The Chelsea Girl Murders by Sparkle Hayter

her phone.
    â€œMaggie, did you kill him?” the blowsy blond woman asked, and laughed. “You had such good revenge plans for him last week.”
    â€œI’d never kill anyone who owes me money, Lucia,” the frizzy-haired Maggie said into her telephone. “I have an alibi. And now I don’t have to get revenge.”
    I was caught in a crossfire. The two women were talking on the phone to each other on either side of me, but looking out into the street, not at each other.
    Maggie went on. “A lot of people may have wanted him dead.”
    â€œOh, Carlos is awake,” blowsy Lucia said, going back into her apartment with the phone.
    â€œCall me later,” Maggie said, hanging up.
    She looked over at me.
    â€œHello,” she said.
    â€œHello.”
    â€œYou found the body, did you?”
    â€œThe body kinda found me …”
    â€œI’m Maggie Mason,” she said. “Who are you?”
    â€œA friend of Tamayo’s, Robin—”
    Before I could finish introducing myself, her phone rang in her hand and she said, “Excuse me,” and answered it. “Hello? Oh, hi. Can’t. Busy that night. I have an art action. What? I can’t tell you that.”
    Maggie Mason. That sound familiar.
    â€œRoger’s the dealer who handles Blair’s work? Yes, I’ve met him and I didn’t like him. Something about him just sends a rat running up my trouser leg,” Maggie said into the phone.
    Involuntarily, I jerked upright. My ex-boyfriend Mad Mike O’Reilly used to say that “it sent a rat running up my trouser leg.”
    â€œI’ve got to find some money. Have you ever had a day when you had to choose between food and cigarettes? Yeah? Well, have you ever had a day when you had to choose between cigarettes and Tampax? Ah, I’m not going to worry yet. I’ve been on the bones of me bum before,” Maggie said. “What? No, the police know I didn’t kill Gerald. I have an alibi, thank God. You know Grace Rouse would love to hang it on me.”
    Rats running up trouser legs, bum bones … I suddenly knew where I’d heard of Maggie Mason, aka Mary Margaret Mason, the “scourge of Kilmerry, the only dry county in all of Ireland,” as my ex-boyfriend Mike put it. Don’t bother looking Kilmerry up on a map. You can’t find it. That was one of Mike’s whimsical nicknames. It was a tiny county, naturally, in Ulster, populated by an ascetic Protestant sect, industrious like Mormons. Maggie was the local angry rebel bent on corrupting every male in her village before she left at age seventeen for Belfast. There she met Mike, who was shooting a story for ANN foreign correspondent Reb Ryan. Mike is a cameraman.
    Mike was married at the time, but that didn’t stop either him or Maggie from dating. They dated off and on for years before they finally split up, after his marriage ended and before he took up with me. He had told a lot of stories about her over the years, not all of them very flattering.
    Maggie, according to Mad Michael O’Reilly, was a wild woman of extreme passions with a legendary bad temper, especially when it came to the men in her life and the other women in her men’s lives. Mike and I had been nonmonogamous, EXCEPT while we were both in New York, so it wouldn’t have been kosher for him to be carrying on with Margaret at the Chelsea Hotel and me in the East Village. Possible, even likely, come to think of it, but not kosher.
    After what I’d heard about Maggie, she’d be a lot more upset about it than I would though. As I recall, when she caught Mike with another woman, she threw the woman’s clothes out of the window, sprayed her and Mike with red paint, and broke a lot of glassware. She and Mike were “off” at the time, so she wasn’t in a position to be jealous. Come to think of it, wasn’t Maggie Mason the woman who forwarded an