Rich, Radiant Slaughter

by Jane Haddam

  We all turned to look at her and she flushed again, something that must have been a habit with her.

  “The thing is,” she said, “to get a sterile awl, you’d have to go to a scientific supply house, or a medical one. They don’t sell sterile awls in your local K Mart. And the supply houses keep records of the equipment they sell, just in case there’s an investigation into somebody’s medical license or research or something.”

  “They sell these needle things at K Mart?”

  “Not at K Mart, but at most pharmacies. Because of bee stings, you know.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “People are allergic to bee stings,” Darcy said. “And wasp stings, too. That’s even more dangerous. And there are these kits you can buy, with the antidote in them, and they come with a plunger and a supply of those needles. They’re bigger than the kind people use for insulin. With wasp stings especially, you have to get a lot of counter measure into the system fast. People with allergies to them can die of wasp stings in thirty seconds.”

  “Wouldn’t you need a prescription for one of those things?” I asked. “In New York, you have to have a prescription for any kind of hypodermic.”

  “I don’t know,” Darcy said.

  “I’ll bet you do,” I said.

  Phoebe sighed. “Here we are again. No way for the murderer to get the murder weapon without leaving a trail.”

  “Well, maybe he did leave a trail,” Hazel said.

  This time, it was her we all turned to see. She didn’t flush. Hazel got embarrassed over revelations about her sex life, but she had long ago learned to stand up for her intelligence. Any romance writer who doesn’t learn to do that early ends up convinced she’s stupid.

  “We’ve been talking and talking about all the cities we’ve been in,” she said. “Why couldn’t the murderer have decided on the killing back in Sherman Oaks or St. Louis or somewhere, and faked a prescription for this stuff and got it filled there, and then waited for here before killing anybody?”

  “Before killing Mrs. Keeley?” I asked. “How could he know he’d want to? We didn’t know Mrs. Keeley. Even Evelyn didn’t meet her until we’d arrived. She’s a friend of Gail Larson’s.”

  “Who died first,” Hazel said, “Mrs. Keeley or Evelyn?”

  “They don’t know,” I said. “Circumstantial evidence suggests it was Evelyn.”

  “Well, then,” Hazel said triumphandy. “So it was Evelyn who was supposed to die all along, and this Mrs. Keeley who got in the way. You’re the one who writes about crime, Patience. You should know all this.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but—”

  “No buts. We really have to get Christopher out of here. He’s due at an interview at four o’clock.”

  I had been due at an interview at two. I’d forgotten all about it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Back in New York, I might have rushed right out and tried to get somebody to check prescriptions for bee-sting antidote. I would certainly have called Tony Marsh at Manhattan Homicide and demanded he look into it. I didn’t have the kind of connections I needed in Baltimore. I promised myself I’d get in touch with Barbara Defborn as soon as I got back to the hotel, but that felt like a one-way street, away from me. I’d give her the information. I wasn’t sure she’d give anything back.

  In the meantime, Hazel and Phoebe and I had the job of getting Christopher Brand safely into a hotel bed. He was out cold and dead weight, I’d once carried Lydia Wentward halfway across Manhattan after she’d passed out in a bar in Times Square during the Third Annual Conference of the American Writers of Romance, but I’d had a flock of readily available cabs to help me and a body that weighed no more than one-ten. Christopher Brand weighed close to two hundred pounds. When we got him down to the street, it was obvious there wasn’t a cab in the city of Baltimore that would come down that block unless it was radioed for. I looked around for the phone Christopher must have used to call Hazel and found nothing. The bar he’d had his drinks in wasn’t visible either. God only knew how far he’d had to walk.

  I’d had Hazel lay him down on the pavement while I searched in the distance for passing vehicles—any passing vehicles, including police cars. Now I walked back and stood over him. The project might have been remotely feasible if Phoebe were able to help, but she wasn’t. Even if she offered—and she had sense enough not to—I wouldn’t have let her try.

  “Were going to have to think of something else,” I said. “We’ll never get him where we need him to go at this rate.”

  “We ought to hurry, too,” Hazel said. “He does have that interview.”

  “He isn’t going to make that interview,” I said. “Even if we get him back in time, he isn’t going to be awake.”

  “Yes, he is,” Phoebe said.

  She pointed at the sidewalk. We had laid him on his back, mostly because we’d been carrying him face up. The rain had stopped, but the gutters weren’t dry. Neither were the roofs. Without realizing it, we’d put him down just under a spot where the wind was dumping spatterings of rain blown from the surfaces of the surrounding buildings. Under the periodic assaults of cold water, he had begun to stir.

  Phoebe bent over and put her ear close to his mouth. ‘“Water torture,” she said. “He keeps saying water torture.’”

  “I ought to set fire to his feet,” I said. “Where’s a puddle?”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Hazel said. “The street is full of puddles.”

  She was right. I walked out to the biggest pothole I could see. It was full of muddy, foul-looking water and the corpses of drowned bugs. I cupped my hands, stuck them in and brought out as much as I could. I didn’t like it, but I knew I’d rather do it than spend the next four hours in this Godforsaken place waiting for him to wake naturally.

  I walked back, stood over his head and let the water go. It splashed right into his eyes and ran down his cheeks. He jerked.

  “You need more,” Hazel said.

  “You could go get some yourself.”

  Hazel sniffed. “I’m not the great detective. I don’t have to subject myself to slime.”

  I walked back to the middle of the street, stuck my hands into the pothole again and came up with more “slime.” It’s remarkable how often I run into this attitude. People will say just about anything to justify not doing something they don’t want to do. I walked the water back to Christopher and dumped it on his head again.

  “What the f—”

  “Get up,” I said.

  “Not quite,” Phoebe said.

  “Don’t you believe it.” I kicked against Christopher Brand’s side, peremptorily. “I know you can open your eyes,” I said, “so open them. Because if you don’t, I’m going to get a load with pebbles in it next time.”

  “Shit,” Christopher said.

  “He talks in his sleep, but he doesn’t swear when he does,” I said. “I read it in the National Enquirer.”

  “You believe the National Enquirer?” Hazel said.

  “You read the National Enquirer?” Phoebe said.

  “I do when I find it on the subway.” I leaned over until I was right next to Christopher’s ear. “Get up,” I demanded. “We’re in the middle of nowhere and I don’t like this neighborhood. At least if you’re on your feet, somebody may mistake you for a threat.”

  Christopher groaned, feebly and unconvincingly. Then he opened a single eye. “What?” he said.

  I’d had it. I really had had it. I have put up with nonsense from men all my life. Every woman has. Colds played out with more panic and trauma than the Lady of the Camellias had managed to whip up for terminal-stage tuberculosis. Minor muscle strains parlayed into near paralysis. Cut fingers advanced to the status of mortal wounds, I’d seen every kind of male sickbed fakery devised. Even Nick indulged in it. I should have known.

  “You should never have stopped snoring,” I said. “It was a dead giveaway.”

  “Now, Patience,” Christoph
er said. His voice was thick, but it was drunkenness, not leftover sleep.

  “How long did you think you were going to keep this up?” I said.

  “Keep what up?” Hazel said.

  “You made Pay put her hands in that filth,” Phoebe said. “How could you?”

  “You mean he wasn’t really passed out?” Hazel said.

  “Oh, he was really passed out,” I said. “That was real snoring I heard when I first came upstairs. I figure he woke up right around the time we started talking about Evelyn’s murder. And he wanted to know what we had. And he was afraid he’d never get it. So—”

  “You mean we carried him all the way down here when he could have walked himself?” Hazel said.

  “Now, Hazel.” Christopher was beginning to look uneasy. “I know it may seem a little strange, but I was just trying to—”

  Hazel marched out to the pothole, filled her rain hat full of water and came marching back. When she got to Christopher, she dumped the whole load in his face.

  I would have applauded that action if it hadn’t been for the fact that Christopher Brand found a way to use it, the way he found a way to use everything. We all wanted to go back to the hotel. Neither Phoebe nor I liked being in a part of the city we didn’t know. Of course, we didn’t really know any of Baltimore, but at least most of the rest of what we’d seen of it was inhabited, and had street signs. Hazel had the romance writer’s obsessiveness about interviews and media contacts. It was beyond her comprehension that any writer anywhere would deliberately stand up an interviewer. On that, I had the advantage. I had met alcoholics before.

  Alcoholics being what they are, Christopher was too much for us. He wanted to drink. He wanted to drink now. He wanted to drink in a place that made him comfortable, which didn’t include the well-lit bistro run by the hotel or the hanging-fern places that lined the harbor. I knew what kind of place we were headed for. If he hadn’t known things I wanted him to tell me, I’d have left him on his own. When Hazel realized I was going to let him drag us into some dive, she almost left us on our own.

  “How can you pander to that?” she demanded. “He’s not in his right mind, and he’s a son of a—”

  “Hazel, I think it’s about time we let up on his poor mother. He’s probably not her fault. Anyway, he just might tell us—”

  “I’ve been trying to get him to tell me for two weeks,” she said. “What do you take me for?”

  The “what do you take me for?” was weaker than it might have been. Hazel knew hersetf well. She had been brought up to be a nice little girl. She had a tendency to be overly polite, and deferential in situations where she should have been anything but. Christopher Brand turned the corner at the end of the block—in the wrong direction, by the way—and she followed us following him.

  He walked another two blocks, turned another corner and walked three blocks more. The uninhabited industrial wasteland fell behind us, and we moved into an area of small grocery stores and large pawnshops. Phoebe trotted along cheerfully. Walking was the one kind of exercise she liked, and she kept chirping about how her doctor had said it was good for her. I wasn’t taken in. Phoebe grew up in one of the uglier sections of Union City, but it was a respectable ugly section. Pawnshops were exotic to her. They were exotic to me, too, but I didn’t have the same perspective.

  The bar Christopher Brand turned into was called the Green Door. I had the terrible feeling that it had been named for the porno movie. Stuffily middle-class neighbors are likely to think of the ordinary corner country bar as a “real sleaze joint,” but that’s lack of experience. The Green Door was a real sleaze joint. It was dirtier than Tempesta’s friend’s garage, and it smelled worse.

  Christopher swung inside without slowing down. Either his sinuses were blocked or he liked that kind of thing, probably the latter. Hazel hesitated on the sidewalk.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go in there,” she said. “I know what you’re trying to do, but—”

  “I have to go in there,” I said. “The two of you can catch a cab back to the hotel if you want. There’s probably a phone inside.”

  “We couldn’t leave you here all by yourself.” Phoebe was appalled. “What if something happened?”

  The truth was, nothing was likely to happen. Patrons of places like the Green Door are usually too whacked to start fights. This was the last stop before a paper bag and a bed made of park bench. I looked down at Phoebe’s stomach.

  “Go,” I said.

  “Come back with us,” Phoebe said. “You can talk to him later.”

  “He’s an alcoholic at the beginning of a binge, Phoebe. There’s no telling when he’ll be coherent again. The kind of thing you’re worried about is no problem. The kind of thing I am might be. There are germs in there.”

  “You mean the baby,” Phoebe said.

  “Exactly.”

  “I’ll take her back.” Hazel grabbed Phoebe’s arm and pulled her into the street, unwilling to go through that door even to call for help. If my sense of direction was right, they wouldn’t have too far to walk. This was a bad block, but not as bad as the one we’d come from. The next one up would be better still. There would be working phone booths and little diners. They’d be fine.

  I watched them until they disappeared.

  Even if I’d had a taste for sleaze bars, I could never have become a habitué. I don’t have the looks for it, and I don’t move right. In low-life bars I tend to attract a lot of attention and a certain amount of hostility. It was a measure of just how low the life at the Green Door was that this time I attracted neither. In fact, I barely generated polite interest. I came in. I looked around until I found Christopher at the bar with a string of shot glasses in front of him. A couple of the patrons at the tables looked up and looked away again, registering nothing. The bartender paid no attention to me at all.

  I crossed the room and climbed the stool next to Christopher’s. The Green Door was the original no-frills bar: no television, no jukebox, no video games. The bar itself was wood only in the realm of imagination. It was made of cheap, hard plastic colored to look like grain.

  Christopher drained one of his shot glasses and put it down in front of me. “You really came in here,” he said. “I didn’t think I was going to have to worry about that.”

  “I sent Hazel and Phoebe home.”

  “Hazel wouldn’t have walked through that door if she thought this place was full of money. You going to order a drink?”

  “No.”

  “I never knew you were a prude, Patience.”

  “I’m not a prude. I wouldn’t want to put my mouth on one of the glasses.”

  “Patience, Patience, Patience. So genteel.”

  “Look,” I said. “You may want to be in here, but I don’t. All I want out of you are some answers. You pulled a very neat little trick back there. You got caught. You owe me.”

  “Do I?”

  “I’m really not in any mood to put up with your crap.”

  He drained another of the shot glasses and stacked it into the one he’d drained before. His mood was hard for me to figure out—floaty, almost amused. He drained a third shot glass and stacked that one, too. Then he swiveled on his seat until he was facing me.

  “Let me tell you what I think I owe you,” he said. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You and all the rest of those people back there. None of you can write worth a damn. None of you would know sensibility if you were dying of it. None of you is anything but a machine for making money. Well, go back there and make it. I haven’t had a serious drunk in six months.”

  “You’ve made twice the money I’ll ever make from writing,” I said, “and you know it.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve made money. And I’ve spent it. And I’ve bled for it, too. Prissy-faced little pains in the butt like Evelyn: Christopher, do this for me, Christopher, do that for me, Christopher, come on this tour. It will help you out. They’ll take you back for charity. Charity. Bullshit.”

  “Is the
Ad Hoc Committee a scam?”

  He’d gone back to looking at shot glasses. This time, only his eyes turned toward me, sliding sideways in his face.

  “Would you be surprised if I said it was?”

  “I don’t know. Evelyn was a flake and an enthusiast. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard she’d been taken for once. In a way, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before.”

  “That’s what you think? Evelyn hasn’t been taken before now?”

  “Has she?”

  “Let’s get off Evelyn. Evelyn’s dead.”

  “That’s the point, Christopher.”

  “This is the point.” He picked up another shot glass and held it up to the light. The liquid was too pale. The drinks were being watered in the bottle, half and half. “This is a scam,” he said. “But at least it’s a cheap scam. They charge a buck seventy-five. They give you a buck seventy-five worth of liquor, upscale prices. I just had one more thing I needed to put it together. I went up to that place, and there it was. Right out in front.”

  “How did you find out about that place?”

  “It’s on the program. You’d know that if you ever read the material Evelyn handed out. Not that anybody but me ever did. Anyway, it was sitting there at the end of the list of sponsoring organizations. ‘Baltimore Office of the Ad Hoc Committee for Advocacy for the Homeless. Care of the People’s Center for Social Action.’ There was also an address. There was an address for the one in New Orleans, too, you know. I went there while the rest of you were doing the tour of Bourbon Street.”

  “Another office?” I was confused. “But with all those offices—Christopher, what is this? A conspiracy theory? How could The Housing Project be a scam with all those people involved in it?”

  “Your problem,” Christopher said, “is that you absolutely refuse to accept the obvious.”

  He lunged at me, sticking his face so far forward, his nose touched mine, I’d never been afraid of him before. I had more sense than to be physically afraid of anyone that drunk. Still, he suddenly seemed dangerous in more ways than I wanted to count.