Sweet, Savage Death

by Jane Haddam

  “The knife is easy,” I told him. “Husbands kill wives. Just in case I didn’t make it as a suspect, whoever would at least have Jaimie Hallman to take up the slack.” I ran my hand along the underside of the top shelf, found a knob, and pulled. Nothing happened. I pushed. Nothing happened. “It’s got to be here somewhere,” I said.

  “What does?” He sounded ready to strangle me, but I ignored him. It was Sunday afternoon. Anybody in this apartment would be breaking and entering even more surely than we were. As I continued to point out to Nick, I was at least the heir apparent.

  “Think like Myrra,” I told him. “Look at what you have. You’ve got something wrong at Fires of Love. We don’t know how she found that out, but she did. There’s something wrong at Fires of Love—”

  “But we can’t know that,” Nick protested. “There isn’t one thing to indicate anything’s going wrong at Farret.”

  “Not at Farret,” I said. “At Fires of Love. Fires of Love is the Advisory Board as well as the editorial and marketing staff. And we know it’s Fires of Love because of the blackmail list. Phoebe figured that out yesterday. Last night. Whenever. At any rate, think like Myrra. You’re a fanatic about business honesty. You want to get this person, only you’re not exactly sure who it is, and you don’t have any way to find out. Maybe you know it’s nothing illegal, just unethical. Maybe it’s illegal, but you don’t know how it’s being done, or you can’t prove it. Whatever it is, it can’t be corrected through normal channels. Being Myrra, you’d use normal channels if you could.”

  “Being me, I’d use normal channels if I could,” Nick said drily.

  “All right,” I said. “But you’re Myrra. And you can’t use normal channels. For some reason, this time that won’t work. Whoever it is, is going to get away. But you won’t let them. The idea infuriates you. Any one of these seven people could have done it, and when you find out who it is, you’re going to get them. Good.”

  “So you blackmail seven people, including yourself?”

  “No, no,” I said. “You don’t blackmail anybody. You’re Myrra, remember. You’d never do anything like that.”

  “Somebody did something,” Nick said. “There are seven live accounts wandering around.”

  “I know,” I said. “But nobody blackmailed anybody. We haven’t found one person who admits to being blackmailed.”

  “Exactly.” Nick raised a single finger. “Who admits to it.”

  “Phoebe is not being blackmailed,” I said. “If Phoebe is not being blackmailed, and money’s going in and out of her account anyway, then that’s probably what’s happening to the rest of the accounts. Or do you think somebody’s paying Phoebe’s blackmail for her?”

  Nick shook his head. “No,” he said. “I do not think someone is paying Phoebe’s blackmail for her. That would be a bit much, even for Phoebe.”

  I smiled, meaning to blither about Phoebe, our only neutral subject. Then my hand hit something under the second shelf. I ran my fingers along the rough edge of a peg, then pushed it slowly, carefully toward the back of the cabinet.

  A door in the cabinet’s face sprung open like a jack-in-the-box.

  Plastic cards cascaded down to the lacquered writing surface.

  Leslie Ashe, edging into the room through the double doors from the sitting room, said,

  “Oh, bloody hell.”

  CHAPTER 25

  LESLIE ASHE HAD NOT been cut on the face. Her right arm was in a sling, her left arm had bandages to the wrist, and she looked pale, but she hadn’t been cut on the face. I tried to remember who had told me that she had been, but I couldn’t. I was too distracted by the fact that Leslie Ashe was nothing at all like Gamble Daere.

  Leslie Ashe and Gamble Daere were the same person. I knew that. Their features were identical. Gamble Daere, however, was a flake. It was in the way she stood, the way she moved. Leslie Ashe was a healthy, stolid, almost clumsy English girl of the kind fond of walking tours. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail. Her head was firmly planted on her neck.

  I wanted to congratulate her on having managed so complete a transformation. If I had been sure of her good will, I would have. Instead, I stood back to let her look over my shoulder at the plastic cards on the desk.

  She said, “Oh.”

  “Oh shit would be more like it,” I said.

  “They won’t tell you anything,” she said. “I tried. I can’t see Aunt Myrra—” She said “aunt” with an “ah,” the way we do in Connecticut. Phoebe says “ant.”

  “I can’t see Myrra, either,” I said. “I don’t think she did. I don’t think anybody blackmailed anybody.”

  We nodded gravely to each other.

  “Nobody blackmailed or everybody blackmailed,” Leslie said. “One thing makes as much sense as the other.”

  “Would somebody please tell me what’s going on?”

  We both looked at Nick and blinked. He seemed unnecessarily wrought up, as if he was responding to a calamity neither Leslie nor I could see. We were caught in our speculations, as if speculations were all that mattered. We had known Myrra. We were united in having known Myrra.

  I reminded myself I did not know Leslie Ashe. She could have come from England to murder Myrra. I didn’t believe it—she seemed too ruthlessly sensible for that—but she stood to inherit ten times the value of the apartment. She would have good reason to frame me too. If I were convicted of Myrra’s murder, I would not be allowed to inherit the apartment. It would revert to the DeFord estate, and to Leslie herself.

  I turned my attention to Nick. He was still confused, and beginning to look angry.

  “Nobody blackmailed anybody,” I said. “Myrra set up the accounts. Myrra made up Amelia’s envelope, and probably others. Myrra deposited the money and took it out.”

  “Whatever for?” Nick put his head in his hands. Wiry tufts of black hair stuck through the spaces between his fingers. “Why in the name of God would anyone—”

  “To get back at someone,” Leslie said. “To catch someone. I hadn’t thought of that.” She nodded vigorously. “I’ll have to tell Teri about that. It’s the first thing that’s made any sense since we got here.”

  “Who’s Teri?” I asked.

  Leslie blushed. “The blond woman,” she said. “The one the other day at the conference. I didn’t mean to cause you a lot of trouble—”

  “You just wanted to get the blackmail envelope out of your hands,” I said. “Did you find it here?”

  “With the cards. And a list of secret numbers. Julie Simms never had it, of course. I just needed a reason to give it to you…” She shuffled her feet against the floor. “I tried to use Myrra’s card in the machine,” she said, “but the numbers weren’t labeled, and it didn’t work.” She tugged at the sling on her arm, frowning. “I’ve been over everything in the apartment. I’ve been over Myrra’s royalty statements and those computer reports they send her. I’ve read her mail. I haven’t found anything.”

  “It couldn’t be royalty statements,” I said. “Myrra knew royalty statements. She could read a printout at two hundred yards.”

  “You’re running on the assumption that Aunt Myrra got killed because she found out who was doing whatever?” Leslie asked. I nodded. “Okay,” she said, “why’d it take her nine months?”

  We made a list of everything that had happened in November that might or might not have tipped Myrra off to who was doing what. We made a list of everything that might have alerted someone to the fact that Myrra was investigating whatever they were doing. We made a list of everything that could have gone wrong at Fires of Love. Leslie made coffee in Myrra’s barn-sized kitchen. Nick passed out baklava. None of us got anywhere.

  “We’ve got to assume Myrra knew what,” Leslie said. “Or approximately what.”

  “We’d better say approximately,” Nick said. He rescued a silver coffee spoon from Camille, who was trying to drag it into my tote bag. He picked her up and held her a
gainst his chest. “We can’t think of one damn thing all seven of these people are capable of.”

  “As applied to Fires of Love,” I said.

  “As applied to Fires of Love,” he agreed. “Let’s do this another way.” He turned to Leslie. “Let’s look at last night. You told Martinez it couldn’t have been Pay who stabbed you.”

  “A small person,” Leslie said. “Smaller than I am. Head came up to about my shoulder. I’m five ten.”

  “Mary Allard,” I said. “Amelia.”

  “Possibly Mary Allard,” Leslie said. “Not Amelia. I’d have known if it was someone that fat. It could have been Teri, except I think I would have recognized Teri. And she was supposed to be on her way out of town.”

  “Could it have been a man?” I asked. “Marty Caine?”

  “It could have been Marty Caine. Or Janine Williams. Or Phoebe Damereaux.” I blanched, but she didn’t notice. “It could have been that girl, the one who’s always lecturing people about contracts and pseudonyms—”

  “Hazel Ganz,” I said.

  “Hazel Ganz. I didn’t get a chance to see anything. I walked in, I put my hand on the light switch, and the next I remember there were police. The room was all torn up. I don’t remember it happening.”

  Nick put cream in the blue china saucer to his coffee cup, put Camille down beside it, and watched her drink. He was beginning to get shadows under his eyes and fine red lines on his nose.

  “Why did you go up there in the first place?” he asked.

  Leslie shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought something might be there. I—well, I still thought Myrra was blackmailing people. It didn’t make sense, but I did. And Janine Williams and Marty Caine were two of them.”

  “Mary Allard knew you were going up there,” I said. “Why tell her? She rode up in the elevator with you.”

  “And kept riding,” Leslie insisted. “And I didn’t really tell anyone. They’ve got a lot of Myrra’s books in the Farret suite. I said I wanted to go up and get them.”

  “Said to who?” Nick asked.

  “Oh, a whole lot of people. Amelia Samson was buying drinks. There was a table full of people from the conference. Everybody we’ve been talking about but Phoebe, I guess.”

  We stared at each other, tired, depressed, hopeless. Camille stepped in her cream and made tracks across the table. I lit a cigarette and watched the light fade outside the kitchen window. There comes a point when you can’t think anymore, and I was past it.

  I was also due at the AWR Cocktail Reception, in the Starlit Room of the Cathay-Pierce, at seven-thirty. So was Leslie. So was Nick.

  So was Mary Allard, who had been the first person to realize that the knife used on Leslie Ashe was not the knife used on Julie or Myrra.

  CHAPTER 26

  IF I HADN’T BEEN PREOCCUPIED, I would have noticed. Instead, I was busy with Nick—a Nick who seemed to have undergone a sea change in the short cab ride across the park. He left me to pay the cab driver while he headed into the Cathay-Pierce at a near run. He glared at the women waiting for elevators as if they had personally offended him. He pushed me into a crowded car as if he was forcing meat into a sausage casing. Approached by Janine, by Marty Caine, by Hazel Ganz—by everyone I or Phoebe had introduced him to at the conference—he stared resolutely at the ceiling. I stared at the ceiling, too. The atmosphere in that elevator was so foul, I was afraid to inhale.

  When we got to the suite, he marched through the living room, closed himself in Phoebe’s bedroom, and started making phone calls. Phoebe watched him go with a shrug.

  “What happened?” she asked me.

  I told her. I told her everything, up to and including the scene in the elevator. Then I settled back to watch Camille try to steal the couch. Camille was making a habit of stealing, though she preferred objects small enough to hide in my tote bag.

  Phoebe paced the carpet, stopped, paced again, stopped. She stared through the bedroom door at Nick hunched over the phone.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Nothing happened. He only gets that way when things are totally fubar.” She considered. “Maybe worse.”

  “Things are the same as they always were,” I said, “except that Myrra was doing God knows what, for God knows what reason. And I don’t know how to separate Myrra’s nonsense from what’s really important.”

  “Concentrate on your apartment,” Phoebe said.

  I concentrated instead on getting ready for the cocktail party. I took a very long shower under a needle-hard spray and thought of nothing, not even home and Connecticut and my Christmas stocking. I put on black satin evening pajamas. I gave my hair five hundred strokes with a wire brush. I sat down at the vanity table for a nice long session with my makeup.

  My sessions with makeup are always long. I wear it only when I must also wear evening dress, so I have no idea what to do with it. I stare at the mirror and draw and dab. I let myself drift and forget what I’m doing. I dream.

  This time I dreamed my favorite dream: I am sitting up in a large bed, a dozen feather pillows propped behind my back. The sheets are starched white Irish linen. The quilt that covers them is goosedown. On the night table to my right is a glass of Bailey’s Old Irish Cream liqueur. In my hands is a country house murder or a good ghost story. Outside it is snowing.

  I could go on like that forever.

  I had tried and rejected three different faces when Nick came in, looking haggard and furious. The odd intensity of mood I had first noticed in him this morning was still with him. It seemed to have neither direction nor release.

  “I was off the phone for one second,” he said. “Amelia Samson called.”

  “What did she want?”

  “How am I supposed to know? I told her you were out.”

  He tramped back to the bedroom. I followed him, my face slicked over with cold cream. I found him sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched over the phone like a gambler with a double or nothing on a long shot.

  He hung up a few moments later. I was sitting on the far side of the room, smoking a cigarette and staring at his back, but he didn’t turn around.

  “That apartment,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much trouble we were in until I saw that apartment. I called Martinez.”

  “What did he say?” The idea of Nick talking to Martinez made me queasy. It called up visions of peace talks and generals and two nations searching for an honorable way to end the war. I didn’t want to end this particular war.

  “We can’t bargain,” Nick said. “I knew that. Now I know I know that.”

  “I don’t want to bargain.”

  He didn’t answer. My words floated in the silence, stinging my eyes like smoke. I’d spent twenty-four hours treating Nick Carras like a cardboard dress-up doll, suitable for carrying doped-up romance writers through hotel hallways and breaking into sealed apartments, and now he was sitting with his back to me. My one defense against Martinez. The one person who both wished me well and could do something about it.

  I started thinking about my parents, my niece and nephews, my brother and sister-in-law. I hadn’t even called them since all this started. I hadn’t shopped for Christmas presents.

  I was too tired to think. I was disintegrating into irrationality. It was ridiculous to think I was falling in love with a man I had not only met the day before, but not bothered to notice until the last five minutes. I said, “I didn’t kill Julie Simms. I didn’t kill Myrra.”

  “I know that.” Now he turned to face me, but he didn’t leave the bed. I thought crazily that he didn’t want to come too close to a murderess.

  “Martinez has been working all weekend,” he said. “So has the district attorney’s office. They’re going to bring you before a grand jury next week. Maybe even tomorrow. And they’re going to get an indictment.”

  “An indictment isn’t everything.”

  “If we went to trial tomorrow, you’d be convicted.”

  “We aren’t going to trial tomorro
w.” Now the tears were really close, the tears and the tiredness. I wanted to curl up in a dark closet with a blanket and the cat. “We’ll have months and months,” I said. “A lot of time.”

  “We’ll have our fingerprints all over Myrra Agenworth’s apartment. All over her desk. All over her private papers.” He sighed. “We shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Why not?” I asked him. “We can’t just sit around doing nothing. Martinez isn’t even looking for alternatives.”

  “I know he isn’t. But you didn’t kill Julie Simms, and you didn’t kill Myrra, and he has to prove his case. We’ve got the time factor.”

  “Murder suspects don’t get out on bail,” I said. “They won’t let me go to Connecticut for Christmas.”

  “McKenna—”

  We both knew I was being unreasonable. I knew he was trying to give me good advice. I didn’t want to hear it. I got up and headed for the dressing room.

  “You ought to start getting dressed,” I told him. “We’re due downstairs any minute.”

  “McKenna.”

  I shut the door of the dressing room. I sat at the vanity mirror and looked at my eyes. Puffy and red—even the threat of tears does that to me. It was so odd to feel frightened and resentful at once. The fear made me want to throw myself in his arms. The resentment—why couldn’t we conduct an independent investigation? why couldn’t we come up with our own solution?—made me want to kill him.

  I pulled my tote bag into my lap. It was full of lipstick cases and rouge bottles, dragged there by Camille, who protested their removal by digging her nails into my fingers. I took her out and put her on the table, where she started worrying one of Phoebe’s sterling silver compacts. Then I started searching for my eye shadow.

  I was on my third try when I felt them. There was a bent prong. I nicked my finger.

  I pulled my hand out and stared at the blood. I could not possibly have known what cut me, but I did. I truly did. It figured.

  There was a knock on the door and Nick said, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I’ll only be a minute.”