Death's Savage Passion Read Online Free PDF Page B

Martinez in on it?”
    Phoebe looked confused. “He quit to go to law school,” she said. “You know that.”
    “I forgot. What about Tony Marsh?”
    This time she looked like she thought I was crazy. “Even if Tony were still a precinct cop, which he isn’t, this would be the wrong precinct. Tony got promoted, don’t you remember? He’s a detective. With Homicide?”
    “I know,” I said.
    “No, you don’t know,” she said. “I know. I was here.”
    “Homicide?” Sarah said.
    “I don’t mean I think it wasn’t an accident,” I said. “I mean, look at those people.” I made a weak gesture in the direction of the knot of cops. “We don’t know any of them. We won’t be able to get them to tell us anything.”
    “That’s true,” Phoebe said. She shook her head. “It just doesn’t matter. There isn’t anything to tell. We were all a little drunk. We were standing on the edge of the platform. We were talking about—” She frowned. “No, we weren’t. We weren’t talking about muggers. We had been talking about muggers, but when the train came in, Verna was telling me about Ellery Queen.”
    “Ellery Queen.”
    “That Ellery Queen was a pseudonym. Or Ellery Queen was a lot of people, not one. Or something.”
    “Ellery Queen was the pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee,” I said.
    “It didn’t sound that simple,” Phoebe said.
    “I didn’t hear anything about Ellery Queen,” Sarah said. “I was talking to Miss Dooley about her paperweight.”
    Amelia pounded over to us, her face mottled gray and white, her nose red and on the verge of runny in the cold. New York subway stations are not well heated or well enclosed.
    “Jesus Christ,” she said. “Around and around and around. They never stop asking questions.”
    “Questions about what?” I asked her.
    Amelia gave me a look that was shrewd and unsubtle and contemptuous. “They want to know if she was a leaper,” she said. “A leaper, for God’s sake. What would make Verna leap in front of a train?”
    I peered at her closely in the darkness. She was doing a good job of playing old shoot-from-the-hip Amelia, but in her eyes a hint of panic was struggling to break into terror.
    “Verna was depressed at dinner,” I said, considering suicide for the first time. “She kept talking about how badly her career was going.”
    “Horse manure,” Amelia said, though I obviously hadn’t made her feel any better. “Her career was in a slump. She wasn’t about to starve to death.”
    “I was standing right next to her,” Phoebe said. “I told you. She just fell.”
    “Somebody’s going to kill themselves over romantic suspense, it ought to be me,” Amelia said. “Verna just had to write one of the things. I have to put out a whole line of them, one a month, under my own name.”
    “Verna was using her own name,” Phoebe said.
    “I’m using my own name,” Sarah said.
    I squinted into the crowd near the tracks. “Did Marilou go home?” I asked. “I don’t see her anywhere.”
    Amelia snorted. “Marilou’s where you’d expect her to be. In the bathroom sucking up what she can and flushing the rest down a nice safe toilet. Now there’s someone who ought to leap in front of a train over romantic suspense. She’s got a contract to write one. She can’t stay straight long enough to figure out what one is.”
    “Marilou Saunders is going to write a romantic suspense?” I said. “Marilou Saunders can’t read.”
    Amelia adjusted her gown and the flaps of her stole. She had one of those fox stoles with the head and paws carefully preserved. A diamond and ruby dinner ring glittered in the light from the fluorescent over our heads.
    “If the idiot police want to ask questions,” Amelia said, “they ought to ask questions of him.” She made a dramatic sweep of the arm in the direction of Max Brady, no longer pugnacious and panicked in the middle of the platform. Max had wilted. He looked like a half-starved