High Heels and Homicide.
KASEY MICHAELS.
To Gail Link, who pushes.
There"s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
-Walter "Red" Smith, 1982.
I can truthfully say I will never make a bad film.
-Eddie Murphy, 1987.
Cast of Characters.
Maggie Kelly. Writing as Cleo Dooley, the creator of Alexandre Blake, Viscount Saint Just, from the best-selling Saint Just Mysteries series. Both of them. Literally.
Alex Blakely aka Viscount Saint Just. The figment of Maggie"s creative imagination, her perfect hero, inexplicably come to life some months earlier in her Manhattan apartment. It"s a problem...
Sterling Balder. The obligatory loyal sidekick to Maggie"s once-only fictional sleuth, now also living large in Manhattan, and a dear soul who would be too confused to ever answer to an alias.
Bernice Toland-James. Maggie"s editor, recently sober, although she is not convinced sobriety is her natural condition.
Tabitha Leighton. Maggie"s agent, married to the Bed-Hopping Champion of the Western World.
Arnaud Peppin. The director of The Case of the Disappearing Earl, the Cleo Dooley novel to be filmed for a television movie on location in England.
Sir Rudolph Medwine. The owner of the country manor house at which the movie will be filmed. Knighted for his creation of the Medwine Marauder fishing reel, Rudy thinks having a movie filmed at his newly purchased house would be smashing great fun.
Byrd Stockwell. Rudy"s nephew, who thinks chasing American actresses of loose morals would be smashing great fun.
Troy Barlow. The perfect choice to play Saint Just, if the Viscount had been into bleach-streaked hair and surfboards.
Nikki Campion. The female lead, best known for being Nikki Campion, as well as the spokesperson for Boffo Transmissions ("When shifting gears, think Boffo!").
Evan Pottinger. A method actor cast in the role of the dastardly villain of the piece.
Perry Posko. An actor for whom playing the sweet, naive, often-b.u.mbling Sterling Balder will be no stretch.
Dennis Lloyd. An English thespian hoping to make the roll of Clarence, the Saint Just valet, into an Emmy-winning performance.
Sam Undercuffler. The screenwriter who adapted Maggie"s book for the small screen.
Joanne Pertuccelli. The regulation corporate b.i.t.c.h, employed by the production company to keep the filming on time and under budget.
Marylou Keppel. Script girl, stand-in, and gofer, hoping to add to her list of "Actors I Have Boinked."
Prologue.
Dear Journal, Once more I take up my pen to record the happenings of my life and of those around me. I must admit that I have been quite remiss in my entries these past six weeks or more, but I have been much occupied with a.s.sembling our apartment after the shambles it had become thanks to those horrible gentlemen I told you about not so long ago.
But everything is all right and tight now, and properly done up according to feng shui guidelines. (Mrs. Tabby Leighton has corrected me, and it is not feng shooee, as I had thought, but feng schway-isn"t that interesting? Saint Just says it isn"t.) My only problem now is that Mrs. McBedie, whom Saint Just has engaged to look after us, will persist in facing the three-legged money frog in entirely the incorrect direction whenever she dusts the "Wealth" corner of our main saloon (what Maggie calls a living room, which I think rather eerie, as who wants to lounge about in a living room?).
Unfortunately, we don"t have much time to enjoy our new apartment, which now legally belongs to Saint Just, who is quite happily solvent now that he is half of the photographic modeling pair of himself and our own Mary Louise, posing for magazine and even billboard advertis.e.m.e.nts for Fragrances by Pierre. It is, I must admit, rather disconcerting to see Saint Just twenty-five feet tall in Times Square.
And we have just baskets and baskets of lovely toiletries now, courtesy of Mr. Pierre, but Saint Just persists in favoring Brut. Maggie finds this amusing.
Saint Just has been toiling night and day at this new venture, which, he told me rather proudly, entails considerably more work than he had supposed when he agreed to pose. Mary Louise has been able to forgo other employment (and more nefarious doc.u.ment-counterfeiting dealings), and is now a student only, completing her last year at what she calls NYU.
It"s lovely to see so much progress since our arrival on this plane of existence just a few short, exciting months ago.
Saint Just still oversees the Streetcorner Orators and Players (or however he says it-I keep forgetting the order), with Mary Louise"s cousin and houseboys in charge. The enterprise has grown to include forty-seven street corners. Just imagine. Saint Just now calls himself an entrepreneur, which also makes Maggie laugh. I like it when she laughs.
Because even all this to-ing and fro-ing by Saint Just does not explain the Decided Coolness I have observed between him and our Maggie, friend and creator of both Saint Just and me. I only hope that she is not so put out with us that she decides to stop writing about us, because I am not sure if we can continue to exist outside our books once Maggie has turned us off inside her head.
That"s the problem with being imaginary characters come to life: this tenuous existence. Saint Just says he is working to ensure that we evolve, grow, and become more of our own persons, thereby enabling us to create our own ident.i.ties, completely separate from Maggie, so perhaps this is why she seems to be sulking. I think Maggie likes to be Needed.
She has completed her new book in record time, a full three months early, which is explained by the fact that she has been all but living in front of her computer seven days a week. Regardless, she is now officially on vacation for the next month, before needing to begin her research for another Saint Just adventure, but has yet to put on an All Done party, as has been her custom in the past. Then again, considering what occurred after the last All Done party, I suppose she has her reasons and all of that.
But back to what is happening now, dear Journal, not what is already past. After all, I believe this journaling business is supposed to be a chronicle, not a history, yes?
Bernie has returned from her drying-out place, and seeing her editor and very good friend again has put the roses back in Maggie"s cheeks, just a little bit, although I"m still concerned for her. She so badly wanted a cigarette the other night that she asked me to "light" the pretzel she"d been munching, poor thing.
But, as Saint Just reminded me, the weeks have pa.s.sed by and the day is rapidly approaching when we must all travel to a place called Ocean City, in a state called New Jersey (quite unlike our own English Jersey, I fear), to partake of Thanksgiving dinner with Maggie"s parents.
I know very little about Mr. and Mrs. Kelly, save that Maggie studiously avoids them whenever possible. In addition, the fact that Maggie has explained Saint Just and me to all in New York as the distant English relations she patterned her Saint Just books on in the first place could prove a tad sticky, as her parents are unaware of our existence.
Saint Just volunteered to have us remain here, safely out of sight in Manhattan, but Maggie looked at him with such daggers that he quickly rescinded that offer. Besides, we leave for England directly after the parental visit, invited guests of the film company that will be turning the very first Saint Just Mystery into a movie made just to fit television screens. I wonder who will portray me. I hope he isn"t pudgy and balding. Then again, I am pudgy and balding.
My Henry will be well taken care of by Mrs. McBedie, who has quite a fondness for mice, thank goodness, although she will insist upon thinking of him as a hamster, a species she considers a more domesticated animal. I am happy to report, also, that I discovered the most lovely new home for Henry, with lots and lots of tunnels for him to run through, and a wheel for him to run on, and a...but I digress. It"s a failing.
Bernie will meet us there-in England, dear Journal-along with Tabby, who says an agent"s place is at her author"s side. Saint Just calls that a tax-deductible hum meant to give Tabby a vacation overseas, but he smiles almost indulgently when he says it. Saint Just, you see, is greatly enamoured of something called loopholes in the American tax codes.
Socks, my very good friend who has taught me all about the Duties of a Doorman, will remain here in Manhattan, to celebrate this uniquely American holiday with his mother, and to toil nightly in the off-off-Broadway play he auditioned for after his paperback-romance cover-model debut proved less than auspicious. I shall miss him, and I have told him he is free to borrow my motorized scooter any time he wishes.
Lieutenant Steve Wendell, also sadly, will not be a part of our entourage, and I will admit to you, dear Journal, if not to Saint Just, the trepidation I feel at his absence.
For, as you already know, dear Journal, we often seem to have need of a representative of the constabulary.
Respectfully, Sterling Balder.
Chapter One.
Maggie Kelly sat at the desk in the corner of the large living room of her Manhattan condo. Sort of sat. She actually was rather supported by her desk, her headset phone jammed down over her uncombed hair, her forehead pressed to the desktop, her arms hanging on either side of the chair. She looked rather like one of those collapsible dolls, one whose b.u.t.ton had been pushed.
She spoke into the headset. "Okay, okay. Once more, with feeling. M, as in moronic. A, as in asinine. R, as in...as in-ridiculous! Margaret. It"s Margaret. My name is Margaret Kelly, not Missy. How difficult can this be? You"d think my name was Schwarzenegger. What? No! Not Missy Schwarzenegger! Margaret Kelly! Oh, G.o.d-what? No! Don"t put me on hold. I"ve already been on hold three times, and I already know all the words to "It"s a Small World." Don"t put me on-oh, h.e.l.l..."
"Talking to your knees, my dear? There are some, myself not included, of course, who might consider that a tad eccentric. But, then, I know you."
Maggie pushed herself upright to glare at Alexandre Blake, the Viscount Saint Just of her bestselling historical mystery series and currently known as Alex Blakely, her supposed distant relative and model for her fictional creation. He lived across the hall now, but had never seemed to be able to understand the concept of knocking first before barging in on her.
She liked having him around, now that she"d gotten her mind around the fact that, heck, he was here. But there were times when she wished he was more of an in and out-no, that might sound a little too s.e.xual-a less-constant presence in her life. Okay, that was better. Not great, but better.
"Why are you always barging in here when I"m at my worst?" she asked him, looking down, to see that she"d b.u.t.toned her pajama top incorrectly. Nothing new there...including the faded pajama top that had been her favorite since college, or maybe high school. Junior year. She wore it now over ancient sweatpants, the knees and seat of the pajama bottoms having worn through a few years ago.
"Feeling snarly this morning, my dear?" Alex asked, one well-sculpted eyebrow raised Clint Eastwood style. (She"d thought she"d re-created Jim Carrey"s expressive eyebrows, but in the flesh, they were definitely Clint"s.) The young Clint of the spaghetti westerns. Young and yummy Clint. And she ought to know, because hidden deep in one of the desk drawers was her physical description of the Viscount Saint Just.
There was a lot of the young Clint Eastwood in the Viscount Saint Just-the lean face, the slashes in the cheeks, the long, sleekly muscular frame-along with snippets of younger versions of Sean Connery (voice in those Bond films), Paul Newman (bluer-than-blue eyes), Peter O"Toole (nose), and Val Kilmer (mouth-oh, dear G.o.d, yes-Kilmer"s mouth in Tombstone: "I"m your huckleberry.").
Maggie had set out to create the Perfect Regency Era Hero, and she really did do good work, if she did say so herself.
Except for the arrogant part. The self-a.s.sured part, and maybe the brilliant-cutting-wit part. She might have gone a little heavy on those, at least she thought so once her fictional Perfect Hero had morphed into a living twenty-first-century man with all his early-nineteenth-century superior male sensibilities intact.
There were moments lately when she wondered if she could mentally incorporate a few more bits of Hugh Grant into the character of Saint Just, who already had a s.e.xy shock of black hair, and then sit back and watch Alex to see if he"d change. Maybe a little something around the eyes-a small air of vulnerability, maybe?
It was a provocative thought, especially as she"d watched Grant in Love Actually late one Sat.u.r.day night. Just she and her two cats and her burnt microwave popcorn with extra b.u.t.ter. She led such an exciting social life.
But that was beside the point, as was her on-again, off-again romantic interest in the gorgeous, perfect hero standing in front of her, which was currently very, very off.
"I have a good reason to be snarly," Maggie said, adjusting the headset, the better to m.u.f.fle the sound of some twit telling her that she could save time by contacting the company on the Internet. "Tried that," she mumbled.
Alex made a small, circling motion with his right index finger. "Forgive the question, but is there someone on the other end of that?"
"There have been a lot of someones on the other end of the phone in the past..." she began, glancing down at her watch, to see that it was noon, "...the past forty-five minutes. And if I could talk to someone who has English as their first language, I would probably spend the first five minutes just sobbing my thanks into the phone. They call this a help line?" She turned in her chair, began shuffling through the mess on her desk. "Where"s my I Love Lou Dobbs b.u.t.ton?"
She felt Alex"s hands on her shoulders as he slowly spun her around to face him. "Maggie. Concentrate. Tell me what you"re doing...attempting to do."
She swallowed. Nodded. Swallowed again. Pretended not to notice that someone inside the earpiece was now asking her, musically, if she knew the way to San Jose. "Okay. I"m on the phone with the airline. I get flyer miles every time I charge something with my credit card, and I want to cash them in for our flight. It might have been easier if I"d asked one of the agents for a kidney."
"You didn"t do that, did you, Maggie? That"s cra.s.s."
She rolled her eyes. "No, I didn"t do that, and I know it"s cra.s.s, as well as a cheap joke. But I"m going nuts here, Alex. I don"t understand what they"re saying, they don"t understand what I"m saying-and I swear to G.o.d, n.o.body understands all the rules. Look," she said, grabbing a card from her desk. "See this? This is a coupon for a free companion ticket. I buy one, you fly free. I buy two, two fly free. I understand this. This is fairly basic, right?"
Alex took the offered ticket. "Quite a few asterisks leading to several separate bits of barely readable print, aren"t there? I do see the small K down at the corner. You"ve circled it."
"Right. It"s a K. But guess what? I need a U. An U. Whatever. You can have a K, but you can only use a U."
Alex deposited the ticket on the coffee table. "I think I"m done understanding, thank you," he said, wiping his hands together.
"Oh, no. No, no, no, you"re just getting started. I can use the K if I use a U with it. The second person I talked to told me that. I"m eligible for a K, but not for a U, and I can"t use a K without a U-but they sent me a K anyway, because I qualified for that one. If I spend another bazillion bucks, I can get a U to go with the K, but by then the K will have expired. Machiavellian in its brilliance, isn"t it?"
"American ingenuity at the corporate level. The K did get you to pick up the phone, didn"t it?"
"Don"t interrupt. I don"t actually need the K, or the U. The third gal I talked to told me I have enough flyer miles to go from here to Hawaii and back, and take half a football team with me. Except that there are only about six seats a plane that are available for free miles, so you have to book in advance. We"re talking way in advance here, maybe a decade. So I"ve got about a million free miles I can"t use, sucker offers with the wrong letter on them, and the ditz who just put me on hold knows how to p.r.o.nounce Schwarzenegger, but doesn"t know how to spell Margaret. That"s it, Alex. We"re not going."
"You"re only saying that because you"re looking for an excuse not to fly at all. Because you"re afraid of flight."
"d.a.m.n straight I am. This whole thing is driving me nuts. Do we fly out of Kennedy for one price or go to Newark for a better price? Or, since we can"t leave until after Thanksgiving anyway, do we fly out of Philly? But which is the right choice? Do I go for convenience? Or price? And then, just when I think, okay, out of Philly, the idiot on the phone who told me about the flight says, No, that one"s booked, so I start thinking, Okay, maybe G.o.d wants me to fly out of Kennedy, maybe he knows something about the Philly flight. Then again, he could know something about the Kennedy flight. But then again, maybe G.o.d"s just pulling my chain. I could be making a life-or-death decision here, and G.o.d"s trying to be funny."
Alex sighed. "Maggie, hang up."
"Hang up? Are you kidding? I spent twenty minutes online trying to figure out when the h.e.l.l I"d tried online before and made up a user name and pa.s.sword, because I sure couldn"t remember them. Then, once I"d gotten a new pa.s.sword, the d.a.m.n site wouldn"t recognize my credit card number anyway, so I had to call, wait, talk, be put on hold, talk, be put on hold, talk, be put-I am not hanging up until and unless this woman figures out how to spell Margaret!"
"Since you already know how to spell stubborn. Very well," Alex said, walking over to the credenza and pouring himself a gla.s.s of wine, as he had the Regency Era disdain for water. "Then you wouldn"t be interested in knowing that thanks to my speaking last week with a representative of the production company, who happened to phone while you were out and I was here, doing nothing in the least nefarious, and after putting forth my personal recommendations on the matter, three airline tickets were delivered just minutes ago to my apartment. I, by the grace or possible cruel joke of G.o.d, decided on Philadelphia, by the way, with our return to Kennedy. We depart for Heathrow the Sunday after Thanksgiving, traveling in something called first cla.s.s. And you Americans vow you aren"t cla.s.s conscious."
Maggie just sat there, stared at him. "You...it"s all...so I"m driving myself nuts for...d.a.m.n it, Alex, why do you keep doing this to me?"
The man had the nerve to look innocent and the panache to carry it off. "Doing what, my dear?"
"Oh, don"t get cute. You know darn well. Stepping in. Taking charge. Never getting ruffled. Always getting what you want. Making me feel like an idiot because I always do things the hard way. And you got three free tickets out of them? I mean, okay, me I can understand. I"m the author. They could certainly spring for a ticket for me. But you and Sterling? How did you finagle that one?"
"Finagle? I"m not familiar with the term, but I"m confident the Viscount Saint Just does not finagle. But, as I am your personal a.s.sistant and liaison with the press and Sterling is your spiritual advisor, it was, of course, only logical that we should accompany you."
"And you"re expecting me to swallow this? Oh, wait. The person who called? Female, right?"
"Why, yes. Miss Browning. She had a lovely laugh. Very like the soft tinkling of delicate silver bells tickled by the breeze of a clear spring day."
"As I"m sure you told her." Maggie made some sort of low, chuckling sound. "They don"t even see you, and they go all gooey and do whatever you want them to do, just the way I planned you. Man, I"m good. But that"s manipulative, Alex, do you know that? It"s not nice."
He shrugged, put down the empty winegla.s.s. "In point of fact, it"s a woman who doubtless spent the remainder of her day spreading her joy to everyone. It is also, my dear girl, three free first-cla.s.s plane tickets to England. I believe we are all to be considered winners in the exchange."
"Okay," she said, giving up. "I"m the last one to be arguing over saving money. Unless you"re actually going to start paying your own way around here, Perfume Man."
Then she gave herself a swift mental kick because that blow had been below the belt. She knew better, she knew his vulnerabilities, because she"d created him. The Viscount Saint Just placed a lot of his pride on being self-sufficient, in all ways.
"Oh, G.o.d, I"m sorry, Alex," she said quickly. "You"ve paid back every cent I advanced you when you first...first showed up. And you"re paying off the mortgage on your condo. You"re an honorable, upstanding-oh boy, I"ll grovel later. She"s back on the line."
"Maggie, what are you-?"
Maggie held up a finger, motioning for him to be quiet. "Yes, yes, that"s right. Missy Schwarzenegger. Two g"s? Oh, right. Two g"s. Boy, you"re good. Uh-huh. Uh-huh, yes. That"s four round-trip tickets, first cla.s.s, from Kennedy to Heathrow. And I"d like to add a leg from Heathrow to Oslo, back to Heathrow, and then to Kennedy. Oh, and I"ll need two kosher meals and one diabetic meal. Uh-huh. And will there be room for the Way-Bac Machine? Uh-huh, Way-Bac Machine. That"s Waycapital B-a-c. No k. G.o.d knows we don"t want anything with a k in it, right? Uh-huh. It"s...it"s kind of a...well, it"s a necessity for one of the pa.s.sengers. Uh-huh, my boy Sherman. You"ll check? Yes, yes, of course I can hold."
Feeling better than she had in, oh, at least an hour and twenty minutes, Maggie took off the headset and laid it on the desk. "That ought to keep her busy for a good ten minutes."