Sweet, Savage Death

by Jane Haddam

  I picked up the white envelope and started to draw out the papers inside, a thick sheaf, some folded, some loose. At the back was a pack of snapshots, the bled-to-the-edges kind typical of those one-day developing services in supermarket parking lots. Most of them were both murky and boring, having been taken in a restaurant somewhere under conditions of minimal light. There was Amelia Samson with a woman who looked like one of her wrens, eating alone at a table for four. Amelia had some kind of fowl, two baked potatoes dripping sour cream and chives, a large dinner roll, asparagus with hollandaise sauce, and a brandy snifter full of wine. The wren had a chef’s salad.

  I went through a few more pictures of restaurant scenes, all different, then came to three photographs of what looked like completely blank pieces of white paper. It was almost possible to see the shape of the overhead lamp from the points of brilliance on the film. I turned the last of these pictures over and over and upside down. I couldn’t make sense of it. I flipped it to the back of the pack and looked down at the next to the last print.

  And very nearly vomited then and there.

  My nausea lasted just long enough for the fear to settle into my arms and neck. In less than a minute, I was too stiff to move, convinced for some crazy reason that if I called attention to myself I would also call attention to the photograph. It didn’t matter that the picture was hidden from the woman on my right by my tote bag, which I’d put on the table to act as a barrier for the cigarette smoke, and that Hazel Ganz, standing up, was too far out of range to make anything out in the muddy print.

  It didn’t help to put the picture at the back of the pack, because there was another one. I put that one back, too, then put the whole pack into the envelope. There was another set of smaller prints, stuck at the bottom in a corner, but I didn’t want to look at them. There was also a set of papers. I tried to steady myself.

  The nausea finally passed. As my head cleared, I began to realize I had the one thing even Martinez had not been able to unearth: a motive for the murder of Julie Simms. Martinez might want to believe I had killed Myrra for her money and Julie because she’d found out about Myrra, but there were holes in that theory and even he knew it. For one thing, until the murder of Julie Simms, Myrra’s death had been officially accepted as a mugging. Why would I, or anyone else, commit a second murder to cover an adequately covered first?

  What was in that envelope, however, had no holes in it. What was in that envelope would have roughly the same effect on one career and two reputations as the Allied bombing had had on Dresden.

  I reached into the envelope and pulled out the papers. Then, feeling the paranoia creep under my skin like a hot pin, I shielded myself from the rest of the table with my tote bag and sweater. The little girl in pink and green makeup asked if I was hot, but I ignored her.

  The large, folded papers were photostats, mainly of hotel registers in places like Northfield, Vermont, and Mystic, Connecticut. By themselves they didn’t mean anything. Neither did the two letters, written in Amelia’s spidery script on stiff, inscribed stationery from Cartier’s, although they were suggestive. Suggestive merely, they didn’t count. If I had found them, I wouldn’t have jumped to conclusions, although somebody had.

  The loose papers were checking account deposit slips, preencoded to Amelia’s account in the New York Guaranty Trust. Each was made out for one thousand dollars cash, and each was dated the first, second, or third of succeeding months. There were twelve of them in all. January first, February first, March first, on through the coming year.

  I looked at them over and over again in confusion. It didn’t make sense. The obvious explanation was that someone (Julie Simms?) was blackmailing Amelia over these photographs. But the money was going into Amelia’s account, not out of it. It didn’t add up.

  I put the deposit slips in a pile and back into the envelope. A woman Phoebe and I had known in college worked for the New York Guaranty. As soon as I had a chance, I’d call her.

  I turned my attention to the photographs. Now that I knew what I was looking for, the woman with the chef’s salad no longer looked like a wren. I flipped through the restaurant scenes and came to the blank white prints, which now seemed to be sales slips of some sort. Then I passed on to the two prints at the end. This time, what I saw was less shocking than sad. Two women, engaged in something it must have been very difficult for them to start and even more difficult for them to continue. Two women, growing old, growing tired, growing lonely, looking for a substitute for something they had once found both necessary and unpleasant. Two women, forced by the cruelties of nature and age into positions so aesthetically unsuitable they could only be disgusting.

  Amelia and Myrra.

  CHAPTER 13

  “YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR mind,” Marian Pinckney said. “Do you have the faintest idea what you’re asking me to do? I can’t just go poking around in someone’s account records because you found a bunch of deposit slips.”

  “Marian,” I said. “We’ve been through this before. It’s not just a bunch of deposit slips.” I turned my back on Nick, who was pressing his face against the glass of the telephone booth door and making fish faces at me. I had been in the booth for an hour. He had been trying to get me out of it for the last thirty minutes. “Listen,” I told Marian. “You have the right to investigate what you think may be a crime, don’t you?”

  “I have no evidence of a crime,” Marian said. “And neither do you.”

  “I’ve got photographs of two people in a very compromising position,” I recited. “I’ve got photographs of incriminating documents. I’ve got a purloined love letter—”

  “Nobody gives a shit about affairs anymore,” Marian said. “How did you get in touch with me, anyway? My number isn’t listed.”

  “I called Sharon Hewitt.”

  “In Kansas?”

  “Kansas City, Missouri.”

  “My God. How’s she doing, anyway? I told her when she married that idiot she’d be miserable, and she probably is. Kansas City, Missouri. Yuck. Cows. And besides, she doesn’t have this number.”

  “She had Tania Griswald’s number, and Tania had yours.”

  “Tania Griswald lives in the British West Indies.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh Christ.” Sound of a match, heavy breathing, quick whistling exhale. “I suppose that means you’re serious,” she said. “Calling the British West Indies. Jesus H. Christ.”

  “For God’s sake, Marian, if I didn’t know you graduated Phi Bete, I’d think you were a complete idiot. Now will you listen to me? I’m sitting here with an envelope with a lot of dirty pictures in it, and hotel records, and love letters, and a full dozen deposit slips each made out to the first of the month and each for one thousand dollars cash, and if that doesn’t sound like blackmail to you, I don’t know what would.”

  “Wait,” Marian said. “Back up. What did you say? A thousand dollars a month?”

  “Cash.”

  “Always the first of the month.”

  “The first or the second or the third. I figure it’s allowing for weekends.”

  “Weekends,” Marian said. “I didn’t think of weekends. We have EFT.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind,” she said. “Just hold on. Just stay on the phone and don’t hang up. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She put the hold button on, and a very tinny band began playing “MacArthur Park” in my ear. I put the phone against my shoulder, extracted a cigarette from the pack in my pocket, and retrieved Camille from the tote bag. Nick was still leaning against the booth door. He was beginning to look angry.

  I turned my back to him again. I was going to have to tell him all about this, and after I calmed him down, I was going to have to convince him to help. I sneaked a look at him over my shoulder. It was an oddly exciting thought, working side by side with a common purpose…

  Just like a romance novel.

  I took a very deep drag on my cigarette
. Neither Miss Marple nor Hercule Poirot allowed sexual impulsiveness to get in the way of an investigation. Especially when the impulse seemed to arise from nothing but… aesthetics.

  The music clicked off. “Marian?” I said. “Are you there?”

  Inhale. Sharp whistle exhale. Small snort. “Oh, I’m here,” she said. “Now, what name did you say this account is supposed to be in?”

  “I didn’t say,” I said. “But it’s Amelia Samson.”

  “Amelia Samson the writer? Virgins in love, that one?”

  “Right.”

  “Shit. Fine. Tremendous. What’s the account number?”

  I read it off to her.

  “Damn,” Marian said. “Double goddamn.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked her, so excited I could hardly take a decent drag on my cigarette. “Do you have something on that account? Do you know something about Amelia?”

  “The only thing I know about Amelia Samson,” Marian said, “is that on the basis of her prose, she’d have failed English I at Greyson. And no, I don’t have anything on her account. I’ve never heard of her account.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, deflated. “You sounded so excited. Like you knew something.”

  “I don’t know a thing,” Marian said. “But I ought to. Oh boy, how I ought to. This thing is so screwy—”

  “There’s something I ought to tell you,” I said. “This thing is screwy. I mean—”

  “Do you know,” Marian said, “I’m the only senior vice president in charge of operations in any bank in the entire world who happens to be female? Do you know what that means? Do you know what a responsibility that is? If this thing is what I think it is, they’re every last one of them going to say it only happened at New York Guaranty because New York Guaranty was fool enough to put a woman in charge of operations. Just you wait.”

  “Well, before you go charging off, listen to me,” I said. “It’s not as easy as you think. I’m sure this is blackmail, but I don’t know who’s blackmailing who. Amelia Samson is the one in the pictures, and she should be the one getting blackmailed, but the account—”

  “No problem,” Marian said. “I know how that works.” She didn’t explain. “Where are you going to be tonight? Say, after nine?”

  I thought about it. The Line Committee meeting was set for eight-thirty.

  “I’ve got a working dinner and a meeting,” I said. “I know I’ll be in by eleven.” I gave her the number. “That’s a suite at the Cathay-Pierce. If you lose the number, ask for Miss Damereaux.”

  “Damereaux,” Marian said. “Right. You’re as screwy as you ever were. Listen, I’ve got to go put this thing in the computer. I’ll call you later and tell you what I know.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “At eleven,” Marian said.

  “I’ll be here.”

  “I still think Sharon has to be miserable among the cows,” Marian said. “Cows, for God’s sake. Whoever heard of anyone being happy about the cows?”

  She hung up before I could explain that Kansas City was a fair-sized urban district without any (or many) cows. At least, I didn’t think it had cows.

  The booth door jammed open. Nick leaned in, picked up Camille, and dropped a piece of baklava in my hand.

  “I give up,” he said. “Just tell me who’s blackmailing you.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “IF I TELL YOU TO stop,” Nick said, “you’re not going to listen to me.”

  “No.”

  The waitress brought a shot of Jack Daniel’s on a black plastic tray. Nick took it and poured it into my coffee. We were in the Castle Walk Lounge, a bar on the ground floor of the Cathay-Pierce priced for tourists and expense accounts, at a table in a window looking out on Fifth Avenue. On the street, fifty-year-old women in overpriced clothes posed at lampposts, frozen for attention.

  “Drink your coffee,” Nick said. “You’re still shaking.”

  I took a deep gulp of something that tasted like mocha medicine and put the cup back into the saucer. Outside it was getting dark, sliding into that gray half-light of New York City winters that made most of any day feel like an infinitely extended evening. We had called Phoebe, and she was coming down. It should have been a quiet time.

  If I put my hands on the coffee cup, the liquid inside jerked and waved, my fingers rattled against the glass. Nick sat in a shadow, his face obscured, his voice like God setting down the commandments, his history impossible to untangle. Phoebe said she had known him when she was growing up. Union City, New Jersey. He had gone to Harvard and been a year ahead of Daniel at the Harvard Law School. He had been in the Army and in Vietnam, but not for long. He had been a Nader’s Raider. Phoebe gave lists, not explanations.

  The lists did not explain what I was feeling. Neither did his manner. He just seemed like a very comfortable man.

  I stopped Camille in the process of burying one of the hotel’s best napkin rings in my tote bag.

  “This is getting to be a habit,” I said. “She steals things and hides them in my bag.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?” Nick said. “If you want to wait for Phoebe, we can wait for Phoebe.”

  “I don’t want to wait for Phoebe,” I said. “And the real problem is that I don’t know what’s wrong. I just know something is.” I put Camille in the tote bag and hoped she’d stay there. “We’ve got Myrra dead and Julie dead,” I told him. “I think everybody knows the two deaths are connected by now. And we’ve got this envelope. According to the people who gave it to me, Julie had the envelope. So that must be connected. But you tell me, Nick. How are they connected?”

  Nick shrugged. “Amelia was blackmailing Myrra. Myrra threatened to expose her. Amelia killed Myrra. Julie found out about it. Amelia killed Julie.”

  “In my apartment.”

  “Amelia knew you stood to inherit the apartment.”

  “No possible way,” I shook my head. “Nobody knew I stood to inherit that apartment but Myrra and her lawyers. I don’t care what kind of relationship Myrra had with Amelia. She wouldn’t have revealed the contents of that will to anyone.” I sighed. “You didn’t know Myrra,” I told him. “I did. That has to be one of my biggest problems.”

  “At the moment, your biggest problem is a grand jury indictment for second-degree murder.”

  I waved it away. “Consider the blackmail,” I said. “I don’t care what Myrra had done, if somebody had tried to blackmail her, she’d have exploded all over three continents. Myrra had absolutely no morality when it came to sex, but she was a hell and damnation fanatic when it came to money. If somebody had tried to blackmail Myrra, she’d have called the police or she’d have killed him. She wouldn’t have paid it.”

  “Doesn’t that prove my point?”

  “No. If she’d known Amelia was being blackmailed, she wouldn’t have let Amelia pay it. And let’s face it. If they weren’t blackmailing each other, somebody had to be blackmailing both of them.”

  “Myrra blackmails Amelia,” Nick said. “Amelia kills her for it. Julie finds out about it. Amelia kills Julie.”

  “What would Myrra want to blackmail Amelia for? Myrra had to be worth twenty million dollars.”

  “Twenty-six.” Phoebe slid into the booth beside Nick. Her velvet caftan was scarlet. Her eyes looked like deep black lakes set in gray and aquamarine deserts. She beamed at the two of us. We had been alone, together, talking. Love, marriage, and a house in Westchester would inevitably follow. “Someone named Barbara Gilbert called,” she said. “Is that Barbara from next door? She sounded hysterical.”

  I pushed the envelope to her. She looked inside, paled slightly, and put it down. She didn’t look surprised.

  “I don’t see how people can stand to take pictures of this kind of thing.”

  “You’re not shocked,” Nick said.

  “About Amelia and Myrra?” Phoebe put her tiny hands in her hair. “I thought that was what you meant on the phone. But it’s not that st
range, is it? They were very close. Every close friendship has a sexual basis.”

  “My God,” Nick said.

  Phoebe smiled at us like a ten-year-old child taking bows at her first piano recital. She was perfectly serious.

  “This Barbara person said there was someone lurking around your apartment,” Phoebe said. “Someone who looked like Ben Hur. Actually, what she said was, it was Ben Hur. But of course I knew she must mean looked like—”

  “It’s probably a policeman,” I said. “If there’s anyone there at all. Barbara is always seeing someone lurking.”

  “It’s not a policeman,” Phoebe said. “He got into the building and was hanging around right outside your door until she called the super and had him put out. And that’s when she got really hysterical. On the phone, I mean. The super put the man out, and he fell on the sidewalk and couldn’t get up. And he kept yelling something about not having very much time, and it was awful. I think.”

  “It’s cold,” I said. “Probably some drunk off the street.” I picked up the envelope and turned it over and over in my hands. Nick was still in the shadows, but he was watching me. I had a nearly irresistible urge to brush my hair.

  Or eat.

  Left to myself, I don’t care much about my hair and I tend to starve myself on general principles.

  “What are we going to do about this?” I asked.

  “What can we do about it?” Nick said. “Wait till your friend at the bank gets back to us.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Phoebe said. “We’ll go up and talk to Amelia. She’s having a tea. Because of the campaign.” Nick blinked, and she explained. “Amelia’s running for President of the Association,” she said. “Against Lydia.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “LYDIA WENTWARD,” AMELIA SAMSON said, “is a pornographer.”

  I had half a mind to tell her she looked like a transvestite. She sat in pompadoured splendor, flanked on either side by wrens. Her hair was piled into a lacquered mountain of strawberry blond curls. Her silver-gray dress, made of heavy brocade, was cut nearly to her navel. Her breasts, which made Dolly Parton’s look flat, were concealed by an ornate, yellow-gold breastplate sprinkled with rhinestones and ending in a choke collar disturbingly similar to the one on Amanuensis, her Siamese cat. Beside her, the wrens were dressed in brown cotton shirtwaists, each with a tiny barrette of baby’s breath and lilac in her hair, each with her legs crossed at the ankles. When Amelia said “pornographer,” they each looked painfully shocked and giggled.