Wicked, Loving Murder

by Jane Haddam

  “He talks to other people,” I said.

  “You think someone wanted to hear what he said to someone else? I mean, not to his assistant?”

  “No,” I said. “As far as I can tell from what’s going on in there”—I jerked my head toward the corridor and Alida Brookfield’s office—“everybody around here knows everything about everyone else anyway. Or practically everything.”

  “So what was he doing in the closet? In fact, what was he doing in that room? The place had been cleared out and set up for you. There wasn’t anything in it anyone could want. Hell, there wasn’t anything in it.”

  “Good point,” I admitted.

  “That’s going to be your office,” Martinez said. “You’re going to spend a month in there.” He looked at me sideways, trying to see if this upset me. It didn’t. It intrigued me. Being intrigued made me guilty and anxious at once. I felt guilty for not being emotionally repulsed by the situation I was in. I was anxious that Alida Brookfield would use the death of Michael as an excuse either to change my office to another room or to call off the special section on romance writing and publishing altogether.

  Martinez decided I was psychologically healthy. “Do you think you can keep an eye on that closet?” he asked me. “Without getting yourself killed?”

  “Sure,” I said. I was beginning to get a little drunk. I didn’t care.

  Martinez didn’t care either. He took the flask from where I had left it between my knees and handed it to me.

  “Have one more swig of this,” he said. I did. He took the flask away and replaced the cap. “Weather’s a bitch,” he told me. “Go home and relax for the weekend. Drink a lot of tea. Eat too much.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Stop off and have Tony take your statement first,” he said.

  “Right again.” I dropped the flask into my bag. There was still a little liquor left in the Drambuie bottle, and I put that in my bag, too.

  “Say hello for me to all the romance writers,” he said. “I miss them.”

  A sudden vision of “all the romance writers” came through the mist of half-shock, half-alcohol that seemed to surround me. They were all out there somewhere, waiting for my report on the status of the special section. Once the news was out, they would want my report on more than that.

  “I can see them now,” I said. “A whole row of them. Lined up on my living room couch.”

  “You got a living room couch?”

  “On my living room floor, then,” I said, giving him a sour look. “Does it matter where they are?”

  “It matters if you bought a living room couch.” Martinez waved me away. “Go talk to Tony Marsh,” he said. “I’ll call you when we get the definite on the autopsy. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “Right,” I said, thinking I’d been saying “right” a lot. I trudged around Janet’s desk and into the corridor, uncomfortably aware that I was happier than I’d been for a long time. The only way it could go wrong, I thought, was if Martinez solved the thing before I managed to install myself at Writing Enterprises on Monday.

  I tried to convince myself he wouldn’t do something like that to me.

  SEVEN

  MARTINEZ DID NOT SOLVE the murder over the weekend. Alida Brookfield did not move me to larger but less emotionally charged quarters, nor did she cancel the special section on romance. She never even considered canceling. When I finished making my statement to Tony Marsh, I found her waiting for me in the corridor. She was holding out a small pile of manilla envelopes.

  “These are the articles that have come in,” she said. “They’ll give you something to do over the weekend.”

  I wanted to tell her I was going to have enough to do over the weekend. The first reporters had started showing up at the door. I could hear the whir of videotape machines in the reception area. We were going to make the six o’clock news.

  Every romance writer from Gramercy Park to Los Angeles was going to know what happened at Writing Enterprises. Worse, they were going to know I was involved.

  I took the envelopes, folded them under my pea coat, and made a head-down charge for the elevators. I was stopped four times. I had my picture taken two dozen times. Cornered by a frowning Chris Borgen with a WCBS microphone in his hand, I stuttered something about having been asked not to talk until the police made their statement (untrue) and escaped.

  There was a foot of snow on the ground and a three-day traffic pileup in the street. A lot of people had abandoned their cars for the warmer, and more congenial, confines of Albert’s and the Park Luncheonette. I could have asked for police escort home. Lu Martinez would have given it. I didn’t want it. The Braedenvoorst was three and a half miles uptown, the wind was hitting me from both directions, the snow was coming down like hurricane rain—but I wanted to walk.

  I walked into one of the most dismal weekends of my life. If there hadn’t been thirteen inches of snow on Friday, nine inches on Saturday, and three and a half inches on Sunday, it would have been worse.

  Romance writers are paranoids. They’re paranoids with an excuse—God only knows they’re made fun of at every possible opportunity—but the excuse makes their paranoia no less compelling. They know people are trying to make them look stupid. They know critics are lurking in broom closets, waiting for a chance to blame the decline of Western civilization and the erosion of world capitalism on the latest Silhouette Desire. They know there are traitors in their midst, spies, Quality Lit thugs who swoop into the world of love and lust to make a few thousand dollars under a pseudonym and then swoop out again, to surface in the pages of the Village Voice with articles accusing category romance of destroying the future of the women’s movement. If they hadn’t known all these things, I would never have ended up at Writing Enterprises.

  Every paranoid needs a liaison to the rest of the world. The members of the American Writers of Romance had me. I was Phoebe (Weiss) Damereaux’s ex-college roommate, best friend, and adopted pain in the ass. Phoebe was AWR president, also known as Queen of Hearts. Phoebe was one of their most successful and most visible members. Phoebe had appeared on the cover of People. Phoebe had talked for half an hour on Phil Donahue. Phoebe even had a book coming out in hardcover.

  Getting a romance out in hardcover is next to impossible. Publishers hate romance even when they can relegate it to that intellectually invisible document shredder of literature, the paperback original. The AWR would do anything for Phoebe. If Phoebe said I was to be trusted, they would trust me.

  They might have trusted me anyway. I am an ex-romance writer. I once wrote four books a year for Farret Paperback Originals. I wrote as Jeri Andrews and Andrea Nicholas (my brother has three children, Jeremy, Andrea, and Nicholas), but I hid only as much as I had to. I did, for instance, attend Myrra Agenworth’s funeral. Myrra had helped over fifty women find work in romance, all of whom eventually went on to write Real Books or Real Magazine Articles under their own names. I was the only one who showed up to say good-bye.

  Romance writers know what they’re afraid of. For all the gushing nonsense they write on eternal love, for all the idiocies they blather on euphemized lust, there isn’t one of them with a head softer than a rock. In the year before Writing Enterprises proposed their special section, articles had begun to appear touting romance as the easy way to break into publishing. Buy a phrase book, follow a formula, invest in a ream of heavyweight bond and six typewriter ribbons—and you can’t fail. Anyone can do it. No talent necessary. No intelligence necessary. No contacts necessary. The lines will take anything. It drove every romance writer I knew crazy. It drove them doubly crazy because it wasn’t true. It drove them crazy enough to try to take over Alida Brookfield’s special section and use it for their own ends—a miracle I was supposed to effect with tact a career diplomat would have killed for.

  I walked into my apartment to find six messages on my answering machine, a wicker basket full of glacéed fruit and Godiva raspberry crowns on my kitchen table, and a refri
gerator full of Corning Ware casseroles. The food had undoubtedly been delivered by Phoebe, which meant that Phoebe was somewhere in the apartment. Where, I could only guess. Myrra had left me twelve rooms plus servant’s wing. Phoebe could be anywhere.

  The cat was standing guard at the refrigerator door. I got her a tiny saucer of Devon cream and a large bowl of 9-Lives Chicken & Cheese Dinner and sat down to listen to my messages. I had just made it through the third one—Amelia Samson, calling from the place she called The Castle, in Rhinebeck—when Phoebe came rushing into the kitchen.

  “Turn that thing off,” she said. “We’re in a lot of trouble. We’re in a lot of trouble.”

  Strictly speaking, we were in no trouble at all. I couldn’t be arrested for the murder of Michael Brookfield because I had been in Alida Brookfield’s office, or in the reception area in full view of one of three people, at the time it probably happened. Phoebe had spent the afternoon in a back room at the Fifth Avenue B. Dalton’s, signing copies of Flowers in the Storm. Trouble came in the form of that premier example of the New Generation of Romance Writers, Ivy Samuels Tree.

  Ivy Samuels Tree looked like one of those African statues meant to represent the queen of the Nile. She wasn’t just beautiful, she was paralyzing. She could have stopped traffic in Herald Square at five minutes to nine on Christmas Eve. From her voice on the phone—the only contact we’d had until Phoebe got us all snowed in together that Friday—I’d expected the typical product of expensive boarding schools and repressive women’s colleges in Massachusetts. I wasn’t entirely disappointed. Ivy had gone to a very expensive boarding school—in Switzerland. She had even spent two years at Mount Holyoke. She had graduated, however, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In theoretical mathematics.

  “Your talent for mathematics stops when you start studying,” she said, running a hand through her short Afro. “I started studying too early.”

  Phoebe put two casserole dishes on the table. One of them contained moussaka. Nick, who is Greek, taught us to pronounce the word “moos-sa-ka.” The New York City habit of calling his favorite food “moo-sak-a” made him wild.

  I was about to explain all this to Ivy—God only knows why—when Phoebe slapped a fork on the table in front of me and said, “This is all beside the point Ivy’s father was a scientist. Ivy was going to be a professor of mathematics. Ivy got married to a complete idiot instead. It’s all ancient history, for God’s sake.”

  “What are we supposed to talk about?” I said. “You come here, you fill my apartment with a lot of strange food, you sit me down with someone I’ve never even met—what are we supposed to talk about?”

  “Today.” Phoebe deposited herself demurely in her seat beside the casseroles. “You’re supposed to talk about what happened today.”

  “What happened today?”

  Ivy gave me a very weak smile. “I was there,” she said. “In that guy’s office. The one who got murdered.”

  I pushed away the plate of moussaka Phoebe offered me and opted for a cigarette instead. “When?” I said.

  “Must have been quarter to four,” Ivy said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  Phoebe got to her feet and started pacing, throwing her hands in the air. “Don’t get like that,” she said. “This is serious.”

  “I know it’s serious,” I said. “Quarter to four.” I turned to Ivy. “You had to be there within fifteen minutes of when he was murdered. It was about quarter after when we found him. What were you doing there?”

  Ivy hesitated, then reached into the large carryall she’d left on the floor beside her chair. She came up with a thick paperback. She handed it to me. “Look at that,” she said.

  I looked. It was a copy of Queen’s Gambit, a romance novel that had been making quite a showing on the racks for the past few months. Inscribed under the title, in flowing script, were the words, “by Ivy Samuels Tree.”

  “Turn it over,” Ivy said.

  I turned it over. On the back were an author bio and a picture. The bio was authentic. The picture was of a blowsy, forty-year-old bleached blonde.

  “My alter ego,” Ivy said.

  “Which is supposed to mean what?” I asked her.

  “Which is supposed to mean romance writers can’t be black,” Ivy said. “Black romance writers don’t sell romance books.”

  EIGHT

  IT WAS WORSE THAN it looked in the beginning.

  “It’s written into my contract,” Ivy said. “I’m not supposed to let anyone know. I’m not supposed to appear anywhere as Ivy Samuels Tree. I’m not supposed to give interviews except over the phone. I’ve been calling myself Ivy Samuels again since the divorce, so that’s no problem, but lately—”

  “Lately she’s wanted to change the terms of the agreement,” Phoebe said. Then she gave me one of her Very Significant Looks. “It’s an exclusivity contract,” she said.

  “They’ve got a clause in there that says they can suspend everything—not pay me any royalties, even if they owe them to me, not publish any of my new books—if I do anything that might, and I quote, ‘possibly prejudice sales potential.’ They can suspend me and not get rid of me, if you see what I mean.”

  I saw what she meant. If Ivy’s publishers, Dortman and Hodges, “suspended” her contract, Ivy would not only not make any money for her work for them, she’d be unable to sell her work anywhere else. No other publishing company would want to take a chance on being sued by Dortman and Hodges for violation of Ivy’s exclusivity clause.

  I lit another cigarette and considered the situation. “None of this would hold up in court, would it? I mean, once you got it across that it was your being black that bothered Dortman and Hodges, then it would be discrimination, right?”

  “Right,” Ivy said. “I’ve been talking to Phoebe’s lawyer friend about it.”

  Phoebe gave me a dirty look. Her lawyer friend is my Commitment friend, Nick. Phoebe thinks I am Treating Nick Badly.

  “The problem,” Phoebe said, “is time.”

  “Five years of time,” Ivy agreed. “That’s how long Mr. Carras thinks it would take before all the appeals were through and everything was clear. We decided not to fight it head on. There are other ways. And I can’t afford to go five years without making any money.”

  My head was beginning to hurt. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Whatever possessed you to sign a contract like that? You’re an educated woman.”

  “At the time I was an educated woman with two children, no job, no husband, and a dollar fifty-three in the bank.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “I couldn’t go to my father, either,” Ivy said. “I married the original black-power militant. My father was a self-made man who thought being self-made was the only thing anyone had the right to be proud of. My father didn’t speak a word to me from the day I married John Tree till the day the divorce became final.”

  “You signed the contract before the divorce became final.”

  “I had to.”

  “Right,” I said again.

  Phoebe tugged at my sleeve. “I think we’d better get to today,” she said. “I mean, now that you have the background.” She pushed her plate of moussaka away, for once not particularly worried that all the food she’d made was getting cold. “It’s this Michael Brookfield person who’s important.”

  I thought about Michael Brookfield with a typewriter ribbon around his neck and got up to get the Scotch and the Drambuie from the cupboard. When I put the bottles on the table in front of Ivy, she looked ready to canonize me.

  “Michael Brookfield wrote me a letter,” Ivy said. I passed out glasses. “He runs this newsletter,” she started again. “I guess he runs a lot of them. One on each of the genres—westerns, science fiction, mysteries, and romance. Soft core porn, maybe. Anyway, the newsletters have a lot of different sections to them. Mostly it’s how-to columns and market information, but there’s always a sort of gossip part, with little items on people in the
field. Brookfield’s letter said he had a picture of me, and the whole story of the contract, and he’d heard I was seeing a lawyer, and he was going to write a column on what a terrible thing had been done to me. It all sounded very sympathetic.”

  “Sounded?”

  Ivy slugged back most of her glass of Scotch. “I don’t think you write a letter like that,” she said. “You just go ahead and publish the column. You don’t write a letter like that to tell someone you’re writing a column.”

  “You mean he was trying to blackmail you,” I said. The idea had possibilities. Michael Brookfield had had “women.”

  “I made an appointment,” Ivy said. “I got there around quarter to four. I got shown right in. God, he was a weird little man. He kept going on and on about the indignities I’d suffered. Why in the name of Christ do white people go on and on about the indignities I’ve suffered? Worst indignities I’ve ever suffered have been being forced to listen to white people tell me what indignities I’ve suffered.”

  I poured her another glass of Scotch. I poured myself a glass of Drambuie. Phoebe considered Ivy’s last speech, decided she knew which way the evening was going, and went to get herself a bottle of Andre pink champagne from the refrigerator.

  “John Tree used to give me a lot of shit about the indignities he suffered,” Ivy said. “I used to kick his ass. I hate people who define themselves as basket cases.”

  “What do they teach you in those boarding schools?” Phoebe said. “Every woman I know who went to a boarding school swears her head off.”

  Ivy and I said, “Wouldn’t be surprised,” simultaneously. Then Ivy knocked back her Scotch and poured herself another one.

  “I wasn’t going to pay anyone blackmail,” she said, “and I wasn’t going to let myself get kicked around. I went into this man’s office in a very belligerent mood. Well, I never got a chance to say anything. He talked nonstop for about five minutes and didn’t make any sense at all. Then he got a phone call.”