Death's Savage Passion

by Jane Haddam

  “So there isn’t any murder,” I said. “If that’s all you’re worried about, don’t worry about it. I told you I don’t want to get involved in anything.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Believe it,” I said. I was lying. I didn’t care. I studied the tip of my cigarette, keeping my face turned away from him. “Why do you think Verna committed suicide? Why do the police think she did?”

  “They try to keep it quiet, except for the insurance companies,” Nick said. “For the sake of the family.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “But why—”

  “She was too far out on the tracks,” Nick said. “Much too far out.”

  FIVE

  “I WAS STANDING RIGHT next to her,” Phoebe said. “First her knees buckled. Then she sort of fell backward. Then she pitched forward. Then she was sort of floating over the tracks.”

  The officer at the desk was middle-aged, middleweight, and overtired. His cheeks were jowly. The rings around his eyes were charcoal. He was wearing an expression of nearly inhuman patience.

  “Let’s try this again,” he said. “First her knees bent. Then she pitched forward—”

  “Backward,” Phoebe said. “First her knees buckled and then she fell backward.”

  Caroline Dooley was sitting on a low plastic bench against the industrial green cement block wall, keeping her hands folded in her lap and her eyes closed. I sat down beside her, trying to decide what was going to make me feel worse: smoking with a policewoman glaring at me, or not smoking. I have been in a number of police stations. I haven’t liked any of them. They’re too crowded. Desks are pushed against each other and filing cabinets are shoved into every open space. They’re also usually too noisy, but this was Gramercy Park at dawn. On the outside of the rail, Max Brady and the romantic suspense contingent milled around looking ready to collapse. On the other side, Phoebe harangued the officer, Nick held his head, and a sad-faced old lady sat in a far corner giving the details of a break-in to a very young patrolman at war with his typewriter.

  “First her knees buckled,” Phoebe said again.

  I opted for the cigarette. “How long has this been going on?” I asked Caroline Dooley. I lit the cigarette with one of Phoebe’s Mamma Leone matches and put the spent match ostentatiously in the cuff of my pants.

  Caroline didn’t bother to open her eyes. “Forever,” she said.

  I tapped ash into my cupped hand. It hurt, but fortunately not for long.

  “It’s going to keep going on forever,” Caroline said, “because Phoebe is sure of what she saw and the policeman is sure what happened and neither of them looks like the yielding type.” She opened one eye at me. “You know Phoebe,” she said.

  I knew Phoebe. I also knew Caroline. Caroline’s mind was a shrine to the non sequitur. If you asked her the time, you got the story of the Pink Panther umbrella she bought in the Village. If you were confused, she was offended. I was willing to bet I’d just heard the longest sane sentence she’d uttered since her First Communion Catechism class.

  I took a very deep drag on my cigarette. I can outglare policewomen, but I don’t like to do it more than I have to.

  “What I can’t understand,” I told Caroline, “is what you people were doing in a subway station at five o’clock in the morning. Any subway station, never mind that subway station. What are we doing in Gramercy Park?”

  “Oh, God.” Caroline sat up straight, making a valiant but doomed effort to look alert. Caroline was always trying to look alert. And on top of things.

  “Well,” she said. “There was Miss English. Miss English is going to be a great romantic suspense writer.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Somebody had never been on a subway train,” Caroline said.

  “You must have been plastered,” I said.

  “I am never plastered,” Caroline said. “Phoebe was plastered. Amelia was plastered. Marilou—”

  We both looked across the room at Marilou. A patrolman had stationed himself less than half a foot from her seat and was glaring down at her. From the way Marilou was grinning, both Caroline and I knew she didn’t have a thing on her. The patrolman knew it, too. It was driving him crazy.

  Caroline stared at the ceiling. “First we went to the Mudd Club,” she said, “then we went walking, and we walked and walked. You wouldn’t believe the kind of people out on the streets of New York at this time of night. Then Verna put the heel of her shoe into Mr. Brady’s ankle. Then—” Caroline frowned. “Verna was plastered. In fact, I think that’s the first time I ever saw Verna plastered. She kept talking to herself.”

  “About what?”

  “People don’t talk to themselves about anything,” Caroline said. “They talk to themselves. If they had something to talk about, they’d talk to someone else.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “She kept babbling about mistakes and all the ones anybody ever made and men and it was all their fault and damn her ex-husband anyway.” Caroline looked sideways at me. “You ever met Verna’s ex-husband?”

  “No,” I said. “Somebody told me he was a psychiatrist.”

  “He has a therapy group for the husbands of romance writers. Helping them cope with their wives’ success.”

  I needed another cigarette.

  “It’s very necessary work,” Caroline said. I couldn’t decide if she sounded defensive or smug. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of neuroses these men get.”

  “Verna,” I said desperately. “Verna was drunk.”

  “Oh, God,” Caroline said. “I’d hate to be an agent. Dana must be a saint.”

  “Right,” I said again.

  “Dana got her by the arm,” Caroline said. “Verna, I mean. They started talking about—mystery stories. Agatha Christie. Ellery Queen. Somebody. Then Miss English said she’d never been in a subway, so Phoebe started herding us up to Twenty-third Street—”

  “From the Mudd Club?” I asked, trying to hold onto sanity.

  “Never go near Bellevue at night,” Caroline said. “They let these people out and even the people know they shouldn’t be out and they come back asking to be let in but the gates are locked and—”

  “The Mudd Club,” I said. “The Mudd Club.”

  “Oh,” Caroline said. “We were above Eighteenth already. It was a long walk.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Anyway, Max Brady got hold of Verna then and started trying to loan her a copy of The Big Sleep. Which is what she was doing the last time I saw her before the train.” The train seemed to get through something heavy and thick in Caroline’s brain. “My God,” she said. “What a mess.”

  I put my cigarette out under my heel, picked the butt off the floor, and put it in my pants cuff with the match. Then I folded my legs up under me and lit another cigarette.

  “I can’t understand how you ended up with Max Brady in the first place,” I said.

  “Neither can I,” Caroline said. “First he was there, then he wasn’t there, then he was there again.”

  “What?”

  “He was with us at Eddie Condon’s. Then he disappeared. Then he reappeared at the Mudd Club. I think.”

  “How did he find you at the Mudd Club?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  I thought of saying “You were there,” but I didn’t. It would have been useless.

  Nick leaned over the dividing rail and waved frantically in my direction.

  “Could you come here?” he asked me. “We want you to talk to Phoebe.”

  The scene was frozen in amber, written as history, decided for all time. Phoebe had her arms crossed over her chest and her eyebrows lowered. Her cheeks looked hollow, meaning she was probably biting them from the inside. The policeman was red where he wasn’t black and blue and looked a breath away from going for his gun.

  “Let me bring you up to date,” he said.

  “Let me bring you up to date,” Phoebe said. She turned to the polic
eman. “Patience knows me. I’m not stupid and I’m not blind and I’ve never been a liar.”

  “Gotcha,” the policeman said. He looked her up and down, checking out the floor-length royal blue velvet caftan, the eight strands of rope diamonds, the sixteen diamond and sapphire rings, the pear-shaped diamond earrings so heavy they made her earlobes droop. I could almost hear what he was thinking: this woman might or might not be a liar, but she was certainly a nut. He held out his hand to me. “I’m Jerry O’Reilly,” he said.

  “Pay McKenna,” I said. I found a chair, dragged it over, and sat down in it. Phoebe has a lot of staying power.

  “The problem we have here,” Jerry O’Reilly said, “is I think your friend is mistaken. She says—”

  “Patience knows what I’ve been saying,” Phoebe said. “Everybody knows what I’ve been saying. They heard me in Hoboken.”

  “Gotcha,” Jerry O’Reilly said. “The thing is, this Miss Train couldn’t have fallen backward like you said and then pitched forward. Nobody could do that unless they were pushed, and you say—”

  “Patience,” Phoebe turned her chair to face me. “I was standing right next to her. I was looking behind her trying to see up the tracks if the train was coming.”

  “She was that close to the edge?” I said. “She was so close you looked behind her and saw the train coming?”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Phoebe said. “I looked to see. I’m short. I spend a lot of time trying to look around other people to see what’s going on. I was looking past her back and nobody put a hand on her back.”

  “It’s a question of physics,” Jerry O’Reilly said in exasperation. “Maybe her knees buckled and she fell backward, but if she pitched forward after that, somebody had to be pushing her.”

  “Maybe she swayed,” I suggested.

  “She didn’t sway,” Phoebe said. “She fell, and her knees sort of collapsed. She almost fell into whoever was behind her, I don’t remember who. And nobody put a hand on her back and pushed her.”

  “You stand up and try it,” Jerry O’Reilly said. “You just stand right up and try it.”

  Phoebe ignored him. “We went into the subway station and we were a little nervous,” she said. “We were standing in a knot, sort of, huddled up for protection. We were talking about muggers and spooking ourselves and we kept getting closer to each other just in case. I wasn’t just standing next to her, I was almost leaning against her.”

  “He says you can talk some sense into her,” Jerry O’Reilly said, shooting his head to the side so that it pointed at Nick’s nose. “What about it?”

  I contemplated my cigarette. I contemplated my nose. I contemplated what Nick was going to say when he heard what I had to say. Then I told the truth.

  “If Phoebe says that’s what she saw,” I said, “that’s what she saw. If Phoebe says that’s what she saw, that’s probably what happened.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Nick said.

  “I told you,” Phoebe said.

  “Make it murder,” Jerry O’Reilly said. “I’ll listen to a murder. I won’t listen to a suspension of the laws of gravity.”

  “I’ll explain it again from the beginning,” Phoebe said.

  Jerry O’Reilly wasn’t having any. “Go home,” he said. “Levitate. Do whatever it is you do when you’re alone. I don’t care.”

  “I’m just trying,” Phoebe started.

  “I’m trying to take statements from witnesses who make sense,” Jerry O’Reilly said. “Someone will type this crap up for you. You can come down tomorrow and sign it. Get out of here.”

  Phoebe shrugged and started gathering up her string bag and evening wrap. Romance writers are the only women in America who still buy real 1950s-style date-dress evening wraps. O’Reilly shouted “Dooley” over our heads. Phoebe looked at him and frowned.

  “I’m really not trying to be obstructionist,” she said. “I just saw what I saw.”

  “That’s all right.” I patted her head. Everyone ends up patting Phoebe’s head. She’s so small and compact. “You go home,” I told her. “I’ll sit around and wait for Sarah.”

  “I’ll sit around and wait for Sarah,” Nick said—generously, in this case, because he wasn’t very pleased with either of us. “I have to stay here for Amelia and Caroline anyway. I’ll bring Sarah home when she’s made her statement.”

  “I might as well stick around,” I said. “I’m not going to get any sleep.”

  “Cancel your appointments,” Nick said. He looked worried. It is his contention that I do not eat, sleep, or relax anywhere near enough to keep me healthy.

  I made a vague gesture at the wall clock. “It’s quarter after seven and I’m due for a session at Images in less than two hours.”

  “PR?” Phoebe asked sympathetically.

  “Last time I was on television, I looked fuzzy,” I said. “According to my lady at Doubleday anyway.” I yawned.

  Caroline Dooley’s voice floated up from the far side of the room, squeaky and nervous.

  “The thing is, Officer, if I had to reconstruct the scene as I saw it, you see, I think I’d have to agree with Miss Damereaux about the sequence and—”

  Sarah was waiting for us at the rail. Her eyes were shining. Her squeamishness had been washed away by excitement.

  “Oh,” she said, breathless and agitated. “It is going to be a murder. It is.”

  SIX

  I DID NOT DO well at Images. They knew what I ought to look like. I knew what I did look like. There was no possible compromise. I have strong bones and wide eyes and high cheekbones. I could be the illegitimate child of John Lindsay and a full-blooded Cherokee. They thought I ought to look like Cheryl Tiegs. Or Christie Brinkley. Or Farrah Fawcett. I got out of there at quarter to twelve, nearly crazy from lack of sleep and more than murderous from arguing. I didn’t care how fuzzy I looked on television. I had no intention of turning into another cookie cutter imitation of every other blond WASP on the celebrity circuit. Images wanted to give me something called a “California cut.” The only thing I like that uses “California” as an adjective is avocados.

  I turned down Fifth Avenue, trying to decide what I thought of what had happened to Verna Train. I know people who can party till dawn, come home, take a shower, and show up at the office two hours later looking like they just returned from a vacation in Bali. I am not one of them. On seven hours’ sleep I am awake. On six, I am operative. Less than six leaves me temporarily stupid and emotionally schizophrenic.

  I hadn’t known Verna Train. I knew things about her—she was divorced; she wrote moderately successful contemporary romances; she was capable of physical aggression when angry or drunk or both. What I had was like a description under “Cast of Characters” at the beginning of a script. It was only a stencil. The stencil didn’t say anything to me. She had been unkind to Sarah. I hadn’t liked it.

  I liked the way I was thinking even less. Nick had reason for his suspicions. I do tend to see murder—cold, deliberate, and brutal—behind everything these days. Worse, I never escape from it. In the past two years I have spent all my time either involved in murders or writing about them. When I return from vacations, my mailbox is full of fan letters enclosing “something extra.” In the past six months, I have received a complete set of press clippings on the DeQuincy, Iowa, disembowelment murders; four sharp knives; a photo essay (amateur—Kodak snapshots pasted to typing paper) on an autopsy; and a detailed plan for the assassination of Claude Rains, who is already dead. That was what I was getting before the book came out, when I was just a picture and a name in newspaper stories. Once the book came out, I stopped opening fan mail, got a telephone number so unlisted even AT&T doesn’t know what it is, and started handing over any packages left on my doorstep to the bomb squad.

  Every time I thought about Verna Train dying, something inside me wanted it to be murder. I was not entirely unreasonable. Facts, after all, were facts. If Phoebe hadn’t been so sure of what she’d seen in the
subway station, I might have talked myself into believing a verdict of accidental death before I got five blocks downtown. Phoebe, however, was sure. Phoebe sees what she sees when she sees it. In a room full of distracted witnesses, Phoebe will be the one person with an accurate account of whatever happened. This is true even when Phoebe is drunk. She is more tenaciously connected to the world than the rest of us.

  I could not think of a single reason why anyone would want to murder Verna Train. Most murders are committed for money. Verna Train did not have real money. She did not have lasting fame, which meant she was worth more alive than dead to both her agent and her publisher. Someone with Phoebe’s or Amelia’s followings might generate enough ink in dying to sell a few books on her coffin, but for someone like Verna to get that kind of press, she would have to die spectacularly. Falling under a subway train would not be enough.

  Which left me where I had started—with Verna dead, possibly (probably) from suicide or subway accident There might be hidden motives—I’d known a few—but Verna was not well placed enough for any of the ones I could think of. The woman had had a minor career that looked on the way to a prolonged downswing when she died. She hadn’t had any clout.

  I hadn’t had any sleep. I stopped in the middle of a block, trying to make the dizziness go away and counting the hours since I’d had anything to eat. When I have gone without sleep, I lose my appetite. Since my body has almost no fat to draw on (I often think it does, but it doesn’t), the result is light-headedness, nausea, and a tendency to giggle. I was at Sixtieth Street. I had a distinct memory of a Hamburger Heaven at Fifty-seventh and Lexington. Hamburger Heavens make Roquefort cheeseburgers. I deserved a Roquefort cheeseburger.

  I was halfway down the long avenue block between Fifth and Madison when I saw the bookstore. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I was thinking about Verna. I felt the odd wrench in my stomach and the. sudden tightening of my nerves, but I didn’t realize what was wrong until I’d passed the display window.

  What was wrong was me. I backed up. There was a pyramid of books in the window, one of those ten-foot-high house-of-cards constructions revolving on a turntable. The largest part of the pyramid was taken up by copies of the new Judith Krantz. The second largest part was taken up by copies of the new V. C. Andrews. The tenth largest part was taken up by me. What I had seen was the black-and-white studio portrait Doubleday had commissioned for the back of my book, visible when the turntable presented its backside to the street.