Amanda Matetsky: Murder Is A Girl’s Best Friend

WHAT’S BLACK AND WHITE AND RED ALL over? A blood-soaked newspaper-like the Monday, December 20, 1954 edition of The Daily Mirror I was reading that fateful morning. The blood wasn’t real, of course-not in the sense that I could actually see it, or touch it, or accidentally smear it on the sleeve of my brand new pink angora sweater-but the paper was dripping with it just the same.

Twenty-six people had been killed in a plane crash at Idlewild airport. British troops had opened fire on student demonstrators on the island of Cyprus, slaying an undisclosed number and wounding many more. Chinese Nationalists had dropped forty bombs on two Communist islands off the shore of Formosa -number of casualties unknown. A man in Chicago had taken a rifle from the gun rack in a Sears Roebuck store and shot himself to death in the midst of a crowd of Christmas shoppers (how the gun happened to be loaded wasn’t explained), and another berserk gunman had gone on a spree in the Bronx, shooting four people before being brought down in a hail of police bullets. A woman walking her miniature poodle was killed by a hit-and-run driver at the corner of York and 69th Street. The dog was dead, too.

I felt bad about all of these fatalities, including that of the pitiful pooch, but the story that claimed my closest attention was the one about the sixteen-year-old girl who was found stripped and stabbed to death in a roadside motel room in Middletown, Rhode Island. The two sailors who had rented and subsequently fled the room had already been tracked down by police and were being held for questioning. I snatched up my scissors, cut the article out of the paper, and placed it in the labeled and dated manila folder sitting on top of my desk. This was the kind of killing Daring Detective readers were interested in. Brutal murder, with a nice thick slice of sex on the side.

What a way to start the day, I thought, taking a bite of the buttered English I’d bought at the coffee shop in the lobby downstairs. A muffin and a murder for breakfast.

The office entry bell jingled and in walked Harvey Crockett, my boss, the corpulent, white-haired, cigar-smoking ex-newspaperman who-in spite of his gloomy, cynical, don’t-give-a-damn outlook on life-was still shocked and dismayed to find himself employed as the editor in chief of a lowly (okay, sleazy) true crime magazine. “Coffee!” he grunted, giving me his usual one-word greeting. He took off his hat, tapped it against his thigh to remove the snow, and then looped it on an upper branch of the coat tree near the front door.

“Good morning, Mr. Crockett,” I said, batting my lashes, grinning like an idiot, doing my best to look properly submissive and worshipful. (If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this odd, out-of-bounds-for-a-woman occupation of mine, it’s that you must treat the men you work for like gods. If you don’t, they will act like the gods they know themselves to be, and make your life a living hell.) “Did you have a nice weekend?”

“Lousy,” he said, removing his wool overcoat, shaking off the snow, and hanging it on the rack. Not bothering to explain himself further, he straightened his too-tight tie, gave me a gruff nod, then propelled his colossal belly past my desk and down the aisle of the large front workroom toward his small private office in the rear. “Coffee!” he repeated over his retreating shoulder. “Bring the newspapers, too.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, growling to myself and making a cross-eyed face at the ceiling. Would it have killed the man to give me a polite hello and ask about m y weekend? Apparently yes, since Crockett had never once-in all the time I’d worked my fanny off for him-offered me anything more than one long-overdue raise and an occasional surly smile. I still liked the guy, though. He was smart, shrewd, and fairly open-minded-which was a heck of a lot more than I could say for three of the other four men who (along with me, the only woman) made up the rest of the Daring Detective staff.

I was standing at the small worktable where (thanks to me, the only woman) the electric coffeemaker and clean cups were always set up, when the entry bell jingled again. My back was to the door, but I didn’t have to turn my head to find out which of my male “superiors” had arrived. The loud huffing and puffing noises told me all I needed to know.

“Hiya, Zimmerman!” I called over my shoulder. “How’s it going?” Lenny Zimmerman was my only friend at the office-the one member of the staff who didn’t make lousy jokes about my name and gender or treat me like a personal servant.

“Fine,” Lenny sputtered, still gasping for air.

I knew without looking his face was as red as a radish. Yours would be too if you’d just trudged up nine full flights of stairs to the office, as Lenny did every Monday-through-Friday morning of his life. The rail-thin, dark-haired, bespectacled twenty-three year old art assistant was deathly afraid of elevators.

“Still snowing up a storm outside?” I asked, stirring cream into Crockett’s coffee and turning to face my breathless, red-cheeked chum.

“Sure is,” he said, giving me a wide, slightly snaggle toothed grin. He set his lunch sack on the nearest chair (when you work on the ninth floor and you’re too scared to use the elevator, you always bring your own sandwich), then hung his slouch hat and overcoat on the tree. “Got three, maybe four inches already. By the time we get off work we’ll have to hail dogsleds to get home.”

I smiled. There was a time when Lenny wouldn’t have been so genial and chatty with me. He would have mumbled a shy answer to my question and scurried off to his desk at the back of the workroom, as breathless and red-faced from embarrassment as from exertion. But that was eight long months ago-before Lenny and I had become true comrades. Before we’d discovered our ardent respect and esteem for each other. Before he had saved my life.

But that’s another story. (The Babs Comstock story, to be exact. See, I was trapped on the fifth floor landing of the office stairwell, being molested and strangled by a cold-blooded murderer-the same man who had murdered Babs Comstock-when Lenny just happened to come barging up the stairs on his way to work, in the miraculous nick of time to prevent my sudden death and accidentally cause the sudden death of my assailant. It was a freaky, but very fortuitous outcome. Ever since then Lenny and I have been as close as brother and sister-two peas in a mutually protective pod.)

“How was your weekend?” Lenny wanted to know. He picked up his lunch sack and headed for his desk at the very back of the front workroom.

“Not bad,” I said. “Dan took me to see The Silver Chalice at the Paramount. It’s in Cinemascope. Stars that popular new actor, Paul Newman. And Pier Angeli.”

“Was it any good?”

“Okay, I guess, if you like those sprawling, pompous, bigger-than-life biblical spectacles. Personally, I’d rather see a neat Alfred Hitchcock mystery. Or a slew of Tom and Jerry cartoons.”

“Hey!” Mr. Crockett interrupted, sticking his head through the door of his office. “Where the heck’s my coffee?”

“Coming right up, sir!” I chirped, pasting another phony smile on my kisser. Why do so many bosses feel they have a right to be rude? I gave Lenny a knowing wink, then took Mr. Crockett his morning fix of newsprint and caffeine.

When I got back to my desk at the front of the workroom, Mike and Mario marched in. Mike Davidson was the tall, fair, flattopped assistant editor of the magazine, and Mario Caruso was the short, dark, ducktailed art director. Both were married and in their early thirties. They lived on opposite sides of town from each other, but for some weird reason I’d never been able to figure out, they almost always arrived at the office in tandem. Went out to lunch together every day, too. A regular Heckle and Jeckle.