Death's Savage Passion

by Jane Haddam

  “Images called,” Dana said.

  I sighed. “I tried,” I said. “I really did. But I haven’t had any sleep and I look lousy in the Images style and I don’t understand if I have to go on television why I can’t just—”

  “You can’t,” Dana said. “I told you when we started. If you want to go this route, you have to keep in shape, you have to look the part, you have to play by the rules. If you want to be famous, McKenna, you have to look famous.”

  “Everybody famous has to look like everybody else famous?”

  “Maybe Images was the wrong place,” Dana said. “But we’ve tried you with Estee Lauder and Merle Norman and Elizabeth Arden and even Mary Kay, for God’s sake. You managed to get yourself thrown out of Mary Kay.”

  “I’ve got to go over to AST,” I said, getting into my jacket. “Someone in PR wants to talk promotion on the paper.”

  The buzzer went off on Dana’s desk. She picked up the receiver, listened for a minute, then hung up. “Damn Phoebe Damereaux,” she said. “There’s a cop in Reception waiting to talk to me.”

  Radd Stassen was not a cop. He was, as he put it, “a private.” The challenge was to discover a private what. Radd Stassen had thirty-two expensively capped teeth, tinted contact lenses that made his eyes look rabbit pink, and tiny embroidered emblems sewn onto all his clothes. His hair was slicked back and sleek, like a lounge lizard’s in a silent movie. He bounced on the balls of his feet, trying to give an impression of energy.

  He was carrying an outsized manila envelope. He patted it fondly, sat down without waiting to be asked, and crossed his legs at the knees.

  “I represent Jane Minetti Brady,” he said. “We’re going to call you as a witness in a civil suit.”

  On the other side of the desk, Dana shifted in her chair, frowned, tapped her forehead. She didn’t know what was in her office, which meant she couldn’t decide if I should be there.

  Radd Stassen decided for her. He put his face very close to mine, squinted, and nodded emphatically. “The blonde,” he said. “I’ve got notes about a blonde.” He took an untidy mess of papers from the manila envelope and shuffled through them. “Pat Campbell,” he said.

  “Patience,” I said. “Patience Campbell McKenna.”

  “Same thing,” he said.

  I did not know what to do with someone who thought “Pat Campbell” and “Patience Campbell McKenna” were the same thing. I hunkered down into my coat, warding off the cold that was more a function of fatigue than room temperature. I was falling asleep. If Dana and Radd Stassen got into something surreal, I could pass out in my chair.

  One look at Dana’s face should have told me that no matter how surrealistic Radd Stassen might be as a person, his mission was anything but. She was suddenly very alert, erect and rigid in her swivel chair, eyes forward, frown plastered from one side of her jaw to the other. She looked the way she looks when someone mentions money in contract negotiations.

  “I haven’t come for information,” Radd Stassen said. “We’ve got information.”

  “What have you come for?” Dana asked him. “Doughnuts?”

  Radd Stassen smiled. It amounted to a neck-tightening grimace and a shimmer of teeth.

  “We already know you act as agent for Maxwell Arthur Brady,” he said.

  “Bob Brown acts as agent for Maxwell Arthur Brady,” Dana said. “Would you like his number?”

  “You act as agent for Maxwell Arthur Brady writing as”—Radd Stassen checked his papers—“Melissa Crowell.” He put the papers on his knees and patted the edges of the stack, pretending to straighten them. “It’s in your capacity as agent for Maxwell Arthur Brady writing as Melissa Crowell that we’re going to call you in the civil suit. Jane Minetti Brady has a certain amount of interest in Maxwell Arthur Brady writing as Melissa Crowell.”

  I woke up long enough to get a cigarette out of the pack in my jacket pocket and (almost) unravel Radd Stassen’s show-and-tell.

  “Melissa Crowell,” I said. “Melissa Crowell writes bodice rippers. You mean Max Brady is Melissa Crowell?”

  “Exactly,” Radd Stassen said.

  “Ridiculous,” Dana said.

  “You take a rape prevention class at the New School Monday and Thursday nights at seven-thirty,” Radd Stassen said. “Maxwell Arthur Brady teaches a class on the history of the private detective at the New School Monday and Thursday nights at seven.”

  “I take a rape class at the New School,” Dana said.

  “We know that’s where you’re passing business information,” Radd Stassen said. “Outside the men’s room on the third floor. We’ve got witnesses.”

  “Bull manure,” Dana said.

  “Jane Minetti Brady got a divorce from Maxwell Arthur Brady in 1969,” Radd Stassen said. “It’s a percentage of income, which translates into a percentage of known income. We now know about this income.”

  Dana sighed, elaborately, grotesquely, exaggeratedly. It was such an out-of-character sound for her, I woke up again. I had a sudden vision of a class called “Acting for Agents,” held in a fifth-floor Chelsea loft every Monday and Wednesday lunch and run by a ringer from William Morris. If it didn’t exist, it ought to.

  “Mr. Stetson—” Dana started.

  “Stassen,” Radd Stassen smiled energetically. “Raddford Hugh Stassen. Know what’s great about my name? It’s my name. The one I was born with.”

  “It must have been quite a trial in Little League,” Dana said.

  “About Maxwell Arthur Brady writing as Melissa Crowell,” Radd Stassen said.

  The buzzer went off on Dana’s desk. She picked up her phone, listened with impatience, and said, “That’s all right. Go to lunch... no, go to lunch now. I’ll come out and get it.” She replaced the phone. “If you’ll excuse me. This is very important and I’ve been waiting all morning.”

  She got up and headed for the door, heels sinking into the carpet, hands rigidly at her sides. Radd and I watched her go. She had more self-control than either of us. She left that office as if she were leaving an empty space.

  She shut the door with a snap. Radd rearranged his big, intrusive body in his chair, wiggled his foot (the one in the air), and smiled at me.

  “Going to call her lawyer,” he said. “They always do.”

  I started hunting for another cigarette. “Somebody buzzed her,” I said.

  “Somebody buzzed her to say they were going to lunch,” Radd Stassen said. “It’s an excuse. She did this Maxwell Arthur Brady a favor, now she wants to know what her liability is. She’ll come back, deny everything, then come into court and change her story under oath. They do it every time.”

  “I didn’t even know Max used to be married,” I said.

  “Ancient history,” Radd Stassen said.

  I found the cigarette. I found the matches. I found a three-week overdue electric bill. “Lisa,” I said. “All the time I’ve known him, he’s been going out with a girl named Lisa.” I thought about it. “Never seen her,” I said.

  “The redhead,” Radd Stassen said. “That’s recent. Last year, year and a half. Before that there was—” He consulted his papers. Every time he consulted his papers, he had to look through the stack page by page. He had apparently yet to hear about categorization by subject. Or even alphabetization. “The older woman,” he muttered. He seized a page. “Train,” he said. “Mrs. Verna Train.”

  I burned my fingers with the match. “Are you nuts?”

  “Of course I’m not nuts. I’ve got pictures.” He was offended.

  “They hated each other,” I told him. “They did physical violence to each other.”

  “Lately. Before Lisa, they used to do other things to each other.” Radd smiled. I was getting very tired of his smile. “Mrs. Brady has kept an eye on Mr. Brady since the divorce,” he said.

  “Mrs. Brady must be better than the KGB.”

  “This Train got him started on the romance stuff.”

  I lit another match and appl
ied it very carefully to my cigarette. Verna Train, in a snit over Max Brady’s affair with the redheaded Lisa, threatens to tell Max’s ex-wife that Max is making a lot of money hacking out bodice rippers under a pseudonym. Max Brady therefore kills Verna Train before she can talk. Possible.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Was it Verna who told you Max was Melissa Crowell?”

  “I can’t tell you where I got my information.” He looked shocked.

  He shouldn’t have given me the information, but it seemed ungrateful to say so. Instead, I tried nodding sympathetically. “Of course not,” I told him.

  Radd Stassen expanded. “People read these private-eye novels and don’t realize what it’s like,” he said. “The name of this game is money. You want to make a lot of money, you got to protect your contacts.”

  “Of course.”

  “What I do, it’s a lot like what a cop does. Except cops can’t afford a night out at the Hudson Bay Inn.” He coughed into his hand. “You like the Hudson Bay Inn?”

  “Um,” I said.

  “You like Oriental sexual positions? That’s my hobby, Oriental sexual positions.”

  I had let my eyes close again. Now I opened them—for a good look at Radd Stassen. He was starring in his own movie. His part was being played by Burt Reynolds.

  “What I am, you know, I’m one of these guys who like to get around.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “I like to get a lot of experience. Try new things. Blow off a little steam.”

  “Right,” I said again.

  “I see a lot of interesting stuff in my work. I stay in shape. I run in the park every morning. I get out every night. I figure, if you don’t burn the candle at both ends, what’s the candle got two ends for?”

  It was time to put a stop to this. “Actually,” I said. “I’m not so fond of the Hudson Bay Inn. I sort of prefer the Four Seasons.”

  The Four Seasons is one of those restaurants where dinner for two can run two hundred dollars without wine. Radd Stassen went white.

  He was saved by Dana, bustling through the door with a pile of folders in her hands and a little too much color in her cheeks.

  “Idiots,” she was saying. “Ask them for projections and you get—” She noticed Radd Stassen. “Oh,” she said. “You’re still here.”

  Radd Stassen started pawing through his pile of papers. “I’ve got some documents,” he said.

  I got out of my chair. I might be “the blonde,” but that could mean anything. Radd Stassen had no right to keep me in Dana’s office. With any luck, Dana wouldn’t want to keep me in her office either.

  “I’m very tired,” I said. “I think I’ll cancel my appointment at AST and go home to sleep.”

  Dana frowned. “Don’t cancel any appointments,” she said. “Especially any appointments about promotion.”

  “You want I should faint while trying to make up my mind between poster proposals?”

  “I want,” Dana started.

  Radd Stassen interrupted her. “I want to talk to you about this Englishwoman,” he said. “Was he leaving this redhead for this Englishwoman? What’s her name?”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  Radd Stassen waved his papers in triumph. “We’ve got pictures,” he said. “Last night. He was all over her.”

  EIGHT

  I GOT OUT OF there. It took a pretense of idiocy. It took putting out my cigarette before I was finished with it. I didn’t care. I was glad to know Radd Stassen wasn’t much of a private detective (an Englishwoman, for God’s sake) and glad to be making my escape.

  Radd Stassen had given me a motive for the murder of Verna Train, if Verna had been murdered. In fact, he had almost given me two. Almost but not quite. I tried to envision Jane Minetti Brady following Max through a succession of jazz bars and campy pickup joints and finally pushing Verna off a subway platform in frustration. It didn’t work. It was Jane Minetti Brady’s hired detectives who were following Max. She might have been along for the ride, but I couldn’t imagine even Radd Stassen putting up with murder. Also, according to Mr. Stassen, Max had been annoying Sarah. Sarah being in the mood she was in, she probably hadn’t been much annoyed, but that didn’t change the fact that Jane watching Max hit on Sarah had no reason to push Verna into the path of a Lexington Avenue local.

  Also, Verna had not been pushed. That much Phoebe had told anyone willing to listen.

  I returned my suspicions to Max. Max-kills-Verna-for-threatening-his-secret-income had a sensible ring to it.

  There was a dish of Halloween candy on a desk in the hallway on the way out of Dana’s office. I took a handful and headed for reception. Tired had become exhausted had become catatonic. I had not been joking when I asked Dana if she wanted me to pass out while preparing posters. I was ready to pass out eating pumpkins.

  From the general direction of reception a thin, shrill, exasperated voice said, “You can’t throw up on the carpet. There’s a ladies’ room down the hall.”

  There was no answering voice. I gulped the rest of the pumpkins I’d picked up—grown people always look ridiculous eating Halloween candy—and wandered, hands in pockets, toward the sound of the shrill voice. I was surprised how quiet the office was otherwise. Dana and Radd Stassen at one end of the hall, the shrieker in reception at the other—nobody else was on the twenty-sixth floor.

  “Oh my God,” the shrill voice was saying. “You can’t do this.” I turned the corner and stopped in the archway. On the other side was a grimacing, panicked Marilou Saunders, holding the doubled, wretching body of Sarah English in her arms.

  It was like looking at a Judy Chicago sculpture—Marilou in black silk, rhinestone buttons, and Max Factor Hot Promise red; Sarah in brown Woolworth slacks and long red double-knit sweater vest; Marilou’s face distorted under terrified eyes; Sarah bent over at the waist and heaving.

  “Dear Jesus,” Marilou said. “I just walked in here.”

  I walked slowly to the blue plastic Dripmaster, poured myself a cup of coffee, and downed it. It seemed very, very important to be calm, and deliberate, and decisive. It seemed necessary to be awake, too, but there was nothing I could do about that. There were spangles like Christmas lights in front of my eyes. My head was buzzing. I had gone beyond the need for sleep and entered a world of waking dreams.

  Otherwise known as sleep deprivation, hallucinatory state.

  If I didn’t get some sleep soon, I was going to start hearing things.

  I threw the coffee cup into the wastebasket beside the Dripmaster. It bounced off the green metal rim and into the corner, staining the carpet. I retrieved it and placed it carefully in the trash.

  Sarah was still doubled over at the waist, still writhing, still straining against Marilou’s hands. Her pain got through to me, moving across my stomach lining in what I thought were sympathy spasms. Emergency lights were going off in my head, but I didn’t seem capable of doing anything about them. I was swimming through molasses.

  “The thing to do here,” I said, “is call 911.”

  “You call 911,” Marilou said. “I can’t just drop her.”

  “Put her on the couch,” I said. “Lay her down.”

  Sarah gave another heave, then a shudder, than a moan. Vomit was coming out of her in a thin brown stream, much too little of it for the violence of the convulsions that ripped through her every few seconds. Marilou, frail and shaky and probably on something, could barely hold her up, never mind move her. She braced her feet against the carpet and dragged.

  I went to the desk, punched buttons until I figured out how to get an outside line, and dialed. I felt almost as nauseated as Sarah looked. The sight of her terrified me. I reached for my cigarettes and tried to think of a way to explain what was happening while still making sense. It couldn’t be done.

  I told 911 I had a matter of life and death—poisoning—and needed an ambulance. I told them I didn’t know what caused the poisoning. I told them time was of the essence. I hi
nted at foul play. I told truth and lies with equal conviction. Nine-one-one had no reaction. Nine-one-one is a computer.

  I hung up and sat down on the receptionist’s desk. I found matches and lit my cigarette.

  “Food poisoning,” I told Marilou, trying to sound confident. “Salmonella. She must have had lunch someplace interesting.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Marilou had managed to get Sarah close enough to the couch to drop her. She brushed off her hands and shook out her dress. “It was the oddest thing. I come through the door and there she is, leaning over her shoes—”

  “Standing up?”

  “Yeah. On her feet and leaning over her shoes. You’d figure she’d have sat down. Or headed for the ladies’ room, for God’s sake.”

  “Maybe it came over her suddenly.” I sounded like my grandmother.

  “It must have.” Marilou threw herself into a chair and started pawing through her purse. “Quaaludes,” she said. “The only thing for a time like this is Quaaludes.”

  I shook my head. The little white Christmas lights had become strobe flashes. Incipient nausea was becoming actual. Every muscle in my face ached. I considered Marilou’s hot pink ultrasuede handbag.

  “You got any speed?” I asked her.

  “You take speed?”

  “I was thinking of something like caffeine pills,” I said. “I—”

  On the couch, Sarah had stopped wretching. She was lying rigid, twitching under the ungraceful folds of her clothes. My exhaustion nausea was joined by an eerie, sick feeling. I knew what was happening to Sarah. In a moment the twitching would stop and the rigidity would melt and the moaning would become a rattle. It would take longer and cause more pain than something simple like a knife.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “What’s the matter?” Marilou said.

  I turned my head and tried to look at her, to concentrate on the emphasized makeup around her wide blue eyes and the thin strand of silver chain around her neck. The chain was under her dress, so as not to clash with the rhinestone buttons. The silver bangle on her wrist was a study in the non-Euclidean geometry of welded metal. The Quaalude was between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. She was not holding a glass of water. She must have been intending to chew the thing.