Rich, Radiant Slaughter

by Jane Haddam

  “You want me to reach in here, find the fifty-dollar bill Jon Lowry gave me and hand it to you.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “You’re nuts,” she said. “I always knew it.”

  She popped the heart clasp, dug into the bill compartment and came up with a fifty.

  “Have it,” she said.

  I took it. I rubbed my fingertips across the surface. I spit on them. Then I held them out for everyone to see.

  In the glossy places where my spit had settled, my fingertips were slowly turning blue.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Phoebe wanted to come along, but I wouldn’t let her. Adrienne wanted to come along, but I wouldn’t let her either, and because she was there I managed to convince Phoebe to stay at the hotel. Barbara Defborn ran off to call her support troops. Nick and I ran out to catch a cab. We left Tempesta and Amelia to fend for themselves. I wasn’t going to waste time arguing them out of coming if they wanted to be stupid enough to follow us. I just kept thinking about crazy old Gertrude Lowry and that fortress of a house with its barbed wire and security guards. Schizophrenia, schizophrenia, schizophrenia. Schizophrenia ran in families.

  I sat in the cab, wishing like hell Barbara Defborn had been willing to take us with her. Like every other cop I’d ever run across, she was happy enough to have my help until the moment came for the kill. Then she wanted me to disappear. She had a lot more sense, and a lot more class, than Tony Marsh or Lu Martinez. She didn’t argue. She didn’t lecture. She just disappeared herself. I had the feeling Nick would have disappeared at the same time if I hadn’t been holding on to his arm. He certainly didn’t want to be in that cab with me.

  “This is crazy,” he kept saying. “There are people who are paid to do this.”

  I ignored him, at least on that point. The cab was poking along, making me nuts. The streets were full of people coming out to see what decent weather looked like. The Christmas decorations seemed to be multiplying themselves. There were tinsel and lights and little glass bulbs everywhere, and on the steps of at least two churches there were choirs. Christmas is my favorite season. The week between it and New Year’s is the time I wait for every year. I just couldn’t get into the spirit. I thought I was going to erupt.

  I leaned into the front seat, asked the driver if I could smoke and got permission. I leaned back again and started digging around for cigarettes.

  “I can see the headlines in New York already,” I said, “and it’s all so stupid, because I’m an ass.”

  “You’re an ass to be doing this,” Nick agreed. “Where do you think we’re going? What do you think were going to do when we get there?”

  Since he knew perfectly well where we were going—he’d heard me tell the driver to take us out to The Butler Did It—I let this pass, too. “It was there all the time,” I said. “You gave it to me this morning. Jon Lowry gave it to me. And the business about the fraud—Christopher Brand did everything but hit me over the head with it and I never knew a thing.”

  “Right,” Nick said.

  “That chalk,” I said. “That chalk was on the money Jon Lowry had in the manila envelope he gave to Phoebe. Phoebe didn’t open the envelope, but I did. I got the stuff on my hands. You were right. It doesn’t really stick too well. But it got into the creases between my fingers and my palms, and it lasted there long enough to get wet. Then it stuck just fine. It was damn near impossible to get off.”

  “Why would there be architect’s chalk on Jon Lowry’s money?” Nick demanded. “I told you they used to use it in kidnapping cases in the thirties. I also told you they gave that up.”

  “Because Jon Lowry really is crazy, as crazy as his aunt ever was. And because he told me.”

  “Excuse me?” Nick said.

  “He didn’t tell me in so many words.” My lighter caught, died, caught. I dragged hard to get my cigarette going and didn’t quite make it. I gave up for the moment. “He kept ranting and raving at me outside the garage about how nobody ever took him seriously and all the things his lawyers did to him and God knows what else. That was the key to the whole thing. He must have been driving his financial people crazy for years. Did he tell you what he did with his money?”

  “About putting it in cash and gold?” Nick said. “He didn’t tell me, but I heard about it. From my friend at the IRS, if you want to know the truth. I almost admire him for it. Tax law is the biggest pile of slime—”

  “You’ve told me, you’ve told me. But I don’t blame the banks. They’ve got to protect themselves and Jon Lowry is not stable. Anybody who talks to him for any length of time begins to see that. He’s paranoid as all hell, and he resents like crazy being treated like a child. Or an incompetent. That’s what Aunt Gertrude did to him, all his life. He didn’t want to file tax forms because he didn’t want to give out information about himself—”

  “I don’t want to give out information about myself either,” Nick said, “and if the courts hadn’t decided that the IRS was immune to the Constitution, I wouldn’t have to.”

  “Don’t lecture,” I said. “There was a good reason why he didn’t want to give out information about himself. He was just as feeble at all this stuff as his financial people said he was. Worse, probably. I’ll bet there’s been legal action, too. Attempts to get control of the money away from him. Attempts to get him committed.”

  “Good guess,” Nick said. “Not about the commitment but about the other thing. The Toliver-Campion Trust filed suit twice. The first time, they wanted control of the money. The second time, they just wanted him the hell out of their bank. But they lost both, Pay.”

  “I assumed they had,” I said. “I also assume a little extra evidence—like Jon falling for a con artist for big money—wouldn’t hurt their chances if they wanted to go to court a third time. But I doubt if any of that matters. Because what Jon cares about is what they think of him. It’s absolutely crucial to him that he’s not perceived as a fool. Which is why he was so angry about the chalk. He knew about it. He knew the bank had done it to him. He knew why. We were standing outside that garage and Evelyn’s body was inside in a bag, for God’s sake, and all he could talk about was all the terrible things people had done to him. How they’d treated him. What an idiot they thought he was. He was distraught all right, but it wasn’t out of grief. He was angry as hell.”

  “About Evelyn or the chalk?”

  “About both. Evelyn for cheating him. The chalk because he knew the bank had put it there just in case he was idiot enough to give the key to one of his safety-deposit boxes to somebody else or fall for a gold-mine scheme or something. I’ll bet if you check the bank in Baltimore where he’s got his box you’ll find some old guy at the head of the safety-deposit room. Or some older woman. Someone who would have known about this particular method of tracing money. Whatever. Other banks had probably tried other things.”

  “Does he have a bank in Baltimore?”

  “Does it matter? Maybe he picked the envelope up in New York. He gave it to Phoebe to hold. I just assumed he must have picked it up here. He has to have those boxes all over the place. He doesn’t have credit cards and he doesn’t have accounts he can wire off to in an emergency. Whatever. That’s not the point, Nick.”

  “The point is that you’re making this up.”

  “It fits. It works. It will check out. You just watch. At any rate, Evelyn never intended to be around long enough to get caught for the frauds. She started in 1985. I’d guess she intended to be out of sight by the beginning of 1988. Instead, into her life came Mr. Jonathon Hancock Lowry and eight hundred fifty million dollars. He was shy. He was awkward. He would have followed any woman anywhere if he could have been made to believe she fell for him before she knew about his money. Either Evelyn didn’t know about his money in the beginning or she was a damn good actress. In fact, we both know she was a damn good actress. Whatever the sequence, he got caught. She had a chance to milk him good and she wasn’t going to let it go.�
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  “Why not just marry him?” Nick said. “Everyone said he was crazy about her.”

  “What was going to happen when all that fraud started coming out? Besides, I don’t think she really liked him much. And she was greedy, but she wasn’t entirely stupid. She didn’t need the whole eight hundred fifty million. She just needed enough of it. She could get that without having to put up with him in bed.”

  Nick thought about it. “All right,” he said. “That I’ll buy.”

  “Good. Buy this, too. The first kick came in Minneapolis. Christopher Brand got a call from his lawyer when we were in Minneapolis. It had to have been about this. I assumed it was the Ad Hoc Committee he’d heard about, because he was checking that out, but it must have been one of the others. And there are a few things you ought to know about Christopher. In the first place, he couldn’t stand Evelyn. He thought she was running him like a slave. In the second place, he absolutely hates Jon Lowry. Hates him. All that inherited money and unearned status blows Christopher’s corks completely. Up until Minneapolis, he was nice to both of them. He had to be. After Minneapolis, he was in the clear. He had Evelyn just where he wanted her. Not that he was satisfied with that.”

  “Christopher Brand isn’t satisfied with anything,” Nick said. “He—well, never mind what he did. It was in the breakfast room this morning. It concerned hash brown potatoes. It was incredible.”

  “Christopher usually is,” I said. “And since what he really wanted was revenge, damn the practical consequences, I think he did what he thought was a very smart thing.”

  “What?”

  “Went right out and told Jon Lowry just what Evelyn was and what she was doing.”

  “McKenna. That would make him not just crazy, but stupid. He could have blackmailed the hell out of Evelyn just by threatening to tell Lowry what he knew.”

  “I know. But you’re making an assumption. You’ve decided that getting at Evelyn would be Christopher’s main purpose. She controlled the tour. She could help or hurt his career. How much do you think Christopher Brand cares about his career? He mouths off about it a lot, but every time he’s ever had a choice between it and anything else, he’s chosen the anything else. He didn’t care about Evelyn. He cares about what all drunks care about, and never forget that Christopher Brand is a drunk. He cares about cosmic truth and cosmic justice and getting the universe to fork over what he thinks it owes him. Making Jon Lowry feel small was much more important to him than blackmailing Evelyn would ever be. Besides, he’d have it around longer. Evelyn was going to make tracks eventually. He’d dealt with enough greedy women to realize that.”

  “So Christopher told Jon and Jon confronted Evelyn?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why didn’t he just walk out?”

  “He didn’t want to walk out. He wanted to erase the whole business. He wanted to make sure nobody would ever know he’d been fooled. I don’t know what he told her to keep her from bolting, but he must have told her something. Maybe just that he didn’t believe it. He had all that lovely money to use for bait.”

  “If he was going to kill her anyway, why wait for Baltimore? Wasn’t Minneapolis early in the tour?”

  “Baltimore was the only city we were scheduled in that wasn’t a hectic mess. All the rest of them were one interview after the other, one party after the other. This was the only place we had any time. He’s been dropping messages off at the reception desk, stealing prescription drugs out of people’s handbags, chasing all over the place—I’ll bet my life he followed Christopher to that God-awful place we were at this afternoon, and to the bar later, too. The neighborhood looked deserted, but you know how that is. You can never tell. And it was better not to wait until we got back to New York. She might have skipped out by then. Anything could have happened.”

  “He killed Evelyn because she knew,” Nick said slowly. “Just because she knew. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And he’s on his way to kill Christopher Brand because he knows.”

  “Right again.”

  “Then why in the name of God did he kill Margaret Keeley?”

  I blew a stream of smoke into the air. “He killed her because she knew, too,” I said. “And don’t tell me that’s farfetched, because it’s nothing of the kind. We’ve been hearing about Margaret ever since we got here. Gail Larson told me she was a snoop. Gail Larson also told me Margaret was very good at finding out scandal, as long as it wasn’t sex scandal. When it came to sex, she let her prejudices get in the way of her instincts. In every other situation, her instincts were excellent. And she did snoop. Into everything. As a matter of course. Christopher Brand found the People’s Center for Social Action and got the whole history of their problems with the Ad Hoc Committee for Advocacy for the Homeless. I think Margaret Keeley did, too. There’s a little girl over there, Darcy Penter. All we have to do is ask her.”

  “Even if I give you that, how did Jon know she knew?”

  “The same way everybody knew what she knew,” I said. “She told him. Phoebe saw her on the street that afternoon she was murdered. She was probably waiting for Evelyn. They were supposed to meet somewhere and go to The Butler Did It together, and Phoebe said Mrs. Keeley was checking her watch and peering around as if she was expecting someone, I’d guess Jon had killed Evelyn by that time and stuck her body in Tempestai rent-a-car trunk. We can get Barbara Defborn to work through all that business about where it was parked and where Jon and Evelyn were and all the rest of it. I’m pretty sure that when he went to meet Margaret Keeley, he was alone. He told her Evelyn had sent him to pick her up and take her over to The Butler Did It, and they went. Evelyn didn’t have any keys on her when she was found. Then when they got to the store, he let her set up and fed her drugged coffee or something while she was doing it, and when she finally passed out he killed her.”

  “You got all this from knowing who was committing fraud and where a lot of architect’s chalk came from?”

  “I got it from being able to make sense in a systematic manner,” I said, “which I can do even if you and Lu Martinez think I can’t. Gracie Allen, my foot. Things like this are rigid, really. Once you have the one or two really important facts, you start at the beginning and there’s only one way to go. Aren’t we there?”

  The cab had started to slow. Nick leaned forward to peer out the windshield. I leaned sideways to look out the window. Up front, the cabdriver said, “Police bar—oh hell.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Put that out,” Nick said.

  He grabbed my cigarette and started to crush it in the ashtray on his side, over and over again, as if he were trying to beat it to death. I grabbed his arm.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted at him. “What do you think you—”

  “Smell,” he commanded.

  “Smell what?”

  The cigarette was out. He leaned over my lap, grabbed the window handle and rolled. Cold air came pouring onto my face, tinged with the liquid afterglow of rain. Something else came pouring in, too—a smell, yes, but the kind of smell that feels as thick and tactile as mayonnaise and always makes you choke.

  The street was full of gas.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They had cordoned off the whole block, from the beauty parlor to Sun’s Wigs and Gifts and the Jewish Council Thrift Shop. They had put up sawhorses and body lines of uniformed patrolmen. They had evacuated everyone they could find. It was nearly seven and after closing time for many of the businesses, but prime take-in hours for others. People were standing at the edges of the sectioned-off area, looking frightened and confused. Nobody looked interested in leaving, although the uniforms kept trying to convince them to. The rainbow surfaced ribbon of gasoline was stagnant and beautiful, standing motionless like a fairy pond in the middle of the street. There had to be ten or fifteen gallons of it, maybe more. It shimmered in the light from the streetlamps, like a liquid Christmas decoration.

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nbsp; Nick wanted me to stay in the cab. I hadn’t listened to him up until then, and I wasn’t going to listen to him now. I got out and walked along the perimeter until I saw Barbara Defborn, crisp and businesslike in her little black suit, standing next to one of the pattol cars. She had a hand mike in her hand and was talking into it, probably to somebody at headquarters. I headed in her direction and saw something I hadn’t noticed before: the fire engines. There were stupefying numbers of fire engines. Every fire engine in Baltimore must have been standing by just beyond that block, and maybe every fire engine in the county. I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if somebody’s house caught fire.

  I wedged my way through a couple of knots of spectators, ducked under the flailing arms of a patrolman trying to explain something with his hands and came to a stop next to Barbara Defborn. She saw me standing there and nearly spit.

  “You didn’t tell me he was crazy,” she said. “This guy is a worldclass Looney Tune.”

  “There didn’t seem to be time to talk back at the hotel.”

  “Shit.”

  I edged a little away from her, just in case she decided to resort to physical violence. She seemed capable of it. “Have you figured out what happened yet? Do you know how the gas got into the street?”

  “Oh, we know how the gas got into the street,” Barbara said. “He may be Looney Tunes, but he’s a smart son of a bitch. He went over there”—she pointed to the gas station in the middle of the block—“and walked into the office and told them he was going to hand-pump twenty dollars’ worth. Then he came back out here, took the nozzle off the pump, rigged it open with a little tape and put it down on the ground just to this side of the tank. I don’t know where he got the car. He might have stolen it. We didn’t want to hang around in there and check it out.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I said. “Is it going to blow?”

  “If your friend has anything to say about it, it is. He’s sitting in that building over there”—she pointed to The Butler Did It—“threatening to light a match. Which is why the fire boys aren’t in there cleaning this mess up.”