Sweet, Savage Death Read online

  “Not drunk,” Janine Williams said, when I finally managed to tear myself away from the phone and make my appointment at Farret. “Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease.”

  She put her hand up and patted her hair into place, ignoring an elaborate board game going on in the hallway. It had been set up by a number of Bright Young Men from Marketing, and as far as I could tell consisted of thin, penlight-like wands which, when applied to the surface of a Plexiglas board cover, caused small discs to hover in the air like flying saucers.

  “All the gossip is so malicious,” Janine said, wandering down the hall toward her office. Her path was blocked in several places by stand-up displays of romance books, including one with a three-dimensional popup of Amelia Samson looking blue. “Drunkenness and divorce and all this nonsense. Lydia even had the man sleeping in a doorway in the Bowery, which is perfectly ridiculous. Julie didn’t put him in the hospital until last year.”

  “Mr. Simms is in the hospital?”

  Janine nodded vaguely. “A sanatorium somewhere in Westchester,” she said, staring at her nameplate on the hollow plywood door of her office. For a moment, she was fixed. It was a moment that went on much too long. All the unease I had left in Phoebe’s apartment, all the nausea from the moment I had found Julie Simms on my floor, began to wash in on me. Then the mood broke, and Janine pushed open her office door and stood back to let me walk through. “A very expensive place, I heard,” she said, still thinking of Julie’s husband. “That was all right as long as Julie was out earning money. What happens now, I don’t know.”

  I sat down in a very uncomfortable chair and pulled my feet up under me, looking past the mountain of computer printouts on Janine’s desk to a corkboard covered with colored three-by-five cards that hung on the wall beside the single file cabinet. One of those cards was for Love’s Dangerous Journey, corrected galleys for which were due more than a week ago and now resided in a marked manila envelope at the 20th Precinct. There had been blood on them, and the police wanted to know whose.

  “I can’t understand why everyone’s having so much trouble with these reports,” Janine said, patting the stack of printouts. “People look at them and say ‘computer’ and then shut right down. These should make it easier to understand what’s going on.”

  “I never read reports,” I said. “I can’t understand why anyone would want to.”

  “Oh, not you,” Janine said. “Writers never read anything if it doesn’t have their names on it. I mean my editors. I have three editors. I have reports that tell them what’s selling and what isn’t selling. Where it’s selling and where it isn’t selling. And they act like it doesn’t matter. For a romance line.”

  I leaned over and looked at the first page of the printout, upside down.

  “These tell you what books sold where, when, and how? You can tell by just looking at them?”

  “I can tell. The front office can tell. My associate editors are waiting to be presented with hardbound ledgers signed in quill pens.”

  “So am I,” I said. “Don’t send me one.”

  “I won’t. Not unless you ask for one. Or your agent asks for one.”

  “I don’t have an agent. I have a problem.”

  I took my cigarettes out, lit one, then groped around in the mess on Janine’s desk for the Vassar College ashtray. I wanted to ask her if she knew Muffy Arnold Whitney, but I stopped myself. Janine had been at Vassar what Phoebe had been at Greyson: the poor girl at the rich girl’s school, the uncomfortable reminder of difference in the midst of privilege. Phoebe had accepted the role cheerfully and lived with it easily—and blown our assumptions to pieces whenever she needed something to do. Janine exuded a nervous defensiveness. She had to be ten years older than Phoebe or I—and twenty years out of college—but she pressed her credentials on us, gently but insistently, almost every time we met.

  She pressed them on me now, in the form of plaques and pictures cluttering the top of her desk. The pictures were all in silver frames and most of them were signed. I stared vaguely at one of Janine in an evening dress that looked like a shirtwaist, surrounded by Phoebe, Amelia, Lydia, Myrra, and Julie in varying degrees of exuberantly ostentatious dress. I was about to ask what it was a picture of when I finally focused on her face. She was looking at me with the exaggerated concern of someone who wants to be empathetic, but who finds herself faced with a problem so alien as to be unimaginable. If I had come to Janine with a chapter that wouldn’t work, a contract foul-up, a copyright problem, she would have been all energy and sincerity. Janine’s commitment to Being An Editor rivaled Thomas Becket’s to the Roman Catholic Church. The murder of an agent in an Upper West Side studio made her go blank.

  I was feeling a little blank myself. The combination of lack of sleep and nagging guilt—although I had no idea what I was feeling guilty of—was making my eyes water and my vision blur. I explained as clearly as possible about the galleys and why I didn’t have them, then sat back and let my eyes wander around the room.

  Like most large publishing companies, Farret relegated its romance division to the darkest and least accessible quarters in the building. Not only did Janine and her staff have to share space with Marketing and Sales, but they were assigned the cramped, windowless cubicles in the core block of the floor. In place of a view of Gramercy Park, Janine had a framed sales chart showing the relative profitability of the four Farret romance lines under her control. The red vein symbolizing Fires of Love was shorter, but significantly higher, than all the others.

  “Looks nice, doesn’t it?” Janine said. “If it hadn’t been for Fires of Love, Farret would probably be out of the romance business altogether.”

  “The blue one doesn’t seem to be doing too well,” I said, having to squint to see anything at all. “Seems to have been cut off in its prime.”

  “Romantic Life,” Janine said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “We folded it around the time we started Fires of Love. That was really a disaster, that line. Innocent virgins swooning at a single glance and probably passing out cold on their wedding nights, for all anyone could tell. Two months after that line hit the supermarkets, one of the soaps had its goody-goody character give birth to miscegnated triplets while her husband went to Switzerland for a sex change operation.”

  “I didn’t think there was such a thing as a romance line that didn’t make money,” I said.

  “They all make money,” Janine said. “Some of them just don’t make enough money. You know how these people are. If you don’t have a 40 percent profit margin, you’re sullying their pristine literary reputations for no good reason.”

  “Maybe what I ought to do is write for the soaps.” I leaned back and closed my eyes. “Do screenplays for soft-core porn—”

  “Now, now.” Janine started straightening papers on her desk. “What you ought to do is stop at the desk and pick up your extra set of galleys, then go do whatever it was you were going to do anyway. Go on living a normal life.”

  “All right,” I said. “What I was going to do today, before somebody decided to kill Julie Simms on my floor, was go to the animal shelter and get a cat.”

  “What?”

  “A cat.” I opened my eyes, wishing I didn’t have to. “I’ve been wanting a cat. I was going to go and get one.”

  Janine looked nonplussed, but she could not stop being Janine. She gave me the brightest smile she could manage, forced an encouraging note into her voice and said, “Well, good. A cat. Maybe you could bring it to the cocktail party on Sunday.”

  CHAPTER 5

  THE GALLEYS WERE NOT waiting at the desk when I got there. The rabbity little editorial assistant who manned the station wasn’t inclined to look for them, so I picked up a copy of Phoebe’s Wild, Haunting Melody and started wandering down the hall toward Marketing. According to the best inside intelligence, the first of the “good parts” started on page thirty. It was not as good a “good part” as the one that started on page 106. That one, according to a
pious-looking little girl I met in the Fifth Avenue B. Dalton’s, was “not describable in words.” I bet. I’d never had the courage to ask Phoebe if she made these things up or actually practiced them.

  “What would you do,” Martin Caine asked me, “if I threw myself off this chair into your arms?”

  “Catch you, put you down, and pat your head,” I said.

  “Figures.”

  He made a stab at attaching a streamer of red crepe paper to the top of the doorjamb and missed. Even standing on a chair, Marty Caine was short. He was in perfect proportion, he was very attractive, and he had the air of a prematurely cynical Frank Sinatra, but he was five five. If that. The first time I saw him, he was sitting down. I nearly made a move. Then he stood up, and I had to restrain myself from ruffling his curly brown hair and offering him a teddy bear.

  I reached up and held the crepe paper in place. He slammed a copy of Cashelmara over the tack and jumped to the floor.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Last year I was ready to hang up mourning, for God’s sake. Can you believe that?”

  “You didn’t think Fires of Love was going to work?” I went into his office and sat on his desk. He was in Marketing, so he got a window.

  He was the Marketing Director for category romance, so he got exactly one window.

  “Hell,” he said, coming in after me, “who knows what’s going to work? If you want to know the truth, no. I didn’t think Fires of Love was going to work. The Advisory Board business was okay—getting writers to help with the tip sheet, promote the line, I liked that. But Janine didn’t take any of their suggestions, and she’s had a couple of failures. I kept thinking there were twenty or thirty lines out there, about half of them just like Fires of Love. Why buy us? But I really wasn’t thinking much. I was too busy being buried under the last debacle.”

  “Good old Romantic Life.”

  “Good old Romantic Life.” He leaned back in his swivel chair and put his feet on the desk. He gestured to my copy of Wild, Haunting Melody. “You get to page 106 yet?”

  “I just picked it up in the hall.”

  “That’s what I want to do in my next life. Be Phoebe’s publicity person. No more late nights, no more working weekends, no more ‘why isn’t this book selling as well as we thought it would.’ Phoebe’s books always sell, you’d have a hard time keeping her out of the magazines, and she’s always nice. From what I hear, she even cooks for you.”

  “Only when she’s keeping kosher.” I didn’t tell him that Phoebe’s keeping kosher never once kept her out of Mamma Leone’s. “I think all you people get much too excited,” I told him. “So a romance line makes 5 percent instead of 50. As long as it’s not losing money—”

  Marty nearly choked. “Oh, God,” he said. “You must have been talking to Janine. She’s very big on this keep-a-good-front business. Well, let me tell you. Romantic Life not only lost money, it lost a mint. It lost so much money, it was so embarrassingly bad, there are still booksellers who won’t talk to us. I nearly had to hire hit men to convince some of the stores to carry Fires of Love.” He jumped up from the desk. “Before Romantic Life, we had such a good reputation, I was getting romance books into stores that didn’t carry romance books. It was great. Snobby little bookstores in Westchester, back-to-the-land bookstores in Vermont. It was wonderful for the genre—”

  “Everyone’s always talking about what’s wonderful for the genre,” I said. “The whole thing makes me tired. Have you ever thought it might be a pulp genre? That where it belongs is in the supermarkets? That there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that?”

  “Maybe,” Marty said. “But let’s face it, Pay. There’s good trash and there’s bad trash. Every other genre but romance has been able to figure that out. There are great mystery novels. There are great horror novels. There are great sci-fi novels. People think romance readers are stupid, and they give them what they think romance readers want, and they get Romantic Life.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I agree the level of contempt is annoying.”

  “The level of contempt is ridiculous. People may not be able to tell you why something is good or bad, but they know. They may take a bad book if it’s the only one of its kind, but when you’ve got the companies putting out ninety books a month and a lot of them are upping the quality control by light-years with every volume, they’re not going to be talked down to. Look at Phoebe. Phoebe writes—”

  “Marty.” I grabbed his wrist, trying to make him stop moving. “You don’t have to sell me. I write the stuff.”

  “Right.” He sat down and put his legs on the desk again. “Sorry. I don’t understand publishing people. They take one look at a book that’s selling well and act like dogs who’ve just had their noses pushed in their own shit.”

  I got out of my chair and started gathering up my things. If Phoebe wasn’t determined to marry Jewish and Marty addicted to six-foot blondes, I could fix them up with each other. I spent a lot of time thinking about it.

  “I’m going to get out of here,” I said. “You going to be at the conference?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He had lapsed into something that looked like boredom. “You remember Lydia Wentward’s Asian tour last fall? She’s got pictures, and she wants blowups. Six feet by five feet. I’m not kidding.”

  “Sounds like Lydia.”

  “Yeah.”

  I was halfway back to the editorial assistant when he yelled, “Pay? I don’t think you did it.”

  The galleys were waiting for me at the desk, wrapped in a large manila envelope. The editorial assistant had her back to me. Her neck was stiff with the rage that infects all graduates of the Seven Sisters who discover that, Phi Beta Kappa or no Phi Beta Kappa, in publishing you start by typing.

  I put the package in my tote bag, took a copy of Romantic Times, and stopped to look at a large oil painting leaning from the top of a low set of bookshelves to the concrete wall. The painting was obviously “cover art” for a Fires of Love book. The hero and heroine were in a much too compromising position for any other romance line. What interested me was the lovingly detailed two-masted schooner in the foreground. Someone had stuck an infinitesimal outboard motor to its ass.

  I took the elevator to the ground floor. Farret has one of those newsstands that carry every magazine published on four continents, every newspaper available in the United States plus The Times of London, and a judicious selection of paperback fiction. I bought six Agatha Christies, nine Nicholas Blakes, and every Dorothy L. Sayers, P. D. James, and Emma Lathen they had. I also bought their entire stock of New York Posts—the edition with “baffled” in the headlines. I put the books in my bag and hefted the Posts into my arms. Then I walked out into the late afternoon gray of Madison Avenue and dumped the newspapers into the nearest trash can.

  I was standing on the northeast corner of East Thirty-fifth and Madison, trying to hail a cab in the lightly falling snow, when a young, brown-haired woman next to me turned to the man whose arm she was holding and said, “Maybe that’s why Julie Simms is dead. Bobby, I’m telling you, something is wrong and I know it.”

  Just then a cab pulled up and I fell into it. We were halfway uptown on our way to the animal shelter before I realized I knew who the woman was.

  Hazel Ganz.

  CHAPTER 6

  “OH,” THE GIRL AT the animal shelter said, “that one. I must admit, we haven’t had a lot of hope for that one.”

  She put her hands into the cage and came out with a kitten just under five inches long, very uncertain on its legs, and scared witless.

  “It’s weaned,” the girl said, “but just. And they’re supposed to be housetrained, but I think it must be a little early for this one.” She held it up to her nose and shook her head. “And she’s listless. I don’t think we’d have held on to her, but she’s so small.”

  “She’s so black,” I said, taking the cat in my hands. It didn’t like being in the air and said so, so I put it in the breast pocket of my shirt. I d
id this on the principle that if human babies are calmer when they can hear a heartbeat, the technique ought to work as well for cats.

  “There are papers to fill out,” the girl said, pulling fretfully at her string tie. “And of course the fee. When she’s ready to be spayed, you just bring her right back and we’ll take care of it for you. People are so irresponsible. You have no idea how many thousands of unwanted cats are born in this city every year.”

  She gave me a fierce glare, as if I had been personally responsible for at least a third of that number, then turned on her heel and walked away. Although she was well under thirty, she was dressed as the prototypical old maid. Her shoes laced up to her ankles. Her dress, made of a dingy calico busy with sentimentalized approximations of cornflowers, fell below her knees and rose high on her throat, ending in a fussy ruffle that spilled over her flat chest. Even her granny glasses looked like they’d come out of her great aunt’s attic.

  I let her go off and began to wander around on my own. Except for a mother nursing six kittens, the cats were all in individual cages, each with its mound of sawdust in the corner, each with its identical tin dinner and water bowl set. They looked miserable. Well-fed, well-cared for, much-petted cats affect a pose of supercilious self-sufficiency. Left alone for twenty-four hours with nothing more than food for the duration and the carpet to shred, they behave like four-year-olds sent to bed without supper. I rubbed the heads of a few of the especially ugly ones as I passed. No one adopts an ugly cat from the animal shelter. No one wants some pink-eyed, white-haired, flat-faced monstrosity curling up at their feet after dinner. God only knows what happens to them.