Sweet, Savage Death

by Jane Haddam

  “Just let her go,” I said. “You’re making her think it’s a game. She’s loving it.”

  I decided that was suitably ambiguous and started to drift away. Nick held on to me.

  “Just a minute,” he said. “Where’s Phoebe?”

  I pointed vaguely to the back of the room. “Getting ready to come in. She’s supposed to march in all alone, of course—”

  “Of course?”

  “They never have escorts for these things.”

  “Of course.”

  He dropped Esmeralda and she dropped the girl’s dress. The girl looked at me, looked at Nick, looked back at me, and knelt down to pet the nice doggy. It gave me an obscure feeling of satisfaction.

  “I’ve been chasing around after you for the past fifteen minutes,” Nick said. “One minute you’re here, the next you’re gone. You’re all gone. The whole batch of you.”

  “Get out of the way,” I said, pushing him into the darkness. “It’s starting.”

  The lights went out. The band began “Bewitched, Bothered, and

  Bewildered.” The great double doors at the back opened and Phoebe walked in, holding a spray of baby’s breath and lavender. Behind her came the Queen of Court and her Prince, carrying roses. Behind them the girls of the daisy chain began marching up the aisle from the back.

  I peered into the darkness, trying to find Amelia or Lydia or Janine or anyone I knew. Instead I found a small girl of five or six, a straw basket of rose petals in her arms, struggling onto the dais. She crossed in front of the crowd and stood solemnly beside Miriam Schaff, who put her hand down and patted the child’s head. Then Phoebe reached the dais, and Miriam leaned down to help her up beside the microphone.

  “Phoebe Damereaux, do you accept your election as Queen of Hearts of this assembly?”

  “I do,” Phoebe said.

  Something moved at the back of the stage, something very slight, very quick. I strained against Nick, trying to see. Whatever it was moved again. I started inching toward it, hoping Nick would think I was trying to get a better look at the proceedings. There was so much stuff up there, lights and microphones and the band’s equipment. Miriam was placing the gold-plated scepter with its heart-shaped head and red and white streamers in Phoebe’s hand. Phoebe took it and stepped back. Miriam leaned over and came up with a single rose.

  “Do you accept this rose, symbol of the undying power and beauty of the love between a man and a woman?”

  “I do,” Phoebe said. She took the rose. She now had something in each hand, and I knew from experience the ceremony wasn’t half over.

  Miriam reached up and took the crown from her own head. It was a quasireplica of the English one, with a heart where the cross should be, and it was solidly encrusted with roses. It looked like the Crown of Thorns would have if it had been subjected to Miracle Gro and a good watering.

  “I present to you this crown, given to me by the first Queen of Hearts by her own hand, to wear in the hour of your glory, and to pass on to your successors.”

  Phoebe seemed unsure of what to do. Then she noticed the small, square, purple velvet pillow on the floor and knelt down on it, like Anne Boleyn at her beheading. I noticed the cameraman from Newsweek edging up to the stage.

  “Accept you this crown?” Miriam Schaff said.

  “I do,” Phoebe said.

  Miriam placed it on Phoebe’s head. It slipped over Phoebe’s ear. Phoebe put her hands up and fixed it.

  “Rise then,” Miriam Schaff said. “All hail the new Queen of Hearts.”

  “Long live the new Queen of Hearts,” everyone said.

  Phoebe looked them all over for a moment, saw me standing just beneath her, and winked. Then she turned and marched slowly and solemnly to the throne, turned again, and sat down. Somebody set off a champagne cork. Somebody else lit a sparkler. Then the lights came on, and I saw her.

  Mary Allard was at the back of the stage, caught in the wires.

  I didn’t stop to think. Mary Allard had no business back there. Nobody but the electricians did.

  I yelled, “Nick,” before I realized he wasn’t anywhere near me. I was already half onto the stage, stumbling over Miriam, tripping on wires and cables, upsetting the singer’s microphone in the middle of the first chorus of “What the World Needs Now Is Love, Sweet Love.” There was light for the first five feet and then nothing, not even shadows, just blackness. Behind me, Nick was yelling, “McKenna! McKenna! Where are you going?”

  “Maybe it’s the dog,” somebody else said.

  I saw a door, one of those heavy metal fire doors, and went through it. It was pitch-black still, but I knew where I was—in one of those back corridors hotel guests never see, used for deliveries and hiding the heating pipes and scrimping on the painting when the money gets low. I moved close to the wall and began to inch along it, listening to the sounds of footsteps coming from every side. Footsteps going up, footsteps going down. I stopped, trying to concentrate.

  Not one set of footsteps, but two. A woman’s shoes on metal. Other shoes, indeterminate, on wood.

  I left the wall and began to move slowly, quietly, into the propless blackness. The woman’s footsteps stopped, tapped, were silent altogether. The others shuffled and dragged.

  She can’t hurt me, I told myself. There are a thousand people out there. She wouldn’t hurt me.

  I reached out and touched metal. It was the wrought iron banister of a staircase, and as I ran my hand along it, I realized the stairs themselves were made of iron. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, but it was difficult to see more than shapes. I put my foot out and found the bottom stair, testing, groping. I put my hand out and felt along the risers, tracing the curve of the circular slope, sliding my fingers through the first thin rivulets of blood.

  I was still at the bottom of those stairs when Nick arrived with a policeman, a hotel security guard, and a flashlight. As soon as they got there, I held my hands up to the light, staring a little dully at the red smeared across them.

  “Jesus Christ,” Nick said. “Are you all right? What were you doing? What’s going on?”

  “Up there,” I pointed. “There’s someone up there.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They pushed past me, their shoes slapping and ringing against the metal. A few seconds later I heard Nick say, “My God.”

  That was all. They came down again, moving slowly. Nick was white. The hotel security guard, who looked like a man whose retirement moonlight had been soured forever, was green.

  “Have you any idea what’s up there?” Nick said.

  “I have not been up there,” I said.

  “Don’t go.” He knelt down beside me, taking my face in his hands. He was trying to be sympathetic. He was clumsy, but he was sincere. In another time and place I might have accepted him gladly. Just then I was frightened to accept anything at all. It was so hopeless.

  “We’re going to have to call in some heavy police,” he said. “You’d better tell me the whole thing.” I looked away, up the stairs. It wasn’t just hopeless, it was absurd. “I’ll tell you,” I sighed. “But you won’t believe me.”

  CHAPTER 30

  THERE WAS A MAN from the Manhattan district attorney’s office: a short, frightened, skinny man in a shiny brown suit with the frenetic air of the incurably lazy. Not one of the star performers, this one. Not a rising light of aggressive overcompetence on his way to the United States Senate. He was just a man, a flack, an assistant district attorney. He was three years younger than I was and looked at least ten years older.

  He was also Detective Martinez’s dream boss. The man simply wasn’t there.

  Martinez’s partner also wasn’t there. He’d never been good for anything but spouting statistics, and now he spouted too many of them, in order of what he considered importance.

  Mary Allard had died, probably within the hour, probably of knife wounds. There were nine visible knife wounds in her face, neck, and ches
t.

  She had been killed where she was found, on a landing at the top of a circular utility staircase meant as access to fuse boxes and heating ducts lodged in the ceiling.

  No purse or briefcase had been found with the body.

  No jewelry had been found with the body.

  No money had been found with the body.

  Body was discovered by Nicholas George Carras (attorney), Howard Elsen Roth (hotel security personnel), and Sergeant Thomas Belgaddio (NYPD) at 10:43 P.M.

  Miss Patience Campbell McKenna (writer) was found near the scene in apparent emotional distress.

  Apparent murder weapon, ebony-handled machete with steel blade approximately five inches long, was found lodged in the victim’s throat.

  I would say he saved the best for last, except he didn’t bother to report the best at all.

  The circular staircase was one of those latticework arrangements. Mary’s blood was dripping down from the top, falling over the risers, staining my hands.

  I just sat at the bottom with my eyes closed and my arms folded across my chest, trying to breathe. It was hard to do with Nick staring at me, still furious after my recital of “the story” from the point when I’d found Myrra’s keys to the death of Mary. It was even harder when I thought of that knife. If somebody hadn’t wiped it clean, my fingerprints were going to be all over it.

  Which would give Martinez just the opening he needed.

  Nick sat beside me, his body so rigid that if I’d flicked a fingernail against him, he’d have come apart like a sheet of ice. I had told him, and he had believed me. He had also stopped talking to me. I was a lemming, he said. I wanted to commit suicide.

  “Don’t say anything,” he hissed in my ear. “Don’t say one word.”

  “There’s nothing I can say,” I told him. “I didn’t even know who was dead until you told me.”

  “Not here,” he said. “We will hold this discussion at a more suitable time and place. Better yet, you can hold it with your lawyer, who is not going to be me.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Don’t talk to me, McKenna. I mean it. Don’t talk to me and don’t talk to Martinez and don’t talk to the judge when we get to court, because whether you know it or not, you’re going to be arraigned tonight.”

  I opened my eyes. “The man from the district attorney’s office,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  I looked up the stairs to where the little army of men was stationed. There seemed to be hundreds of them—many more than had been in my apartment. There were men with little black bags and men with cameras and a policewoman with a face Medusa would have died for. I wondered where they’d found her. The policewomen I saw on the streets were all pretty, young, attractive women.

  “What’s an arraignment, anyway?” I asked Nick.

  He sniffed at me. “An arraignment is where they ask you if you’re guilty or not guilty.”

  “For God’s sake,” I said. “I haven’t even been arrested.”

  “Give it time.”

  I looked away, back at the army of men. I thought about my father and my mother and my brother in Connecticut. I was going to have to tell them something eventually. What? That I kept stumbling over bodies the way other people tripped on the subway stairs? That everything would be all right and I’d come out of this with the fattest crime book contract in the history of publishing? That at the moment being handed over to an institution for the criminally insane would be good luck?

  It would have been better if Nick had maintained his earlier sympathy. I wanted him to hold my hand. He was sitting with his arms folded across his chest, hands under elbows.

  A door slammed open. Martinez came in on little cat feet—or elephant hooves, take your pick.

  “Miss McKenna,” Martinez said, “Miss McKenna, I would most sincerely like to talk to you.”

  He sounded anything but sincere, but I got to my feet anyway. Nick got up with me. He brushed the lint off his pants and examined his fingernails (dirty) at the same time.

  “I take it you’re her lawyer,” Martinez said.

  “For the present,” Nick said.

  “I used to know somebody else traveled with their lawyer. Bonanno family, I think.”

  “Lieutenant—”

  “Never mind,” Martinez said, turning on his heel.

  The police had taken over one of the conference rooms, a gaudy gold-leaf and red velveteen monument to bland pretentiousness that held one fake mahogany table, eighteen captain’s chairs, a blackboard, and a draw-down map of Texas. Nick and I sat across from each other at one end of the table. Martinez sat near us at the head, like a Victorian paterfamilias.

  “Should I read her her rights?” Martinez said.

  “Are you arresting my client?”

  “Somebody’s arresting your client,” Martinez said. “Mr. McReady—”

  The little man from the DA’s office bustled in, admirably on cue. His tie was twisted over his shoulder and the hair he had left hung limp with sweat against the pitted scars on his cheeks. He hurried to the far end of the table and sat down, divorcing himself from the proceedings.

  “Now,” Martinez said, looking straight at me. “Do you have any explanation for this thing? Anything at all?”

  “Don’t answer that,” Nick said.

  “This whole thing is a huge misunderstanding,” I said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Nick said.

  “A body locked in your apartment is not a misunderstanding,” Martinez said. “A second body you just happen to stumble over is not a misunderstanding.”

  “You’re assuming things,” I said. “You’re assuming Myrra wasn’t murdered by a mugger. If Myrra was murdered by a mugger, you don’t have one shred of motive—”

  “Shut up,” Nick shouted. “If you don’t want my advice, you don’t have to take it, but you don’t have to have me here representing you, either. If you want me here representing you, you will sit down, shut up, and answer only those questions I tell you to answer.”

  I folded my arms across my chest. Martinez sighed.

  “The bag,” he said. “I would like to see what’s in the bag. Can she do that, Mr. Carras—”

  Nick hesitated.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. I upended the bag on the table, letting my life spill out, cat and all. Martinez stared at the debris.

  “What is all this stuff?” he asked. “Three wallets? Why do you need three wallets?”

  “One of them’s Phoebe’s,” I said. I picked up a brown suede one and looked inside. “This one’s Hazel Ganz’s.”

  “You tell me,” Martinez said. “What are you doing with Miss Damereaux’s wallet? And Miss—”

  “Hazel Ganz,” I said. “She steals things.”

  “Hazel Ganz steals things.”

  “No,” I said. “The cat.” I gestured to Camille, who had the corner of Martinez’s ID folder in her mouth and was dutifully dragging it across the table toward the tote bag. “I put the tote bag down in the ladies’ room when we were all there, and I suppose—”

  Martinez retrieved his ID from Camille. “A kleptomaniac cat,” he said. “I don’t think I want to know anything about a kleptomaniac cat.” He waved his hand over the rest of the pile. “What else?”

  Nick coughed. “I think that’s enough of this, Lieutenant,” he said. “Perhaps you would let my client clean up this mess and return—”

  “She’s not going to return anything,” Martinez said. “How the hell do I know what’s going to be important?”

  “What do you think is going to be important?” Nick said. “This? It’s a corkscrew. This? As far as I can tell, it’s a lipstick. What about the penlight? There isn’t blood on any of this stuff.”

  He stood there waving the penlight in his hands, right under Martinez’s nose. I reached into my pocket and found my cigarettes, trying to keep my hands from shaking. We’d been looking for days, we’d been driving each other crazy, and the solution had been h
ere all the time. The only possible solution. The only sensible solution.

  Nick was standing a few feet away from me, holding the penlight like a magic wand. I was sure that at any minute Nick would flick the switch and let Martinez know what I already knew.

  He didn’t get a chance. Martinez stood up and waved around something of his own. The warrant.

  “Patience Campbell McKenna,” Martinez said, “I hereby arrest you—”

  I reached across the table and started shoving things into my tote bag, beginning with the penlight. Because, of course, it wasn’t a penlight at all. It was a magnet.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE POLICEWOMAN WITH MEDUSA’S face loved the cat. She held Camille in her lap and petted her all the time I was being booked, fingerprinted, folded, spindled, and mutilated. She made cooing noises in Camille’s ears. Camille, who began by preening and purring, ended by taking a bite out of the woman’s right thumb.

  I answered a lot of silly questions about my next of kin and marital status. I thought about that magnet. I thought about it until my head felt ready to crack open, but I still couldn’t make it all come together.

  I now knew how somebody had locked Julie Simms’s body in my apartment. Knowing how, I also knew who. Unfortunately, there was no conceivable motive whatsoever for that person to have killed not one but three of her acquaintances. Acquaintances, not even friends.

  Something was wrong at Fires of Love, I told myself stubbornly. What could go wrong that any one of the people on Myrra’s list could have caused? Every time I tried to find an answer, I came up with: nothing. I knew what it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be Farret cheating on royalty statements or foreign rights sales, because Amelia and Phoebe and Julie could not have been responsible for those crimes. It couldn’t have been a plagiarism scandal either. In that case, either one of the writers or Farret would have to be involved, and both of them could be. Marty Caine, however, could not be. There might be a conspiracy, but I didn’t believe it. And what about Julie? What could an agent do that a writer, an editor, and a marketing director could also do, at least in the way of business crime? Nothing, nothing, nothing.