Death's Savage Passion Read online

  Max Brady was in blue jeans and a shapeless crew neck he must have had in college. He had his back to the dining room.

  One of the reasons romance writers have little respect for mystery writers is that, in romance writer terms, mystery writers don’t know how to “promote themselves.” Max Brady took that truism a step further. He didn’t know how to match his socks.

  I let Phoebe and Sarah go in without me and climbed onto a stool next to William L. DeAndrea, two-time Edgar winner (an Edgar is like an Oscar, except it’s given by the Mystery Writers of America instead of the Motion Picture Association to a mystery novel instead of a movie) and all around Nice Person. DeAndrea was so optimistic, he didn’t have to bother trying to think well of people. He thought well of people. He thought well of a lot of people who had no right being thought well of.

  “I’ve got a romance title for you,” he said. “Starved for Love, by Anna Rexia.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “How about Plunging Passions, by Dee Fenestrate.”

  “You could do that with mystery novels,” I said. “Death on Vacation, by Maura Torium.”

  “Not bad.”

  Billy Palmer was behind the bar. I signaled for a Perrier to match DeAndrea’s. I’d go to work on the Drambuie after dinner.

  “I wanted to talk to you about that,” I said, making what I hoped was a covert gesture at Max. “That is going to be a problem.”

  “That is already a problem,” DeAndrea said. “That is stewed. In fact, that is soon to be sick.”

  “Oh, fine,” I said. “Under the circumstances—”

  “Under the circumstances, I don’t think you have anything to worry about. You would if the mess his book is in were the main problem, but it isn’t.”

  “Lisa left him. Again.”

  “Third time this month.”

  “What kind of a mess is his book in?”

  DeAndrea shrugged. “He writes hard-boiled California private eye, his book is in a mess. Nobody reads that stuff anymore. At least nobody reads people like Max. He had a twenty-five-hundred-dollar advance and it’s being remaindered without earning even that back. My Rod Is Hot. That one. AST doesn’t even want to talk to him anymore.”

  “He really wrote a book called My Rod Is Hot?”

  I looked over my shoulder at the table in the corner and Caroline Dooley in her gray flannel suit. “AST,” I said.

  “Yeah,” DeAndrea said. “Not that she didn’t say hello. She was very polite.”

  “Oh, fine,” I said.

  “The problem is, I don’t read that stuff either.”

  I made another gesture in Max’s direction. “Can he hear any of this?”

  “Right now he couldn’t hear Big Ben if it went off under his earlobe.”

  On the far stool, Max Brady suddenly sat up and said, in a very sober, clear, and portentous voice: “Raymond Chandler is the only serious writer to emerge from Depression America.”

  Billy Palmer gave him a worried look. You are allowed to get only so drunk and no drunker in New York State. Max might very well have crossed the line. It was hard to tell. Max Brady was the kind of drunk who looked and sounded sober until he fell to the floor and passed out.

  I slid off my stool, stretched, and patted DeAndrea on the arm. “Get him out of here,” I said. “If he starts another fight with Verna, she’s going to break a chair over his head.”

  “If he starts another fight with Verna, I’m going to break a chair over his head,” DeAndrea said. “Then again, maybe I’ll let Verna do it. She can afford it better than I can.”

  At the table in the corner, Sarah was high, Verna was cool, Phoebe was gracious. The rest of them were a little stiff, as if they weren’t sure how they felt about each other. They parodied themselves. Dana made noises about sub rights and paperback deals. Marilou giggled lewdly. Amelia harrumphed. Caroline Dooley held a molded crystal paperweight in the air, explaining to no one in particular that it was really her initials and the most marvelous present anyone had ever given her. Sarah was launched on her fifteenth retelling of the Story of the Miracle.

  “I sent that novel to everybody,” she said. “I even sent it to all of you.”

  Verna Train looked down her nose and her cigarette holder, making her eyes cross. “What did you say your name was again?”

  “Sarah English,” Sarah said. She blinked, but she wasn’t annoyed. She didn’t expect anyone really famous, like Verna Train, to remember her name.

  “Never heard of you,” Verna Train said.

  “I sent it care of your publishing company,” Sarah said.

  I took the seat beside her and patted her on the shoulder, in almost conscious imitation of Phoebe.

  “Ninety percent of the people you sent that thing to never got it,” I said. “Ninety percent of the people who got it didn’t read it. I didn’t read it.”

  Sarah English looked shocked. “But you helped me get it published,” she said. She flushed, eying Caroline Dooley. “Accepted for publication,” she corrected herself. “How could you help me if you didn’t read it?”

  “I sent it along to Dana,” I said. “Dana read it. If Dana hated it, I’d have read it to see if I wanted to work on it, but Dana loved it, and Caroline loved it, and here you are.”

  “It’s so complicated,” Sarah said.

  Actually, it wasn’t complicated at all. It’s both easier and harder to get published than most people think. Easier, because writing commercial fiction is a game with rules written down in a number of places, and because the vaunted “slush piles” mostly contain manuscripts so excruciatingly terrible they don’t even constitute competition. Harder, because a new writer without friends or contacts is like odd man out at a square dance. She has to find a way to join the circle. There are ways, but finding them isn’t easy.

  Caroline Dooley wiped Bloody Mary off her upper lip and said, “Some of it’s luck. We were looking hard for good romantic suspense. You gave us good romantic suspense. We could have been looking hard for stories about cats.”

  “Maybe I’ll write a romantic suspense about cats,” Verna said. “I have cats.”

  “All romance writers have cats,” Phoebe said.

  At the far side of the table, Amelia sighed. “Romantic suspense, romantic suspense,” she said. “Blood and guts and people tied up in basements. Who wants all that stuff?”

  “You’re writing a whole romantic suspense line,” Verna said.

  Amelia sniffed. “Money’s money,” she said. “I still don’t know who wants all that stuff.”

  “Everybody wants that stuff,” Verna Train said. “Maybe you and Phoebe can do anything you want to, but the rest of us have to pay attention to the market.”

  “I always pay attention to the market,” Amelia said.

  “But you don’t have to,” Verna said. “You don’t have to do things you—” She stopped and looked into her drink. The rest of us, suddenly quiet, looked into her drink with her.

  In the corner, Marilou Saunders rustled her clothes and giggled. “I wrote a romantic suspense,” she said. She giggled again and waved her drink in the air, something that looked like straight Scotch. The rest of us turned away from her. Marilou was a pill and cocaine addict—at least we thought she was—and when she was high, she was impossible. When we insisted, she left her paraphernalia at home, but she always stoked up before walking out the door. We couldn’t do anything about her and we’d given up trying.

  Verna had given up listening. “I don’t even like romantic suspense,” she was saying. “I mean, I wrote one—”

  “You wrote a wonderful one,” Caroline Dooley said. “I heard from Sheila over at Gallard Rowson. She’s very impressed.”

  “Yeah,” Verna said. She tapped her nails against her glass, inexplicably at a loss. “Well,” she started up again, “I’m a professional. A professional should be able to do what she’s asked to do. I just don’t like the stuff, that’s all. I don’t want to spend the next twen
ty years embroiling my heroines in smuggling plots. I want to concentrate on love.”

  “We want you to concentrate on love, too,” Caroline said. “For God’s sake, Verna, this is a fad. Give it a year or two. Less.”

  “In the meantime, I either go bankrupt or crazy.”

  “I just like to imagine myself having adventures,” Sarah said. “That’s what I did with my book, Shadows in the Light.”

  “Shadows in the Light?” Verna said. “That’s the name of your book?”

  “Don’t you think it’s a good title?” Sarah said. “I thought it was a wonderful title, but—”

  “I’m not criticizing your title,” Verna said.

  This time, when Sarah flushed, there was a little anger in it. Verna was being rude. I was glad to see Sarah getting just tiddly enough on gin and tonics and just accustomed enough to this table to think she didn’t have to put up with Verna’s rudeness forever. Of course, since Verna was invariably rude, I didn’t see what good it was going to do Sarah to take offense at it.

  “I just like to imagine what it would be like to lead an interesting life,” Sarah said, her voice steady and surprisingly strong. “I live in this small town. People who live in New York just can’t realize. I go to work in an office every day and sometimes I go to a movie with women friends, and once a year I go on a package tour for vacation, if I can afford it. Mostly, I can’t afford it. People in New York just don’t realize how much people in places like Holbrook want to escape from that.”

  Caroline Dooley came as close as I’d ever heard her to laughing out loud. “Oh yes we do,” she said. “That’s why Miss Samson over there has enough money to buy New Jersey.”

  “Nobody in their right mind,” Amelia said, “wants to buy New Jersey.”

  “If I had enough money to buy New Jersey, I’d wait out the market until people were buying what I want to write,” Verna said. She waved her cigarette holder in the air. “Two years ago I got a divorce—from a psychiatrist, yet—and I turned down the alimony, I turned down the property settlement, I walked away with my nose in the air. I’m a romance writer, right? Now look at me.”

  “You’re hardly starving,” Dana said.

  Sarah English was frowning in concentration. “Men are all right,” she said, “but they just aren’t enough. I mean, there are men in Holbrook. And what would be the use of marrying the world’s handsomest and richest man if you were just going to live like every other housewife in Holbrook?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Verna said. “The point about housewives in Holbrook is they don’t have any money.”

  “The point about housewives in Holbrook,” Marilou Saunders said, “is they don’t have any sex.”

  “The point about housewives in Holbrook is that they’re housewives,” Sarah said. Her voice positively rang. This she was sure of. “I used to read about Miss McKenna in the papers,” she gave me an adoring look. I wondered how long it was going to take to talk her out of that “Miss.” “I used to think what an exciting life she had, mixed up in murders, and helping the police, and writing books, and living in New York, and having a lover—”

  I nearly choked on my Perrier. Sarah had found out Nick was my lover from the newspapers? My mother, charity queen of Fairfield County, was going to kill me.

  “I wanted to have a life just like that,” Sarah was saying, “as different from Holbrook as possible and nothing like a housewife. I mean, you have to admit, housewives don’t get to do anything. Even if they like being housewives, it has to get boring.”

  “I was a housewife once,” Amelia said. “I wouldn’t say it was boring.”

  “You couldn’t say it was pleasant, either,” I reminded her.

  “You should see the book I’m working on now,” Sarah said. “My heroine’s pulling off a diamond heist and she’s got a good reason for it and it’s exciting. It’s something different. Of course, there’s sex in it, they make you put sex in it, but I think most people are like me and skip those parts. I mean, nobody believes that stuff.”

  “I do,” Phoebe said. She looked wistful. She had built her reputation on the hottest sex scenes in the business (“good parts” as they’re known among the fans). She was addicted to the self-help section of the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble.

  Amelia had built her reputation on syrupy sixty-thousand-word tracts (one a week for the past thirty years), all of which ended with the closing of the wedding-night bedroom door. She thought Sarah was right on the mark.

  “Miss English has a point,” she said. “Men have never been a tenth as good as we hoped or a hundredth as good as they think they are.”

  Verna Train looked depressed.

  THREE

  I MADE IT HOME earlier than the rest of them. They wanted to do a round of bars—a singles place on the West Side outfitted entirely in pink, a chrome and stained-glass hockey pub (East Side) where all the tables were miniature aquariums filled with yellow-striped tropical fish, a blues place in the Forties where the waiters wore bow-tie earrings and Little Orphan Annie decoder rings. Phoebe, who is president of the American Writers of Romance, was deep in conversation with Dana about returns accounting and warranty clauses. Caroline was showing her molded crystal paperweight around for the sixth time. Verna was morose. Sarah wanted to see more of New York. Amelia had a serious gin gleam in her eye. When Amelia gets a serious gin gleam, she can lay waste to Gordon’s principal warehouse. I had had three double Drambuies and decided I was either going to get home to sanity or melt. I dropped Sarah and Phoebe at the Forties blues place and went uptown.

  When I opened the door to my apartment, the cat was waiting in the foyer and every light in every one of the twelve rooms was blazing. I live in the Braedenvoorst, one of those New York apartment buildings more famous than most of the people living in it, in an apartment willed to me by a romance writer named Myrra Agenworth. Myrra also willed me “everything in the apartment at the time of [her] death” and her story, which was the start of the book I now had on the bestseller list (barely on, but on). I did better with the story than I did with the apartment. After I sold all the furniture and the paintings at auction at Sotheby’s (with the exception of Myrra’s portrait, which I kept over the fireplace in the living room), I banked the money to pay the maintenance. Then I neglected to buy new furniture. I had a platform bed, a night table, a worktable, a kitchen table, and five chairs. That was it. In twelve rooms.

  I put the cat on the kitchen table and went to the refrigerator to see if there were socks in it. Nick always keeps his clean socks in the refrigerator. He usually keeps them in my refrigerator because I have a built-in washer-dryer, which is what he uses to do laundry. He rolls his socks into balls, so they look like blackened melons against the white enamel. Then he turns on all the lights and waits in the one bedroom with a bed in it.

  The socks were in the otherwise empty vegetable bin. There were five balled pairs of them, arranged in a pyramid. I kicked the drawer shut, got a can of decaffeinated Diet Coke and the container of Devon cream, and started searching cabinets for a saucer. Nick, my cleaning lady, and I all put away dishes in my apartment. We each have strongly held views on where they belong.

  I found two saucers in what I thought of as my silverware drawer, filled one with Devon cream and the other with dry cat food, and put them both on the floor. Camille licked at the Devon cream and sat in the cat food.

  My mail and my appointment calendar (a bound composition book with the date written at the top of each page in Bic medium point) were on the kitchen table. Tomorrow I had to go to Austin, Stoddard & Trapp (who had paperback rights to my Agenworth book) to discuss possible promotion with an escapee from Hunter College named Evelyn Nesbitt Kleig. I had to meet Dana and “get things straightened out,” by which she meant come to my senses and accept the miniseries offer. I also had a session at a place called Images, but I was trying to forget it.

  The mail was considerably less exciting: an envelope from the Mystery Writers o
f America that was undoubtedly their monthly publication, The Third Degree; three bills (Saks, Bonwit’s, and, God help me, Bloomingdale’s), none of which I had any intention of looking at for at least a week; and a letter from Dana’s office with “J. Dunby, Foreign Rights” written under the letterhead. I opened that one. Four hundred thirty dollars for the Yugoslavian rights to Love’s Dangerous Journey, the last romance novel I wrote for the now defunct Fires of Love line at Farret Paperback Originals.

  I wandered across my empty living room and through the back hall, turning off lights.

  “Listen,” I said. “I want you to sue someone for me.”

  No answer. I went into the bedroom and found Nick sitting cross-legged in the middle of my bed, stacks of word-processor printed pages (right-hand margin justification) arranged artfully on my grandmother’s wedding quilt. He had a Walkman around his neck and earphones in his ears. I took the earphones away from him, listened for thirty seconds to the Beach Boys doing Be True to Your School, and tossed them aside.

  “I want you to sue someone for me,” I said again.

  “Who is it this time?” He cleared a space for me on the bed. I sat down in it.

  “The Mystery Writers of America,” I said. “For sex discrimination.”

  “This is number nine,” he said. “In the last six months.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Which means in the last six months you have asked me to sue nine separate organizations for sex discrimination, including the American Kennel Club. If I remember rightly, you objected to pick-of-the-litter rules. For God’s sake, McKenna, you don’t even own a dog.”

  “Not the point,” I said.

  “Exactly the point,” he said. “Also, you told me the MWA had a whole slew of female directors, or officers, or whatever they are.”