Murder on a Hot Tin Roof

Chapter 23

I GOT HOME SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT and went straight to bed. Abby and Jimmy and Otto weren’t back yet-but even if they’d been there, beckoning me next door for company, comfort, conversation, and a nightcap, I would have declined. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. Not even Dan. And to make sure I wouldn’t have to, I took my phone off the hook before lugging myself and the electric fan upstairs.

I don’t remember what happened after that. I know I must’ve set the fan on the dresser, plugged it in and turned it on, and then stripped off my clothes and flopped down on the bed naked, because that was the way I found things in the morning. The fan was blowing a hot wind over my bare skin, and my clothes were lying in a jumble on the bedroom floor.

My head felt like a volleyball full of sand, but it didn’t hurt so much anymore. The bump wasn’t as swollen as before, and I was able to pull myself up to a sitting position on the side of the bed without feeling the least bit dizzy. When I took a look at the clock on my bedside table, however, my senses went into a cyclone spin. It was a quarter to nine! I was so late for work it was sinful.

Jumping to my feet and tearing into the bathroom, I took a fast shower, dried myself off, and got dressed in a frenzy- which will explain how I wound up wearing a shocking pink blouse with a red plaid skirt and a pair of green platformed sandals. My stocking seams were twisted every which way, and I applied my makeup in such haste that my poor face looked like an abstract portrait by Picasso.

After my mad dash to the subway, my two connecting train rides (first uptown, then across), and my hot, sweaty scramble to my office building at 43rd and Third, I was a complete wreck. Flying past the lobby coffee shop where I usually bought my morning muffin, I darted into the first open elevator I came to and took it to the ninth floor.

As I exited the elevator and stumbled down the hall to the

Daring Detective office, I tried to pull myself together-i.e., straighten my clothes, smooth down my hair, act cool. But it was hopeless. (Well, it’s hard to act cool when you look like a character in a Looney Tunes cartoon.) In an effort to silence the office entry bell and slip inside unnoticed, I opened the door as slowly and quietly as I possibly could and tried to squeeze through it sideways.

My efforts were so fruitless they were foolish. The entry bell jangled as loudly as it always did, and before I was even halfway through the door, all three of my male coworkers-Mario, Mike, and Lenny-were staring up at me from their desks in the large communal workroom, watching me try to sneak inside.

“Look who’s here!” Mario crowed, making sure that his voice was loud enough to be heard by our boss, Harvey Crockett (whose private office door was, as usual, standing wide open). “It’s our own little page-turner, Paige Turner! And she’s only an hour and forty-five minutes late! Guess we’re lucky she showed up at all.” Mario Caruso, the art director of the magazine, was a short, dark, thickset (and thick-headed) man in his early thirties who liked to cause trouble. Especially for me.

“Good morning, all,” I said, squaring my shoulders, tossing my head, and stepping all the way into the office. I was trying to appear self-possessed, aloof, and indifferent to Mario’s taunting remarks, but I felt as cool and composed as the melting mannequins in the big fire scene in the 3-D thriller,

House of Wax.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Mike asked me. “You look awful.” Mike Davidson was

DD’s tall, wiry assistant editor and head staff writer (I was the tail). Mike was a lousy writer, but-thanks to the sexist policies of our woman-hating editorial director, Brandon Pomery-his bylines outnumbered mine twenty to one. “Who picked out your clothes this morning?” Mike jeered, skimming his palm over the shelf of his sand-colored flattop. “Rin Tin Tin?”

Now, do you think that wisecrack was even the weeniest bit funny? Neither did I. I thought it was as lame and sloppy as the pitifully dull stories Mike cranked out for

Daring Detective. Mario, on the other hand, must have found Mike’s quip to be the funniest darn thing he ever heard in his life, because he was laughing so hard I thought he was going to spit up. His fat, swarthy face turned as pink as my blouse, and his spasms of hilarity were so violent his greasy ducktail was coming unglued.

But my dear friend Lenny Zimmerman, the lowly art assistant whose desk was situated in the farthest depths of the common workroom, wasn’t laughing at all. He was peering at me through his crooked, black-rimmed, bottle-thick glasses, with a look of intense concern on his pale, narrow face. He knew that something was wrong-that something bad had happened to me. Ever since the day he’d saved my life (which was over a year ago, when I was working on my very first murder story), Lenny had been able to read me like a book.

And that was what he was doing now-turning my pages, so to speak-trying to judge how much trouble I’d gotten myself into this time.

“Pipe down!” Harvey Crockett barked, sticking his large white-haired head through his open office door. “Get back to work! It’s ten fifteen!” He gave me a snarly, disgruntled look. “Especially you, Paige. Gotta make up for lost time.”

It wasn’t just my lateness that had upset him. It was also the holiday. Crockett was a smart but stodgy ex-newspaperman whose only reason for living was his job. He wasn’t proud that he was now the executive editor of

Daring Detective magazine instead of a reporter for the Daily News, but he wasn’t ashamed of it, either. The actual product or the nature of his work didn’t matter that much to him; it was just the job. And right now, coming off an unwelcome three-day weekend, Crockett was suffering from job withdrawal.

Caffeine withdrawal, too. “Make some coffee, Paige,” he sputtered, “and make it now. This place needs a jumpstart.”

“Yes, Mr. Crockett,” I said, dropping my purse down on my desk (which, since I also served as the office receptionist, was the one closest to the entrance). I hurtled across the room, hoisted the heavy Coffeemaster off the table where it was always stationed, and hauled it toward the door. Pitching Lenny what I hoped was a reassuring smile, I scooted out into the hall and headed for the ladies’ room to wash out the percolator and fill it with water.

As the only female on the

DD staff, I always had to make the coffee. (That’s women’s work, in case you haven’t heard.) I normally resented being the coffee slave, but today I was grateful for the chore. The ladies’ room was quiet and the water was cool. And when I’d finished cleaning and filling the pot, I had a chance to catch my breath, adjust my makeup, and straighten my stocking seams. I couldn’t do anything about the mismatched colors of my crazy outfit, but after realigning the buttons on my blouse, and closing the zipper on my skirt, I looked and felt a little better.

When I returned to the workroom and began spooning coffee into the percolator, Mr. Crockett was satisfied. “Bring me a cup when it’s ready,” he said, stepping back inside his office.

“Ditto,” said Mario, who was watching (or rather, ogling) my every move and making ugly smoochy faces whenever I glanced in his direction.

“Me, too,” Mike chimed in, never looking up from the story he was pecking out, with two fingers, on his typewriter.

Lenny didn’t ask me for coffee. (He rarely drank the stuff, but when he did, he got up and got it himself.) And he didn’t say anything else to me, either. He didn’t have to. His urgent, puzzled, anxious gaze was saying it all.

I was sorry to be causing Lenny such worry, but there was nothing I could do to ease his concerns right now. If I went over to talk to him, Mario would start making more nasty-and loud-remarks, and then Mr. Crockett would come bursting out of his office to growl at us again. And that wouldn’t do anybody any good. Lifting my shoulders in an apologetic shrug, I winked at Lenny and tossed him another quick smile. Then I turned my back on the boys in the workroom and faced a different pile of problems.

THERE WAS SO MUCH WORK STACKED UP on my desk I wanted to run back to the ladies’ room and hide out there till lunchtime. There were letters to open and sort, newspapers to clip, stories to edit and rewrite, galleys to proofread, invoices to record, photos to label and file. And it was already twenty to eleven! And I had to call Binky at noon! And if

DD’s second-in-command, Brandon Pomeroy, happened to stroll into the office before I left on my lunch hour, he would see all the paperwork on my desk, and find out how late I’d come in this morning, and then he wouldn’t let me leave at all.

Which would throw a big wrench in my plans to visit the Actors Studio.

However, I wasn’t

that worried about Pomeroy coming in early. Truth was, he hardly ever made it into the office before lunch. (When you’re a close relative of Oliver Rice Harrington-the powerful and wealthy publishing mogul who owns the magazine you work for-you can show up whenever you like. And when you’re a lazy, jaded snob who breakfasts on dry martinis, you like to show up late.) Nevertheless, Pomeroy had been known to pull surprises out of his hat from time to time, and I was praying that today would not be one of those times.

After I served my boss and coworkers their coffee, I took another survey of my work load. The newspapers were taking up the most room on my desk, so I chose to tackle them first. Snatching the

Daily Mirror off the top of the pile, I began flipping through it as fast as I could, looking for juicy crime stories to clip out for our files (one of my more mindless daily chores). There was one story about Gray, but it was even briefer and less informative than the article I’d read on Sunday. A wave of sadness washed over me as I cut the piece out and put it in the labeled and dated manila folder I had set aside for Pomeroy. (Reading the new crime clips was the only aspect of his job Pomeroy seemed to relish, and if the folder of clippings wasn’t sitting on his desk when he came in, he’d have a royal snit fit.)

The other three morning editions also ran short articles about Gray’s murder, merely recapping the barest facts and reporting that the case was still under investigation. Two other homicides had occured in the city in the past week (one in Harlem, one in the Bronx), and they were rehashed as well.

As I was cutting out these articles and putting them in the folder, I snuck a quick look at some of the day’s top stories: The national economy had shown a strong upsurge during the first six months of 1955, smashing all peacetime records; Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson had suffered a moderately severe heart attack while visiting a friend in Virginia; The grand opening of Disneyland Amusement Park in Anaheim, California, was scheduled for July 17th.

But the biggest story of the day, bar none, was the heat. WE’RE HAVIN’ A HEAT WAVE! one headline proclaimed. NO RELIEF IN SIGHT! cried another. Actually, the temperature

had dropped a bit-all the way down to 95.8 degrees!-but the humidity was so high nobody could tell the difference. So the papers were jammed with advertisements for products that promised to keep you cool and dry. I gazed with longing at the full-page ad for Ambassador Window Air Conditioners, knowing I’d never be able to save up the 169 bucks I’d need to buy one. But all was not lost; there was hope for me yet. For just seventy-nine cents I could “Beat the Heat with Mexsana Medicated Powder!” Maybe I’d go get some after work.

When I finished clipping the papers, I opened, sorted, and distributed the mail. Then I fixed all the typos, misspellings, and bad grammar in two of Mike’s stories, wrote the captions for three four-page layouts, proofread about a dozen galleys, put the corrected stories, captions, and proofs in a large envelope, and called for a messenger to take them to the typesetter. I labeled all the photos and took them into the file room, but left them in a stack on top of one of the file cabinets, deciding I’d organize and put them away later.

In an effort to clear my desk (or just make it

look clear in case Pomeroy came in), I hid the batch of unrecorded invoices in my top left-hand drawer. Then, at twelve o’clock on the dot, after glancing over my shoulder and determining that none of my coworkers had me under close observation, I hunched over the top of my desk, stealthily picked up the phone, and dialed Binky.