The heroine of A Death in the Life and Scarlet Night, Julie Hayes is a study in contradictions. Married to the patrician Geoffrey Hayes, she keeps a shop on West 44th Street (where she once set herself up as "Reader and Adviser"), maintains ties with the gentleman gangster Sweets Romano, and works full-time for gossip columnist Tony Alexander

Tony sends Julie to do a nostalgia piece on a dance marathon to take place in the Garden of Roses, a crumbling rococo edifice being renovated by the unlikely Morton Butts. But Julie's story is not a nostalgia piece; it asks questions -- the wrong questions. Tony kills it instantly, but not before Julie learns while working on the story that Broadway publicist Jay Phillips has committed suicide. Then Tony Alexander himself is murdered. Why? Is there a connection?