Death's Savage Passion (3 page)

“I just like to imagine what it would be like to lead an interesting life,” Sarah said, her voice steady and surprisingly strong. “I live in this small town. People who live in New York just can’t realize. I go to work in an office every day and sometimes I go to a movie with women friends, and once a year I go on a package tour for vacation, if I can afford it. Mostly, I can’t afford it. People in New York just don’t realize how much people in places like Holbrook want to escape from that.”

Caroline Dooley came as close as I’d ever heard her to laughing out loud. “Oh yes we do,” she said. “That’s why Miss Samson over there has enough money to buy New Jersey.”

“Nobody in their right mind,” Amelia said, “wants to buy New Jersey.”

“If I had enough money to buy New Jersey, I’d wait out the market until people were buying what I want to write,” Verna said. She waved her cigarette holder in the air. “Two years ago I got a divorce—from a psychiatrist, yet—and I turned down the alimony, I turned down the property settlement, I walked away with my nose in the air. I’m a romance writer, right?
Now
look at me.”

“You’re hardly starving,” Dana said.

Sarah English was frowning in concentration. “Men are all right,” she said, “but they just aren’t enough. I mean, there are men in Holbrook. And what would be the use of marrying the world’s handsomest and richest man if you were just going to live like every other housewife in Holbrook?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Verna said. “The point about housewives in Holbrook is they don’t have any money.”

“The point about housewives in Holbrook,” Marilou Saunders said, “is they don’t have any
sex.”

“The point about housewives in Holbrook is that they’re housewives,” Sarah said. Her voice positively rang.
This
she was sure of. “I used to read about Miss McKenna in the papers,” she gave me an adoring look. I wondered how long it was going to take to talk her out of that “Miss.” “I used to think what an exciting life she had, mixed up in murders, and helping the police, and writing books, and living in New York, and having a lover—”

I nearly choked on my Perrier. Sarah had found out Nick was my lover from the newspapers? My mother, charity queen of Fairfield County, was going to
kill
me.

“I wanted to have a life just like that,” Sarah was saying, “as different from Holbrook as possible and nothing like a housewife. I mean, you have to admit, housewives don’t get to do anything. Even if they like being housewives, it has to get boring.”

“I was a housewife once,” Amelia said. “I wouldn’t say it was boring.”

“You couldn’t say it was pleasant, either,” I reminded her.

“You should see the book I’m working on now,” Sarah said. “My heroine’s pulling off a diamond heist and she’s got a good reason for it and it’s exciting. It’s something different. Of course, there’s sex in it, they make you put sex in it, but I think most people are like me and skip those parts. I mean, nobody believes that stuff.”

“I do,” Phoebe said. She looked wistful. She had built her reputation on the hottest sex scenes in the business (“good parts” as they’re known among the fans). She was addicted to the self-help section of the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble.

Amelia had built her reputation on syrupy sixty-thousand-word tracts (one a
week
for the past thirty years), all of which ended with the closing of the wedding-night bedroom door. She thought Sarah was right on the mark.

“Miss English has a point,” she said. “Men have never been a tenth as good as we hoped or a hundredth as good as they think they are.”

Verna Train looked depressed.

I
MADE IT HOME
earlier than the rest of them.
They
wanted to do a round of bars—a singles place on the West Side outfitted entirely in pink, a chrome and stained-glass hockey pub (East Side) where all the tables were miniature aquariums filled with yellow-striped tropical fish, a blues place in the Forties where the waiters wore bow-tie earrings and Little Orphan Annie decoder rings. Phoebe, who is president of the American Writers of Romance, was deep in conversation with Dana about returns accounting and warranty clauses. Caroline was showing her molded crystal paperweight around for the sixth time. Verna was morose. Sarah wanted to see more of New York. Amelia had a serious gin gleam in her eye. When Amelia gets a serious gin gleam, she can lay waste to Gordon’s principal warehouse.
I
had had three double Drambuies and decided I was either going to get home to sanity or melt. I dropped Sarah and Phoebe at the Forties blues place and went uptown.

When I opened the door to my apartment, the cat was waiting in the foyer and every light in every one of the twelve rooms was blazing. I live in the Braedenvoorst, one of those New York apartment buildings more famous than most of the people living in it, in an apartment willed to me by a romance writer named Myrra Agenworth. Myrra also willed me “everything in the apartment at the time of [her] death” and her story, which was the start of the book I now had on the bestseller list (barely on, but on). I did better with the story than I did with the apartment. After I sold all the furniture and the paintings at auction at Sotheby’s (with the exception of Myrra’s portrait, which I kept over the fireplace in the living room), I banked the money to pay the maintenance. Then I neglected to buy new furniture. I had a platform bed, a night table, a worktable, a kitchen table, and five chairs. That was it. In twelve rooms.

I put the cat on the kitchen table and went to the refrigerator to see if there were socks in it. Nick always keeps his clean socks in the refrigerator. He usually keeps them in
my
refrigerator because I have a built-in washer-dryer, which is what he uses to do laundry. He rolls his socks into balls, so they look like blackened melons against the white enamel. Then he turns on all the lights and waits in the one bedroom with a bed in it.

The socks were in the otherwise empty vegetable bin. There were five balled pairs of them, arranged in a pyramid. I kicked the drawer shut, got a can of decaffeinated Diet Coke and the container of Devon cream, and started searching cabinets for a saucer. Nick, my cleaning lady, and I all put away dishes in my apartment. We each have strongly held views on where they belong.

I found two saucers in what I thought of as my silverware drawer, filled one with Devon cream and the other with dry cat food, and put them both on the floor. Camille licked at the Devon cream and sat in the cat food.

My mail and my appointment calendar (a bound composition book with the date written at the top of each page in Bic medium point) were on the kitchen table. Tomorrow I had to go to Austin, Stoddard & Trapp (who had paperback rights to my Agenworth book) to discuss possible promotion with an escapee from Hunter College named Evelyn Nesbitt Kleig. I had to meet Dana and “get things straightened out,” by which she meant come to my senses and accept the miniseries offer. I also had a session at a place called Images, but I was trying to forget it.

The mail was considerably less exciting: an envelope from the Mystery Writers of America that was undoubtedly their monthly publication,
The Third Degree;
three bills (Saks, Bonwit’s, and, God help me, Bloomingdale’s), none of which I had any intention of looking at for at least a week; and a letter from Dana’s office with “J. Dunby, Foreign Rights” written under the letterhead. I opened that one. Four hundred thirty dollars for the Yugoslavian rights to
Love’s Dangerous Journey,
the last romance novel I wrote for the now defunct Fires of Love line at Farret Paperback Originals.

I wandered across my empty living room and through the back hall, turning off lights.

“Listen,” I said. “I want you to sue someone for me.”

No answer. I went into the bedroom and found Nick sitting cross-legged in the middle of my bed, stacks of word-processor printed pages (right-hand margin justification) arranged artfully on my grandmother’s wedding quilt. He had a Walkman around his neck and earphones in his ears. I took the earphones away from him, listened for thirty seconds to the Beach Boys doing
Be True to Your School,
and tossed them aside.

“I want you to sue someone for me,” I said again.

“Who is it this time?” He cleared a space for me on the bed. I sat down in it.

“The Mystery Writers of America,” I said. “For sex discrimination.”

“This is number nine,” he said. “In the last six months.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means in the last six months you have asked me to sue nine separate organizations for sex discrimination, including the American Kennel Club. If I remember rightly, you objected to pick-of-the-litter rules. For God’s sake, McKenna, you don’t even own a dog.”

“Not the point,” I said.

“Exactly the point,” he said. “Also, you told me the MWA had a whole slew of female directors, or officers, or whatever they are.”

“That’s
not the
point
either,” I said.

“What is the point? How do you sue an organization for sex discrimination when half their officers are female?”

“Romantic suspense,” I said. “They hate romantic suspense.”

“I hate romantic suspense,” Nick said. “But Patience. Remember: recourse to law. Sex discrimination is bad, I don’t approve of it, but there is a difference between what is and what is not a situation to which the proper response is recourse to law. I sued the telephone company for you, didn’t I?”

“Not for sex discrimination.”

“Never mind what we called it when we went to court. It was sex discrimination. You wanted the policy changed, I got the policy changed. Right?”

“Right,” I said. I fished a cigarette out of my bag.

“Quit,” he said.

“What?” The lighter was defunct. I started hunting for matches. Camille, brown and gray kernels of dry cat food clinging to her fur, jumped onto the bed and started playing with the Walkman earphones. It took her exactly one third of a second to tie her paws into immobility.

Nick started to untangle her. “Quit,” he said again. “If you don’t like it, for whatever reason that may be, quit.”

“Well, no,” I said. “Where would I hear the gossip?”

“This is about gossip?” Nick said.

“Well,” I said.

“Don’t quit,” Nick said. “Don’t sue either. Untie the cat.”

I said, “Oh.” There wasn’t anything else to say. I found a matchbook (Mamma Leone’s; Phoebe must have got it for me) and lit up. Nick had all six feet eight inches of himself sprawled across his papers and his hands in Camille’s fur. He is a remarkably good-looking man, powerfully built in the shoulders, slender and elegant in the hips. Even Amelia, who ranks men a rung below Godless Communists in the natural order of things, can’t resist Nick.

I turned my back to him and lay my head on his chest. “Sorry I’m so contentious,” I said. “I’ve just had five hours of romantic suspense.”

“So have I.” He gestured to the papers on the bed, then plunged his hands in and came up with a paperback cover proof for a novel called
Dangerous Liaison.
The cover painting showed a man and a woman on a windowsill ledge over a four-story drop. He had his arms around her waist and was bending her backward. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch high-heeled sandals.

“Marvelous,” I said.

“Romantic suspense and the lack of romantic suspense,” he said. “I’m either putting people into it or filing bankruptcy for people who didn’t get out of category romance fast enough. It’s all I do anymore.”

“Phoebe’s bringing you clients,” I said.

“Phoebe’s bringing me clients,” he agreed. “Believe me, I’m grateful. I’ve got my own office. I’m making enough to get married on, even to you. I will tell you, however, that I’m getting sicker than you’ll ever know of romantic suspense.”

I ignored the crack about marriage. Nick was always making cracks about marriage.

“I just don’t understand it,” I said. “Two years ago, three romance lines had hundred-million-dollar years. How could things change so fast?”

“Market saturation and editorial incompetence.”

“Thanks.”

I felt him shrug. “Right at this moment, every category romance line is in trouble. At least two of them are probably going to crash. If you want my opinion, the romantic suspense lines aren’t going to save the situation for long. They’re making the same mistakes and they’re going to go on making them. Six books a month, twelve books a month, fourteen books a month. Tip sheets, which means all the books start sounding the same after the first year. General conviction that the readers are fools and illiterates and can’t tell good from bad. You name it.”

“Susan Dangerfield,” I said, picking up another cover proof. This one had a man and a woman in a dark alley. He had one arm under her breasts and the other pointing into the distance, a .357 Magnum dangling from his fingers. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch high-heeled sandals.

“One of my packagers is thinking of doing a line,” Nick said. “This is research.”

“What happens when romantic suspense doesn’t work?”

“More bankruptcies. A few real disasters. From what I hear, your agent is going to go down like a penny dropping from the observation deck of the World Trade Center.”

“Dana?”

“It’s just a rumor,” Nick said. “They say she’s bare-assed to the wind with a storm coming up behind her, and I believe it. Have you seen that line she’s doing for Gallard Rowson?” He hunted through his papers. “Passionate Intrigues. That’s what it’s called. Nothing but brand-name authors. Some minor television celebrities. They have to be costing her ten thousand a shot in up-front. She’s going to have to sell a lot of books to justify the expense.”

I thought of Verna’s romantic suspense, and something clicked.

“That must have been what Verna was talking about at dinner,” I said. “She kept complaining about how she wrote a romantic suspense and she hated it, and I couldn’t figure out why she bothered.”

“She’s Dana’s client?”

“Yeah.”

“Dana probably talked her into it. Circumstances probably talked her into it. She wasn’t big enough to survive this thing. She had a little trouble with her last publisher.” He shrugged again.