Sweet, Savage Death Read online

Martinez sighed. “Isn’t there any way you can corroborate any of this?”

  “If you looked at the volume of work I produced that week—that month, for God’s sake, I mean the month from November second to December second—even you’d think accusing me of running around murdering people was ludicrous. I cannot seem to get it into your head that fall is my busiest time. I get more than half the magazine work I do in a year between the middle of September and Christmas. In the past three months, I’ve written two romance novels, three major articles for national magazines, and no less than fifteen how-to columns on everything from handling a checking account to choosing a neurosurgeon. I didn’t have time to murder anybody.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to go over,” Martinez said. “You didn’t kill Myrra Agenworth because you were too busy?”

  “Oh, hell,” I said, taking Camille out of my tote bag to let her play on Martinez’s desk. “Ask Barbara. Maybe she heard me typing.”

  “Maybe,” Martinez said. “Let’s go over last night again.”

  I nearly exploded. “We’ve gone over it six times,” I told him. “You’ve got the testimony of the cabdriver. You’ve got Phoebe’s statement. Even you said the times were impossible.”

  “I said the times were tight.”

  “According to your own timetable, I had exactly six minutes between getting out of a cab in front of my apartment and waking Carlos to help me open the door. In those six minutes, I would have had to enter my apartment, stab a perfectly healthy woman nine times without anyone hearing a sound, walk out, figure a way to bolt the door from the outside, get Carlos, and start playing the injured innocent. Oh, come on.”

  Martinez stared at the ceiling. The cat started climbing his tie.

  “Earrings,” he said. “Let’s talk about earrings.”

  “What earrings?” Phoebe said. “Whose earrings?”

  “Myrra’s earrings.” I leaned back to let the superannuated Greek waiter put a plate of shish kebab on the white Formica table. It was after midnight, and the Trio was the only restaurant in the neighborhood still serving dinner. The Trio was always serving dinner, and breakfast and lunch, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It had linoleum on the floor and metal strips around the edges of the tables and a real soda fountain counter along one wall, but the food was very hot and very good and came in quantity. I preferred it to most of the smoked glass and polished chrome places that had opened on Columbus Avenue in the past year. I worried a little about the waiters, because they never seemed to go home. I had an almost irrepressible urge to ask Phoebe’s Friend the Lawyer if Greeks ever got any sleep.

  Phoebe’s Friend the Lawyer was named Nicholas George Carras. He had very thick, very black, Kennedy-liberal long hair and blue eyes, a face straight out of a romance heroine’s wet dream, and the kind of long, elegant fingers usually associated with safecrackers. He was also the tallest man I had ever seen outside professional basketball. He was taller than a lot of men in professional basketball.

  If I hadn’t been concentrating on killing Detective Martinez, I would have been ready to kill Phoebe.

  “Myrra’s earrings,” I said, trying to drown out the sound of Nick’s conversation (in Greek) with the waiter, “were missing from the body when it was found. Also the necklace. That ruby thing.”

  “They were supposed to go on exhibit at the conference,” Phoebe said. “In a glass box. Jewels of Love.”

  “Jewels of Love.” I put my head in my hands. Start at the beginning, I told myself. Things are coming apart. The small cat was at the bottom of my tote bag, shredding my American Express bill. Two people were dead. Phoebe had hired a lawyer on the basis of whether or not she would be able to marry me off to him. The police were holding Myrra’s dog for vivisection.

  I looked up into the eyes of Nick Carras. For the moment, he looked very intelligent. He had the eyes of a man who knew himself very well, and was amused, even when what he knew was not entirely to his credit. We exchanged smiles, because we both knew we were attracted to each other for superficial reasons. He was six eight at a minimum, and I liked men tall enough to make me feel small. I was a WASP from a moneyed family in Fairfield County, and there is something in every hyphenated American on the way up that wants me for a wife. Most of them can’t distinguish one New England preppie from another. They make love to the concept instead of the woman, and end by feeling angry and betrayed by their children. Nick Carras, I thought, would not be one of those. I was beginning to like him very much.

  “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why the police think you killed this Agenworth woman. The Simms problem I can understand.”

  “I thought Myrra was mugged,” Phoebe said, resentful.

  “The apartment and the earrings,” I said, still looking into Nick Carras’s eyes. It’s amazing how many minutes you can spend looking into someone else’s eyes, especially if they’re very blue, very deep, very intelligent eyes. “Myrra decided to leave me a little something in her will. Twelve rooms plus servants’ wing in the Braedenvorst, plus everything in them at the time of her death.”

  “My God,” Phoebe said. “That apartment.”

  “Twelve rooms in the Braedenvorst,” Nick said. “That must go for two or three million dollars.” He looked shell-shocked. His theoretical rich girl had just turned into a very real heiress.

  I couldn’t stop myself from making it worse. “There are all those paintings,” I said. “And the jewelry she kept lying around. Four original Degas. The contents of her wastebaskets. The heart-shaped bathtub.”

  “All right,” Nick said. He had mastered his shock, but he was having trouble making things make sense. So was I, but I was used to confusion. It is not possible to live for long among romance writers without learning to think of insanity as background music.

  Nick Carras thought of the world as both rational and explicable. He was trying.

  “All right,” he said again. “You and this Myrra Agenworth were good friends.”

  “Not exactly,” I shook my head. This was what made it so difficult. “I would have said she was my friend, but I wasn’t really hers. She adopted young women writers. I was one of them.”

  “Young women romance writers,” Nick said.

  “Not at all. I’m not really a romance writer. I started out doing investigative and women’s rights pieces for the alternative press. Later I picked up a couple of the national slicks. It doesn’t pay the rent. Romance pays the rent. Myrra got me into romance, and a lot of other people, too. Half the population of Manhattan Radical Feminists is now writing romance on the side.”

  “And pretending they aren’t,” Phoebe said. Her nose twitched. It was the only expression of contempt I’d ever seen her make. “They write four books a year for one of the lines and then run around saying how awful it is and romance should be prevented from taking up so much space in the bookstores. Caroline Hesse didn’t even come to the funeral.”

  “Caroline Hesse has a Pulitzer Prize for journalism,” Nick protested. “Magazine journalism.”

  “Caroline Hesse is Maura Sands for the Passion Romance line at Acme,” Phoebe said. “None of them came to the funeral. There had to be dozens.”

  Nick turned to me. “You went to the funeral,” he said. “You were closer to her than the others.”

  “Maybe.” I toyed with a grilled green pepper. “I actually liked her, I guess. I wasn’t just using her, and I think a lot of the people around her were. And I’m not ashamed of my Fires of Love books. They’re silly, because the parameters of the genre as it now exists force them to be silly, but otherwise they’re pretty good examples of the form. I can’t afford to let anyone know I’m writing them, but it’s not because I’m ashamed of them.”

  “Other people wouldn’t understand,” Nick suggested.

  “Other people think it’s the mark of the devil,” I said.

  “She thought you were wonderful,” Phoebe said. “She thought you were a genius.”

 
; “If she did, I never heard about it.”

  “If she did, everybody else heard about it,” Nick said. His air of purposefulness and conviction had returned, and he was sitting up straighter in his chair. I wondered what he had constructed to make my world comprehensible to him—and whether it would help or hurt me.

  “They’ve got motive,” he admitted. “But you have to have more than motive.”

  “He’s got more than motive,” I said. “He’s got the earrings.” I looked at the ceiling. This was no time to develop a crush on somebody’s blue eyes. Things were much worse than Phoebe or Nick realized, much worse than I had ever expected them to be. Every time I thought of my last interview with Martinez, my throat felt as if it were being attacked by buzz saws.

  “Myrra was wearing a pair of ruby earrings and a ruby necklace the night she was killed,” I said. “They weren’t on her when her body was found. One earring I say I found on Esmeralda’s collar at the animal shelter. I’m the only one who noticed it there. The other earring—Well, they found the other earring in Julie’s handbag, lying right there on the floor of my apartment after she was killed.”

  They were staring at me, shocked. I smiled like a woman close to death from seasickness.

  “We know what Martinez thinks,” I said. “Julie knew something about Myrra’s death. Julie was trying to blackmail me or maybe just accuse me. Julie was found dead in my apartment.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “YOUR PICTURE’S IN THE Post,” Daniel said. “Did you see that? In the Post, for God’s sake.”

  I cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear and reached across the bed to retrieve my cigarettes from Camille. We had a brief tug-of-war. She had captured my cigarettes and started a long trek to bury them in my tote bag. She did not appreciate my attempts to extract one for smoking purposes.

  “Are you listening to me?” Daniel insisted. “You’re not saying anything. I said your picture was in the goddamned New York Post”

  I sighed. “I didn’t think you read the Post,” I said. “I thought it embarrassed you to be seen with it.”

  “I see the front page,” he said. “I see the front page every time I pass a newsstand.”

  I got hold of a cigarette and lit it.

  “All right,” I told Daniel. “You saw my face on the front page of the New York Post while you were passing a newsstand. So what? Half the population of Manhattan saw my face on the front page of the Post while they were passing a newsstand.”

  “My point exactly,” Daniel said. “Patience, there’s a partnership vote on me in three days.”

  “I thought those things were secret. I thought they never told you when—”

  “Of course they don’t tell you,” he said. “You hear things. After eight years, I have quite a network for hearing things.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “And Patience,” he said. “I took you to the firm dinner party last year. They all know you. I mean, they’ve all seen you, and once they see you—Well, Patience, you don’t have the world’s most ordinary looks. I mean, you’ve got to do something about this thing.”

  I told myself I should feel sympathetic. If for no other reason than that I had spent a great deal of my time during the last few years nursing Daniel’s hopes, dreams, and fears about partnership, I should bleed for him now. I couldn’t.

  “Listen,” I told him. “I’m very sorry for all your embarrassment.” Was I really saying this? “I hope nothing goes wrong with the partnership. But Daniel, I just don’t see what I can do about it.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you can’t tell the police where you were when that woman got killed? Are you saying they’ve got a case?”

  “Since nobody knows when that woman got killed, as you put it, I don’t see how I could convince them I wasn’t there.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Daniel said. “You were there. This thing is going to trial.”

  “Sometime, someplace, this thing is going to trial,” I agreed.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Daniel said again.

  Then he hung up.

  I put the receiver into the cradle and looked around the large, baroque/modern bedroom for my robe. The bedroom was in a suite at the Cathay-Pierce. Phoebe always rented a suite at the Cathay-Pierce for the conference, even though her apartment was just across the Park, because she wanted “to be around to do business,” meaning go to parties.

  I found my robe and started to get out of bed to put it on. The phone rang again.

  “Phoebe?” The woman on the other end of the line had a very heavy accent.

  “Phoebe’s in the next room,” I said. “I’ll get her.”

  “You tell Nick,” the woman said. “He left the house, he didn’t take his orange pills. You tell him.”

  The phone went dead.

  I put on my robe, put Camille in my pocket, and went into the sitting room of the suite. Nick and Phoebe were sitting together on the couch, looking like the bomb had fallen. I took a cheese Danish from the room service tray and sat on the floor.

  “You forgot your orange pills,” I told Nick. “Some woman called and told me to tell you.”

  “Vitamin C,” Nick said. “My mother. She’s up visiting from New Jersey.”

  I put Camille on the floor to play.

  “Daniel thinks I did it,” I told Phoebe. “Can you believe that? He’s known me for three years and he thinks I did it.”

  “Which?” Nick Carras said.

  “Both, I guess. We were talking about Julie.”

  “Daniel Harte.” Phoebe made a sound like an angry horse. “Daniel Harte would believe anything. What did he call for, anyway? You’re embarrassing him?”

  “Something like that.” I lay down on the floor and let Camille climb onto my stomach. She began making her way to my pockets. “The way this thing is going,” I said, trying to make myself sound as reasonable as possible, “the only way we’re going to convince Martinez I didn’t murder two people is to let him know who did. I mean—”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Nick said. He got off the couch and started pacing, his long legs jerking arrhythmically. “I’ve been through this before,” he said. “I used to work for Nader. You know what happens when an interested party starts investigating for itself? It gets in deeper. It ends up at all the wrong places at all the wrong times. Look what happened when you went out to the animal shelter.”

  “I didn’t go out to the animal shelter to investigate,” I said. “I went to get a cat.” I sat up. “Were you really with Nader?” I asked. “I’m impressed.”

  “Washington office,” Nick said. “Three years. My point is that you’re in all the wrong places at all the wrong times as it is. All we need is to have you wandering into another murder, or finding the knife—”

  “And I’ve seen all those books in your bag,” Phoebe said. “Life is not Hercule Poirot. You’re not going to find out how to solve this thing by reading the complete works of Arthur Conan Doyle.”

  “Dorothy L. Sayers,” I said. My hair was falling into my face, and I hefted it aside. “I was just getting myself acclimatized. And you’ve got to admit this thing looks like an Agatha Christie. And Martinez could probably get an indictment right now if he wanted to. God only knows what he’s waiting for.”

  “He’s not.” Nick leaned over and shoved his face into mine. His blue eyes had dark flecks in them but no dreams. To him, this situation was a reality he neither could nor wanted to escape. I resented it. It was easier for me to imagine myself the heroine of a thirties murder mystery, where all the moves were planned in advance to reveal a true killer. I faced his calm examination of strategies with distaste. He went on.

  “According to my friend in the district attorney’s office, you’re shortly to have a date with a grand jury.”

  “Oh, fine.”

  “And as things stand now,” Nick sat down on the couch beside Phoebe, “you’re going to be indicted, and you’re going to go to trial. You can’t afford to mess aro
und in this thing.”

  “I can’t afford not to.” Now I was up and pacing. Camille was jouncing around in my pocket like a baby kangaroo. “Don’t you realize what’s going on? This thing is crazy. Muggers who return earrings. Locked rooms. Dogs tied up at the animal shelter. What was Julie doing in my apartment in the first place, can you tell me that? She’s never been to my apartment. I don’t think she knew where I lived.”

  “That’s our selling point,” Nick said, suddenly sounding all briskly professional. “How did that door get locked? If we can get the jury thinking about how that door got locked…”

  “Not how,” I insisted. “Why. Why in God’s name go to all that trouble? I mean, okay. Maybe somebody knew Barbara had a key and they didn’t want her finding the body, they wanted me to find the body. But why me? Why not kill Julie in Central Park? My apartment isn’t convenient to anything.”

  “That’s an idea,” Nick said. “Who knew this Barbara had a key to your apartment?”

  “Half the island of Manhattan,” Phoebe said. “She’s always telling Barbara stories.”

  “And how did they get into my apartment in the first place? The police said the lock wasn’t forced. They could be wrong, since they kicked the door in, but still.” I stopped for breath. “I know this is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but I’m beginning to think I’ve been set up.”

  I looked at the two of them, sitting side by side on the couch. They weren’t going to be any help. I might be able to talk Phoebe into something later, but for the moment I was on my own.

  I tightened the belt of my robe and started toward the bedroom.

  “I’ve got to get dressed,” I said. “I’ve got First Novel at ten-thirty.”

  “Just a minute,” Phoebe said. From the way the two of them were looking at each other, I knew there was something very wrong. I waited in the bedroom door.

  “I wasn’t going to tell you this,” Phoebe said. “But they found Myrra’s necklace, the one she was wearing? It arrived in the mail this morning, in a brown manila envelope, addressed to ‘Chairman, Jewels of Love Committee.’ I think Amelia opened it.”