by Jane Haddam
“The real problem in a case like this,” Amelia said, “is you know how it happened and you don’t want to make it worse. Also, you don’t want to give them”—romance writers routinely refer to all nonromance writers, especially members of what they think of as the Literary Establishment (such as Sidney Sheldon), as them—“a chance to make fun of us. And with everything falling apart the way it is—”
“But why would she do something like this?” I said. “Even if I grant her career was going nowhere, and no matter what else I think of what you do, I know you’ve done better than this—”
“Of course I’ve done better than this,” Amelia said. “What do you take me for?”
“Then why steal it in the first place? It wouldn’t have advanced her career. It wasn’t her kind of thing.”
“It would have ruined her career if she’d started reneging on contracts. Which she almost did.”
I bit my lip. One of the iron rules of romance publishing is that you never fail to deliver a book when you promise one. The lines run more like magazines than book publishers. They put out a certain number of books each month. Their lead time gives them very little room to establish inventory. Even “big” romances are produced on a schedule designed to give the world’s most ardent workaholic a nervous breakdown. To renege on a contract, unless you were an Amelia or a Phoebe, might easily mean you never worked again.
“She had writer’s block,” I said slowly.
“Bullshit,” Amelia said. “She had burnout. The last three books before this and the two after were written by what’s his name. The objectionable asshole with the pornographic mystery titles.”
“Max Brady?” I had forgotten Max Brady.
“Max Brady,” Amelia said. “My feeling is, he wrote every one in the last two years except the one she took from me and this new one. God only knows who wrote the new one. It wasn’t Verna.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Wait till it comes out,” Amelia said.
“I don’t think she’s supposed to be able to do that. Get a ghost, I mean. From what I hear, for Dana’s line, even Marilou Saunders had to write her own.”
“Maybe she didn’t tell Dana.”
“It’s supposed to be great romantic suspense,” I said. “Not just okay. Great. Why would somebody do something like that and not publish it on her own?”
Amelia shrugged again. “Don’t know and don’t care. I read it. It’s good for that kind of thing. And Verna didn’t write it. Believe me.” She finished her drink in a single long swallow. “The way Verna was going, she was turning into a house name.”
It went through me like an electric shock.
“What?” I said. “What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Amelia said. “I want another drink. Sit down and have your lunch.”
“House names,” I said. “Ellery Queen. Everything is going to make sense.”
Amelia thought I was out of my mind, but I didn’t care. What had Phoebe said? “She was saying something about Ellery Queen being a lot of people.” Right. I crammed things into my tote bag, dropping them in my hurry. I had to get Max Brady. I had to get to him right away.
I didn’t know why Sarah had died, but I thought I knew why Verna had. If I was right, maybe Nick had been half right.
Maybe it was Marilou someone had meant to kill.
Amelia waved her fork at me. “So I’ll eat your lunch,” she said. “You’ve always been a crazy person.”
TWENTY-TWO
I WANTED TO GO directly to Max Brady’s. Instead, I made myself detour to the 42nd Street Library magazine room—just to be sure. I read ten books and two dozen magazines a month. I could have been confused. If I was confused, my whole theory was a piece of nonsense.
I wasn’t confused. It took me a while to find what I was looking for—I thought the article had appeared in The Armchair Detective; it was in the March issue of Gumshoes instead—but when I did, it was exactly as I had remembered it. The title, banally enough, was “Will the Real Ellery Queen Please Stand Up?” The byline read, “Additional Research by Max Brady.” I tapped my finger against the “Max Brady.” That was better than I could have hoped.
The theory went like this: Not all Ellery Queen books were written by Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, or Frederic Dannay and whomever after Lee died). Some of them were written by rank outsiders and did not feature Queen as a detective. They were published as “by Ellery Queen” because books “by Ellery Queen” made more money than books by other mystery writers. It was a weird situation. Most house names are invented by the publishing company. Superfantastic Books thinks it could make a lot of money with a series about a mercenary soldier. Marketing and editorial get together and invent a name for our hero (“Cannonball Jones”) and a name for the writer (“Mack Savage”). They then go out and hire a lot of writers to produce books that will be published as “by Mack Savage.” The writers get no credit, minimal royalties, and a minuscule advance. The “Ellery Queen” setup was the only one anyone had heard of that involved the name of an actual, living writer being farmed out with the writer’s permission. Assuming Dannay and Lee had given their permission. Assuming such a situation had ever actually existed. No one was absolutely sure, and Dannay and Lee were now both dead.
I put the magazine back in its filing box. It was the only thing that made sense of the “Ellery Queen” conversation Phoebe had reported to me. I wondered what Max had told Verna. Ellery Queen did it, so it was all right if she did it? Gallard Rowson was being stuffy with all their “truth in advertising” bull? He had written a book for Marilou, so there was no reason he shouldn’t write another for her? By the time Verna got around to stealing Amelia’s pitiful excuse for an outline, she must have been desperate. She would probably have listened to anything.
Max Brady had an even greater need for money than Verna. He had an ex-wife who liked to keep tabs on him. From all indications, his career as the hopeful successor to Hammett and Chandler was a dismal failure.
I took the box back to the checkout desk and headed out of the library. For all I knew, Max was ghosting half the romantic suspense books in town. He couldn’t let anyone know. It would finish him in the mystery writers’ community. They would forgive him Melissa Crowell—everybody has money problems now and then—but consorting with those “romantic suspense bimbos” would be something else.
Suddenly, I had exactly the solution I wanted all tied up with a ribbon.
Max Brady lived in a fifth-floor walk-up in a decaying brownstone surrounded by abandoned tenements on Thirty-ninth Street off Tenth Avenue. A little further east, the area was beginning to have a certain vogue. The residents had renamed it Clinton and gone public in New York magazine on the joys of ethnicity. Max’s block was still recognizable as Hell’s Kitchen.
I walked into his vestibule and stared apprehensively at the double line of mailboxes just outside the inner door. The mailboxes had buzzer buttons incorporated in them. Most of the buzzer buttons were broken. So was the lock on the inner door. I pressed Max’s buzzer and waited. Nothing happened.
I pushed the inner door. It creaked forward, revealing a cement block floor carpeted with four-letter words and girls’ names (with phone numbers). I hesitated.
It would have been easier if I’d wanted Max to be home. I wanted to break into his apartment. With any luck, the manuscript of Marilou’s book would be on his desk and a box of rat poison under his kitchen sink.
I swallowed my conscience and headed up the stairs. All brownstones built in a certain era for people of modest means have the same stairs—metal-railed, narrow, slippery with linoleum. All of them have the same light fixtures in the stairwells, big square fluorescents more often out than on. Only one of the fluorescents in Max’s stairwell was on, the one on the second-floor landing. As soon as I got beyond it, I was in darkness.
I had to count landings to know where I was. It was impossible to see apartment numbers on d
oors. According to Max’s mailbox, he lived in 5E. I got to the fifth-floor landing and looked around. There were only two apartment doors.
I stood in the darkness and listened. After a while, I heard a sound from the front apartment, an out-of-key voice doing operatic scales. The voice was so off-key, it could have cut through the building supports and brought the house down.
I went to the door of the back apartment. I pressed the buzzer. I waited. Nothing happened. Either Max was out, or he was passed out. If he was passed out, he might or might not wake up when I broke in on him.
I have had some experience with murderers. They are not safe people to know. They are certainly not the kind of people you want to stumble over while obviously checking into their affairs. I am not a cautious woman, but I have a reasonable amount of common sense. I have no interest in getting myself killed. On the other hand, Max Brady drunk and passed out, or drunk and awakening from a hangover, was hardly a figure of fear I could take seriously. Max Brady sober was hardly a figure of fear I could take seriously. He was simply too small and too out of shape.
I got out my credit cards, then dismissed them for my driver’s license. For some reason, I keep my Connecticut driver’s license. It is laminated in plastic. It is very thin. It is perfect for doors.
I had a moment of worry that Max might have been sensible enough to get himself a dead bolt. I couldn’t get past a dead bolt with my driver’s license. Phoebe had trouble getting past dead bolts, and Phoebe can open any lock ever made just by looking at it. I put my license in the crack and drew it upward.
This is the kind of thing you learn by reading too many detective stories.
The lock creaked, whined, and popped. The door swung open on the most god-awful mess I’d ever seen.
I almost didn’t have the courage to enter. There were massive black plastic garbage bags, full of now-returnable beer and soda cans, covering the kitchen floor. There were piles of takeout cartons (mostly Chinese and pizza) covering the kitchen table. Turning sideways toward the single room, I saw three months’ worth of laundry in piles on the floor, four-months-in-use sheets on the unmade bed, and a congealed hot turkey sandwich plate (half-eaten) on the night table. The only thing that made the room less depressing than Cassie Arbeth’s house was the worktable by the window. The worktable was pristine. The typewriter was not only new, it looked dusted. Typewriter paper was stacked neatly in boxes. Even the work in progress had a small open box of its own, placed just to the right of the keyboard.
If Max was anywhere in that room, he was buried for the duration. I let the door swing closed behind me, peeked into the bathroom just to make sure, and then headed for the worktable. I did not have to search the apartment. If Max was getting paid for it, it was laid out neatly and efficiently among all the other things he was getting paid for.
I could deal with the kitchen—and possible sources of arsenic—later.
I stepped over a pile of ancient, torn, reeking T-shirts and looked at the page in the typewriter. The work in progress was a novel called Roses for the Reaper. Brady was writing it under his own name. Page 106 started:
There are too many scum like Halloran in the best society. What honest crooks and tenth-rate con-men are jailed for without benefit of clergy, the Hallorans of this world expect to get handed to them on a platter. What Halloran wanted handed to him on a platter this time was my head. I wasn’t going to give it to him.
I went around this paragraph a few times, then gave up on it. I was sure it made something like sense to Brady and his readers—all two of them.
There was a pile of Eagle A typewriter boxes in an even stack under the worktable. I got them out and started to go through them. Most were Brady’s own productions: Max Brady hard-boiled specials or rape-and-ravage Melissa Crowells with titles like Raging Passions and Wild Savage Affair. High-concept titles.
There was another stack of boxes behind the first. I got these out. The first three were Verna Trains, straight historical romances and contemporary “noncategories.” A “noncategory” romance is a category romance over ninety thousand words. Looking over the first chapters, I thought Brady had little feeling for romance of the nonviolent variety. The books he wrote for Verna were full of fainting virgins and mysteriously powerful heroes—stock romance stereotyping circa 1954. No wonder Verna’s books weren’t making any money.
The last two boxes in the stack were the first two parts of a long and lugubriously written mainstream novel on the publishing business. Max had written a forward saying that he knew nothing like this ever got past the hatchet men of the publishing mafia, but he was determined to leave a record of the Truth. I cringed. God only knows how many people out there are determined to leave a record of the Truth, by which they usually mean their favorite conspiracy theory. Max’s was a dilly. He thought Simon & Schuster was in league with the White House and Mobil Oil to suppress any portrayal of American Life as It Really Is. American Life as It Really Is was presented most accurately in the novels of Max Brady.
Right.
I went out to the kitchen to look for rat poison. I found several thousand cockroaches and an unopened tin of boric acid. People use boric acid for cockroaches because it’s reputed not to kill pets.
I went back to the worktable and sat in Max’s chair. I was beginning to wonder what I had come looking for. Evidence that he’d ghosted both Verna’s and Marilou’s romantic suspense novels for Dana’s line, certainly—but it wasn’t here. Evidence that he had access to arsenic, rat poison, cockroach poison. That wasn’t here either. I was beginning to feel a little silly. What would I have done with that stuff if I’d found it?
I started rocking back and forth in Max’s chair. I wanted A Plan. I wanted to know What I Was Supposed to Do Next. It occurred to me that I approached murders the way I had once approached writing romance novels. I wanted to proceed with a rigid, predetermined outline, all possibilities covered, the threat of surprise neutralized. Murders never seemed to oblige.
I was still rocking in the chair when the good luck and bad luck hit me at once. The good luck was that I went rummaging through Max’s typewriter ribbon box—more as a result of nervous energy than any directed search—and came up with Caroline Dooley’s crystal monogrammed paperweight.
The bad luck was that I looked up at a sound from the hall and found Max coming through his front door.
It happened so fast, I just sat there, weighing the crystal paperweight in my hand and letting my mouth hang open. It struck me I’d been wrong about Max. With his denim jacket off and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, he was thin but not puny. The muscles in his forearms were well developed. His shoulders strained the seams of his shirt. I sent up a prayer that he was dead drunk.
“Oh, fine,” he said. “I’ve now become the target of Pay McKenna, Girl Sleuth.”
I coughed and went for my cigarettes. “I came looking for you,” I said. “The door—”
“The door was locked when I left,” Max said. “I remember locking it. I’m not drunk all the time.”
“Right,” I said.
“Put the paperweight down,” Max said. “I already told Caroline it was me. Not that she hadn’t had it figured out anyway.”
I put the paperweight on the worktable. Max threw himself on the bed, oblivious to the mess. We sat staring at each other for a while. I was at a complete loss for words. I still thought Max had killed Verna and Sarah, though I thought he’d meant to kill Marilou. He’d admitted to wrecking Caroline’s office, hadn’t he? I must have been wrong when I’d said the same person couldn’t have wrecked that office and poisoned Sarah in the same lunch hour. Max must have found a way to do it. I brushed away the nervousness I felt at the sloppiness of the explanation. Details. I could get to the details later.
Max took out a pack of unfiltered Camels, lit one, and tossed the spent match into his sheets. He smelled like stale beer.
“Shit,” he said. “The stupid thing about this is that I want to talk about thi
s. I want to tell somebody. It’s driving me crazy.”
“What?”
“You had to break in on me?” Max said. “You couldn’t call me up and use one of those clever little Agatha Christie ruses the papers are always talking about?”
“I was at the 42nd Street Library and I just came over,” I said, thinking it was best to ignore the break-in as far as possible. “You want to tell me why you killed Verna and Sarah English?”
“Are you out of your mind?” Max’s eyes were coming out of his head. “That’s the kind of thing I mean,” he said, calmer. “That’s why I want to talk to somebody. Everybody’s probably running around convinced I bumped off my primary meal ticket and some poor little slob from the provinces I didn’t even know.”
“I thought maybe you were gunning for Marilou,” I said. “You wrote her book, didn’t you? The one for Dana?”
“Yeah. Most of the books in the series. But for God’s sake, if I wanted to bump off Marilou Saunders, I could have done a better job of it. You in the hospital. Some poor schmuck of a civilian dead. Where was the planning in that? Where was the common sense, for that matter?”
“Plans go wrong,” I said.
He rubbed his lips. “Look,” he said. “I’m a hack, right? Okay, I don’t say so right out loud, and I don’t say so even to myself most of the time, but that’s what I am. I’m never going to be Raymond Chandler, or Dashiell Hammett, or even Erie Stanley Gardner. I’m just not good enough.” He bit his lip. He smiled. “You heard it here first,” he said. “But it’s the truth. And another part of that truth is that I make my living, such as it is, ghostwriting, writing under pseudonyms, writing to order whenever I can get the work. Verna—” He got off the bed and started pacing, as far as that was possible, among the debris. “Caroline Dooley is a grade-A bitch,” he said. “So I’m a hack. She uses hacks all the time. She didn’t have to sabotage my book. It wasn’t any of her goddamned business if I was helping Dana out. It wasn’t any of her business and it wasn’t any of her concern.”