Death's Savage Passion (6 page)

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.

This happened every fifteen seconds. It was like having my name in blinking neon lights.

I am not one of those writers who pretend to hate publicity. I want all the publicity I can get. I want to spend fifty weeks at the top of the New York
Times
bestseller list. I put up with Marilou Saunders to get on her talk show. I thank critics for bad reviews—if I happen to meet them at the kind of party where we are both expected to be civilized. I was not, however, ready for that window.

I paced back and forth in front of it, trying to decide what to think of it. I wondered how anyone ever got a book off a display like that. I considered the possibility that this bookstore didn’t sell books. It ordered books to make displays of, giving its oversensitive homosexual millionaire owners a chance to Show What They Could Do with Design. I felt dizzy again. I decided to go in.

There was a long, low table of books behind the revolving turntable. On that table were Judith Krantz’s book, and V. C. Andrews’ book, and mine. I picked up one of mine and turned it over and over in my hands. It was thick and heavy and felt good—about the weight of a doorstop, which is what most critics use books for. The studio portrait was also good. It looked like me. It didn’t look like a studio portrait.

I put the book back on the table. It looked very credible sitting there among all the other books. It looked like a real book.

I had actually written a real book.

Somebody had actually published the real book I had written.

In hardcover.

To be sold in bookstores.

Good
lord.

I was telling myself that panicking over good news was the mark of a lunatic when someone tapped the arm of my jacket and “ahemmed” politely in my ear.

“That’s a
very
good book,” the little voice said. “Very scary.”

I turned around. The girl standing behind me had her hands clasped at her belt and her face tortured into an expression of extravagantly expectant helpfulness. She was pale and wan and plain. Her hair (dull brown, wiry) was a mess. One look in her eyes and you knew she
hated
working in that store.

She peered at me through heavy horn-rimmed glasses.

“Miss
McKenna,”
she said. “My
goodness.”

Nobody in New York says “My goodness.” Nobody wears four-inch horn-rims either, but there we were. This girl’s horn-rims were purely ornamental. There was no magnification in the glass.

I gave her the best smile I could manage with a head full of sleepless confusion and said, “I’ve never seen it in a bookstore before. Then I saw it in the window, and—”

“I just read it,” the girl said. “It was wonderful.” Her voice was very firm. I wondered if it would be as firm if she were talking to V. C. Andrews. V. C. Andrews doesn’t know the difference between the English language and a banana split.

The girl was kneeling on the avocado green carpet, pulling copies of my book from the drawer in the side of the display table.

“If you have a minute, it would really help if you signed some of these,” she said. “In this neighborhood they like them signed if we can get them signed. We have signed copies of the Krantz book, of course, because we always have signed copies of the Krantz book, we always give her a party, but if you have a minute—”

She thrust ten copies of my book into my arms. She picked up twice that many for herself.

“If you sign them on the title page,” she said, “we can’t return them. It’s as good as a sale.” She grinned.

I grinned back. “Why doesn’t PR tell me these things?”

“Oh,” she waved a hand in the air.
“PR.”

I know an ally when I see one. I hooked the books under my arms. “If you’ve got a place for me to sit,” I said.

She was already halfway across the carpet to the back of the store. “We have a little office,” she said. “I can give you some coffee. All you have to do is sign your name. Then when people come in asking for them inscribed”—she made the word sound like bad Park Avenue French for something unprintable—“I can give them some of these.” She pushed open a heavy metal door and held it until I walked through. “Anybody stupid enough to pay half a million dollars for a one-bedroom apartment,” she said, “is stupid enough to feel superior about a signature.”

The office was small and cramped and functional, with a rickety little desk and a minuscule chair wedged between unsteady piles of books. At least half the books were paperbacks. At least 90 percent of the paperbacks were romances. There was an overflowing green tin ashtray on a bookshelf above my head. I took it down, lit a cigarette, and dropped the match among the butts.

“Just your name,” the girl said again. “If it was before publication, I’d have you date them, but that’s the only kind of date these people want. Like other people will see the book on the coffee table and pick it up and read the date and think the guy who owns it has some kind of in.”

“I could always backdate it,” I said.

“Whatever for?”

“It would be nice if you actually sold some of these things. I’d like to be read, for God’s sake.”

The girl dismissed this with another wave. “These people don’t read,” she said. “I mean, they do, but they read trashy paperback originals. I mean, I like trashy paperback originals. Even so. These people pick up three impressive-looking hardcovers and a dozen Phoebe Damereaux and pretend the Damereaux are for their invalid mothers. If you know what I mean.”

“I know Phoebe Damereaux,” I said. “Long may she wave.”

“Yeah,” the girl admitted. “She’s pretty good. And she’s in hardcover now, so I suppose she doesn’t count. But you see what I’m saying.”

I said I did and started signing books. I was very tired. My signature looked like a secret code for the mining of Haiphong Harbor. In Vietnamese.

“What I heard,” I told her, “is nobody’s reading romance novels any more.”

“Nobody’s reading the lines,” she nodded emphatically, making a wild gesture at the towers of paperbacks surrounding us. “Look at these returns. God, you should see the kind of trouble we have with those. Sabotage. I’m not kidding.”

“Sabotage?”

“With the dumps. You know, the display things. People come in and destroy other people’s dumps, or move them, or hide them. And then there’s Harlequin. They want to opt out of the romance book centers and have us carry only Harlequin, which is ridiculous because Harlequin doesn’t sell as well among the yuppies as some of the others, and what we have here is a yuppie market. Then everybody is buying everybody else out, and lines are folding right and left, and God knows what all. It’s a mess.”

I took a deep drag on my cigarette. My signature was beginning to look like a biology class drawing of a frog.

“What about the contemporaries?” I asked her. “You know a writer named Verna Train?”

That took her a while. She seemed to be communing with a central book file located somewhere in her cerebellum.

“Verna Train,” she said finally. “Charla Menlowe.”

“What?”

“It’s like a clump,” she said. “Like actresses. Brooke Adams and Karen Allen are a clump. They look alike. They take the same kinds of parts. You see? Verna Train and Charla Menlowe are a clump, they do the same stuff. They’re good enough to have an audience, but they’re nothing special. But people recognize the names, you see, because they were all over the place during the boom, so if they did something else, we’d want to handle it, we’d make some money just from the name recognition. But not their romance stuff. Not anymore.”

“Right,” I said. I knew all this already.

“In fact,” she said, “that’s what’s happening. There’s a brand-new line coming out in a few months taking all these sorts of middle-level people and putting them into romantic suspense. We’re very excited about it. Not that we’re excited about romantic suspense—that’s not going to go anywhere. But the recognition factor, that’s something else. You know about romantic suspense?”

I knew more than I wanted to know about romantic suspense. I knew more than she knew about the line she was describing. I was glad she thought it would be successful, especially since Nick didn’t. I bent over the fifteenth book and forced the pen to make a signature. It looked vaguely like a crossword puzzle grid.

“You know,” she said. “All that infighting doesn’t help. The kind of readers who buy the line stuff don’t want to think of their favorite writers as—as bitches.”

“The genre is doomed,” I told her.

“Probably,” she said. “But some of these women are monsters, believe me. And it gets in the papers, and it gets around. Take that Amelia Samson. There’s this story going around, it was in
Romantic Times,
that when Miss Train started losing sales and her publisher wanted to drop her, Miss Samson could have stopped them but she refused. And they’ve known each other forever. They’re supposed to be friends. Some people say Miss Samson even did a little pushing to get Miss Train ousted. What respectable yuppie wants to be associated with a person like that?”

All the respectable yuppies I knew
behaved
like that, but I didn’t say so. I didn’t say the story didn’t sound like Amelia, although it didn’t. “I don’t suppose it’s hurt Amelia any,” I told her.

The little girl shook her head emphatically. “It’s hurt Amelia Samson a lot. That and the fact that she’s still living in 1921. But believe me, that sort of nonsense doesn’t do anyone any good.”

My signature now looked like a route map for the N train.

It was time to quit.

I
T WAS THE BEGINNING
of the lunch rush, one of those times when the streets of New York are crowded with cars and people frozen into immobility and distinctly unhappy about it. Even if I could have found a cab, I wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere in it. I would just have traded crowd claustrophobia for traffic jam. I started downtown on foot, dodging arm-swinging secretaries in pastel linen skirts and ankle-strap shoes, ignoring “Walk” and “Don’t Walk” signs. “Walk” and “Don’t Walk” signs don’t mean anything on Lexington Avenue at half past twelve. Crowds form an unbroken stream. In the restaurants, they form the breathing equivalent of an unsplittable atom. I took a look into Hamburger Heaven. Even if I could fight my way to the counter, I’d never carve out enough room to eat. I let three girls in dirndl minidresses and Art Deco legwarmers push past me and took comfort in the fact that Dana never ate lunch. If Dana ever started eating lunch, her wardrobe would become inoperative.

I turned south and west, running a little to keep myself awake. It got the adrenaline flowing, but it didn’t clear my head.

In the lobby of Dana’s building, the stream was running against me. Assistant art directors in black tights and black turtlenecks and rose jumpers, assistant personnel directors in navy blue wool and frilly white blouses, assistant editors in tweed skirts and “good” (single-ply) cashmere sweaters and last year’s slingbacks—all of them were on their way out of the elevators and into the street. I ducked through the nearest pair of air-lock doors, realized I was in a “30th Floor Only” car, and ducked out again. I waited by a set of doors with a sign on them saying “22-49,” flattened myself against the wall to let the horde disgorge, then darted in to push the button for “26.” At certain times of day, finding the right elevator going in the right direction in a New York office building can be the emotional equivalent of storming the beach at Iwo Jima.

The twenty-sixth floor was one of the reasons I’d hired Dana. Most agents work out of their apartments, or rent two- or three-room suites in modest little buildings in the Forties. Dana had the entire floor. She had three telephone banks. She had wall-to-wall Bigelows on the floor and framed publicity posters for half a dozen bestsellers on her walls. The bestsellers were a little dated—Dana used to specialize in mainstream fiction, which has been losing out to the genres and the nonfiction how-to books
(Fifteen Minutes to Thinner Thighs and Your First Million)
—but they were very famous. Some of them were famous enough to have made six-figure movie deals before anybody had ever heard of six-figure movie deals.