Death's Savage Passion by Jane Haddam Read Free Book Online Page A

shining. Her squeamishness had been washed away by excitement.
    “Oh,” she said, breathless and agitated. “It is going to be a murder. It is.”

SIX
    I DID NOT DO well at Images. They knew what I ought to look like. I knew what I did look like. There was no possible compromise. I have strong bones and wide eyes and high cheekbones. I could be the illegitimate child of John Lindsay and a full-blooded Cherokee. They thought I ought to look like Cheryl Tiegs. Or Christie Brinkley. Or Farrah Fawcett. I got out of there at quarter to twelve, nearly crazy from lack of sleep and more than murderous from arguing. I didn’t care how fuzzy I looked on television. I had no intention of turning into another cookie cutter imitation of every other blond WASP on the celebrity circuit. Images wanted to give me something called a “California cut.” The only thing I like that uses “California” as an adjective is avocados.
    I turned down Fifth Avenue, trying to decide what I thought of what had happened to Verna Train. I know people who can party till dawn, come home, take a shower, and show up at the office two hours later looking like they just returned from a vacation in Bali. I am not one of them. On seven hours’ sleep I am awake. On six, I am operative. Less than six leaves me temporarily stupid and emotionally schizophrenic.
    I hadn’t known Verna Train. I knew things about her—she was divorced; she wrote moderately successful contemporary romances; she was capable of physical aggression when angry or drunk or both. What I had was like a description under “Cast of Characters” at the beginning of a script. It was only a stencil. The stencil didn’t say anything to me. She had been unkind to Sarah. I hadn’t liked it.
    I liked the way I was thinking even less. Nick had reason for his suspicions. I do tend to see murder—cold, deliberate, and brutal—behind everything these days. Worse, I never escape from it. In the past two years I have spent all my time either involved in murders or writing about them. When I return from vacations, my mailbox is full of fan letters enclosing “something extra.” In the past six months, I have received a complete set of press clippings on the DeQuincy, Iowa, disembowelment murders; four sharp knives; a photo essay (amateur—Kodak snapshots pasted to typing paper) on an autopsy; and a detailed plan for the assassination of Claude Rains, who is already dead. That was what I was getting before the book came out, when I was just a picture and a name in newspaper stories. Once the book came out, I stopped opening fan mail, got a telephone number so unlisted even AT&T doesn’t know what it is, and started handing over any packages left on my doorstep to the bomb squad.
    Every time I thought about Verna Train dying, something inside me wanted it to be murder. I was not entirely unreasonable. Facts, after all, were facts. If Phoebe hadn’t been so sure of what she’d seen in the subway station, I might have talked myself into believing a verdict of accidental death before I got five blocks downtown. Phoebe, however, was sure. Phoebe sees what she sees when she sees it. In a room full of distracted witnesses, Phoebe will be the one person with an accurate account of whatever happened. This is true even when Phoebe is drunk. She is more tenaciously connected to the world than the rest of us.
    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