Sweet, Savage Death

by Jane Haddam

  I found a match and lit my cigarette, very slowly, very carefully. She still wasn’t making much sense. I was no longer worried about her being a complete lunatic, but I did think she might be angry enough to be unreliable. Besides, I wanted to return to the always absorbing process of self-flagellation. I was comfortable there.

  The social worker had no intention of letting me go. “Literary Services,” she told me, “is where you send them a manuscript and they evaluate it. They’re supposed to tell you how to make it publishable. They’re supposed to tell you if it never will be publishable. They charge you a fee.”

  I coughed. It was a bogus cough, and we both knew it.

  “They charge you a fee every time,” the social worker said. “The same fee. I wrote a novel. That’s a hundred and twenty-five dollars every time they read it. They read it six times.”

  This time my cough was real. I’d swallowed smoke. “Yes,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I’ve heard of things like that.”

  “Heard of them!” She seemed mortally offended that I’d heard of them. “I’ll tell you what I think. I don’t think they tell you how to make it publishable at all. I think they tell you things that won’t make any difference, so they keep you coming back. If you did end up being published, you wouldn’t be any use to them anymore.”

  I took a deep drag on my cigarette and decided not to say any more. I knew what she was talking about—I even knew she was right—but I didn’t see what I could do about it that she wasn’t already doing. “Literary services” is a racket. What you need when you finish a novel is an agent or a friend at a publishing house, not an evaluator.

  As far as the social worker was concerned, what she needed was a lawyer. “I’m going to get them. I’m going to go to the Better Business Bureau, and I’m going to sue. Just you wait. By the time I’m finished with them—”

  An overfed, overanxious young man with black hair just a little too long to be fashionable came chugging down the corridor, followed closely by Janet. His flesh was squeezed into a Brooks Brothers gray flannel two sizes too small for him. Perspiration had soaked through his jacket and made large dark semicircles under his arms. He held out his hands to the social worker.

  “Mrs. Haskell!” He was working overtime to make himself sound exultantly pleased. “You should have called ahead! We could have had lunch!”

  “I’ve had my lunch.” She brushed by him without touching his hands. “I want to talk to you,” she said, stalking into the corridor. “I’m going down to sit in your office and I’m not moving till I’ve had my say.”

  The young man frowned at her back. Then he adjusted his tie, straightened his back as if some mental nanny were reminding him of the benefits of Good Posture, and turned to me.

  “You must be Miss McKenna,” he said. “I’m Jack Brookfield.”

  I noted his age—no more than thirty-five—and decided he had to be Alida’s son, not her husband. That was just as well. I had never heard of Alida having a husband.

  “Patience Campbell McKenna,” I said.

  “We’re all thrilled to have you here. We couldn’t wait to see if you looked like—” He stopped. He had apparently decided that mentioning my newspaper photographs might not, under the circumstances, be a good idea. He cast a look over his shoulder, as if he expected to see an impression of Mrs. Haskell’s back on the air in the corridor. “Amateurs,” he said. “You don’t know what a relief it’s going to be to work with a real professional.”

  “I don’t know if I want to be thought of as a relief,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s a compliment, Miss McKenna, it’s a compliment.” He turned at the corridor and smiled at me, but he was already straightening his clothes and edging away. “I suppose I’d better go see to Mrs. Haskell. They get so overwrought, really. They don’t realize—”

  He whirled away again and plunged into the corridor. I put my cigarette out in the ashtray, half-smoked. I was just beginning to think I ought to spend some time considering the scene I’d just witnessed when a light went off on the phone on Janet’s desk, and she stood up and smiled at me.

  “That’s Miss Brookfield now,” she said. “You can go right in.”

  TWO

  WRITING ENTERPRISES BEGAN AS a single publication, Writing Magazine. I used to subscribe to it when I was at Emma Willard. I wanted to absorb a little of the atmosphere of the milieu, to feel like a writer while I was trying to become one. I failed. Writing was a stolid little how-to periodical concentrating on first-person technique, correct manuscript preparation, and admonitions to Write Only When Inspired.

  Alida Brookfield changed all that. The old staff had been a superannuated Addams family whose religion was Literature.

  Alida Brookfield was a businesswoman whose religion was fads. She imported Indian clothes when everyone wanted Indian clothes. She sold electric trains from a suffocatingly precious specialty store on East Fifty-fourth Street. She was even involved, once, with the manufacture of contraband hula hoops.

  Writing promised to be more profitable than any of these. She bought it in 1972. In 1984, she still showed no inclination to move to another line of business. She had found her home.

  Alida Brookfield was not worried about correct manuscript preparation, and she couldn’t have cared less about inspiration. She changed the name of her newly acquired periodical to Writing: The Magazine for Professional Freelancers and concentrated on the financially exciting possibilities. There would always be people who couldn’t write but wanted to be writers. There would always be people whose personal get-rich-quick fantasy was to produce the next sex-and-sin bestseller in their sleep. There would always be people who didn’t know the score.

  Her staff concentrated on the writing and selling of magazine articles—with the emphasis on “sell.” Unwilling to thoroughly discourage their readers—thoroughly discouraged readers stop buying magazines—they concentrated on selling to magazines whose standards were low and whose rates of payment were even lower. MAKE BIG MONEY WRITING FOR THE SPECIALTY MAGAZINES, one cover promised. The author of that article was one Curt Hardy, whose credits included Nebraska Heritage, The Antiquing Gazette, and Cat and Dog Times. Cat and Dog Times pays a cent and a half a word. Nebraska Heritage pays half a cent. Since Writing couldn’t ignore book publishing completely (too many people are working on epics about Bright Young Men Destroyed by Success), there was “Selling Your Novel,” by Jean Pandric. Miss Pandric’s new spy thriller had just been issued by Sparrowdale Press in Muncie, Indiana.

  Laced through all this nonsense was some very bad advice. Writing was very militant about what it liked to call Writer’s Rights. It urged its readers to Stand Up for Themselves with editors. If editors didn’t like simultaneous submissions, that was just too bad. Magazine writing paid so little, writers couldn’t afford not to make simultaneous submissions. If the editors of Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, discovering you had submitted the same article to both of them at the same time, declared you’d never work for either of them again—they were just bluffing. If they weren’t, you didn’t need them anyway.

  I have been in this business six years. I have been very lucky. My articles have appeared in most of the national women’s magazines. My romance novels were issued by a major New York paperback house. Like most people in my position, Writing made me furious. The sight of it on a newsstand could paralyze me. The sight of it in one of my friend’s living rooms could incite me to violence. I don’t much like any of the writing magazines, but at least Miss Brookfield’s competition, The Writer and Writer’s Digest, made an effort to portray the business honestly. Alida Brookfield did not see the point in honesty. Writing earned its advertising revenue from vanity presses, make-a-thousand-dollars-a-week-in-your-spare-time schemes, and bogus literary agents based in Iowa. I once took a copy with a coverline on “How to Crack the Categories” and stuffed it down a lover’s garbage disposal. I broke the garbage disposal. I didn’t mind paying for it.

&
nbsp; I did mind being in Alida Brookfield’s office, but there was nothing I could do about it. Phoebe had blackmailed me into it. Phoebe could blackmail me into taking on the Iranian army if she went to work at it.

  Alida Brookfield’s office was a large corner room with a wall of windows looking up Park Avenue South to the Pan Am Building. What had been saved in the nondecoration of the reception area had been spent here. The hardwood floor had been sanded, polished, and covered with Persian throw rugs in reds and golds. The desk was a massive mahogany affair that looked more stable than the building. There was a wet bar in one corner. It opened on a glass-topped coffee table and a conversational grouping of plush-seated chairs.

  Miss Brookfield rose as soon as I came in. It was like watching a wax dummy move. She was sixty-two, but she looked as if she’d been artificially preserved at the age of fifty. Her white hair was twisted into a French knot. Her green silk shirtwaist was straight from the third floor of Saks. Her nails were just round enough and just long enough and just palely colored enough for fashion. Her skin was plastic-smooth. She looked laminated.

  She gestured with one hand at the conversational grouping and with the other at the two people standing to the left of her desk.

  “Miss McKenna,” she said. “How wonderful to see you here.” She didn’t smile. Her voice had no inflection.

  The thin little man with the bald spot shifted from one foot to the other, looked at me, looked at the ceiling, looked at the floor, and then said,

  “Maybe I ought to come back later. Maybe—”

  Alida Brookfield tapped the top of her desk. The sound was louder than I would have expected.

  “This is Mr. Lahler, our comptroller.” She pointed at the thin man. “And this,” she gestured to the young woman on Mt. Lahler’s right, “is Felicity Aldershot, head of our Writing Workshops and Correspondence Schools Division.”

  Felicity Aldershot bore an uncanny resemblance to Glenda Jackson. She sounded like Glenda Jackson, too.

  “We’re so excited to have you here,” she said, in a voice that owed something to the British midlands and something more to dramatic training. “We’ve all been so looking forward to this project.”

  Alida Brookfield began to lead the way to the conversational grouping. “We were discussing the consequences of last year’s project,” she said. “We expanded the Publishing Division, you know.” She frowned. “You did realize we had a Publishing Division?”

  I knew they had a Publishing Division. Writing Enterprises Books put out such titles as Magazine Writing for Fun and Profit, Where Do You Get Your Ideas? A Sourcebook, and How to Make the Bestseller List Your First Time Out. About two years ago, they had entered the category market. Writing Enterprises Books now published third-rate romances, fifth-rate westerns, tenth-rate mysteries, and unspeakable science fiction. At the back of each book was a ten-page essay on How to Write a (Whatever) by the author.

  “We took our fiction list international eighteen months ago,” Alida Brookfield said. “We’re just now getting the returns. It was all dear Felicity’s idea.”

  Felicity Aldershot nearly winced at the “dear.” She overcame the impulse. She smiled instead.

  “Miss Aldershot’s from England,” Alida Brookfield said. “She’s been with us over eight years. She’s made quite a difference to Writing Enterprises.”

  “Oh,” Felicity Aldershot said. “Oh, no.”

  “It was her idea to take the magazine international,” Alida said, as if stating something for the record. “The year after she came. Then Literary Services a year later. I had no idea how large a market there was in Europe.”

  Felicity Aldershot looked uncomfortable. Alida let her stay that way for a few seconds, then leaned back in her chair and sent both Felicity and Martin Lahler what my mother would call a Significant Look. Mr. Lahler started trotting toward the door.

  Felicity Aldershot was more gracious. She smiled, said, “So nice to have met you” in an Upstairs, Downstairs voice, and made her way to the door with measured dignity. She closed the door with a sharp click. It was as if she’d run up a flag announcing that Miss Brookfield and I were now to be left alone.

  Miss Brookfield offered me a pastel-papered cigarette from the gold cigarette box on the coffee table, took one herself, and sat down on one of the plush chairs.

  “I suppose we ought to get right down to business,” she said. When Alida Brookfield talked business, her voice sounded like tin. “We’d like to devote forty-eight pages of the July issue of Writing to an overview of the romance publishing business. Do you mind if I call it a business?” She looked as if she expected me to mind.

  I shook my head. “It’s all a business,” I said. “Even literary publishing.”

  She was surprised and pleased. “That’s fine, then,” she said. “We try to treat it all as a business here. We try to teach our readers to approach writing and publishing as a business proposition subject to the rules and customs of business procedure.” She wasn’t saying anything, and she knew it. “For our romance section,” she said, sounding very careful, as if she were considering this possibility for the first time, “we would like to include interviews with several successfully published romance writers. We’d like to talk to them about how they write what they write, why they write what they write, how they first broke into print—”

  “Miss Brookfield.” I reached into my pocket for my pack of Merits. Alida Brookfield’s pastel-papered specials were the original coffin nails. They were strong enough to pierce wood.

  “You talked all this over with Phoebe weeks ago,” I said. “I know because it took her most of the last ten days to talk me into it. What it amounts to is this: you want to run sidebar interviews with Amelia Samson, Lydia Wentward, Phoebe Damereaux, Verna Train, Hazel Ganz, and Ivy Samuels Tree to accompany your special section articles. They will only agree to give these interviews if someone they trust edits the section. They want me.”

  “It’s all perfectly ridiculous,” Alida Brookfield said. “They have no reason not to trust my staff.”

  “They think they do.”

  “I don’t have to agree to this, you know. Magazines don’t usually allow interview subjects to look at their own interviews before publication. Never mind letting them hire someone to edit a lot of articles they had nothing to do with in the first place. I should throw you out of here.”

  “I wish you would.”

  “Why won’t I?”

  “The competition has already done articles on romance writing. Writer’s Digest has done several. You weren’t first so you have to be best, and to be best you’ve got to have those interviews. Besides,” I said. “You’ll put Phoebe on the cover and sell an extra fifty thousand on the newsstands.”

  Alida Brookfield sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. The silly part was over. “I keep trying to get Felicity to take over the magazine,” she said, “but she doesn’t want any part of it. Not that I blame her. We’re giving people what they want, Miss McKenna. It may not be what you want, but it suits them just fine.”

  “My people want to be sure there are no inaccuracies in the articles. They don’t want to see their faces plastered next to advice on phone queries.”

  “You make phone queries all the time.”

  “Only to editors I’ve worked with before. Worked with more than once.”

  “You don’t understand what it’s like for these people. They don’t have the contacts you have. They’re fighting for a chance.”

  “Phoebe spent five years in a fifth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side, sending in stories over the transom. I came out after I left graduate school six years ago. I didn’t have any contacts, either.”

  “These people live in places like Oklahoma. They can’t all come to New York.”

  “Stephen King lives in Maine. It hasn’t hurt him any.”

  “That’s different.”

  I was about to tell her I knew why it was different, but I didn’t see the point. The conv
ersation was uncomfortable for both of us. Alida Brookfield wasn’t used to defending herself. I wasn’t used to arguing, for the sake of form, with someone who agreed with me but couldn’t afford to admit it. I put my cigarette out in the blown-glass swan beside the gold cigarette box on the coffee table and said,

  “As far as I can tell, this is the agreement. You have chosen the articles and assigned the writers for this section. These articles should have started to come in. Beginning Monday, I will come to the office every morning, like a regular employee. I will edit the articles, oversee the interviews of Miss Damereaux and company, pass on headlines and artwork, and do whatever else is necessary to ensure the section is something my people can live with. They will pay my salary, which has been negotiated at twenty-five cents a week. You will pay me nothing. Four weeks from Monday, I will disappear. We’ll never have to speak to each other again. Unless we want to.”

  Alida Brookfield made a sour face. “Do you know anything about editing a magazine?”

  “I was editor of a small national consumer monthly called Fireman’s Friend for eighteen months. I hated it.”

  “This is a much larger operation.”

  “This is a forty-eight-page section.”

  “You can’t expect us to change the fundamental editorial policies of this magazine for a small group of romance writers with prejudices that—”

  I lit another cigarette, dropped it into the blown-glass swan, and put my head in my hands. “Miss Brookfield,” I said, “it’s been a long day. It’s going to be a long night. I don’t want to argue with you. I don’t want to renegotiate the agreement. If you need something along those lines, talk to Phoebe. Just tell me one thing: yes or no?”