Death's Savage Passion (18 page)

“I don’t see what Verna has to do with it.”

“I don’t see how anyone could have both poisoned that coffee
and
ripped up Caroline’s office,” I said.

“Halloween candy,” Nick said.

“I don’t care what it was in. The timing is still wrong. That was lunch hour. Caroline’s office is halfway across town from Dana’s. Nobody could have done both those things.”

“Maybe nobody did.” Nick put his head in his hands. “McKenna, you still can’t prove the poisoning was deliberate. Okay, somebody moved Sarah’s body. Maybe Marilou Saunders did it to avoid the scandal.”

“Maybe I have green hair. Nick—”

“Answer a question for me,” Nick said. “What for?”

“You’ve been saying that for days.”

“I have to say it. One of two things has to be true. Either everything that’s happened has been a deliberate plan, at which point you have to decide why anyone would want to kill a second-rate romance writer and a hick from Connecticut. Or only some of it was deliberate, which leaves you a lot less to explain.”

“Just who moved Sarah’s body. And why.”

“Exactly. Marilou Saunders. To keep her name out of the papers. To give herself a chance to disassociate herself from the poisoning. By the time she found out it was caused by a nut, she’d have to go through with getting rid of Sarah’s body anyway, because she had Sarah’s body.”

“So she put it in Caroline Dooley’s apartment and lit a match?”

“Marilou Saunders?” Nick said. “Why not? Didn’t I just see her throwing a temper tantrum full of four-letter words on national television?”

I blushed. “It wasn’t my fault,” I said.

“You started it,” he said.

“It may be the simplest explanation, but it doesn’t solve anything,” I said. “It doesn’t explain why no one was poisoned by the candy before—”

“Luck.”

“And Verna—”

“An accident.”

“And all the phone calls saying it was Sarah—”

“Marilou covering her ass.”

“Explain someone ripping up Caroline’s office and taking her keys,” I said. I sounded sullen.

“Romance sabotage, of which there’s been quite a bit recently. Nothing so blatant as that, mind you, but quite a bit. And we don’t really know someone took Caroline’s keys. Caroline lost her keys, from what Tony Marsh tells me, the same day her office was torn apart. The super got her a new set made. Okay. But there’s nothing to say it’s connected. She’s a bubble head. She’d lose her rear end if it wasn’t screwed on.”

“That’s a mess,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “So tell me, first, why someone would want to kill Verna and Sarah? And while you’re at it, think up a plot for a conspiracy, because you’re right. If someone was trying to kill you, or Sarah, or Marilou, deliberately, then that person could not also have ripped up Caroline’s office. Not unless he had a helicopter at his disposal.”

“I didn’t know that part about Caroline and the keys,” I said. “Not all of it.”

He gave me an evil look. “It’s not always a mystery, McKenna. Sometimes it’s just a lot of bad luck. And coincidences happen.”

“Horse manure,” I said. I started to gather up my things. “With you, it’s
never
a mystery.”

“This is the woman,” he said, “who less than a week ago said she only wanted to deal with
ancient
murders. Ancient history.”

“The key,” I said, “is finding out how those two things could have been done at once. That’s the key.”

Nick just shook his head.

A
MELIA GOT TO THE RUSSIAN
Tea Room before I did. Got there and set up shop. Although knowledgeable New Yorkers refuse to sit “upstairs,” Amelia
preferred
upstairs. There was more room to spread out. Amelia at lunch needed a lot of room to spread out. By the time I was shown to her table, she had territorialized the entire west corner of the room. It was quarter after one. She was dressed in vintage Worth and had an ostrich feather in her hair.

“It’s always such an
experience
having her with us,” the hostess said, bringing me upstairs. “Miss Samson is a very loyal customer.”

A waiter took over at the top of the stairs, showed me to my seat (the only one of six at Amelia’s table not covered with papers), held my chair, and promised to come back immediately with “another cocktail for Miss Samson.” Miss Samson already had a cocktail. It was pink. It had red and green and blue flags in it.

“I suppose it also has gin in it,” I said, stowing my tote bag at my feet. “Do you have to do that in the middle of the afternoon?”

“Gin and grenadine,” Amelia said. “Doesn’t it look awful? If anybody asks, I can always say it’s a Shirley Temple.”

“Will anybody believe it?”

“Fans believe it. Fans”—she shook her head resentfully—“are the only problem with the Russian Tea Room.”

I didn’t tell her she’d have less trouble with fans if she stopped sending her heroines to dinner in her favorite restaurants. The waiter came back with another cocktail and the menus. We ordered a pair of chicken Kievs and waved the man away.

I got a cigarette out and lit it. “This ought to be good,” I said. “You couldn’t just tell me over the phone?”

“My phone has been tapped for years,” Amelia said. “Besides, this isn’t a publishing place.” She patted the nearest stack of papers. “I don’t leave these lying around, you know.”

I picked up the stack closest to me. It was a typed plot outline for a book called
Into His Arms,
in which a shy, sensitive seventeen-year-old is forced by the deaths of both her parents to leave the protective confines of her convent school in Yorkshire (a convent school in Yorkshire?) to become governess to the children of infamous industrialist Black Jack Marlowe. I reached across the table for the stack of papers marked “scene.”
Into His Arms
took place in the winter of 1981-82. I put the stack of papers back.

“Seems right on the mark,” I said blandly.

Amelia snorted. “Oh, I know what you think of this sort of thing. I know what all of you think. The brave new world of sex and the executive woman and fifty-fifty marriages.” She waved her gin in the air. “Asinine. Falling on your heads. To be expected.”

“I don’t write romances any more,” I said. “Phoebe has executive women, or the historical equivalent. She does very well.”

“Your Miss Damereaux is a very smart woman,” Amelia said. “I’ve never said otherwise.”

Amelia had not only said otherwise, she had once implied that both Phoebe and I were fourth-rate human beings bent on destroying her. At the time, she had lifted me off my feet by the front of my sweater and was slamming me into a tile wall in a utility room in the Cathay Pierce Hotel. Amelia Samson is fat, but the bulk in her shoulders is all muscle, and she knows how to use it. I opted for discretion and sat quietly while the waiter brought single (for me) and double (for Amelia) chicken Kievs.

When he was gone, Amelia did the unexpected. She ignored her lunch. She reached into her bag and came up with a book.

“Look at this,” she handed it over.

It was a Dortman & Hodges paperback of Verna’s last “big” contemporary,
Flight into Romance.
I could tell it was romance and not romantic suspense because although the heroine was fleeing for her life down a forest path, she was in
Cosmopolitan
lingerie instead of an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse.

I turned the book over and read the jacket copy. It was the story of a shy and sensitive seventeen-year-old who is forced by the deaths of both her parents to leave the protective confines of her convent school in Milwaukee to become governess to the children of the infamous industrialist Black Jack Harrow.

I put the book down next to my soupspoon. I was starving, but I couldn’t have put food in my mouth if my life depended on it.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Amelia was attacking her lunch. “What’s to understand? She ripped me off.”

“How could she have ripped you off?” I asked her. “Her book’s already in print. Yours is just an outline.”

“My book has been an outline since two years ago last Christmas,” Amelia said. “I’ve got a room full of outlines back home. For God’s sake, you know what I have to produce in a month. What if I got sick? I have to have inventory.”

“Inventory,” I said.

“I’ve got a file cabinet full of manila envelopes sealed by a notary,” Amelia said. “I always make sure one of my girls is a notary. I keep the file
locked.”

“Then how did Verna get hold of this?”

Amelia waved the fork. “Those aren’t the only copies. I’ve got copies all over the house. Those are just to protect me.”

“Oh,” I said.

“My heroine’s name is Susannah Place,” Amelia said. “Hers is Susannah Parrish.”

“But
Amelia,”
I said.

“But Amelia nothing. She paid one of my girls and got the outline and used it. I’m not guessing, Patience. She told me. The girl told me, too, after I confronted her. Paid her five thousand dollars. Verna did.”

“Dear Lord.”

“Fired the girl. Came to an agreement with Verna.”

“That’s why she wouldn’t file a complaint with AWR,” I said. “That’s been driving Phoebe crazy.”

“If it had really been driving Phoebe crazy, she’d have done something about it,” Amelia said. “Like I said, she’s a smart woman. She knew something was screwy. And what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just let it go.”

No, I thought, she couldn’t just let it go. The old ladies of romance were nobody’s fools. Their books might be treacle, but their heads were solid rock. They could forgive you any personal betrayal. They would drop a forty-year friendship in a minute for any
business
betrayal. I was surprised Amelia hadn’t exposed Verna and had done with it.

“The real problem in a case like this,” Amelia said, “is you know how it happened and you don’t want to make it worse. Also, you don’t want to give
them”
—romance writers routinely refer to all nonromance writers, especially members of what they think of as the Literary Establishment (such as Sidney Sheldon), as
them
—“a chance to make fun of us. And with everything falling apart the way it is—”

“But why would she
do
something like this?” I said. “Even if I grant her career was going nowhere, and no matter what else I think of what you do, I know you’ve done better than this—”

“Of course I’ve done better than this,” Amelia said. “What do you take me for?”

“Then why steal it in the first place? It wouldn’t have advanced her career. It wasn’t her kind of thing.”

“It would have ruined her career if she’d started reneging on contracts. Which she almost did.”

I bit my lip. One of the iron rules of romance publishing is that you never fail to deliver a book when you promise one. The lines run more like magazines than book publishers. They put out a certain number of books each month. Their lead time gives them very little room to establish inventory. Even “big” romances are produced on a schedule designed to give the world’s most ardent workaholic a nervous breakdown. To renege on a contract, unless you were an Amelia or a Phoebe, might easily mean you never worked again.

“She had writer’s block,” I said slowly.

“Bullshit,” Amelia said. “She had burnout. The last three books before this and the two after were written by what’s his name. The objectionable asshole with the pornographic mystery titles.”

“Max Brady?” I had forgotten Max Brady.

“Max Brady,” Amelia said. “My feeling is, he wrote every one in the last two years except the one she took from me and this new one. God only knows who wrote the new one. It wasn’t Verna.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Wait till it comes out,” Amelia said.

“I don’t think she’s supposed to be able to do that. Get a ghost, I mean. From what I hear, for Dana’s line, even Marilou Saunders had to write her own.”

“Maybe she didn’t tell Dana.”

“It’s supposed to be great romantic suspense,” I said. “Not just okay. Great. Why would somebody do something like that and not publish it on her own?”

Amelia shrugged again. “Don’t know and don’t care. I read it. It’s good for that kind of thing. And Verna didn’t write it. Believe me.” She finished her drink in a single long swallow. “The way Verna was going, she was turning into a house name.”

It went through me like an electric shock.

“What?”
I said. “What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Amelia said. “I want another drink. Sit down and have your lunch.”

“House names,” I said. “Ellery Queen. Everything is going to make sense.”

Amelia thought I was out of my mind, but I didn’t care. What had Phoebe said? “She was saying something about Ellery Queen being a lot of people.” Right. I crammed things into my tote bag, dropping them in my hurry. I had to get Max Brady. I had to get to him right away.

I didn’t know why Sarah had died, but I thought I knew why Verna had. If I was right, maybe Nick had been half right.

Maybe it was Marilou someone had meant to kill.

Amelia waved her fork at me. “So I’ll eat your lunch,” she said. “You’ve always been a crazy person.”

I
WANTED TO GO
directly to Max Brady’s. Instead, I made myself detour to the 42nd Street Library magazine room—just to be sure. I read ten books and two dozen magazines a month. I could have been confused. If I
was
confused, my whole theory was a piece of nonsense.

I wasn’t confused. It took me a while to find what I was looking for—I thought the article had appeared in
The Armchair Detective;
it was in the March issue of
Gumshoes
instead—but when I did, it was exactly as I had remembered it. The title, banally enough, was “Will the Real Ellery Queen Please Stand Up?” The byline read, “Additional Research by Max Brady.” I tapped my finger against the “Max Brady.” That was better than I could have hoped.

The theory went like this: Not all Ellery Queen books were written by Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, or Frederic Dannay and whomever after Lee died). Some of them were written by rank outsiders and did not feature Queen as a detective. They were published as “by Ellery Queen” because books “by Ellery Queen” made more money than books by other mystery writers. It was a weird situation. Most house names are invented by the publishing company. Superfantastic Books thinks it could make a lot of money with a series about a mercenary soldier. Marketing and editorial get together and invent a name for our hero (“Cannonball Jones”) and a name for the writer (“Mack Savage”). They then go out and hire a lot of writers to produce books that will be published as “by Mack Savage.” The writers get no credit, minimal royalties, and a minuscule advance. The “Ellery Queen” setup was the only one anyone had heard of that involved the name of an actual, living writer being farmed out with the writer’s permission. Assuming Dannay and Lee had given their permission. Assuming such a situation had ever actually existed. No one was absolutely sure, and Dannay and Lee were now both dead.