Adam and Evil (An Amanda Pepper Mystery)

by Gillian Roberts

  Which is precisely what Mackenzie said.

  “How? Through a bookstore?”

  “Not one like Bauman’s, no. But it’s like art—you don’t find paintings stolen from museums for sale at the reputable galleries where the provenance of the works is known, but there are always less reputable dealers and unethical collectors, and those paintings disappear into the hands of private collectors who never show them to anyone else. They just have to have them. Collectors are a breed apart from thee and me. Go on the Net and look at the lists of stolen books people are on the lookout for.”

  I mulled this over, still without any conviction that this made sense. Some logical glue was missing.

  “To answer your question,” Mackenzie said, “sure, books get stolen, but it can’t be easy stealin’ them from a library—or one of these stores—without being caught. Emily was barely there long enough to get the drill down.”

  He spotted another of the aluminum portable kitchens on the corner across from us. This one had a line of people waiting for one of its unhealthy offerings.

  I pushed Emily to the back of my mind—still wishing, however, that I knew her way out. Since she wasn’t using it, maybe I could.

  “Popular spot,” he said. “To think we’ve never dined there before.”

  Mackenzie bought generously. You never knew who might stop by, he said. Best to have too much rather than not enough. He sounded like my mother.

  “Here you go,” the man in the instant restaurant said. The voice, I thought. That stonewashed voice.

  A bearded man handed Mackenzie the order. “Want drinks?” he asked, sounding as if pebbles lined his throat. He put sodas and bottled water on the sliver of counter, and slowly, like a Polaroid photo coming into life, I recognized the steak-sandwich maven. The Thwart Man. The library—the quarrel with the woman who turned out to be H. Emily Fisher Buttonwood. Who turned out to be dead. “Hi,” I said. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  “Wow,” Mackenzie muttered. “Your lines are real original. What next? ‘What’s your sign?’ Or ‘What’s a nice guy like you doin’ in a place like this?’”

  “Been here a while now,” the steak-sandwich man said.

  I shook my head. “No… a meeting, maybe? I heard you speak. You’re Louie. The advocate for the homeless.”

  His smile changed his face so much, I wouldn’t have recognized him at all had he been serving his sandwiches with that smile. “Louie Louie,” he said. “Louis Lewis,” he spelled out, “if you must know. You know me, huh?” he asked. “You’re in the group, too? I thought I knew all the—”

  “No, no. Not yet. Thinking about it,” I said. “So you’ve been here a long time?” Hadn’t Terry and I decided he must be a trust-fund baby? How jealous we’d been. How wildly wrong.

  “Pays the rent,” he said. “Six hours a day so’s I don’t wind up homeless, too. My uncle owns a bunch of these. Gave me the easiest shift—twelve to six. Don’t have to get up too early, don’t have to be around after dark.”

  “You’re here every day?”

  He held up a finger, as if in warning. “Weekdays only.” He looked at me, his head at an angle that was reminiscent of when I’d seen him with Emily Fisher. His stance had subtly become more aggressive. “You’re thinking this isn’t such a hot job, aren’t you?”

  “No. Why would you—”

  “Don’t bother. I know how people feel. But lemme tell you, being outside, like I am—it’s healthier. I haven’t been sick a single day since I started. Ask my uncle—I never missed one day of work. Tell me that’s true of inside jobs.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Always getting head colds or worse. You’re right, that’s amazing—a perfect attendance record. Congratulations.”

  “You are one cordial customer, Miz Pepper,” Mackenzie said as we walked away. “Unless he was an old friend. Or beau.”

  “I saw him quarreling with Emily Fisher the day she was killed.”

  “I remember now. You were pushin’ him as somebody to watch. The homeless advocate. Right. Because you decided that, against all logic, it was a part-time cheesesteak salesman who did her in, not a schizophrenic student who felt she dissed him.”

  I kept my eyes on the pavement. Frankly, I was disappointed to lose Louis Lewis as a suspect. He’d been my favorite, and not just because of his ridiculous name. Until five minutes before, I’d known nothing about him aside from that name, and he had no humanity, no identity except his anger, which I’d witnessed. It would have been so easy and remote if he’d have been the murderer, but with his unbroken attendance record at the steak kiosk, he was out, and the field narrowed ever more tightly around Adam, yet I was increasingly sure he hadn’t done it. Money was too involved with Helena and with Ray Buttonwood to be irrelevant. Money was a strong motive for what seemed a premeditated act. Adam had no motive, was not a violent person, and couldn’t have planned something that no one would see or hear, the way this murderer had.

  “Hope not,” Mackenzie said as we entered Jefferson Hospital.

  “Not what?” My thoughts were still tangled around Louie.

  “Sleuthing. You. I really hope not. You’re in enough trouble without interfering with a—”

  “Thanks. I know the drill.” I didn’t want to be annoyed with him. Not now. “Only thing I’m interfering with—we’re interfering with—is hospital routine.” I smiled. So did he. The moment was defused.

  I hated how Beth looked. All sorts of bruises had found their way to the surface overnight. “You’re doing your face in autumn colors in spring?” I said. “How daring.”

  She grimaced. I thought it was supposed to be a funny expression, although along with her multihued face, it made her look still more horrifying.

  Her leg was straight out and encased at the knee. She looked understandably unhappy and uncomfortable, and it all felt my fault—my city, my streets, my fault. But maybe she hadn’t noticed that, so I chose not to mention it.

  “Look at it this way,” I told my older sister. “Life in the big city is full of adventures. Like this one. Frankly, when’s the last time you slept with a stranger?” To her credit, Beth pretended to do the calculations. The woman she was rooming with, a grim creature who’d had foot surgery, did not adjudge my remark to be funny. Nor did she want us to think we’d get away with smuggling in cheesesteaks.

  “Against the rules,” she said. “Not permitted. I’m calling the nurse.”

  “Some people bring chocolates,” I said.

  “Chocolates don’t smell the way those things do,” she said. “It’s already making me sick. I’m calling the nurse.”

  Mackenzie was about to speak, but I put a hand on his forearm and smiled an I-can-handle-this at him.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “They are fragrant, aren’t they? I’ll just open this window a crack, and that should do it.” I stood downwind, salivating in the fumes. I was ready to eat even the paper they were wrapped in.

  “I’m ringing the nurse. Your sister is supposed to stick to the special, individualized hospital menu the dietician has worked out for her.” She’d memorized the damn puff piece the hospital provided. “She’s to behave the same way the rest of us do.”

  We explained that Beth found cheesesteaks psychologically healing, and she did not need to eat hospital food in order for her lacerations or ligaments to heal.

  The woman said, “Rules are rules.” Her thumb was on the buzzer that brings the nurse.

  “That’s true,” I said, “but isn’t it also a truism that rules are made to be broken?”

  “Not hospital rules. Not rules in my room. And to have all of you—like a dinner party—sitting around and planning to munch and chew…”

  “We’ll be so quiet and well-mannered, you’ll never—”

  “You disrupt the entire hospital and endanger sick people with your—”

  I gave her my sandwich and said I wasn’t hungry and wouldn’t she please, please try it.

  Her moral
scruples were never heard from again. Nor was she. Not even a thank-you. One small burp, and she didn’t follow it with so much as an “excuse me.”

  I tried to find the moral center of that small episode, to make it a learning experience, since it certainly wasn’t a culinary one, but all I heard from my inner self were stomach grumbles until Mackenzie, having a good laugh about my persuasive powers, shared his steak. As did Beth. “And what would you have done differently?” I asked.

  “Drawn my gun,” Mackenzie said. “Blown her away.”

  Beth was full of plans for how she was going to manage her unborn business despite being on crutches for a while.

  “I’ll help,” I promised. “I’ll be your legs. I’ll carry you around like Tiny Tim. Don’t you worry about a thing.” I didn’t have a chance to tell her how possible that was, now that I had all the time in the world, because Sam, neatly tailored and carrying his briefcase, entered at that point. I’d expected him. That’s why I hadn’t tapped the fourth cheesesteak.

  “Didn’t expect you tonight,” Beth said, her face lit with joy. Sam’s such a dry and methodical man, such a predictable and, frankly, unsexy, forgettable man, I’m always shocked to be reminded of the charge that runs between Beth and him.

  He put a small bouquet on the night table next to her. There were five enormous baskets and floral arrangements lined up on the windowsill. Beth’s friends moved speedily. “I can’t stay long. My folks can only baby-sit till seven…. You’ve gone Technicolor, Beth. Your poor face!” His words were light, but he looked as if he might cry.

  “Doesn’t hurt. Just looks disgusting. It’s a shame it isn’t Halloween,” she said.

  “We’re having dinner,” Mackenzie said. “Join us. There’s a place set for you.” He handed Sam the final white-paper-wrapped cheesesteak. Sam sighed, shook his head, said how really bad the combo of steak, cheese, and fried onions was for him, then quietly ate the whole thing.

  I wondered what Sam really thought of me. To him, I was always the troublemaker, and now I must have seemed even more of a screw-up and the cause or x factor in the accident.

  I wondered if he was right.

  “What about Ray?” Beth asked. “What about Helena? What’s going to happen to them?” Her swollen lips were set in that stern line that tolerated no nonsense. I got the sense she’d like to see them hang. Me too.

  “They released Ray last night. His nose is broken.”

  Which might make him more interesting-looking. Finally something had happened to his face.

  “I don’t care about his nose. How about arresting him for reckless driving?”

  “He wasn’t driving the car. Helena Spurry was. It was her car.”

  I don’t know why that should have so surprised me, but it did. Even the dog-faced woman in the next bed stopped chewing and looked over, as if also startled.

  “And Helena’s still in the hospital. This one, one floor up. Turns out she had a couple of broken ribs and possible internal damage.”

  “You aren’t representing her, are you?” Beth’s voice had edged toward the shrill. “That isn’t why you know those details, is it?”

  “I refused,” he said softly. “I can’t imagine why she asked me in the first place, given that my wife was her victim.”

  “Because you’re a good lawyer, that’s why,” Beth snapped. “And she is going to need one!”

  “There’s nothing to collect, though,” I said sadly. “No money there.” So no great settlement was going to pad my brand-new retirement, either. “Wish she’d married her sugar daddy, whoever he was, before going for her joy ride. Which reminds me—what were they doing together? Is Ray Helena’s secret love? That ‘prospect’ of hers?”

  Sam looked horrified. “He’s—he was—married to her sister!”

  “Like that never happens?”

  “No,” Sam said. “No. He…no.”

  “Trust the man,” Beth said. “The truth is, Sam knows who Ray is involved with.”

  “Beth,” Sam said sadly.

  “What does it matter? Emily’s dead. And she knew. We all knew.”

  Mackenzie’s beeper buzzed. Everybody was saved by the buzzer. Mackenzie excused himself to make a call, and we chatted about tiny, noncontroversial things—the quality of the food, the calls from the children, how my minor bumps and aches were coming along, and the like.

  Then my guy reappeared. “This is either good or bad news, but there’s just been a—the thing is, a witness we’ve been tryin’ to reach for weeks is upstairs here, just brought in, an’ I need to interview her as soon as possible. Very convenient and serendipitous, but sorry, Mandy. You get to go home in a taxi. Alone.”

  “I’ll take her home,” Sam said. “It’s almost on the way. I’ll get on the expressway from there.”

  I felt mild apprehension, for no obvious reason. Of course Sam would make the offer, and indeed, the Vine Street Expressway was seconds from my house; he’d have offered even if that were not so. But I felt it nonetheless, and after we finished the cursory chitchat and promised to be in touch the next day, Sam and I left, and I felt it still.

  Sam’s approach to life is straight on. If I had to draw mental charts, or diagrams of attention, most would look like the spiky mountains and valleys an electrocardiogram produces. Mackenzie’s would look like that—in duplicate, or triplicate, mountains doing a do-si-do with valleys, and all points tracking. But I envision Sam’s as a straight line. Perhaps several parallel straight lines, but they move inexorably from A to Z, with not a zig or zag en route.

  Halfway to my place, which wasn’t far away at all, I was aware of that straight line again. “Amanda,” he said in his formal manner, “I know that you’ve been upset on behalf of your student, and you’ve been trying to find other solutions to the identity of poor Emily’s murderer. I know this because Beth is now involved, and she asked me a great many questions about Ray Buttonwood’s whereabouts this past Thursday. And believe it or not, last night, at the hospital, she asked more.”

  “Because of the accident. Because it felt like he—whoever—aimed the car at us.”

  Sam sighed. “I gather they were fighting about a loan. They’d been taking care of preparations for a memorial service, neither of them willing to allow the other to plan it, and wound up fighting about money Emily had loaned Helena. Of course, that missing money is part of Emily’s estate, and her husband would inherit…or at least her son, and so it’s all a mess. The business is not a success, and unless there’s a miracle—”

  “Well, this would hardly be a miracle, but there’s supposedly a man on the horizon, a future husband.” I didn’t try to contain the contempt in my voice.

  “She mentioned him,” Sam said, “although not by name. She’s optimistic, and feels that then she could settle out this debt. But may I emphasize that the gentleman in question is most assuredly not Ray Buttonwood. I myself believe that it’s not anybody. Or rather, it’s somebody who has no idea he’s being auditioned as husband number two, or that there’s an outstanding large debt, let alone one he’s expected to pay off.”

  I wondered if Emily’s financial solution had been as illogical and unlikely as her sister’s.

  Sam cleared his throat. “Let me reemphasize that I was with Ray on that…tragic day. We were taking a deposition. He was barely gone from my sight until we were finished, well after the… sad event. There’s no rational way to think he could have done that. Or would have. He’s a good lawyer. That makes him seem fierce or unpalatable to you and Beth, and so be it. He’d argue to the death—but that’s the only way he’d kill anybody.

  “I’m sorry, Amanda, for dashing your hopes, and I’m sorry for the boy, but there is every indication, and no doubt in my mind, that your student is the perpetrator. I just hope they find him soon, and that they keep him somewhere that’s safe for him—and safe for the rest of us, too. Mostly for you. You’re too close to a disturbed young man who has already killed. Much, much too close.”

&
nbsp; Twenty

  One happy thought about being fired: I didn’t have papers to mark. Or, more accurately, I didn’t have to mark the papers I still had.

  I didn’t have calls to return, either. The answering machine was a blank.

  I could watch TV, rent a video, read a book, scrub the floors, polish my nails. Do absolutely nothing. Whatever I wanted.

  Odd that it didn’t make me happier. And odd that, having all options available, I couldn’t choose one. It was a replay of my paralysis about what I’d do if I could do anything, and where I’d live if I could live anywhere.

  I found myself behaving as if this were an ordinary Tuesday evening. I emptied my briefcase, stared at its contents, and realized as soon as I saw the worn paperback of Turn of the Screw that I’d never had the conference with Lia about her adaptation. Havermeyer be damned. I’d go back to tie up loose ends. I wasn’t walking out on Lia.

  Good. I’d done something. I’d made a decision.

  Now what? There was nothing I had to do. I put everything back in the case. And fidgeted.

  Adam. I should have made him talk longer when he’d called. Had the phone tapped. I should have ensnared him, tricked him, trapped him, allowed the police to take him in—to protect him. From me. Instead, I’d helped make him a fugitive. With a little more of my help, he was sure to land on America’s Most Wanted. But there was nothing I could do about him now.

  What should I do, then? Something different. Something I normally never had time to do. Something to signify a new, unemployed era.

  A bubble bath. The very image of leisure. A long soak in the tub. That was what I’d do with my first night of freedom. Or was that my first night of an aimless, purposeless life?

  I undressed and then considered my sweater and slacks, which had, as the day progressed, begun to feel too woolly. The wrong texture against the skin. The season had turned, and I probably wouldn’t wear them again till autumn. Time to wash and put away the sweater, have the slacks cleaned. I checked my pockets, lest I lose something for the next two seasons. Nothing, except the predictable unused, disintegrating tissue, one paper clip, and a crumpled piece of paper. I started to toss the lot until I realized what the paper was and where I’d found it: Bauman/Sabin: AL: CDPP—17K, EAPMS95K… Numbers, letters, more of the same. I remembered asking Beth if she knew what it meant. Neither of us had had a clue, and we’d renewed our search for the love letters. I must have absentmindedly stuck it in my pocket.