by Jane Haddam
“The Advisory Board,” Phoebe said now, “was because of one of those ads for a writing school. You know those ads?”
“God, yes. ‘Let us tell you if you have the talent to become a published writer.’”
“You don’t approve of them. I don’t approve of them either. They lie to people.” There was a groaning and creaking of springs. “Anyway, I was looking at one of these ads, and then I started thinking about Fires of Love. It was just after Janine asked me to do one. I’d never done a category before, but Farret was in so much trouble, and Myrra was going to do one, and I thought—”
“You thought you’d be nice.” I settled a hotel ashtray on my stomach and lit a cigarette. Camille came out from under the covers, checked out the light, and turned around to go back to sleep. I said, “You’re always trying to be nice.”
“I keep thinking of why someone would want to blackmail everyone on the Fires of Love Advisory Board, and I can’t. I mean, I can’t make it make sense. There isn’t anything.”
“Maybe, it’s something that’s coming,” I suggested. “They want to get you all to do something, so they set this thing up—”
“Set what up?” Phoebe said. “I wasn’t being blackmailed. So what was happening?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I took a drag on what had to be the filter of my cigarette and stubbed it out. “Go to sleep. We’ll think about it in the morning.”
Phoebe sighed. “It was just a publicity stunt, a lot of famous romance writers and an agent. People would look at the ads and think, with all those people involved, it must be good. You know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Pay?” Voice very high and strained. “Pay, do you think I’m famous?”
I thought about it. I never had before. Phoebe was always Phoebe. She rescued alley cats. She loved touristy restaurants. She had started just out of college in a third floor walk-up on the Lower East Side, complete with bathtub in the kitchen. Now there were ten rooms on Central Park West in the nineties and strand upon strand of rope diamonds. In less than ten years.
“Not as famous as Myrra,” I told her. “Not yet. But getting there.”
There was another creaking and groaning of springs. “Just one thing,” she said, voice very small now, “I don’t know what I think about it. You understand? I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about it.”
“Feel happy.”
“It isn’t that simple.”
A moment later, I heard the regular sawing whistle of her deep breathing. Phoebe was asleep.
I’ve always wanted to be able to fall asleep like that.
CHAPTER 23
WHAT PHOEBE SAID WAS, “Ben Hur is waiting for you in the living room. So is Nick.”
She said it to the back of my head, which was covered by a blue, red, and gold Cathay-Pierce quilt. I was trying to recuperate from having been awakened, at nine o’clock on Sunday morning, by Nick’s mother. Nick’s mother was lamenting the fact that Nick was not with her, on his way to church.
“Every Sunday morning of his life,” she said. “Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at the Greek school. He thinks he’s all grown up, he stops going to church. Does this seem nice to you?”
“No,” I said.
“Tell him I put a little bag in his pocket,” she said. “He thinks he’s all grown up, he stops eating.”
“You’ve got to wake up,” Phoebe said.
I came out from under the quilt. I made my eyes focus. It didn’t help. Phoebe looked like a large yellow beach ball.
“Your friend Barbara was right,” Phoebe said. “It was Ben Hur. I mean, of course, not the original—”
I reached for my cigarettes, found one Camille had not shredded, and lit it. Phoebe was wearing a yellow terry cloth robe in the approximate shape of a monk’s habit. That explained the beach ball.
“Nick’s mother wants to know why he isn’t at church,” I said.
“Make sense,” Phoebe said. She sat on the edge of the bed and curled her feet under her. There was nothing left of the small voice of the night before. Her eyes were bright and round. Her hair was pinned to the top of her head like a wiry, manic crown. She had been up for hours. “He’s out there eating Nick’s baklava,” she said. “He won’t talk to us. It has to be you.” She leaned forward and squinted into my eyes. “You think you’re ready to get up yet?”
I took a drag and stared at the ceiling. Phoebe not only slept well and easily, she woke immediately. She was more coherent when she first opened her eyes than I was after six cups of coffee.
“I’ll get up when you start making sense,” I said. “Ben Hur. Ben Hur cannot be in the living room of a suite in the Cathay-Pierce.”
“Not Ben Hur Ben Hur,” Phoebe said. She got off the bed and headed for the living room. “Jaimie Hallman Ben Hur.”
She had closed the door behind her when it hit me.
“For God’s sake,” I said. “Phoebe. Jaimie Hallman’s dead.”
Jaimie Hallman was not dead. He didn’t look much like the eighteen-year-old boy who’d won three gold medals in the 1960 summer Olympics in Rome. He looked even less like the too handsome young man who had been America’s favorite movie star for nearly two decades after that. But he was alive, and when I first saw him, relaxed and distracted on Phoebe’s blue velvet couch, he still had the fine-boned, almost delicate face of the kind of man people called “beautiful.”
His presumed death had been the biggest story of 1980. It still did very good business in papers like the National Enquirer. It had love and death, mystery and terror—and movie stars. Some photographer had taken a picture of the boat Hallman had been sailing before his disappearance. It drifted like a ghost ship at the edges of an expensively dredged marina. The body, needless to say, had never been found.
The body had found us. It saw me and tried to get up. Something went wrong. Its arms trembled and jerked. It smiled.
“It’s all this running around,” he said, his voice clear and distinct. “The L-dopa only does so much.”
“Mr. Hallman has been telling me why he’s supposed to be dead when he isn’t dead,” Nick said. He used his best professional voice. It annoyed me. Trying to make things make sense was laudible. Forcing them to was ridiculous. A dead person had just walked into Phoebe’s temporary living room. It was not the time or place for the American Bar Association waltz.
“Your mother called,” I told him. “She wanted to know why you weren’t in church.”
Nick’s eyes got as wild as Rasputin’s. He looked ready to kick me. His mother must have made a regular practice of this sort of thing.
“About Mr. Hallman—” he started, stiff as an old maid.
“It was a mistake,” Jaimie Hallman said.
“You people are terrible,” Phoebe said. She threw a quilt over him, poured him a cup of something from the room service tray, and started stuffing velvet throw pillows in unlikely places. In less than a minute, Jaimie Hallman looked like a goosedown mountain with a head of blond hair sticking out of it.
He smiled at Phoebe. Then he looked at us.
“She’s all right,” he said. “I walk in the door, first thing I know I’ve got tea. I’ve got bagels and cream cheese and lox. I’ve got baklava and cookies.” He looked at his lap. “Now I’ve got more tea, a quilt, and a cat.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Nick said. We both recognized the look on Jaimie Hallman’s face. It was the look Marty Caine always had whenever he spoke of Phoebe. It was the look everybody had five minutes after they met her. You had to be a close friend before you realized she wasn’t a stereotypical Jewish mother in training. Jaimie Hallman wasn’t a close friend. He was physically exhausted. For the moment, he thought Phoebe was a saint.
“Mr. Hallman’s been running around to your apartment for days,” Phoebe said. “In his condition. He has to rest.”
“I can’t rest,” Jaimie Hallman said. “I’ve been trying to tell this to somebody since Friday. The police won’t listen to
me. You were never home.”
“They sealed my apartment,” I said. I didn’t mention the smells of blood and urine, or my impulse to walk away from that apartment and everything now in it. I didn’t want to push Jaimie Hallman any farther than I had to.
Jaimie Hallman had been pushed too far as it was. He lay his head against the back of the couch and closed his eyes. The lines were deep gouges on either side of his mouth. He looked seventy instead of forty.
“It just disappeared,” he said.
“What just disappeared?” Nick and I at once.
“The knife that killed Julie. I had it.”
I thought Nick was going to cough himself into an aneurism. He got up and started pacing the room, the great bulk of him out of control. The intensity of those movements was disturbing. It was as if he were looking for a justification for violent physical activity. Having got it, he would push himself until we were all exhausted.
It was entirely out of character, but I didn’t ask what was wrong. I was edgy myself. It was Sunday morning. Things were getting too close. In a few hours, even I wouldn’t be able to pretend anymore.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Nick said. “When did you lose it? Where did you lose it?”
“It had to be before last night,” I said. “Before Leslie.”
“Leslie Ashe was stabbed with a hotel kitchen knife,” Nick said. “Myrra and Julie were stabbed with a long, thin, double-edged blade.” He stopped in mid-pace and stared at Jaimie Hallman.
Hallman stared back at us, trying to understand what was going on. Confusion made him anxious. There were creases of strain across his forehead.
“I’m sorry,” Nick said. “I didn’t mean to.”
“I lost it this morning,” he said. “In the hotel. I had it wrapped up in tissue paper. It was in my pocket when I walked into the hotel, and then it wasn’t after I got in here.”
“Did you talk to anyone?” I asked. “Were there people in the elevator?”
“I talked to everyone,” Jaimie Hallman said. “This place is packed. To the gills. The elevator was like a subway at rush hour, except I knew everybody. Janine Williams. Hazel Ganz. Amelia Samson. Half Julie’s client roster—”
“How did you know Julie?” I asked.
Jaimie Hallman’s eyes widened. “I was married to her,” he said. “In 1979. Just before—” He waved his trembling arm in the air. “Parkinson’s disease. That was why we didn’t do anything about the death reports.”
“Mr. Hallman had a boating accident in 1980,” Phoebe said, as if no one had ever heard of Jaimie Hallman’s “drowning.” “He was lost for a couple of days. He had trouble swimming.”
“Beginning of this,” Jaimie Hallman waved his arm again. “It was a mistake. The papers started saying I was dead. No one knew I was married to Julie. The way my money was set up, it didn’t matter.” He considered. “I’m not officially dead,” he said, “just missing.”
“That’s a relief,” I said.
Jaimie Hallman sighed. “It would have come out eventually. We had the baby a year and a half ago. She’s got to be taken care of. I’m calling myself Jay Simms, but I think that police detective is onto it. Onto something, anyway. The whole thing was a fluke. I’m surprised it lasted this long.”
“Specifics,” Nick insisted. “The knife. How did you get the knife?”
“If you’re thinking I killed her, forget it,” Jaimie Hallman said. “These days, the best I do is get it up. Much effort beyond that, I can’t make. The knife came in the mail.”
“What?” Actually, three “whats,” in unison.
“It came in the mail,” Jaimie Hallman said. “The morning after Julie was murdered. It couldn’t have been sent, but my doorman didn’t see anyone deliver it.” He paused. “You know, it had to be pretty early in the morning. Well before nine. By eight-thirty there would have been people around—”
“Maybe there were people around,” Nick said. “Maybe someone did see it delivered. Maybe—”
“After eight-thirty, we’ve got two doormen,” Jaimie Hallman said. “Somebody’s always at the door. Nobody saw anyone come in with a package. Nobody saw anyone they didn’t know, period. Yet when I went to the package carrels, there it was. And it wasn’t there Thursday.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Nick shook his head. “If it was a nice, middle-class-looking white woman, no one would have noticed.”
“After eight-thirty, someone would have noticed.”
Nick sighed. “Was it a long, thin, double-bladed knife?”
“It was a steel-bladed, ebony and ivory-handled machete.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Nick said.
They sat silently across from each other, looking mutually tired. Phoebe bustled. I lit another cigarette. “It would have come out eventually,” Jaimie Hallman had said. Something was beginning to dawn on me.
Logic is a wonderful invention. It is so wonderful, people often mistake it for reason. Reason, however, requires sense. Logic requires only consistency.
There was something very consistent about what had not happened to Phoebe and to Amelia Samson. If the same thing had also not happened to Julie Simms, I would have an explanation for at least half the nonsense I’d discovered this weekend.
“This business about being dead,” I said to Jaimie Hallman, “how important was it? Would you have paid blackmail to keep it from coming out?”
Jaimie Hallman blinked. Phoebe, walking by with a small tray of amorphous pastry, kicked my ankle.
“It was a joke,” Jaimie Hallman said. “There’s this psychic who works for the National Enquirer.” He blushed. “You know those stories? Jaimie Hallman speaks from beyond the grave? They’re true. I go to this psychic and—uh, appear. If you see what I mean.” He gave a tentative shrug. “It keeps the residuals coming in.”
“But no blackmail going out.”
“None at all. It was going to come out when it came out. Lately I didn’t really care. In the beginning—” He stared at his right thumb, twitching and jerking as if it was on strings. “Julie and I were pretty good together,” he said finally. “She cared, but she didn’t really mind. She wasn’t in it for Jaimie Hallman, movie star. I think I wanted to be dead, in the beginning. She got me over it.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Just what I thought.”
CHAPTER 24
SOMEONE, PROBABLY THE LAWYERS, had changed the locks on Myrra’s apartment. I should have expected it. At the very least, I should have come prepared for it. Everything else was wrong, upside down, frustrating. Why shouldn’t Myrra’s locks be changed?
I tried my keys twice, gave up, and got out my credit cards.
“Phoebe taught me to do this,” I told Nick.
He stood in the narrow back hall, arms crossed over his chest, fuming. I concentrated on the door and reminded myself it was enough that he had come. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t like sneaking in the service entrance of the Braedenvorst and taking a freight elevator to the twelfth floor. It was a tribute to the lifetime influence of Phoebe Damereaux that he had agreed to this expedition.
“There are several things wrong with this,” he said. “For one thing, we’re breaking and entering. For another, someone may be in there. For a third—”
“I can’t break in to something I own,” I said. The lock jerked, wobbled, caught again. I reapplied the credit card. “We’re going in the back way,” I said. “It’s Sunday afternoon. It’ll be all right.”
“It would be better if you told me what you were doing,” Nick said.
The lock snapped. I turned the knob and opened the door onto another narrow back hall, the “servants’ hall” in Myrra’s ancient, oak-paneled apartment. I peered into the darkness. If Martinez didn’t get me convicted of murder, I would own this apartment, and everything in it as of the day Myrra Agenworth died. I would have to sell the paintings and the furniture just to pay the maintenance.
I took Nick by the wrist and pulled him inside. “Think l
ike Myrra,” I told him, creeping through the hall.
He stopped. He took off his shoes. He looked—endearing, padding along in his socks.
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” he said.
We went through a swinging door into a large, more expensively decorated hall. Large, dark rooms opened on either side. I stuck my head in each one. Bed followed bed. Draped damask canopy followed draped damask canopy.
“Go at it the other way around,” I said. “Marian Pinckney says there were seven blackmail accounts in the New York Guaranty. One was Myrra’s. One was Julie’s. Of the other five, Phoebe, you and I have, individually or jointly, talked to four. I don’t know about Lydia, but Amelia, Marty Caine and Jaimie Hallman definitely say there wasn’t any blackmail. Phoebe and I figured it out about Janine. She didn’t have the money to be paying someone a thousand dollars a month.”
“So somebody’s lying,” Nick said.
“Not exactly.”
Myrra’s study was the last room on the left. I turned on the electrified brass chandelier that hung from the center of the twenty-foot ceiling. Even then, the room was dark. Blood-colored drapes covered the windows. A bloodred carpet barely covered the dark wood floor. Heavy lamps and overstuffed chairs crowded along the wall.
Myrra’s desk was an ornate rosewood secretary, the kind with five or six secret drawers. Its polished wood surface had never known a typewriter. Myrra dictated her novels while lying in the heart-shaped sunken bathtub—or said she did. They all had odd places for writing or dictating: in bed, while flying, only after making love. Phoebe would have to invent something like that. It didn’t do just to write at a desk.
Beside me, Nick shifted, nervous, jumpy, resentful. “If you’re so smart,” he said, “tell me about the knife. What was Jaimie Hallman doing with it?”