Murder is a Girl's Best Friend

Table of Contents

 

 

Praise for MURDERERS PREFER BLONDES

“A beautifully realized evocation of time and place; 1950s New York City comes alive for those of us who were there and even those who weren’t. Amanda Matetsky has created a very funny and interesting female protagonist, Paige Turner, and put her in the repressed and male-dominated year of 1954, which works like a charm. This is more than a murder mystery; this is great writing by a fresh talent.”

—Nelson DeMille

 

“Prepare to be utterly charmed by the irrepressible Paige Turner, and take an enchanting trip back in time to New York City, circa 1954 . . . A thoroughly fun read.”

—Dorothy Cannell

 

“Amanda Matetsky has created a wonderfully sassy character in the unfortunately named Paige Turner. In her 1950s world where gals are peachy and cigarettes dangle from the lips of every private dick, a busty platinum blonde finds herself at the wrong end of a rope and Paige is on the case of a swell who dunit, sweetheart. Delightfully nostalgic and gripping. Irresistible.” —Sarah Strohmeyer, author of
Bubbles In Trouble

 

“A great idea well-executed—funny, fast, and suspenseful.”

—Max Allan Collins, author of
Road to Perdition

 

“
Murderers Prefer Blondes
is a gas; full of vivid characters and so sharp in its depiction of the fifties when you read it you’ll feel like you’re sipping champagne in the Copacabana.”—Betsy Thornton, author of
Ghost Towns

 

“Paige Turner is the liveliest, most charming detective to emerge in crime fiction in a long time. She is the product of her time and place—New York in the fifties—with a little Betty Boop and a little Brenda Starr in her makeup, but she is also her own woman, funny, smart, energetic, brave, hard-working, and determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. She is irresistible, a force of nature.”

—Ann Waldron, author of
The Princeton Murders

 

“Matetsky adeptly captures the atmosphere of the 1950s, and her characters—especially Paige and her friend Abby—are a delight. This journey back to a time that now seems innocent is refreshing.”—
Romantic Times

 

“A fun new mystery series . . . a real page-turner . . . a delightful historical amateur sleuth tale.”—
BookBrowser

 

“A fast-paced, smart debut with a feisty heroine that entertains and keeps readers eagerly turning Paiges.”

—
The Mystery Reader

 

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

MURDER IS A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND

 

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with
the author

 

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / July 2004

Copyright © 2004 by Amanda Matetsky.

 

Song lyrics on page ix are from “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”.
Music by Jule Styne. Words by Leo Robin. Copyright © 1949 (Renewed)
by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP). International Copyright Secured.
All rights reserved.

 

All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without
permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the
Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is
illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic
editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of
copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-16155-5

 

Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and
the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design
are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

For Molly,
because a sister is a girl’s best friend

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have the best group of cheerleaders in the world, and I heartily thank them all: 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, Ann Waldron, Nelson DeMille, Dianne Francis, Art Scott, Betsy Thornton, Santa and Tom De Haven, Nikki and Bert Miller, Herta Puleo, Marte Cameron, Cameron Joy, Sandra Thompson and Chris Sherman, Donna and Michael Steinhorn, Gayle Rawlings and Debbie Marshall, Regina Grassia, Joan Unice, Judy Capriglione, Martha Cevasco, Betty Fitzsimmons, Nancy Francese, Jane Gudapati, Carleen Kierce, April Margolin, Margaret Ray, Doris Schweitzer, Carol Smith, Roberta Waugh and her saintly sidekick, Joseph.

I send heaps of gratitude and good wishes to my dear friends at Literacy Volunteers of America-Nassau County, Inc., and my fellow mystery writers and readers at Sisters in Crime-Central Jersey. And to my wonderful co-agents, Annelise Robey and Meg Ruley of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, and my superlative editor at Penguin Group, Martha Bushko, I shout THANK YOU at the top of my lungs.

“Men grow cold when girls grow old,
And we all lose our charms in the end.
But square-cut, or pear-shaped,
These rocks don’t lose their shape—
Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

—as sung by Marilyn Monroe in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Prologue

IT ISN’T EASY BEING ME. MY NAME IS Paige Turner, which is laughable enough all by itself, but when you couple the silly name with the fact that I’m a
writer,
my entire identity takes on an aura of absurdity. To put it more succinctly, I’m a living joke. People start giggling the minute they meet me. And then, when they learn that I’m a mystery novelist and a staff writer for
Daring Detective
magazine, the giggles turn into great big snorts and belly laughs. It’s so embarrassing and annoying I’m thinking of leaving my job to become a switchboard operator, or a stenographer, or a teacher, or a nurse—like every single other (okay, every other single) woman working in Manhattan.

There I go, lying again (I’ve been doing a lot of that lately). I’m not really thinking about leaving my job. I’ve always wanted to be a crime and mystery writer—ever since I was a skinny midwestern teenager, eating potato chips in bed and reading Raymond Chandler’s
Farewell, My Lovely
for the first time—and now that I finally
am
one, at the grand old age of twenty-eight, I’m not about to quit. I’d change my name before I’d change my job.

But I’m not going to do that, either. I was deeply in love with my late husband Bob Turner, and even though he’s been gone for three years now (Bob was killed in Korea in late 1951), and even though we lived together as man and wife for only one short, glorious, rapturous month, I will keep my married name until the day I die—or get hitched again, whichever comes first. And the way things have been going for me in the last few months, I’m sure to be pushing up pansies long before my new boyfriend, NYPD Homicide Detective Sergeant Dan Street, ever dreams of popping the question.

You probably think I’m kidding, but I’m not. Dan’s so mad at me right now he’d rather kill me than marry me. Plus, I keep getting myself into so damn much trouble—serious, scary, life-threatening trouble—it’ll be a flat-out miracle if some overexcited homicidal maniac doesn’t beat him to the punch.

Eight months ago, when I started working on my first story for
Daring Detective
—investigating and writing about the rape and murder of a pretty blonde waitress/mother/call girl named Babs Comstock—I learned just how dangerous my line of work can be:
extremely
dangerous, if you must know. I came
this
close to meeting the same awful fate as the pitiful young victim I was writing about. And by the time I finished investigating
this
story—my sixth for the magazine, and the one I’m preparing to tell you now—I was a mangled and bloody mess.

I’m not complaining, though. At least I’m still alive, which is more than I can say for some other people who made the mistake—or simply had the misfortune—of playing a part in this lurid and tragic tale. And even though I’m sitting here in my aqua chenille bathrobe at my yellow Formica kitchen table in my grubby little Greenwich Village apartment on a forced eight-week convalescent leave from work—my shattered leg in a plaster cast and my wounded shoulder strapped tight in five layers of gauze and adhesive tape—I can still inhale, and exhale, and think, and talk, and move all of my fingers.