Punish Me with Kisses (11 page)

S
uddenly no task was too small or menial for Lillian Ryan. Could she help Penny with some extra typing? She was going out for coffee—would Penny like some, too? She left notes on Penny's desk, telephone messages signed with drawings of a smile as if to confirm what a happy pleasure it had been to take them down. Penny assumed that having been humbled by her less rapid promotion, Lillian was trying to reform herself by showing sincerity and good will. But one day early in November another motive emerged, one that caught Penny off her guard.

That morning Lillian arrived at the office and announced she'd quit smoking cigarettes. "I know it irritates you," she said, as if perhaps Penny's irritation had brought the decision on, "and I've decided to take up jogging too."

Penny was pleased; she detested the smell of exhaled smoke and was disgusted by the ashtrays around their cubicle overflowing with Lillian's lipstick-stained butts.

"Got to give up coffin nails," Lillian said. "Got to get in shape. Taking a week in Jamaica this January. Want to look good on the beach." She raised a corner of her blouse, pinched a roll of skin, then turned so Penny could see it too. "Look at this! A real spare tire, right? How long do you think it'd take me to run it off?"

"Probably not by January," Penny said, "but you might be able to make a dent."

"Sure hope so. I'm tired of dating creeps. Last spring when I went to Tahiti all I could come up with was that
ape
."

Lillian had written a little story about her adventure in Tahiti that had been published in a feminist magazine. She'd met a man at a Club Med village with whom she'd spent a pleasant week swimming, canoeing, playing tennis and telling jokes. But all had turned sour the final night when Lillian had invited him to her cabana for a drink. She was in the midst of changing into a caftan when, quite unexpectedly, he'd lunged. "Didn't he understand," she wrote, "that I was a liberated woman, that changing clothes in front of him was an act of trust, not an invitation to treat me like a whore?" Her article had inspired a lot of ridicule around the office, but the derision did not matter to Lillian. She was now, she proclaimed, a "published writer," which meant that special value should now be given to her views.

At noon that day she asked if Penny were free for lunch. "Sure," said Penny. The invitation surprised her. "Sure. OK, if you want."

"Great. You can fill me in on jogging. I've got a couple of ideas, too, so maybe you'll let me pick your brains." Lillian led her to a fancy-looking bistro, the sort of place a senior editor might take a successful author he was trying to impress.

"Looks kind of expensive," Penny said.

"So what? This one's on me."

They ordered Bloody
Marys
at the bar, then Lillian twisted in her seat to see who else was there. "Look, there's Henderson trying to steal that Jackie Susann type away from Dell. She lives in Dallas, pounds out crap and makes a mint. Watch Henderson play footsy. What an operator he is. Next thing he'll have her out to his place in Connecticut, get her in the sack, steal her from Dell, then quit B&A and take her to some other joint."

Penny was impressed. She asked Lillian how she knew so much.

"Wire myself in. Stay late and read the files. Sneak around and look on people's desks. Get chummy with the secretaries. Hang around the corridors and listen in to calls. No one ever tells you anything, so you got to hustle information for yourself. I'm developing sources outside the house now too. I'm not planning to stay at B&A forever, you know."

After they were seated she got Penny onto the subject of running, asked a lot of questions about shoes and leotards and stretching exercises, all the obvious stuff that was explained in dozens of running books. "It's getting colder now. I'd better get over to Saks and look at warm-up suits. All I want to do is lose some weight, not join the sweaty undershirt crowd."

Penny thought of making love with Jared, the two of them dripping with sweat. Somehow it was hard for her to imagine Lillian reveling in perspiration. She was the antiseptic type who'd paint on lipstick before going out to run.

Near the end of the lunch, when they were waiting for dessert, Lillian suddenly changed the subject. There wasn't any transition or pause; she started out with a sentence about running and ended with the non sequitur comment that she didn't think the nonfiction novel was dead, the way
MacAllister
had said it was, at an editorial meeting several weeks before.

"So everyone's done those things—so what?
In Cold Blood
,
Blood and Money
, and
Helter
Skelter
are classics, plus I don't know how many more. People eat them up. The stories are true, and all the detail, the procedural part, there's an endless fascination with that. I got a call the other day from an investigative reporter. He's done a lot of police reporting. Now he wants to do a book. Since this guy's really talented, I started thinking up ideas. We had drinks a few times, kicked some things around, but nothing we thought of really stuck. He kept telling me 'I need an angle, a way in, someone who's never talked before,' and I was thinking, well"—she locked into Penny's eyes then lowered her voice to a whisper—"I was thinking,
Jesus Christ
, here I am sitting right on top of something, something so big it could maybe make a real killing for everyone involved."

Lillian lowered her voice even more to imply extreme confidentiality. "Look—here I am sitting next to you all these months, sharing the cubicle, practically living with you, if you see what I mean. We're like sisters. We both came to B&A the same time, we've had our ups and downs, but we're both in the same boat, anxious to get on with our careers. So I was thinking: nobody, but nobody knows more about your sister's story than you. The background. The bringing up. All the details, those little nuances that can make this sort of book so good. You know the leads, who to see, who to talk to, everything. I mean you're an absolute goldmine just waiting to be tapped."

Penny felt unnerved. She couldn't imagine being party to a book like that.

"You and I could edit it together, maybe work up a proposal freelance, then shop it around. If Mac's interested—great! But he's going to have to
pay
. If he can't come up with the right sort of dough, we can quit and go half a dozen other places where they'll snap it up real fast."

"Listen, Lillian—is this why you invited me to lunch?"

"Don't you see? You know
everything
, and with this writer it could really come alive. Your point of view, everything
you
always wanted to say. People still talk about it, you know. Everyone at the office—they're fascinated by the case. People haven't forgotten. They'll see this thing, hear about it and think: 'Yeah, I remember that. Who really killed her? What really happened anyhow?' "

"Lillian—"

"I'm telling you . . ."

"Listen to me."

"—could be
very big
."

"Will you just shut up, Lillian. Will you just please shut up.
"

"Sorry. Guess I got carried away. But you see what I'm talking about, the scale—"

"
Shut up!
"

Lillian finally caught the anger in her voice, because she suddenly snapped her mouth closed, then reached into her purse for a cigarette.

"Oh, shit," she said after she'd lit it. "I really was going to quit." She started to put it out, then stopped and took another drag. "What the hell? I guess one more won't do me that much harm."

Penny just stared at her, appalled by her venality, her crude attempt at manipulation, the transparency of all her attempts to ingratiate herself over the past few weeks. "You must really take me for a fool," she said.

"Huh? Take it easy. What's the matter anyway? You think I'm trying to get the story away from you? I'm talking about a fifty-fifty split."

"You really don't understand, do you?"

"Actually I think I'm pretty savvy."

"Good, because I'm only going to say this once."

"What?"

"I think your idea stinks."

"Don't you want to meet the writer?"

"Absolutely not."

"Well, think about it. I bet you change your mind." She suddenly stopped fidgeting with her cigarette, stared with deep curiosity into Penny's eyes. "Funny—I didn't think you'd take it this way at all."

"You miscalculated. Maybe we're not 'like sisters' the way you thought."

"Oh, cut the bullshit, Penny. I know what's going down. Everybody knows. The whole office. You think we don't know who calls you all the time, meets you downstairs after work? Someone told me he's even moved in. I mean, talk about taking people for
fools
—"

Penny pushed away her plate of chocolate mousse. "I can't believe I'm listening to this."

Lillian took a deep breath. "Like I said, Pen—everybody knows you're shacked up with Evans. You really ought to think it through. What's that all about? What are the
implications
, if you see what I'm talking about."

Penny pushed back her chair. "
Leave me alone
," she said, her voice trembling, her hands shaking too. She strode out of the restaurant. On the street she paused, then walked around the block to quiet her nerves. She'd have to face Lillian through the afternoon, would have to sit beside her, only a foot or so away, and transact her business as if a confrontation hadn't taken place.
Implications
—it was pretty clear what she meant. Oh, yes, the
implications
: that she and Jared were in the thing together; that one or the other of them had killed Suzie and then they both had covered up; that now that a decent interval had passed they'd felt it was safe to resume their affair. Lillian said the whole office knew. People were buzzing about it, thinking the worst as people always did. How naive of her to think she could have a private life, that people would ever leave her alone.

Lillian was cool through the afternoon, distant but polite. Penny envied her sang-froid, for she herself still felt tense and hurt. One time, when she came back from the women's room, she found Lillian whispering into the phone, cupping the mouthpiece with her hand. Lillian left soon after that, then reappeared just before five o'clock.

"Sorry I upset you," she announced from the door, after clearing her throat. "I really didn't think my little idea would set you off."

"Let's just drop it, all right?"

"Sure. Fine with me. It was just an idea anyway." She lit a cigarette. "Look at me—smoking again. Just a bundle of nerves. Well—see you tomorrow." She waved cheerfully and left.

Penny waited until she was sure Lillian was gone. Then she did something she'd never done before in her life: She opened the drawers of Lillian Ryan's desk and started rummaging around.

There was all sorts of junk in there, bits of paper with unidentified phone numbers, a half-eaten Hershey bar, even a wad of used tissues bearing lipstick stains. In the center drawer she found a file folder marked "Ideas." She opened it and riffled through the papers until she found what she was looking for: a single, long yellow page from a legal pad entitled "
Berring
Case." She read the notes scrawled out in Lillian's hand: "$100,000 advance. $25,000 expenses for investigators. LR, author-editor—80%. PC—20% for full release."

The "investigative reporter" was to be Lillian herself, and as for the "fifty-fifty split," that seemed to have been improvised over lunch.

There wasn't much else, a crude outline, some lurid chapter headings, a few tentative titles—
Death in the
Poolhouse
; Murder in Maine; To Kill the Heiress
—scrawled out on the back. It was disgusting, worse than she'd imagined, a cheap attempt to market Suzie's death. She replaced the folder, then noticed something else, carbons of some letters Lillian had written to agents initialed LR/pc at the bottom, as if Penny were a typist and Lillian her boss. What a bitch, she thought.

S
he was disappointed in Jared's reaction—he didn't seem outraged. "Just relax," he told her. "Who cares? She's just trying to make herself a buck."

"But don't you see how exploitive she is?"

"Sure I see. But that's her problem, not yours."

"I'd say it could be our problem if she ever does the book."

"But she can't do it. She knows she's not going to get anywhere with you, so she'll have to drop it, and that's the end."