Rich, Radiant Slaughter

by Jane Haddam

  That, however, was not Gail’s problem. “The books are here,” she said. “They’re just in the ballroom. In boxes. Not even very well-marked boxes. And on top of that, there are other boxes, and somehow everything got all mixed in together. I’m having the worst time sorting it out. And in the meantime—”

  “You’re not selling anything.”

  “I’m selling my hind end off. You have no idea how many people are delighted to realize that Agatha Christie is still in print.”

  “Does that money go to charity?” I asked.

  “It’s going to have to. I made a little mistake in the ad I ran in the Sun.” She tapped the box I was carrying. “Go take that over to the table, sit down, open up and start signing books. I’ll go back to the office and try to find the rest of them. And when I get my hands on Evelyn Nesbitt Kleig—”

  “She’ll probably have an explanation, you know,” I said. “Jon Lowry’s right, she’s a flake, but she’s a responsible flake. Especially when it comes to her charities. Whatever’s holding her up, it’s got to be unavoidable.”

  “I don’t care if she was spirited away by elves,” Gail said, “I’m having a nervous breakdown.”

  She turned on her heel and stomped away. At my side, Phoebe stirred a little and said, “I think I’m going to be sick. Again.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. “There’s no place for you to be sick in. Go get Nick and Adrienne. I’m going to take this box over to the desk and get us started. If Tempesta goes for me, fight her off.”

  “Why would Tempesta go for you?”

  “She always likes to sign first. Remember New Orleans?”

  “Oh,” Phoebe said. “Yeah. But Christopher Brand is smarter, you know. He always likes to sign last.”

  “And he always loses out to Amelia. Go get Nick and Adrienne.”

  “See you in a minute.”

  She started tottering across the room, and I watched Nick watch her move. His face went from puzzled to curious to outright shocked. I had to suppress a laugh. I could practically see the word running across his forehead like the neon Newsweek ribbon in Grand Central: PREGNANTPREGNANTPREGNANTPREGNANTPREGNANT.

  The box was beginning to feel very heavy. I shifted its weight a little and carried it over to the table. Then I looked around for somewhere to put it down. With the tablecloth covering whatever was under it so completely, I couldn’t tell if the table would stand the weight. The floor around the desk was littered with paperback books and assorted trash. People had been dumping their champagne glasses indiscriminately. They’d also been damaging the merchandise. I kicked half angrily at the plastic and pushed the books carefully with the side of my foot. Some people are pigs. Truly.

  I had gotten the box onto a more or less cleared square of floor when the woman came up to me, clutching a copy of Blood Red Romance she’d picked up someplace else in the store and wearing what I was sure was her very bravest smile. She was young and eager—she might even have been one of the women who had been around Tempesta when I first came in—and she couldn’t decide if she was allowed to talk to me. I got the top of the book box open by tearing at it with all my might, breaking a fingernail in the process. Then I gathered a handful of books and stood up.

  “Just a second,” I said. “I’ll be all set up in a minute.”

  “Oh, I’m not trying to hurry you!” she said. “I can wait!”

  “Well, I won’t make you wait too long.”

  “I bought this here, you know. I have the sales slip right in my purse.”

  In my opinion, given the way that party was going and all the mess-ups still unresolved in the background, I doubted if Gail Larson would have noticed a header dump full of Charlotte MacLeod novels going out the front door, but I didn’t want to say so. It seemed like an incitement to crime. I got another handful of books out of the box and put those on the desk, too.

  “There,” I said.

  “You don’t know how much I admire you,” the young woman said. “I read that article about you in People. If I ever saw a dead body, I think I’d just faint.”

  “Fainting might have been better than what I did do,” I said.

  “Oh, no. Crime is so awful these days, really. The police just can’t handle it. There aren’t enough of them. We need people like you.”

  A New York assistant DA named Luis Martinez had told me, on more than one occasion, that what the police really needed was for me to take a long vacation, preferably in Pago Pago. I didn’t tell her that. I took her book, grabbed for the chair Gail had put out for us to sit on and sat on it. Then I started to edge it forward, keeping my knees together and my feet flat. It went slowly and it made a squeak, but at least it got me close enough to grab one of the pens.

  The woman beamed at me. “I’ve got all your books,” she said. “I’ve got them in hardcover. Even the first one. I didn’t hear about that until it came out in paperback, but I bought it then and I liked it so much I ordered the hardcover to keep. At Waldenbooks. I probably could have come right down here and bought it without—are you all right?”

  I looked down at my left foot, out of sight under the tablecloth. I had stopped moving the chair forward. Without the tablecloth, I might have been able to get my knees under the desk. With it, I was never going to fit. I’d put my foot forward to steady myself while I signed.

  Now I wiggled that foot a little and bit my lip. There really isn’t any other feeling like it, that feeling of stepping into flesh. I felt the sweat on my forehead and put my hand up to brush it away. I looked up and saw Adrienne coming toward me, running really, a vision in velvet and perfectly plaited braids.

  “Miss McKenna?” the woman said.

  “Patience,” Adrienne said.

  “McKenna?” Nick said.

  “Get her out of here,” I said. “Get her out of here now.”

  Maybe we really should be married. There are times when we have something very much like ESP. Nick grabbed Adrienne around the waist, tucked her under his arm and went plowing through the crowd in the direction of the open door.

  I pushed the chair back as far as it would go and looked down again. There was nothing to see. The tablecloth hung perfectly. If I hadn’t put my foot under there, I’d never have known it wasn’t an empty space.

  Evelyn, I thought.

  I reached for the tablecloth and pulled it back. I stared at the navy-blue gabardine suit and the little veiled hat.

  Stuck under that table, neck wrapped in a bright green paisley scarf, was the body of Mrs. Harold P. Keeley.

  Chapter Eight

  The homicide detective they sent from wherever Baltimore keeps its homicide detectives was a woman. Her partner was not, but he didn’t really count. Like most investigative teams, this one had a dominant partner and a deferential one. She was dominant, all newly-elected-chairman-of-the-board brisk efficiency and periodic flashes from the polished gold of flat round earrings. He was deferential to the point of being functionally nonexistent. I got an impression of wispy hair and a red-and-gold-striped tie, but not much else. I was not alone. Whatever chauvinistic stereotypes might have lingered in that crowd had been washed away by crisis. Ms. Detective walked in. Ms. Detective got our attention, just by being there. Ms. Detective was forever afterward the one person we looked to whenever we had a question. Especially about ourselves.

  Ms. Detective’s name was Barbara Defborn. I tried to keep it in mind, but that was hard to do. She didn’t show up until nearly an hour into the real craziness, when the uniformed cops had been over the scene four or five times and the men from the medical examiner’s office and forensics were already stowing things in little plastic bags. The store was a mess. I’d been good after I’d first discovered the body. I hadn’t shouted or screamed or give in to any kind of surface panic. I’d even tried to call the police without letting anyone know I was doing it. That sort of thing never works. Once a real mess like that gets underway, news of it seems to be airborne. At least a third of the people who had
been at the party when I found Mrs. Harold P. Keeley’s body were gone by the time the uniformed police got to the store. Another tenth were gone by the time the plainclothes team got there, in spite of the uniformed branch’s frantic attempts to keep them herded together. Efforts at imposing order were impeded by the store’s size and shape and function. There’d been barely enough room for the guests when all that was going on was a party. Now one entire corner was taken up with esoteric investigative equipment and oversized ungainly arc lamps and nervous men and women with things that had to be done now. The storm had gotten worse, making it impossible for even the drunkest of us to sit on the stoop for any length of time. The bartender at the Elite VIP Lounge had no intention of arguing with the cops, but he had no intention of making us comfortable either. He knew trouble when he saw it. Every once in a while somebody would wander over there, down a drink in record time and come right back. He’d have to squeeze through the front door.

  I’ve done my time in this world feeling like an arthritic sardine. I’m tall enough to be easy to crowd. I get enough exercise so that any long-term enforced immobility makes my joints ache. I decided after fifteen minutes of having my stomach attacked by restless elbows and my foot bones assailed by spike heels that I was going to have to do something about myself if I intended to get back to the hotel in one piece. What I did was climb a mantel. It was a little uncomfortable, but it had a few things to recommend it. I was effectively out of the fray. The only way anyone was going to injure me while I was up there was to do it deliberately, and in my old age I have come to feel no compunction at all about retaliating for deliberate hurt. I was also in a position to see things none of the other civilians could. I had a clear view of the signing corner and everything going on there. I had a better view of the body than the people standing next to it. The people standing next to it were distracted by detail and the vagaries of artificial light. From my aerial view, I got the complete picture, in all its weirdness.

  Somebody had left a little tin disposable ashtray on the bookshelf closest to my left foot. I got hold of it, got my cigarettes and lit up. The medical examiner’s people had the body on its back, getting it ready to be stuffed into a bag and carted out—finally. That they hadn’t done it sooner might have seemed strange to me if I hadn’t been involved in three other cases. In a straightforward crime—a wife standing over her dead husband with a discharged shotgun; a brother-in-law with a piece of lead pipe in his hands and a sister’s husband with a gash in his head—the police like to get the body out as soon as possible. There isn’t much anybody but the ME can do with it in situations like that, and nothing much the ME can do with it either. Bring it in. Poke it around. Write a report. In all likelihood, the culprit is in custody—and confessing his head off—long before that report gets written. It’s different in cases where there are questions. Then the homicide detectives like to check over everything, corpse included. What had delayed the homicide detectives, I didn’t know, but delayed they had been, and delayed the body had been. I didn’t blame the Baltimore uniformed police at all, or the ME’s people. I’ve seen a man dead from strangulation. Whatever had happened to Mrs. Harold P. Keeley, whatever the killer meant to suggest had happened, she hadn’t died because someone put a scarf around her neck and pulled.

  No bulging eyes, no lolling tongue, no blue tinge to the skin, no rigor. I tapped ash into my little tin ashtray and watched them cover her face. If she had been dead long enough—if she’d died, for instance, early in the day—none of those signs would have been present by the time we found her. I didn’t think that was going to wash as an explanation. The ME’s people were having a hard time moving her. That was probably rigor coming up. I did a few calculations and came to the startling conclusion that she must have been killed within an hour before the party started. It would have made even more sense if she’d been killed while the party was in progress, but I couldn’t see how that could have been done. Killed and folded up and provided with somebody else’s scarf—Mrs. Harold P. Keeley would never have owned any article of clothing that could be described as “bright green paisley.”

  One of the men who was trying to move her slipped, stubbed his toe, swore, stumbled. The edge of the bag got away from him. The nylon flap that had been covering her face dropped again. When I saw her this time, she had her head turned to the left side and her right ear exposed. I leaned forward suddenly. Along the strip of skin just underneath her ear and above her jaw was what looked like a long streak of blue eye shadow. Bright blue eye shadow, the kind that comes in a powder the manufacturer promises is “infused with youthful oils.” I hadn’t known Mrs. Harold P. Keeley long, but I’d pegged her well enough to realize she would no more have worn bright blue eye shadow than she would have owned a bright green paisley scarf.

  The stumbling man got hold of himself, flipped the nylon back over her face and started to zip up. I felt something tugging on my feet and looked down. Gail Larson was there, holding a plastic champagne glass full of something much darker, and probably much stronger, than New York State champagne.

  “Johnnie Walker,” she said, offering the glass to me. “You want a slug?”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “What happened to that nice little girl? I thought she belonged to you.”

  “Adrienne’s back at the hotel. I explained the situation to that man over there”—I pointed to one of the uniformed cops who had been first on the scene—“and he let Nick and Phoebe bring her back.”

  “Phoebe pregnant?”

  “Very. And I didn’t want Adrienne in the middle of all this.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  She looked back over the crowd. The fan I’d been talking to when I’d found the body was being interviewed by the nondescript partner. Ms. Barbara Defborn had started in on Christopher Brand. The romance writers, including Tempesta Stewart, were all huddled into a clot near the front door. I sighed. Once we got out of here, all hell was going to break loose for real. Tempesta and Amelia both had that look on their faces: the one they got before they decided to make serious trouble.

  Gail was more interested in Christopher, doing his best to look belligerent and sexy in response to Defborn’s almost schoolteacherly calmness. He wasn’t getting anywhere. The great thatch of shaggy gray hair, the truck driver’s shoulders and slender, almost feminine waist—none of it was doing any good. Ms. Defborn didn’t look within a hundred years of losing her patience, never mind falling for him.

  Gail jabbed her plastic glass in the air. “You know what he told me? That Christopher Brand? He said this would be good for the store.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious. We got stuck together when the cops first came in. I couldn’t get away from him. And he kept telling me and telling me not to worry, I’d make a mint after this, all Baltimore would be trooping through here in a few days. It was insane.”

  “I wonder if he’s telling Ms. Defborn about the fight he had with Keeley back at the Inner Harbor.”

  “If he isn’t, he ought to be,” Gail said. “You know how Tempesta is. She saw the whole thing. She’ll never keep her mouth shut.”

  “Do you suppose there is something irregular about his divorce from Haverman? Could she have been right?”

  “I don’t know,” Gail said. “Mrs. Keeley was a very strange person when it came to gossip. Some kinds she was really good at. Real scandal. You know, somebody embezzling money or somebody dealing drugs or somebody who’d been in a mental institution and wasn’t telling anybody. With that sort of thing, she was practically clairvoyant. But with men-and-women stuff … it’s hard to explain. She didn’t like men much. When sex-related things happened, she tended to believe the women. A few years ago, there was this girl, married to an old man with a lot of money. It turned out later she’d been feeding him arsenic and sleeping with his sons the whole time. Our Mrs. Keeley believes to this day—and the truth was on the front page of the Sun, for God’s
sake—that he was the one to blame and she was the saint.”

  “What’s Mr. Harold P. Keeley like?”

  “Dead.”

  Across the room, Ms. Defborn dismissed Christopher Brand and motioned to Tempesta Stewart. Tempesta went trotting over, her hips twitching, her face frozen into smug malice. Christopher gave her a look. Then he stalked off.

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is how she was gotten in here. I was watching the body while they were bagging it up. She couldn’t have died more than an hour before the party started. With the store open and all—”

  “The store wasn’t open,” Gail said.

  “It wasn’t?”

  “It usually is on Tuesdays,” she said, “but I just couldn’t handle it today. I opened from eleven to two, and then I locked up again and did some errands. I didn’t think there was going to be any problem. With things here, I mean. There were other problems. I waited and waited for the champagne. It was supposed to arrive at noon. Nothing. I called the supplier and got the most God-awful gibberish—”

  “What kind of gibberish?”

  “It’s on the way. The truck has had a breakdown. It’ll be there in time. Don’t worry. The usual crap. Then I got through to somebody who sounded as officious as hell and she told me I’d told her I was going to pick the stuff up myself, and it was ready anytime I wanted it. I was about ready to kick somebody. So I closed the store down and went to get the stuff. But I wouldn’t jump to conclusions if I were you. I would have closed the store down anyway. I had to get the plastic glasses and the cigarettes and some extra pens. Writers are always complaining about how there aren’t any pens at signings.”

  “Well, at least we don’t have to look for a ghost. Somebody just brought her in here while you were out and shoved her under the table. Was that tablecloth thing all set up at the time?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Gail said. “Actually, everything Mrs. Keeley promised to do was done. The table was set up. The posters were set up. The displays were moved around. The displays I usually use were stuck in the back room, not that there’s any room for them there—”