1 Death Pays the Rose Rent
Read 1 Death Pays the Rose Rent Online
Authors: Valerie Malmont
HIGH PRAISE FOR
VALERIE S. MALMONT AND
DEATH PAYS THE ROSE RENT
“Delightful.”—
Pen & Dagger
“Valerie S. Malmont’s sense of humor is crisp and
Tori Miracle is good fun.”
—
The Courier-Journal
(Louisville, Ky.)
“Valerie Malmont has created a small-town gothic Pennsylvania that’s full of theater, pageantry, and
murder. With its inventive plot and charming sleuth,
Death Pays the Rose Rent
is pure pleasure for mystery lovers.”—Alison Glen, author of
Showcase
“The murders are committed with flair; the characters are finely drawn. …Those who enjoy a perky mystery will delight in
Death Pays the Rose Rent
and eagerly await the next Tori Miracle tale.”—
Gothic Journal
“A lot of fun!”—Marlys Millhiser,
author of
Death of the Office Witch
“Tori Miracle is a fresh and appealing new amateur sleuth who charms you, then pulls through the dark caves and sinister secrets of Iickin Creek. Delighted with her company, you will willingly follow along.”—Sister Carol Anne O’Marie,
author of
Murder in Ordinary Time
“A delight …Mystery fans looking for a whodunit with lots of twists and turns and a bright and charming sleuth will love meeting Tori Miracle
in
Death Pays the Rose Rent.”
—
Louise Titchener, author of
Mantrap
A Tori Miracle Mystery
DEATH
PAYS THE
ROSE
RENT
VALERIE S. MALMONT
Mystery Writers of America Presents
New York Lincoln Shanghai
Death Pays the Rose Rent
All Rights Reserved © 1994, 2003 by Valerie S. Malmont
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.
Mystery Writers of America Presents an imprint of iUniverse, Inc.
For information address:
iUniverse
2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100
Lincoln, NE 68512
Originally published by Simon & Schuster
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
ISBN: 0-595-27148-0
ISBN: 978-1-4697-8529-5 (ebook)
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
I stood in the green room, waiting for my first two minutes of fame to begin. Never in my entire thirty years had I endured a more humiliating experience than The Makeup Room. My face was now as ageless and devoid of expression as the show’s hostess, Jenny Jerome. My short, black, wavy hair had been teased into a mess that even Elizabeth Taylor would have laughed at; my brown eyes were heavy with bright blue eye shadow “to bring them out” and circled with an inch of charcoal; my cheeks were streaked with scarlet to simulate cheekbones; and my lips were puffy with a greasy red lipstick I wouldn’t have picked for myself in a million years.
The blond hostess of “Wake Up, New York” finished her interview with the sexy male star of the summer’s blockbuster movie. The lights dimmed; he was escorted offstage by a giggling girl in an NYU T-shirt; the blonde had her stiff helmet of hair resprayed; and I was propelled forward by a hand placed firmly between my shoulder blades.
I was on TV!
She smiled at me in the condescending way that tall, perfectly proportioned people often use with short, plump people and began to read from a Tele-PrompTer hidden somewhere behind my left shoulder. To the viewers at home it would look as though she were speaking directly to me.
“It’s now my pleasure to welcome Victoria Miracle, a crime reporter and author of that fascinating new book The Mark Twain Horror House. Vicky, as I understand it, you—”
I interrupted her. “Tori. I’m called Tori. That’s the name I use when I write.”
“Oh, sorry.” She continued reading, “Vicky, as I understand it, you were covering the terrible murder of that little girl in the Greenwich Village town house and discovered the house had a history of hauntings dating back to the time when Mark Twain lived there. Vicky, please tell us how you made the transition from newspaper reporter to psychic investigator.”
“It’s Tori, please.” I forced a smile to my lips, which didn’t quite reach my eyes. “Jenny, I’m afraid the information you have about me is wrong. I’m not a psychic investigator. I simply wrote a novel using the house and its strange history as background material. The story itself is fiction—completely fabricated, totally made up in my head—an exercise in ‘what if’ writing. I hope readers will—”
“Thank you, Vicky, for this fascinating glimpse into the world of paranormal research. We certainly appreciate your taking the time away from your exciting investigations of the supernatural.” She flashed a relieved smile at the camera, revealing perfect white-
capped teeth. “That concludes our interview with Vicky Merkle, a real-life ‘ghost buster’ and author of The Mark Twain Horror House.”
“My name is Tori Miracle, and I’m not a ghos—” I started to protest, but it was too late. The lights were off. Jenny removed the microphone from her ample bosom and reached for a water glass, obviously exhausted from the effort of reading off the Tele-PrompTer. I was surprised she could read. She certainly hadn’t bothered to read my book. I was led away by the NYU T-shirt, through a maze of cables and cameras, to the studio door.
The studio limousine was waiting for me there, but not with the same driver who had picked me up that morning at five
A
.
M
. That first one probably didn’t want to risk his life again by making a second trip into Hell’s Kitchen.
Nestled in the luxurious dove gray plush backseat of the limousine, I wished I could have blamed the publicist who arranged for that stupid interview, but I was the one who’d made a fool of myself in front of several million people. I should have known what to expect, since I’d seen the show before, but my book hadn’t been selling well, and I’d said I’d do anything to try to boost sales. This morning’s fiasco certainly wasn’t going to help, though.
When we stopped on Tenth Avenue, the driver
reached back
to open my door from the inside. I’d bet he’d never delivered a talk-show guest to this neighborhood before. To him, it must have looked threatening. To me, it was just home—a neighborhood like any other—it had its good points and its bad ones.
It was too early for the bars to be open, so our homeless front-door regular was still asleep under a pile of newspapers on the stoop. I nudged him gently with one foot. “Morning, Sarge,” I said when he stuck his head out.
“Hi, Tori. What’re you doing out so early?”
“I was on TV.”
“Great. What for?”
“I was on ‘Wake Up, New York,’ being interviewed about my book.”
“You wrote a book? Congratulations! Someday I’m going to write one that’ll blow the lid off the Vietnam conspiracy. Maybe you’d like me to tell you about it, and you can write it?”
I shook my head. “Sorry, Sarge. I couldn’t do it justice.”
He nodded in agreement. Over the past four years I’d heard a number of stories from him; he was a vet suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome, but unable to go to the VA for help because he “knew too much”; he was in the Witness Protection Program; and right after Oliver Stone’s movie came out, he was hiding from the mob because he was the mystery man with the umbrella in the Kennedy shooting.
“Well then, maybe you could lend me a couple of bucks for breakfast. I haven’t eaten in days,” he said pitifully.
I opened my purse and fumbled around until I located my wallet. It held four dollars and a little change. He looked disappointed with the two bills I
handed him; enough for something to eat, but not enough for booze.
“Sorry, Sarge. That’s all I can part with, now that I, too, have joined the great ranks of the unemployed.”
“What happened to your job on the paper?”
“Got pushed out. We were bought by one of those huge multimedia conglomerates. They put their own people in all the good jobs and doled out the crummy ones to the old-timers. I didn’t last long after that.”
“Hey, I’m real sorry about that. Buy you a cup of coffee? My treat.”
“I’ll take a rain check. But thanks.”
He looked relieved.
Even that early, the downstairs hall smelled of cabbage and urine. Our landlord was “gentrifying” the building to get even more exorbitant rents out of his tenants, but he had started on the top floor and was working down. While my cats and I had two whole rooms, plus a bath, all to ourselves on the fourth floor, the downstairs apartments each housed two or three families. And worst of all, there was only one communal bathroom on each floor, set at the end of the unlit hallway.
The one advantage to living here, aside from the almost affordable rent, was that I felt safe. No thief in his right mind would ever consider breaking into an apartment in a building that looked and smelled this bad.
I had to stop for a moment on the third floor to catch my breath. I really must lose twenty pounds, I thought. I’ll start my diet tomorrow.
Fred and Noel were just beginning to wake up and were indignant that I had left them alone at an hour when we were usually all snuggled up together on my futon.
As big, orange Fred glared at me, it occurred to me that he looked considerably brighter than poor Jenny Jerome of “Wake Up, New York.” How long, I wondered, before she was shunted off into bimbo-limbo?
I put the kettle on for coffee and gave each cat a handful of Tasty Tabby Treats. As usual, Fred gobbled his in two seconds and then hovered over Noel, waiting for a chance to steal some of hers. The dainty calico ate leisurely, in a most ladylike manner, ignoring his boorish behavior.
A shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits knock on my door heralded the arrival of my next-door neighbor, the soon-to-be-famous actor slash Italian waiter, Murray Rosenbaum. With typical New York caution, I peered out through the little magnifying-glass hole in the door before unhooking the chain.
“I saw you on TV. Darling, you were marvelous.”
“Thanks, Murray. But your Billy Crystal impression needs a little more work.”
“That’s an actor’s life—nothing but work, work, work.”
He wore a crimson satin bathrobe and white silk pajamas and smelled like Christmas; Aramis, I guessed.
“Come on in. I was just going to fix coffee.”
After pushing the piles of unopened bills and magazines to one side of the table, I poured hot water into two mugs and stirred in instant coffee.
“Want some powdered pretend-cream or artificial sweetener?”
He shuddered. “This is bad enough, thank you. Any luck finding a job?”
I sipped my coffee and shook my head. “Guess I broke the number-one rule—never quit a job until you’ve got another one lined up.”
“You were the best crime reporter on the paper. What happened?”
“They assigned me to cover fashion shows. Fashion shows! Me, who doesn’t know the difference between Lamborghini and Lagerfeld.”
“One’s a car.”
“Exactly.”
“Something will turn up,” said my ever optimistic neighbor. “Look at the bright side. You can get started on that second book. And you can use some of your ‘leisure’ time to clean up this apartment.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
I looked around the small living room-kitchen combination, seeing it as if for the first time; the avocado green refrigerator, the harvest gold stove with two nonfunctioning burners, the black and gray tiles on the floor, the single grime-streaked window, the brown sofa with bright orange flowers, covered with a week’s worth of laundry, and the blue velour recliner in front of my TV. Papers and books, everywhere and anywhere, on top of chairs, under furniture, stacked in the corners, covering the couch; even my unmade bed had a two-foot-high pile of stuff on the side where I don’t sleep. Had I really lived
here nine years? It was just supposed to have been a way-stop after college.
“I guess I am a little disorganized,’’ I admitted. “But look at my kitchen counter. I’m quite proud of how clean I keep it.”
“That’s because you never cook. If the corner deli went out of business, you’d starve.” We both laughed at his half-truth.
“Tori, I’ve known you for a year now—long enough to know you have excellent taste. When we’ve gone out to dinner, you know gourmet food and which wines are good—heck, you can even pronounce them. You visit museums frequently. You love concerts, operas, Broadway shows. You always look nice, even though I know most of your things come from secondhand shops. You have all the right instincts for a life of gracious living, but your home is a disaster. Didn’t your mother teach you anything about housekeeping … or cooking …or …?”
“Murray, my dear, nosy friend. I don’t usually talk about my past, but for you, I’ll make an exception. I grew up in more countries than I can name. My father’s a career foreign service officer. He never made much money, but we lived like we were rich, thanks to Uncle Sam. We always had cooks, chauffeurs, gardeners, amahs, maids to wash, maids to iron, maids to scrub floors, you name it—we paid somebody to do it for us. Until I came to this country for college, I’d never stepped foot in a kitchen, scrubbed a toilet, or ironed a dress. When I finally had to, I found I didn’t care much for it. In brief, I missed all those
normal childhood experiences that should have turned me into your typical domesticated adult.”
I tried to sound light and breezy. No need to mention the loneliness, the constant moving, the life empty of friendship and roots. It hurt too much, and Fd learned long ago to avoid the subject of my past.
“Interesting, Tori, but it’s never too late to get control of your life. Concentrate on one thing at a time. Let’s start with this table, for example. If you go through this great unread pile of mail, you’ll find most of it could be pitched. Then you’d be left with a small stack of important things that you could handle. Get me a garbage sack.”
I put a paper grocery bag on the floor next to him and watched as he filled it with catalogs, advertising circulars, begging letters from charities, and anything else that didn’t have first-class postage on it.
“There,” he said with a satisfied sigh. “Here’s two issues of the Smithsonian. This pile’s your bills. My goodness, dear, three from the phone company, two from the cable company …”
“Put those on top.” A phone I can do without, but I sure don’t want to give up my old late-night movies. There’s just nothing like settling down after a hard day’s work with a classic like Plan 9 from Outer Space.
“Cable’s not going to do you a bit of good if you don’t pay these electric bills,” he said, waving more envelopes at me.
I sighed. “I’ll probably be evicted before they get around to turning it off.”