Amanda Matetsky: Murder on a Hot Tin Roof

The fourth book in the Paige Turner Mysteries series, 2006

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.

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.