Death's Savage Passion

by Jane Haddam

  “That’s not the point either,” I said.

  “What is the point? How do you sue an organization for sex discrimination when half their officers are female?”

  “Romantic suspense,” I said. “They hate romantic suspense.”

  “I hate romantic suspense,” Nick said. “But Patience. Remember: recourse to law. Sex discrimination is bad, I don’t approve of it, but there is a difference between what is and what is not a situation to which the proper response is recourse to law. I sued the telephone company for you, didn’t I?”

  “Not for sex discrimination.”

  “Never mind what we called it when we went to court. It was sex discrimination. You wanted the policy changed, I got the policy changed. Right?”

  “Right,” I said. I fished a cigarette out of my bag.

  “Quit,” he said.

  “What?” The lighter was defunct. I started hunting for matches. Camille, brown and gray kernels of dry cat food clinging to her fur, jumped onto the bed and started playing with the Walkman earphones. It took her exactly one third of a second to tie her paws into immobility.

  Nick started to untangle her. “Quit,” he said again. “If you don’t like it, for whatever reason that may be, quit.”

  “Well, no,” I said. “Where would I hear the gossip?”

  “This is about gossip?” Nick said.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Don’t quit,” Nick said. “Don’t sue either. Untie the cat.”

  I said, “Oh.” There wasn’t anything else to say. I found a matchbook (Mamma Leone’s; Phoebe must have got it for me) and lit up. Nick had all six feet eight inches of himself sprawled across his papers and his hands in Camille’s fur. He is a remarkably good-looking man, powerfully built in the shoulders, slender and elegant in the hips. Even Amelia, who ranks men a rung below Godless Communists in the natural order of things, can’t resist Nick.

  I turned my back to him and lay my head on his chest. “Sorry I’m so contentious,” I said. “I’ve just had five hours of romantic suspense.”

  “So have I.” He gestured to the papers on the bed, then plunged his hands in and came up with a paperback cover proof for a novel called Dangerous Liaison. The cover painting showed a man and a woman on a windowsill ledge over a four-story drop. He had his arms around her waist and was bending her backward. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch high-heeled sandals.

  “Marvelous,” I said.

  “Romantic suspense and the lack of romantic suspense,” he said. “I’m either putting people into it or filing bankruptcy for people who didn’t get out of category romance fast enough. It’s all I do anymore.”

  “Phoebe’s bringing you clients,” I said.

  “Phoebe’s bringing me clients,” he agreed. “Believe me, I’m grateful. I’ve got my own office. I’m making enough to get married on, even to you. I will tell you, however, that I’m getting sicker than you’ll ever know of romantic suspense.”

  I ignored the crack about marriage. Nick was always making cracks about marriage.

  “I just don’t understand it,” I said. “Two years ago, three romance lines had hundred-million-dollar years. How could things change so fast?”

  “Market saturation and editorial incompetence.”

  “Thanks.”

  I felt him shrug. “Right at this moment, every category romance line is in trouble. At least two of them are probably going to crash. If you want my opinion, the romantic suspense lines aren’t going to save the situation for long. They’re making the same mistakes and they’re going to go on making them. Six books a month, twelve books a month, fourteen books a month. Tip sheets, which means all the books start sounding the same after the first year. General conviction that the readers are fools and illiterates and can’t tell good from bad. You name it.”

  “Susan Dangerfield,” I said, picking up another cover proof. This one had a man and a woman in a dark alley. He had one arm under her breasts and the other pointing into the distance, a .357 Magnum dangling from his fingers. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch high-heeled sandals.

  “One of my packagers is thinking of doing a line,” Nick said. “This is research.”

  “What happens when romantic suspense doesn’t work?”

  “More bankruptcies. A few real disasters. From what I hear, your agent is going to go down like a penny dropping from the observation deck of the World Trade Center.”

  “Dana?”

  “It’s just a rumor,” Nick said. “They say she’s bare-assed to the wind with a storm coming up behind her, and I believe it. Have you seen that line she’s doing for Gallard Rowson?” He hunted through his papers. “Passionate Intrigues. That’s what it’s called. Nothing but brand-name authors. Some minor television celebrities. They have to be costing her ten thousand a shot in up-front. She’s going to have to sell a lot of books to justify the expense.”

  I thought of Verna’s romantic suspense, and something clicked.

  “That must have been what Verna was talking about at dinner,” I said. “She kept complaining about how she wrote a romantic suspense and she hated it, and I couldn’t figure out why she bothered.”

  “She’s Dana’s client?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dana probably talked her into it. Circumstances probably talked her into it. She wasn’t big enough to survive this thing. She had a little trouble with her last publisher.” He shrugged again.

  I had a sudden vision of Phoebe thumbing furtively through sex manuals at the back of the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble. “Nick?” I said. “Is Phoebe going to be all right? I mean, are her books going to do well, or is she going to get caught up in this thing and find herself having to write juveniles or something?”

  “Wild Winter Passionsong was number one on the Times list for thirty-six weeks.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Yes it does.”

  “Nick—”

  “That’s all you care about, isn’t it? You don’t know anything about the business you’re in and you don’t want to know.”

  “I want to know about Phoebe.”

  “Phoebe will be all right. Let’s change the subject.”

  “To what?”

  “I can think of a lot of things. I can think of some that haven’t come up recently.”

  “That came up two days ago.”

  “So it’s been two days.”

  “Nick.”

  “Just letting you know you haven’t been forgotten.”

  I turned over on my stomach, searching for an ashtray. “I’m drunk,” I said. “And for your information, I don’t care about the business and I don’t want to care. I want to write nice long nonfiction books about murders I haven’t been involved in and go on Johnny Carson and talk about what psychopaths eat for breakfast. That’s all.”

  “Murders you haven’t been involved in.”

  “Exactly.”

  He put his hands in my hair and stroked the back of my neck with the tips of his fingers. It was a very comforting gesture, the physical equivalent of a lullaby.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said. “The Agenworth book is successful. The Brookfield book will be successful next year. You’ll think of something to do a third book on. A nice historical murder.”

  “Ancient history,” I said.

  “Ancient history,” he agreed. He stood up and started stacking papers into his arms. “I’ll let you sleep,” he said. “Dream about Lizzie Borden. You aren’t going to get personally involved in any more murders.”

  It was about five in the morning when Phoebe called to tell me Verna Train was dead.

  FOUR

  NICK HAD TO BE there because he was Phoebe’s lawyer, and Amelia’s lawyer, and even Caroline Dooley’s lawyer—at least he’d been Caroline Dooley’s lawyer when she got her divorce, which was the only time she’d needed a lawyer. I didn’t have to be there, but I was. Maybe it was Pho
ebe’s voice, sounding so oddly uneven over the phone. Maybe it was the thought of Sarah English, ending her first night on the town in New York in a tangle of police and hysterical women.

  They were in the Lexington Avenue subway station at Twenty-third, and none of them was hysterical. Dana and Caroline were sitting on a bench, doing their best to look like Good Businesswomen and Good Citizens. Sarah was sitting on the bench with them, mildly drunk and very, very curious. Amelia was lecturing the police. Phoebe was standing just a little to the side of the one open entrance, waiting for us. I noticed the out-of-place first. Max Brady was standing alone in the middle of the platform, looking pugnacious and panicked at once.

  Phoebe and Sarah ran up to us as soon as we came off the stairs. It was odd to see Phoebe in floor-length velvet and forty pounds of jewelry at nearly dawn. Her topknot had come undone. Her wiry hair fell around her face in undisciplined wisps, making her look like an electrified ghost.

  Sarah smiled when she saw me, then frowned, then looked near tears. “It isn’t the way I expected it would be,” she said. She made a mighty effort at cogitation. “Of course, it isn’t a murder.”

  Phoebe ignored her. “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” she said. “They got the train out of here, but I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now.”

  “Train?” I half thought she was talking about Verna. We had been drifting in the direction of Amelia and the police. Nick put a hand on my arm and stopped me.

  “I don’t think you ought to go over there,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of these, but I have, and it’s going to be a mess.”

  “It is a mess,” Phoebe said.

  “It’s like something out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Sarah said sickly. “There was so much blood.”

  “What’s a mess?” I said. “What does this have to do with a train?”

  Phoebe blinked twice, decided I wasn’t being willfully perverse, and said, “That’s what happened. Verna fell off the platform and got hit by a train. The Lexington Avenue local.”

  I stepped back, a jerky, involuntary, instinctive reaction that did nothing to calm the sudden, violent churning in my stomach. There had been a subway accident scene in a god-awful Z movie Nick and I had seen in Times Square, a scene full of blood and metal and hanging intestines. I looked over my shoulder at the tracks. Through the knot of police I could see a smear of blood on the far wall, nothing else. I didn’t need anything else. If I could have made myself move, I would have been sick.

  “I’ll go over and talk to them,” Nick said. “Sit down, for God’s sake.”

  We didn’t sit down. We stood watching him cross the platform. Then we turned away and stared at the graffiti on the wall behind the bench. I got a pack of cigarettes out of my pocket, extracted and lit one. I have never been able to decide if smoking is legal on New York subway platforms, but at that point I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything except not having to look at the tracks again.

  “It would have been different if it was murder,” Sarah said. She sounded as if she’d convinced herself.

  “It all happened so fast,” Phoebe said. “First we were standing around talking about how no mugger was going to mess with a whole crowd of women, and then there was the train.”

  “Who’s here from the police?” I asked her. “Could we get Martinez in on it?”

  Phoebe looked confused. “He quit to go to law school,” she said. “You know that.”

  “I forgot. What about Tony Marsh?”

  This time she looked like she thought I was crazy. “Even if Tony were still a precinct cop, which he isn’t, this would be the wrong precinct. Tony got promoted, don’t you remember? He’s a detective. With Homicide?”

  “I know,” I said.

  “No, you don’t know,” she said. “I know. I was here.”

  “Homicide?” Sarah said.

  “I don’t mean I think it wasn’t an accident,” I said. “I mean, look at those people.” I made a weak gesture in the direction of the knot of cops. “We don’t know any of them. We won’t be able to get them to tell us anything.”

  “That’s true,” Phoebe said. She shook her head. “It just doesn’t matter. There isn’t anything to tell. We were all a little drunk. We were standing on the edge of the platform. We were talking about—” She frowned. “No, we weren’t. We weren’t talking about muggers. We had been talking about muggers, but when the train came in, Verna was telling me about Ellery Queen.”

  “Ellery Queen.”

  “That Ellery Queen was a pseudonym. Or Ellery Queen was a lot of people, not one. Or something.”

  “Ellery Queen was the pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee,” I said.

  “It didn’t sound that simple,” Phoebe said.

  “I didn’t hear anything about Ellery Queen,” Sarah said. “I was talking to Miss Dooley about her paperweight.”

  Amelia pounded over to us, her face mottled gray and white, her nose red and on the verge of runny in the cold. New York subway stations are not well heated or well enclosed.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said. “Around and around and around. They never stop asking questions.”

  “Questions about what?” I asked her.

  Amelia gave me a look that was shrewd and unsubtle and contemptuous. “They want to know if she was a leaper,” she said. “A leaper, for God’s sake. What would make Verna leap in front of a train?”

  I peered at her closely in the darkness. She was doing a good job of playing old shoot-from-the-hip Amelia, but in her eyes a hint of panic was struggling to break into terror.

  “Verna was depressed at dinner,” I said, considering suicide for the first time. “She kept talking about how badly her career was going.”

  “Horse manure,” Amelia said, though I obviously hadn’t made her feel any better. “Her career was in a slump. She wasn’t about to starve to death.”

  “I was standing right next to her,” Phoebe said. “I told you. She just fell.”

  “Somebody’s going to kill themselves over romantic suspense, it ought to be me,” Amelia said. “Verna just had to write one of the things. I have to put out a whole line of them, one a month, under my own name.”

  “Verna was using her own name,” Phoebe said.

  “I’m using my own name,” Sarah said.

  I squinted into the crowd near the tracks. “Did Marilou go home?” I asked. “I don’t see her anywhere.”

  Amelia snorted. “Marilou’s where you’d expect her to be. In the bathroom sucking up what she can and flushing the rest down a nice safe toilet. Now there’s someone who ought to leap in front of a train over romantic suspense. She’s got a contract to write one. She can’t stay straight long enough to figure out what one is.”

  “Marilou Saunders is going to write a romantic suspense?” I said. “Marilou Saunders can’t read.”

  Amelia adjusted her gown and the flaps of her stole. She had one of those fox stoles with the head and paws carefully preserved. A diamond and ruby dinner ring glittered in the light from the fluorescent over our heads.

  “If the idiot police want to ask questions,” Amelia said, “they ought to ask questions of him.” She made a dramatic sweep of the arm in the direction of Max Brady, no longer pugnacious and panicked in the middle of the platform. Max had wilted. He looked like a half-starved munchkin with encephalitis.

  “Nobody knows what he’s doing here,” Amelia said. “Least of all him.”

  Nobody found out what Max was doing there, not that night. Phoebe remembered asking him to come on the round of bars because she “felt sorry for him and he looked lonely.” Dana remembered sharing a cab with him. Caroline remembered DeAndrea getting disgusted and going home. We didn’t have time to explore the issue. The police were interested in asking questions, but not in the middle of an empty subway station in the freezing late-October dawn. They started rounding us up for a trip to the precinct house. Nick got very lawyerly and advised
us to go along.

  “Actually,” he told me when we were getting into a cab on Twenty-third Street (since we weren’t material witnesses, the NYPD didn’t think they owed us transportation), “I’d advise you to go home, but you wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”

  “In that case, I’d advise you to keep your mouth shut. It’s not a murder, Pay. It’s a tragedy. It’s a god-awful mess in more ways than one. It’s not a murder.”

  “I didn’t say anything about murder. I’m worried about Sarah.”

  “If the verdict is suicide, it’ll be bad enough.”

  There were “Driver Allergic” signs all over the partition, but the driver was smoking a panatela, so I lit another cigarette and sat back in my seat. Nick had a very odd look on his face. His eyes were secretive. His mouth was tight.

  “Why do I get this feeling you’re not telling me something?” I asked him. “Why do I get this feeling something is going on I know nothing about?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Bullfeathers. You mentioned suicide. You were the second person to mention suicide.”

  “It’s always a possibility. In cases like these.”

  “In cases like these.”

  “Exactly.”

  I took a deep drag. Every answer he gave wound him up tighter. He was no longer looking at me. He was staring out the window on his side of the cab, pretending an interest in the popcorn boxes in the gutters of Madison Avenue.

  “Exactly nothing,” I told him. “Something’s been wrong all night. I can feel it. I didn’t think anything of it before, but I think something of it now and it’s not because Verna died. It’s because you’re acting weird, Nick. You aren’t even talking like you.”

  He took a deep, going-on-the-offensive breath. “You’ve got murder on the brain,” he said. “You’ve been involved in two cases and you see them behind every tree. If your grandmother died of heart failure, you’d go running to the dictionary of poisons to find out what drug could imitate coronary occlusion. It’s become an obsession with you. There isn’t any murder, McKenna.”