Sweet, Savage Death Read online

  “You and Phoebe,” Mary Allard said now, “I know you’re both going to say you’re busy, but if you’d just have dinner with me—”

  “I already have plans for dinner,” I said, looking around a little frantically. Phoebe was nowhere in sight, but she would be. She had come to the service in full Phoebe Damereaux regalia (black velvet caftan this time) and she was on the lookout for reporters. Reporters meant publicity, and, unlike me, she was out for all the publicity she could get. I was hoping to hide. Category romance paid my rent. My ego was supported by articles in slick women’s magazines like Sophistication and alternative newspapers like Left of Center. I wrote articles on the growing incidence of alcoholism among working women, the cover-up campaign on the dangers of chemical wastes, the co-optation of women in the executive suite, and the dangers inherent in the growth of the New Right. I would continue to write them as long as no one ever found out I was also writing category romance.

  I saw Janine Williams drifting away from a conversation with a middle-aged woman who had come armed with a manuscript and eyes that glowed like penlights. I waved.

  Mary held on to my sleeve. “They say Phoebe wrote a book for Fires of Love,” she said sweetly.

  “Right,” I said. Fires of Love was the new “sensual” line at Farret. Six books a month had begun appearing on the stands last Christmas. Eight books a month were planned beginning in January. Every one of them promised “more love, more romance, more sensual detail,” a code for more sex.

  “If Phoebe’s going to write category—” Mary said.

  She never got a chance to finish. Janine pulled up beside us, turned on her sweetest smile, and linked her arm through mine. The gesture should have been friendly, but it wasn’t. Janine felt for Mary Allard what doctors feel for people who practice medicine unlicensed. Mary was not a real editor and should not be allowed to call herself one. Mary was not a real editor and should not be invited to all-industry conferences. Mary was not a real editor and should not be acknowledged on the street by employees of legitimate houses. Now Janine had attached herself to my arm, convinced she had the right to use me as an excuse for another round of bitchery.

  “Phoebe’s looking for you,” Janine said, staring straight at Mary Allard. “I left her with Julie Simms. And you know what that means.”

  “Oh, dear,” I said.

  I started to disengage myself from Janine, hoping to withdraw as far as possible from her fight with Mary and the inexorable march of CBS News. If I hurried, I could get Phoebe into a cab and on the way to Luchow’s before anyone even knew I was there. But Janine held on tightly, as tightly as she held on to her smile.

  “Our most successful line ever,” she told Mary Allard. “We think we’ll gross a hundred million in the first year.”

  “That’s good,” Mary Allard said. “It’s about time Farret had a line that made money.”

  “Exhausted,” Julie Simms said, plunging into the group and pulling Phoebe behind her. Phoebe looked pink and happy, as if she’d just managed to top the Times bestseller list and get paid for it in chocolate. Her small, round body bounced and rippled under the black velvet, and her eyes, always dark, looked almost black.

  “Isn’t it terrible,” Julie Simms said. “Not one relative. Not even the granddaughter.”

  “Ah, yes,” Janine said. “She inherited all that money. Twenty million dollars, somebody said.”

  “Twenty million dollars,” Julie agreed. “Did you know her name was Leslie Ashe? The daughter’s daughter’s, I think.”

  “Sounds like a romance novelist,” I said.

  “Oh, no, no, no.” Julie wrinkled her nose, making herself look even more like Doris Day than she usually did. She took her handkerchief out of her pocket and patted the grime off her forehead. “I’ve got to escape from Lydia,” she said. “She’s on something, of course, and she thinks she needs me, and I’m due for dinner with Hazel Ganz and she thinks her book isn’t making enough money. They never think their books are making enough money.”

  “Books never make enough money,” Phoebe said. “That’s the truth.”

  Julie patted her arm. “Now, now. We’ll get you up there one of these days. Movie contracts. Apartments in the Dakota. Vacations in Tahiti. You’ll see.”

  She backed away and disappeared, swallowed by a tangle of newspaper photographers looking for a star. They caught Barbara Cartland and ignored us.

  I didn’t want to give them time to get bored or Mary Allard and Janine time to think of something else to say. I grabbed Phoebe’s arm and began pulling her down the steps. There was a cab cruising east from the river, and I didn’t want to lose it.

  CHAPTER 2

  I GOT HOME LATE, well after midnight, and a little drunk. I stopped at my mailbox and pulled out four letters, two from Janine, one from Sophistication, and one from the law firm of Hoddard, Marks, Hewitt and Long, offices at Fifty-five Broadway. I nearly stopped right there and read that one, but the vestibule where the mailboxes were was cold, and the door to the street didn’t lock, and there had been a mugging already that winter. I let myself in the inner door and started making my way up the three narrow flights of steps.

  Both the letters from Janine contained checks, each for twenty-five hundred dollars and each representing the second half of the advances on two Fires of Love books I’d handed in nearly four months ago. They had each taken me about a week to write, straight on the typewriter, no corrections for anything but spelling. The letter from Sophistication also contained a check, payment in full for an article on careers for women in the aerospace industry, which had taken me about six months to research and write. That check was for a thousand dollars.

  I stopped at the first landing and turned the letter from the lawyers over and over in my hands. I was feeling cold and achy and nauseated, as if I was getting the flu to accompany my incipient hangover. The letter from the lawyers was in a very white, very stiff envelope, and it frightened me. I might have said something in an article that someone could sue me for. An editor at Sophistication might have changed something in an article and made me liable for a lawsuit. The way contracts for magazine articles ran, I’d have to pay for the lawsuit no matter who was at fault, and no matter who won in court. I leaned against the metal stair rail and ran my fingers over the raised lettering in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope. Then I put it, with the rest of the mail, into the pocket of my coat.

  On the second landing, I stopped to knock on the door of 2B, the apartment directly beneath my own. The sound of a punk band wavered, momentarily wailed, then subsided. I called out a thank-you he probably couldn’t hear and continued up the stairs.

  On the third landing, I put my purse, used only twice since it was given to me at Christmas 1969, on the floor. I patted my pockets until I found my keys. I made resolutions, pre-New Year’s, but just as futile. I would go inside, lie down on the couch, and get immediately to sleep. I would wake up in the morning and sit down to correct galley proofs of Love’s Dangerous Journey, my Fires of Love novel for June. I would neither drink nor fast for a week.

  I put my key in the lock, turned it twice, and pushed. The door opened a half inch and stopped.

  It had been bolted shut from the inside.

  “I don’t need a locksmith,” I told Carlos. “It’s not the lock, it’s the bolt.”

  He was coming reluctantly up the stairs behind me, complaining that it wasn’t his problem. It probably wasn’t. Carlos served four buildings on West Eighty-second Street, for which he received his apartment and what amounted to spending money. He exterminated cockroaches (as far as possible), replaced hall lights, and painted over graffiti. He periodically waited for the telephone repairman when tenants were at work or had to be out. I doubt if there was anything in my lease saying he had to break down doors when people locked themselves inside.

  He stopped in front of the door and said, “How come it’s bolted when you’re out here?”

  “It’s Barbara,” I told
him, pointing vaguely in the direction of 3C. “She has a key. She comes in and watches HBO when I’m out.”

  He turned the knob and rattled the heavy metal door on its runner. The door was painted a pale pink and streaked with white. The floor was made of faded pink linoleum. Beyond that door was a nine-by- twelve room that cost me five hundred dollars a month and periodically exploded in cockroaches.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “The door’s bolted, she’s got to be in there.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Why’d she bolt the door if she was watching TV?”

  I shrugged. “Barbara,” I said. “You know Barbara.”

  Barbara was the only tenant in the building with three locks on the door, and she locked every one of them when she crossed the hall to ask for a cup of sugar. Ringing her doorbell was an adventure. She’d ask who it was, get your answer, then begin the slow process of unpeeling, the metal gears grinding and clanging in front of your nose.

  “If she’s in there, why doesn’t she open it herself?” Carlos asked me.

  “Maybe she’s sick,” I said. I went to sit on the stairs, drawing my legs under my dress to hide the run in my stockings. The liquor I’d drunk after dinner was beginning to turn nasty on me. The worry was making it worse. I’d stood in front of that door a good long time before going across the street to get Carlos, and I knew something had to be very wrong. Through the crack I had seen that the lights were off and the television was silent.

  I pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of my coat and lit one, dropping the match through the railing down the stairwell. Barbara locking herself in my apartment, even pulling the bureau out of its hiding place in my closet to cover the door, was not surprising. Barbara locking herself in my apartment and turning off all the lights was impossible. I rubbed the palms of my hands against the rough material of my dress and thought of all the things that could have gone wrong: Barbara sick with food poisoning, Barbara robbed and raped by someone coming up three flights of brick facing to the window, Barbara attacked on the street and crawling into my apartment to die. I put my cigarette, half smoked, under the heel of my shoe.

  “She could be sick,” I said. “Break down the door.”

  “It’s a metal door,” Carlos said. “I can’t just break it down. I’ll take the wood off the facing.”

  “It’s a little door bolt,” I said. “It won’t matter.”

  He kicked timidly against the jam. “They won’t pay for it,” he said. “You come and ask me to kick in your door, they won’t pay for it.”

  “So they won’t pay for it. When I move, they can pay for it then.”

  “They’ll take it out of your security deposit.”

  “They’ll keep the security deposit anyway. Open the door.”

  He started hunting through his pockets for cigarettes, which he no longer kept rolled up in the sleeve of his shirt. I was thinking that someone must have told him that that went out of style in 1954, and then I stopped, tightening, staring across the hallway at 3C.

  The gears ground and clanked. Metal edge scraped against metal edge.

  Barbara’s door was coming open, lock by lock.

  The phone was ringing when the police finally got there. Barbara was sitting beside me on the stairwell, fully dressed in jeans and a turtleneck sweater. She’d been wearing a pale green robe when she first came out to find us standing in the hall, but she’d changed while she was calling the 20th Precinct. She had combed her hair and put on a fine gold chain. She had dabbed her wrists with a faint perfume.

  “You ought to call Daniel,” she told me. “If I were you, I’d call Daniel.”

  I lit three more cigarettes instead. I sat on the stairwell, watching Carlos sweat. We were all thinking the same thing: the door was bolted, someone was inside, someone was inside whom we didn’t know. Carlos had taken a seat on the stairway just above us. If whoever was inside had a gun, he didn’t want to be anywhere near it.

  I stared at the cracks in the linoleum and the cracks in the plaster walls and the dim fluorescent hall light that separated Barbara’s apartment from my own. I thought about how much I hated my apartment and how tired I was of fasting and how sick I felt whenever I tried to stand up. I thought about everything but what was going on behind that door.

  I could live if someone stole the television set. I could buy a new typewriter. I probably should. What I didn’t know was whether or not I could live in the apartment now that someone had gotten into it.

  The buzzer went off and the phone began ringing at the same time. Barbara went across the hall to her apartment, unlocked all the locks, and buzzed the police through on the ground floor.

  “Anybody hurt?” It was one of the officers, calling up the stairwell. I could hear doors opening above and below us, carefully secured by chains. It had been the same when Maria was mugged in the vestibule. She cried out, and no one came. When the police arrived, all the doors opened on their chains, all the tenants came to the cracks to listen.

  “Rosetti,” the officer said. He appeared, puffing with exertion, out of the stairwell. “This is Officer Marsh.”

  Officer Marsh was a pale boy who looked too young to ride a two-wheeler. He smiled shyly and scuffled his feet against the stained plaster wall. I listened to the phone while Carlos and Barbara went through their stories, interrupting each other, confusing the issue, raising their voices louder and louder. Carlos wanted to concentrate on the condition I was in when I woke him. Barbara wanted to talk about the legal aspects of forced entry. Finally, I said, “I wish whoever’s in there would answer the phone.”

  They all turned to stare at me, and I blushed.

  “It’s driving me crazy,” I told them. “It keeps ringing and ringing.”

  “Ringing and ringing,” Officer Rosetti said. He did not seem much interested in me, or in my door. He was a short, dark man with thick kinky hair and deep worry lines in his forehead. I had seen him around the neighborhood, which meant he must have been assigned to the 20th Precinct for some time. “Who are you?” he asked me. “What’s your name?”

  “Pay McKenna,” I said. The phone stopped ringing, and we both looked quickly, a little embarrassed, at the door. We turned away in unison, being careful not to look at each other. “Patience Campbell McKenna.” I gave my full name. “I live in that apartment.”

  “Could you tell me what the problem is, please?”

  The please was not very cordial, but I let it go. I told him about coming home after dinner with Phoebe, about the door being bolted, about Barbara coming into the hall. It wasn’t much of a story. It had none of the drama and violence of a simple street robbery. There was just that door, bolted shut, and the way it had spooked us all.

  “Anyone got a set of keys?” Rosetti asked.

  “No one,” I said. Myrra had had a set, a pair of red tin keys she kept with her own sterling silver ones on a ruby-knobbed keychain, but I didn’t think that counted. Rosetti didn’t care that I had given Myrra my keys the third time we met, or that when she took them she didn’t know what she was doing. I had found her wandering up and down Columbus Avenue in a light rain, hatless, coatless, and minus an umbrella. She was wearing a thin, green silk dress that tied into a bow at the throat and carrying a wad of airmail paper in the palm of her hand. The airmail paper was a letter from a friend in London, saying that Myrra’s daughter had died. Maybe I thought she wanted a substitute, a waif to mother in place of the now forever absent Joan. Maybe I was in need of mothering myself—my family is such a strange collection of WASP vagaries and New England eccentricities, I could be in need of anything. For whatever reason, I took Myrra by the arm and began to play the forlorn child. Myrra took my hand and my keys and guided us both to her apartment, promising to make me herb tea with honey. She was supposed to use the keys to rescue me when I was locked out. It seemed the sort of thing a mother would do, and the only promise of a future commitment I could make on such short notice. She looked old and small and lost
and half dead. I wanted to leave her with something.

  I looked up to find Officer Rosetti giving me a cross-eyed, cheek-puckered stare. He was not, I reminded myself, interested in Myrra. He had never heard of Myrra.

  “Anyone got a set of keys?” he asked again.

  “No one,” I repeated, trying to sound louder, more confident than I had before. I managed only to sound harsh and make myself feel foolish. Then Barbara said,

  “I have a set.”

  Everyone swung to stare at her. She held her set of keys between thumb and forefinger. They swung in the air like a hypnotist’s watch.

  Officer Rosetti recovered first. “You’re out here,” he said to Barbara.

  “Of course,” Barbara said.

  “Were you in there? Tonight?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “You sure? You didn’t go in there accidentally, come out, lock yourself out…” He gave it up. The door was bolted from the inside. Somebody had to be inside. He turned to me. “You have a boyfriend?”

  “In a way.”

  “He doesn’t have a set of keys?”

  “No.”

  “Could he have got hold of a set of keys? Copied yours without letting you know about it?”

  “What for?”

  Rosetti shrugged, looking at the door. It was beginning to spook him too.

  “How the hell should I know what for?” he asked the ceiling. “How should I know why people do crazy things? They just do crazy things.”