Wicked, Loving Murder

by Jane Haddam

  Wicked, Loving Murder

  A Patience McKenna Mystery

  Orania Papazoglou writing as Jane Haddam

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media

  Ebook

  For Bill

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  Preview: Death’s savage Passion

  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 receptionist’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.”

  I found a match and lit my cigarette, very slowly, very carefully. She still wasn’t making much sense. I was no longer
worried about her being a complete lunatic, but I did think she might be angry enough to be unreliable. Besides, I wanted to return to the always absorbing process of self-flagellation. I was comfortable there.

  The social worker had no intention of letting me go. “Literary Services,” she told me, “is where you send them a manuscript and they evaluate it. They’re supposed to tell you how to make it publishable. They’re supposed to tell you if it never will be publishable. They charge you a fee.”

  I coughed. It was a bogus cough, and we both knew it.

  “They charge you a fee every time,” the social worker said. “The same fee. I wrote a novel. That’s a hundred and twenty-five dollars every time they read it. They read it six times.”

  This time my cough was real. I’d swallowed smoke. “Yes,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I’ve heard of things like that.”

  “Heard of them!” She seemed mortally offended that I’d heard of them. “I’ll tell you what I think. I don’t think they tell you how to make it publishable at all. I think they tell you things that won’t make any difference, so they keep you coming back. If you did end up being published, you wouldn’t be any use to them anymore.”

  I took a deep drag on my cigarette and decided not to say any more. I knew what she was talking about—I even knew she was right—but I didn’t see what I could do about it that she wasn’t already doing. “Literary services” is a racket. What you need when you finish a novel is an agent or a friend at a publishing house, not an evaluator.

  As far as the social worker was concerned, what she needed was a lawyer. “I’m going to get them. I’m going to go to the Better Business Bureau, and I’m going to sue. Just you wait. By the time I’m finished with them—”

  An overfed, overanxious young man with black hair just a little too long to be fashionable came chugging down the corridor, followed closely by Janet. His flesh was squeezed into a Brooks Brothers gray flannel two sizes too small for him. Perspiration had soaked through his jacket and made large dark semicircles under his arms. He held out his hands to the social worker.

  “Mrs. Haskell!” He was working overtime to make himself sound exultantly pleased. “You should have called ahead! We could have had lunch!”

  “I’ve had my lunch.” She brushed by him without touching his hands. “I want to talk to you,” she said, stalking into the corridor. “I’m going down to sit in your office and I’m not moving till I’ve had my say.”

  The young man frowned at her back. Then he adjusted his tie, straightened his back as if some mental nanny were reminding him of the benefits of Good Posture, and turned to me.

  “You must be Miss McKenna,” he said. “I’m Jack Brookfield.”

  I noted his age—no more than thirty-five—and decided he had to be Alida’s son, not her husband. That was just as well. I had never heard of Alida having a husband.

  “Patience Campbell McKenna,” I said.

  “We’re all thrilled to have you here. We couldn’t wait to see if you looked like—” He stopped. He had apparently decided that mentioning my newspaper photographs might not, under the circumstances, be a good idea. He cast a look over his shoulder, as if he expected to see an impression of Mrs. Haskell’s back on the air in the corridor. “Amateurs,” he said. “You don’t know what a relief it’s going to be to work with a real professional.”

  “I don’t know if I want to be thought of as a relief,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s a compliment, Miss McKenna, it’s a compliment.” He turned at the corridor and smiled at me, but he was already straightening his clothes and edging away. “I suppose I’d better go see to Mrs. Haskell. They get so overwrought, really. They don’t realize—”

  He whirled away again and plunged into the corridor. I put my cigarette out in the ashtray, half-smoked. I was just beginning to think I ought to spend some time considering the scene I’d just witnessed when a light went off on the phone on Janet’s desk, and she stood up and smiled at me.

  “That’s Miss Brookfield now,” she said. “You can go right in.”

  TWO

  WRITING ENTERPRISES BEGAN AS a single publication, Writing Magazine. I used to subscribe to it when I was at Emma Willard. I wanted to absorb a little of the atmosphere of the milieu, to feel like a writer while I was trying to become one. I failed. Writing was a stolid little how-to periodical concentrating on first-person technique, correct manuscript preparation, and admonitions to Write Only When Inspired.

  Alida Brookfield changed all that. The old staff had been a superannuated Addams family whose religion was Literature.

  Alida Brookfield was a businesswoman whose religion was fads. She imported Indian clothes when everyone wanted Indian clothes. She sold electric trains from a suffocatingly precious specialty store on East Fifty-fourth Street. She was even involved, once, with the manufacture of contraband hula hoops.

  Writing promised to be more profitable than any of these. She bought it in 1972. In 1984, she still showed no inclination to move to another line of business. She had found her home.

  Alida Brookfield was not worried about correct manuscript preparation, and she couldn’t have cared less about inspiration. She changed the name of her newly acquired periodical to Writing: The Magazine for Professional Freelancers and concentrated on the financially exciting possibilities. There would always be people who couldn’t write but wanted to be writers. There would always be people whose personal get-rich-quick fantasy was to produce the next sex-and-sin bestseller in their sleep. There would always be people who didn’t know the score.

  Her staff concentrated on the writing and selling of magazine articles—with the emphasis on “sell.” Unwilling to thoroughly discourage their readers—thoroughly discouraged readers stop buying magazines—they concentrated on selling to magazines whose standards were low and whose rates of payment were even lower. MAKE BIG MONEY WRITING FOR THE SPECIALTY MAGAZINES, one cover promised. The author of that article was one Curt Hardy, whose credits included Nebraska Heritage, The Antiquing Gazette, and Cat and Dog Times. Cat and Dog Times pays a cent and a half a word. Nebraska Heritage pays half a cent. Since Writing couldn’t ignore book publishing completely (too many people are working on epics about Bright Young Men Destroyed by Success), there was “Selling Your Novel,” by Jean Pandric. Miss Pandric’s new spy thriller had just been issued by Sparrowdale Press in Muncie, Indiana.

  Laced through all this nonsense was some very bad advice. Writing was very militant about what it liked to call Writer’s Rights. It urged its readers to Stand Up for Themselves with editors. If editors didn’t like simultaneous submissions, that was just too bad. Magazine writing paid so little, writers couldn’t afford not to make simultaneous submissions. If the editors of Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, discovering you had submitted the same article to both of them at the same time, declared you’d never work for either of them again—they were just bluffing. If they weren’t, you didn’t need them anyway.

  I have been in this business six years. I have been very lucky. My articles have appeared in most of the national women’s magazines. My romance novels were issued by a major New York paperback house. Like most people in my position, Writing made me furious. The sight of it on a newsstand could paralyze me. The sight of it in one of my friend’s living rooms could incite me to violence. I don’t much like any of the writing magazines, but at least Miss Brookfield’s competition, The Writer and Writer’s Digest, made an effort to portray the business honestly. Alida Brookfield did not see the point in honesty. Writing earned its advertising revenue from vanity presses, make-a-thousand-dollars-a-week-in-your-spare-time schemes, and bogus literary agents based in Iowa. I once took a copy with a coverline on “How to Crack the Categories” and stuffed it down a lover’s garbage disposal. I broke the garbage disposal. I didn’t mind paying for it.

  I did mind being in Alida Brookfield’s office, but there was nothing I could do about it. Phoebe had blackmailed me into it. Phoebe c
ould blackmail me into taking on the Iranian army if she went to work at it.

  Alida Brookfield’s office was a large corner room with a wall of windows looking up Park Avenue South to the Pan Am Building. What had been saved in the nondecoration of the reception area had been spent here. The hardwood floor had been sanded, polished, and covered with Persian throw rugs in reds and golds. The desk was a massive mahogany affair that looked more stable than the building. There was a wet bar in one corner. It opened on a glass-topped coffee table and a conversational grouping of plush-seated chairs.

  Miss Brookfield rose as soon as I came in. It was like watching a wax dummy move. She was sixty-two, but she looked as if she’d been artificially preserved at the age of fifty. Her white hair was twisted into a French knot. Her green silk shirtwaist was straight from the third floor of Saks. Her nails were just round enough and just long enough and just palely colored enough for fashion. Her skin was plastic-smooth. She looked laminated.

  She gestured with one hand at the conversational grouping and with the other at the two people standing to the left of her desk.

  “Miss McKenna,” she said. “How wonderful to see you here.” She didn’t smile. Her voice had no inflection.

  The thin little man with the bald spot shifted from one foot to the other, looked at me, looked at the ceiling, looked at the floor, and then said,

  “Maybe I ought to come back later. Maybe—”

  Alida Brookfield tapped the top of her desk. The sound was louder than I would have expected.

  “This is Mr. Lahler, our comptroller.” She pointed at the thin man. “And this,” she gestured to the young woman on Mt. Lahler’s right, “is Felicity Aldershot, head of our Writing Workshops and Correspondence Schools Division.”

  Felicity Aldershot bore an uncanny resemblance to Glenda Jackson. She sounded like Glenda Jackson, too.

  “We’re so excited to have you here,” she said, in a voice that owed something to the British midlands and something more to dramatic training. “We’ve all been so looking forward to this project.”