A Century of Great Suspense Stories

Heartbreak House Sara Paretsky

Sara Paretsky is regularly reviewed in places where other mystery writers are never mentioned. Her novels, dealing as they do with the lives of contemporary women, have found an audience outside genre. She appeals to people who rarely if ever read mystery stories. And she appeals to that generation known as boomers who have learned the hard way that despite some major advances for women, there is still a substantial way to go before we reach anything like parity between the sexes. Here is Paretsky at the top of her game, much as she is in her latest novel, Total Recall.

Natasha’s hair, as sleek and black as a raven’s wing, framed the delicate oval of her face. Raoul thought she had never looked more desirable than now, with her dark, doelike eyes filled with tears, and a longing beyond tears.

“It’s no good, darling,” she whispered, summoning a valiant smile. “Papa has lost all his money. I must go to India with the Crawfords to mind their children.”

“Darling — for you to be a nanny — how utterly absurd. And in that climate. You must not!” His square, manly face suffused with color, betraying the strength of his feeling.

“You haven’t even mentioned marriage,” Natasha whispered, looking at the bracelets on her slender wrist, wondering if they, too, must be sold, along with Mama’s diamonds.

Raoul flushed more deeply. “We’re engaged. Even if our families don’t know about it. But how can I marry you now, when I have no prospects and your papa cannot give you a dowry...”

Amy looked up. “Wonderful, Roxanne. Your strongest effort yet. Do Raoul and Natasha get married in the end?”

“No, no.” Roxanne took the manuscript back. “They’re just the first generation. Natasha marries a planter, not that she can ever give her heart to him, and Raoul dies of blackwater fever in the jungle during the Boer War, with Natasha’s name on his writhen lips. It’s their grandchildren who finally get together. That’s the significance of the last page.”

She turned the manuscript over and read aloud to Amy, “Natalie had never met Granny Natasha, but she recognized the face smiling at the head of the bed as she embraced Ralph. It seemed to say ‘Godspeed and God bless,’ and even, in the brief glimpse she caught before surrendering herself to love, to wink.”

“Yes, yes, I see,” Amy agreed, wondering if there were another person in New York — in the world — who could use writhen with Roxanne’s sincere intensity. “Very much in the spirit of Isabel Allende or Laura Esquivel.”

Roxanne looked haughtily at her editor. She didn’t know the names and didn’t care to learn them. If Amy thought the star of Gaudy Press needed to copy someone, it was time for her to have a conversation with Lila Trumbull, Roxanne’s agent.

Amy, an expert on Roxanne Craybourne’s own doelike glances, leaned forward. “All the South American writers who’ve been winning Nobel prizes lately have ghosts haunting their work. I thought it was a nice touch, to show The New York Times and some of these other snobs in the most delicate way imaginable that you are fully aware of contemporary literary conventions, but you only choose to use them when you can enhance them.”

Roxanne smiled. Amy really was quite nice. She’d proved it the weekend she’d stayed at the Taos house, after all. It was terrible to be so suspicious of everyone that you couldn’t trust their lightest comments. But then, when she thought how badly Kenny had betrayed her...

Amy, watching the shift from complacency to tragedy on her star’s face, wondered what nerve-storm she now had to deflect. “Is everything all right, Roxanne?” she asked in a gentle, caring voice that would have astounded her own children and grandchildren.

Roxanne gave a little sniff, brushing the hint of a tear from her left eye. “I was just thinking of Kenny, and how badly he treated me. And then to see it written up in the Star and the Sun. It’s too much to suffer tragedy, without having it plastered around the supermarkets where all one’s friends see it, and badger one forever. Not to mention Mother’s insufferable mah-jongg club.”

“Kenny? What — did his embezzling habits not die at the end of his parole?” Amy was startled out of maternal concern into her normal sardonic speech. She cursed herself as soon as the words were out, but Roxanne, in as full a dramatic flight as one of her own heroines, hadn’t noticed.

“I thought he was trying.” She fluttered tapered, manicured fingers, muscular from the weight of the rings they held up. “Mother kept telling me he was just taking advantage, but it’s the kind of thing she’s always saying about my boyfriends, ever since high school, jealous because she never had half as many when she was young. And when he hit me the first time and said he was truly sorry of course I believed him. Anyone would have. But when he walked off with a million in bearer bonds it was just too much. What else could I do? And then, well, you know I had to spend months in the hospital.”

Amy did know. There had been dreadful late-night meetings at Gaudy Press over the news that Roxanne Craybourne might have suffered permanent brain damage when Kenny Coleman beat her up for the last time. Even Roxanne, on checking out of the rehabilitation clinic where she’d spent two months after leaving the hospital, had decided she couldn’t forgive Kenny that. She divorced him, changed her security system, and moved the twenty-four-year-old gardener who’d brought her flowers every day into the master suite.

And then, in eleven weeks, gone on to write the thrilling tale of Natasha, the heiress victimized by her papa’s trusted henchman, who embezzled all his money. “Poured white-hot from her molten pen” was the copy Gaudy would run in the national ad campaign.

“And I’m terrified that she’ll marry that damned gardener next,” Amy told her boss the next morning. “First it was the dreadful surgeon who slept with his women patients, then Kenny, and now some gardener who needs a green card.”

Clay Rossiter grinned. “Send her a wedding present. She thrives on that kind of situation.”

“I’m the one who has to hold her hand through all these trials,” Amy snapped. “She doesn’t thrive: she trembles on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”

“But, Amy, sweetie, don’t you see — that’s what makes her such a phenomenal success. She’s the helpless waif who crops up in A Clean Wound, Embarrassment of Riches, and the rest. She believes in the agonies of all those idiotic Glendas and Corinnes and — who did you say the latest was — Natasha? Did you persuade her she couldn’t call it A Passage to India?”

“It was tough,” Amy said. “Of course she’d never heard of E. M. Forster — I finally had to show her the video of A Passage to India before she listened to me. And even then she only agreed to a title change when I persuaded her that Forster’s estate would make money from her because her fans would buy the video thinking it was her story. And no, I haven’t got a clue whether he’s got an estate or if it would get royalties, and don’t go talking to Lila Trumbull about it, either, for pity’s sake. We’re calling Natasha’s misery Broken Covenant. Oh, by the way, A Clean Wound hit the paperback list at number two. We’re printing another five hundred thousand.”

Rossiter smiled. “Just keep feeding her herbal tea. Send her roses. Let her know we’re her best friends. See if you can engender some kind of vicious streak in the gardener, assuming he hasn’t got one already.”

“You do that,” Amy said, getting to her feet. “I’ve got a meeting with one of our few real writers — Gary Blanchard has done a beautiful book, a kind of modern-day quest set in the Dakotas. It’ll sell around eight thousand, ten if we’re lucky. Broken Covenant should make it possible to give him an advance.”

After Amy left, Clay went back to the fax he’d received from Jambon et Cie PLC, his corporate masters in Brussels. They were very disappointed in Gaudy’s third-quarter performance. It’s true they’d made a profit, thanks to the strong showing of Embarrassment of Riches in hardcover, but Gaudy needed several more bankable stars. They were too dependent on Roxanne Craybourne — if they lost her they’d be dribbling along with the nickel-and-dime stuff, the so-called literary writers which Jambon was doing its best to discard. If Clay Rossiter didn’t want to be looking for a new job in six months, Jambon expected a marketing plan and sales numbers to show the list was acquiring market flexibility.

Clay curled his lip. Eighteen pages of numbers followed, a demented outburst of someone’s spreadsheet program. Title by title Brussels had gone through Gaudy’s list, with projections of sales based on changing the number of copies in Wal-Mart, the amount of bus-side advertising, the weight of paper used in dust jackets, the number of trips each sales rep made to key accounts. And Clay was expected — ordered, really — to give a written response to all these projections by the end of the month.

“The curse of modern business is not tight capital, bad management, low productivity, or poor education, but the personal computer,” he snarled.

His secretary poked her head through the door. “Did you say something, Clay?”

“Yes. Idiotic boys — and girls — who’ve never held a book think they can run the book industry from three thousand miles away because they have a microchip that lets them conjure up scenarios. If they’d ever ridden a truck from a warehouse into Wal-Mart they’d know you can’t even tell how many copies the store took, let alone — oh, well. What’s the use. Send a note down to Amy that she cannot give her new literary pet — what’s his name? Gary Blanchard? — more than twenty thousand. If he wants to walk, let him. If I see Farrar or Knopf on the spine when the book comes out it will not make me weep with frustration.”

Isabella trembled in his arms. “I must not. You know I must not. Your mama, if she saw me—”

Her raven hair, enhancing the milky purity of her skin, cascaded over his shoulders as Albion pulled her to him more tightly. “She will learn to love you as I do, my beautiful Mexican flower. Ah, how could I ever have thought I was in love before?”

Albion Whittley thought distastefully of all the spoiled debutantes he’d squired around New York City. He wasn’t just Albion Whittley — there was that damned “IV” after his name, meaning his parents expected him to marry someone in their set. How could he expect them to believe that the gardener’s daughter stood head and shoulders above all the Bennington girls he’d had to date? The purity of her heart, the nobility of her impulses — every penny she earned going back to Guadalupe to her crippled grandmother.

“Albion, darling, are you enjoying your little holiday? Isabella, I left my gloves on my dressing table. Fetch them for me while my son and I have a talk.”

Mrs. Albion Whittley the Third had appeared on the terrace. Her tinkling laugh and light sarcastic manner made both young people blush. Albion dropped Isabella’s hand as though it had turned to molten lava. The girl fled inside the mansion...

“Beautiful,” Amy gushed, marveling at her own acting ability. “They triumph over every obstacle in the end? Or is it like Natasha, only able to experience happiness through her granddaughter?”

Roxanne looked reproachful. “I never tell the same story twice. My readers wouldn’t stand for it. Albion joins the CIA to prove his manliness to Mama. He’s sent on a secret mission to Central America, where he has to take on a drug lord. When he’s wounded Isabella finds him in the jungle and nurses him back to health, but the drug lord is smitten by her beauty. Since she knows Albion’s mother is implacable she agrees to become the drug lord’s mistress. This leads her to a jet-setting career in Brazil and Spain, and she meets Mrs. Whittley as an equal in Majorca. In the end the CIA kills the drug lord, and Albion, who’s never forgotten her, rescues her from the fortress where she’s been incarcerated.”

“Wonderful,” Amy said. “Only I don’t think we can call it The Trail of Tears.”

She tried explaining how disrespectful this might seem to the American Indian community, but gave up when her star’s eyes flashed fury.

“Everyone knows how good I am to the Indians who live on my estate in Taos. I’m not having them wreck my book because of some hundred-year-old battle they can’t forget. And after the way Gerardo treated me — he was half Indian, and always bragging about it — I think they owe me some consideration for a change.”

“It’s the libraries,” Amy said hastily. “So ignorant. But we don’t want your book shelved with Indian literature, do we? Your loyal fans will want to see it prominently displayed with new fiction.”

They agreed in the end on Fool’s Gold, with a Central American pyramid to be shown in jagged pieces around a single rose. Roxanne settled her jacket around her shoulders and held out her cup for more tea. She wasn’t sure she even wanted a Central American pyramid. Wouldn’t it always remind her of the misery she’d felt when Gerardo betrayed her? Her mother had warned her, but then Mother was positively lying in wait to watch her misery.

Amy, alert to the quiver in Roxanne’s chin, asked if the cover decision troubled her. “We’ll get Peter to do a series of layouts. You know we’re not tied to what we decide today.”

Roxanne held out a hand. Amy tried hard, but she wasn’t sensitive — she wasn’t an artist, after all — she lived in the world of sales and bottom lines.

“This whole discussion overwhelms me with memories of Gerardo. People said he only wanted me for my money. And to get a green card. But it’s not impossible for love to flourish between a man of twenty-four and a woman my age. Just think of Cher. And despite all those ridiculous exercise videos she isn’t any better looking than I am.”

That much was true. Adolescent passion kept Roxanne young. Her own skin could indeed be described as milky, her dark eyes lustrous, childlike, confiding. Her auburn hair was perhaps hand tinted to keep its youthful shades of color, but if you didn’t know she was forty-six you’d assume the rich browns and reds were natural.

“When I found him in bed with my maid I believed Gerardo, that she was homesick and he was comforting her. My mother ridiculed me, but how can you possibly live so cynically and ever be happy?”

Roxanne held her hands out in mute appeal — two poignant doves, Amy thought, murmuring, “Yes, indeed.”

“But then, the night I got back from Cannes, I found them together at the swimming pool. He wouldn’t come to Cannes with me — he said he shouldn’t leave the country until his immigrant status was straightened out, so I raced home a day early just to be with him, but then even I had to realize — and he’d paid for her abortion, with money I’d given him.”

“You poor child,” Amy said, patting her hand. “You’re far too trusting.”

Roxanne lifted her doelike eyes in mute gratitude. Amy was so warm, a true friend, unlike the hangers-on who only wanted to sponge off her success.

“Someone in Santa Fe suggested I talk to a psychiatrist. As if I were sick!”

“How dreadful.” Amy sounded shocked. “And yet, the right psychiatrist — a sympathetic woman, perhaps — could listen to you impartially. Unlike your mother, or your friends, who are always judging you and scolding you.”

“Is that what psychiatrists do?” Roxanne opened her eyes wide. “Listen?”

“The good ones do,” Amy said.

“You did what?” Clay Rossiter screamed. “You’re the one who needs a psychiatrist. We can’t have her getting over her neuroses. They’re what drive her books. Look, fifteen weeks after finding Raoul in bed with her maid she produces a bestseller for us. We can do an initial run of a million five. That’s our paychecks for the entire year, Amy.”

“Raoul was the hero of Broken Covenant. Gerardo was her gardener. You’re not the one who has to feed her tea and bolster her after the cad has been found out. Not to mention take her to Lutèce and listen to the storm of passion while it’s at gale force.”

Clay bared his teeth at her. “That’s what we pay you to do, Amy. You’re the goddamn star’s goddamn editor. She likes you. We even had to write it into her last contract that she will only work with you.”

“Don’t lose sleep over it. The chances are against Roxanne entering therapy. She’s more likely to pick some New Age guru and have a deep mystical experience with him.” Amy got up. “You know Gary Blanchard signed with Ticknor & Fields? I’m really annoyed, Clay. We could have kept him for twenty-five thousand: he’s very humble in his needs and it makes me sick to lose a talented writer.”

“He’s humble because he knows no one wants to read artistic work. Let Ticknor & Fields have him. They don’t have Jambon et Cie breathing down their necks.” Clay picked up his latest fax from Brussels and waved it at her.

Amy skimmed it. Jambon was disappointed that Clay had rejected all of their previous marketing proposals, but pleased he had let Gary Blanchard go. All of the scenarios they had run on Quattro showed that every dollar spent on advertising would lose them thirty cents on revenue from Blanchard’s work. They definitely did not want anyone on the Gaudy list who sold fewer than twenty-seven thousand in hardcover.

“This isn’t publishing,” she said, tossing it back at him. “They ought to go into breakfast cereal. It’s more suited to their mentality.”

“Yes, Amy, but they own us. So unless you want to look for a job right before Christmas, don’t go signing any more literary lights. We can’t afford them.”

“I dreamed I went to the airport to catch my flight to Paris, but they wouldn’t let me in first class. They said I was dirty, and badly dressed, and I had to fly coach. But all the coach seats were taken so I had to go by Greyhound, and the bus got lost and ended up in this dreary farmhouse in the middle of Kansas.”

The eminent psychiatrist, his kindly gray eyes moved to tears by the beautiful girl on the couch in front of him, sighed and stirred in his chair. How could he ever persuade her that she was clean enough, good enough, for first class?

Amy choked. “Roxanne. Dear. Where’s the story?”

“It’s here. In front of you. Have you forgotten how to read?”

“But your readers expect passion, romance. Nothing happens. The doctor doesn’t even fall in love with Clarissa.”

“Well, he does of course, but he keeps it to himself.” Roxanne picked up the manuscript and thumbed through it. She began reading aloud, clicking her rings against the chair arm for emphasis.

Clarissa put her hand trustingly in the older man’s. “You don’t know how much this means to me, Doctor. To finally find someone who understands what I’ve been through.”

Dr. Friedrich felt his flesh stir. His professional calm had never been pierced by any of his patients before, but this gaminelike waif, abused by father, abandoned by mother, so in need of trust and guidance, was different.

He longed to be able to say “My dear, I wish you would not think of me as your doctor, but your dearest friend as well. I long for nothing more than to protect you from the blasts of the stormy world beyond these walls.” But if he spoke he would lose her precious trust forever.

Roxanne dropped the pages with a thump, as though that settled the point.

“Well, why can’t he marry her?” Amy asked.

“Amy, you didn’t read it, did you? He’s already got a wife, only she’s in an institution for the criminally insane. But his compassion is so great he can’t bring himself to divorce her. Then the Nazi-hunters confuse him with a man who was a prison-camp guard who looked like him, and he gets arrested. It turns out that the wife has turned him in — that her criminal insanity has given her a persecution complex and she blames him for all her troubles. So Clarissa has to find him, behind the Iron Curtain — this takes place in 1983 — where he’s been put into a gulag — and rescue him. And the wife has a brainstorm when she finds out he’s been rescued. That kills her. But Clarissa has already become a nun. They sometimes dream about each other, but they die without seeing one another again.”

Amy blinked. “It seems a little downbeat for your readers, Roxanne. I wonder if—”

“Don’t wonder at me, Amy,” Roxanne snapped, her luminous eyes flashing magnificently. “Dr. Reindorf says happy endings are difficult to find. My readers need to learn that just as much as I do. If they keep expecting every book to be a panacea they’ll be just as badly off as me, expecting every man I fall in love with to solve all my problems.”

“I warned you,” Clay snarled. “Send her off to the fucking shrinks and what happens? We get cheap psychology about her readers and a book no one will buy. The woman can’t write, for Christ sake. If she loses her adolescent fantasy about true love she loses her audience.”

“Maybe Dr. Reindorf will betray her as badly as Gerardo and Kenny, and that surgeon, her first husband, who gave us A Clean Wound.”

“We can’t take that chance,” Clay said. “You’ve got to do something.”

“I’m sixty,” Amy said. “I can take early retirement. You’re the one who’s worried about it. You do something. Get the publicity department to plant a story in the National Enquirer that Roxanne is getting therapy from a child molester.”

She meant it as a joke, but Clay thought it was worth an effort. His publicity staff turned him down.

“We can’t plant stories about our own writers. Publishing is a community of gossips. Someone will know, they’ll leak it to someone else who hates you, and the next thing you know Roxanne will be at Putnam and you’ll be eating wiener-water soup.”

Clay began to lose sleep. Final Analysis, done in silver with a suggestive couch on the cover, came well out of the gate, but word of mouth began killing it before the second printing was ready. It jumped onto the Times list in third place but stayed there only a week before plummeting to ninth. After five short weeks Final Analysis dropped off the list into the black hole of overstock and remainders.

The faxes from Brussels were hot enough to scorch the veneer from Clay Rossiter’s desktop, while Roxanne’s agent, Lila Trumbull, called daily to blame Clay for not marketing the book properly.

“But you can’t market long, dull dreams and their interpretation,” Clay howled to his secretary. “As I told Amy.”

Clay fired Amy, to relieve his feelings, then had to rehire her the next morning: Roxanne had an editor clause in her contract. She could leave Gaudy if Amy did.

“Only, if she’s going to keep turning out cheap psychology it won’t matter. Pretty soon even Harlequin won’t touch her. And, by the way, we won’t be able to afford you. How long has she been seeing this damned shrink?”

“About nine months. And the last time she was in New York she only stayed overnight so as not to miss a session. So it doesn’t seem to be following the course of her usual infatuations.”

“He’s not in New York? Where is he?”

“Santa Fe. This isn’t the only town with psychiatrists in it, Clay.”

“Yeah, they’re like rats: wherever you find a human population, there they’ll be, eating the garbage,” Clay grumbled. “Maybe he can fall off a mesa.”

When Amy left he stared at the clock. It was eleven in New York. Nine A.M. in New Mexico. He got up abruptly and took his coat from behind the door.

“I have the flu,” he told his secretary. “If some moron calls from Brussels tell him I’m running a high fever and can’t talk.”

“You look healthy to me,” she said.

“It’s the hectic flush of fever.”

He was out of the office before she could chide him further. He flagged a cab, then changed his mind. The cops were forever questioning cabdrivers. He took the long, slow subway ride to Queens.

On the flight to Albuquerque he wondered what he should do about renting a car. He’d paid cash for his ticket so that he could use an assumed name, but he’d need a driver’s license and credit card to rent a car. When the man next to him got up to use the bathroom Clay went through his breastpocket. They didn’t look anything alike, but no one ever inspected those photos. And fortunately the man’s home was in New Mexico. He wouldn’t miss his license until after Clay mailed it back to him, with cash for the price of the rental, of course.

It turned out to be easy. Pathetically easy. He called Dr. Reindorf and told him the truth, that he was Roxanne’s publisher, that they were all worried about her, and could he have a word in confidence. Someplace quiet, remote, where they wouldn’t run the risk of Roxanne seeing Clay and feeling spied upon. Reindorf suggested a mesa with a view of Santa Fe below it when he’d finished seeing patients for the day.

Clay made the red-eye back to New York with an hour to spare. The next morning Amy stuck her head around his door. She started to ask him something, but decided he really did have the flu, his eyes were so puffy. It wasn’t until later in the day that Roxanne called her, distraught at Reindorf’s death.

“She somehow ended up going to the morgue to look at the body, don’t ask me why,” Amy told Clay’s secretary, since Clay had gone home sick again. “It had been run over by a car several times before being thrown from the mesa. The cops hauled her ex-gardener in for questioning, but they don’t seem to have any suspects.”

“The news should revive Clay,” his secretary said.

Ancilla’s hands fluttered at her sides like captive birds. “You don’t understand, Karl. Papa is dead. His work — I never valued it properly, but I must try to carry it on.”

“But, darling girl, it’s too heavy a burden for you. It’s just not a suitable job for a woman.”

“Ah, if you knew what I felt, when I saw him — had to identify his body after the jackals had been at it — no burden could be too big for me now.”

Karl felt pride stir within him. He had loved Ancilla when she had been a beautiful, willful girl, the toast of Vienna. But now, prepared to assume a woman’s role in life — to shoulder a load most men would turn from — the spoiled child lines dropped from her cherry lips, giving her the mouth of a woman, firm, ripe, desirable.

“I love it,” Clay said. “I’m ecstatic. And you’re calling it Life’s Work? You got her to change it from An Unsuitable Job for a Woman? Good going. It’s been only seventeen weeks since that shrink died and she’s already cured. We ought to be able to print a million, a million two, easy. I’ll fax Brussels. We’ll go out to celebrate.”

“I’d rather celebrate right here.” Amy shut his office door. “We have a chance to sign a really brilliant new writer. Her name is Lisa Ferguson and she’s written an extraordinary novel about life in western Kansas during the sixties. She’s going to be the next Eudora Welty.”

“No, Amy. Hispanic experience is good. African is possible. But rural Kansas is of no interest to anyone these days except you. I’m certainly not going to pitch it to Brussels.”

Amy leaned over the desk. “Clay, Lila Trumbull called me seventeen weeks ago. The day after you went home sick with the flu.”

“She’s always calling. How can you know what day it was?”

“Because that was when Roxanne’s shrink’s body was found.” Amy smiled and spoke softly, as if to Roxanne herself. “Lila thought she saw you in the Albuquerque airport the day before. She was stopping to see Roxanne on her way back to New York from L.A. and was sure you were renting a car when she was picking up her bags. She’d called to you, but you were in such a hurry you didn’t hear her.”

Clay shifted in his chair. When he spoke his voice came out in a croak.

“I... she... she should have asked at the rental counter. They could’ve told her no one rented a car in my name that day. Anyway, I couldn’t have been there. I was home with the flu.”

“That’s what I told her, Clay. You were home sick — she must have been mistaken. And that’s what I’ll tell anyone else who asks... I’ll call Lisa Ferguson’s agent and tell her thirty, okay?”

Clay stared at her glassily, like a stuffed owl. “Sure, Amy. You do that.”

Amy stood up. “Oh — and, Clay, in case you’re thinking how good I’d look at the bottom of a mesa — or under the IRT — I hope you remember Roxanne has an editor clause in her contract. And she’s made it clear a dozen different ways that she won’t work with you.”

Clay’s secretary came down to Amy’s office a few minutes later. “Can you talk to old Mr. Jambon in Brussels? Clay’s gone home sick again. I hope there isn’t anything serious wrong with him.”

Amy smiled. “He’s fine. He just got a little overexcited this morning about Roxanne’s new book.”