Death's Savage Passion Read Online Free Page A

Drambuies and decided I was either going to get home to sanity or melt. I dropped Sarah and Phoebe at the Forties blues place and went uptown.
    When I opened the door to my apartment, the cat was waiting in the foyer and every light in every one of the twelve rooms was blazing. I live in the Braedenvoorst, one of those New York apartment buildings more famous than most of the people living in it, in an apartment willed to me by a romance writer named Myrra Agenworth. Myrra also willed me “everything in the apartment at the time of [her] death” and her story, which was the start of the book I now had on the bestseller list (barely on, but on). I did better with the story than I did with the apartment. After I sold all the furniture and the paintings at auction at Sotheby’s (with the exception of Myrra’s portrait, which I kept over the fireplace in the living room), I banked the money to pay the maintenance. Then I neglected to buy new furniture. I had a platform bed, a night table, a worktable, a kitchen table, and five chairs. That was it. In twelve rooms.
    I put the cat on the kitchen table and went to the refrigerator to see if there were socks in it. Nick always keeps his clean socks in the refrigerator. He usually keeps them in my refrigerator because I have a built-in washer-dryer, which is what he uses to do laundry. He rolls his socks into balls, so they look like blackened melons against the white enamel. Then he turns on all the lights and waits in the one bedroom with a bed in it.
    The socks were in the otherwise empty vegetable bin. There were five balled pairs of them, arranged in a pyramid. I kicked the drawer shut, got a can of decaffeinated Diet Coke and the container of Devon cream, and started searching cabinets for a saucer. Nick, my cleaning lady, and I all put away dishes in my apartment. We each have strongly held views on where they belong.
    I found two saucers in what I thought of as my silverware drawer, filled one with Devon cream and the other with dry cat food, and put them both on the floor. Camille licked at the Devon cream and sat in the cat food.
    My mail and my appointment calendar (a bound composition book with the date written at the top of each page in Bic medium point) were on the kitchen table. Tomorrow I had to go to Austin, Stoddard & Trapp (who had paperback rights to my Agenworth book) to discuss possible promotion with an escapee from Hunter College named Evelyn Nesbitt Kleig. I had to meet Dana and “get things straightened out,” by which she meant come to my senses and accept the miniseries offer. I also had a session at a place called Images, but I was trying to forget it.
    The mail was considerably less exciting: an envelope from the Mystery Writers of America that was undoubtedly their monthly publication, The Third Degree; three bills (Saks, Bonwit’s, and, God help me, Bloomingdale’s), none of which I had any intention of looking at for at least a week; and a letter from Dana’s office with “J. Dunby, Foreign Rights” written under the letterhead. I opened that one. Four hundred thirty dollars for the Yugoslavian rights to Love’s Dangerous Journey, the last romance novel I wrote for the now defunct Fires of Love line at Farret Paperback Originals.
    I wandered across my empty living room and through the back hall, turning off lights.
    “Listen,” I said. “I want you to sue someone for me.”
    No answer. I went into the bedroom and found Nick sitting cross-legged in the middle of my bed, stacks of word-processor printed pages (right-hand margin justification) arranged artfully on my grandmother’s wedding quilt. He had a Walkman around his neck and earphones in his ears. I took the earphones away from him, listened for thirty seconds to the Beach Boys doing Be True to Your School, and tossed them aside.
    “I want you to sue someone for me,” I said again.
    “Who is it this time?” He cleared a space for me on the bed. I sat down in it.
    “The Mystery