Free Death's Savage Passion by Jane Haddam

divorce,” he said.
    “Mrs. Brady must be better than the KGB.”
    “This Train got him started on the romance stuff.”
    I lit another match and applied it very carefully to my cigarette. Verna Train, in a snit over Max Brady’s affair with the redheaded Lisa, threatens to tell Max’s ex-wife that Max is making a lot of money hacking out bodice rippers under a pseudonym. Max Brady therefore kills Verna Train before she can talk. Possible.
    “Tell me,” I said. “Was it Verna who told you Max was Melissa Crowell?”
    “I can’t tell you where I got my information.” He looked shocked.
    He shouldn’t have given me the information, but it seemed ungrateful to say so. Instead, I tried nodding sympathetically. “Of course not,” I told him.
    Radd Stassen expanded. “People read these private-eye novels and don’t realize what it’s like,” he said. “The name of this game is money. You want to make a lot of money, you got to protect your contacts.”
    “Of course.”
    “What I do, it’s a lot like what a cop does. Except cops can’t afford a night out at the Hudson Bay Inn.” He coughed into his hand. “You like the Hudson Bay Inn?”
    “Um,” I said.
    “You like Oriental sexual positions? That’s my hobby, Oriental sexual positions.”
    I had let my eyes close again. Now I opened them—for a good look at Radd Stassen. He was starring in his own movie. His part was being played by Burt Reynolds.
    “What I am, you know, I’m one of these guys who like to get around.”
    “Right,” I said.
    “I like to get a lot of experience. Try new things. Blow off a little steam.”
    “Right,” I said again.
    “I see a lot of interesting stuff in my work. I stay in shape. I run in the park every morning. I get out every night. I figure, if you don’t burn the candle at both ends, what’s the candle got two ends for?”
    It was time to put a stop to this. “Actually,” I said. “I’m not so fond of the Hudson Bay Inn. I sort of prefer the Four Seasons.”
    The Four Seasons is one of those restaurants where dinner for two can run two hundred dollars without wine. Radd Stassen went white.
    He was saved by Dana, bustling through the door with a pile of folders in her hands and a little too much color in her cheeks.
    “Idiots,” she was saying. “Ask them for projections and you get—” She noticed Radd Stassen. “Oh,” she said. “You’re still here.”
    Radd Stassen started pawing through his pile of papers. “I’ve got some documents,” he said.
    I got out of my chair. I might be “the blonde,” but that could mean anything. Radd Stassen had no right to keep me in Dana’s office. With any luck, Dana wouldn’t want to keep me in her office either.
    “I’m very tired,” I said. “I think I’ll cancel my appointment at AST and go home to sleep.”
    Dana frowned. “Don’t cancel any appointments,” she said. “Especially any appointments about promotion.”
    “You want I should faint while trying to make up my mind between poster proposals?”
    “I want,” Dana started.
    Radd Stassen interrupted her. “I want to talk to you about this Englishwoman,” he said. “Was he leaving this redhead for this Englishwoman? What’s her name?”
    “What are you talking about?” I said.
    Radd Stassen waved his papers in triumph. “We’ve got pictures,” he said. “Last night. He was all over her.”

EIGHT
    I GOT OUT OF there. It took a pretense of idiocy. It took putting out my cigarette before I was finished with it. I didn’t care. I was glad to know Radd Stassen wasn’t much of a private detective (an Englishwoman, for God’s sake) and glad to be making my escape.
    Radd Stassen had given me a motive for the murder of Verna Train, if Verna had been murdered. In fact, he had almost given me two. Almost but not quite. I tried to envision Jane Minetti Brady following Max through a succession of jazz bars and campy pickup joints and finally pushing Verna off a subway platform in