Fear and Loathing

by Hilary Norman

  ‘For another newspaper?’ Martinez said.

  ‘I’m working on a book,’ she said.

  ‘Fiction?’ Sam said.

  ‘Non,’ she said.

  ‘Mind if I ask what it’s about?’ Martinez said.

  ‘I don’t mind you asking,’ she said, ‘so long as you don’t mind if I don’t tell you.’

  ‘No problem,’ Martinez said easily.

  ‘So.’ Sam steered them back. ‘You’ve found no other details in common between the Gomez feature and the issue that ran the photos of Mr Burton and his wife-to-be?’

  ‘None,’ Harper Benedict said.

  ‘Can you think of any other articles in The Beach during your editorship that shared commonalities with those items?’

  Her chin went up. ‘You’re expecting more killings?’

  ‘I sincerely hope not,’ Sam said. ‘On the contrary, if you had run, say, a number of stories featuring the subject of interracial relationships—’

  Benedict shook her head. ‘I can’t recall any features concerning that subject, but I’m betting there were any number of photos of interracial couples or mixed race individuals.’ She shrugged. ‘You’ll be welcome to read through as many issues as you like, and all the correspondence files too.’

  ‘That would be good, ma’am,’ Martinez said.

  ‘I imagine you’ve already checked to see if any local news stations or magazine programs ran anything about the victims.’

  ‘Ongoing, ma’am,’ Sam said.

  ‘I wasn’t trying to tell you your job,’ Harper Benedict said.

  ‘All help gratefully accepted,’ Sam said.

  ‘So,’ Martinez said outside, heading back to the car, a dozen more back issues of The Beach under one arm, the promised correspondence files to be sent to the station by day’s end. ‘What did you make of her?’

  ‘Jury’s out,’ Sam said.

  ‘The cool, untouchable type.’ Martinez opened the doors, dumped the papers on the back seat, got in with a grunt.

  ‘You don’t trust her.’

  ‘Not one bit.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘The eyes had a lot to do with it. Warm and friendly to icicles in a blink.’

  ‘Just playing us,’ Sam said.

  ‘Like this is amusing?’ Martinez was grim. ‘She knows we’re looking at seven dead people and she wants to mess around?’ He started the engine, checked the mirror, hesitated. ‘We got five minutes to visit with Grace?’

  ‘She’ll have patients and we don’t have time.’

  ‘Nah, we got old newspapers to read,’ Martinez said.

  ‘And their editor to check up on,’ Sam said.

  And forensics and voice ID to chase regarding Nick Gibson’s recorded message.

  And their own brains to rack as to how to trace the writer of the letter to Santa Barbara PD.

  Enough to be getting on with.

  Tuesday evening, Cathy and Gabe had worked the same shift, had a late pizza with Luc, then gone back to her place for the night.

  ‘I’m heading up to my uncle’s tomorrow for a few days,’ Gabe said, about a minute after they’d finished making love.

  Surprise, followed by irritation, hit Cathy.

  ‘What’s up?’ Gabe asked.

  ‘You hadn’t mentioned it.’

  ‘I didn’t know until today.’

  ‘We’ve spent hours together and you still didn’t mention it.’

  ‘I’m telling you now.’

  ‘Maybe I could ask for time off,’ she said lightly. ‘Come with you.’

  ‘Not a good idea.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘For one thing, Nic wouldn’t appreciate the lack of notice.’

  ‘You didn’t give any.’

  ‘I made sure Michel could work my shifts,’ Gabe said. ‘Easier for a waiter.’

  ‘What’s the other thing?’ She shifted onto her right elbow, waited.

  ‘It’s not a good time for my uncle,’ he said.

  ‘Why not? Is he sick?’

  ‘Not sick. Just busy. Preoccupied.’

  ‘Not too preoccupied for you to visit.’

  ‘I’m going to my lopin,’ Gabe said. ‘I won’t see much of him.’

  ‘So why can’t I come there with you? To your lopin, I mean.’

  ‘It’s still on my uncle’s land.’ Gabe sighed. ‘You need to understand, Cathy. Yves isn’t the most sociable of men.’

  ‘And you don’t want him to meet me,’ Cathy said.

  ‘More the other way around, I’d say. If that were the reason.’ Gabe sat up. ‘Why does it bug you so much, my not taking you there?’

  ‘I guess I feel it’s a missing piece.’

  ‘So I’m a jigsaw?’

  ‘I think we all are,’ Cathy said.

  ‘I haven’t met your family,’ Gabe said. ‘But I don’t feel as though you’re keeping something from me.’

  ‘They’re thousands of miles away. If we were home, you’d have met them.’

  ‘If I wanted to.’

  Annoyance returned. ‘Why wouldn’t you want to?’

  ‘I probably would.’ Gabe shrugged. ‘Though sometimes you make them sound a little too perfect. I might feel inadequate.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Why? Because they’re too perfect to let me feel bad?’

  ‘Jesus,’ she said.

  Gabe was silent for several seconds. ‘If you really want to go there, I’ll take you. Not tomorrow, but soon.’

  ‘I don’t even know exactly where “there” is. Somewhere in the Var. I know your uncle’s name and that he has a farm, and I know he grows olives and maybe lavender because you brought both once when you’d just come back from there. If that was where you’d been.’

  ‘Where else would I have been? If that’s where I’d told you I was going.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Insecurity made her mad at herself. ‘I still don’t even know what you grow on your lopin. If you grow anything.’

  ‘Marijuana,’ he said.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she said, unsure if he was joking.

  ‘Maybe that’s what I grow,’ he said. ‘Maybe that’s why I haven’t taken you there yet, because I’m not sure how you’d react.’

  She felt tired abruptly, disliked sparring. ‘So you’ll take me some day.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But not yet.’

  ‘Not unless you insist.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Maybe I have another girlfriend there.’

  ‘Maybe you do.’

  He rolled closer, put his arms around her. ‘I don’t. I’m just being an ass. No other girlfriend, there or anyplace else.’ He paused. ‘And on my land, I grow—’

  ‘No.’ She cut him off. ‘Please don’t tell me.’

  ‘But you want to know.’

  ‘Not till you want to tell me.’

  ‘OK,’ Gabe said.

  Late on Tuesday, the back issues of The Beach and folders of correspondence having yielded nothing of obvious significance, Sam’s researches into Harper Benedict’s family history raised some interesting information.

  Harper had been born in 1975 in upstate New York to George Benedict and his wife, Hildegard, known as Hildy. George, a modern language teacher born György Benedek in Hungary in 1940 to Edvard Benedek, heir to an old paper manufacturing business, who had emigrated to the United States after World War Two with a considerable fortune intact.

  Mildly interesting as that was, what had perked Sam and Martinez right up was the small detail that George’s mother, Alida Benedek, had written a book published by an insignificant Budapest house in 1933: a rant in support of Nordicism, the ideology that claimed Nordic people to be racially superior to all others.

  ‘So Harper’s grandma was a white supremacist,’ Martinez said.

  ‘For sure,’ Sam said. ‘And the name, Alida, by the way, means “noble”.’

  ‘Which takes us where?’

  ‘I guess that
depends on what Harper thinks about her grandma,’ Sam said. ‘Though even if she keeps a shrine to Alida in her bedroom, it still doesn’t give us much more than a bad smell.’

  They sat in the office, mulling it over. Florida had more than its share of neo-Nazi groups, particularly active in its prisons, but the City of Miami Beach itself was never going to lay down any kind of welcome mat for residents or outsiders trying to ram those kinds of sentiments down people’s throats.

  ‘There’s no way that paper had a white supremacist following,’ Martinez said. ‘I checked through the 2007 issues three times and I didn’t see a spark of bias.’

  ‘This still feels like something,’ Sam said. ‘Three victims in a paper edited by a woman with a bigot for a grandmother.’

  ‘Maybe Harper hates what her grandma stood for,’ Martinez said.

  ‘What if she doesn’t?’ Sam said.

  ‘Do we know how come Harper moved to Florida?’

  ‘Came with mom and dad. George passed away in 2000. Guess they got tired of cold winters.’

  ‘Hildy still alive?’

  ‘No mention of her death. No mention of anything much about Hildy, other than that she married George and gave birth to Harper. No other kids.’

  ‘So Harper’s probably rich.’ Martinez paused. ‘“Virginia” has to be rich too.’

  ‘Wow,’ Sam said wryly. ‘Conclusive or what?’ He looked at the back page of the July edition. ‘Published by HBP Press, so probably her own company, or her mother’s – or maybe George bought a publishing house for them, put it in their names.’

  ‘I thought George was a teacher.’

  ‘With a possibly sizable inheritance.’ Sam paused. ‘It’s not the McClatchy Company, but I guess it signifies a certain amount of power.’

  HBP Press, it turned out, had published a free weekly paper called Hudson, circulated in the north-east in the late eighties, surviving just two years. Then the firm had moved to South Carolina, where Santee Weekly had been born, its distribution from Columbia to Charleston, this paper still in existence, though no longer owned by HBP. The move to Florida appeared to have happened in the mid-nineties, and here the publishers had quit naming newspapers after rivers and had plumped for The Beach, which had apparently brought HBP’s newspaper publishing history to an end.

  ‘Going into book publishing now, you think?’ Martinez said. ‘In time for Harper’s book, maybe?’

  ‘I don’t know that Ms Benedict strikes me as the self-publishing type,’ Sam said, scanning something on his iPad. ‘Now here’s a thing. HBP stands for Hildegard Benedek Publishing – not Benedict. Which suggests – big maybe – that Harper’s mom might have admired her husband’s old world.’

  ‘Maybe it was her world too,’ Martinez said.

  Sam nodded. ‘Time to go ask her daughter if Hildy Benedict is dead or living, and if so, where we can find her.’

  Back in Bal Harbour, in the same serene living room, the kind, Sam thought, that smacked of confidence and, perhaps, a cool, clear conscience. Or maybe it was the type of complacency sometimes brought about by inherited wealth and a feeling of being somehow above the rules.

  Or maybe he was letting his own prejudices run away with him.

  ‘That was quick.’ Harper Benedict had welcomed them without concern or annoyance, had brought them Nespresso coffee and told them that she was glad to be disturbed again, since her work was going badly.

  ‘Is your mother still living, Ms Benedict?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘call me Harper. And no, she is not. She passed away several years ago. Why do you ask?’

  ‘We did a little reading about you and your company,’ Sam said. ‘That fact was missing.’

  ‘I asked you earlier if I was a suspect.’ Still amused.

  ‘Something funny about that?’ Martinez said.

  ‘I think so,’ she said.

  ‘Your family history is interesting,’ Sam said.

  ‘That’s one word for it,’ Benedict said.

  ‘The history of your publishing firm too, ma’am,’ Martinez said.

  ‘Is HBP your own firm?’ Sam asked.

  Harper Benedict smiled again. ‘You found Alida’s book. My redoubtable grandmother’s life’s work. And now, what you really want to know is if her opinions swam down the line to me, her one and only grandchild.’

  ‘Did they?’ Sam asked.

  The smile left her face and her blue eyes grew darker with anger. ‘They did not, Detective Becket. As a matter of fact, they did not even make it as far as her son, my father. Though they did seem to leap the marital bridge into my mother’s misguided soul.’ She paused. ‘Assuming she had one.’

  The room was very quiet for a moment.

  ‘I apologize,’ Sam said.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ she said. ‘I guess you had to ask.’

  ‘I felt I did,’ Sam said.

  ‘So.’ Benedict shook her hair and the darkness lifted. ‘Did anything leap out of our back issues or files?’

  ‘Not immediately,’ Sam said.

  ‘Though we would like to hold on to them, if you don’t object,’ Martinez said.

  ‘So long as you return them when you’re done.’

  ‘Of course,’ Martinez said.

  Sam drained the last of his coffee. ‘Just to clarify,’ he said. ‘When your mother died, did HBP Press pass to you?’

  ‘It had already passed to me,’ Benedict said.

  ‘So in the period of your editorship, you were also the proprietor?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Is the firm still in existence?’ Martinez asked.

  ‘No.’ Affability draining away again. ‘Anything else I can help you with?’

  Sam stood up. ‘Can’t think of a thing, ma’am.’

  Martinez rose too. ‘So the book not coming along so well?’

  ‘Too many interruptions, perhaps.’

  ‘Sorry for that,’ Sam said. ‘Multiple homicides tend to have that kind of ripple effect.’

  She got up, walked ahead of them toward the door.

  ‘You never told us when your mother passed away,’ Sam said.

  ‘No,’ Harper Benedict said. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘So, something to hide?’ Martinez said outside. ‘Or just being a bitch?’

  Traffic on Collins thrummed between them and the high-price buildings partially obscuring the ocean.

  ‘Maybe she just feels her deceased family are none of our business,’ Sam said. ‘She certainly gave the impression she rejected Grandma Alida’s beliefs.’

  ‘Called her mother “misguided” too.’ Martinez took out a stick of gum. ‘Could have been play-acting.’

  Sam looked down the road. Make a right and he could be home, which was tempting.

  Not yet.

  ‘Back to base,’ he said. ‘Let’s give that family tree a good shake, see what falls.’

  The list was long.

  Had been much longer, necessitating classification and sifting, and as time had passed, her top one hundred had reduced to fifty, after which she’d created fresh stipulations and qualifications in a process resembling that of a fussy employment agency. If she could have, she thought she might have enjoyed inviting candidates for interview.

  ‘What makes you feel you’re the right person for this execution?’

  She had, for a time, done almost that, silently addressing each applicant or family of applicants, though after a while, it had transmuted more into a courtroom scenario. Guilt a foregone conclusion, albeit sometimes not the individual’s personal guilt, but she had decided on a biblical bent, King James edition: ‘visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation’. And who was she to argue with that?

  Not that it had helped a damn when it came to carving a shortlist. Still twenty family names on there, still unviable. And she was, she thought, a pragmatic person.

  So she had taken the only sensible course of action. Had taken her
shortlist, closed her eyes, held a pin tightly, made a circle, twirled her hand around a few times – and then stabbed it down onto the list.

  Twice it had pierced a hole in a margin, once it had landed between two names, and so she’d extracted the pin and begun again.

  Bringing it down to the final five families.

  Five plus one, of course.

  Two already finalized and dealt with.

  Three to go.

  And her ‘Plus One’ – husband, wife and their progeny; sparing the adopted daughter who was, in any event, overseas. So, just the guilty pair and the next generation.

  Planning for Number Three was already complete. A meeting set tomorrow with her Crusaders.

  Her sorry, pathetic little mercenary quartet.

  And then, the deed. To be topped off with the next message.

  For Becket. With Love. From Virginia.

  June 12

  No record had yet been found of the death of Hildegard Benedict – possibly aka Benedek. She had not died in Florida or South Carolina, and all of late Tuesday’s checks, including those made via the Social Security Death Index, had come up empty. Which did not mean that she had definitely not passed away, might feasibly mean that an incorrect record had been entered – might mean all manner of innocent things.

  Sam and Martinez would, in due course, be asking her daughter about this, but before that they intended to learn as much as they could about Harper Benedict herself.

  Harper had never published a book before, and all examples of her own writing appeared to have been varied; no specialist subject, no pet loves or gripes, no obvious axes to grind. So far as they’d been able to ascertain, she had never married, had committed neither felonies nor misdemeanors. Records regarding the family were minimal; the Benedicts had valued their privacy, paid their taxes, raised no hackles in any of the communities where they had resided.

  Harper Benedict had attended the Academic Magnet High School (motto: Seriously Smart) in North Charleston (excelling at lacrosse and golf), and University of Miami, where she’d majored in English Literature.

  They’d tried summing up late Tuesday.

  ‘Good student, good brain, physically tough, brave enough to play lacrosse.’ Sam had sighed. ‘I don’t know what we were hoping for, but we sure haven’t found it.’