Death's Savage Passion

by Jane Haddam

  “That’s slander,” Marilou said. “I can sue you for slander and I’m going to sue you for slander and if they take me off the air I’m going to sue you for more than that, you and that black son of a bitch who calls himself a television director.”

  “Sarah English is dead,” I shouted. “Where did you go? What do you think you’re trying to get away with? If you didn’t do anything, why are you hiding?”

  “Who the screwing frog do you think you are?”

  The “screwing frog” activated something in the back. We were suddenly surrounded by people. Two nervous young men with bantamweight builds pulled at Marilou’s arms, trying to drag her into the wings. Nobody touched me—in heels I’m almost six three, and can look formidable—but I was cordoned off by people. It made me laugh. They’d used their heavies for me, but I was the one willing to go. Marilou was taking her two bodyguards apart.

  “I’ll tell you now what I told you then,” she screamed at me. “I’m not going to let that little bitch drag me into her crap, not for any price, do you hear me?”

  “What little bitch?” I screamed back. “Who are you talking about?”

  She broke away from the bantamweights and came at me—fast. My bodyguards didn’t have a chance to react. She had her nails into the silk of my shirtwaist before anyone even knew she was moving. She had ripped the right lapel from the dress front before they had a chance to get to her.

  “I know what you’re doing,” she hissed at me, “and I’m not having any, McKenna. I’m not having any. You can take that home and stuff it where the sun don’t shine and then you can tell her.”

  This time two of the biggest ones got a grip on her.

  TWENTY

  I HAD TO GO home to change my dress. The Network offered to buy me another—take the dress size, send someone to Saks, deliver an identical replacement—but it would have taken too long. I wanted some peace and quiet before I met Amelia. My refusal made the fat little emissary from middle management very unhappy. I might hold the Network responsible. I might sue.

  “Of course Miss Saunders wasn’t herself today,” the emissary said. “You have to excuse Miss Saunders.”

  “Miss Saunders was as much herself as I’ve ever seen her,” I said. “You ought to put a leash on that woman.”

  “Of course, if she knows anything about a crime, I’m sure she’d be happy to testify,” the emissary said. “Our understanding, though, is that—”

  “She doesn’t have to testify,” I said, “just talk to the police. And I don’t care what your understanding is. I was there. So was she.”

  “Ah,” the emissary said. “Well. We will of course talk to Miss Saunders about that. In fact, someone is talking to Miss Saunders about that right now. However—”

  I dismissed him. I knew what “however” meant. I also knew Marilou could no longer get away with it. My story was becoming more plausible by the minute. Hers was beginning to look sick. Tony Marsh had his body.

  I refused the offer of a limousine and took a cab to the West Side, feeling very high. I thought I finally had a handle on this thing. I felt in control of it. I thought I knew how to approach it.

  I ran into my apartment, hot to tell Phoebe all about it, and found a note on the kitchen table. “Have taken Adrienne to Eeyore’s,” it said. Eeyore’s is a children’s bookstore. I crumpled the note into a ball and threw it into the yellow plastic garbage pail Phoebe had acquired while I was out. I considered going to Eeyore’s to find them. I rejected the idea. As far as I knew, Adrienne did not yet know her mother was dead. Talking to Adrienne about Sarah dying was going to take all afternoon whenever I did it. It might take several days. I couldn’t break that up to have lunch with Amelia.

  I called Nick’s office. His secretary answered, murmured gracious hellos, and said Nick was in conference. The conference wasn’t going anywhere. If I got in a cab right this minute, Nick would be ready to see me when I arrived.

  I changed into a skirt and sweater and flat-heeled boots and headed for the door.

  Nick’s office is in the far West Forties, in one of those buildings that look designed to house novelty companies and porno publishers on their way to bankruptcy. In the beginning, when Nick had just left Nader’s Raiders and his partner had just escaped from a white-shoe Wall Street firm, the address had been functional. The rent was minimal for Manhattan. Now that Nick and David were doing well, they were reluctant to move. Their clients like coming to Eleventh Avenue. Eleventh Avenue had atmosphere. Eleventh Avenue showed that Life was Real and Life was Earnest. Since most of their clients were either romance writers or small romance packagers, this was supposed to make sense.

  It did not make sense to me. I had lived in terrible buildings in terrible neighborhoods when I was working cheap. To my mind, you worked, you advanced, and you moved into something more comfortable. Preferably on Columbus Avenue in the Seventies.

  I had to ring six buzzers before someone let me into the lobby. I had to ring six more buzzers before the elevator door opened. The owners and occupants obviously thought a surfeit of buzzers would defeat the average mugger, who was reputed to be too stupid to count and too strung out to remember anything from one second to the next.

  I had to stand under a prism viewer before Nick’s secretary let me into the office. She came to the door and opened it for me. She didn’t want me to get the idea she had anything against me personally.

  “He’s in the back by himself,” she said, closing the door behind me. “As soon as I said you were coming over, he locked himself in his office with a lot of papers.”

  “I’ll talk him out of it,” I said.

  I plowed into the back and barged into Nick’s office without knocking. I was expected. Like all secretaries, Nick’s called ahead.

  I dropped into his client’s chair, the one that his mother had bought for her first apartment. In 1948. “I wanted to talk to somebody,” I said. “I think I have something worked out. I wanted you to look at it.”

  “Why me? Why not Phoebe?” He ran a hand through his hair. “That’s what usually happens around here. You and Phoebe get into trouble, as much trouble as you can think of, and then as soon as you’re arrested or somebody ties you up in a closet, I’m supposed to be the cavalry and rescue you.”

  “Phoebe took Adrienne to Eeyore’s,” I said.

  “You don’t want to talk to Adrienne about Sarah,” Nick said.

  “I’ll get around to it,” I said.

  He pushed the papers on his desk a little farther toward the center and tipped his swivel chair toward the wall. He looked exhausted and none too happy with me. I expected another lecture. Instead, he said, “Tell me your beautiful solution.” He said it the way an overtried father would tell his prodigal son, “Give me the excuse this time.”

  I hesitated. I decided I was being silly. Nick is always like that, in the beginning. “It’s not a solution,” I told him. “It’s a problem. I worked out a chain of events—” I stopped. I threw out an empty Merit box and extracted a fresh one from my bag. “You remember the night Sarah arrived and you told me about Dana’s suspense line and you said she had her ass to the wind?” I said. “That’s not what I hear from everybody else. What I hear from everybody else is the idea’s going like wildfire.”

  “If it is, then she doesn’t have her ass to the wind anymore.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Nick shrugged. “I told you what the projections were. Maybe they were wrong. If they were wrong, Gallard Rowson is going to make a lot of money. So is Dana.”

  “Could they be that wrong?”

  He grinned. “Remember Farret Paperback Originals?” he said. “Of course they could be that wrong. This is a more pleasant way to be wrong. Maybe the books aren’t as bad as everybody thought they would be. Maybe celebrity names are enough.”

  “Mmm,” I said. I had a copy of Marilou’s book in my bag. I had a terrible feeling I ought to read it.

  “Tell me about your timetable,
” Nick said.

  I took a blank piece of paper from his desk and a pen from his pencil holder. I wrote “Sequence” at the top of the page.

  “First,” I said, “Verna dies. That’s Thursday night, Friday morning. Don’t frown at me like that. First, Verna dies. Then Sarah dies. I’m poisoned. Marilou is in Dana’s reception room and says she isn’t. Caroline’s office gets ripped up. You see anything wrong with that?”

  “I don’t see what Verna has to do with it.”

  “I don’t see how anyone could have both poisoned that coffee and ripped up Caroline’s office,” I said.

  “Halloween candy,” Nick said.

  “I don’t care what it was in. The timing is still wrong. That was lunch hour. Caroline’s office is halfway across town from Dana’s. Nobody could have done both those things.”

  “Maybe nobody did.” Nick put his head in his hands. “McKenna, you still can’t prove the poisoning was deliberate. Okay, somebody moved Sarah’s body. Maybe Marilou Saunders did it to avoid the scandal.”

  “Maybe I have green hair. Nick—”

  “Answer a question for me,” Nick said. “What for?”

  “You’ve been saying that for days.”

  “I have to say it. One of two things has to be true. Either everything that’s happened has been a deliberate plan, at which point you have to decide why anyone would want to kill a second-rate romance writer and a hick from Connecticut. Or only some of it was deliberate, which leaves you a lot less to explain.”

  “Just who moved Sarah’s body. And why.”

  “Exactly. Marilou Saunders. To keep her name out of the papers. To give herself a chance to disassociate herself from the poisoning. By the time she found out it was caused by a nut, she’d have to go through with getting rid of Sarah’s body anyway, because she had Sarah’s body.”

  “So she put it in Caroline Dooley’s apartment and lit a match?”

  “Marilou Saunders?” Nick said. “Why not? Didn’t I just see her throwing a temper tantrum full of four-letter words on national television?”

  I blushed. “It wasn’t my fault,” I said.

  “You started it,” he said.

  “It may be the simplest explanation, but it doesn’t solve anything,” I said. “It doesn’t explain why no one was poisoned by the candy before—”

  “Luck.”

  “And Verna—”

  “An accident.”

  “And all the phone calls saying it was Sarah—”

  “Marilou covering her ass.”

  “Explain someone ripping up Caroline’s office and taking her keys,” I said. I sounded sullen.

  “Romance sabotage, of which there’s been quite a bit recently. Nothing so blatant as that, mind you, but quite a bit. And we don’t really know someone took Caroline’s keys. Caroline lost her keys, from what Tony Marsh tells me, the same day her office was torn apart. The super got her a new set made. Okay. But there’s nothing to say it’s connected. She’s a bubble head. She’d lose her rear end if it wasn’t screwed on.”

  “That’s a mess,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “So tell me, first, why someone would want to kill Verna and Sarah? And while you’re at it, think up a plot for a conspiracy, because you’re right. If someone was trying to kill you, or Sarah, or Marilou, deliberately, then that person could not also have ripped up Caroline’s office. Not unless he had a helicopter at his disposal.”

  “I didn’t know that part about Caroline and the keys,” I said. “Not all of it.”

  He gave me an evil look. “It’s not always a mystery, McKenna. Sometimes it’s just a lot of bad luck. And coincidences happen.”

  “Horse manure,” I said. I started to gather up my things. “With you, it’s never a mystery.”

  “This is the woman,” he said, “who less than a week ago said she only wanted to deal with ancient murders. Ancient history.”

  “The key,” I said, “is finding out how those two things could have been done at once. That’s the key.”

  Nick just shook his head.

  TWENTY-ONE

  AMELIA GOT TO THE RUSSIAN Tea Room before I did. Got there and set up shop. Although knowledgeable New Yorkers refuse to sit “upstairs,” Amelia preferred upstairs. There was more room to spread out. Amelia at lunch needed a lot of room to spread out. By the time I was shown to her table, she had territorialized the entire west corner of the room. It was quarter after one. She was dressed in vintage Worth and had an ostrich feather in her hair.

  “It’s always such an experience having her with us,” the hostess said, bringing me upstairs. “Miss Samson is a very loyal customer.”

  A waiter took over at the top of the stairs, showed me to my seat (the only one of six at Amelia’s table not covered with papers), held my chair, and promised to come back immediately with “another cocktail for Miss Samson.” Miss Samson already had a cocktail. It was pink. It had red and green and blue flags in it.

  “I suppose it also has gin in it,” I said, stowing my tote bag at my feet. “Do you have to do that in the middle of the afternoon?”

  “Gin and grenadine,” Amelia said. “Doesn’t it look awful? If anybody asks, I can always say it’s a Shirley Temple.”

  “Will anybody believe it?”

  “Fans believe it. Fans”—she shook her head resentfully—“are the only problem with the Russian Tea Room.”

  I didn’t tell her she’d have less trouble with fans if she stopped sending her heroines to dinner in her favorite restaurants. The waiter came back with another cocktail and the menus. We ordered a pair of chicken Kievs and waved the man away.

  I got a cigarette out and lit it. “This ought to be good,” I said. “You couldn’t just tell me over the phone?”

  “My phone has been tapped for years,” Amelia said. “Besides, this isn’t a publishing place.” She patted the nearest stack of papers. “I don’t leave these lying around, you know.”

  I picked up the stack closest to me. It was a typed plot outline for a book called Into His Arms, in which a shy, sensitive seventeen-year-old is forced by the deaths of both her parents to leave the protective confines of her convent school in Yorkshire (a convent school in Yorkshire?) to become governess to the children of infamous industrialist Black Jack Marlowe. I reached across the table for the stack of papers marked “scene.” Into His Arms took place in the winter of 1981-82. I put the stack of papers back.

  “Seems right on the mark,” I said blandly.

  Amelia snorted. “Oh, I know what you think of this sort of thing. I know what all of you think. The brave new world of sex and the executive woman and fifty-fifty marriages.” She waved her gin in the air. “Asinine. Falling on your heads. To be expected.”

  “I don’t write romances any more,” I said. “Phoebe has executive women, or the historical equivalent. She does very well.”

  “Your Miss Damereaux is a very smart woman,” Amelia said. “I’ve never said otherwise.”

  Amelia had not only said otherwise, she had once implied that both Phoebe and I were fourth-rate human beings bent on destroying her. At the time, she had lifted me off my feet by the front of my sweater and was slamming me into a tile wall in a utility room in the Cathay Pierce Hotel. Amelia Samson is fat, but the bulk in her shoulders is all muscle, and she knows how to use it. I opted for discretion and sat quietly while the waiter brought single (for me) and double (for Amelia) chicken Kievs.

  When he was gone, Amelia did the unexpected. She ignored her lunch. She reached into her bag and came up with a book.

  “Look at this,” she handed it over.

  It was a Dortman & Hodges paperback of Verna’s last “big” contemporary, Flight into Romance. I could tell it was romance and not romantic suspense because although the heroine was fleeing for her life down a forest path, she was in Cosmopolitan lingerie instead of an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse.

  I turned the book over and read the jacket copy. It was the story of a shy and sensit
ive seventeen-year-old who is forced by the deaths of both her parents to leave the protective confines of her convent school in Milwaukee to become governess to the children of the infamous industrialist Black Jack Harrow.

  I put the book down next to my soupspoon. I was starving, but I couldn’t have put food in my mouth if my life depended on it.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Amelia was attacking her lunch. “What’s to understand? She ripped me off.”

  “How could she have ripped you off?” I asked her. “Her book’s already in print. Yours is just an outline.”

  “My book has been an outline since two years ago last Christmas,” Amelia said. “I’ve got a room full of outlines back home. For God’s sake, you know what I have to produce in a month. What if I got sick? I have to have inventory.”

  “Inventory,” I said.

  “I’ve got a file cabinet full of manila envelopes sealed by a notary,” Amelia said. “I always make sure one of my girls is a notary. I keep the file locked.”

  “Then how did Verna get hold of this?”

  Amelia waved the fork. “Those aren’t the only copies. I’ve got copies all over the house. Those are just to protect me.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “My heroine’s name is Susannah Place,” Amelia said. “Hers is Susannah Parrish.”

  “But Amelia,” I said.

  “But Amelia nothing. She paid one of my girls and got the outline and used it. I’m not guessing, Patience. She told me. The girl told me, too, after I confronted her. Paid her five thousand dollars. Verna did.”

  “Dear Lord.”

  “Fired the girl. Came to an agreement with Verna.”

  “That’s why she wouldn’t file a complaint with AWR,” I said. “That’s been driving Phoebe crazy.”

  “If it had really been driving Phoebe crazy, she’d have done something about it,” Amelia said. “Like I said, she’s a smart woman. She knew something was screwy. And what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just let it go.”

  No, I thought, she couldn’t just let it go. The old ladies of romance were nobody’s fools. Their books might be treacle, but their heads were solid rock. They could forgive you any personal betrayal. They would drop a forty-year friendship in a minute for any business betrayal. I was surprised Amelia hadn’t exposed Verna and had done with it.