Rich, Radiant Slaughter Read online

  Rich, Radiant Slaughter

  A Patience McKenna Mystery

  Orania Papazoglou

  This book is for Matthew William DeAndrea, who helped.

  From the Baltimore Sun, Monday, December 14:

  Book Party to Benefit Homeless

  Baltimore this week will be host to one of the most unusual charity drives in American history, the National Book Drive for Family Shelter. Organized by Evelyn Nesbitt Kleig of the New York publishing firm of Austin, Stoddard and Trapp, the tour, which has already done service in nine U.S. cities, brings best-selling authors to their fans for literary gossip, autograph signings, a celebrity auction and charity book sales. The tour benefits the Ad Hoc Committe for Advocacy for the Homeless, a group dedicated to finding acceptable housing for this country’s approximately 50,000 homeless families.

  Among the famous authors coming to Baltimore will be: Phoebe Damereaux, popular historical novelist and creator of this year’s spectacular hit, Timeless Love; Pulitzer Prize-winning literary figure Christopher Brand; romance celebrity Amelia Samson; Christian family advocate Tempesta Stewart; and true-crime-author-cum-detective Patience Campbell McKenna.

  Gail Larson, owner of The Butler Did It mystery bookstore on North Charles Street, will host a champagne book party for the visiting authors from four to seven Tuesday afternoon. Times and locations for other events will be announced tomorrow.

  Expenses for the tour have been underwritten by billionaire recluse Jonathon Hancock Lowry. All proceeds for all events will go directly to AHCAH.

  Persons wishing further information, or wishing to volunteer their time to the enterprise, should contact Mrs. Margaret Johnson Keeley of the Baltimore Book Lovers Association at …

  Chapter One

  It started on one of those days that could have been the opening of a John Carpenter movie, and because of that wasn’t much good as the opening of anything else at all. Great banks of black clouds, distant thunder, intermittent attacks of sleet: the train shuddered and swayed through freeze-frame tableaux of twisted metal, using the weather for a metaphor. What the metaphor was supposed to mean, I didn’t know. For one thing, I was tired. The twisted metal was the minor industrial district on the outskirts of Baltimore. Baltimore was the tenth stop in a ten-city, four-week charity book tour I’d been on since its beginning in New York. The last time I’d had a full night’s sleep, I’d been back in Manhattan. The last time I’d sat down to a meal that wasn’t fast food or rubber chicken, I’d been in New Orleans—and that had been almost ten days ago. I’d gotten to that point in the private history of exhaustion where the material world seems to be disintegrating.

  My new reading glasses slid down my nose, ruining my focus on page 264 of Whispers of Romance for the third time in six minutes. I turned the book over in my lap and took the glasses off. In spite of its title, Whispers of Romance was not a novel. It was—at least theoretically—a work of nonfiction devoted to an exploration of “the romantic suspense novel as a paradigm and determinant of traditional female consciousness.” It read like the kind of book that would have a line like that on its cover, and it was just as self-indulgent and confused as I’d expected it to be. Someday, somebody is going to write a book about romance novels and romance readers who actually knows something about one or the other. At that point, I’ll be able to sit down with a book that calls itself “a study” and not be subjected to pseudo-feminist fantasies about brainwashed ninnies working themselves to the bone to forge their own chains. Until then, I had Whispers of Romance, a book deemed “feminist” because of its hatred of women by a woman so politicized she went into spasms of Marxian dialectics every time she stubbed her toe.

  Across the narrow gap between our facing seats, Phoebe was reading Hazel Ganz’s latest, Passionate Time. It looked a hell of a lot better than Whispers of Romance, but everything did. I stuck out my foot and kicked her lightly in the ankle. I could have hit her ankle if she’d been on the other side of the aisle and a full seat up. I am six feet tall and almost all legs. I have the kind of body the magazines want everybody to have—which drives the pseudo-feminists even crazier than romance novels do.

  Phoebe does not have the kind of body women are supposed to have—or ever have been supposed to have, in the entire history of civilization. She is four foot eleven. She weighs a hundred thirty pounds. Dressed up for a public appearance, in full Phoebe Damereaux regalia, she looks like an overdecorated dwarf Christmas tree in perpetual motion. She was dressed in full Phoebe Damereaux regalia that morning, even though it was barely seven o’clock and we were on a train. Floor-length jade-green velvet caftan, nine strands of twenty-four-inch rope diamonds, diamond globe earrings big enough to use as crystal balls, ostrich-feather hair combs in her wiry black hair: at the terminal in Baltimore there would be press, and Phoebe would be ready for them. She had a reputation to maintain.

  She also had what looked like an incipient weight problem. The caftan was tight. I paid as much attention to that as I could—I really was tired—and then decided I was imagining things. In her way, Phoebe had always had a “weight problem.” She’d always been heavier than the insurance charts said she ought to be. In another way, she’d never had a “problem” at all. Her weight had been stable for as long as I’d known her, all the way back to our freshman year at Greyson College for Women. Being, like many very thin people, a near neurotic about weight, I knew that people who have weighed one thing for many years don’t tend to gain or lose with any speed, unless they’re ill. Phoebe certainly didn’t look ill. In fact, she looked better than she ever had.

  She stuck the torn-off end of a pack of Mamma Leone matches into Passionate Time and put it on the seat beside her. There were dozens of other people on this tour, including the entire executive board of the American Writers of Romance, but we were the only ones up and moving early enough to make it to breakfast in the dining car. Even Evelyn Nesbitt Kleig, the publicist for Austin, Stoddard and Trapp who had organized this mess, had remained safely barricaded in her Pullman sleeper.

  “How is that?” Phoebe said, gesturing to the book on my lap.

  I shrugged. “How am I supposed to know?”

  “I take it that means it’s dismal.”

  “The phenomenological-existential interface of expectation and reality tends to cause both psychological and emotional dissonance in the spatiotemporal arena.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “It might not be so bad if I knew what it meant.”

  “Does the writer know what it means?” Phoebe said.

  “No.”

  “Well. You don’t actually have to read the whole thing through, you know. You’re only trying to decide what to vote for for the award. You must know by now you’re not going to vote for that thing.”

  “Don’t you read them all the way through?”

  “Well, yes. But these are novels.”

  “Bad novels,” I pointed out. “Some of them, anyway.”

  “Fortunately, Hazel’s isn’t one of the bad ones,” Phoebe said. “I was getting a little nervous. Category is in such a mess. Nobody’s making any money. Second Chance at Love went down to two books a month. For a while there, it looked like they were going to stop publishing altogether. Advances are down to twenty-five hundred dollars a book. It’s really much better for Hazel to be doing historicals. I was beginning to wonder how she was going to keep her son at Groton.”

  “Hazel has a son at Groton?” Hazel was not only the archetypical Midwestern housewife, she looked like the archetypical Midwestern housewife. Calico shirtwaist dresses. One-inch stack-heeled shoes. “Good” cloth coats in sensible navy blues and at-least-it-won’t-show-the-dirt dark grays. The idea of her showing up at a Groton Parents
’ Day, with all those people in natural ranch mink and customized Rolls-Royce limousines, was staggering.

  I took Whispers of Romance off my lap and pitched it onto the seat beside Passionate Time, not bothering to mark my place. “Maybe the AWR should consider giving up the nonfiction award,” I said. “Half the time you can’t think of anybody to give it to. The people who write these things just want a chance to prove how intellectual they are. And avant-garde. And politically correct. Then people like me have to read the damn things, and I don’t even belong to the AWR.”

  “Are you sorry you agreed to do it?” Phoebe said. “I mean, I know how you feel about the convention, and I wouldn’t have asked except—”

  “Except nobody wants to read these things.”

  Phoebe blushed. “Amelia threatened to firebomb us or something if I made her sit on the nonfiction committee again. And Hazel—”

  “I’m sure they all had good excuses, Phoebe.”

  “But you write nonfiction,” Phoebe said. “And you’ve won the award—”

  “I won it because it was one of those years you had nobody else to give it to.”

  “Whatever. You like romance writers. You like romance novels. You get published in The Atlantic. You’re very respectable, Patience. And besides—”

  “And besides,” I said, “you knew damn well you could talk me into it, because you know damn well you can talk me into anything.”

  Phoebe looked away. “I wonder where Evelyn is,” she said. “We’re practically there.”

  I got my cigarettes out of the pocket of my jeans—Phoebe knows never to put me anywhere but in smoking sections—and put the whole matter of the Charlotte Brontë Award for Best Nonfiction Book About Romance out of my head. Back in the days when I’d been writing romance, I’d taken it all very seriously. Now I wrote true crime. I kept up with romance because Phoebe and I were close, and with the American Writers of Romance because I’d known most of them forever and liked them all. Almost all. I thought about Miss Tempesta Stewart, Grand High Pooh-Bah of born-again Christian romance, back there somewhere in one of the sleeping compartments. I put her out of my head, too. She was an unpleasant reminder of the fact that, since the world did not stand still, the world of romance writers and romance readers and romance novels wouldn’t stand still either. In the good old days it had been all optimism and high ideals and sisterly solidarity on a scale Manhattan Radical Feminists couldn’t manage if they started cloning themselves. Now … I shook my head. The Good Old Days. 1984. I wasn’t just exhausted, I was losing it. And did I really think the years I’d spent in a third-floor walk-up closet on West Eighty-second Street were better than the ones I’d spent in a twelve-room prewar co-op on Central Park West?

  Maybe I did. Sometimes. When I wasn’t thinking straight.

  My mother always says I have less common sense than a gnat.

  Phoebe started up from the opposite seat, blanched, grabbed the unsteady seat arm to steady herself. I looked up, surprised and a little concerned. Phoebe had literally turned green. I’d always thought that was only a figure of speech.

  “Are you all right?” I said. “You look—”

  “Tuna fish.” Phoebe smiled weakly. “It must have been the tuna fish.”

  “What must have been the tuna fish?”

  “At that place in Jackson, or wherever it was we stopped last night. I bought a tuna fish sandwich at a stand. Don’t you remember?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I did. And ever since I’ve been feeling a little—”

  “Sick,” I said.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “We ought to get you to a doctor.”

  Phoebe shook her head violently. “No, no,” she said, “I’m really fine. I just feel a little—sort of seasick, that’s all. It’ll go away in a couple of hours. I think I’ll just go down to the ladies’ room here—”

  “Do you want some help?”

  “Of course I don’t want some help. I’m just going to the ladies’ room. Finish Whispers of Romance. Then you can spend the time in Baltimore running up phone bills to Nick and Adrienne and reading Hazel’s book.”

  She lurched into the aisle, staggering against the motion of the train. I bit my lip. She really did look sick—as sick as I’d felt one year and three months before, when I’d swallowed a Styrofoam cup of arseniclaced coffee and nearly died. I knew she was lying to me, too. She hadn’t had a tuna fish sandwich, in Jackson or anywhere else, the night before. What she had had was one half of a gigantic pecan cinnamon bun. I knew that because I was the person who had had the other half.

  I watched her disappear through the safety door at the end of the aisle and turned my head to go back to staring out the window. The weather seemed to be getting worse. The black clouds no longer looked like clouds at all, but like great flat sheets of fire-damaged metal, a celestial manhole cover shutting us away from the sky. The red and green and gold of the Christmas ornaments that had been hung along the signal posts every few feet of track looked dispirited and limp. The sleet was rapidly turning into hail. It was a dark and stormy night, I thought, and then I amended it. It wasn’t night at all. According to the digital clock on the side of the terminal coming up ahead of us, it was 7:15 in the morning.

  Sick in Baltimore. Sick in Jackson. Sick in New Orleans. Sick in Sherman Oaks, too—although Phoebe thought I didn’t know about that. I’d taken off to the lobby just before she’d taken off to the bathroom. Halfway to the elevators, I’d realized I’d forgotten my wallet. When I’d let myself back into our hotel room, I’d heard her through the wall—heaving like someone who has just taken an overdose of ipecac.

  My cigarette had burned into a long column of ash. I tapped it into the inadequate metal ashtray on the arm of my seat and started to gather up my things. The train was slowing to a stop.

  It wasn’t the fact that Phoebe was pregnant that bothered me. That can happen to anyone, especially someone like Phoebe, whose sexual experience had been limited to David Grossman, my fiancé’s law partner and the man she had been seeing for the past three years. I wasn’t worried about the out-of-wedlock part either. Nick and I were the ones who had a wedding on the calendar—eight weeks away—but Phoebe and David had been heading in that direction for months. It was going to happen sooner or later. A baby would just make it happen sooner. My private opinion was that Phoebe would make a great mother. She had changed her name from Weiss to Damereaux when she started writing the books that would turn her into the biggest thing to hit historical romance since the death of Georgette Heyer, but she had never really abandoned the Weiss part. She was the kind of woman whose children would never be satisfied with anybody else’s cooking, including their own. And for good reason.

  There was a hiss and a squeal and a shriek, and we came to a stop. Outside, on the wall over the door to the waiting room, I could just see a hand-lettered cloth banner that said: WELCOME BOOK TOUR. BALTIMORE WELCOMES THE NATIONAL BOOK DRIVE FOR FAMILY SHELTER. DECEMBER 15-18.

  I got Phoebe’s overnight bag from the shelf above my head and set it down in the aisle. No, it wasn’t the fact that Phoebe was pregnant that was bothering me. It was the fact that she hadn’t told me one damn thing about it.

  Phoebe and I had been as close as Siamese twins for eighteen years. We’d been through poverty together. We’d been through the various stages and uncertainties of success, although Phoebe was more successful than I could ever be. Phoebe had introduced me to Nick. Nick and I had introduced her to David. When I’d wanted to adopt the eight-year-old daughter of a murdered woman I had known briefly before her death, Phoebe had gone to war with the New York State Department of Public Welfare to make sure the adoption went through. When Phoebe had been rejected for an apartment by a co-op board composed of people who still thought of anti-Semitism as fashionable, I’d used my family connections to change their minds. There are people who say that women—especially women who stubbornly refuse to have their consciousnesses raised—can ne
ver really be friends. I knew it wasn’t true.

  Which meant, as far as I was concerned, that the situation as it stood that day in Baltimore made absolutely no sense at all.

  Chapter Two

  When I’d first heard about the National Book Drive for Family Shelter, I’d thought of it as just another rip-off of Bob Geldof and Band Aid. As an analysis, that made a certain amount of sense. The setup was right. A whole collection of authors, popular and prestigious, would get on a train and go from one city to the next across the United States, giving interviews, signing autographs and—most important—selling books. The money from the book sales would be donated to an organization called the Ad Hoc Committee for Advocacy for the Homeless. The Ad Hoc Committee—they liked to call themselves The Housing Project—would use the money to find shelter for families with small children and no place to live. As a charity, it had it all over the publishing community’s last foray into good works, meaning the literacy drive. The literacy drive had turned out to have a few kinks in it, at least for the sort of people who like to describe themselves as “thoughtful” and “compassionate,” which almost everybody connected to books does. One of the things “thoughtful” and “compassionate” people abhor is lending their names to anything that might be construed, even if only by an act of aggressive irrationality, “racist, sexist or ethnocentric.” With the literacy drive, practically anything anybody did fell into one of those categories, and quite a few things fell into all three. Holding Shakespeare Appreciation Seminars was declared to be “perpetuating patriarchal stereotypes of women.” Passing out free copies of The Wizard of Oz was denounced as “promoting anti-aspirational negativism.” Even the health-food nuts got into the act. They didn’t like Catcher in the Rye, although their reasons were slightly different from the ones put forward by conservative school boards. Conservative school boards didn’t like Catcher because it had the f-word in it. Health-food nuts didn’t like it because the hero ate junk food, and the example of a hero eating junk food might, well, incite children to ruin their teeth. Homelessness was a much better cause. Even conservatives couldn’t hate a project dedicated to solving a problem with private, rather than government, money. Even outright Marxists had to agree (at least in public) that it was better for everyone if the children had a warm bed to sleep in at night while the revolution was waiting to happen.