Rich, Radiant Slaughter

by Jane Haddam

  “It was nonsense, but it was the same as mine,” I said. “You ‘ought’ to be dead. And that’s what worries me about Christopher Brand’s. There’s no ‘ought’ about it. It says ‘you die.’ It’s not even a threat. It’s a statement of fact.”

  “I wouldn’t go to a good Christian school anyway,” Adrienne said. “They wouldn’t take Courtney.”

  “Who’s Courtney?” Tempesta said.

  “Courtney Feinberg. She’s Adrienne’s best friend. Can’t any of you people stick to the subject?”

  Barbara Defborn could. She had opened her purse and taken out the Baggie with the filth-encrusted envelope in it. She had laid the Baggie on the coffee table. Now she was staring at it, undecided.

  “‘You die,’” she said.

  “Whoever set this up meant to make it look like a series of nut killings,” I said. “Meant to make it seem as if the people he or she killed weren’t the targets in any real sense. Meant to make it look random. Homicidal rage, striking out without direction.”

  “I know that,” Barbara Defborn said.

  “But this isn’t meant to look like that at all,” I went on. “Either that, or by the time whoever it is got to Christopher Brand, it was just too much. There’s rage in that note, Barbara, real rage, not the political kind. Whoever that is hates Christopher Brand. And Christopher Brand is out on the streets somewhere, getting totally blotto in tenthrate bars. You remember what you said about Mrs. Keeley being drugged?”

  “Of course I remember,” Barbara said. “We got the report back on Miss Kleig, too. She was full of methaqualone. But that doesn’t help us, Patience. The Darvocet Mrs. Keeley took came right out of a pill bottle in her own purse. And the methaqualone—”

  “Don’t tell me Evelyn was kiting on Quaaludes,” I said. “I won’t believe it.”

  “She wasn’t. But methaqualone is a common prescription for some kinds of depression. It’s supposed to be controlled, but you know what that is. Doctors hand the stuff out right and left. At least two members of the tour have it—Hazel Ganz and Ivy Samuels Tree. Miss Tree has been spending all her time with the Association of Afro-American Writers. Miss Ganz has been out more than she’s been in. We’re checking it, but it’s going to come down to somebody lifting a bottle out of somebody else’s purse. Just you watch.”

  “With Christopher Brand, it’s not going to have to come to even that,” I said. “Nobody’s going to need to drug him. The man’s a full fledged alcoholic and he’s dead set on having the world’s most amazing binge. In another hour, he’s going to be comatose all on his own.”

  “And vulnerable,” Barbara Defborn said.

  “If he gets anywhere near this group, he will be,” I agreed. “I was cursing him out half an hour ago, but I’m beginning to be grateful. At least this gives us some time. He was at a place called the Green Door the last time I saw him. He might still be there. If he isn’t, we’ll know the kind of place to look.”

  “What do you mean, look?” Ameba Samson’s voice boomed across the lobby, a cannon that had somehow acquired a fake British accent. “You don’t have to look. I know exactly where he is.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The trouble with Amelia, in my opinion, is that she’s always been an irresistible force. Physically, mentally, vocally, emotionally—if there’s an immovable object in the universe that might counter her effect, it hasn’t been found. She came sweeping up to us in all that metal-wire underconstruction and all those beads, the vision of a nineteenth-century matriarch with a nasty mind. Maybe that’s what she always wanted to be. The second half of the twentieth century has never sat too well with Amelia. It lacks the rewards of periods with more rigid hierarchies.

  She gave Nick one of her Looks, causing him to say “shit” under his breath and scoot sideways on the couch. She gave Tempesta another one, but didn’t get the same effect. Tempesta had to deal with Amelia almost daily on AWR business, and she was used to the act. The far semicircular couch being empty, Amelia marched over to that. Then she sat down in it as if it had been made for her and pounded on the carpet with her cane. The cane was a new wrinkle. It had surfaced on and off during the tour. It had a silver knob and a mahogany shaft and a lot of carving near the base. I had never seen her use it to walk with. She just carried it around with her and waved it for emphasis. Or pounded it, as she was doing now.

  Actually, I would have been a little uncomfortable if Amelia had used that cane to walk with. Amelia had been a part of my life so long, I couldn’t help thinking of her as eternal. And as eternally strong. Amelia had been a draft animal all her life—in her father’s house before she married; at the steam laundry in the days when she’d been poor; at the typewriter ever since. There had been a time when I hadn’t thought any of that to be true. After all, these days Amelia wrote only plot outlines—she had two dozen secretaries who turned the outlines into books—and she wrote those in bed at that, I’d come to understand that the impression of ease and luxury and self-indulgence was illusory. Amelia’s fans expected her to live like a queen. She did her best to oblige them.

  She pounded her cane on the floor again and looked straight at Phoebe. “Have you got your hands on that young man yet? If you have, I think you should turn him over to me.”

  “We’re straightening it out,” Phoebe said hastily.

  “No, we’re not,” Nick said. “All we’ve done is found him.”

  “Hiding under a rock somewhere, of course,” Amelia said.

  “Hiding out in his cabin in Vermont,” Nick said. “Having a moral crisis. Or so he says.”

  “Bull manure,” Amelia said.

  “My feelings exactly,” Nick said.

  “You know what you ought to do with him?” Amelia’s eyes shone. “You ought to call his mother and tell her the whole story. Beginning to end. That’s what you ought to do. Isn’t she the one who gave me the lecture about how civilization was crumbling because men no longer understood it was their duty to do right by the girls they got in trouble? The one at the party Phoebe gave last New Year’s?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “And she loves Phoebe. And she’s desperate for grandchildren. And she’s got a niece with Down’s syndrome she absolutely dotes on.”

  “Better and better,” Amelia said.

  “Oh God,” Phoebe said.

  “Never let them get you thinking they’re invulnerable,” Amelia said. “They’re not. And never let them get away with bullshit. The New Morality. Horse feathers. Biggest con game in the history of sex. Take the bastard apart. He’s asking for it.”

  “Is there something going on around here I don’t know about?” Barbara Defborn said.

  I got out another cigarette and lit up again. It was starting. Whenever I got anywhere near these people, I got dizzy.

  “Could we get to Christopher Brand?” I said. “If he’s not at the bar, where is he?”

  “He’s on his way to The Butler Did It,” Amelia said. “I ran into him down on Charles Street outside the First Federal Bank. They have one of those machines you can put your Visa card in. Drunk as a skunk and high as a kite, as we used to say when I was growing up. I suppose that’s banal. Anyway, he said he was going down to The Butler Did It to sign some books for Gail. She called me, too, although she didn’t seem to be in the kind of hurry to get me she was in to get Christopher Brand. All she said to me was that she wanted to reschedule the signing before we left, not that she wanted me to come in tonight.”

  “That’s right,” Phoebe said. “She does want to reschedule the signing. I talked to her this evening. But I’m sure she said she wanted to reschedule the whole signing. To have all of us there together. And not tonight.”

  “Well, he was potted,” Amelia said. “And his usual objectionable self. He got it mixed up. Maybe we should call Gail and warn her.”

  “At the store?” Phoebe was still confused.

  “Of course at the store,” Amelia said. “I think pregnancy has addled your brain.”

&
nbsp; “No, it hasn’t,” Phoebe said. “She’s not going to be at the store. She told me. She thought she’d have the place cleaned up and ready to open tonight, but she couldn’t get it done. God, she sounded like she was losing her mind. She said she’d do a bunch of stuff, run around like crazy, and then come back and find it wasn’t done at all. I don’t know. It was confusing and she wasn’t making a lot of sense. But she did say she was going to lock up and go out to dinner and just relax for a while. With her—POSSSLQ?”

  “Dan,” I said absently. I caught Nick’s eye and saw that he was thinking just what I was. Neither one of us liked this at all.

  Amelia was going on. “It’s like I said. He was potted. Reeling around and hardly able to stand up. I don’t know how he’s going to get all the way out to North Charles. He’ll probably have to walk. There isn’t a cabdriver in the world who would pick him up. This tour has been an absolute mess. Everybody on it is crazy.”

  “Everybody means everybody,” Tempesta said.

  Amelia ignored her. “I leave the hotel to go to the bank, who do I meet? Mr. Lowry, all frantic because he has to go make funeral arrangements, or shipping arrangements, and he wants to buy flowers for the bag she’s going to be shipped in—I’m not making this up—and he can’t, because he doesn’t have time to stop and buy them and he can’t get them over the phone like a normal person because he doesn’t have a credit card. Do you believe Mr. Jonathon Hancock Lowry doesn’t have a credit card?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, apparently it’s true,” Amelia said, “although it took a little while to convince me of it. So he hands me a fifty-dollar bill and asks me to pick something up. Pick something up, for God’s sake. I took the fifty dollars and I called a florist. They gave me some song and dance about how they couldn’t deliver until tomorrow morning, but I took care of that.”

  “I’ll bet you did,” I said. I felt sorry for the florist.

  Amelia was going on. “So I call the florist from the lobby phone,” she said, “and when I come out of there I run into Hazel, I’m beginning to think nervous breakdowns are a communicable disease. Anyway, she’s over near the elevators, and when she sees me she starts waving and shouting and jumping up and down, and when I get there all she wants to talk about is her taxes. Her taxes this, her taxes that. I—”

  “Taxes?” Nick said.

  “I don’t understand why so many people have trouble with their taxes,” Amelia said. “I’ve been doing my own for years and I’ve never had any trouble. I got audited once and they owed me money. Of course they did. I always build that in. I don’t understand why everybody doesn’t.”

  “Not everybody makes enough money to afford to pay more taxes than they have to,” Phoebe said. “For God’s sake, Amelia.”

  “Taxes,” I said slowly. There are times when thinking seems to me to be a physical act. I could feel the machinery grinding, the muscle flexing—isn’t the brain supposed to be a muscle? Or something like it. Suddenly, I felt very stupid.

  “Amelia,” I said, “what was it exactly about Hazel’s taxes? Exactly.”

  “How am I supposed to know what it was exactly?” Amelia snorted. “You know Hazel. She gets on a subject and she just can’t get off. Author’s lending rights. Pseudonyms in romance publishing. Exclusivity clauses. She goes on and on and on.”

  “Yes, but what did she say?”

  “What she said was, she came back from being out, and she had a note in her box to call her lawyer back in Cleveland. So she called him, and he told her he’d had a letter from the IRS. And that was as far as I got with the common sense, because after that she was talking gibberish. Sheer gibberish. Did you ever hear of something called the Children’s Crusade for Animal Rights?”

  I blanched. “Oh yes,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t believe it. There’s nothing of the sort. Especially since—Do you know what Hazel said? She said it was all about giving pets the vote.”

  “It was about doing away with dog pounds,” I sighed. “At least, that was what it was when I heard about it.” I turned to Nick. “Did your friend from the IRS ever call back? Do you know what my letter was about?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, “as a matter of fact, I do. They’re going to disallow a deduction to something called the Victims’ Rights League. But it’s all right. They’re not going to audit. They just want—”

  “How can they know what to disallow if they don’t audit?” Amelia demanded.

  “We always list my charitable deductions,” I said. “A lot of people do that. There’s been so much tax fraud with those it sometimes saves a lot of time and trouble if you spell it out and back it up when you have a big number for that line. And I always have a big number. Between my mother and Evelyn, I’ve been giving away a third of everything I earn.”

  “Guilt,” Amelia said wisely. “All you young women nowadays. Guilt. We didn’t have women’s lib when I was growing up, but we at least had sense. We made our livings because we had to. We didn’t get all hot and bothered when we were good at it. Now there’s this women’s lib and you all run around driving yourselves crazy when you think you’re making too much money.”

  Barbara Defborn stirred beside me on the couch. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Are you saying there’s been fraud? This charity you’re all collecting for is a fraud?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “But that’s wonderful.” She heard herself and got flustered. “I don’t mean it’s wonderful,” she said. “Of course, it’s awful for anyone to be taken in like that. But—a motive. We’ve finally got a motive. Miss Kleig found out about the fraud and whoever was doing the defrauding killed her. And Mrs. Keeley—”

  “Stop,” I said. “I did that, too. You can’t get anywhere that way. It’s backwards.”

  “Backwards?” Barbara Defborn said.

  “Why would Evelyn discover the fraud?” Amelia said. “Wasn’t the Victims’ Rights League one of hers? Why would she discover this one when she hadn’t discovered that one?”

  “She didn’t discover anything,” I said. “She was the fraud.”

  ‘What?” Three whats—Nick’s and Amelia’s and Barbara Defborn’s. “She was the fraud,” I repeated. “She engineered the whole thing. Every time. With the Ad Hoc Committee for Advocacy for the Homeless. With the Victims’ Rights League. With the Children’s Crusade for Animal Rights. All of it. None of them were real. It was right in front of my face all the time and I never even saw it.”

  “I still don’t see it,” Nick said. “This is the first time we’ve had any trouble.”

  “What tax year?”

  “Nineteen eighty-six.”

  “Exactly. Nineteen eighty-six was the year after Evelyn became my publicist at AST. And I was like everyone else. She never seemed to pay much attention to being a publicist. She was always involved in one charity or another. Her strongest commitment was to the outside work. But she was my publicist. She took a paycheck every week. It never even occurred to me that charity was anything more for her than a particularly compelling hobby. Why should it? People tend to believe what they’re told, and what they think they see. It’s like what happens when identical twins get together and try to confuse people about which is which. If you think you know you’re looking at Person A, you discount contradictory evidence unless it hits you right in the face or gets too overwhelming to be ignored. Evelyn was a lousy publicist—except for her charities. Evelyn was lazy as hell—except when she was working for her charities. Evelyn didn’t have the sense of a gnat—except when it came to her charities. I had a million explanations for it. The one I never thought of was that she didn’t care about her job because she didn’t have to. She didn’t intend to have it for long. All she was doing was making sure it looked like she had a legitimate source of income while she was raking in the real money. If she hadn’t gotten greedy, she’d have been gone without a trace before any of us heard from the federal government. You know how long these things ta
ke. Six months ago, she could have dropped out of sight without a word, and nobody would have bothered to look for her. And when it did come out and they did start looking, she would have been gone.”

  “But you can’t know any of this,” Barbara Defborn protested. “You just can’t. You’re making leaps all over the place.”

  “I know I am,” I said. “But I’m right. Check it out. It’s the only way this will make sense.”

  “It destroys any sense any of it might have made,” Barbara said. “Why would somebody kill her? Turn her in, I can see that. Even kidnap her and hold her until the cops could pick her up—if somebody was mad enough about being cheated, I could see that. It’s a bit off the wall, but people get that way. But why—”

  “He didn’t want to turn her in,” I said. “If he turned her in, everybody would find out, and that’s just what he didn’t want.”

  “But everybody was going to find out anyway,” Barbara insisted. “There was so much fraud. What do you think this guy was going to do, wipe out half the Treasury Department and all the bunco squads in five states?”

  “He didn’t know there was this much fraud,” I said. “He hadn’t known her very long. He probably thought this was it. After she was dead, he could take care of it. He could take over the organization. He could fix things. At least he had a chance. As long as she was alive, he didn’t have any.”

  “Who?” Tempesta Stewart said. “Who are you talking about?”

  I turned to Amelia. “Do you have that fifty-dollar bill Jon Lowry gave you?”

  “Of course I do. Only supermarkets and liquor stores take fifty-dollar bills. And Saks, of course, but Saks isn’t open at this time of night. What did you think I’d done with it? Tom it up?”

  “Show it to me.”

  Amelia looked as if she wanted to have me committed, but she reached for her purse. It was a mammoth thing covered with beads and embroidery, and she had to search through it for a while. Finally, she came up with an oversized checkbook wallet with her name tooled into the leather and a gold-plated heart for a clasp.