Cold and Pure and Very Dead (24 page)

Not,
how’s her health?
Or,
where has she been all
these years?
Or,
what’s her emotional state in this moment of crisis?
But,
how does she look?

I’d come to New York to find out everything I could about Mildred Deakin’s life here in the 1950s. Increasingly I was convinced that she hadn’t killed the reporter, and of course she’d had nothing to do with the murder of Jake Fenton. If the roots of these crimes did lie, as I suspected, in her early literary career, Milly’s agent might unknowingly hold the one piece of information that would untangle everything. Love, lust, hatred, anger, ambition, greed—from everything I’d heard, the Manhattan literary scene of forty years ago had been a hotbed of homicidal motivations.

“Milly doesn’t look very well,” I temporized, spreading cream cheese thick on a pumpernickel bagel, then loading it with lox.

“Hmm.” Evelyn’s green eyes slitted in their thick mascara fringes. “And she used to be such a glamour-puss.”

I tried to accommodate the term
glamour-puss
with the plain, weatherworn woman I’d met in the Hudson jail. The two images simply didn’t compute.

I bit into the bagel. Heaven. “As I said on the phone, Ms. Sackela, I’m pursuing the possibility of writing a Deakin biography, and I’m delighted to locate someone who was actually acquainted with Mildred Deakin … Milly Finch, as she’s now known.” I took another bite and chewed, considering the best approach to this conversation. Evelyn knew that Milly had been charged with homicide—she’d trilled and clucked over it on the phone—but I’d kept mum about my connection to the investigation. And I hadn’t told either of my police minders that I’d located the agent or that I was coming here today. I’d decided that a long-time pub-biz player like Evelyn Sackela would be far more likely to open up to a literary biographer than to a cop. The intellectual
mystique of the pure disinterested scholar would get me the best gossip, then Lieutenants Syverson and Piotrowski could send in their investigative cleaning ladies and vacuum up the crumbs. I began in my driest academic tones.

“Ms. Sackela, I’m convinced that in-depth research into Mildred Deakin’s life will not only afford compelling life-narrative material, but will also provide the key to understanding the psychosocial and textual ambiguities of
Oblivion Falls.”
It’s not easy to form polysyllabic words between mouthfuls of cream cheese and smoked salmon. “In particular, I wish to deconstruct the sociobiographical circumstances that caused its author to vanish so precipitously.” I’d misused the term
deconstruct
, but the word was a surefire way to impress a layman, and very few outside the academy understood what it meant. “And who would be in a better position than you, her literary agent, to know just exactly what was going on in her life at the moment of her disappearance?” I felt so smarmy misleading this elderly woman that I wanted to excuse myself and go take a shower.

“Well, Karen—it
is
okay, isn’t it, if I call you Karen? You seem such a girl to me it’s difficult to think of you as
Professor.”
She wriggled in her chair, as if she were settling in for a good long titillating gossip.

“A
girl?”
I almost choked on the last bite of bagel. “Ms. Sackela, I’m almost forty.”

“It’s Evelyn. And forty’s a
baby.”
She selected a cigarette from a leaded glass box on the coffee table, leaned back, and lit up. The first drag was so long and languorous, I half expected the agent to morph into Lauren Bacall right before my eyes.

“If you say so.” It felt good to be thought of as a girl again, even if by an octogenarian, even if only for an hour.

“Karen,
nobody
ever knew ‘just what was going on’ with Milly Deakin.” The avid glint in Evelyn Sackela’s eyes let me know that encouraging her to talk about her former client wasn’t going to be a problem. “Milly kept herself very much to herself. She was strange that way.”

“But you must have some idea why she left Manhattan so suddenly in November of 1959?”

“November? It wasn’t November. She took off sometime in the summer—early. I remember calling her several times about a Fourth-of-July get-together at Lillian’s on the Vineyard, but she never answered her phone. And I hadn’t seen her for months before that. She’d been getting odder and odder.” She shook her head; not a hair shivered in the platinum flip. Something told me the elaborate hairdo was special for my visit. “She broke lunch dates, just left me sitting there at ‘Twenty-one’—twice! Got extremely evasive about the new book. Said it was going to be steamier than the first one. Maybe so, but I never saw a word. She kept making excuses for not showing it to me, then started calling at odd hours, soused and crying. Then she just vanished. Poof!” She waved her cigarette between two withered ringless fingers.

“And you don’t have any idea—?”

“Not an inkling.” Evelyn took another drag. Smoke curled from pursed lips. “Could have been anything. She was living that crazy boozy life we all lived back then. God knows how anyone survived it. And the
men!
We all slept around, of course, but Milly was like a bitch in heat. Couldn’t get enough. Then there was the dope—”

“Milly was on drugs?” My eyes popped wide open.

“Who wasn’t?” She shrugged. “The stuff was all over the place—pot, horse, coke.…” She shook her head again. “The good old days,” she said wryly. “It’s a wonder I’m still alive.”

I’d been thinking the very same thing.

Evelyn laughed abruptly. “Karen, you’re gaping at me like I’m some sort of debauched fossil that’s just unexpectedly hiccuped back into life!”

I closed my mouth. “Sorry, Evelyn. I’m afraid I’m a product of a much more prudent generation.”

“And with good reason, I’d say. At least
we
didn’t have AIDS to worry about.”

“Speaking of sex—”

“Were we?” she asked coyly.

“You mentioned AIDS,” I responded dryly. “I made the leap. So … speaking of sex, was there any one man in particular in Milly’s life?”

“Aside from my husband, you mean?” She slammed the cigarette into the ashtray, viciously, as if she wanted to kill it.

“Oh.” I was getting in over my head here. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Fred Sackela—may he rot in hell—had an eye for a pretty girl, and Milly was that. But unfortunately she didn’t take him with her when she did her bunk. Fred hung around for another decade before he absconded with some twenty-year-old flower child for a summer of love in Haight Ashbury. He never came back. Overdosed on LSD.”

“Oh, my.” I felt as if our roles were reversed, that I was the eighty-year-old and Evelyn was some hot young thing set on scandalizing me with her dissolute life.

She hefted the pitcher of mimosas and glanced at me. I held my hand over my glass. She filled hers. “The only time I ever knew Milly Deakin to be less than casual about her conquests was with some guy from Columbia.”

“Colombia? You mean the country?” I visualized some handsome Central-American diplomat. He was
dressed like a gaucho. I don’t think they have gauchos in Colombia.

Evelyn barked with laughter, then began coughing and snatched an inhaler from a half-open side-table drawer. When she’d caught her breath, she continued. “No, not the country—the university. Some professor. I used to see them together at the jazz clubs. Milly was starry-eyed around him, like an infatuated schoolgirl.”

“Really?”

“And he was a
doll
. Tall, curly-haired, with that gaunt, hollow-cheeked look intellectual men used to have back then—Kerouac, Cassady.” She coughed three ghastly hacks, and resorted once more to the inhaler. A couple of puffs left her still wheezing. Under the thick makeup, her complexion grayed. Age and illness vied with loneliness and the desire to talk. She slumped, exhausted, back in her chair. “Sorry I’m not more help with Milly’s disappearance, Karen. What else can I tell you?”

I knew I should leave and let Evelyn rest, but I had so many questions only she could answer. “What’s going to happen with
Oblivion Falls?
Are you still handling it?”

“Yes, I am.” She wheezed. “I still do rights and royalties for a few of my old clients. And I do keep up with the business.” She gestured toward a pile of
Publishers Weekly
stacked on a Naugahyde ottoman within reach of her armchair. Then she levered herself up off the low chair. “My office is right down the hall. Come on. We’ll look at Milly’s file, see if anything there will help you out.”

I followed the agent down the narrow hall to a good-sized room filled with gray filing cabinets and surprisingly up-to-date computer equipment. “I’ve got most of the current data on disk,” Evelyn said, “but not Milly’s. I don’t think anything’s come through for her
since I got computerized. That reprint request for
Oblivion Falls
was a few years back. Let’s see …” She pulled out a file cabinet drawer labeled
A–E
, selected a thick file, and slapped the folder down on a dusty library table. We both coughed.

“Okay, the reprint permission is the most recent action on Milly’s account. I am … was … her literary executor, so I signed the contract myself. The publisher was a small feminist press, and they didn’t offer an advance. I didn’t push it. Who the hell else would have wanted the book? But now—thanks to you, my dear—now, it’s a different story. Let’s see …” She plucked a half-dozen recent-looking newspaper clippings from the file and set them aside on the table. I recognized my interview with the
Times
from the picture of the young Milly Deakin that accompanied it.

Evelyn rifled through the folder, separated the top document from the rest, studied it intently, then looked up at me. “Come October first there should be a humongous royalty payment. And—will wonders never cease?—after forty years of being dead, Milly Deakin herself will be around in person to receive it!” She laughed, then hacked twice. Her makeup was a vivid mask over the gray complexion.

I knew I was pushing my luck—and hers—but I had one more question to ask. “Evelyn, who would have gotten those royalties if Milly’s whereabouts hadn’t been discovered?”

The agent started to respond, then stopped and glanced at me through narrowed eyes. “I shouldn’t be telling you this financial stuff. It’s confidential. Does Milly know you’re here? Do you have her permission to ask these questions?” She wheezed again and looked around for an inhaler.

My tongue wouldn’t let me lie. “No.”

A half dozen conflicting impulses flitted through her eyes, but the urge to gossip won out over professional discretion. She shrugged.

“The royalties would have been paid to her estate, of course. But at the moment I can’t remember who her heirs were. I do know that when Milly’s father died, she told me she had no further living relatives.” Evelyn pulled a molded plywood chair up to the table and sat. “Let me do an archeological dig in this file and see if she ever designated anyone else as her heir.” She grimaced wryly. “Like my respiratory system, my memory’s not what it used to be, and this was all a very long time ago.”

The agent began sorting through documents. A letter on fine cream-colored stationery caught her eye. It was attached to a matching business-size envelope that caught mine. The envelope seemed familiar to me, not as if I’d actually seen it before, but as if I’d read about it somewhere, or had had it described to me. Cream laid paper. Green three-cent stamp. I peered over her shoulder. Elegant engraved return address:
Anthony Parton, Esq. Attorney at Law, Madison Avenue, New York
. Recipient’s address neither handwritten nor word-processed, but typed in the old-fashioned way—on a manual typewriter. Something about this envelope was pecking at my brain like a nervous sparrow. Where had I heard about a business letter from a Manhattan lawyer?

“Ha,” Evelyn Sackela barked, then half choked on the resultant cough. “This is it. This letter is the last communication I ever received from Milly Deakin, and it’s directed to me through her attorney. Looks like Milly won’t be collecting her own royalties, after all. Her final instructions to me before she vanished some forty years ago were that all future royalties from
Oblivion Falls
were to be paid to a Mrs. Grace Lapierre in Stallmouth, New Hampshire. My records indicate I sent checks to Mrs. Lapierre for, let’s see, eight years. But the book went out of print in 1967, and there haven’t
been
any royalties since.”

Mrs. Grace Lapierre?
Gracie Lapierre!
It was all I could do to keep from snatching the attorney’s letter out of Evelyn’s frail hand: this letter was surely the mate to the one Lolita had told me about—the letter that had arrived one weekday afternoon and changed the Lapierre family’s life.

“Grace Lapierre was the sister of Bernice Lapierre, Milly’s father’s housekeeper,” I said, slowly, putting it all together. “Bernice brought Milly Deakin up. She was like a mother to her. But after her daughter Lorraine died, Bernice committed suicide. So Milly must have left the royalties to Bernice’s sister in memory of her foster mother.” I was moved by the writer’s benevolence.

“Isn’t that lovely?” Evelyn rasped. “Well, now that the reprint edition has been so very successful, Mrs. Lapierre is in for a nice little surprise. If she’s still alive, that is. Otherwise, the proceeds are payable to her heirs.”

Gracie Lapierre had been dead for years. This windfall of
Oblivion Falls
royalties would be paid to her daughter, Lolita Lapierre, who was still very much alive indeed.