Sweet, Savage Death Read online

  “What about you?” Amelia looked at me. “Don’t you think Lydia Wentward is a pornographer?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never read any of her books. I’ve read Phoebe’s books, and they don’t necessarily close at the bedroom door.”

  “Nonsense,” Amelia said. “There’s no comparison. Phoebe handles her love scenes with discretion and taste.”

  Phoebe beamed. Nick and I shot her a disbelieving look. Phoebe’s love scenes were famous for being not only “poetic,” but more complicated than the most esoteric positions in More Joy of Sex.

  “The problem with Lydia,” Amelia was going on, “is that she doesn’t take her work seriously. She cares about nothing but money. She doesn’t realize what a responsibility we have to the women of this country.” She picked her teacup up in two ringed fingers, her pinkie, adorned with a small garnet and a very large amethyst, held defiantly in the air. “Bodice rippers,” she said venomously. “Rape fantasies.”

  “Maybe that’s why Julie wouldn’t handle some of her work,” Phoebe said, trying to look helpful and innocent. “There was a novel a few years ago—”

  “Savage Breath of Love,” Amelia said. “It finally came out under Acme. That was a disaster. No tension in that one at all. That’s what it all depends on, tension.” She looked around at the wrens. “Sexual tension.”

  The wrens tittered.

  “But that wasn’t why Julie wouldn’t handle the book,” Amelia said. “Julie was no fool. She knew Lydia for what she was. She wouldn’t have let this travesty go on.”

  The wrens nodded in unison.

  “It’s too bad it wasn’t this Lydia who died,” Nick whispered in my ear. He was having trouble looking comfortable in a straight-backed, armless, fake Louis XVI chair. “We’d know right where to find the murderer.”

  “This is nothing,” I whispered back. “She hasn’t even started.”

  But Amelia had not only started, she had finished. She waved her teacup in the air, dismissing Lydia.

  “Mary Allard,” she said to me, changing the subject. “I suppose you’ve heard she wants to sit on the Line Committee?”

  “She’s perfectly eligible,” I said. “Her line isn’t up for an award. No other line from her company is up for an award. And if that’s what Julie wanted—”

  “I don’t believe Julie wanted it,” Amelia said. “That letter has to be forged.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I’m not so sure I want to be on the Line Committee. I haven’t done the reading. I write for Fires of Love and two other lines at Farret. If Fires of Love won the award and I was on the committee, I’d expect people to protest.”

  “But Fires of Love won’t win the award,” Amelia said. “It’s not possible.”

  “Not possible?” Phoebe looked a little pale, even under all that makeup.

  “Of course not,” Amelia said. “Fires of Love is a terrible line. Everybody knows that.”

  “I think ‘everybody’ is a bit much,” I said gently. “I hear they’re going to gross a hundred million this year. A lot of people think Fires of Love is a wonderful line.”

  “Oh,” Amelia said. “The money.” She fussed with her breastplate. “Of course, you have to listen to the money,” she went on, “because that’s what tells you what your readers want. I suppose it’s not all that surprising that Fires was an initial success. But it can’t last, dear Patience. The whole thing’s ridiculous.”

  “What’s ridiculous?” I asked. “I’m on my third Fires of Love book. It’s got everything.”

  “Of course it does,” Amelia said. “But it doesn’t have anything new. There isn’t one thing to distinguish that line from a dozen others, and there are dozens of others. Even that Allard woman’s Passion Line has something—a quality to it, a distinctive style. Fires of Love is just old-fashioned formula romance of the worst kind.”

  Phoebe laughed. “It certainly has a formula,” she said. “A nine-page tip sheet.”

  “Every line has a tip sheet,” I argued. “For God’s sake, Phoebe. If they didn’t have tip sheets, I couldn’t write them.”

  “I suppose you don’t have enough romance in your life,” Amelia sighed. “That’s true of so many young people these days. No romance. No passion. I don’t know what you live for.” She gave Nick a leer that made him jump in his chair. Then she got heavily to her feet. “I’ve got to go down the hall for a minute,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  She lumbered carefully away, swaying from side to side like a crippled ship. Phoebe and Nick and I sat still in our chairs, listening, waiting. This seemed like the perfect chance, but we had to be sure. We didn’t want to be waylaid by the wrens, or overheard. Then we heard the sound of running water and the barely perceptible tinkle of glass.

  “She’s got a utility room,” Phoebe said.

  “Like a dressing room,” I said. “With a sink.”

  “Plus a refrigerator,” Nick said. “One of those.”

  “Maybe I ought to see if she needs help,” I said, getting up. “Maybe she needs help carrying things.”

  “Oh no,” one of the wrens said, while her sisters looked horrified. “Oh, no, Miss McKenna, please. It really isn’t necessary. Guests don’t need to do a thing around Miss Samson, not a thing. Maybe I’ll just go check on her—”

  “No, no,” I said, backing quickly toward the nearest door. “It’s not any trouble, really. I’ll just go along here,” I opened a set of double doors in Chinese lacquer red and slipped through to the other side, “and I won’t be a minute.”

  The double doors gave onto a small, darkened sitting room, which gave onto a narrow hall, at the end of which was a dim, shadowy light. I could hear the sound of water running and the heavy thud of something hard hitting against tile. I tiptoed into the hallway and looked down the passage to Amelia, standing in the open door of the utility room, pouring something into a small, clear plastic cup.

  “Amelia?” I called softly, edging down the hall.

  She whirled around and squinted at me. “What is it?” she demanded. “Can’t I even attend to myself in peace?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you like this,” I said, squeezing past her into the white-tiled, square little room. The overhead light was bright white and harsh, making Amelia’s skin, even under the thick coat of foundation and cherry-red rouge, look dead. I leaned against a narrow strip of wall beside the half-sized refrigerator. “I didn’t want to talk in front of the—the ladies.” I had been about to call them “wrens.”

  Amelia took a sip from her plastic glass and gave me the fisheye. She didn’t say anything. I didn’t know where to start. What if she had never seen the envelope? What if she pretended she hadn’t? I couldn’t begin to imagine myself describing those pictures to her. No Amelia Samson novel had ever featured an unvirginal heroine—or allowed two people to make their way to bed without benefit of a wedding reception for at least a thousand guests. In the world of Love’s Finest Flower, there was no crime, or death, or perversion. There was certainly no blackmail.

  I cleared my throat and said, “It’s about an envelope. Julie—”

  I felt my back hit the wall before I even knew I had moved. My head knocked against the crack between the wall and the refrigerator. My arms shot out at both sides and hit the sharp edges between the tiles.

  “Where is it?” Amelia hissed, shaking me hard. “Who gave it to you? What have you done with it?”

  “Amelia, put me down.”

  Instead, she lifted me again and gave me another shake.

  “I mean to have it back,” she said. “You won’t get anything out of me. I won’t pay you.”

  “Amelia,” I choked out, “for God’s sake, put me down. I don’t want you to pay me anything. I just have this thing and I don’t know what to do with it.”

  She gave me the fisheye again, but she let me go. She turned around and brought out the plastic glass and the gin bottle and poured the first full of the second. It was then I noti
ced the cigarette lying lit in the ashtray behind her, its smoke nearly invisible in the glare of the overhead light.

  She made a little smile. “So you didn’t know I drank,” she said. “And you didn’t know I smoked cigarettes. And there were a few other things you didn’t know I did.”

  “Amelia, I didn’t go looking for the damn thing,” I said. “Someone just gave it to me.”

  “Who?”

  “A fan,” I said, blushing slightly. “Some fan gave Julie a manuscript, and Julie meant to give the fan one of those information packets, and instead she gave the fan the envelope. Anyway, the fan—”

  “Don’t lie to me,” Amelia said. “Julie Simms never had that envelope. Julie Simms never saw it. Julie Simms never even knew it existed. The only people who knew were Myrra and myself.”

  “What about the person who gave it to you?”

  “Never mind who gave it to me,” Amelia said. “I want to know where you got it.”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, Amelia, but that’s really what happened. Two women came up to me in the lobby—”

  “You’re sorry.” She sat down on a low stool, her monstrous legs pushing against the fabric of her dress, her cigarette between thumb and forefinger, the smoke drifting into my eyes. “Do you know how much I’m worth?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I don’t.”

  “Neither do I. But it’s a lot of money, Miss Patience Campbell McKenna, Miss White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Foxcroft School to Greyson College Junior Assemblies bitch.”

  “It was Emma Willard,” I said automatically.

  “Do you realize I never have to write another word again, as long as I live? I’ve got enough money to buy the state of Connecticut and recharter it as my own private monarchy, if I want to. You all think you’re so bloody wonderful. You and Phoebe Jewess Weiss. You and Julie Beauty Queen Simms. You and that little priss-faced Williams woman. Do you know where we came from, Myrra and me?”

  “Amelia—”

  “Let me tell you,” she said, draining her glass again and pouring yet another. “Let me tell you, Miss Women’s Liberation Was All My Idea. Where I came from it was the boys who went to college. I quit school at fourteen and went to work in the steam room of a laundry, because we needed the money to send my brother to the goddamn university. The University of Nebraska. A cow college. Cheap, right? Except it was the middle of the Depression and my father’s store went bankrupt and then the job he got laid him off, but we were going to eat beans for ten years to be sure my brother went to college. My family was like that. Most families were, then. It didn’t matter if the girls got an education, because the girls were getting married.

  “Well, I got married. I was sixteen and I’d had the sweat coming down my back for two years and I’d had it. You know what that’s like? You’re always hot and you’re always wet and the water gets in your clothes and the dye runs until you’re the color of whatever you’ve been wearing, blue and green and yellow from those cheap dyes sinking into your skin. So I got married.

  “I had a wonderful wedding in a church, because that’s something else families paid for, big weddings for the daughters. I stood up there in a white veil and said ‘I do’ to the handsomest man I ever met and the most charming, and it was two years and two babies later I realized it wasn’t the Depression, the bastard couldn’t get a job, didn’t want a job, and wouldn’t hold it if it was forced on him. So I gave the two babies to my mother and I went back to the goddamn laundry, and then two things happened.”

  The squint she gave me was like the evil eye. “Two things happened,” she repeated. “First, my brother ran away to the war and got himself killed in a training camp exercise, end of the Bright Young Man who was going to Lift Us All From Poverty. Then I came home one night with my arms all mottled green and my money in my stocking and I decided I wasn’t going to do it, I wasn’t going to give it to that little whiskey hauler with his fine eyes and the brains of a pickled herring. I wasn’t going to give it to him to go down to some bar and drink it all away, not that time. So I didn’t. So he gave me a black eye.”

  She threw back her head and laughed, full and deep and bittersweet.

  “Do you know what my mother said to me?” she asked. “Said it was my duty. Said God gave women their men to preserve and protect and bring to salvation, forever and ever, till death do ye part. Good old midwestern snake-oil-salesman fundamentalist, that was my mother. But that wasn’t me.”

  She got off the stool and steadied herself against the sink.

  “I’m going back to my tea,” she said. “And to the best suite in this hotel and the best china and my own goddamn life. And if you think I’m going to pay you a red cent for what’s in that envelope, you’re out of your bloody mind. Put those pictures up on a bulletin in the lobby. I don’t give a flying shit.”

  CHAPTER 16

  I WAS OUT OF THERE so fast, even Phoebe didn’t see me go. I needed air. I hit the street just as it started to snow and headed west against the holiday crowds. It was late afternoon, the beginning of dusk, and street-lamps glowed faintly in halos of mist. This was the season I liked best in Manhattan: the crush along the major avenues, the snow-glitter and winking lights in the windows of the stores, the band of angels in Rockefeller Center. I was passing a choir in full uniform singing Adeste Fidelis on the steps of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral when I realized I might not get home to my niece and nephews in Connecticut this year. I might not wake up too early Christmas morning to paw through a Christmas stocking limp with age and drooling Hershey’s kisses through its heel. I might very well be in jail.

  Amelia and Myrra, I thought, wondering if a thirty-year-old woman who still looked forward to her mother’s Christmas stocking was entirely sane. I couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything. Images floated in and out: Julie and Myrra, Camille, Nick Carras, a friend of mine at college who had committed suicide by hanging herself from the overhead heating pipe in her room. I turned onto Sixth Avenue thinking it all came together somehow, and I was well into Times Square before I realized I wasn’t making sense.

  It couldn’t have been after five o’clock, but it was dark. Times Square in the early darkness is full of noise and people, exciting the way a roller coaster is exciting, dangerous yet safe. I walked close against the walls of buildings, looking at posters for Broadway shows and X-rated movies, trying to see past the blinking neon lights and oil-grimed windows to the inner room of a storefront theater called only “Live! Girls! Live!” and promising “Ladies Night Thursday—Ladies Admitted

  Free.” Covering the narrow doorway was a larger-than-life-size, fully lit, plastic Santa Claus, a string of blue and yellow lights spelling out “Noel” beneath him.

  On impulse, I left the main thoroughfare and went down a side street lined with stores only a few feet wide, each selling buttons, or badges, or erotic underwear for men—it didn’t matter, as long as the item was highly specific and physically small, so that dozens and dozens of examples could be displayed against black velveteen in the window. On this street, the men who sat in the doorways looked tired and old and drunk, and the women paced back and forth in half a dozen sweaters, talking to themselves. I walked to the far end of the block and stopped in the coffee shop to order a hot chocolate to go, milk added. From the window, I could see the darkness leading to the river and feel the first cold of real menace, the promise of the kind of death Myrra had had. Something was moving out there, I could see it, although I couldn’t distinguish it from the pattern of shadows made by dimming streetlamps and the fitful echo of Broadway’s neon glare.

  I took my hot chocolate, determined to get back to the Square and take the first cab I could find. Someone had told me once that there were roving packs of dogs near the river, worse than wolves, human-hating. I stepped out into the dark and told myself the river was a long way away, blocks and blocks, and I wasn’t obliged to go down that street looking for something I didn’t want to find. I couldn’t
shake the feeling I’d already found it. The drunks in the doorway had turned to ooze and regenerated into the octopus nightmares of my childhood, sliding and growing, soundless, under my feet.

  I crossed the street and made myself stop, almost exactly in the middle of the block, at the window of a store selling “love aids.” I drank hot chocolate and stared at the barb-tipped leather bullwhips, nail-studded leather face masks, a pair of leather panties with a dildo strapped to the front, its sides bristling with fine metal wires. The machinery of sadomasochism—a joke in college dormitories everywhere on those nights everyone stays up too late, dressed in nightgowns and robes, drinking gin and grenadine from coffee mugs.

  The sound of feet in high-heeled leather shoes, walking too slowly, staying too far behind.

  I turned toward the light spilling out from the Square and started walking, weaving in and out of the old women with their sweaters and their songs. Half a block, a short block, a street and not an avenue, and whatever was coming up behind me was young and female, a hooker, nothing to worry about, no one I knew.

  I turned the corner on Ninth Avenue and stopped, breathless, in the light from a record store. It was fully dark and bitterly cold, making my lips and knuckles feel dry and chapped. I read every word on the cover of an album by Kim Carnes, and then I heard them again.

  The sound of a woman in high-heeled leather shoes, walking slowly, walking raggedly, catching up.

  I turned downtown, toward the light, and tried to pick up speed. Every few feet another man in another cap pushed another piece of paper into my hands. It was impossible to refuse them, and I found myself filling my pockets with cardboard cards in cheap pastels and slick, shiny brochures full of women exercising with weights. Pregnancy tests and health spas, free film and menswear sales, it didn’t matter. There was no time to stop and no time to notice, until I was suddenly below Forty-second Street, on a part of Ninth Avenue as bleak and deserted on a Saturday as a warehouse district, but filled instead with iron-shuttered stores and the sound of those shoes.