Helen Lathrup is a beautiful, domineering editorial director of a major New York magazine group, known for her cruelty toward the writers, artists, and editors whose lives she intersects. One Friday morning, she is shot through the head in her private office. The killing is discovered by Lynn Prentiss, an associate editor, who hears a muffled sound and investigates. The office is plunged into chaos. Among the staff are Frederick Ellers, a talented but alcoholic editor nursing a burning grievance against Lathrup; Ruth Porges, a restrained woman whose lover Roger Bendiner was seduced away from her by Lathrup; and Jim Macklin, an easygoing editor who serves as a foil to the tension around him. Each harbors damage done by Lathrup's manipulations. Lynn, shaken by her discovery and exhausted by hours of police questioning, leaves the office in the evening only to find herself followed through the streets. Her terror escalates until she ducks into a restaurant, where her pursuer turns out to be a naïve young artist named Ralph Gilmore, who merely wanted to show her his portfolio. She examines his drawings, which are hauntingly beautiful but commercially unsaleable, and tells him so honestly. He leaves, visibly crushed. Separately, Ralph Gilmore is revealed to have his own consuming grievance against Lathrup. She had championed his novel, become his lover, then savagely criticized and rejected both him and his work. Driven to desperation, he had purchased a gun. He is soon identified as a suspect. Meanwhile, the investigation is led by Lieutenant Joseph Fenton of the Homicide Squad, a thirty-year veteran whose experience has left him weary but sharp. His first strong lead is Michael Willard, a true-crime article writer who sent threatening letters to Lathrup after she benefited enormously from a film and television deal based on his work, while he received almost nothing legally. Willard turns himself in and confesses. But Fenton, questioning him closely, quickly determines that the confession is false. Willard, a periodic alcoholic, had been hospitalized at Bellevue on the night before the murder and cannot have committed it. His confession is the product of guilt, grief, and alcoholic instability. Ruth Porges, still grieving the loss of Roger Bendiner to Lathrup, descends into an excavation site near the office building one morning to retrieve a dropped locket. At the bottom, she overturns a flat stone and discovers the murder weapon, a long-barreled pistol fitted with a silencer. She recognizes it immediately, having been shown it once in a moment of casual pride by someone she knows well. She realizes she knows who killed Lathrup. Rather than go to the police, Ruth decides to protect the killer, reasoning that she herself had wanted Lathrup dead, and that the killer was another of Lathrup's victims driven beyond endurance. She plans to dispose of the gun in the East River after dark. But the killer already knows she has been seen emerging from the excavation. He appears at her apartment, calm at first, then increasingly dangerous. Ruth refuses to reveal where she has hidden the gun and attempts to reason with him. He does not trust her. He strangles her. The case multiplies in horror. A second Eaton-Lathrup editor is found strangled in her apartment. Then Allen Gerstle, the group's society exposé columnist, vanishes entirely. The police, who had believed the case nearly solved, find themselves with multiple victims and no firm suspect in custody. Ballistics confirms that the gun Gilmore purchased was not the murder weapon, weakening the case against him further. Fenton, surveying the accumulating wreckage, understands that the killer is someone embedded in the office world around Lathrup, someone intimate enough to have access, motive, and the cold nerve to continue. The investigation presses forward into a widening field of suspects, each shaped and damaged by the same ruthless woman whose death began everything.
By Frank Belknap Long · First published 1961 · Genre: Horror, Supernatural, Weird Fiction · 10 chapters