Death's Savage Passion (17 page)

“They won’t buy her drugs for her,” I said.

“Oh, they’d do that if they had to.” Angelo gave me a limp wrist. He was very proud of his limp wrist. “Fortunately, Ms. Saunders has her own connections in that regard. What they won’t give her is an alibi.”

“Alibi?”

“Some bimbo says our dear Ms. Saunders was hanging around when she—the bimbo—got poisoned, and apparently she was, or she doesn’t remember, which is more likely, but anyway, they won’t do it for her. They’ll make sure nobody talks to her, but they won’t lie to the police for her.” He gave me his dimple again. “I won’t do it either,” he said.

I was very, very cautious. Even through terminal fatigue, I knew how important this was. “She asked you to give her an alibi for a time someone was poisoned?”

“She asked everybody,” Angelo said. “She asked the night clerk, and he isn’t even here in the middle of the afternoon—the alibi time, sweetheart.”

A red light stuck in the wall over the mirror started to flash. Angelo made agitated stabs at my eyelids with what looked like a surgical instrument.

“That’s two minutes,” he said. “You have to get moving.”

Under other circumstances, I might have behaved myself. Being on television frightens me. I don’t have that much to say. What I do have to say is probably actionable. I am also overly aware that anything I say is going to be heard by my mother. No matter what my mother says in public, she is very careful to watch every show I’m on and read every word I’ve written.

This time I was too angry to care. I kept seeing the faces of Tony Marsh, and Nick, and even Phoebe when I told them Marilou and Sarah had been in that room. That, more than the fact that someone had killed Sarah and nearly killed me, fueled my rage. I heard my name called over a loudspeaker. I felt the clammy hand of a production assistant on my back. I saw a light go on over the curtained entrance to the set. The next thing I knew, I was trying to walk sideways across the stage while smiling directly at the camera with the light on over it.

Marilou Saunders was sprawled in a paisley wingback chair, hands folded in her lap, legs crossed at the knee, eyebrows arched. She was wearing a yellow peekaboo blouse just this side of legal and a skirt so straight it looked poured in concrete. Behind her was a publicity poster for her romantic suspense novel and a minidump of advance copies. The painting showed a man and a woman climbing a rope over a plunging canyon, woman first, man bringing up the rear and kissing her ankle passionately in the process. The woman was wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch high-heeled sandals. I took one of the books and stuffed it into my pocket.

“Patience!” Marilou said deliriously as I sat in the wingback opposite her. She snatched a copy of
my
book from the desk and held it in the air, backward, so my picture was showing. This let her audience know I had written a book without making them feel they knew enough about it to have to go out and buy it.

Marilou turned to the camera. “Well!” she said, leaving the country of delirium for the realm of orgasm. “We’ve been reading about you in the papers again, haven’t we? I believe the New York
Post
even had your—obituary?” She gave this last a broad interpretation and a wink. I had a sudden vision of her announcing the starvation toll in Ethiopia with a giggle. It was awesome to contemplate.

“Well!” Marilou gasped again. “You’re not dead, are you?”

You couldn’t have held me down with cast-iron constraints: Marilou’s face worked like a mechanical doll’s with a nervous tic. She had a copy of the
Post
by her chair. She was grinning at me.

“You certainly don’t look dead,” she trilled.

“No thanks to you,” I said.

The smile never faltered. The eyes never stopped rolling. The words, however, were mangled. Marilou Saunders croaked.

“You had to just leave me there?” I asked her. “You couldn’t have waited for the ambulance? And what about
Sarah?”

“We’re on the
air,”
Marilou hissed. The hissing was new. Nothing else was. Eyes continued to roll, smile continued to proclaim sunshine and light for the world. “You can’t
do
this.”

“They found Sarah’s body yesterday,” I said. “She’d been dead for four days. She must have been dead when you
left.”

Jerky little hand signals were added to the rolling eyes and the smile. “I’m going to have your
ass.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” someone in the back said. “We were broadcasting. That went
out.
What’s the matter with that asshole in the booth?”

“You just said asshole on a nationwide hookup,” somebody else said.

“Why don’t we break for a commercial?” Marilou giggled.

Nothing happened.
Nothing happened.
The same lights continued blinking on the same cameras. The same cameramen continued to point the same cameras in our direction. They could only hear the director in the booth, not us, but by then even I thought the director should have intervened.

Marilou staggered to her feet. “You
bastard,”
she screamed in the direction of the control booth. “You’ve always been after my ass, you goddamned self-righteous son of a
bitch
—”

All the lights in the studio went out.

Marilou looked around the darkened set, blinked, and threw herself into her wingback. “You bitch,” she said to me. “The two of you had it planned. That black bastard has had it in for me from the beginning, the Christ-damned stuck-up son of a whore, and this time you were in on it, goddamn you.”

“I was in on what?” I said. “You’re the one running around refusing to talk to people. You’re the one who said you were never there, which you were, because I saw you there, and how do I know you didn’t kill Sarah and put her body in Caroline’s apartment?”

“That’s slander,” Marilou said. “I can sue you for slander and I’m going to sue you for slander and if they take me off the air I’m going to sue you for more than that, you and that black son of a bitch who calls himself a television director.”

“Sarah English is dead,” I shouted. “Where did you go? What do you think you’re trying to get away with? If you didn’t do anything, why are you hiding?”

“Who the screwing frog do you think you are?”

The “screwing frog” activated something in the back. We were suddenly surrounded by people. Two nervous young men with bantamweight builds pulled at Marilou’s arms, trying to drag her into the wings. Nobody touched me—in heels I’m almost six three, and can look formidable—but I was cordoned off by people. It made me laugh. They’d used their heavies for me, but I was the one willing to go. Marilou was taking her two bodyguards apart.

“I’ll tell you now what I told you then,” she screamed at me. “I’m not going to let that little bitch drag me into her crap, not for any price, do you hear me?”

“What little bitch?” I screamed back. “Who are you talking about?”

She broke away from the bantamweights and came at me—fast. My bodyguards didn’t have a chance to react. She had her nails into the silk of my shirtwaist before anyone even knew she was moving. She had ripped the right lapel from the dress front before they had a chance to get to her.

“I know what you’re doing,” she hissed at me, “and I’m not having any, McKenna.
I’m not having any.
You can take that home and stuff it where the sun don’t shine and then you can tell
her.”

This time two of the biggest ones got a grip on her.

I
HAD TO GO
home to change my dress. The Network offered to buy me another—take the dress size, send someone to Saks, deliver an identical replacement—but it would have taken too long. I wanted some peace and quiet before I met Amelia. My refusal made the fat little emissary from middle management very unhappy. I might hold the Network responsible. I might sue.

“Of course Miss Saunders wasn’t herself today,” the emissary said. “You have to excuse Miss Saunders.”

“Miss Saunders was as much herself as I’ve ever seen her,” I said. “You ought to put a leash on that woman.”

“Of course, if she knows anything about a crime, I’m sure she’d be happy to testify,” the emissary said. “Our understanding, though, is that—”

“She doesn’t have to testify,” I said, “just talk to the police. And I don’t care what your understanding is. I was there. So was she.”

“Ah,” the emissary said. “Well. We will of course talk to Miss Saunders about that. In fact, someone is talking to Miss Saunders about that right now. However—”

I dismissed him. I knew what “however” meant. I also knew Marilou could no longer get away with it. My story was becoming more plausible by the minute. Hers was beginning to look sick. Tony Marsh had his body.

I refused the offer of a limousine and took a cab to the West Side, feeling very high. I thought I finally had a handle on this thing. I felt in control of it. I thought I knew how to approach it.

I ran into my apartment, hot to tell Phoebe all about it, and found a note on the kitchen table. “Have taken Adrienne to Eeyore’s,” it said. Eeyore’s is a children’s bookstore. I crumpled the note into a ball and threw it into the yellow plastic garbage pail Phoebe had acquired while I was out. I considered going to Eeyore’s to find them. I rejected the idea. As far as I knew, Adrienne did not yet know her mother was dead. Talking to Adrienne about Sarah dying was going to take all afternoon whenever I did it. It might take several days. I couldn’t break that up to have lunch with Amelia.

I called Nick’s office. His secretary answered, murmured gracious hellos, and said Nick was in conference. The conference wasn’t going anywhere. If I got in a cab right this minute, Nick would be ready to see me when I arrived.

I changed into a skirt and sweater and flat-heeled boots and headed for the door.

Nick’s office is in the far West Forties, in one of those buildings that look designed to house novelty companies and porno publishers on their way to bankruptcy. In the beginning, when Nick had just left Nader’s Raiders and his partner had just escaped from a white-shoe Wall Street firm, the address had been functional. The rent was minimal for Manhattan. Now that Nick and David were doing well, they were reluctant to move. Their clients like coming to Eleventh Avenue. Eleventh Avenue had atmosphere. Eleventh Avenue showed that Life was Real and Life was Earnest. Since most of their clients were either romance writers or small romance packagers, this was supposed to make sense.

It did not make sense to me. I had lived in terrible buildings in terrible neighborhoods when I was working cheap. To my mind, you worked, you advanced, and you moved into something more comfortable. Preferably on Columbus Avenue in the Seventies.

I had to ring six buzzers before someone let me into the lobby. I had to ring six more buzzers before the elevator door opened. The owners and occupants obviously thought a surfeit of buzzers would defeat the average mugger, who was reputed to be too stupid to count and too strung out to remember anything from one second to the next.

I had to stand under a prism viewer before Nick’s secretary let me into the office. She came to the door and opened it for me. She didn’t want me to get the idea she had anything against me personally.

“He’s in the back by himself,” she said, closing the door behind me. “As soon as I said you were coming over, he locked himself in his office with a lot of papers.”

“I’ll talk him out of it,” I said.

I plowed into the back and barged into Nick’s office without knocking. I was expected. Like all secretaries, Nick’s called ahead.

I dropped into his client’s chair, the one that his mother had bought for her first apartment. In 1948. “I wanted to talk to somebody,” I said. “I think I have something worked out. I wanted you to look at it.”

“Why me? Why not Phoebe?” He ran a hand through his hair. “That’s what usually happens around here. You and Phoebe get into trouble, as much trouble as you can think of, and then as soon as you’re arrested or somebody ties you up in a closet, I’m supposed to be the cavalry and rescue you.”

“Phoebe took Adrienne to Eeyore’s,” I said.

“You don’t want to talk to Adrienne about Sarah,” Nick said.

“I’ll get around to it,” I said.

He pushed the papers on his desk a little farther toward the center and tipped his swivel chair toward the wall. He looked exhausted and none too happy with me. I expected another lecture. Instead, he said, “Tell me your beautiful solution.” He said it the way an overtried father would tell his prodigal son, “Give me the excuse this time.”

I hesitated. I decided I was being silly. Nick is always like that, in the beginning. “It’s not a solution,” I told him. “It’s a problem. I worked out a chain of events—” I stopped. I threw out an empty Merit box and extracted a fresh one from my bag. “You remember the night Sarah arrived and you told me about Dana’s suspense line and you said she had her ass to the wind?” I said. “That’s not what I hear from everybody else. What I hear from everybody else is the idea’s going like wildfire.”

“If it is, then she doesn’t have her ass to the wind anymore.”

“Right,” I said.

Nick shrugged. “I told you what the projections were. Maybe they were wrong. If they were wrong, Gallard Rowson is going to make a lot of money. So is Dana.”

“Could they be that wrong?”

He grinned. “Remember Farret Paperback Originals?” he said. “Of course they could be that wrong. This is a more pleasant way to be wrong. Maybe the books aren’t as bad as everybody thought they would be. Maybe celebrity names are enough.”

“Mmm,” I said. I had a copy of Marilou’s book in my bag. I had a terrible feeling I ought to read it.

“Tell me about your timetable,” Nick said.

I took a blank piece of paper from his desk and a pen from his pencil holder. I wrote “Sequence” at the top of the page.

“First,” I said, “Verna dies. That’s Thursday night, Friday morning. Don’t frown at me like that. First, Verna dies. Then Sarah dies. I’m poisoned. Marilou is in Dana’s reception room and says she isn’t. Caroline’s office gets ripped up. You see anything wrong with that?”