Sweet, Savage Death Read online

  “He could have if he wanted to,” I said, thinking that Daniel would not have wanted to. “But I’d have given them to him if he’d asked. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Rosetti nodded. It was not what he wanted to hear.

  “I have your permission to kick this thing in?”

  “Of course,” I said. “That’s what I got you over here for.”

  Carlos looked like he was about to object, but I kicked him lightly in the ankle and he stopped before he got started. He went into the corner and folded his arms across his chest.

  Rosetti stood back, drew up his right leg, and kicked. There was a crack of splintering wood and a metallic rap, and the door went flying inward.

  “Damn,” Rosetti said. “What did you do, paint over the windows with black? You can’t see your nose in front of your face.”

  He leaned forward and fumbled against the wall, looking for a light switch. The neon in the ceiling coil above the sink flickered and died, flickered and died again, going into its strobe routine. Rosetti took a step forward and stopped.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, “somebody killed Doris Day in a junior studio.”

  CHAPTER 3

  IT WAS THE CAT that finally took the skin off me, the very small cat that belonged to the punk rock fanatic in 2B. The punk rock fanatic must have opened his door to find out what was going on or even come out onto the stairs to watch the police. The cat walked right between Officer Marsh’s legs and into the apartment.

  She got halfway across my amber and gold carpet before she stopped, raised her fur, and started hissing. We all turned and stared, ignoring the blood seeping into the cracks in the fine old parquet floor, ignoring the shards of glass, the ruins of an ugly white lamp belonging to my landlord, which spread out in a semicircle under my worktable.

  Detective Martinez, one of the plainclothesmen from Homicide, leaned down and picked the cat up by the scruff of its neck. He was gentle enough. I didn’t have random cruelty to hold against him, although he looked capable of it. He was a short, square man with lines under his eyes and across the tops of his hands. If I’d been thinking straight, I’d have realized he was younger than I was, maybe too young for this particular murder. I was not thinking straight. The lines on his face filtered through my pain and fear and nausea and emerged monstrous.

  He held out the cat to me. “This yours?”

  I shook my head. I was nearing breakdown, and there were tears—the kind of tears you get right before your period or when you’ve had just one Scotch too many—sitting like stingers in the corners of my eyes. I wanted to leave my apartment to sit on the stairs, but I couldn’t move. I wanted to escape the smell that grew stronger by the minute, but I was held by it. I tried to concentrate on the pictures of my brother and sister-in-law, my niece, and two nephews that covered one small section of an otherwise barren wall. They stood against an almost too green lawn, smiling into the late afternoon of a suburban Connecticut July.

  Detective Martinez went off to give the cat to Officer Marsh and returned holding Julie Simms’s appointment book, a battered, red-leather album with gold lettering on the spine.

  “Now,” he said, holding it open to a place near the end, “maybe we could use your friend’s apartment across the hall? There were a few things I wanted to ask you—”

  Martinez was unfailingly polite, unfailingly deferential, unfailingly frightening. He was half a foot shorter than I was but felt half a foot taller. His bulk seemed to block the exits. He thought I’d stabbed Julie Simms nine times in the face and neck and chest, at some point severing her carotid artery. That’s what the men from the medical examiner’s office were saying, that someone had severed her carotid artery. I shivered and moved away from Martinez, not sure what I was supposed to think or feel.

  “We can’t use Barbara’s apartment,” I told him. “It’s a studio just like this one. She won’t have anywhere to go.”

  “This will only take a few minutes,” he tugged at me. “I don’t think she’d mind for a few minutes.”

  I nodded and trailed him out the door and across the hall. He must have talked to Barbara at some point, but I didn’t know when. I went in the door of 3C and through the tiny Pullman kitchen and sat on Barbara’s immaculate white couch. I remember wondering for the five millionth time how anybody could keep a couch so white.

  He sat opposite me in a green plastic upholstered chair, one I recognized as part of the landlord’s early repertoire.

  “Start from the beginning,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I had dinner with a friend and came home late,” I began, and went through it all again, for the third time that night. Repeating that story had become a ritual more engrossing than any High Mass. It banished everything: Julie’s body, fallen in a puddle of blood and urine and feces; Martinez’s suspicions; the frantic buzzing in my head.

  I gave Martinez Phoebe’s name and address and phone number. I told him about the funeral and listed everybody I remembered talking to there. When I came to the part about finding the door bolted, he stopped me.

  “Can you think of any way that could be done?” he asked me. “How did someone get the door bolted?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought someone was inside. Julie must have—”

  He shook his head. “Not possible,” he said. “In the first place, Miss Simms died in your apartment. Even if the medical examiner comes in tomorrow and says she really died by poison, she couldn’t have walked three feet with the wounds she has in her. She has to have sustained those knife wounds in your apartment. Which brings us to the question of what happened to the knife.”

  I thought of all my shiny new kitchen knives, stuck in the butcher block holder I’d bought at Macy’s.

  “Somebody must have come in the window,” I told Martinez, knowing I must sound like an idiot.

  He just shook his head again, looking at me with eyes as big and moist as a dog whose master has died.

  “The windows were both locked. Nobody came in the windows or left that way.”

  I began to wish I had something to hold in my hands, preferably a drink, preferably a strong one. I lit a cigarette instead, holding out the pack to offer one to Martinez.

  “This is ridiculous,” I told him as he pulled a pack of unfiltered Camels from his jacket pocket and lit one. “The whole thing sounds like an Agatha Christie mystery. People don’t get killed in locked rooms.”

  “Julia Simms did.”

  “Julie,” I corrected. “Her name was Julie Simms and she was a literary agent for romance writers and I didn’t even know her that well. I’ve told you all this.”

  “And you don’t know how she wound up in your apartment, stabbed at least nine times.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “And you don’t know how the door got bolted.” Another statement. He didn’t sound as if he believed this one any more than he had the last.

  “No,” I said again. “I don’t know how the door got bolted. I don’t know how someone got into my apartment and locked and bolted the door and then got out again with everything shut up tight. I wish I did.”

  He said nothing, just staring at me for a minute, but I knew all about that trick and I wasn’t going to bite. I’d used it often enough myself, when I was interviewing someone who did not want to be interviewed or getting information I had no business having. Most people can’t stand silence. Stare at them without saying a word, and they’ll talk and talk. Sometimes they’ll even tell you all the things they had no intention of telling you.

  After a while, Martinez flipped open Julie’s appointment book and stared at a page.

  “You say you saw Miss Simms this afternoon? At a funeral?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “At Myrra Agenworth’s funeral. Myrra Agenworth was a category romance novelist. Julie—”

  “What’s a category romance novelist?”

  “Someone who writes ca
tegory romances,” I said. “A category romance is like a Harlequin, you know. They’re short, they’re written to a formula. Actually, Myrra wrote family sagas, too, but—”

  “That’s all right,” Martinez said. “When was this funeral? From what time to what time?”

  “From four-thirty to about six,” I said. “It was a very long service. But I didn’t actually see her at the service, I saw her afterwards, on the church steps. She was with Phoebe Weiss, the woman I had dinner with.”

  Martinez consulted the notebook. “I have a Phoebe Damereaux. No Weiss.”

  “Same person.” His eyebrows shot up, and I blushed. “People don’t usually write romance novels under their own names,” I explained. “Phoebe Damereaux is Phoebe Weiss’s pseudonym.”

  “All right,” he nodded. “Do you know any of the rest of these people? Hazel Ganz?”

  “Julie was supposed to have dinner with someone named Hazel Ganz. A client, I think. I only know her by sight.”

  “Amelia S.”

  “Amelia Samson,” I said. “She’s—”

  “I know who Amelia Samson is. The one with the castle.”

  “That’s right. I think her real name is Joan Wroth, but I’m not absolutely sure.”

  “What about someone named Mary A? There’s a rude little drawing—”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “I expect there would be. That’s Mary Allard, she’s editor of the Passion Romance line at Acme. But Julie wouldn’t be doing business with her, not now.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Because this Allard woman cheated a few of Julie’s clients, and Julie found out about it, and there were audits and lawsuits. It was silly, really, because any one category romance book doesn’t make that much money. It’s the line as a whole that makes money, so you want to keep your writers happy so they’ll go on writing books for the series. And what happened with Mary is that she or someone in her company falsified royalty statements, and when Julie found out about it, Passion lost most of their best writers.”

  “But this Allard woman didn’t lose her job?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Acme has a reputation—well, let’s just say the company probably applauded her for it, if you get what I mean.”

  He stared off into space, lost in private speculations. Nasty-minded speculations, too, I thought, and vowed to be quieter and less eager to please. I didn’t count on his dropping a bomb in my lap.

  “How about this one?” he asked. “Leslie Ashe.”

  “Leslie Ashe?” I could hear my voice squeak and practically feel the eyes bulge out of my head. “But that’s not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Leslie Ashe is Myrra’s granddaughter. She isn’t even in the country. She didn’t come for the funeral. She lives in England.”

  Martinez looked down at Julie’s appointment book. “Leslie Ashe,” he recited. “Breakfast at the Plaza Hotel, seven A.M., Friday, eleven December. That’s about three hours from now.”

  What Daniel said was, “Did you give them this number? If you’re coming right here, you must have given this number.”

  I sat curled up in the ugly green plastic chair, drinking very strong tea with lemon and sugar from one of Barbara’s white china cups. It was not very good china, but china is not one of the things Barbara spends money on. She does spend money on teas, and the kind she gave me was rich and dark and electric. I was coming awake, even if it was five o’clock in the morning.

  “You can come here if you want,” Daniel was saying. “I won’t leave you to sleep in the street.” He let out a strained, artificial little whinny. “I have to leave for work at seven-thirty, but you could at least have a shower.”

  “Right,” I said, beginning to wish I’d called Phoebe. But I didn’t need Phoebe just then, I needed Daniel. Or I needed what Daniel was supposed to be, which he was not. After three years, I should have known that much and usually did. Tonight there was a dead woman in my apartment and a policeman waiting in the hall, and I wanted comfort. I didn’t want to remind him how often I had provided comfort.

  “Well,” he coughed. “You could come and crash here tomorrow and not go out of the apartment. I guess that would be all right. Unless,” his voice brightened, “unless you have appointments. Do you have appointments?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m supposed to come in and sign my statement to the police. I don’t know if that’s tomorrow.”

  “I won’t be home till after nine,” Daniel said doubtfully. “This is the last big push, you know. I should hear about the partnership right after New Year’s.”

  “You’ve told me,” I said. Daniel is a very senior associate at the law firm of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore. He either made partner this year or he was out. I sent up a small prayer that somehow, somewhere, all the money that had gone to Saint Paul’s and Amherst and the Harvard

  Law School would result in nothing more impressive than a two-room office three floors above the main street in Akron, Ohio.

  “Maybe you should go to Phoebe’s,” Daniel said brightly. “She always sleeps late.”

  “Maybe I should,” I said. I dropped the receiver back into the cradle without bothering to say good-bye. It was not like Daniel to be so blatantly insensitive. His selfishness was usually cloaked in philosophy. We did not have keys to each other’s apartments because he did not believe in “the blurring of independent lives.” He also did not believe in the enforced remembrance of birthdays and anniversaries and what he called “the commercialization of Christmas,” a sentiment that seemed to apply solely to trips to see the tree lit up in Rockefeller Center. I had been with him three years and still had no idea why. He was a very beautiful man, fine-boned and strong of body. I was used to him.

  I fumbled through my coat for cigarettes and came up instead with the mail. I dropped the envelopes into my lap and didn’t bother to go chasing after the check that went fluttering to the floor. I concentrated instead on the letter from Hoddard, Marks, Hewitt and Long. It reminded me of Daniel.

  I picked at the corner until it tore. Bad news is supposed to come in threes, I thought. Might as well get it over with. I pulled out the single sheet of heavy letterhead and unfolded it on my lap.

  “Dear Miss McKenna,” it read, “I am writing to request your attendance, as one of the beneficiaries, at the reading of the will of Susan Marie DeFord, a.k.a. Myrra Agenworth, on Monday, December 14 at 2:30 P.M. in the offices of…”

  CHAPTER 4

  JULIE SIMMS HAD A BABY. It was eighteen months old, a girl, and lived with Julie’s mother in an apartment in Gramercy Park. There was also a husband, very young and still very much alive, either in a detox center someplace or sleeping in a doorway in the Bowery. The husband had money but no family. The Chase Manhattan Bank paid the income from his trust fund directly into a checking account, and the checking account was depleted by the ravages of drink. Or the evils of rum, if you will. That was the Gospel According to Lydia Wentward. I got back at her by calling her “Ellie” (her real name was Elspeth Hoag) and hung up to consider what I was going to do with the rest of the afternoon.

  I was in Phoebe’s apartment, theoretically in seclusion. Phoebe was out on a round of visits to publishers, agents, and Italian restaurants. I picked at the cheese blintzes she had left warming for me in the oven and answered the phone.

  The Gospel According to Amelia Samson: Julie’s husband was indeed alive and indeed an alcoholic, which was to be expected, since Julie was more successful than he was. He wanted to get a divorce and start a normal life, but she refused because she was Catholic and because she secretly loved him. Some tragedy in her childhood (a father unfaithful to the mother, Amelia thought) made it impossible for her to trust men. Julie therefore needed her career and her husband, which was exactly what the husband could not accept. He got her into my apartment and stabbed her to death so he could give up drinking and make a fresh start with a woman who respected the vocation of wife and mother.

  The G
ospel According to Mary Allard: Julie Simms was not now and never had been married. She had her baby out of wedlock because she was thirty-four when she got pregnant and was afraid she’d never get the chance again. This had nothing to do with her murder. Julie Simms was murdered either by Janine Williams or Lydia Wentward, both of whom were in Big Trouble, although Mary didn’t know about what. She knew about the trouble because Julie had hinted as much to her, when she made a lunch appointment last week.

  The Gospel According to Melissa “Muffy” Arnold Whitney, Rye Country Day School, Farmington Class of ’69, Vassar Class of ’73, Junior Assemblies, Westchester Cotillion, Cosmopolitan Club and now managing editor of Sophistication, which is exactly the job her mother had in 1951, when she found out she was pregnant with Muffy and (of course) had to give it all up: I just heard about it and it’s terrible, I feel so sorry for you, you must be so uncomfortable being in all the papers like this, but of course it’s a perfect story for us now that we’re so involved in these lady executive murders, it’s going on all over the country, these men just hate women who carry briefcases, I never touch one anymore, but of course Sheree Hyland’s working on it and she’s not worried and she wants to interview you so could you come in Thursday at eleven and bring the “Taking Off” copy with you? I know it isn’t supposed to be due until after New Year’s but I’ve got this hole in the March issue, these writers from California are so unprofessional, and anyway I can’t thank you enough and I’ll see you then.

  The Gospel According to Phoebe (Weiss) Damereaux (delivered by phone from Mamma Leone’s during the lunch rush): everybody in town is figuring out where you are, and you should not be answering the phone. These people are going to hound you to death. Also, you should heat up the chicken in the blue and white Corning Ware casserole on the third shelf in the refrigerator, because if you insist on living on black coffee and Merit cigarettes, you’re going to be dead of starvation before we get this thing straightened out. Also also, I talked to My Friend the Lawyer, and we’ll meet you for dinner at Oenophilia at seven-thirty. Reservations in the name of Carras. Also also also, Lydia called (very high on some kind of pep pills) and said that Julie’s husband was a drunk and he came through the window of your apartment and stabbed her with a broken bourbon bottle. This doesn’t sound like what you told me.