Rich, Radiant Slaughter

by Jane Haddam

  I picked the envelope up off the vanity table. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t remember what. I turned it over and saw that the flap had been tucked in, but not moistened and glued down. I pulled the flap out and found a folded piece of typing paper.

  “Read it,” Tempesta said.

  I read it. It had been spelled out in thick red crayon, and what it said was: YER AN ENEMY OF WOMIN EVERYWHERE. YER OUGHT TO BE DEAD. I put it down.

  It’s one of the sad truths about being a writer, any kind of writer, that books bring out the worst in nuts. A writer whose work deals with violence, as mine does, has the hardest time, but no writer is completely immune. Phoebe had had a nut letter or two in her time. Amelia had had dozens. This was awful, but I couldn’t see that it had anything to do with me.

  “For God’s sake,” I said. “What were you talking about on the phone? How could you think this had anything to do with me?”

  “Why not?”

  “Tempesta, this is hate mail. We all get hate mail from time to time. If this is the first—”

  “She’s supposed to be good at investigating things,” Tempesta interrupted, turning to Nick. She turned back to me. “I’ve had my share of hate mail,” she said. “More than my share. Any human being who does the Lord’s work in this secular society gets hate mail. And on some level that may be legitimate hate mail, but I will tell you what it is not. It is not the work of some illiterate crazy.”

  “She’s right,” Nick said.

  “She’s right?” I said.

  Tempesta snatched the letter back. “In the first place,” she said, “crayon it may be written in, but heavyweight bond is what it’s written on. Maybe you work on a computer, but I still use a typewriter, and I use heavyweight bond for final drafts. The stuff costs an arm and a leg. And feel this. It’s excellent quality.”

  I took the letter back. Tempesta was right. It was excellent quality—in fact, it was Southworth cockle finish, some of the best paper made, and it did cost an arm and a leg. It also had a very distinctive watermark.

  Tempesta waited to make sure she’d made her point, then went on. “In the second place,” she said, “my husband gets letters from illiterate people every day of his life. He even gets them hand-delivered on Sundays, after the service. He’s a preacher, in case nobody’s bothered to tell you that. And contrary to what the Godless media is trying to make the people of this country believe, not every Christian charismatic preacher is Jim Bakker. My husband reads his mail. I read his mail. I answer a lot of it, too. I’ve never seen a letter where somebody couldn’t spell ‘your’ but got all the letters in ‘ought’ right. You know how ignorant people spell ‘ought’? A-w-t. That’s how. A-w-t.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “Never mind the fact that whoever it is knows it should be ‘an’ and not just ‘a’ in front of ‘enemy.’”

  She caught the look I sent her and shrugged. “Among the other things I’ve done in my life, before I married the man God made for me and set down to write good books good Christian women could read, was teach. At Fayesboro Christian School. You wouldn’t believe the things I saw at Fayesboro Christian School. These people would come barefoot out of the hills, they’d work themselves sick, they’d get a Ford dealership or a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise and they’d think they were rich. And they still talked like they were calling hogs back in West Virginia. And their kids—”

  “Shh,” I said.

  “Don’t shush me,” Tempesta said. “Nobody shushes me. Not even my husband.”

  “Wait a minute,” I insisted.

  I thought, hard. Ever since I’d arrived in Baltimore, I’d been so tired, I hadn’t been able to concentrate. Even with all the sleep I’d had last night, I still felt fuzzy. Things happened, and seemed important, and then disappeared from my consciousness. Blue lines on my hands. Something Nick had said about a letter from the IRS. The desk clerk calling out to me as I walked Phoebe toward the elevators after checking in—

  I looked around the room, still piled with steamer trunks and miscellaneous luggage. Nick had meant to move them that morning. He’d probably decided it would wake me up.

  “Do you know where my tote bag is?” I asked him.

  “This thing?” He held it up.

  “Give it to me.”

  He tossed it over, and I rooted through the piles of ancient American Express bills and cat-clawed Lord and Taylor catalogues for the envelope I now remembered sticking away in there, more than twenty-four hours ago.

  “When Phoebe and I checked in yesterday,” I said, “the desk clerk handed me this—wait, here it is.” I drew out the envelope. The similarities were unmistakable. Plain white. “Patience Campbell McKenna” scrawled across the front in ink. I turned it over. The flap had been tucked in, but not glued. “How much you want to bet?” I said.

  “I can’t believe this,” Tempesta said. “She actually looks happy about it.”

  “Open it,” Nick said.

  I opened it. Inside, there was a single sheet of heavyweight bond. I checked the watermark and found the Southworth symbol. The message was in black crayon this time. It said: YER RUIN IT FOR EVERBODY. YER OUGHT TO BE DEAD.

  “Score,” I said.

  “Is she always like this?” Tempesta said. “Doesn’t she realize what this means? That stupid woman got herself murdered, and as far as anybody knew, it was just some neighbor of hers. With this going on—you know this has got to be connected with that. You know it does. I mean, just one of us wouldn’t have been, but two of us—”

  “I don’t see how the two things necessarily have to be connected,” Nick said. “After all, you could be right. Mrs. Keeley could have been killed by practically anybody. I think it’s highly unlikely the murderer would have been someone on the tour. Juxtaposition does not necessitate—”

  I held up a hand. “Stop, both of you. You’re both wrong. The murderer does have to be somebody on the tour, or somebody connected to it. I suppose it could be Gail Larson. But that was clear before we ever saw these letters. The letters don’t exactly change anything. They just make it easier.”

  “Easier,” Tempesta said. “She’s gone off her head.”

  “Look,” I said. “Mrs. Keeley’s body was found in Gail Larson’s book-store. Right? The bookstore was locked between two and about quarter to four. Gail had a key. Evelyn had a key. Mrs.—you know, I don’t know that.”

  “Don’t know what?” Nick said.

  “That Mrs. Keeley didn’t have a key. I just assumed she didn’t. She and Evelyn were supposed to meet at the store. Gail didn’t like the woman—Mrs. Keeley, I mean. You know what she was like. If I had been Gail, I wouldn’t have put it past her to get a duplicate made if she had the chance. That’s just about all Gail would have needed. That woman drove her nuts. And Phoebe said something yesterday about seeing Mrs. Keeley on the street somewhere, checking her watch and looking like she was waiting for somebody who was late.”

  “And you think it was Evelyn,” Nick said.

  “There’s a way to find out.” I got up and went back to the bed, to the night table and the phone. I picked up and put in a call to The Butler Did It. “It’s after eleven o’clock,” I said. “If Gail isn’t actually open, she’ll probably be there cleaning up the mess. Unless the police are still—Hello?”

  “I’m not open,” Gail Larson said. “I may never be open. If you’ll please—”

  “Calm down,” I said.

  “Pay?”

  “Hi,” I said. “I thought I’d call on the off chance the police were finished with the place.”

  There was a sound in the background like the rustling of a thousand doves. It was probably paper. One of the things I’d noticed, around the time Barbara Defborn and I went out for a drink, was that hundreds of paperback books seemed to have been accidentally trashed in the crisis.

  The rustling stopped and was replaced by a clanking. I hadn’t the faintest idea what that was. Then the clanking st
opped and Gail said, “Okay. I can talk. I had to do something with this chair. It keeps collapsing. You have no idea what kind of mess this place is in. And your Christopher Brand was right. Everybody from Alexandria to Wilmington wants to drop in at the store.”

  “Don’t you have any help?”

  “Not today. Oh God, Pay. I thought it would be slow. I gave everybody the afternoon off and now they’ve completely disappeared. Don’t they read the papers?”

  “I don’t read the papers.”

  “Never mind. Is this about something in particular?”

  I ignored the impatience in her voice. She was right to feel it, but I figured I was just as right not to feel guilty about it. After all, this was about something in particular.

  “What I wanted to know was, did you give a key to the store to Mrs. Harold?”

  The quality of the silence changed almost instantaneously. I could practically feel the freeze.

  “Dear God,” Gail exploded. “You and that Defborn woman. I must be getting a reputation as some kind of lunatic. What do you people take me for? I didn’t even want Margaret Keeley in this place without a chaperon. She’d have gone through my drawers. Hell, she got herself into the back room and tried to do that a couple of times while I was actually here. She read people’s credit-card receipts, I’m not kidding—”

  “So Evelyn was supposed to let her in,” I said.

  “Of course Evelyn was supposed to let her in. That was part of the deal. I think I dreamed up some nonsense about how it was Evelyn’s show and she’d feel all huffy if anybody else had a key. I don’t know. I was just talking. And—”

  She was going on, but I wasn’t listening. I have my flashes of insight, but I’m not really that quick a study, most of the time. A lifetime of reading and writing fiction has made me capable of periodic mental leaps, but it’s an acquired skill. Whatever talent for deduction I’ve earned a reputation for is the result of sheer, plodding, elementary logic. Logic was kicking in now. I could picture Gail standing next to me while I sat on a mantel in the store, with one corner of the room occupied by cops and “support personnel,” telling me that when she’d come in that afternoon, all of Mrs. Keeley’s work was done, but none of Evelyn’s was.

  “Gail?” I said.

  “Sorry,” Gail said.

  “No need to apologize,” I said. “Just one more thing. This party, did you get to plan the details yourself, or did Evelyn draw up a blueprint?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it a blueprint,” Gail said. “Evelyn sent me all this stuff about two months ago, the most detailed plans I’ve ever seen for a signing in my life. It would’ve sent me right up the wall, but there was a note attached to it, and the note said not to worry. It was all going to fall apart when we actually got into it and she wouldn’t care. She’d just feel better if there was a master plan somewhere. Even if she knew we wouldn’t follow it.”

  “That sounds like Evelyn.”

  “Yeah, well. It was a big project. When I’m being sane, I don’t blame her. I’d probably be a lot better off if I got a little more organized myself.”

  “How master was this master plan?” I said. “Did it have a signing schedule?”

  “Oh, yeah. But that was the least part of it. Evelyn said she’d set up schedules for every part of the tour, trying to give each of you a shot at the best spots, but the way you guys were, it almost never worked out. She said you people were always bumping each other around, and nobody could talk manners into Amelia Samson. She was right, too.”

  “I know she was. Who was supposed to be up first last night?”

  There was a pause. “You know,” Gail said slowly, “that’s a funny thing. It never struck me before. Everything was such a mess and I couldn’t find any books and nobody knew where Evelyn was, but it almost worked out the way it was supposed to.”

  “I was supposed to sign first,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Gail said. “Isn’t that a coincidence?”

  “I don’t know. Did you ever find the rest of the books?”

  “About half an hour ago. They were way in the back. Under about a jillion other boxes. I don’t even know how they got there. They were under boxes that came in weeks ago.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Are you okay?” Gail said. “You sound funny.”

  “I’m fine. Maybe I’ll stop over later this evening.”

  I hung up and looked back across the room. Tempesta and Nick were standing side by side in front of the vanity table, staring at me as if I’d lost my mind—or maybe as if they expected me to pull a rabbit out of a hat. I had a terrible feeling I might be able to manage the latter.

  “I have just,” I told them, “had the scariest hunch I’ve ever had in my life.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  By the time we were all in the hall on our way to Tempesta’s room, I had begun to sympathize with her feeling that I must be crazy. I have always loved puzzles. Both my bedroom and my office, back in New York, were littered with collections of crosswords and Double-Crostics. I’ve had a subscription to Games magazine since the day it first appeared. I get a little package from Will Weng’s Crossword Club in the mail every month. In recent years, I’ve even begun to develop a passion for murder mysteries of the classic 1930s type: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen. Sometimes my life and the situation I’m in begin to seem like scenes from those. Whenever that happens, I am good at figuring things out, just the way I’m good at doing logic puzzles. (I haven’t won the Games national crossword competition yet, but I’m working on it.) It’s a matter of believing that there are no consequences. Sitting in my room with Tempesta and Nick, going through the elements that had been perking through my brain as I slept, putting it all together, I had felt less anxiety—less pressure— than I did when I had just delivered a manuscript.

  Going down that hall was something else again. I kept thinking I must have slept very well, because the particulars had arranged themselves very neatly in my brain. I’d only needed an organizing principle. Her note, and my own, gave me that. I couldn’t have explained it the night before, but I’d known from the beginning that Margaret Keeley’s murderer had to be one of us—a member of the tour, or someone (like Gail Larson) connected to it. Part of that was an assumption I’d only recently had verified—that Gail had not given Mrs. Keeley a key to the store—but it had been an assumption based on sound knowledge. Without a key, Mrs. Keeley would have had to be let into the store. Gail could have done it if she were there. Evelyn could have done it if she and Margaret met somewhere, even just on the street in front of the store. At that point, anyone who wanted to murder Margaret Keeley and leave her body in The Butler Did It had a problem. Someone who had nothing to do with the signing party would have looked conspicuous hanging around North Charles Street. The store was closed. There was also the body itself. At least part of the reason for sticking it under that table and covering it with the cloth had to be to delay discovery. Anyone but Evelyn would have had to worry about both Evelyn and Gail messing around that table, setting up. The only way to avoid that was to set it up the way it was supposed to be. I thought whoever had killed Margaret Keeley had probably been a little nervous about time. Or else …

  I stopped at Tempesta’s door and stared at the knob as if it were a piece of nonrepresentational art. Behind me, Tempesta and Nick came to a halt. Tempesta let out a noise that sounded remarkably like “shit,” surprising both because it was a word I’d never heard her use (she said “doo-doo” on cable television) and because up until then she had made no sound at all. No one had. For the entire length of our trip, the only audible evidence of our existence had been the soft shoosh of leather on carpet.

  I turned around, aware that I was stalling and not caring very much. It really is different when the consequences begin to appear plain. I no more wanted to walk into Tempesta’s room at that moment than I wanted to take a high dive off the World Trade Center.

  “You know
,” I said, “all this time, I’ve been assuming the business with the books was a stopgap thing. Sort of second best. I thought whoever it was had killed Mrs. Keeley and then tried to rig things so she wouldn’t be found, but there was a time problem and it couldn’t be done the way it should have been. I thought the books should have been out of their cartons and all set up. That way, there’d be absolutely no chance that someone would extract them and go over to that table to make a display of them and accidentally stumble on the body. Then I thought there probably hadn’t been time for that—or the killer thought there hadn’t been time—and so he or she just moved things around in the back. Now I wonder—”

  “McKenna,” Nick said patiently. “If we’re going to go in there—”

  “In a minute,” I said. I had my hand on the knob. It felt slick. “The thing is, once you start working it out, what actually did happen makes more sense. Gail was able to find my books last night, and only my books. She said on the phone that when she found the other boxes they were buried under returns and shipments and God knows what else. With all the confusion last night, they were effectively out of the picture. And I can’t honestly say the time element works either. Those book boxes are heavy, especially when they’re full of hardcovers, and most of the ones for the charity sale were. Hazel Ganz and Ivy Samuels Tree and Lydia only come out in paperback, but everybody else—Christopher Brand, Amelia, Phoebe, Tempesta here—had at least one box of the heavy stuff. Amelia could have moved those boxes in a hurry. Christopher Brand might have been able to. The rest of us—”

  “Christopher Brand,” Tempesta said, almost spitting. “Gail Larson asked him to help with those boxes last night, but he wouldn’t do it. Oh, he told her he’d do it. He isn’t a complete turd. He just disappeared as soon as he’d said yes.”