Death's Savage Passion

by Jane Haddam

  This happened every fifteen seconds. It was like having my name in blinking neon lights.

  I am not one of those writers who pretend to hate publicity. I want all the publicity I can get. I want to spend fifty weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. I put up with Marilou Saunders to get on her talk show. I thank critics for bad reviews—if I happen to meet them at the kind of party where we are both expected to be civilized. I was not, however, ready for that window.

  I paced back and forth in front of it, trying to decide what to think of it. I wondered how anyone ever got a book off a display like that. I considered the possibility that this bookstore didn’t sell books. It ordered books to make displays of, giving its oversensitive homosexual millionaire owners a chance to Show What They Could Do with Design. I felt dizzy again. I decided to go in.

  There was a long, low table of books behind the revolving turntable. On that table were Judith Krantz’s book, and V. C. Andrews’ book, and mine. I picked up one of mine and turned it over and over in my hands. It was thick and heavy and felt good—about the weight of a doorstop, which is what most critics use books for. The studio portrait was also good. It looked like me. It didn’t look like a studio portrait.

  I put the book back on the table. It looked very credible sitting there among all the other books. It looked like a real book.

  I had actually written a real book.

  Somebody had actually published the real book I had written.

  In hardcover.

  To be sold in bookstores.

  Good lord.

  I was telling myself that panicking over good news was the mark of a lunatic when someone tapped the arm of my jacket and “ahemmed” politely in my ear.

  “That’s a very good book,” the little voice said. “Very scary.”

  I turned around. The girl standing behind me had her hands clasped at her belt and her face tortured into an expression of extravagantly expectant helpfulness. She was pale and wan and plain. Her hair (dull brown, wiry) was a mess. One look in her eyes and you knew she hated working in that store.

  She peered at me through heavy horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Miss McKenna,” she said. “My goodness.”

  Nobody in New York says “My goodness.” Nobody wears four-inch horn-rims either, but there we were. This girl’s horn-rims were purely ornamental. There was no magnification in the glass.

  I gave her the best smile I could manage with a head full of sleepless confusion and said, “I’ve never seen it in a bookstore before. Then I saw it in the window, and—”

  “I just read it,” the girl said. “It was wonderful.” Her voice was very firm. I wondered if it would be as firm if she were talking to V. C. Andrews. V. C. Andrews doesn’t know the difference between the English language and a banana split.

  The girl was kneeling on the avocado green carpet, pulling copies of my book from the drawer in the side of the display table.

  “If you have a minute, it would really help if you signed some of these,” she said. “In this neighborhood they like them signed if we can get them signed. We have signed copies of the Krantz book, of course, because we always have signed copies of the Krantz book, we always give her a party, but if you have a minute—”

  She thrust ten copies of my book into my arms. She picked up twice that many for herself.

  “If you sign them on the title page,” she said, “we can’t return them. It’s as good as a sale.” She grinned.

  I grinned back. “Why doesn’t PR tell me these things?”

  “Oh,” she waved a hand in the air. “PR.”

  I know an ally when I see one. I hooked the books under my arms. “If you’ve got a place for me to sit,” I said.

  She was already halfway across the carpet to the back of the store. “We have a little office,” she said. “I can give you some coffee. All you have to do is sign your name. Then when people come in asking for them inscribed”—she made the word sound like bad Park Avenue French for something unprintable—“I can give them some of these.” She pushed open a heavy metal door and held it until I walked through. “Anybody stupid enough to pay half a million dollars for a one-bedroom apartment,” she said, “is stupid enough to feel superior about a signature.”

  The office was small and cramped and functional, with a rickety little desk and a minuscule chair wedged between unsteady piles of books. At least half the books were paperbacks. At least 90 percent of the paperbacks were romances. There was an overflowing green tin ashtray on a bookshelf above my head. I took it down, lit a cigarette, and dropped the match among the butts.

  “Just your name,” the girl said again. “If it was before publication, I’d have you date them, but that’s the only kind of date these people want. Like other people will see the book on the coffee table and pick it up and read the date and think the guy who owns it has some kind of in.”

  “I could always backdate it,” I said.

  “Whatever for?”

  “It would be nice if you actually sold some of these things. I’d like to be read, for God’s sake.”

  The girl dismissed this with another wave. “These people don’t read,” she said. “I mean, they do, but they read trashy paperback originals. I mean, I like trashy paperback originals. Even so. These people pick up three impressive-looking hardcovers and a dozen Phoebe Damereaux and pretend the Damereaux are for their invalid mothers. If you know what I mean.”

  “I know Phoebe Damereaux,” I said. “Long may she wave.”

  “Yeah,” the girl admitted. “She’s pretty good. And she’s in hardcover now, so I suppose she doesn’t count. But you see what I’m saying.”

  I said I did and started signing books. I was very tired. My signature looked like a secret code for the mining of Haiphong Harbor. In Vietnamese.

  “What I heard,” I told her, “is nobody’s reading romance novels any more.”

  “Nobody’s reading the lines,” she nodded emphatically, making a wild gesture at the towers of paperbacks surrounding us. “Look at these returns. God, you should see the kind of trouble we have with those. Sabotage. I’m not kidding.”

  “Sabotage?”

  “With the dumps. You know, the display things. People come in and destroy other people’s dumps, or move them, or hide them. And then there’s Harlequin. They want to opt out of the romance book centers and have us carry only Harlequin, which is ridiculous because Harlequin doesn’t sell as well among the yuppies as some of the others, and what we have here is a yuppie market. Then everybody is buying everybody else out, and lines are folding right and left, and God knows what all. It’s a mess.”

  I took a deep drag on my cigarette. My signature was beginning to look like a biology class drawing of a frog.

  “What about the contemporaries?” I asked her. “You know a writer named Verna Train?”

  That took her a while. She seemed to be communing with a central book file located somewhere in her cerebellum.

  “Verna Train,” she said finally. “Charla Menlowe.”

  “What?”

  “It’s like a clump,” she said. “Like actresses. Brooke Adams and Karen Allen are a clump. They look alike. They take the same kinds of parts. You see? Verna Train and Charla Menlowe are a clump, they do the same stuff. They’re good enough to have an audience, but they’re nothing special. But people recognize the names, you see, because they were all over the place during the boom, so if they did something else, we’d want to handle it, we’d make some money just from the name recognition. But not their romance stuff. Not anymore.”

  “Right,” I said. I knew all this already.

  “In fact,” she said, “that’s what’s happening. There’s a brand-new line coming out in a few months taking all these sorts of middle-level people and putting them into romantic suspense. We’re very excited about it. Not that we’re excited about romantic suspense—that’s not going to go anywhere. But the recognition factor, that’s something else. You know about r
omantic suspense?”

  I knew more than I wanted to know about romantic suspense. I knew more than she knew about the line she was describing. I was glad she thought it would be successful, especially since Nick didn’t. I bent over the fifteenth book and forced the pen to make a signature. It looked vaguely like a crossword puzzle grid.

  “You know,” she said. “All that infighting doesn’t help. The kind of readers who buy the line stuff don’t want to think of their favorite writers as—as bitches.”

  “The genre is doomed,” I told her.

  “Probably,” she said. “But some of these women are monsters, believe me. And it gets in the papers, and it gets around. Take that Amelia Samson. There’s this story going around, it was in Romantic Times, that when Miss Train started losing sales and her publisher wanted to drop her, Miss Samson could have stopped them but she refused. And they’ve known each other forever. They’re supposed to be friends. Some people say Miss Samson even did a little pushing to get Miss Train ousted. What respectable yuppie wants to be associated with a person like that?”

  All the respectable yuppies I knew behaved like that, but I didn’t say so. I didn’t say the story didn’t sound like Amelia, although it didn’t. “I don’t suppose it’s hurt Amelia any,” I told her.

  The little girl shook her head emphatically. “It’s hurt Amelia Samson a lot. That and the fact that she’s still living in 1921. But believe me, that sort of nonsense doesn’t do anyone any good.”

  My signature now looked like a route map for the N train.

  It was time to quit.

  SEVEN

  IT WAS THE BEGINNING of the lunch rush, one of those times when the streets of New York are crowded with cars and people frozen into immobility and distinctly unhappy about it. Even if I could have found a cab, I wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere in it. I would just have traded crowd claustrophobia for traffic jam. I started downtown on foot, dodging arm-swinging secretaries in pastel linen skirts and ankle-strap shoes, ignoring “Walk” and “Don’t Walk” signs. “Walk” and “Don’t Walk” signs don’t mean anything on Lexington Avenue at half past twelve. Crowds form an unbroken stream. In the restaurants, they form the breathing equivalent of an unsplittable atom. I took a look into Hamburger Heaven. Even if I could fight my way to the counter, I’d never carve out enough room to eat. I let three girls in dirndl minidresses and Art Deco legwarmers push past me and took comfort in the fact that Dana never ate lunch. If Dana ever started eating lunch, her wardrobe would become inoperative.

  I turned south and west, running a little to keep myself awake. It got the adrenaline flowing, but it didn’t clear my head.

  In the lobby of Dana’s building, the stream was running against me. Assistant art directors in black tights and black turtlenecks and rose jumpers, assistant personnel directors in navy blue wool and frilly white blouses, assistant editors in tweed skirts and “good” (single-ply) cashmere sweaters and last year’s slingbacks—all of them were on their way out of the elevators and into the street. I ducked through the nearest pair of air-lock doors, realized I was in a “30th Floor Only” car, and ducked out again. I waited by a set of doors with a sign on them saying “22-49,” flattened myself against the wall to let the horde disgorge, then darted in to push the button for “26.” At certain times of day, finding the right elevator going in the right direction in a New York office building can be the emotional equivalent of storming the beach at Iwo Jima.

  The twenty-sixth floor was one of the reasons I’d hired Dana. Most agents work out of their apartments, or rent two- or three-room suites in modest little buildings in the Forties. Dana had the entire floor. She had three telephone banks. She had wall-to-wall Bigelows on the floor and framed publicity posters for half a dozen bestsellers on her walls. The bestsellers were a little dated—Dana used to specialize in mainstream fiction, which has been losing out to the genres and the nonfiction how-to books (Fifteen Minutes to Thinner Thighs and Your First Million)—but they were very famous. Some of them were famous enough to have made six-figure movie deals before anybody had ever heard of six-figure movie deals.

  I rapped my knuckles against the receptionist’s desk, smiled a greeting, and took a very full, very black cup of coffee from the blue plastic Dripmaster on the end table next to the John Homans couch. I looked at the little plastic dish of rat pellets on the floor in the corner and wondered if there was anywhere in New York without a rodent problem (cockroaches are not a problem; cockroaches are an Alternative Population). I swallowed the coffee in one long chug and headed for Dana’s office. The receptionist would buzz me through, but I wasn’t worried about interrupting anything. Dana does not see people in her office during lunch. Dana sees them on the phone during lunch.

  She was getting off the phone as I walked in.

  “You wouldn’t believe who that was,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe what that was.”

  “Haven’t had any sleep either, I take it.” I dropped into a chair and started searching for cigarettes.

  “That was some idiot in PR over at Gallard Rowson,” Dana said. “She’s got an idea to promote Verna’s book. She wants to put Verna’s bio on the back cover and start the text with”—Dana paused dramatically—“‘She lived dangerously and died violently, but before she did, she left us this book.’”

  “Well,” I said. “The syntax is interesting.”

  “Oh, come now,” Dana said. “Doubleday can’t be that bad.”

  “Doubleday isn’t bad at all,” I said. “It’s PR. PR people aren’t Doubleday, or Dortman & Hodges, or Avon, or Austin, Stoddard & Trapp. PR people are PR people. They have schools for them.”

  “I suppose they must,” Dana said.

  I found my cigarettes wedged into the envelope of my American Express bill. I extracted them. Dana was fussing with papers on her desk, looking for something that wasn’t there. I found a pack of Monk’s Inn matches, lit up, and threw the spent match and a handful of scrap paper into Dana’s Steuben glass ashtray.

  “I thought you were bringing Sarah English with you,” she muttered. “Now what the hell—” She brushed her short, Vidal Sassooned hair out of her eyes. “I’ve lost the specs, of course. I’ll have Fanny bring in another set.” She buzzed through on her desk phone. “You’ve got to tell Miss English to come in and talk to Jane Herman. As long as she’s in the city, we might as well get things straightened out.”

  “Jane Herman?”

  Dana sighed impatiently. “Jane sold Miss English’s book. I don’t read unsolicited mail anymore. Even recommended unsolicited mail.” Her mouth twisted wryly. “Maybe I should start. That was the best romantic suspense this office has seen yet, and Jane didn’t have the sense to submit it to our line. She just shot it straight off to Austin, Stoddard & Trapp. Without even telling me.”

  “I thought your line had to have brand-name authors.”

  “And celebrities,” Dana said. “Yes, it does. Gallard Rowson took one look at the competition and insisted on a hook. Assholes.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Not that it wasn’t a good idea,” Dana said again. “It was a great idea. You should see the orders. You should see the subscriptions. Subscriptions are sales. The readers want celebrities.”

  “Figures,” I said.

  Dana took a pile of proofs out of a drawer and tossed them to me. Passionate Intrigues was written in red and black script across the top of each cover. The cover paintings bled into the spines. The one for Mysteries of the Heart showed a man and a woman, locked in lecherous embrace, dangling from a rope suspended from the bottom of a glider descending into the Grand Canyon at dusk. The man had his lips as close to the woman’s nipple as genre romance covers will allow, which meant he was half a breath from swallowing it. The woman was wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch high-heeled sandals.

  “The competition is awful,” Dana said. “Judy Sullivan over at Walker. Bernstein and Marcel—you know Bernstein and Marcel? T
hey’re general agents, but they somehow managed to sew up half the decent mystery writers in the world, it seems like, and most of romance. They’re packaging for Avon and they’ve got everybody.”

  “You’ve got Verna Train,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” Dana said. “I’ve got Ivy Samuels Tree and Hazel Ganz writing as Harriet Lowry and God knows who else. I’ve got the names; I’m just not sure I’ve got the quality. What does Hazel know about romantic suspense?” She tapped her teeth with the tip of her silver Tiffany T-pen. Then she put the pen in her pocket. She was careful to position the T-shaped clip exactly in the center of the linen flap. “You wouldn’t want to try romantic suspense?” she suggested. “I could pry your Jeri Andrews pseudonym out of Farret.”

  “Jeri Andrews has retired,” I said.

  “I was afraid of that.” There was a knock on the door. Dana called “Come in” and sat looking regal while a thin, pimply-faced secretary scurried to the desk with a sheaf of photocopies in a blue plastic folder. “Excellent,” Dana said. “You can go to lunch now.”

  The secretary did everything but kiss her feet. Dana tossed the photocopies to me.

  “Look them over,” she said, “but a quarter of a million on signing is a quarter of a million on signing. Plus residuals. As long as you deal with network programming, you’re dealing with business people. The movie people think they’re one up on God and they rob you blind. And you can’t prove it.”

  “Double cost accounting,” I said wisely.

  “People should stop teaching you buzz words.”

  I threw the folder onto her desk. “Okay,” I said. “I’m not crazy. It’s a big, unusual deal and you’re a brilliant agent and with 15 percent of this you can afford to take me to Lutece for dinner. How’s that?”