by Jane Haddam
I knew computers that weren’t that efficient, but I didn’t mention it. I dumped the newspapers on Felicity’s well-carpeted floor—three-inch pile, in mauve—and began to rummage in my bag for the articles. They were still in their manilla envelopes. I threw them on Felicity’s desk.
“These are impossible,” I said. “Even she must know these are impossible.” I jerked my head toward the left wall, beyond which the fight of the century had diminished to a low angry hum, like the sound near telephone poles on hot summer days in the country. “I’ve only read them once, but I don’t even think they’re salvageable.”
Felicity Aldershot sat back in her chair and smiled. She was playing the Wise Parent Gently Exposing the Muddled Thinking of an Impressionable Child. Her desk was a modern sculpture in mahogany. The prism on the blotter was from Steuben Glass. Her office was smaller than Alida’s but it had cost just as much to furnish, if not more.
She tapped the envelopes. “What do you think would make them salvageable?” She made the word sound like something in a foreign language.
“Look,” I said. “There’s this thing by Ronald Harbank.” I looked through the envelopes and found it. “ ‘Writing the Romance—A Surefire Recipe.’ In the first place, I don’t think Ronald Harbank has written a romance. He’s never written one I’ve ever heard of, anyway, and I hear of a lot of them. And if he was anybody in the field, I would have met him.” That was true enough. Phoebe, like Myrra before her, “took up” new romance writers. Her parties were populated by the oddest people.
“Mr. Harbank writes as Jessica Henry for Zedidiah,” Felicity said.
I made a face. “Zedidiah is a tenth-rate house with a nasty reputation,” I said. “They operate almost entirely work-for-hire. Never mind the fact that they’ve got zero distribution.”
“Now, now,” Felicity said. “Everybody can’t write for the major houses, you know. Zedidiah gives a lot of unknowns a chance.”
“Zedidiah gives a lot of unknowns the shaft,” I said. “Acme would be bad enough, for God’s sake, but at least they put out a halfway decent romance line. Zedidiah buys and publishes crap.”
“Zedidiah buys and publishes manuscripts they receive over the transom,” Felicity Aldershot said. “The purpose of Writing magazine is to help our readers get published. Don’t be fooled by the subtitle. We call it The Magazine for Professional Freelancers, but our major audience is the unpublished writer. Zedidiah will give that writer a chance.”
“I’ll repeat myself,” I said. “Zedidiah will give that writer the shaft. Any of the lines will buy manuscripts over the transom, even the ones that say they won’t. And the agents are happy to see new work. A successful romance writer can make them a lot of money.”
“The major lines buy one manuscript over the transom for every two thousand they reject,” Felicity Aldershot said. “Those odds are close to impossible.”
“Those odds are the best in the business.”
“If you stick with the majors,” Felicity said. “Most of our readers would be overjoyed to come out with a small press. Besides, if they publish a book with a small press it may give them a chance to publish something with a larger press, next time.”
There was an ashtray on Felicity Aldershot’s desk, half-concealed by a pile of reports on the story preferences of science fiction readers. I pulled it into the open and lit a cigarette over it. The problem was not in what Felicity was saying, but what she wasn’t saying. She wasn’t saying it depended on which small press. She wasn’t saying it depended on how good the book was to begin with. She wasn’t saying that Mr. Harbank’s article made all these conjectures superfluous.
I flipped the article open to the middle. “Do you realize what he’s advocating here?” I asked her.
“He’s advocating science,” Felicity Aldershot said smoothly. “This is a very scientific method.”
“He’s advocating plagiarism,” I said. “For God’s sake, Felicity. Maybe it’s not plagiarism in the legal sense, but it’s plagiarism any other way. First you’re supposed to read ten romance books. Then you’re supposed to go through them with a lot of felt pens. You underline dialogue in red. You underline description in yellow, you underline action in green. You figure out how many pages there are to an average chapter. Then you use this—this color scheme—like a blueprint and write in words that fit.”
“So?”
“So you don’t write your own book,” I said. “How do you expect them to move from a smaller press to a larger press when all they’re doing is using other people’s ideas, other people’s structures, other people’s methods? How do you expect them to produce anything original?”
Felicity Aldershot said, “I don’t.”
It was a standoff. We were not coming from two competing but complementary points of view. We were not speaking the same language in the same universe. Felicity Aldershot did not want to help the readers of Writing get published. She wanted to help them sustain an illusion.
I had read Mr. Harbank’s article on the subway coming to Gramercy Park that morning. I had read the other article—“Making Your Characters Breathe,” by Hester Marrison—over coffee in the Park Luncheonette. I had not had time to show them to Phoebe, or Ivy, or any of the others involved. I didn’t want to. Someone like Amelia Samson would get three paragraphs into the Harbank piece and have a stroke. Phoebe would declare war on Gramercy Park.
Writing may or may not be an art, depending on the writer. Selling that writing is a business. Like any other business, it has rules and customs. Knowing the rules and customs can be a great help to someone just beginning.
Not knowing the rules and customs—or, worse yet, knowing the wrong ones—can destroy someone.
“My people won’t like it,” I said. “More than that. My people won’t stand for it, and they won’t be associated with it.”
We might have had a fight. It would have been appropriate. Fighting was the customary means of communication at Writing Enterprises. Unfortunately, we were interrupted. The door of Alida Brookfield’s office opened and Jack Brookfield came flying through.
He literally came flying. It was as if someone had picked him up and tossed him into the hallway.
TWELVE
IT BROUGHT EVERYONE OUT. Writing Enterprises staffers crowded in from the back corridors, eager to see who and what had blown Alida’s fuse this time. From their looks of cynical amusement, I decided this wasn’t an anomaly. Alida held these exhibitions regularly. Alida might even enjoy them.
Alida didn’t look like she was enjoying herself, but I knew that might not mean anything. She was standing over Jack Brookfield’s body, prodding his bulging stomach with her toe. She had been crying. There were traces of mascara tears at the corners of her eyes. Anger and frustration, I thought, not sorrow. Alida Brookfield looked as if she’d never been sorry about anything.
She pulled her foot back and gave Jack a vicious kick in the side. “Get up,” she said. “Get off the goddamn floor.”
Jack Brookfield was beached. “I’m going to sue you for assault,” he said. “I’m going to have your sagging ass.”
“I’m going to have your ass,” Alida said. “I’m going to haul myself into the men’s room, I’ll get pictures of what you do in the men’s room, I’ll get photostats of everything, all the records—”
Jack found the leverage he needed. He got to his knees, then to his feet. His suit was streaked with dirt and lint. His face was scratched and puffy.
“You’re crazy,” he told her. “You don’t know what’s been going on around here and you never will.”
“You don’t know when you’ve got it good,” Alida said. “You don’t know when to leave well enough alone. You’ve got to have everything, you’ve got to leech, you impotent little fag—”
I heard a sigh in my ear and turned. Stephen Brookfield was standing right behind me. He had his hands in his pockets and a superior little smile on his face. He looked like a television villain at the moment
of triumph, unaware that the hero’s friends are already scaling the walls to effect a rescue.
It occurred to me I was always thinking of the Brookfields in terms of television, B movies, and third-rate paperback originals.
Stephen Brookfield was thinking of me as an audience. He nodded at his aunt and his brother and said,
“Remarkable example of a lemming, isn’t she?”
“Lemming?”
“Well, someone’s already dead. You’d think she’d go easy on that stuff until she knew who killed him.”
I disliked Stephen Brookfield enough to be a nuisance. “You think Jack killed Michael?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I think Jack might have killed Michael. That should be enough.”
“Why should Jack kill Michael?”
“Why not?” He put his hands in my hair. I stepped as far away as I could with the crowd pressing in on me. He gave me a look that said he knew my reluctance was only temporary. They always know your reluctance is only temporary. They know it the way romance writers know the bogeyman in the closet is the fiction editor of The New Yorker.
Alida and Jack had squared off, but they had run out of words. They stood on opposite sides of the hall, their backs pressed against facing walls. Felicity Aldershot stood in the door to her office, looking from one to the other.
“Go back to your offices,” Alida said. She didn’t bother to raise her voice. “Get out of here.”
The crowd around me started to disperse. The corridor was silent. When they got to their cubicles on the back corridors, they would probably lock themselves in and indulge in furious torrents of gossip, but for the moment they were being discreet.
Alida didn’t look at them, or at Stephen, or at Felicity, or at Jack. She seemed to be staring at the ceiling. Jack was staring at her.
“Why I put up with this, I don’t know,” Alida said.
Felicity wasn’t going to risk another outbreak. She moved forward and put her hand on Alida’s arm, said something in Alida’s ear. Alida straightened and began patting distractedly at her face and hair.
“I know, Fel,” she said. “Oh, I know. I know.”
“Touching, isn’t it?” Stephen Brookfield said. He said it loud enough to be heard. Alida Brookfield ignored him. Jack, who did not think it was touching, pried himself away from the wall, faced Stephen, and let out all the murderous rage he had unsuccessfully tried to impose on Alida.
“You,” he told Stephen, “are going to wind up with your throat cut.”
“Jack thinks Alida killed Michael,” Stephen said. “He thinks she’s gone crazy. He thinks she’s going to kill us off one by one.”
Jack pushed past us. He elbowed Stephen out of the way. He was just tall enough so that his elbow caught Stephen in the diaphragm, winding him.
I didn’t like Stephen any more than Jack did. I had also had enough for one morning. It was much too early—not even ten o’clock, if I could believe Felicity Aldershot’s desk digital—and I wanted to be somewhere locked and quiet where I could think. Most mornings I’m not up at ten. I’m often not up at ten-thirty. One of the nice things about working freelance is the option to work from nine at night to five in the morning if it suits you.
I turned away from the sight of Alida Brookfield with her head on Felicity Aldershot’s shoulder and made for the back corridor and my “office.” I was halfway there when Janet caught up with me.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she said. “You’ve got a phone call. A Mr. Carras.” Janet looked harassed. “He says it’s very, very urgent.”
THIRTEEN
THE FIRST THING NICK said was, “Is this a secure line?”
I considered sitting on the rickety desk, decided it would collapse under me, and took the chair instead. I got a cigarette and lit it. I do not usually enjoy getting phone calls from Nick Carras. We met under strained circumstances. We developed what friendship there is between us under strained circumstances. Every time we meet, we conspire to strain the circumstances even more. Phoebe thinks we are made for each other—Phoebe went to high school with Nick in Union City, New Jersey, and nursed his ego by phone when he was at the Harvard Law School—but I haven’t seen any sign of it. Besides, the man I was seeing before I started seeing Nick was a lawyer. I had had enough of lawyers. Once I started seeing Nick, I couldn’t talk myself into seeing anyone else, but I wasn’t sure that mattered. I might just be going through an isolationist period.
If Nick would stop insisting he was saving his (unlikely) virginity for the marriage bed, I wouldn’t have to be going through an isolationist period.
I took three quick drags on my cigarette and made up my mind to keep this conversation rational. I reminded myself that Nick keeps his clean socks in the refrigerator. I said, “I am sitting under the light of a naked bulb in what was, until a few days ago, a utility closet. I have just been watching Installment Sixteen in ‘The Continuing Holocaust.’ I don’t think this is a secure phone.”
Nick said, “Oh.” Then he paused. Then he asked, “Do you think it’s all right anyway? I mean, do you think anyone’s listening in?”
“Nick, for God’s sake. They’re all listening in. The phone is probably tapped six times—each of them has tapped all the phones, and none of them knows the others have. Or they all know the others have but they think nobody knows they have—oh, never mind.”
“What’s going on over there?”
“You don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.”
There was another pause. “The thing is,” Nick said, “I think I do want to know.”
“Why?” I thought this was another attempt to Show an Interest in My Life. Nick works very hard at that sometimes. He occasionally manages it even when he isn’t thinking about it.
He wasn’t thinking about it now. “I’ve got a couple of ladies in my office,” he said.
“Women,” I said automatically.
He corrected himself just as automatically. “Women,” he said. “One black woman and one Jewish woman. The Jewish woman wants to know why you didn’t eat the stuff she left out for you this morning.”
“I was late. I stopped at the luncheonette when I got down here.” No need to say anything about just having coffee.
Nick knew I had just had coffee. “We’ll let it go at that,” he said, letting me know Phoebe was listening. “The thing is, I could use a little information from where you are. I talked to Mr. Martinez, and I wasn’t happy about the way he sounded. I don’t think you’re going to be very happy about it either.”
“He’s screaming treason,” I said.
“Not that bad,” Nick said. “To tell you the truth, I can’t figure out why he isn’t screaming murder. In fact, the whole thing’s a little odd. He didn’t even sound interested.”
“You handed him a brand new suspect with a brand new motive and he didn’t sound interested?”
“I didn’t tell him about the motive,” Nick said. “What do you take me for? But I don’t think I handed him a brand new suspect. It’s not just that he didn’t sound interested. He didn’t sound surprised.”
I considered this. Martinez had not mentioned a mysterious black woman to me when he bought me pie and Perrier. Why wouldn’t he mention it if he knew about it?
“There’s something even odder than that,” I said. “Janet must have seen her come in. Friday. Only I don’t think Janet’s said anything to anyone.”
“You mean to the people who work there?”
“I mean to the Brookfields. Or Felicity Aldershot.”
“Is that in character?”
I thought about Janet’s pimples and Janet’s greasy hair and Janet’s avid, close-set eyes. “It’s definitely out of character,” I said. “Everybody in this place gossips about everybody else. Continually. Whether they have something to gossip about or not. If I had to guess, I’d say Janet was usually worse than most.”
“Why?”
“Plain girls who mind being plain tend to comp
ensate. Janet has to be one of those people who pay for their invitations with information.”
“Men take her out to listen to her gossip?” Nick didn’t believe it.
“Women have her around to listen to her gossip,” I said.
Nick said, “Oh.” He had never considered the possibility that plain women might have as much trouble making friends with women as they did with men. I didn’t think he’d ever considered the possibility of plain women.
I was being unfair, and I recognized it. I have a tendency to make Nick the focus of neuroses developed in his absence in reaction to people he’s never met. I stubbed out my cigarette—it had burned to the filter—lit another one, and prepared to get off the phone. When I start imagining other people’s faces on Nick’s body, it is time to get off the phone.
I started to say something about the work piled on my desk—there were a lot of manilla envelopes, presumably put there by Alida or Felicity Aldershot—when I heard a murmur of voices in the background and realized Nick was consulting. I pulled the envelopes into my lap. “Love and Money,” the first one said. “Love Scenes that Sizzle, Scorch, and Score!” There was also “Researching the Historical—A Checklist.” I opened that one. The first paragraph read, “If you’ve ever looked at one of those five-hundred-page sexy historicals and thought, ‘I’d never be able to do all that research,’ think again. There’s a lot less research involved than you think!”
Verna Train was going to take one look at that and burn down the building.
I was either going to kill myself or develop a terminal ulcer.
Nick came back on the line. “There’s something else,” he said. “Her sister got a call this morning.”
“Sister?” I assumed “her” meant Ivy.
“Her sister lives with her,” Nick said. “Takes care of the kids. She left the kids with the sister and came into New York for the weekend.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Her sister called up this morning and said she’d had a call. From Alida Brookfield.”
