Rich, Radiant Slaughter

by Jane Haddam

  “Patience?” the voice on the phone said.

  I rolled over and got my cigarettes off the night table. Phoebe calls me Patience. Nick and Adrienne sometimes call me Patience, but rarely. My mother calls me Patience when I absolutely refuse to come wide awake at three o’clock in the morning to discuss centerpieces for the wedding. Most of my friends call me Pay or McKenna.

  Nick looked up from his papers. “Is there actually anybody on the other end of that line?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I—”

  “You are there,” the voice said. “Good. I was beginning to think I’d called one of those heavy breathers.”

  The slur in the words and the logical reversal came together, and I made the connection. “Tempesta,” I said. “What in the name of God—”

  “It’s almost eleven o’clock, Patience. If I woke you up, I don’t want to hear about it. And don’t take the name of the Lord in vain.”

  “Just a minute,” I said. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and waved to Nick. “Is there coffee around here anywhere? Where are Phoebe and Adrienne?”

  “Phoebe and Adrienne went to see some museum,” Nick said. “We had breakfast together downstairs. Apparently, when Phoebe isn’t being sick, she’s eating. A lot.”

  “What’s a lot?”

  “Three orders of pancakes, two orders of hash browns, four orders of toast and grits. She ordered sausage once, but she couldn’t get it down. Who’s on the phone?”

  “Tempesta Stewart,” I said. He raised his eyebrows halfway up his forehead, but I didn’t elaborate. “Coffee?”

  “You can call room service when you get off the phone.”

  I took my hand off the mouthpiece and lit a cigarette. “Tempesta? Okay, I’m here, I’m awake and I’ve been too washed out to do anything to anybody. What are you talking about?”

  “Were you asleep?” Tempesta said.

  “I was asleep,” I said.

  “All morning? You haven’t been downstairs once today?”

  “Tempesta, for—”

  “Don’t say it. Oh Lord. You know, I was really hoping it was you. I really was. It didn’t seem too likely, but the only person who did seem likely was Christopher Brand and the last person I’d want to talk to is—oh Lord, that man.”

  “Tempesta, isn’t saying ‘Lord’ just as bad as—”

  “Don’t start. Just don’t start. Can you get down here right away?”

  “I can get down there when I’ve had a shower and some coffee.”

  “I’ll come to you.”

  There was a click on the line, and then a dial tone. I stared at the receiver for a minute and then chucked it back into the cradle. Nick folded his hands over his papers and waited expectantly. Before I met him, I used to make lists of all the things I wanted in a man, the kind of lists some women turn into advertisements in the personals columns of highbrow magazines. It would have had to be a highbrow magazine, because at that time in my life I was convinced that intelligence was the key to everything. Maybe that was because, at the time, I was choosing my dates more for their physical perfection than for anything else. There is a cliché that says beautiful women are almost always stupid, but believe me, the stupidity of beautiful women cannot begin to sink to the depths of the stupidity of beautiful men. Now I had Nick, who was not only beautiful and intelligent, but six or seven other things I’d said I’d wanted before I was thirty. The perversity of life was holding fast. There were a lot of things I loved about Nick, but the things I’d said I’d wanted weren’t among them.

  One of the things I’d said I’d wanted was patience. Nick was sitting over his papers, being very patient. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and decided to take my shower before I murdered him for his patience.

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t know what she wanted. Except I think it has nothing to do with me, but she’s coming over anyway. You’ve met Tempesta.”

  “I represented her once,” he said.

  “You did?”

  “It was a weird case. Of course, it’s a matter of public record now, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it then because of confidentiality. But I wanted to. Oh boy, did I want to.”

  “What did she do?”

  “That’s just it,” Nick said. “She didn’t. What she was accused of doing was nailing shut a door of the Downtown Church of Wicca and painting a big gold cross on the front of it.”

  “What’s Wicca?”

  “The trendy name for witchcraft. According to the people at the Downtown, etc., it’s a revival of the ancient term, but I couldn’t tell you about that. I’ve got my doubts about all these revivals of ancient terms anyway. However, she was accused of doing it and I—”

  “You got her off?”

  “Oh, I got her off, all right. I just wasn’t supposed to.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “She didn’t want to be off. That’s the truth. She kept running around saying, ‘I am proud to take complete responsibility for this military act in the defense of God our Father,’ or something like that. You know how she talks. But she literally couldn’t have done it. It was a physical impossibility. You know what she is. Tallish but on the frail side. The last time she saw any serious exercise she was in sixthgrade gym class. These nails were the industrial kind, really thick, and they’d been pounded right through great slabs of hardwood. I might have done it, working hard. Amelia might have done it, working hard. Tempesta Stewart?”

  “So what happened?”

  “She got off because there was no way she couldn’t,” Nick said, “and now she pretends she didn’t. I caught her on some CBN talk show one night when I couldn’t sleep and I was flipping through the channels. She was telling everybody on earth how she’d nailed shut that door.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “I’ll go further. I don’t think she could have lifted the kind of hammer she’d have needed to do the job. And don’t get ideas about hand jacks and all the rest of that. The Downtown Church is a very well-heeled little organization. They’ve got money and they’ve got connections. The police took that door apart, and about six independent laboratories did tests on it. Findings consistent with hand delivery. It’s too bad her husband was in Tulsa at the time.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he makes Marvelous Marvin Hagler look like a shrimp. Take your shower.”

  I grabbed my robe from the pile of clothes I’d unearthed from my suitcase the night before, and headed for the bathroom.

  I have the kind of mind that can speculate about anything when it wants to, but almost never wants to when it should. In the bathroom, tucking my hair under a shower cap—I’d washed it the night before; I didn’t want to wait two hours for it to dry—I speculated about Tempesta Stewart. From the skewed perspective of my very much not born-again life, it was hard to understand why she’d do what Nick said she’d done. I could accept the idea that her public persona could be just as calculated, and therefore just as manufactured, as Phoebe’s, but the commonplace reason for doing something like that—to sell more books—didn’t make sense in this case. I remembered the rise of Tempesta Stewart very well. Her books had started charting long before anybody ever heard anything about guerrilla tactics in defense of the Lord, and she’d been getting all the ink she needed when she’d been just the only romance writer whose novels would not be occasions of sin for the women of the Pentecostal and fundamentalist elite. In fact, the impression I had was that all this Christian-terrorism business was hurting her sales rather than helping them. It went over big with the readers of Christian Soldiers Today, but it made everybody else nervous. And for a while there, Tempesta had looked like the first self-styled Christian writer with a chance to break out into the general market.

  My mind skittered through a whole list of increasingly unlikely explanations. Tempesta thought she’d heard from God Himself about the direction her life was supposed to take, and this was it. That was unlikely because, from what I understood, these pe
ople always told you when God had spoken to them, and Tempesta had never claimed any such thing. Everything I could think of was unlikely for just that reason, except the possibility that Tempesta was going off the deep end. She didn’t seem to be. These people talked. They talked and talked and talked. They said anything that came into their heads, claimed the most amazing adventures, and then got off ended if you refused to believe them. If Tempesta had stuck to seeing visions of Jesus in her bathroom mirror or hearing the Voice of God on her radio when the set was turned off, the whole thing would have made perfect sense. So would a Tempesta who actually was committing “revolutionary Christian acts,” because there were people like that in the world and they did do things like that. “Militant Pro-Life Group Bombs Florida Clinic, Injures Six.” What didn’t make sense was a Tempesta Stewart who wasn’t bombing abortion clinics but just cutting into her sales by saying she was.

  Of course, the incident with the Downtown Church of Wicca might have been an anomaly, but I was willing to bet it wasn’t. One of the things I’d found out in three years of being involved with crazy people was that anyone who had committed a really odd act once had probably either committed it before or was about to commit it again. The vandalism at the Downtown Church of Wicca might have been her first foray into terrorist fantasy, but it certainly wouldn’t have been her last.

  I dropped my robe, stared into the mirror—and came to a screeching halt. Instant replay: the mirror, the nattering worry about wrinkles, my hands. I put my hands up to the light and looked down at the creases between the fingers and the palms. I didn’t expect to see anything. When I’d found those blue lines the night before, I’d gone back out into the room to talk to Nick about them. I’d found him snoring. I’d thought about waking him up and decided not to. He’d had as long a day as I had. I couldn’t think of a thing he could do. It had seemed silly to disturb him for an exercise in futility. I’d gone back into the bathroom, climbed into the shower and taken special care washing off my hands.

  Now the blue lines were still there—fainter, like washed blue ink, but there. I got back into my robe and went out to the main part of the room.

  “Nick,” I said. “Look at this.”

  He had stacked his papers away and was combing his hair, bending over nearly double to get a look at his face in the vanity mirror. He turned when I came in and stared at my outstretched hands.

  “You look like Lady Macbeth walking,” he said. “Look at what?”

  “This.” I shoved a hand at him and pointed to the lines in the creases with the index finger of the other one. The light in the bedroom was weaker than the light in the bathroom. I moved closer to the lamp so he could get a better look.

  “Ink,” he said positively. “You’re letting pens explode in your bag again.”

  “I don’t think so. It was there last night. I’ve got it on both hands. And when I found it last night, it was—I don’t know. Powdery. Gritty. Like eye shadow that had been sweated into and gone all gunky.”

  “Eye shadow?”

  “What really worries me about this,” I said, “is that Mrs. Keeley had the same sort of thing on her last night. I mean she may have, of course, because I only saw it from a distance. But just under her ear on one side she had a streak of something I thought was blue eye shadow, and I remember thinking it didn’t make any sense, because Mrs. Keeley would never use eye shadow.”

  “Maybe it was somebody else’s eye shadow. Maybe that’s your eye shadow.”

  “I don’t wear eye shadow either. And eye shadow would have come right off. I can’t seem to get this stuff washed out.”

  Nick sat back and rubbed his face. Then he laughed a little. “You know,” he said, “if this was 1933, I might actually have an explanation for you. Although how the hell you’d have gotten hold of it—”

  “Gotten hold of what?”

  “This kind of chalk.” He stood up and stretched, habitual restlessness. “In the thirties they used to dust the things they gave to kidnappers, like leather bags or newspapers they wrapped money in, with this kind of chalk. It was colorless when it was dry, but when you sweated into it it turned colors. Blue sometimes. Green. Anyway, the idea was, the kidnappers would pick up their loot and get this stuff all over their hands, and it would be the devil’s own business to get the color off. Then the police would pick up the suspects and look at their hands, and they’d know.”

  “They stopped doing that? It sounds like a great idea.”

  “It wasn’t. In the first place, it didn’t work all that well with hands. It turned out you had to sweat a lot before the stuff actually started to work, and there had to be a lot of the chalk, too. And the chalk would just flake off whatever you put it on, so by the time the kidnappers got to the money there might not be enough of the stuff left to do any good. And if there was enough, it was even worse. Kidnappers are not nice people, McKenna. They’d find their hands turning blue or green or whatever, and they’d kill their victim and just hide out until the color wore off.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I think they still make the stuff, but they use it for structural engineering problems. You know, you’re building a skyscraper and you’ve got floor after floor but no walls, and you have to put some of the partitions in before you close off. You need something you can mark the lines with that won’t wash away in a rainstorm and won’t blur too much. This stuff turns out to be really good if you mix it with water first. DuraBond, I think it’s called. Anyway, it’s dirt cheap and easy to use. But I can’t see when you’d have been in a building under construction. Or Mrs. Keeley either.”

  “I haven’t been in a building under construction. Are you sure it isn’t used for anything else?”

  “It’s hardly used for construction anymore. You can buy it in most hardware stores, if that’s any help. I think do-it-yourself nuts like it. It’s like I said, though. It’s really old technology. There are new felttips on the market that—”

  “Nick.”

  “Only trying to help.”

  “Maybe I’d better go take that shower.”

  I started for the bathroom, but I never got there. When Tempesta Stewart knocks on a door, she makes sure she’s going to be heard.

  Chapter Twelve

  She came through the door jangling like an old-fashioned sleigh, the charms on her sterling-silver link bracelets clacking together every time she took a step. When I first met her, she’d gone in for a lot of gold. In the days before the public holiness of Jim and Tammy Bakker bit the dust, almost everybody I’d ever heard describe himself as “born again” went in for a lot of gold. In the wake of IRS audits, church secretaries with Playboy contracts and public confessions of the pursuit of lust, all that had gone out of style. Tempesta was loaded down, but not with anything I couldn’t have afforded myself even in my leaner years. What she looked like was an upscale version of the Perfect American Housewife as she appears in ads in Metropolitan Life and Architectural Digest. It was a very different housewife look from the one cultivated by Hazel Ganz. It let you know Tempesta had money, or that her husband did. It could never in a million years have been described as either “homey” or “maternal.” Her print skirt had come straight from Laura Ashley—a hundred fifteen dollars. Her blue blazer was cashmere. Even her high-heeled boots were designer items, although not the slap-in-the-face kind put out by Gucci. I looked them over and decided Susan Bennis Warren Edwards, Park Avenue. That was another thing about Tempesta. She could talk Southern all she wanted, she could prattle on forever about tending her garden and life back home on the farm, but she was essentially an urban woman. She would have looked right at home at the reception desk in any law firm on Wall Street.

  She came into the foyer, looked me up and down with undisguised contempt, looked Nick up and down with resignation and planted herself in the chair Nick had been sitting in when she knocked. Then she rooted through her bag until she found a pack of cigarettes and a silver lighter and lit up.

  �
�I keep trying to quit these things, but it never works,” she said.

  “My husband says they’re the work of the devil, and for once I believe him.”

  “For once?” I said.

  “I told you,” she said, “don’t start. I’ve had enough today.” She looked at Nick. “I suppose you told her all about the witch’s door?”

  “It depends what you mean by ‘all about,’” Nick said.

  “I’d tell you the truth again, which is that God gave me the strength to do it, but you wouldn’t believe it anyway. And that’s not what this is about. Are you two living in sin?”

  I had just got a cigarette of my own going. I choked on the smoke.

  “Tempesta,” I said.

  But Tempesta wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Nick, and the way she was looking at him was oddly refreshing. I had never met a woman, even a woman who calls herself a lesbian, who does not look at Nick with a certain amount of sexual speculation. Nick is that kind of man. Like Christopher Sarandon or the young Peter Fonda, he would make the perfect romance-novel hero. As far as Tempesta was concerned, he might as well have been Moe, Larry or Curly. She looked right through him.

  “What I’ve heard,” she said, “is that she is good at investigating things.” She tossed her head in my direction. “In my opinion, the only things women are good at investigating are their credit-card limits, but I could always be wrong. With God, all things are possible. Not that I think she’s found God.”

  “What was it you wanted Miss McKenna to investigate?”

  “Oh, don’t ‘Miss McKenna’ me. She wrote ‘Ms.’ on her bio anyway. What I want her to investigate is this.” She stuck her hands back into her purse and came up with a plain white business envelope, her name scrawled across the front in blue ink. She tossed it on the vanity table. She blew smoke at it. “Take a look at that,” she said. “The writing on the front is the desk clerk’s. I asked. What’s inside—well, take a look.”