Wicked, Loving Murder

by Jane Haddam

  Alida Brookfield began to lead the way to the conversational grouping. “We were discussing the consequences of last year’s project,” she said. “We expanded the Publishing Division, you know.” She frowned. “You did realize we had a Publishing Division?”

  I knew they had a Publishing Division. Writing Enterprises Books put out such titles as Magazine Writing for Fun and Profit, Where Do You Get Your Ideas? A Sourcebook, and How to Make the Bestseller List Your First Time Out. About two years ago, they had entered the category market. Writing Enterprises Books now published third-rate romances, fifth-rate westerns, tenth-rate mysteries, and unspeakable science fiction. At the back of each book was a ten-page essay on How to Write a (Whatever) by the author.

  “We took our fiction list international eighteen months ago,” Alida Brookfield said. “We’re just now getting the returns. It was all dear Felicity’s idea.”

  Felicity Aldershot nearly winced at the “dear.” She overcame the impulse. She smiled instead.

  “Miss Aldershot’s from England,” Alida Brookfield said. “She’s been with us over eight years. She’s made quite a difference to Writing Enterprises.”

  “Oh,” Felicity Aldershot said. “Oh, no.”

  “It was her idea to take the magazine international,” Alida said, as if stating something for the record. “The year after she came. Then Literary Services a year later. I had no idea how large a market there was in Europe.”

  Felicity Aldershot looked uncomfortable. Alida let her stay that way for a few seconds, then leaned back in her chair and sent both Felicity and Martin Lahler what my mother would call a Significant Look. Mr. Lahler started trotting toward the door.

  Felicity Aldershot was more gracious. She smiled, said, “So nice to have met you” in an Upstairs, Downstairs voice, and made her way to the door with measured dignity. She closed the door with a sharp click. It was as if she’d run up a flag announcing that Miss Brookfield and I were now to be left alone.

  Miss Brookfield offered me a pastel-papered cigarette from the gold cigarette box on the coffee table, took one herself, and sat down on one of the plush chairs.

  “I suppose we ought to get right down to business,” she said. When Alida Brookfield talked business, her voice sounded like tin. “We’d like to devote forty-eight pages of the July issue of Writing to an overview of the romance publishing business. Do you mind if I call it a business?” She looked as if she expected me to mind.

  I shook my head. “It’s all a business,” I said. “Even literary publishing.”

  She was surprised and pleased. “That’s fine, then,” she said. “We try to treat it all as a business here. We try to teach our readers to approach writing and publishing as a business proposition subject to the rules and customs of business procedure.” She wasn’t saying anything, and she knew it. “For our romance section,” she said, sounding very careful, as if she were considering this possibility for the first time, “we would like to include interviews with several successfully published romance writers. We’d like to talk to them about how they write what they write, why they write what they write, how they first broke into print—”

  “Miss Brookfield.” I reached into my pocket for my pack of Merits. Alida Brookfield’s pastel-papered specials were the original coffin nails. They were strong enough to pierce wood.

  “You talked all this over with Phoebe weeks ago,” I said. “I know because it took her most of the last ten days to talk me into it. What it amounts to is this: you want to run sidebar interviews with Amelia Samson, Lydia Wentward, Phoebe Damereaux, Verna Train, Hazel Ganz, and Ivy Samuels Tree to accompany your special section articles. They will only agree to give these interviews if someone they trust edits the section. They want me.”

  “It’s all perfectly ridiculous,” Alida Brookfield said. “They have no reason not to trust my staff.”

  “They think they do.”

  “I don’t have to agree to this, you know. Magazines don’t usually allow interview subjects to look at their own interviews before publication. Never mind letting them hire someone to edit a lot of articles they had nothing to do with in the first place. I should throw you out of here.”

  “I wish you would.”

  “Why won’t I?”

  “The competition has already done articles on romance writing. Writer’s Digest has done several. You weren’t first so you have to be best, and to be best you’ve got to have those interviews. Besides,” I said. “You’ll put Phoebe on the cover and sell an extra fifty thousand on the newsstands.”

  Alida Brookfield sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. The silly part was over. “I keep trying to get Felicity to take over the magazine,” she said, “but she doesn’t want any part of it. Not that I blame her. We’re giving people what they want, Miss McKenna. It may not be what you want, but it suits them just fine.”

  “My people want to be sure there are no inaccuracies in the articles. They don’t want to see their faces plastered next to advice on phone queries.”

  “You make phone queries all the time.”

  “Only to editors I’ve worked with before. Worked with more than once.”

  “You don’t understand what it’s like for these people. They don’t have the contacts you have. They’re fighting for a chance.”

  “Phoebe spent five years in a fifth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side, sending in stories over the transom. I came out after I left graduate school six years ago. I didn’t have any contacts, either.”

  “These people live in places like Oklahoma. They can’t all come to New York.”

  “Stephen King lives in Maine. It hasn’t hurt him any.”

  “That’s different.”

  I was about to tell her I knew why it was different, but I didn’t see the point. The conversation was uncomfortable for both of us. Alida Brookfield wasn’t used to defending herself. I wasn’t used to arguing, for the sake of form, with someone who agreed with me but couldn’t afford to admit it. I put my cigarette out in the blown-glass swan beside the gold cigarette box on the coffee table and said,

  “As far as I can tell, this is the agreement. You have chosen the articles and assigned the writers for this section. These articles should have started to come in. Beginning Monday, I will come to the office every morning, like a regular employee. I will edit the articles, oversee the interviews of Miss Damereaux and company, pass on headlines and artwork, and do whatever else is necessary to ensure the section is something my people can live with. They will pay my salary, which has been negotiated at twenty-five cents a week. You will pay me nothing. Four weeks from Monday, I will disappear. We’ll never have to speak to each other again. Unless we want to.”

  Alida Brookfield made a sour face. “Do you know anything about editing a magazine?”

  “I was editor of a small national consumer monthly called Fireman’s Friend for eighteen months. I hated it.”

  “This is a much larger operation.”

  “This is a forty-eight-page section.”

  “You can’t expect us to change the fundamental editorial policies of this magazine for a small group of romance writers with prejudices that—”

  I lit another cigarette, dropped it into the blown-glass swan, and put my head in my hands. “Miss Brookfield,” I said, “it’s been a long day. It’s going to be a long night. I don’t want to argue with you. I don’t want to renegotiate the agreement. If you need something along those lines, talk to Phoebe. Just tell me one thing: yes or no?”

  “Come with me,” Alida Brookfield said. “I’ll show you to your office.”

  THREE

  MY OFFICE WAS DOWN three corridors, around four corners, and directly opposite the unpainted double doors of the Art Department.

  The silly part wasn’t over yet. Alida Brookfield wanted me to realize my exact position at Writing Enterprises. Since she owned Writing Enterprises, she reserved the right to define that position. My office was a closet. Literally. Until a week before
I entered it, the room had been repository for mops, brushes, and industrial-strength cleaner.

  Offices were laid out along the corridors in descending size. Beginning with Alida Brookfield’s Persian corner, the first main corridor contained (in order of diminishing importance) Felicity Aldershot’s office (Writing Workshops and Correspondence Schools), Michael Brookfield’s office (Newsletters), and Stephen Brookfield’s office (Publishing). Jack’s Literary Services started the slide around the corner and was the only office on that corridor with a person’s name on the door. The other doors sported titles. Departments Editor, Writing; Domestic Sales, Publishing; Scheduling Coordinator, WWCS. The progression might or might not have had something to do with the importance of the positions in the firm. The progression on the first corridor, I was sure, had to do with nothing but Alida Brookfield’s personal preferences in employees and relatives. Publishing—fourth on the list—had to be more important to the financial condition of the company than Newsletters, which was third.

  My corridor contained Mr. Lahler, the Art Department, the men’s and ladies’ rooms, and me. The Art Department was one large room with rows of desks. Mr. Lahler’s office was a cramped cubicle made more suffocatingly claustrophobic by being forced to accommodate two desks—a larger one for Mr. Lahler himself, and a smaller one for the timid little girl who was his assistant. Two plaques hung from the door, MARTIN LAHLER, COMPTROLLER, the first one read. The second said, ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT.

  Someone who looked like an emaciated Jack Brookfield was standing in Lahler’s door when Alida and I came up to it.

  “I don’t want any arguments,” he was saying. “For God’s sake, Marty, it isn’t a lot of money—”

  Felicity Aldershot emerged from the Art Department, her hands in her hair. “Don’t tell me you’re fighting this out again,” she said. “Alida made it absolutely clear—”

  “I don’t care who made what clear,” the emaciated man said. “I’ve got a problem and I don’t see—”

  Jack Brookfield stuck his head out of the men’s room. “It’s her goddamn money,” he said, “if she doesn’t want you making an idiot of yourself in front of the entire population of Wall Street—”

  “This has nothing to do with Wall Street.”

  “Commodities markets,” Felicity Aldershot said. “That has to be the next step.”

  “My division is making a lot of money,” the emaciated man said.

  Felicity Aldershot gave him the fish eye. “Not that that has anything to do with you,” she said.

  At my side, Alida Brookfield decided the farce had gone far enough. She shuffled, coughed, and made a point of bumping into the pasteboard corridor wall. The little group around Lahler’s office swung toward her immediately, straightening, as if they were drawing to attention. They were like a company in a forties army comedy, aware too late of the approach of their sergeant.

  Alida Brookfield walked down the corridor ahead of me and stopped at Lahler’s door. She looked the emaciated man up and down with palpable contempt.

  “I don’t care how much your division is making,” she said. She turned to Lahler. “Everything I said stands,” she told him. “I’m not putting any more cash into Steve’s fliers, and I’m not putting up with Michael’s—” She stopped herself. She had remembered my existence. “Never mind,” she said. “You’ve got my instructions. All you have to do is carry them out.”

  “Someday somebody’s going to carry them out on your head,” Steve said. He gave Lahler a look of childishly impotent rage, one step away from plugging his thumbs in his ears and sticking out his tongue. Then he turned on his heel and strode off toward the more favored corridors. He looked right through me.

  Alida Brookfield straightened her dress and her emotions and gave me a smile.

  “Well,” she said. “Miss McKenna. I’m afraid I haven’t been able to give you a large office, but I’ve tried to give you a convenient one. You’ll be able to see the mechanicals as soon as they come out of the Art Department.”

  Her expression said she was as likely to give a large office to someone in my position as she was to eat cow dung. I decided to ignore it. I’m not good at threats and counterthreats, and we’d had a long morning of those. I’m not good at handling myself in embarrassing situations, either, and no other situations seemed to exist at Writing Enterprises. Felicity Aldershot, Jack Brookfield, and Marty Lahler were frozen in the positions they’d assumed at Alida’s entrance. They didn’t look likely to move.

  Alida put her hand on the knob of a door whose green BUILDING SUPPLIES sign had been inadequately concealed behind a sheet of white paper.

  “We’ve put a desk in here for you,” she said, swinging the door open and pulling a string to activate the overhead bulb. “And a coatrack and a phone. The phone’s plugged into a jack in the Art Department, so be careful not to trip over the cord. We’ve even given you a closet.”

  She sounded so proud of the closet, I moved closer to look at it. It took up almost one entire wall of the minuscule rectangle I was supposed to live in for the next four weeks. It was an oversized portable wardrobe of peeling blond wood with mammoth double doors. I had a suspicion I would never be able to open those doors. If I tried, they would smash into the rickety little desk and office chair that had been crammed against the opposite wall.

  “We can get you a typewriter,” Alida Brookfield said. “If you think you’ll need it.” She obviously thought it would be beyond decency for me to need any such thing.

  Felicity Aldershot was more accommodating. “Of course she’ll need a typewriter,” she said. “What if she has terrible handwriting? How will you read her memos?” She edged up to the door of the office and peered in. “There’s an outlet in that corner,” she said.

  We all looked at the corner. Alida Brookfield considered the possibility that my handwriting might be too idiosyncratic to read.

  “She can have Mary Lang’s old typewriter,” Felicity said. “Nobody’s using it yet.” I decided this was a euphemistic way of saying Mary Lang had quit—or been fired—but not replaced. I wondered what made Felicity feel the departure of an employee required euphemism.

  Alida Brookfield looked around the office, frowning. “I suppose we could stock the closet,” she said, sounding doubtful. “With paper and pens and things. So you wouldn’t have to go running to the stock girl every time you needed something.”

  We all looked at the closet. I looked at the desk against the other wall. I decided it was a good time for pleasant accommodation.

  “Well!” I said, actually making myself enter the room. The place made me feel as if I were choking. “This will do perfectly.”

  Neither Felicity Aldershot nor Alida Brookfield looked as if she believed me. I patted the top of the desk. I patted one of the doors of the wardrobe. I couldn’t keep my hands off that wardrobe. It would have dwarfed a room three times the size of this one.

  “I must admit it’s a remarkably large closet,” I said.

  I had to find out whether those doors would open without demolishing the desk. I grabbed the knobs and pulled them toward me.

  There was no place to go to get out of the way. When the body came tumbling out, it landed on top of me.

  FOUR

  TWO THINGS SAVED MY sanity: the snow, and Detective Lieutenant Luis Martinez. The snow was the first of the Great February Blizzard, so named because it stopped traffic on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, shorted out three subway lines, and cut off all access to New Jersey within three hours of the first flake hitting the antenna on the Empire State Building. Lu Martinez was the man who had once arrested me for the murder of Myrra Agenworth.

  I got Lu Martinez by the simple expedient of asking for him. I didn’t bother to go through the usual rigmarole. I didn’t report a homicide and request a certain detective be assigned to it. I just called One Police Plaza and asked for Lu Martinez. Then I went into a song and dance about what might or might not have happened to Michael Brookfield. Michae
l Brookfield was the body. I had managed to drag that much from a hysterical Felicity Aldershot and a livid Alida Brookfield.

  Lu Martinez and I should not have been friends, but we were. He had arrested me. Before he arrested me, he harassed me. After I was no longer under arrest—because someone else was—he lectured me. None of it mattered. Lu Martinez spent a lot of his time on the Upper West Side and a lot of late nights in Original Ray’s Pizza. I lived on the Upper West Side, couldn’t cook, and was being nagged into a nervous breakdown by Phoebe, who thought I should gain weight. Lu Martinez thought I should gain weight, too. He bought large double-cheese-with-sausage pies and made me eat half of them.

  I asked for him because I knew how he worked and because I knew I’d be doing him a favor. His Anita wouldn’t marry him until he finished law school. He wanted to accumulate a year’s vacation time, quit the department, and install himself full time at Brooklyn College. In order to accumulate a year’s vacation time, he had to have excuses not to take vacations. I handed him one.

  I was in the reception room when he came in, followed by the usual uniformed menagerie. I was on my fourth cigarette and my fifth prayer that a drink would miraculously appear from a mysteriously opening compartment in the gray industrial carpet. It didn’t come from a compartment, but it came. Martinez had no sooner entered the reception area than he began rummaging in the pockets of his jacket. He’d gone through every one before he finally found the brass hip flask.

  “Drambuie,” he said, handing it to me. “I got it on the way over. The Drambuie, I mean. The flask was for a present. I was going to give it to you when your book came out.”

  Martinez couldn’t wait for my book to come out. He was dying to see himself in print. He was desperate to know, as he put it, “what his character was like.”

  I took much too long a swig on the flask. Then I lit a cigarette and put the flask between my knees. The liquor calmed me just enough to let me feel sick.