Sweet, Savage Death

by Jane Haddam

I turned the corner and found myself in a room of dogs, their cages low and close to the ground, their voices sharp with eagerness, their eyes painfully hopeful. I petted only the smaller ones. Although I grew up with large dogs—my father could not imagine life without a Great Dane sitting erect beside his chair, keeping him company during the six o’clock news—I am invariably afraid of them. I restrict myself to beagles and basset hounds and collies, the last of which can be very vicious. I once saw a collie bite the head off a kitten who’d done no more than try to make friends. I was only thirteen, it was a kitten I was particularly fond of, and the incident should have put me off collies forever, but it didn’t. Lassie was the first and only television show I was allowed to watch as a child. It was magic.

  I had my hands on the head of a very un-Lassie-like collie when I saw the cocker spaniel. It was sitting in the far corner of what I first thought was an empty cage, half buried in sawdust and shaking like a tremor in the San Francisco Bay. With the small cat in my pocket protesting loudly, I leaned over and reached out to the dog, making cooing noises like a demented nanny. The only effect it had was to kick up an even more violent trembling in the corner. I had to do a full waist bend just to get within reach of the dog’s head.

  Almost as soon as I touched it, it stopped shaking. It sniffed around for a moment, worrying my fingers with its nose, then shook the sawdust clear as if it were water and began to crawl across the cage to me. The rhinestones in its collar winked in the harsh overhead light. The pink ribbons in its ears drooped to the floor. A red and white flash glittered at its throat.

  Myrra’s dog.

  With one of Myrra’s earrings caught in its collar.

  I rang the bell for the attendant.

  “This dog,” the mock-spinster said, “is a female who has had puppies.” She gave me the kind of accusatory glare I’d always associated with snake oil salesmen who preach about sin.

  “She had a litter of six,” I said. “They all went to very nice mansions in Westchester.”

  “I’m sure. And I’m sure the puppies had puppies who went to very good homes, too. The ones we find wandering around in garbage cans are the result of spontaneous generation.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I can see what you’re up against.” I couldn’t imagine Esmeralda rooting around in garbage cans. Myrra had given that dog all the affection and luxury she had been unable to give her daughter when her daughter was growing up, and Myrra, newly divorced, was first trying to write. I had never known Myrra to indulge herself as she indulged Esmeralda. Esmeralda’s tastes were so refined that, although she loved caviar, she would only eat beluga, and although she loved chocolates, she would only eat Godiva raspberry creams. Esmeralda had a mink hat and jacket with her initials on the hand-carved wooden buttons; a down sleep cushion whose covers, each made of a different pastel silk, were changed daily; and a Steuben glass dinner dish.

  At the moment, she had a case of the nerves and a very small cat. The cat was sleeping on Esmeralda’s head, which seemed to make them both happy.

  “She’ll have to go in for spaying right away,” the spinster said.

  I took the pen she held out to me and shook my head.

  “I don’t think I can promise that,” I said. “The woman she belonged to wouldn’t have approved of it.”

  “The woman she belonged to doesn’t have any say in the matter. She abandoned the poor creature. We cannot have this city overrun with domesticated animals with no conception of how to survive in the wild—”

  “Central Park West is hardly the wild,” I said. “And Myrra didn’t abandon the dog. She took it out for a walk and got mugged in Riverside Park. We’ve all been looking for Esmeralda for over a week.”

  “Mugged,” the woman said.

  “Murdered,” I smiled.

  “Just a minute.” She disappeared through a low, narrow door and returned a moment later with a shoebox. “You have to understand this is a most unusual situation,” she said. “This dog came to us a little over a week ago. As you can see, she is not wearing a license.”

  “Well, of course not,” I said. “If she was wearing a license, wouldn’t somebody have got in touch with Myrra or the family?”

  “Certainly. But she was not wearing a license. She was, however, dressed up in these ridiculous garments—” The hat and jacket came whipping out of the shoebox. “She was also tied very carefully to our porch. A baby in a basket, so to speak.”

  “Well, maybe someone found her wandering,” I said. “They just thought this was the best place to bring her.”

  “Unlikely. It is the lurid belief of most of the residents of the City of New York that we gas our animals here.”

  “But still—”

  “But still. But still, I opened the office myself that morning, at six. Of course, I didn’t actually open the office, but I came in to do some work. The last person to leave the night before locked up well after three. I simply do not believe that some Good Samaritan was wandering around this neighborhood between three and six on a December morning, tying dogs to doorknobs with granny knots.”

  “What December morning?” I asked, feeling a little faint. “When?”

  She pulled out a file card and adjusted her glasses on her nose, the time-honored gesture of Mrs. Grundys and maiden lady civics teachers everywhere.

  “The second,” she said. “December second.”

  “If you’d just murdered somebody,” I asked the cabdriver, “and that somebody had a dog with them, would you take the dog to the animal shelter and leave it there?”

  “If I’d just murdered somebody?” We were stuck in traffic just above the World Trade Center, seemingly for good. Esmeralda was in a carrier on the cab floor. Camille (the cat) was in my pocket, her empty carrier beside me on the seat. I had to do something to take my mind off the time. I had promised Mr. Grandison, senior partner at Hoddard, Marks, Hewitt and Long, and executor of Myrra’s estate, that I would be in his office by six.

  “If you were a mugger,” I said, “and you mugged someone in Riverside Park. And you murdered the person you mugged. Would you take the dog she had with her and take it to the animal shelter and tie it up there?”

  “You writing one of those murder mystery novels?” the cabdriver said. “My wife likes those murder mystery novels. Different from detective stories. I used to like detective stories. Philo Vance. You know about him?”

  “Sort of.” The last murder mystery I’d read was an Agatha Christie I’d picked up in the Milan airport during my obligatory backpacking tour around Europe after college graduation. I was hot, dirty, exhausted, and trying to fly Alitalia standby to Rome in the middle of July. The Agatha Christie was a French translation, and the last two pages were missing. Of course, there were the books in my bag, but I hadn’t read them.

  “Muggers are mostly short skinny guys,” the cabdriver said. “Eunuchs, you know. They get that way from all the dope. Can’t hurt you.”

  “Muggers never kill anybody?”

  “Sure they do. I just don’t understand how.”

  “Right.”

  There was a break in the traffic, a very small break, but enough. He floored the gas pedal and shot through, maneuvering us onto the nearly empty southbound side of Broadway.

  “Wasn’t the animal shelter where I picked you up?” he asked me.

  “It’s right around the corner from there,” I said.

  “And you’re talking a mugging in Riverside Park?”

  “Riverside in the Eighties.”

  “You’re saying this mugger is going to kill a guy in Riverside Park in the Eighties, then walk a dog to Second and Fifty-ninth and tie it up outside the animal shelter.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  We pulled up outside a heavy, dirty-brown building that looked like the cross between an Italianate mausoleum and a monument to the Glory that was Greece.

  “Nah,” the cabdriver said. “Like I said, muggers are these s
kinny little guys. Puerto Ricans. Ninety-pound weaklings. They don’t know about dogs.”

  I tipped him a dollar. I didn’t mention that I hadn’t needed his advice. No mugger was going to take a mink-clad cocker spaniel with a rhinestone collar and a leather leash all the way across town to tie it to the doorknob of the animal shelter. Not at three o’clock in the morning, he wasn’t.

  At least, I didn’t think so.

  CHAPTER 7

  HODDARD, MARKS, HEWITT AND Long had the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth floors of the Hogarth Building, as the mausoleum was called, and private elevators going to each one. The elevators had brass doors and tired old men in blue-jacketed uniforms to operate them. They were entirely filled by secretaries and paralegals on their way out the door and into the subway and home to Queens and the Upper East Side respectively. Both groups looked like they spent a great deal of time reading Mademoiselle, but different parts of it.

  A blue-jacketed functionary beckoned me, and I piled into a polished brass and red damask cage. I had decided to come to Hoddard, Marks, Hewitt and Long because I thought the earring, which was probably valuable, most properly belonged to the estate. Myrra, like most women not born to wealth, had had no use for paste, and if her taste consisted of an unwavering devotion to brand names, that didn’t make the things she owned any less expensive. Jewelry came from Harry Winston, glassware from Steuben. The entire history of European painting was reduced to Degas and Bosch, but every piece of property was authentic, irreplaceable, and accompanied by a documentation folder that rivaled the FBI file on Eldridge Cleaver. It was also undoubtedly willed to someone. The lawyer would know to whom.

  Even so, going up in the elevator, I was uneasy. I had a feeling the police had known all along that Myrra’s death was not an ordinary mugging. I could see the discrepancies. It was ridiculous for a woman Myrra’s age to decide to walk her dog at two-thirty in the morning, and it wasn’t in character. Myrra wrote at dawn. She had put herself to bed at eleven o’clock every night of her life for the past twenty years. Guests were invited for dinner at seven and unceremoniously ushered out at quarter past ten. Why would she get dressed to the teeth and go wandering off to Riverside Park four and a half hours after her normal bedtime?

  I blinked. I had somehow got off the elevator, and now I was standing in a fifty-thousand-dollar sea of Persian rug. The girl behind the wide-bellied cherrywood desk was very young and very thin and very angry. I didn’t blame her. It was Friday.

  “I have an appointment with Mr. Grandison,” I said. “I’m Pay McKenna.”

  “Of course.” She made it sound as if she knew perfectly well who I was and exactly how late. Since I never wear a watch, I couldn’t tell. “Mr. Grandison is on the phone,” she said. “If you’ll just take a seat, he’ll be with you in a moment.”

  I looked around at the seats, mostly black leather chairs shined to look like polished ebony. I didn’t think they’d benefit from Esmeralda’s attention, and I said so.

  “Technically,” the girl said, “you shouldn’t bring a dog in here at all. Unless it’s a Seeing Eye dog. Is it a Seeing Eye dog?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “It’s part of the property I’m delivering to Mr. Grandison,” I said. “It belonged to a client of his.”

  A light went on on her telephone and she turned away to answer it.

  “A dog,” she said. “In a box.” There was a silence, during which she sniffed a little and did rabbit imitations with her nose. “Of course,” she said at last. “Of course. Right away.” She stood up and smiled at me, the way secretaries smile to let you know you’ve made an enemy for life. “If you’ll come this way, please.”

  She led me out of the reception area and down a long corridor lined with cherrywood doors, each sporting a single brass nameplate. The names on the nameplates sounded like a WASP hall of fame—Hewitt, Alden, Ingersoll, Winthrop, Whitney, Renfrew, Standish, Hayes. In this company, McKenna sounded a little foreign, and Weiss/Damereaux was unthinkable.

  She stopped in front of a door with “Grandison” on the nameplate and knocked softly. I didn’t hear anything, but she must have, because she turned the knob and stuck her head in.

  “Mr. Grandison?” she said. “I have Miss McKenna.”

  A mumble. I started to wonder just how elaborate this ritual could get. Would we still be here a week from now, invisibly bowing back and forth through a barrier of cherrywood and brass?

  The girl suddenly stood aside and threw the door wide, revealing a very small, very fat man behind a desk much too large for him. He rose to greet me, his well-padded hands outstretched, his smile thick and nervous. Fat-lipped, fat-bellied, and droopy-eyed, I noticed. Myrra must have hated the man. Although she could never tell if her women friends were pretty or plain, she had unyielding requirements for men.

  “Miss McKenna,” Mr. Grandison said, trying hard to beam. “Do sit down. I hope you had a pleasant afternoon.”

  I nodded, not knowing what to say to that. He sat down behind his desk, where he looked like a power-mad, slightly maniacal dwarf.

  “What is this?” he said. “You’ve found Miss DeFord’s dog?”

  It took me a minute to remember that Myrra’s real name had been Susan Marie DeFord and to convince myself that I had not somehow arrived in the wrong place to talk to a man who wouldn’t understand a word I was saying. I put Esmeralda’s carrier on the desk and opened it. She was shivering with panic and nipped me twice before I managed to get her positioned on Mr. Grandison’s blotter.

  “The dog and the earring,” I told him. “I was more worried about the earring than the dog.” I didn’t say I was perfectly capable of taking care of the dog.

  I ran my hand along Esmeralda’s collar and unhooked the earring. It was hard to do. The post had become tangled in the dog’s hair, and the facets of some of the stones were caught in the hollows near the clasp.

  I put the ruby and diamond pear in front of Mr. Grandison. He didn’t even look at it.

  “Of course,” he said. “I can’t possibly discuss the terms of the will at this time.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll wait till Monday. What I wanted to discuss was—”

  “I will tell you it was a very old will,” Grandison said. “Made nearly four years ago. It was very unusual for Miss DeFord to let four years go by without making a new will.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “She couldn’t let a month go by without making a new funeral service. No, Mr. Grandison, it’s about the earring—”

  “It was a very unusual will,” Grandison said dreamily. He was staring at the ceiling, oblivious not only to the earring but to the fact that Esmeralda was getting ready to permanently mark his felt desk blotter. “Not that she cut her own family, of course. Miss DeFord had a very highly developed sense of family. That’s always the surest sign of good breeding, don’t you agree?”

  He seemed to be waiting for my answer. I said, “Of course.” Myrra was the daughter of an unskilled laborer and the ex-wife of a stevedore, but I didn’t think he wanted to hear it.

  “She also had a very highly developed sense of duty,” Mr. Grandison said. “She aligned herself with causes. With very controversial causes, if I may say so. And there was her insistence on honesty, she had the highest standards of business honesty. Why, I’ve never seen anything like the fury of that remarkable woman when faced with even the slightest business indiscretion—”

  “Mr. Grandison,” I said, determined to get the conversation back to the present, “about the dog—”

  “But I thought I explained it to you perfectly,” he said. “I simply can’t help you now. The procedures for the reading of a will have been established through centuries of custom. I cannot reveal the contents of Miss DeFord’s last testament to you until Monday.”

  “Mr. Grandison,” I said. “Please. I really don’t want to know the contents of Myrra’s will at this mo
ment.”

  He looked shocked.

  “But I don’t understand,” he said. “What do you want?”

  I took the earring from the blotter, stroking Esmeralda in the process. She no longer looked panicked, but she did look forlorn.

  “This earring,” I said. “It belonged to Myrra and it must belong to someone now. And this dog. Do you have any idea what happened when Myrra died? What happened to the dog?”

  “I don’t understand,” Mr. Grandison said. “Why are you concerned about a dog?”

  “I’m concerned about what happened to this dog the night Myrra died,” I said. “And I thought the earring was probably expensive. Myrra’s jewelry usually was.”

  “You mean you didn’t come about the apartment?” Mr. Grandison said. “You don’t want to know the conditions you have to meet before you take over Miss DeFord’s apartment?”

  CHAPTER 8

  “DO IT AGAIN,” MARTINEZ said. “Start over again from the beginning.”

  I sighed and shut my eyes, trying to block out the white cinder-block room. I had been in Martinez’s office for four hours. It was after eleven o’clock. I had missed my dinner. The only thing I wanted was to go home to bed, and I couldn’t even do that. The police had sealed my apartment.

  “On the night of December second, I was having a marathon,” I repeated. “A marathon is when I write a whole romance book in five or six days. I was on the last day of one. I got up at ten or ten-thirty, made myself a cup of coffee, and sat down at the typewriter. I did not stop until dawn, when I went to sleep.”

  “You were alone the whole time?” Martinez said.

  “Of course I was alone the whole time. I can’t stand people around when I write. Even breathing distracts me.”

  “Did somebody call you?” Martinez said. “Did somebody visit?”

  “If somebody called, they got the answering machine. Somebody probably did. If somebody rang the doorbell, they wouldn’t have got an answer. But nobody rang the doorbell. Nobody rang the doorbell the entire five days.”