SAID AND DUNNE

The handwriting was on the backroom wall of Mortimer's. There, scrawled for all to see, was Hector Paradiso's bloodstained death note revealing his murderer's name. Extracted from Dominick Dunne's hit novel An Inconvenient Woman, this plot detail was just one of the decorative elements for a party celebrating the book's publication. It was the kind of New York social gathering that Pauline Mendelson, another character in the novel, would have loved. Walking into the festivities, she would have found herself surrounded by eastern-establishment types, new-money tenderfeet, hotshot power brokers, and literary bigwigs. And a reproduction of Van Gogh's White Roses was hanging over the bar.