Wicked, Loving Murder Page 7

  “Is this what you called up about?” I asked him. “Why didn’t you tell me this in the beginning?”

  “It wasn’t all I called up about,” Nick said. “I told you the other things I called up about.”

  “Right,” I said. “What did Alida Brookfield call her about?”

  “That’s what we don’t know. She wanted to make an appointment, but we don’t know what the appointment is about.”

  “An appointment for when?”

  “Quarter to five tomorrow.” There was a little silence on the line, more consultation in the background. “You can tell her we’ll be there, if you want.”

  “But Nick,” I said.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Phoebe brought lunch and your cat stowed away in the hamper and this is an office and there’s such a mess—”

  I looked at the dead receiver a few moments before putting it in the cradle. I could picture Camille popping out of the hamper with one of Phoebe’s chicken wings in her mouth, causing havoc in Nick’s office. I should have been amused. I was much too worried.

  I was not worried about Alida Brookfield wanting to see Ivy. I could think of sensible explanations for that.

  I couldn’t think of a sensible explanation for Janet not telling everyone in the office about Ivy Samuels Tree, Mysterious Black Lady.

  Mysterious Black Woman.

  FOURTEEN

  IT WOULD HAVE BEEN worse if I’d had any time. It might have been worse if I’d had any privacy. Since I had neither, I spent the afternoon in alternating states of confusion and frustration, occupied by problems that, as far as I knew, had nothing to do with the death of Michael Brookfield.

  Writing magazine was meeting a printer’s deadline. Even under the best circumstances, magazine staffs lead manic-depressive lives. Half the time they sit staring at the walls, doodling and daydreaming about the blockbuster bestseller they’re going to write about The Business. They spend the rest of their time meeting printer’s deadlines. The entire staff of Sophistication once stayed up for seventy-two hours—straight through, no naps or breaks for lunch—to meet a printer’s deadline. Printers have a union with very strict regulations about overtime. The people who own printing businesses have developed a near mania on the subject of not having to pay overtime. Mechanicals must arrive at the plant with plenty of time to spare. If they don’t, the magazine is charged a late penalty. The people who own magazines have developed a near mania on the subject of not having to pay late penalties. Add to this the inevitable: the freelance writers all got their articles in late; six people are out with flu in Columns and Departments alone; and the assistant in Production (the brand new Smith graduate with bulimia) can’t proofread. All magazines are assembled in the four days immediately preceding a printer’s deadline. On the day of the deadline, a messenger service is called. Having been so instructed, a man arrives at four-fifteen exactly to collect the package. He is then kept waiting an hour and twenty minutes while the Art Department dismantles and repastes pages twenty-four and twenty-five, which the Art Director thinks are Crooked.

  The staff of Writing had a few extras to contend with. In the first place, there was me, my legs shoved under a desk designed for a dwarf, my mind presumably focused on a section not due till the next printer’s deadline, leeching the energies of three second assistants in the Art Department so I could see What It Would Look Like. In the second place, there was Alida Brookfield. That scene in the hall was not an isolated incident in the life of Writing Enterprises—it wasn’t even an isolated incident in the day. Alida kept appearing in the back corridors, an artist’s conception away from breathing smoke and flame. She stopped in Columns and Departments and tore a piece on Targeting the Query Letter to shreds. She fired the Marketing Editor. She rewrote the Letter from the Editor three times, and insisted on having each version typeset, proofread, and pasted down before rejecting it. At three-thirty, she had another screaming match, complete with breaking glass. This time, it was Stephen she was after.

  I would have kept my door shut if I could. I couldn’t. There was no window. The fan did nothing but reposition stale air. The room was so small it made me feel like Alice after she’d eaten the little cake. I shut the door several times—once when I wanted to climb into the wardrobe and look around—but it never stayed shut more than a few minutes. I’d get halfway through a cigarette and begin to feel as if I were being strangled. I’d get up and open the door.

  All I found in the wardrobe was a small hole, positioned shoulder height for someone five ten. I had to stoop to look through it. Phoebe, who is four eleven, would have had to stand on a box to look through it. Anyone looking through it would see a dirty swatch of pasteboard wall.

  I tried to concentrate on the special section articles. I hadn’t thought anything could be worse than that plot-by-blueprint nonsense. I was wrong. Consider the following advice from “Doing It with Dialogue”:

  Romance is a genre that celebrates the emotions. Never forget that you’re dealing with the wild, the passionate, the extraordinary—and that your dialogue should reflect this heightened state of awareness. A hero who calls the heroine “dear” is as tame as hubby at home—which means, no romance hero at all! Pull out all the stops! Indulge your most extravagant fantasies! Have you always wanted a tall, dark, handsome stranger to call you “a little spitfire”? It may never happen to you—but it can happen to your heroine!

  A few paragraphs later, the author of this piece—one Ilona Darby—advises her readers to “use the exclamation point! Use it! Use it!”

  The one piece of decent thinking occurred halfway through “Love and Money: Love Scenes that Sizzle, Scorch, and Score!” The writer suggested sitting down at the typewriter when the mood is on you and writing sex scenes to store for future use. This sounds appalling, but it actually makes sense. Writing a good category romance sex scene takes a certain kind of psychological preparedness. If you happen to wake up one morning in that admittedly bizarre state, I say use it.

  If you ever find yourself in the offices of Writing Enterprises, I say find an excuse to go home. I didn’t really need an excuse—Alida Brookfield wasn’t paying me and couldn’t very well keep me at my desk—but I did need a sop to my conscience. I didn’t trust the woman. I didn’t trust Felicity Aldershot, either. I was sure that as soon as I disappeared into the elevator, they’d be plotting how to sneak this stuff past me, into the section, and next to Phoebe’s interview. Since I was to pass the mechanicals, they couldn’t get everything by me forever, but I didn’t want things to go that far. I didn’t want to give them a legitimate excuse called “too close to deadline to change anything.”

  At five to six, things finally started to calm down. Felicity Aldershot stopped in to say good night. She had what should have been a fashionable cashmere coat buttoned and belted until it made her look like breakfast porridge. She was wearing three-hundred-dollar shoes in a style better suited to an arthritic grandmother. She couldn’t have been thirty-five. She was doing her best to look eighty.

  She smiled for the sake of politeness and said, “Alida thinks we ought to have a meeting. All of us and all of you.”

  “All of who?”

  “All the romance writers,” Felicity said. “And all the staff here.”

  I thought of Ivy, who couldn’t be seen in public, and of Hazel Ganz, who lived in Parma, Ohio, and who would probably be snowed in at the Cleveland airport trying to get to New York. Then I thought of Amelia Samson and nearly burst out laughing. Alida Brookfield thought she knew how to throw a temper tantrum. Next to Amelia Samson, Alida Brookfield was a feeble-voiced domestic cat.

  I told Felicity we could only get four out of six at a meeting. Felicity said she would discuss it with Alida. Then Felicity disappeared.

  As soon as she was out of the office, I was on my feet. I got my pea coat from the single hanger in the wardrobe, shrugged into it, and started binding myself with scarves. There had been cautious predictions of more snow coming over
the radio all day, and in New York the February wind is always particularly bad. I had a scarf that went around my neck and down my chest under my coat. I had another scarf that went around my neck over my coat. I had another scarf that went over my shoulders and could be raised to cover my ears in periods of dire necessity. All these scarves were different colors. The nice, sober navy blue went inside the coat.

  I was pulling on gloves when I heard the knock on the door. When I looked up at Marty Lahler, I thought he’d come in to deliver another message from Alida. A minute later I thought he’d come to confess to the murder. He was sweating so much his palms made water stains every time he rubbed them against his pants. His bald spot was oozing sweat into his ring of thin sandy hair. Every other inch of visible skin was dry. He was a paradigm of nervousness.

  He waited until both my gloves were on before he approached my desk. Then he shoved his hands in his pockets, craned his neck until he could look me in the eye, and said, “You never had any lunch! I could take you to dinner!”

  FIFTEEN

  I SHOULD HAVE SAID no. I am thirty-one years old. I know that look when I see it. I know what a disaster it can be to encourage that look when there is no hope. I even know what a disaster it can be to encourage that look when there is hope. I could not turn Marty Lahler down. He must have spent hours getting up the courage to walk into my office and ask me that question. Every minute of those hours showed in his face. I had the distinct feeling I was the first woman he’d asked out in years.

  “I could take you to the Russian Tea Room,” he said. He frowned. “If it isn’t too far uptown,” he amended.

  He seemed to be on the verge of being defeated by the simplicities of Manhattan geography. I was panicking for another reason entirely.

  “I’m not dressed for it,” I told him. I meant it was too expensive. Alida Brookfield did not pay for Marty Lahler’s suits. They came off the rack at Alexander’s.

  Marty Lahler had always wanted to take a woman to dinner at the Russian Tea Room. He fell back on the great Manhattan article of faith.

  “Nobody cares what you wear in this city anymore,” he said.

  I almost sighed out loud. Marty Lahler wasn’t familiar with the Russian Tea Room except as a fantasy. I knew it inside out. Phoebe is addicted to touristy restaurants. The Russian Tea Room is her second favorite after Mamma Leone’s.

  Dinner for two at the Russian Tea Room can cost sixty dollars. With wine, it can cost a hundred. We’d be seated faster, served better, and presented with more palatable food at Cabana Carioca or Wylie’s. I could have told Marty that, but I would have been wasting my time. None of it mattered to him.

  I looked into his thin, pointed, anxious face and promised myself I would buy a ticket on the first plane to Brazil the next time Phoebe suggested a project. Then I grabbed my tote bag and followed him out the door.

  We had nothing to talk about. In the elevator, in the cab, in the line at the restaurant, we were practically silent. I tried everything I could think of. Marty Lahler didn’t go to concerts, didn’t go to movies, didn’t even watch television. He hadn’t read a book since leaving Queens College. He thought painting was “suspicious.” He had never heard of the New York City Ballet. By the time we were seated—at an obscure table in a back corner on the second floor—I was beginning to wonder if he actually lived and breathed.

  I fell back on my mother’s favorite Prescription for Popularity. (My mother talks like this. She has had a great deal of experience chairing committees and browbeating the Weston, Connecticut, Town Council.)

  I asked Marty Lahler about the work he did for Writing Enterprises.

  The question came as such a shock to him, it drew his attention away from the red tinsel boas on the lamps.

  “What I do at Writing Enterprises?” he said. “I do the books.”

  I considered breaking my water glass on the side of the table and eating the pieces.

  “I know you do the books,” I said. I forced a note of admiration into my voice. “It must be very interesting. Working with money, you know, and watching a business grow from a small concern to a large one. That sort of thing.”

  Marty Lahler frowned. “Sometimes it’s hard,” he said. “Like now, with all this foreign publishing stuff—”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. I said it because he paused. I didn’t want any more pauses in the conversation.

  “Do you know about paperback books?” he asked me. “You print a lot of them, and then you’re supposed to sell two thirds of what you print, and if you sell more you didn’t print enough. At least, that’s what she told me.”

  “Alida Brookfield?”

  Marty shook his head. “Miss Aldershot,” he said. He gave me a funny look that was oddly comforting. It was the first sign of intelligence he’d displayed. “Miss Brookfield doesn’t concern herself with things like that,” he said. “She—she sets policy.”

  “You mean she doesn’t know what the hell is going on?”

  Marty laughed. I welcomed the break in the tension. “I think she’s going through that thing women go through when they’re older,” he said. “I used to think that happened all at once, but my sister says it doesn’t. She says it takes years.” I didn’t bother to tell him that, in a woman of Alida’s age, those years would be safely over. It made him feel better to think there was a medical—rather than psychological—explanation for Alida’s craziness.

  “Anyway,” he said. “Miss Brookfield doesn’t do the day-to-day stuff anymore. She sets policy and the rest of us carry it out. Right now the policy I’m supposed to be carrying out is collaring all the returns from overseas and making sure we sold what we were supposed to and no more and no less.” He blinked. “Except I can’t,” he said.

  “You can’t?”

  “The police came in and took it all away. The papers and things. They let me make photocopies of what I wanted so I could work on them, but I didn’t get everything, so I’m stuck. And we’ve got a problem because we have to tell the plant how many to print in what languages—we have to tell them about everything, the magazines, the Newsletters, the new books—it’s all so complicated—and we’re always underestimating some countries and not having enough.” He did his best to look judicious. “Of course, all we had of the books was six months’ returns. But they should have been indicative.”

  I wondered who’d taught him the word “indicative,” I wasn’t cruel enough to ask. I decided Alida was cheating the IRS. It was the only explanation I could think of for her having hired an accountant too fundamentally unintelligent and essentially inexperienced not to know what papers he needed to make a report.

  “Did you underestimate everything?” I asked him. “Or did you overestimate some places?”

  “We didn’t overestimate anything,” he said. He was very proud of it. “There were always more people who wanted our product than we’d expected.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s nice.”

  We stared at each other. The conversation lay flapping and dying on the table between us.

  Marty Lahler couldn’t stand it any more than I could. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the floor. He gripped his wine glass so hard I thought it would break. Then he exploded.

  “She doesn’t pay them anything,” he said. “That’s what the problem is. She doesn’t pay any of us anything but they’re her nephews, they’re supposed to be executives, and she has them living in walk-ups and eating out of delis—” He stopped for breath. When he started again, he was considerably calmer. “Miss Aldershot has an employment contract,” he said. “She’s got everything written in. Bonuses and salary and everything.” He leaned across the table, telling me a secret. “She makes forty thousand dollars a year.” He was almost reverent—almost, because there was a thin gleam of envy in his eyes and an uncomfortably malicious undertone in his voice. “Last year, with the bonuses, she made over three times that.”

  “She made two hundred percent of her salary for bonuses last y
ear?” That didn’t make any sense. There wasn’t a company in the world that did business like that.

  Marty Lahler wasn’t interested in bonuses. “The rest of them make their fifteen thousand and the clothes and five hundred a month for an apartment. She won’t give them any more. That’s why he was stealing—Mr. Michael Brookfield, I mean. He was fixing the books in Newsletters and only letting us have some of it. You can’t rent a decent apartment in Manhattan on five hundred a month.”

  I had no trouble remembering what I had rented in Manhattan at five hundred a month. Marty had a point there.

  “They could live in Brooklyn,” I suggested. “Or Queens.”

  “I live in Queens,” Marty said. “Nobody would live in Queens if they didn’t have to.” He sat back in his chair and stared over my head, as if he were watching a movie projected on the wall behind me for his private amusement. “You know,” he said, “most places, accountants make a lot of money. They make a lot more money than fifteen thousand a year.”

  That might have started us on a real conversation. It might, at least, have been the beginning of Marty Lahler talking about himself. Very few people are boring when they let you know what they really feel, what they really want—instead of what they want you to think they feel and want. Unfortunately, at that moment the waitress came up to take our order. Marty retreated into the absorbing occupation of ordering everything on the menu.

  He hardly said another word to me until he leaned from the cab window to call good night, just before I disappeared into the Byzantine labyrinth the Braedenvoorst calls a courtyard.

  SIXTEEN

  I REAPPEARED EIGHT HOURS later, breathing fire. I do not like to be woken in the morning. I especially do not like to be woken by the phone ringing in the kitchen—ringing untiringly, for minutes, as if the caller knew I was asleep and was determined to wake me up. In these circumstances, I usually arrive at the phone to find my agent at the other end, which means I have to stifle my urge to blow a police whistle into the receiver. My agent wouldn’t wake me for the world. She lets the phone ring forty times because, while she’s calling me, she’s also checking the particulars of a contract for that sitcom writer she handles on the Coast.