High Heels and Homicide

Chapter two

Saint Just returned to his own apartment, caught between amusement at Maggie's rather adorable fierceness when dealing with the vagaries of the uncaring world and a small sadness that the breech between them still sat like a huge elephant in the middle of her living room, with neither of them daring to do more than periodically mention its existence.

She could, it seemed, create a hero… she just couldn't understand one.

«Sterling?» he called out, snatching up his sword cane from its resting place in—how coincidental?—a plaster stand in the shape of an elephant. «Have you changed your mind about accompanying me to the bank?»

Sterling Balder, wiping his hands on the «Kiss the Cook» apron tied around his pudgy waist, emerged from the kitchen, his cheeks floury white. «I've nearly got it, Saint Just,» he said, shoving his spectacles higher on his nose. «I think this next batch will be the charm.»

«More scones, Sterling? I thought we'd discussed this. We have enough paperweights as it is.»

Sterling's lower lip came out in a pout. «That's not nice, Saint Just. Mrs. McBedie insists on serving those English muffins, as she calls them, but I just know scones would be much more the thing, if I could only master them. You should have more faith in me, and all of that. Besides, Henry likes my scones. He's living in one of them, as a matter of fact, having eaten his way in.»

Saint Just winced. He'd told himself to forget about the tension between Maggie and himself, but obviously he'd allowed it to color his mood. «My deepest apologies, Sterling, I've become a beast. I'll be happy to sample one of this new batch with my tea the very moment I return.»

«Could you possibly stop at Mario's on your way back? It being Mrs. McBedie's day off, I thought we could have cold sliced meat for dinner.»

«Maggie has already requested pizza, if that's all right?» Saint Just asked, heading for the door once more. «And you have enough on your plate with the scones.» Saint Just knew that he'd have more than enough on his own plate—more stone-hard scones. «I'm also convinced this batch will be the charm.»

«Thank you, Saint Just. You're a good man.»

Saint Just considered Sterling's praise as he employed the tip of his sword cane to depress the call button for the elevator. Sterling was a good man, a good soul. He wasn't quite that certain about himself.

Once out on the street, Saint Just donned his new black, wide-brimmed hat—the one Maggie called his Riverboat Gambler hat—and tucked his cane under his arm, not in the least believing either accessory an affectation, or at all out of place with his midnight-blue silk knit pullover and tan slacks. And, because he was Saint Just, it all worked.

His confident, long-legged stride took him the few blocks to his bank, the one he had chosen after much online research; a choice Sterling had seconded because new account holders were rewarded with a chrome-and-black toaster oven.

He stepped into the building, his hat in his hand, and easily made his way to his favorite teller, Mrs. Halliday, as there was only one other customer in the bank at the moment. Two, if he counted a second gentleman at one of the tables, scribbling on a deposit slip.

«Good afternoon, my dear,» he said. «Aren't you looking well today. And how is your son? Still with the footballers?»

«Yes… er, thank you,» Mrs. Halliday said, not looking at him. «How may I help you today, sir?»

Saint Just frowned, lowered his voice. «Is something amiss, Mrs. Halliday?»

She smiled then, a rather plain woman whose smile could make her quite attractive. Except this smile was more of a rictus and eminently unflattering. «A very fine day, yes, it is.»

The hairs on the back of Saint Just's neck began to prickle as he felt someone looking hard at his back. He reached into his pocket, slowly extracted his money clip. «I was hoping you could exchange this for smaller bills,» he said, pulling out a one-hundred-dollar bill and slipping it across the countertop.

With fumblings fingers, Mrs. Halliday opened the drawer and pulled out five twenties, quickly counted them out. Not at all usual; Mrs. Halliday always gave him three twenties, three tens, and two fives, just as he preferred. «Have a nice day, sir,» she said, folding her hands on the counter without picking up the larger bill.

«I'll make a point of it, madam. Good day,» Saint Just said, then turned, seemingly oblivious of the man at the desk, the second man at the first teller's cage.

His cane in his hand, no longer tucked under his arm, he replaced his hat, setting it at a slight tilt, and strolled leisurely toward the door, then out into the street.

Where he stopped, stepped in front of the thick wall be-side the glass doors, flipped open his cell phone, and pushed two buttons. Lieutenant Wendell's number was one Saint Just had in the phone's memory.

Three rings, and the Lieutenant answered.

«Wendell, my good man, Alex Blakely here. Would it be at all possible for you to stop by my bank?» He gave him the address. «You are nearby, correct? Or is Maggie meeting you somewhere?»

«Maggie? I haven't talked to Maggie in a week. She doesn't return my calls. I know she's got a deadline and everything, but I was beginning to—why should I meet you at your bank? What's up?»

«Possibly nothing, possibly quite a bit. You haven't answered me. Are you close by?» As for the other—how very interesting. But he'd have to consider Maggie's fib another time; Mrs. Halliday had very clearly put her dependence upon him.

«No, I'm way the hell up in—Blakely, what in hell did you do now? Are you playing hero again? No, don't tell me. Oh, cripes—tell me.»

«So indecisive, my friend. Is it any wonder Maggie can't find it in herself to perceive you as a serious beau?» Saint Just stepped forward, held up his hand to a woman approaching the door to the bank, shook his head. «As you're unavailable, perhaps you'd allow for a substitute? Any of your number will do. Lights and sirens are always so welcome. But I really must go now.»

He folded the phone, slipping it back into his pocket as he smiled at the woman. «I'm dreadfully sorry to inconvenience you, madam, but it would appear the bank is being robbed at the moment. Perhaps you could visit our branch on Broadway? It's also a full-service facility. Thank you, and please call again,» he said, bowing, giving a slight tip of his hat as the woman all but ran down the street.

Saint Just then smiled at passersby, tipping his hat an-other time or two, before taking a final, quick peek through the gold-toned window, and moving to just beside the door, to stand at the ready.

The door opened, his cane came out and up at knee level, and the first man through the door found himself sprawled facedown on the sidewalk, what breath was left in him effectively expelled when his partner tripped and landed on top of him.

It was all rather lovely… quite a bit like slow-motion dominoes.

«Oh, how clumsy of me,» Saint Just said as a loud alarm began to ring inside the bank, and people on the sidewalk variously stopped, stared, shrieked, or moved along with an intensity of purpose that all but shouted, «Not my table, not my problem.»

With the tip of his cane pressed against one jugular, the heel of his classically stylish shoe firmly planted in one back, Saint Just then posed rather like a hunter with his first kill. An excited couple, speaking rapid Japanese, kept their mini videocam rolling, so that Saint Just, always polite, bowed to them.

He was, however, distracted by the sound that seemed to go poof inside the open black plastic bag one of the men had dropped—signaling the explosion of the dye pack an adventurous teller had placed inside it.

He was definitely distracted by the small, dusty cloud that served to turn one leg of his new slacks a garish pur-pie.

«Oh dear, an unexpected punishment for performing a good deed. Ah, and look at you. That's going to leave a mark, isn't it, poor fellow?» Saint Just asked the robber closest to the open bag, but the man, his face and hair now purple, only coughed, blinking furiously.

More excited Japanese, with the woman hitting her companion's shoulder to get his attention, and Saint Just realized that the tourist was now eager to capture for posterity the arrival of a few of New York's Finest.

That was fine with Saint Just. He had been wondering what he was going to do when the robbers recovered their breath and realized they outnumbered him two to one. Brandishing his sword cane on a city street at midday certainly wasn't the action of a prudent man. He'd happily turn over the miscreants to the police, and be on his way.

At least, that was his intention. As it turned out, the uniformed policemen had other ideas for his immediate future, which, unfortunately, had a lot to do with slamming him up against the wall, telling him to «spread 'em,» and then slapping him in handcuffs.

There was often no justice in this world.

But, Saint Just realized as he heard his name being called by none other than Holly Spivak, she of the traveling Fox News van, in America there is always the media.

Maggie opened the door and stood back as Bernice Toland-James swept into the apartment: tall, slim, her mane of inspired bushy long red hair flying like a flag in her self-created breeze. Designer clad, chemically peeled, silicone enhanced, suctioned and tweaked, lifted and toned, Bernie was that most dangerous of females: powerful in business, perimenopausal, and newly sober.

She was also Maggie's editor and very best friend.

«Here you go. Liverwurst is yours, salami's mine,» Bernie said, flinging out her arm, so that the paper bag she held nearly clipped Maggie on the nose. «Got any cigarettes? I forgot mine at the office, damn it.»

Maggie took the bag and put it down on the coffee table, beside the two glasses of lemonade she'd poured the moment the doorman buzzed Bernie's arrival. Socks would have just let her come up, but this new guy was by-the-book. Which was good, because Bernie's arrival could be startling enough, without her showing up unannounced.

«You know I quit, Bernie, and I'm carrying the extra ten pounds to prove it. What do you think kills more—cigarettes or obesity? Never mind. But I've got a spare nicotine inhaler around somewhere, if you want it.»

«Yeah, right,» Bernie said, kicking off her shoes before sitting on one of the couches, pulling her long legs up under her. «That's like a scotch on the rocks minus the scotch. No thanks. Besides, you look stupid with that thing in your mouth, no offense.»

«None taken,» Maggie said, collapsing onto the facing couch. «I love being told I look stupid. What's wrong with the manuscript?»

Bernie dug in the bag, pulled out the sandwiches. «Here you go. Let's eat.»

«Let's eat and talk,» Maggie said, taking the foil-wrapped sandwich, then grabbing a snack-size bag of potato chips, leaving the tortilla chips for Bernie. She ripped open the bag, carefully positioned five potato chips directly on her liverwurst, then replaced the top piece of seeded rye bread and squished the sandwich between her hands. Gourmet all the way. «What's wrong with the manuscript?»

Bernie held up a sienna-tipped finger as she nodded her head and chewed, finally swallowed. «You're a great writer, Maggie. The best. The Saint Just Mysteries are top drawer. I always knew you could write. Never a problem there. Really. Sales? Sales are terrific. You're carrying us on your back, Mags, so I can say as both your editor and your publisher, Toland Books is damn grateful.»

«But? Come on, Bernie. We both know there's a big but coming.»

Bernie took a sip of lemonade, winced. «But… how do I say this nicely? Okay, I've got it. But this book stinks on ice. One hundred thousand words that demonstrate why editors drink. Sorry, honey.»

«It… it… oh, it does not!»

«Not the writing. The writing's great. Really. But who wants to read The Case of the Lamenting Lordship?»

»The Case of the Lonely Lordship ,» Maggie corrected. She'd never really been nuts over the title, which probably should have told her something. She hated working without a title. «It's a little dark, I admit it.»

Bernie pushed her hair back, used its length to tie it in a knot. «Saint Just spends two thirds of the book contemplating his navel and the last third going around making amends for being a bad, bad man, like he's doing some kind of wacko Regency twelve-step program. I had to prop my eyelids up with toothpicks to read it for more than ten minutes at a time. Where's the joy? Where's the humor? Where's the murder in this murder mystery, for crying out loud? And we're not even going to talk about the sex, because there wasn't any.»

Maggie looked down at her sandwich, her appetite gone. «He killed a man, Bernie. He had to come to terms with what he'd done.»

«Oh, yeah, right. He killed a man. Big deal. The guy was no good anyway. Saint Just's a hero—our hero. If I wanted someone wringing his hands and beating his breast for four hundred pages, I'd buy—hell, I wouldn't buy that cheap, lazy, manipulative pap. I hate that drivel. Everybody cry? Spare me.»

«Saint Just can't have a crisis of conscience?»

Bernie ripped open the bag of tortilla chips, spilling them out on her lap. «Again, spare me. It's the Saint Just mysteries, Mags, not the confessions of a tarnished hero. Heroes don't have crises of conscience. They bed the ladies and solve murders, both brilliantly, then go for drinks at Boodles or White's or somewhere. End of story, watch for the next Saint Just Mystery, available soon.»

«I… I think his character needs to… to grow a little.» Maggie winced, then said the hated word. «Evolve.»

«Oh, no. Not that. Please, not that. Are you planning on writing for the critics now, Maggie, instead of your loyal readers? You want a list of all the good popular fiction writers who bought into that crap about not writing real books? I know where I can't look to find that list—the New York Times , that's where. Your readers want Saint Just. Edgy, confident, brilliant, a bit of a bastard, but with heart. They don't want Hugh Grant.»

Maggie tried to swallow, choked, and reached for her glass. «So… so you want a rewrite?»

«Honey, I want a bonfire, a big one. Except for Sterling's subplot. Poor guy, that's the first time in a half-dozen books he finally got laid. I wouldn't want to lose that—but giving Sterling that nice, tame little love scene instead of Saint Just, not in addition to Saint Just's rolls in the hay? Nope, that's a cop-out. It doesn't work. It's cheat-ing.»

Maggie wasn't going to cry. She refused to cry. She was a professional, damn it, and she was not going to—"I put everything I had into that book, Bernie. It all just poured out of me. I know it sounds dumb, but that was… that was a book of the heart for me, something I just had to do.»

The editor put down her sandwich. «Aw, honey, I know that. What I want to know now is why? Are you going through some blue period or something? What did I miss while I was drying out at the happy farm?»

Maggie was on thin ice now, and she knew it. «Well… you know. Buddy's murder and everything. You being accused. And then Sterling? I was so worried about Sterling… and then Saint Just—I mean Alex …»

«Oh, brother.» Bernie looked toward the sideboard and the bottles she'd insisted Maggie not hide just because her best friend was a boozer, recently retired. «I guess it was bound to happen. I mean, Alex is a god, we both know that, and you did base Saint Just on him. But one is fiction, Mags, and one is Alex. I know you don't like that Alex is always… well, always in the thick of things whenever there's trouble. But now you're mixing them up, kiddo, the real and the fictional. You can't control Alex, so now you're trying to give twenty-first-century morals and all that crap to a guy from eighteen-sixteen. You've got to keep them separated in your mind, Maggie.»

«That… that's sometimes difficult,» Maggie said, wishing for a cigarette with all her being. Should she tell Bernie the truth? Could she? Bernie was her best friend… but Bernie was sober now, and what Maggie told her today, the woman would remember tomorrow. Forever. Forever might be a long time to go around regretting opening her big mouth.

Bernie nodded. «I guess it is. But just because you could never see Alex killing anyone doesn't mean Saint Just has to morph into frigging Alan Alda. And don't say who , because I'm not that old.»

«My God.» Maggie looked at her liverwurst sandwich again, beginning to think it looked pretty good. Like she'd had a liverwurst-and-potato-chip-on-rye epiphany. «You're right, Bernie. Saint Just is Saint Just. The whole time I was writing, I felt like I was trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. It was… I guess it was just something I had to do. As… as a writer, hokey as that sounds.»

«Okay, that's fair. But, now that you've done it, do us both a favor and don't do it again. Books of the heart are almost always just for the writer, not for public consumption. God knows I've read and rejected enough of them.

Just forget about the book for a while. Go do your penance in New Jersey with your folks, go to England, leave your laptop here in New York. Find a nice Englishman to flirt with or something.»

«Yeah, that's what I need, all right. Another Englishman,» Maggie said, wincing. And yet, she felt better. She really did. Maybe the book had been an exorcism of sorts, and now it was out of her system. Saint Just was Saint Just. Hadn't Alex told her that? «I yams what I yams,» she said, and grinned.

«What?»

«Popeye, Bernie. I yams what I yams. Doesn't anybody watch the old cartoons anymore?»

«No, some of us have a life,» Bernie said, and Maggie threw her sandwich wrapper at her friend, just as the door opened and Sterling raced into the room.

«Turn it on, turn it on! Miss Spivak is talking to Saint Just.»

«No! Oh, cripes, now what? I let him out of my sight for two minutes and—» Maggie nearly toppled off the couch, reaching for the remote control, then hit the Power button. Moments later, she saw Saint Just on the screen, Holly Spivak beside him, the Fox News van behind them.

«… truly, Miss Spivak,» Alex was saying, «the kudos all go to Mrs. Halliday, who so cleverly warned me that something nefarious was afoot. I, for my small part in the affair, merely reacted.»

Holly Spivak pulled the mike back to her own face. «And there we have it, Kevin—Mr. Blakely's modest explanation of what can only be called an act of heroism caught somewhere between Zorro and the Keystone Kops, as two of New York's Finest nearly arrested our hero, mistaking him for one of the bad guys, when he had actually just single-handedly foiled a daring daylight bank robbery.

Thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Yasimoto, again, here's all the action, caught on tape by Mr. Yasimoto, who happened to be videotaping his wife as she posed in front of the bank.»

Videotape. Of course. You couldn't walk more than five steps in any direction in Manhattan without bumping into some tourist with a videocam.

Maggie forgot to breathe as the tape rolled and she saw a woman who had to be Mrs. Yasimoto, smiling and pointing to the art deco facade of the bank. Suddenly the woman screamed, and the picture blurred, then refocused, to show Alex—with a rousing, theatrical flourish—placing the tip of his cane against the neck of one of two men sprawled on the pavement.

Maggie closed her eyes. «Ah, jeez, doesn't he ever give it a rest?»

«Look, Maggie, look!» Sterling shouted. «The constables! They're arresting Saint Just.»

Okay, it was time to open her eyes again… and there was Alex, being pushed against the wall and frisked. And his pant leg was purple. Why was his pant leg purple? And did she really want an answer to that question?

«You know,» Bernie said, munching on a tortilla chip, «at times like this, Mags, I can see why you sometimes get confused between Alex and Saint Just. He does make a pretty good hero.»

«Yeah,» Maggie said, and decided to take another bite of her sandwich. It was safer than talking to Bernie.

Saint Just was Saint Just. Sometimes, if you just sort of squinted, life was simple. Okay, she had to learn to live with it. She could live with it. Really. She could. Hoo-boy…