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Jumping to my feet and tearing into the bathroom, I took a fast shower, dried myself off, and got dressed in a frenzy- which will explain how I wound up wearing a shocking pink blouse with a red plaid skirt and a pair of green platformed sandals. My stocking seams were twisted every which way, and I applied my makeup in such haste that my poor face looked like an abstract portrait by Picasso.

After my mad dash to the subway, my two connecting train rides (first uptown, then across), and my hot, sweaty scramble to my office building at 43rd and Third, I was a complete wreck. Flying past the lobby coffee shop where I usually bought my morning muffin, I darted into the first open elevator I came to and took it to the ninth floor.

As I exited the elevator and stumbled down the hall to the

Daring Detective office, I tried to pull myself together-i.e., straighten my clothes, smooth down my hair, act cool. But it was hopeless. (Well, it’s hard to act cool when you look like a character in a Looney Tunes cartoon.) In an effort to silence the office entry bell and slip inside unnoticed, I opened the door as slowly and quietly as I possibly could and tried to squeeze through it sideways.

My efforts were so fruitless they were foolish. The entry bell jangled as loudly as it always did, and before I was even halfway through the door, all three of my male coworkers-Mario, Mike, and Lenny-were staring up at me from their desks in the large communal workroom, watching me try to sneak inside.

“Look who’s here!” Mario crowed, making sure that his voice was loud enough to be heard by our boss, Harvey Crockett (whose private office door was, as usual, standing wide open). “It’s our own little page-turner, Paige Turner! And she’s only an hour and forty-five minutes late! Guess we’re lucky she showed up at all.” Mario Caruso, the art director of the magazine, was a short, dark, thickset (and thick-headed) man in his early thirties who liked to cause trouble. Especially for me.

“Good morning, all,” I said, squaring my shoulders, tossing my head, and stepping all the way into the office. I was trying to appear self-possessed, aloof, and indifferent to Mario’s taunting remarks, but I felt as cool and composed as the melting mannequins in the big fire scene in the 3-D thriller,

House of Wax.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Mike asked me. “You look awful.” Mike Davidson was

DD’s tall, wiry assistant editor and head staff writer (I was the tail). Mike was a lousy writer, but-thanks to the sexist policies of our woman-hating editorial director, Brandon Pomery-his bylines outnumbered mine twenty to one. “Who picked out your clothes this morning?” Mike jeered, skimming his palm over the shelf of his sand-colored flattop. “Rin Tin Tin?”

Now, do you think that wisecrack was even the weeniest bit funny? Neither did I. I thought it was as lame and sloppy as the pitifully dull stories Mike cranked out for

Daring Detective. Mario, on the other hand, must have found Mike’s quip to be the funniest darn thing he ever heard in his life, because he was laughing so hard I thought he was going to spit up. His fat, swarthy face turned as pink as my blouse, and his spasms of hilarity were so violent his greasy ducktail was coming unglued.

But my dear friend Lenny Zimmerman, the lowly art assistant whose desk was situated in the farthest depths of the common workroom, wasn’t laughing at all. He was peering at me through his crooked, black-rimmed, bottle-thick glasses, with a look of intense concern on his pale, narrow face. He knew that something was wrong-that something bad had happened to me. Ever since the day he’d saved my life (which was over a year ago, when I was working on my very first murder story), Lenny had been able to read me like a book.

And that was what he was doing now-turning my pages, so to speak-trying to judge how much trouble I’d gotten myself into this time.

“Pipe down!” Harvey Crockett barked, sticking his large white-haired head through his open office door. “Get back to work! It’s ten fifteen!” He gave me a snarly, disgruntled look. “Especially you, Paige. Gotta make up for lost time.”

It wasn’t just my lateness that had upset him. It was also the holiday. Crockett was a smart but stodgy ex-newspaperman whose only reason for living was his job. He wasn’t proud that he was now the executive editor of

Daring Detective magazine instead of a reporter for the Daily News, but he wasn’t ashamed of it, either. The actual product or the nature of his work didn’t matter that much to him; it was just the job. And right now, coming off an unwelcome three-day weekend, Crockett was suffering from job withdrawal.

Caffeine withdrawal, too. “Make some coffee, Paige,” he sputtered, “and make it now. This place needs a jumpstart.”

“Yes, Mr. Crockett,” I said, dropping my purse down on my desk (which, since I also served as the office receptionist, was the one closest to the entrance). I hurtled across the room, hoisted the heavy Coffeemaster off the table where it was always stationed, and hauled it toward the door. Pitching Lenny what I hoped was a reassuring smile, I scooted out into the hall and headed for the ladies’ room to wash out the percolator and fill it with water.

As the only female on the

DD staff, I always had to make the coffee. (That’s women’s work, in case you haven’t heard.) I normally resented being the coffee slave, but today I was grateful for the chore. The ladies’ room was quiet and the water was cool. And when I’d finished cleaning and filling the pot, I had a chance to catch my breath, adjust my makeup, and straighten my stocking seams. I couldn’t do anything about the mismatched colors of my crazy outfit, but after realigning the buttons on my blouse, and closing the zipper on my skirt, I looked and felt a little better.

When I returned to the workroom and began spooning coffee into the percolator, Mr. Crockett was satisfied. “Bring me a cup when it’s ready,” he said, stepping back inside his office.

“Ditto,” said Mario, who was watching (or rather, ogling) my every move and making ugly smoochy faces whenever I glanced in his direction.

“Me, too,” Mike chimed in, never looking up from the story he was pecking out, with two fingers, on his typewriter.

Lenny didn’t ask me for coffee. (He rarely drank the stuff, but when he did, he got up and got it himself.) And he didn’t say anything else to me, either. He didn’t have to. His urgent, puzzled, anxious gaze was saying it all.

I was sorry to be causing Lenny such worry, but there was nothing I could do to ease his concerns right now. If I went over to talk to him, Mario would start making more nasty-and loud-remarks, and then Mr. Crockett would come bursting out of his office to growl at us again. And that wouldn’t do anybody any good. Lifting my shoulders in an apologetic shrug, I winked at Lenny and tossed him another quick smile. Then I turned my back on the boys in the workroom and faced a different pile of problems.

THERE WAS SO MUCH WORK STACKED UP on my desk I wanted to run back to the ladies’ room and hide out there till lunchtime. There were letters to open and sort, newspapers to clip, stories to edit and rewrite, galleys to proofread, invoices to record, photos to label and file. And it was already twenty to eleven! And I had to call Binky at noon! And if

DD’s second-in-command, Brandon Pomeroy, happened to stroll into the office before I left on my lunch hour, he would see all the paperwork on my desk, and find out how late I’d come in this morning, and then he wouldn’t let me leave at all.

Which would throw a big wrench in my plans to visit the Actors Studio.

However, I wasn’t

that worried about Pomeroy coming in early. Truth was, he hardly ever made it into the office before lunch. (When you’re a close relative of Oliver Rice Harrington-the powerful and wealthy publishing mogul who owns the magazine you work for-you can show up whenever you like. And when you’re a lazy, jaded snob who breakfasts on dry martinis, you like to show up late.) Nevertheless, Pomeroy had been known to pull surprises out of his hat from time to time, and I was praying that today would not be one of those times.