Death's Savage Passion (22 page)

“Where are you?”

“Trying to catch Dana before she leaves the office.”

“McKenna—”

I hung up. If Phoebe spent any time thinking about it, she’d realize
no one
went looking for Dana at five-thirty. Dana liked to do things during business hours. Dana broke routine only for large deals involving multimillion-dollar offers from German paperback houses. I was hoping it had been a dead week. I didn’t want to find Dana or talk to her. I wanted to search her files.

Somewhere in those files was a copy of Verna Train’s romantic suspense novel. Sarah’s novel wouldn’t be there, but I had a copy of that at home. I had to have the two manuscripts together to be absolutely sure.

I got off the elevator at twenty-six to find a dead floor. The lights were off in the reception room. The typewriter was put away. The green Dripmaster had been washed, dried, and turned on its head. I sat down. The manuscript was the most important thing, but not the only thing. Now that I was in Dana’s office, I could think of a few items it wouldn’t hurt to clean up before I got home to Nick’s apoplexy and Tony’s inevitable skepticism.

Like where Sarah’s body had been when the police searched the office.

Like how Sarah and I had both managed to take arsenic when it had only been intended for one of us.

Like, where the arsenic had come from.

I got out of my chair and headed for the center offices, trying to think of a reasonable explanation for being there if someone happened to be wandering around. First the general file room, then Dana’s office. I could always say I had come to look for Dana. No one would believe it, but I could say it.

I was out of the office and down the hall before it hit me. I had to back all the way up to be sure I wasn’t imagining things.

The green plastic Dripmaster.

The day Sarah died, it had been a blue plastic Dripmaster.

I walked across the carpet and touched it. On the floor in the corner I could see a small plastic dish of rat pellets. I had a sudden vision of myself spilling coffee into that corner while Sarah lurched around the reception room. There had been no plastic dish of rat pellets there then. There
had
been such a dish when I first came in to see Dana. A full dish.

All she’d had to do was dump the dish into the Dripmaster. She could have done it with Sarah in the room. She could have shielded the Dripmaster with her body while she “made coffee,” electric coffeemaker blend plus rat pellets. The water would have dissolved enough of them as it went through.

When she found me lying on the floor with the line open to 911, all she had to do was chuck the Dripmaster, hollow out one or two Halloween candies and put pellets in them, hide Sarah’s body, and wait. Of course, she hadn’t realized there would be Marilou to contend with. As it turned out, it didn’t matter. Marilou didn’t want to talk any more than Dana wanted her to.

Where had she hidden Sarah’s body? Where, for that matter, had she hidden the Dripmaster and the plastic dish for the rat pellets?

I started back toward the central offices.

The halls were dead dark and I was a little punchy. I wandered in and out of offices, around and around corridors, up and down back hallways. In the dark, Dana’s offices seemed endless, convoluted, sinister. In a suite full of paper, there are paper rustles, paper sighs, paper complaints. Paper shudders and snaps in the ghost breezes, the ghost drafts. Writers’ offices, literary agents’ offices, publishing houses all sound like haunted mansions after dark.

I held my breath, tried a door, looked in, found a ladies’ room. I tried another door and found a storage closet full of oversized black plastic garbage bags. The garbage bags made me hesitate, but I couldn’t decide what they made me think of. I closed the door and moved on. I could always come back, I told myself. My subconscious added, “in the morning.” The last thing I wanted was to go wandering around those offices any longer than I had to.

I no longer wanted to go wandering around those offices at all. I have, at various times in my life, broken into offices, apartments, and hotel suites after hours. I am always very brave going in and very chicken when I get there. I was very chicken now. Dana’s offices were spooking the hell out of me. I was beginning to think I’d arrived on the tail wind of a brainstorm. I should have tried to get Tony to listen to me first. Then if I met too much resistance, I could have tried to find out for myself. I could—

I had been moving while I was thinking. In the dark I hadn’t noticed the door. Even if I had, I’d have had no reason to expect it to be open. It was a big, ugly, splintered-wood double door, the kind often locked and barred to make a wall in a makeshift room. There had been “walls” like that at Farret and Writing Enterprises. I was so used to ancient-door-used-as-wall, I would never have tried to open it. I didn’t have to. I leaned against it. It pitched me into the hall.

It pitched me into more than the hall. It sent me sprawling headfirst across a utility corridor into a set of freight elevator doors. Those, too, were ancient and wooden. They swung on hinges instead of sliding on tracks. They opened whether the carriage was on that floor or not.

I caught myself right before I fell into the tangle of wires on top of the elevator cage. Caught myself and stopped, looking down at the gears and cables and electric lines.

Looking down at the body of Radd Stassen, his ankle caught in a rope, his mouth stretched into a maniac’s grin.

I was wondering what had made him die grinning when I heard her voice at the end of the hall.

“Some people,” she said, “are hell-bent on suicide.”

It was a duet for stringed instruments: Dana at one end, me in front of the swinging doors of that freight elevator, fuses blown and windows blocked by black construction paper. We were two ghosts talking in the dark.

I couldn’t see if she was holding a weapon. I couldn’t see her face.

“That’s where Sarah’s body was,” I said. “On top of the elevator cage. When the police wanted the elevator, they rang for it. It wouldn’t have occurred to them to open the doors before the cage got here. Or you ran down and sent the elevator up a few floors. Either way.”

“Why in the name of God would I want to kill a first novelist—a first
romantic suspense
novelist, for God’s sake?”

“For the same reason you had to kill him,” I gestured at Radd Stassen. “The Gallard Rowson line’s a sham, Dana. Ghostwritten from start to finish, contract or no contract. Max Brady did most of it. I sent you Sarah’s manuscript and you stole it whole. Mostly the slush pile isn’t worth bothering with, but Sarah was an exception. I kept thinking it was Verna who must have stolen it, and as long as I did, things wouldn’t come together. Verna was supposed to have stolen Amelia’s outline, but I’m beginning not to think so. No matter what she told Amelia. I think you stole that, too.”

“Ask Amelia’s little secretary. She says it was Verna.”

“You could have paid her for that.” I started inching away from the elevator shaft. Even if Dana didn’t have a weapon, she could rush me. If she rushed me, I might lose my balance and fall. I didn’t want to end up on the top of that elevator cage with Radd Stassen’s body.

Unfortunately, Dana was between me and the exit. The only way I could move was back toward the windows, into a corner.

“Gallard Rowson wouldn’t take ghostwritten,” I said. “That was in the contract. They would have ruined you if they’d found out what you were doing.”

“Gallard Rowson takes what I give them. I don’t tell anybody anything they don’t want to hear.”

“You used to have a lot of hot-shit writers, but you don’t anymore,” I said. “You got into genre much too late, so you had to go all out. You had no track record in packaging. You had to give Gallard Rowson something. They wanted brand names and celebrities really writing their own books. They wanted personal revelations they could sell to the readers.”

“It’s been very successful. The initial subscription is through the ceiling.”

“It won’t stay that way if the books are awful. There isn’t any way you could give Gallard Rowson what they were asking for. Marilou Saunders can’t write, and neither can the rest of your celebrities. And your romance writers aren’t romantic suspense writers. You had to have the books and the plots and the characters, not just the bylines. And you had only one way to get them. Ghosts. Max. Cheating.”

“So what?”

“If it came out, Gallard Rowson would dump you.”

“Maybe. And maybe not.”

“You couldn’t take the chance, Dana. You’re the packager. Gallard Rowson pays the advances, but the authors contract with you. They work for you. A few of those people probably wanted, and got, guarantees. Like Marilou Saunders. Whether the book is published or not, they get paid. Whether it makes royalties or not, they get paid. And you pay them.”

“This is getting positively baroque,” Dana said.

I took a deep breath. Was I imagining it, or was Radd Stassen beginning to smell? I was probably imagining it, but imagining it was enough.

“It wouldn’t have mattered if Jane Herman hadn’t sold Sarah’s novel to Caroline. If Sarah had sold it somewhere else, you could have blamed Verna for stealing it, but with it coming out of your own agency, you were going to get looked at more closely than you could allow. And you couldn’t afford that. You had to make the whole situation go away. And you almost did.”

“No ‘almost’ about it, Patience. Truly.”

“Radd Stassen was checking into Max Brady, so you had to get rid of him. Maybe he found something. You put Sarah’s body in a big plastic garbage bag and hid it here somewhere and then you had to stash it and you knew she’d be found, so you—what? Put it in a suitcase? You took it up the freight elevator in her building, that you must have done. And you set fire to the paper in there because you needed to call attention to Caroline. To anyone but yourself.”

“Does this get better as it goes along?”

“You were looking for copies of Sarah’s manuscript. You went out to Holbrook and searched her house. You got Max all worked up and made sure he’d do your dirty work at Caroline’s office—”

“No,” Dana said. “That I didn’t do. I got him worked up, yes, but Caroline’s office was a bonus. I hadn’t expected that. It did save me some work.”

“And it got you the keys.”

“Oh yes. But I’d have got the keys anyway, Patience. One way or the other.”

“You killed Verna because she was going to blow it. She realized it was Sarah’s manuscript you were putting out as hers. What did you do—tell her it was a ghost deal? And when she found out it wasn’t, she was going to talk? You killed Sarah because she would have talked, and she’d have insisted on her book being published as her book. You killed Radd Stassen because he was getting too close.”

“But nobody killed Verna,” Dana said gently. “Nobody could have. The police have gone on record with that.”

“I was watching a demonstration today,” I told her. “Self-defense techniques for rape attempts. I know how it was done, Dana. I know how the arsenic got into the coffee and how it got into the Halloween candy. I know everything but what happened to poor Radd Stassen. You’ll probably tell me.”

“No,” Dana said.

I took the “little silver thing” out of my pocket. “This is yours,” I said. “I must have taken it off you that day in the reception room. It’s been bothering me ever since. You must have been moving Sarah’s body and I must have seen. They said I wouldn’t let go of it in the emergency room.”

The silence was thick, heavy, motionless. I could feel her at the other end of the hall, shifting from foot to foot, getting ready to move toward me. I started to panic. Worse, I started to imagine things. I thought I heard the sound of the safety being clicked off on a gun. I thought I heard the sound of a knife being unsheathed. I thought a lot of things that couldn’t be true, because none of them were Dana’s style. Dana would push. Dana would poison. Dana would never handle a weapon. It would be much too obvious.

Besides, I was looking right at her. Her hands were free.

I got my hands on the windowsill and pulled myself up until I was sitting on it, my legs swinging in the air. If she came too close, I could always kick. In the darkness, I might get away with it. I tried to keep my arms and torso tense, my legs loose and limber. I tried to remember what friends had told me about self-defense. It didn’t help.

Dana was coming toward me, slowly, shuffling down the hall.

“I didn’t know we’d sold that damn manuscript until you brought that little hick up here,” she said. “I thought I had the thing taped. Jane must have said something, but I didn’t realize it was the same one. If you hadn’t brought Sarah up here, there really would have been a mess.”

“This isn’t a mess?”

“This is messy,” Dana said. “There’s a difference.”

She fumbled with something, made a sound like breaking plastic, sighed. A flashlight went on in my face.

“If you don’t get off that window,” she said, “I’m going to break your ankle.”

“I’ll kick you,” I said.

“Don’t be childish,” she said.

“Stop,” Phoebe said. “Or I’ll shoot.”

It was so absurd, we were both caught in a kind of suspended animation. The idea of Phoebe (Weiss) Damereaux, four feet eleven, 130 pounds, everything-would-be-all-right-if-you’d-only-eat-more, pointing a gun at someone and spouting trite dialogue from a horse opera was enough to give anyone pause.

It gave Dana the idea she should turn around. She did, moving very slowly, pivoting on one heel, frowning.

As soon as she had her back to me, I jumped her.

I had her on the floor before I realized she had nothing but the flashlight in her hands after all.

W
E PUT SARAH DOWN
in what might very well have been the last private cemetery plot in Manhattan. I had to bribe my Aunt Eugenie (who owned the plot), and we had to agree to cremation and a silver urn in a marble box (to save space; Eugenie had every intention of being buried there, too), but we did it. Adrienne insisted on it. In the week since Dana Morton had been arrested, Adrienne had organized her grief. There were rituals to be performed, courtesies to be observed, poetic balances to be maintained. We brought Sarah’s body to St. Thomas’s churchyard in a stretch limousine. Everybody wore black.