On the homeward-bound Broadway bus, Rannie checked her cell. There were text messages from various S&S folk, all understandably in shock over Ellen’s death. Only Ellen’s assistant, Dina, thought to connect the dots between Ret’s murder and Ellen’s. “Please say the big secret book isn’t by Ret.”
A text from Larry simply said, “Call.” That would wait until she was home.
One by one, she deleted texts. There were also old voice messages; Rannie was all set to clear them en masse when she realized some were from Ellen on Sunday. A chill slithered up from the nape of her neck and across her scalp. She shouldn’t delete them, should she? Not before informing the police of their existence. All she remembered about the messages was the increasing note of panic in her friend’s voice. Was there anything more? Should Rannie listen to them again?
No. She couldn’t bear to.
In her wallet was the card of the policeman from the morgue. William Grieg. As soon as she was in her apartment, Rannie called. Grieg arrived half an hour later and, after listening to Ellen’s messages, said, “Ms. Bookman. You think you’re up to answering some questions now?” Immediately Rannie wished that she had a hand to hold, specifically one belonging to Tim Butler. “One sec,” she said and called Tim again, leaving a message to get in touch; right after, she felt babyish and so, facing Grieg with a look of resignation, told him, “I’m not eager. But since you’re here . . .”
Over Diet Cokes in the living room, Rannie talked while Grieg studiously took notes.
“What time did Ellen Donahoe usually go for a run?”
“On days she wasn’t at work, around nine thirty.”
“Had Frank . . .” He leafed back in his notebook. “Frank Meeker tried to contact her recently?”
“Not that I know of. He’s married now.” The SOB.
“Was Ms. Donahoe seeing anyone new?”
“Yes. But she didn’t say who. On Sunday she was meeting the guy for lunch. She said it was nobody special.”
Grieg asked about colleagues from S&S and what Ellen’s job entailed, so Rannie used Ellen’s relationship with Ret as an example of an editor’s function. Grieg seemed surprised at how much day-to-day involvement and confidence boosting were required in the job.
“Had they worked together before?”
“Yes.” Rannie explained that Ellen had been Ret’s editor for many books, including Dark Side of the Moon, the biography of Mike Bellettra. “Ellen was devastated about what happened to Ret. I don’t know if you remember—”
“Remember? Who could forget, Bellettra attacking her like that? Lye—nasty stuff.” He shook his head in distaste. “I once followed up on a 911, a domestic, a woman screaming how her husband was threatening to kill himself by swallowing lye. He did it too, right as I came in the apartment. It took two days for the poor bastard to die.” Grieg paused and his brow furrowed. “You know, actually now that I’m thinking about it, it wasn’t lye. It was Drano.” He nodded to Rannie. “Yeah, definitely Drano.”
Rannie refrained from comment. Lye. Drano. Lemon-scented Clorox. What did it possibly matter which lethally corrosive cleanser the poor schlub had taken?
The cop consulted his notes again and, looking up at Rannie, asked, “Do you know Lawrence Katz?”
Strangely, it took a half second for Rannie to compute that Larry and Lawrence Katz were one and the same.
“Larry? Yes! Why?”
Grieg avoided the question. “How do you know him?”
“He used to work at Simon & Schuster, where I once worked. That’s where I first met him.”
“ ‘First’ met him?” Grieg repeated.
“Years ago, after my divorce, Larry and I saw each other for a short time . . . socially.” Grieg kept his expression neutral, she noticed. “Larry left New York. We lost touch. It was a short romance.” Rannie frowned. “We connected at an unhappy time in both our lives, and for a while being unhappy together seemed better than being unhappy alone.” Rannie could hear herself and mentally winced: Why did she feel it necessary to blather on about her neediness to a member of the NYPD?
“When were you last in touch?”
Rannie crossed her legs. “Well, coincidentally I saw Larry yesterday. It was the first time in ages.” How suspicious did that sound?
“You ran into him?”
“No. I had a meeting with him at Dusk Books.” That sounded professional, aboveboard.
“Why suddenly reconnect?”
The short-form answer was “I hoped he’d have freelance work for me.” Then Rannie drained her Diet Coke and added, “Well, truthfully it was more than that.” Jesus! Why had she used the word “truthfully” as if up till now she’d been lying like a shag rug? Rannie wet her upper lip, which felt stuck to her gum. “Dusk, where Larry works, just published a book about Ret Sullivan. It’s called Tattletale.” Rannie paused. “And I have to confess—” Shit! “Confess”? What was wrong with her? “I have to confess that morbid interest made me call Larry. I was curious if he’d kept up with Ret.”
“So he knew Ms. Sullivan?”
Grieg had to be aware of that already since he was part of the homicide investigation and Larry had been questioned, twice now. “Publishing is a very small world,” Rannie replied.
“And had he?”
Rannie looked at him blankly. “Had he what?”
“Had Mr. Katz kept up with Ms. Sullivan?”
Ooh. This was getting stickier and stickier. “He said no.”
He stopped writing and looked up. “Any reason not to believe him?
Rannie owed no allegiance to Larry Katz, not when she was being interviewed about a double homicide. Yet she wished giving a forthright answer didn’t feel quite so much like ratting out someone whom she’d once been genuinely fond of. “Larry is the kind of guy who loves crossword puzzles, anagrams, any kind of word game. I mention this because the author of Tattletale is called Lina Struvel.” Rannie showed him her copy of the book. “I’m not sure why but this morning, I began fixating on the author’s name. All of a sudden I saw that if you take all the letters in ‘Lina Struvel’ and move them around, you come out with ‘Ret Sullivan.’ Ret Sullivan wrote the book.”
Grieg eyes were still fixed on the book cover. “A word scramble. You figured this out yourself?”
Rannie tried to smile modestly, although the obnoxious smart girl in her never ceased craving recognition of her cleverness.
“And Lawrence Katz’s involvement in this book would be what?”
“I don’t know this for sure, but I’m guessing he was the editor. Suggesting to Ret that she use a word-scramble pseudonym would be a very Larry thing to do.”
“Why bother? It seems like everybody and his brother has a memoir out. Ret Sullivan was a big-time author. So why not have her write the book and use her own name?”
Rannie shrugged. “Maybe just for a goof.” She could see Grieg was not getting the humor.
“So if Larry Katz was the editor,” he pointed at Tattletale, “then he’d have been in touch with her, Ms. Sullivan, quite a bit, if I’m following your drift.”
Rannie didn’t feel a nod was even required. She sank back into the couch. Jesus, she’d just made Larry sound like a sophomoric, games-playing twit. And while he sort of was, he was also a decent guy. Larry’s signing up Ret to write Tattletale could even be construed as a good-hearted gesture in a certain, off-kilter light. No doubt he saw profit in the book, yet handing Ret the project was a mitzvah of sorts. Rannie tried explaining this line of reasoning to Grieg. “He was throwing a lifeline to a woman who spent her days holed up in an apartment with her press clippings for company. He gave her something to do.”
“Did Ellen Donahoe know Larry Katz?”
Publishing was hands-down the most incestuous business. “Yes. We all knew each other from Simon & Schuster.”
“So just professional colleagues?”
Redundancy alert! Rannie’s brain signaled. Colleagues by definition connoted a professional relationship. “Yes, they were business acquaintances,” she said. “Ellen and I were more than that. We were friends, and she was great about giving me freelance work after I lost my job at S&S.”
“Ms. Bookman, do you mind saying why you were let go?” He was tactful enough to avoid saying “fired.” But Rannie could tell a whole raft of creepy reasons for dismissal had instantly occurred to him. . . . Had Ms. Bookman been stealing? Engaging in inappropriate behavior at the office—oh, maybe like getting caught having sex with the entire sales force? Or perhaps threatening another employee?
Rannie recounted in detail the ludicrous story of Nancy Drew that led her to file for unemployment. He tried to suppress a smile.
“It’s okay. I’d think it was funny too if it had happened to someone else,” Rannie said. Would he bother to verify her story with S&S human resources? Probably.
“Pretty harsh if you weren’t the one who screwed up.”
Rannie shrugged in a “whatever” way.
After that, his questions returned to Ellen. “When did you last see her?”
“On Sunday at her apartment. I picked up a copy of the manuscript about Charlotte Cummings so I could start copyediting it. Ellen had the only hard copy besides Ret’s.” Uttering those last words jogged Rannie’s memory. “Ellen told me that the copy she gave me and the one the police took from Ret Sullivan’s apartment might not be identical.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. According to Ellen, Ret Sullivan might have made some last-minute changes that would be entered on her disk. I was supposed to check over that final version. But once it was in police custody, Ellen said I should just work on the printout she gave me: she was quite sure that Ret wasn’t adding new chunks or making major changes.”
“But Ms. Donahoe didn’t know that for certain.”
Rannie frowned and suddenly started to conjure up a new scenario. Maybe Ret’s final manuscript did contain a bombshell and somehow the murderer found out about it. Could Ret have been engaging in a little prepublication blackmail on the order of “Pay me to leave out the dirt, or else”?
“I don’t know what to think. If the disk with you guys is meaningful, why didn’t the killer take it? It was in a briefcase right in plain sight—it seems to me a briefcase would strike anyone as a logical place for the disk.”
He nodded. “How familiar are you with the manuscript, the version you worked on?”
“Very.”
“So you’d notice differences between the two?”
“Anything substantive, absolutely.”
He asked if she’d mind coming down to the precinct.
Armed with her photocopy of Portrait of a Lady, Rannie accompanied the cop to his car and rode to the Twenty-Fourth Precinct on the Upper West Side, about a mile and a half from her apartment. It was a white-brick sugar cube, four stories high. Somehow the scraggly, three-quarters-dead plantings in front made the building look even uglier.
She was left at the desk of a detective on medical leave. It took two hours to read Ret’s final manuscript on his PC. Phones jangled constantly, announcements came over a loudspeaker at frequent intervals, and the cops’ preferred means of communication was shouting across the room to each other. None of it bothered Rannie. It was gratifying to think that her expertise was needed and valued. She was not snooping, she was aiding an investigation. And she felt completely safe inside the precinct building, safe in the same way that she’d felt when her dad would tuck her into bed before turning on her Tinker Bell night-light.
When she was done, Grieg thanked her. “I appreciate you giving up your time.”
The problem was that she’d turned up bubkes. Exactly as Ellen had predicted, the two versions were essentially the same. On Ret’s disk there was a more detailed description of Charlotte’s Northeast Harbor “cottage,” which, after her death, would become a research center for a vast wildlife preserve created from the acres of shoreline property that she owned. Again, Rannie found herself wondering if Ellen might have been Audio. She mentioned this to Grieg and showed him the acknowledgments. Ret trusted Ellen as much as she trusted anyone. They worked well together. Somehow it seemed likelier that Ellen had been killed for snooping than for editing. And yet nothing scurrilous appeared in the manuscript. Grieg scribbled all this in his pad but didn’t seem impressed with Rannie’s reasoning.
Once outside, Rannie took Grieg up on his offer of a ride. It was rush hour, therefore horrendous traffic.
“Actually could you hold on a sec?” she asked when they reached the sidewalk. Rannie texted Nate. “Going straight to Grandma’s. Meet me there.” It was better to avoid a phone conversation. Dinner at Mary’s was the source of untold arguments between Rannie and Nate, who rightfully resented the almost inedible fare that was served. Usually they both wolfed down a quick burger or slice of pizza beforehand, but time didn’t allow for that this evening.
“Instead of home, would you mind dropping me off at Eighty-Third and Park Avenue?”
“Whatever you say.” Grieg opened the car door for her. “Want a real-deal police escort?”
“Absolutely!”
In less than a minute he had a flasher attached to the roof of his car and away they went, siren blasting. It was even better than riding in Ret’s Rolls . . . well, maybe that was going too far. They sped through the Eighty-Sixth Street transverse and down Park Avenue in record time. So in addition to walking and two A.M. cab rides, there was yet a third way to travel aboveground in NYC unimpeded—police escort!
She thanked Grieg as Mary’s white-gloved doorman extended a hand to help her from the police vehicle. Certainly this was not the usual mode of transportation for residents of the building or arriving guests; nonetheless, the doorman’s smile was as cordial as ever.
“I wished I’d turned up something,” Rannie said.
“I would have been amazed if you did. Double-checking is ninety-nine percent of my job.”
“Same with copyediting.”
The doorman was about to shut the door behind her when Grieg held up a hand to forestall him. “One more thing.” He was addressing Rannie. “By any chance, were you Audio?”
Come again? “Me! No! Of course not! What makes you—”
Grieg cut her off. “Just asking,” he said and then, motioning for the doorman to shut the door, he took off, leaving Rannie standing under the canopy, mouth open, eyes as round and wide as in a cartoon double take.
Analyzing what prompted Grieg’s last question, delivered with an undertone of accusation, had to be put on hold. The elevator door opened. There was Mary, waiting to greet her.
“Come in, come in, Rannie dear. What a day! I’m in quite a dither!” Mary exclaimed. In the past year Rannie had noticed how increasingly minor nuisances—a mix-up in a delivery from the dry cleaners, a misplaced electric bill—could send Mary into a tailspin.
The phone started ringing and Mary’s hands flew up.
“Oh, Lord! It’ll be Daisy again! This must be the tenth time she’s called. I’d better dash off and get it.”
“Dashing off” now translated to proceeding with great caution, Mary making her way haltingly from the large entry hall, through the living room, and into the small den. Mary had a cane. Rannie wished she’d use it.
“No, Daisy dear, I’m not hard of hearing,” Mary was saying and motioned to Rannie to sit down. “It sometimes takes me a little while to reach the phone.”
The TV was on mute in the den; however, from images flashing on the screen, all of the same tiny, fashionably dressed, anciently old lady, Rannie understood why the day had been so dither-making for Mary.
Charlotte Cummings had exhaled for the very last time. Rannie raced to Mary’s bedroom and turned on the TV. The mayor, in front of City Hall, was speaking before reporters, full-bore somber: “New York has lost a true icon,” he intoned.
The coverage focused on the extraordinary length of Charlotte Cummings’s life, someone born before World War I. The NBC anchor signed off, saying, “Now the life of this extraordinary lady has at last come to an end.” His demeanor and tone were appropriately grave too; yet hearing a slight stress on the words “at last” made Rannie think of the Oz Munchkins warbling about the Wicked Witch, who was “really most sincerely dead.”
When commercials came on, Rannie returned to the den. Mary was still on the phone.
“Oh, you managed to book a direct flight?” Mary was saying. “At this time of year and such short notice, well, yes, I am amazed.”
Mary nodded several times in silent response to whatever Daisy was telling her. She opened an end table drawer and took out a notepad from Piping Rock Country Club, on which she began writing in her neat Chapin School print. “Yes, dear. I have everything down, though I still say Charlotte would want you to stay in Florida.”
A moment later, Mary hung up. At the same time Rannie’s phone pinged, announcing a text. Nate. He was bailing. “Bio test. Gotta study.”
Yeah, right.
“Daisy got a call this afternoon from Charlotte’s granddaughter. The first thing Daisy asked was, ‘This isn’t another false alarm, is it?’ ” Mary giggled. “But now it’s all over the news.”
“When and where is the funeral?” Rannie asked as Mary freshened her drink.
“Saint Thomas on Saturday morning.”
A neo-Gothic structure the soothing color of chocolate pudding, Saint Thomas Church sat at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street and was famous for its boys choir. The church also boasted two walls of giant stained-glass windows, more than a hundred years old. However, over time the metalwork holding the glass had disintegrated to the point where hundreds of pieces were threatening to burst from their frames. From copyediting Portrait of a Lady, Rannie now knew that Charlotte Cummings had come to the rescue, coughing up three million dollars for their restoration.
“The first year we were married, Peter took me to Saint Thomas on Christmas Eve to hear the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus. It was transporting.”
Oops. Mary’s smile suddenly tightened.
Rannie rarely brought up her ex-husband, yet never mentioning him only made the elephant in the room grow more enormous. “Charm can only take you so far” had become Mary’s terse and pretty much on-the-money appraisal of her youngest son. She had never really forgiven him for leaving Rannie and their kids.
Quickly Mary turned the conversation back to Charlotte Cummings’s funeral. “There’s a guest list and reserved seating. Can you imagine? As if it’s a wedding.” Mary paused to jiggle ice cubes and imbibe. “Well, I suppose a lot of important and fancy people will be there. Oh, how Daisy hates crowds since she broke her hip. She’s terrified of someone knocking her over.” Then all at once Mary looked “dithery” again. “Will you look at me! What an awful hostess I am!” Mary rose from the silk striped armchair and moments later Rannie had a glass of white wine in her hand. She sipped it tentatively. It tasted okay. Mary kept white wine in the minifridge under the bar solely for Rannie’s pleasure. However, the number of visits it took to polish off a bottle meant the wine always turned sour before the bottle was empty.
“Terrible to live so long,” Mary said. “Although, really, you wouldn’t say Charlotte Cummings was living, would you? She just wasn’t dead.”
Rannie nodded and as she sipped her wine she thought more about Charlotte Cummings. It was a shame that Ret Sullivan wasn’t around to dash off a last chapter on the funeral, which undoubtedly would be loaded with pomp and full of famous faces. A celebrity sendoff was just up Ret’s alley. Would anyone at S&S even bother including a short preface in the book, something along the order of “Charlotte Cummings died on blah blah and was buried at blah blah”? Always conscientious Ellen certainly would have seen to it. Suddenly the wine turned sour in Rannie’s mouth. Ellen too was “most sincerely dead.” It wasn’t even twenty-four hours ago that Rannie had identified her body. She shut her eyes as if that could block out the memory of the morgue, Ellen on the gurney.
“Dear, you look unhappy.”
“No, no, I’m fine. Just tired.” Rannie stopped then and blurted out a request, the words sounding strange even to her own ears. “Mary, I’d take Daisy to the funeral . . . that’s if she’d like me to.”
“Lord, volunteering for a funeral! I try to avoid them like the plague!”
Rannie tipped her head in acknowledgment. “It’s horrible to admit. But the voyeur in me wouldn’t mind seeing the turnout—and the restored windows.” There was more to it than that, of course. A homicide detective had just accused her of being Audio, Ret’s snoop. Well, the snoop in Rannie wanted, pure and simple, to check out Charlotte Cummings’s funeral. She had no expectation of picking up some telltale clue in the pews of Saint Thomas that would solve either Ret’s murder or Ellen’s. Nevertheless, Rannie felt an urge to go, and here was the perfect excuse to do so.
“Well, I’ll certainly mention it to Daisy. The windows are something to see now.”
Mary offered a tray of withered baby carrots. “I had absolutely no idea that airlines give a ‘bereavement’ discount,” she said brightly. “Otherwise Daisy would have had to pay more than thirteen hundred dollars for a plane ticket!”
Rannie dipped a carrot in a small bowlful of something that bore a faint resemblance to salsa and yet tasted more like unheated tomato vegetable soup. Then she broke the news about Nate.
“Well, isn’t that too bad? But I understand. I told Nate I’ll be there when the Chapel tennis team plays Collegiate. That’s in just a week.”
Here was one of the reasons Rannie loved Mary. She accepted without a particle of rancor her fairly bit part in Nate’s life now. Rannie’s mother, on the other hand, seemed almost to revel in taking umbrage over any slight from her grandchildren . . . or her daughters.
The news over, Rannie and Mary watched Jeopardy!, another of Mary’s sacred rituals, most evenings in Earla’s company as well. “Ooh, phooey.” Mary scowled upon seeing the categories pop up. “I’m hopeless at baseball.” As usual, after every correct response from Rannie, Mary declared that Rannie should try out to become a contestant because she’d win “a bundle.”
After Final Jeopardy!, Mary stood and collected the carrots and dip. “I’ll be back in a moment. I need to heat up one of the dinners Earla left. We have a choice. Tuna tetrazzini or chili. Which do you prefer?”
“Ooh, that’s hard,” Rannie said. As she’d sampled both in the past, the truthful answer would have to be “neither.”
“Well, since we had salsa for hors d’oeuvres, shall we do chili and make a Mexican night of it?” Mary suggested.
“Olé!” Rannie answered gaily, consoling herself that Skippy in all his wonderful chunkiness would be at home, waiting for her.