Murder on a Hot Tin Roof Read online

  Murder on a Hot Tin Roof

  Amanda Matetsky

  Mystery novelist and crime reporter Paige Turner is thrilled to see the hottest show on Broadway-but when she visits the star the next morning, he's been prematurely chilled. With her friend Abby, Paige embarks on a quest for the killer that has her springing all over the city like an overheated feline.

  Amanda Matetsky

  Murder on a Hot Tin Roof

  The fourth book in the Paige Turner Mysteries series, 2006

  For Harry, Sylvia, Matthew, Molly, Rae, Joel, Ira,

  Liza, Tim, Tara, Kate, Mary Lou, and Dick-

  my favorite cast of characters

  Acknowledgments

  I am, as always, most grateful to family and friends-especially Harry Matetsky [1], Molly Murrah, Liza, Tim, Tara and Kate Clancy, Ira Matetsky, Matthew Greitzer, Rae and Joel Frank, Sylvia Cohen, Mary Lou and Dick Clancy, Susan Frank, Ann Waldron, Nelson DeMille, Dianne Francis, Dorothy Newmark, Craig Hughes, Art Scott, Betsy Thornton, Santa and Tom De Haven, Nikki and Bert Miller, Herta Puleo, Esther Schoenhorn, Marte Cameron, Mirella Rongo, Al Faust, Cameron Joy, Sandra Thompson and Chris Sherman, Donna and Michael Steinhorn, Stephanie and Burt Klein, Mark Voger, Gayle Rawlings and Debbie Marshall, Judy Capriglione, Martha Cevasco, Judy Dini, Betty Fitzsimmons, Nancy Francese, Jane Gudapati, Carleen Kierce, April Margolin, Margaret Ray, Doris Schweitzer, Carol Smith, Roberta Waugh and her heavenly helpmate, Joseph.

  My good friends at Literacy Nassau are a source of much-needed encouragement, as are my fellow mystery writers and readers at Sisters in Crime-Central Jersey. And my co-agents, Annelise Robey and Meg Ruley of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, and my editor at Penguin Group (USA), Martha Bushko, are the most inspiring and indulgent supporters any writer could ask for. A million thanks to them and every one of my readers.

  Prologue

  DANGER IS A POWERFUL DRUG. IT MAKES your heart throb, your head buzz, your limbs quiver, and your skin crawl. It sends adrenaline shooting through your veins like a bolt of electricity. It can make you weak as a kitten, or stronger than Charles Atlas. It can fill you with terror, or cause you to feel so brave and defiant you’d gladly challenge Senator Joe McCarthy (and all the rest of his hateful red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee vigilantes) to a duel.

  You have to be very careful, though. Danger is such a devious, potent, and seductive stimulant that once you develop a taste for it, you can easily become addicted.

  As I seem to be.

  I’m Paige Turner (more about the preposterous name later), and I’m the only female on the six-person staff of a sensational (okay, trashy) true-crime magazine called Daring Detective. Normally, my job wouldn’t be especially dangerous-except for the fact that, as an abnormally assertive woman, I’m always in danger of getting fired-but since I’m also the only female writer in the whole darn detective magazine industry, and since I’m always trying to prove myself to be as tough and capable as any man… well, let’s just say I have a tendency to put myself in a teensy bit too much peril.

  Like the time I was writing about the rape and murder of an unwed mother/call girl and nearly got raped and murdered myself. Then, last Christmas, when I was working on the story of a young Macy’s salesgirl who was killed over an oatmeal box full of diamonds, I got shot! And just a few months after that-after my leg and shoulder wounds had healed and I was running all over Manhattan investigating the so-called suicide of a famous TV star-I was almost thrown to my death over a mezzanine railing.

  Get the picture? Danger clings to me like a possessive lover. Or maybe, as I noted before, it’s the other way around. But whatever the case (i.e., whoever’s doing the clinging), one thing is inescapably true: Danger and I have a very intimate relationship.

  This drives my boyfriend, NYPD homicide detective Dan Street, right out of his cautious, crime-busting mind. Every time I begin working on another unsolved murder story, he pops his cork altogether. He starts stomping around like a storm trooper, smoking one Lucky Strike after another, getting all red in his glowering yet gorgeous face, and flatly forbidding me to get further involved. If Dan had his way, I’d quit my job, take up embroidery instead of writing, and never again set foot outside the confines of my tiny, roach-infested Greenwich Village apartment.

  It’s nice that Dan worries about me so much, I guess. I surely wouldn’t like it if he didn’t care. But as a twenty-nine-year-old Korean War widow who has to make her own way in the world… and who prides herself on her own pluck and ingenuity… and who has longed to be a crime and mystery writer since she was an innately curious (okay, insanely nosy) girl of fourteen-well, I’m forced to admit that I sometimes find Dan’s concern for my safety a bit bothersome (all right, annoying as hell). And, as much as I admire and respect Dan’s noble and steadfast authority-in both his personal and professional life-there are times when, if I want to get on with my own life, I simply have to ignore it. And go on about my business. (And, though it pains and shames me to admit it, tell Dan a few lies to cover my tracks.)

  I never had this problem with my late husband, Bob Turner. Not because Bob was more supportive and understanding than Dan, but because Bob and I weren’t together long enough for any such power struggle to arise. We had been married only one brief, blissful month when he was called overseas to help General Douglas MacArthur fight the enemy in North Korea. I saw my brave, beloved husband off at Grand Central Station, hugging and kissing him as if my life depended on it, and begging the Fates to bring him back home to me soon.

  Well, the filthy, fickle Fates must have been really ticked off at me about something, because I never saw him again.

  Bob was killed in action three years and seven months ago, on the first day of December, 1951. And I’ve been on my own ever since. Except for some breathtakingly bittersweet memories, a small government-issued insurance policy, a few khaki-colored U.S. Army T-shirts, and-natch!-the hindmost half of my embarrassingly comical name, Bob didn’t leave me anything when he died. So, I’ve had to support myself. Totally. Which isn’t easy when you’re a woman living alone (and striving to do a man’s job) in the dog-eat-dog world of Manhattan. Which is why I’ve become the hardest-working (not to mention most danger-prone!) crime writer ever to nab a piece of the Daring Detective payroll pie.

  Though most of my DD duties consist of making coffee and attending to all secretarial and clerical chores (the boring, servile stuff my chauvinistic boss, Brandon Pomeroy, calls “women’s work”), I have, on occasion-as mentioned above-probed into an unsolved homicide, identified the murderer, and then written an in-depth, first-person story so shocking, scandalous, and exclusive that our editor-in-chief, Harvey Crockett (the ex-newspaperman who’s in charge of the whole DD operation) has overruled Brandon Pomeroy’s objections and published my work in the magazine. And a couple of my DD stories have even been expanded (by me, of course) and somewhat fictionalized (for legal reasons) and then published as mystery novels in twenty-five-cent paperback form.

  If I were a man, I’d be making darn good money by now. I’d be living the life of Riley (or at least Mickey Spillane) in a snazzy bachelor pad uptown, wining and dining a slew of glamour girls at the Stork and the Copacabana. But nothing like that happens to you when you’re a woman. When you’re a single working gal like me, you get paid a fraction of what your male coworkers earn. You live in a dingy little duplex over a fish store on Bleecker Street, and you dine alone on Campbell ’s soup and crackers at your secondhand yellow Formica kitchen table. You also risk your neck (as well as your hotly developing romance with the city’s most handsome homicide detective) to fight your way up the sexist professional ladder.

  My best friend and next door neighbor, Abby Moscowit
z, is really proud of me for having the courage (she calls it the chutzpah) to stick to my girlhood goals. She says a woman has to have “balls” if she wants to make it in America ’s biggest and hardest city. And, you can take it from me, Abby knows what she’s talking about. She’s a fabulous freelance magazine illustrator (the best I’ve ever seen!), yet the only way she managed to get any work in the field was by barging into publishing offices and threatening to camp out in the waiting room-cooking beans on a hot plate and washing her stockings out in the ladies’ lavatory-until somebody looked at her portfolio.

  And by using a male signature on all her work.

  And by flaunting her female curves in front of the male art directors who dole out the assignments. (Abby’s breasts, you should know, are as fully developed as her hypothetical balls.)

  But as bold and brash as Abby is, she never gets herself into even half as much trouble as I do. You’ll see what I mean if you read the shocking and terrifying true story I’m about to start writing (i.e., expanding into a dime store mystery novel) for you right now. You’ll see how Abby somehow rises-almost floats-above the most atrocious and hazardous of situations, while I flap around in the dirt like a beheaded chicken, blindly scratching my way toward disaster and flipping feathers all over the place.

  The story starts out innocently enough (don’t they all?), but soon degenerates into a steamy tale of forbidden love, uncontrollable passion, unthinkable desperation, and-you guessed it!-murder. And that’s where you’ll find me-right in the murderous middle of things as usual-working my twitchy little tail off to get to the truth, and endangering my own twitchy little life while I’m at it.

  But here, my dear reader and friend, is the 64,000-dollar question: Am I courting danger, or is danger stalking me? Is danger my greatest affliction-or my deadliest addiction?

  I honestly don’t have a clue. Read the story, then you tell me.

  Chapter 1

  IT WAS A HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN that night. Seven o’clock on a Friday evening-July 1, 1955, to be exact-and even though the sun had slipped below the skyscraper skyline, the mercury was still stuck at a blistering 98.3 degrees. The steamy, jam-packed subway ride home from work had left me weak, wobbly, and drenched in perspiration (mine or somebody else’s?-it was hard to tell), and as I staggered down Bleecker Street toward my apartment, the hot sidewalk under my swelling feet was scorching the soles of my stilettos.

  I needed a drink, and I needed it now. If Abby wasn’t at home-standing at her kitchen counter and mixing me up a tall, icy-cold Tom Collins-I’d have to kill myself.

  No call for concern. The minute I opened the door to our building and began climbing the narrow chute of stairs to the small landing between Abby’s apartment and mine, I heard the ultra cool sounds of John Coltrane pulsing through her open door. Then Abby poked her head and one hand-the hand that was holding my cherry-topped Tom Collins-out into the hall.

  “You’re late to the gate, Kate!” she piped, speaking in rhyme as she often liked to do, and giving me a new name in the process. She flipped her thick, black, waist-length braid of hair off her shoulder and stepped all the way out onto the landing. “Half the ice in your drink has already melted! This gunk is sunk.”

  I tried to think up a clever reply, but couldn’t. My brain had melted, too. “That’s okay,” I said, wiping my sweaty forehead on my sweaty forearm and trudging the rest of the way up the steps. “I’m so thirsty I’ll drink anything-as long as it’s wet.” To prove my words, I grabbed the glass from Abby’s hand, threw my head back, and poured a good third of the diluted cocktail down my dehydrated throat.

  I considered pouring the rest of the drink down inside the front of my lavender linen dress, but quickly ditched that idea. It would cool me off for a few glorious seconds, I knew, but then later-as the sugary concoction warmed to the rising temperature of my skin-I’d feel steamier and stickier than ever. And my new dress would be ruined. So, instead of giving myself a Tom Collins dunk, I guzzled the rest of the watered-down gunk. (Okay, you caught me. I don’t often speak in rhyme, but I have, on occasion-I’m thoroughly embarrassed to admit-been known to write that way.)

  “Way to go, Flo!” Abby said, her stunning Ava Gardner face lighting up in a satisfied smile. Aside from drawing and painting, listening to jazz, and pursuing her bohemian interest in the taboo practice of free love, the preparing and sharing of exotic alcoholic beverages was Abby’s all-time favorite pastime. “Come on in,” she said, beaming. “I’ll make you another one.”

  A welcome breeze was blowing in Abby’s apartment. Actually, three welcome breezes. One came from the electric fan sitting on the floor at the rear of the kitchen area, right in front of the wide-open back door (which led out to the rusty fire escape landing, which led down to the small, weed- and, no doubt, rat-packed courtyard behind our building). A revolving draft blew from the fan perched on the kitchen counter, and another came wafting from the tall, whirring contraption set near the easel in Abby’s living room-cum-art studio.

  I plopped myself down at the kitchen table, in the spot I thought most likely to benefit from all three breezes, and lit up an L &M filter tip. “Oh, God!” I exclaimed. “Please kill me right now! I can’t endure this unbearable heat for even one more second.” (I am, as you will eventually discover, somewhat prone to hyperbole.)

  “Yeah, it’s pretty awful,” Abby said, sighing. She poured a healthy dose of gin into my fresh drink, gave it a vigorous stir, then, nestling the glass in a cocktail napkin, carried it from the kitchen counter to my place at the table. “I was working on a new illustration all day,” she said, nodding toward her easel, “a cover for Husky Male magazine, and it was so crazy hot in here I thought I was going to faint.” She sat down at the table, lit up a Pall Mall, and took a deep swig of her own drink. “It got so bad I had to take off all my clothes and work in the nude.”

  Uh oh. I knew what that meant. It meant the crazy heat wave had probably been of her own making-that Abby had likely worked with a handsome young Husky Male model that afternoon, and that she’d spent more time seducing (or, as she would say, shtupping) him than painting him.

  “I take it you weren’t alone,” I said, letting more than a shred of sarcasm seep into my tone. (I disapprove of Abby’s promiscuous ways, you should know, while she thinks I’m a total prude.) “Anybody I know?” I asked. “Or did the model agency send you a brand-new toy?”

  “Oh, shut up, Paige! You’re such a prig!”

  “I am not. I’m a healthy, passionate, open-minded woman who just happens to believe that the beautiful and intimate act of procreation should be enjoyed with one’s husband, not every Tom, Dick, and Murray in Manhattan.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s all fine and good if you’re married,” Abby snorted. She gave me an impish smirk, hoisted one eyebrow to the hilt, then blew a perfect smoke ring in my direction. “And need I remind you, Little Miss Morality, that neither one of us is?”

  Her smoke ring hit the crossbreeze and disappeared.

  “I’m not the one who needs reminding,” I said with a sniff. “I’m painfully aware of my single-woman status. You, on the other hand, seem to think you’re married to all mankind.”

  Abby laughed out loud. “No, I’m a lover of all mankind, you dig? I’m not ready for marriage yet. Who knows if I’ll ever be?” Taking another big gulp of her drink, she eyed me over the rim of her glass. “And I think any woman who waits till she’s hitched to indulge in the pleasures of sex is a dope. Present company included.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said, putting my mental dukes up for round two of our favorite fight. “Well, I think any woman who gets pregnant out of wedlock is an even bigger dope!”

  Abby rolled her eyes. “Do you see anybody here who’s pregnant?” she huffed.

  “Not yet,” I needled.

  “And you never will!” she said, flipping her long braid from one shoulder to the other. “I’m no dope, you dig? I’ve got a diaphragm, and I know how to use it.”


  (I had a diaphragm, too, I should tell you-courtesy of the Margaret Sanger Clinic on 16th Street. I’d had myself fitted for the contraceptive device right after Dan and I started dating, when I came to realize how thoroughly attracted to him I was. I hadn’t used the contraption yet-nor did I intend to anytime in the near future-but my desire for Dan was so intense, I couldn’t be sure of my self-control. And like any good Girl Scout, I believed in being prepared.)

  “The diaphragm isn’t infallible, you know,” I said, turning serious and giving Ab the evil eye. I hated to be such a nag and a killjoy, but I felt it was my solemn duty. Abby was the best friend I’d ever had in my life. I loved her like a sister. And if she ever had to suffer the brutal social ostracism of unwed motherhood, or the wrenching torture of giving up her baby for adoption, or-worse-the pain and horror of a squalid backstreet abortion, I didn’t think either one of us would be able stand it.

  Abby tossed her head and let out a loud guffaw. “Chastity ain’t the answer, either, babe!” she insisted. “It may keep you from getting pregnant, but it still makes your life miserable!”

  “How would you know?” I teased. “You’ve never tried it.”

  We were both laughing now-which was the way most of our sex-focused sparring matches ended: in a draw, with a couple of chuckles and no hard feelings.

  “Speaking of chastity,” Abby said, “will the sex-starved Detective Street be dropping by to see you tonight?”

  “Not a chance,” I said, heaving a pregnant sigh. (No pun intended. I swear!) “He left town early this morning and drove up to Maine with his daughter. They’re spending the holiday weekend with his parents. And since Monday is the big day-July Fourth, I mean-they won’t be back till Tuesday.”