Death's Savage Passion (7 page)

I rapped my knuckles against the receptionist’s desk, smiled a greeting, and took a very full, very black cup of coffee from the blue plastic Dripmaster on the end table next to the John Homans couch. I looked at the little plastic dish of rat pellets on the floor in the corner and wondered if there was anywhere in New York without a rodent problem (cockroaches are not a problem; cockroaches are an Alternative Population). I swallowed the coffee in one long chug and headed for Dana’s office. The receptionist would buzz me through, but I wasn’t worried about interrupting anything. Dana does not see people in her office during lunch. Dana sees them on the phone during lunch.

She was getting off the phone as I walked in.

“You wouldn’t believe who that was,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe
what
that was.”

“Haven’t had any sleep either, I take it.” I dropped into a chair and started searching for cigarettes.

“That was some idiot in PR over at Gallard Rowson,” Dana said. “She’s got an idea to promote Verna’s book. She wants to put Verna’s bio on the back cover and start the text with”—Dana paused dramatically—“‘She lived dangerously and died violently, but before she did, she left us this book.’”

“Well,” I said. “The syntax is interesting.”

“Oh, come now,” Dana said. “Doubleday can’t be that bad.”

“Doubleday isn’t bad at all,” I said. “It’s PR. PR people aren’t Doubleday, or Dortman & Hodges, or Avon, or Austin, Stoddard & Trapp. PR people are PR people. They have schools for them.”

“I suppose they must,” Dana said.

I found my cigarettes wedged into the envelope of my American Express bill. I extracted them. Dana was fussing with papers on her desk, looking for something that wasn’t there. I found a pack of Monk’s Inn matches, lit up, and threw the spent match and a handful of scrap paper into Dana’s Steuben glass ashtray.

“I thought you were bringing Sarah English with you,” she muttered. “Now what the hell—” She brushed her short, Vidal Sassooned hair out of her eyes. “I’ve lost the specs, of course. I’ll have Fanny bring in another set.” She buzzed through on her desk phone. “You’ve got to tell Miss English to come in and talk to Jane Herman. As long as she’s in the city, we might as well get things straightened out.”

“Jane Herman?”

Dana sighed impatiently. “Jane sold Miss English’s book. I don’t read unsolicited mail anymore. Even recommended unsolicited mail.” Her mouth twisted wryly. “Maybe I should start. That was the best romantic suspense this office has seen yet, and Jane didn’t have the sense to submit it to our line. She just shot it straight off to Austin, Stoddard & Trapp. Without even telling me.”

“I thought your line had to have brand-name authors.”

“And celebrities,” Dana said. “Yes, it does. Gallard Rowson took one look at the competition and insisted on a hook. Assholes.”

“Right,” I said.

“Not that it wasn’t a good idea,” Dana said again. “It was a great idea. You should see the orders. You should see the subscriptions. Subscriptions are sales. The readers want celebrities.”

“Figures,” I said.

Dana took a pile of proofs out of a drawer and tossed them to me.
Passionate Intrigues
was written in red and black script across the top of each cover. The cover paintings bled into the spines. The one for
Mysteries of the Heart
showed a man and a woman, locked in lecherous embrace, dangling from a rope suspended from the bottom of a glider descending into the Grand Canyon at dusk. The man had his lips as close to the woman’s nipple as genre romance covers will allow, which meant he was half a breath from swallowing it. The woman was wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch high-heeled sandals.

“The competition is awful,” Dana said. “Judy Sullivan over at Walker. Bernstein and Marcel—you know Bernstein and Marcel? They’re general agents, but they somehow managed to sew up half the decent mystery writers in the world, it seems like, and most of romance. They’re packaging for Avon and they’ve got
everybody.”

“You’ve got Verna Train,” I said.

“Oh yes,” Dana said. “I’ve got Ivy Samuels Tree and Hazel Ganz writing as Harriet Lowry and God knows who else. I’ve got the names; I’m just not sure I’ve got the quality. What does Hazel know about romantic suspense?” She tapped her teeth with the tip of her silver Tiffany T-pen. Then she put the pen in her pocket. She was careful to position the T-shaped clip exactly in the center of the linen flap. “You wouldn’t want to try romantic suspense?” she suggested. “I could pry your Jeri Andrews pseudonym out of Farret.”

“Jeri Andrews has retired,” I said.

“I was afraid of that.” There was a knock on the door. Dana called “Come in” and sat looking regal while a thin, pimply-faced secretary scurried to the desk with a sheaf of photocopies in a blue plastic folder. “Excellent,” Dana said. “You can go to lunch now.”

The secretary did everything but kiss her feet. Dana tossed the photocopies to me.

“Look them over,” she said, “but a quarter of a million on signing is a quarter of a million on signing. Plus residuals. As long as you deal with network programming, you’re dealing with business people. The movie people think they’re one up on God and they rob you blind. And you can’t prove it.”

“Double cost accounting,” I said wisely.

“People should stop teaching you buzz words.”

I threw the folder onto her desk. “Okay,” I said. “I’m not crazy. It’s a big, unusual deal and you’re a brilliant agent and with 15 percent of this you can afford to take me to Lutece for dinner. How’s that?”

“Images called,” Dana said.

I sighed. “I tried,” I said. “I really did. But I haven’t had any sleep and I look lousy in the Images style and I don’t understand if I have to go on television why I can’t just—”

“You can’t,” Dana said. “I told you when we started. If you want to go this route, you have to keep in shape, you have to look the part, you have to play by the rules. If you want to be famous, McKenna, you have to look famous.”

“Everybody famous has to look like everybody else famous?”

“Maybe Images was the wrong place,” Dana said. “But we’ve tried you with Estee Lauder and Merle Norman and Elizabeth Arden and even Mary Kay, for God’s sake. You managed to get yourself thrown out of Mary Kay.”

“I’ve got to go over to AST,” I said, getting into my jacket. “Someone in PR wants to talk promotion on the paper.”

The buzzer went off on Dana’s desk. She picked up the receiver, listened for a minute, then hung up. “Damn Phoebe Damereaux,” she said. “There’s a cop in Reception waiting to talk to me.”

Radd Stassen was not a cop. He was, as he put it, “a private.” The challenge was to discover a private what. Radd Stassen had thirty-two expensively capped teeth, tinted contact lenses that made his eyes look rabbit pink, and tiny embroidered emblems sewn onto all his clothes. His hair was slicked back and sleek, like a lounge lizard’s in a silent movie. He bounced on the balls of his feet, trying to give an impression of energy.

He was carrying an outsized manila envelope. He patted it fondly, sat down without waiting to be asked, and crossed his legs at the knees.

“I represent Jane Minetti Brady,” he said. “We’re going to call you as a witness in a civil suit.”

On the other side of the desk, Dana shifted in her chair, frowned, tapped her forehead. She didn’t know what was in her office, which meant she couldn’t decide if I should be there.

Radd Stassen decided for her. He put his face very close to mine, squinted, and nodded emphatically. “The blonde,” he said. “I’ve got notes about a blonde.” He took an untidy mess of papers from the manila envelope and shuffled through them. “Pat Campbell,” he said.

“Patience,” I said. “Patience Campbell McKenna.”

“Same thing,” he said.

I did not know what to do with someone who thought “Pat Campbell” and “Patience Campbell McKenna” were the same thing. I hunkered down into my coat, warding off the cold that was more a function of fatigue than room temperature. I was falling asleep. If Dana and Radd Stassen got into something surreal, I could pass out in my chair.

One look at Dana’s face should have told me that no matter how surrealistic Radd Stassen might be as a person, his mission was anything but. She was suddenly very alert, erect and rigid in her swivel chair, eyes forward, frown plastered from one side of her jaw to the other. She looked the way she looks when someone mentions money in contract negotiations.

“I haven’t come for information,” Radd Stassen said. “We’ve got information.”

“What have you come for?” Dana asked him. “Doughnuts?”

Radd Stassen smiled. It amounted to a neck-tightening grimace and a shimmer of teeth.

“We already know you act as agent for Maxwell Arthur Brady,” he said.

“Bob Brown acts as agent for Maxwell Arthur Brady,” Dana said. “Would you like his number?”

“You act as agent for Maxwell Arthur Brady writing as”—Radd Stassen checked his papers—“Melissa Crowell.” He put the papers on his knees and patted the edges of the stack, pretending to straighten them. “It’s in your capacity as agent for Maxwell Arthur Brady writing as Melissa Crowell that we’re going to call you in the civil suit. Jane Minetti Brady has a certain amount of interest in Maxwell Arthur Brady writing as Melissa Crowell.”

I woke up long enough to get a cigarette out of the pack in my jacket pocket and (almost) unravel Radd Stassen’s show-and-tell.

“Melissa Crowell,” I said. “Melissa Crowell writes bodice rippers. You mean Max Brady is Melissa Crowell?”

“Exactly,” Radd Stassen said.

“Ridiculous,” Dana said.

“You take a rape prevention class at the New School Monday and Thursday nights at seven-thirty,” Radd Stassen said. “Maxwell Arthur Brady teaches a class on the history of the private detective at the New School Monday and Thursday nights at seven.”

“I take a rape class at the New School,” Dana said.

“We know that’s where you’re passing business information,” Radd Stassen said. “Outside the men’s room on the third floor. We’ve got witnesses.”

“Bull manure,” Dana said.

“Jane Minetti Brady got a divorce from Maxwell Arthur Brady in 1969,” Radd Stassen said. “It’s a percentage of income, which translates into a percentage of
known
income. We now know about this income.”

Dana sighed, elaborately, grotesquely, exaggeratedly. It was such an out-of-character sound for her, I woke up again. I had a sudden vision of a class called “Acting for Agents,” held in a fifth-floor Chelsea loft every Monday and Wednesday lunch and run by a ringer from William Morris. If it didn’t exist, it ought to.

“Mr. Stetson—” Dana started.

“Stassen,”
Radd Stassen smiled energetically. “Raddford Hugh Stassen. Know what’s great about my name? It’s my name. The one I was born with.”

“It must have been quite a trial in Little League,” Dana said.

“About Maxwell Arthur Brady writing as Melissa Crowell,” Radd Stassen said.

The buzzer went off on Dana’s desk. She picked up her phone, listened with impatience, and said, “That’s all right. Go to lunch... no, go to lunch now. I’ll come out and get it.” She replaced the phone. “If you’ll excuse me. This is
very
important and I’ve been
waiting
all
morning.”

She got up and headed for the door, heels sinking into the carpet, hands rigidly at her sides. Radd and I watched her go. She had more self-control than either of us. She left that office as if she were leaving an empty space.

She shut the door with a snap. Radd rearranged his big, intrusive body in his chair, wiggled his foot (the one in the air), and smiled at me.

“Going to call her lawyer,” he said. “They always do.”

I started hunting for another cigarette. “Somebody buzzed her,” I said.

“Somebody buzzed her to say they were going to lunch,” Radd Stassen said. “It’s an excuse. She did this Maxwell Arthur Brady a favor, now she wants to know what her liability is. She’ll come back, deny everything, then come into court and change her story under oath. They do it every time.”

“I didn’t even know Max used to be married,” I said.

“Ancient history,” Radd Stassen said.

I found the cigarette. I found the matches. I found a three-week overdue electric bill. “Lisa,” I said. “All the time I’ve known him, he’s been going out with a girl named Lisa.” I thought about it. “Never seen her,” I said.

“The redhead,” Radd Stassen said. “That’s recent. Last year, year and a half. Before that there was—” He consulted his papers. Every time he consulted his papers, he had to look through the stack page by page. He had apparently yet to hear about categorization by subject. Or even alphabetization. “The older woman,” he muttered. He seized a page. “Train,” he said. “Mrs. Verna Train.”

I burned my fingers with the match. “Are you
nuts?”

“Of course I’m not nuts. I’ve got pictures.” He was offended.

“They hated each other,” I told him. “They did physical violence to each other.”

“Lately. Before Lisa, they used to do other things to each other.” Radd smiled. I was getting very tired of his smile. “Mrs. Brady has kept an eye on Mr. Brady since the divorce,” he said.

“Mrs. Brady must be better than the KGB.”

“This Train got him started on the romance stuff.”

I lit another match and applied it very carefully to my cigarette. Verna Train, in a snit over Max Brady’s affair with the redheaded Lisa, threatens to tell Max’s ex-wife that Max is making a lot of money hacking out bodice rippers under a pseudonym. Max Brady therefore kills Verna Train before she can talk. Possible.

“Tell me,” I said. “Was it Verna who told you Max was Melissa Crowell?”

“I can’t tell you where I got my information.” He looked shocked.

He shouldn’t have given me the information, but it seemed ungrateful to say so. Instead, I tried nodding sympathetically. “Of course not,” I told him.

Radd Stassen expanded. “People read these private-eye novels and don’t realize what it’s like,” he said. “The name of this game is money. You want to make a lot of money, you got to protect your contacts.”

“Of course.”