onto a parachute. Guilt made everything else possible.
Writing Enterprises was on the twentieth floor of an overly ornate pre-World War I building between Twentieth and Twenty-first streets on Park Avenue South. The candy concession was run by an alcoholic who spent most of his time in the public phone booth on the other side of the lobby, talking to his bookie. The three self-service elevators never managed to be more than one third in service. It was a very bad building in a very good part of town. The owner had to be holed up in Jamaica somewhere, blissfully unaware that commercial rents in the Gramercy Park area were now well over thirty-five dollars a square foot.
The twentieth was the top floor. The elevator opened directly on the Writing Enterprises reception area. If I hadn’t been so involved with my own problems, I might have noticed how seedy that reception area looked. The carpet was third-rate gray industrial broadloom, worn in the corners, stained near the edges of the receptionist’s desk. The furniture was rickety and gouged, as if it had been picked up cheap at a bankrupt novelty company’s distress sale. Either Alida Brookfield was working overtime to keep the decor of her headquarters in tune with the decor of the rest of the building, or Writing Enterprises wasn’t doing as well as she said it was.
The idea that Writing Enterprises might be having financial trouble was so ludicrous I didn’t even consider it. As I said, I was involved with my own problems. What do you do when the death of a friend leaves you so much better off than you’d been before she died that you don’t want to go back? It had taken me a year to admit it, but once I had, I couldn’t get it out of my head. I didn’t want to go back. Before Myrra died, I was a magazine writer who did category romance novels on the side to pay the rent. I lived in a one-room third-floor walk-up on West Eighty-second Street. I took the subway everywhere, even at night. Now I had a book coming out from Doubleday, detailing my involvement in the Agenworth mess—a real book, with my name on the cover and my picture on the back flap. I had inherited Myrra’s eleven-room apartment in the Braedenvoorst. I hadn’t been on a subway for months. I missed Myrra, but I didn’t want to go back to being who I was and what I was before she died. I couldn’t convince myself that catching her murderer gave me the right to the things I had because she’d been murdered.
If that sounds irrational, so be it. That cold afternoon in February, I was feeling very irrational. I was also very preoccupied. If I hadn’t been, the scene that erupted in the reception area would have made more of an impression on me.
It started with a woman with a face like a social worker’s and a body like a piece of beef jerky. She came in just after I sat down, marched up to the rec
eptionist’s desk, and banged her fist on the carriage of the IBM Selectric II.
“I want to see Jack Brookfield,” she said. “And I want to see him now.”
The receptionist was a pimply, nervous girl named Janet. She had buck teeth, bitten-to-the-quick nails, and less than a high school education. Faced with what looked like the Wrath of God in the person of a dimly remembered maiden aunt, she fell back on formula.
“If you’ll take a seat, I’ll see if he’s in,” she said. She sounded like a B-movie actress impersonating a thirties telephone operator. The social worker wasn’t having any.
“If he’s not in, I’ll wait,” she said. “I’ll wait if I have to wait a week.”
Janet bit her lip. She looked from the social worker, to me, to the social worker again. Then she looked back at me and smiled.
“I’ll see if Miss Brookfield’s ready yet,” she said. She got up, hurried into the corridor that started behind her desk, and disappeared.
The social worker turned her attention to me. She hadn’t noticed me when she came in, which surprised me a little. I am six feet tall and weigh a hundred twenty-five. I have very long blond hair that falls to my waist. I am conspicuous at the best of times. That day I was wearing a long black skirt, black suede ankle boots, and a violently lavender sweater with leg warmers to match. I would have stood out at a convention of eccentrics.
The social worker didn’t see me at all. She marched up to my chair, planted her feet wide apart and her hands on her hips, and stared at the wall just above my head. She was a small woman. If I’d been standing up, she’d have been looking at my chest.
“Do you have something to do with these people?” she asked me.
I rummaged in the pocket of my skirt for my cigarettes. For all I knew, she was one of those people who stand on street corners telling you the Russians have stolen their shoes.
“Don’t have anything to do with Literary Services,” she said. “Literary Services!” The expression on her face made it clear that, as far as she was concerned, she was uttering the Ultimate Obscenity. She looked down at the top of my head. “It’s a racket,” she said, a note of shrewdness creeping into her voice. “It’s expensive, too. Literary Services—the only thing they service around here is their wallets, and they’re not going to do it at the expense of mine.”