Wicked, Loving Murder

by Jane Haddam

  This time, I found Martinez. Martinez likes working eight to four, although he only manages that shift one week out of three. He likes getting up at six. He eats breakfast.

  “Meet you downstairs in twenty minutes,” he said. “Got some stuff to tell you.”

  “I’ve got to feed the cat,” I said. “Come up.”

  “Can’t come up. I’m alone.”

  I was about to ask him whether it was Anita or the police department who didn’t approve of his being alone with me in my apartment, but the dial tone had already begun buzzing in my ear. I replaced the receiver in the cradle and started shuffling back to the bedroom wing. Camille dug her claws into the hem of my flannel nightgown and let herself be dragged along. Cats are very practical animals. Camille had been left without dinner last night until after ten. She had no intention of letting me get away before she had a full dinner dish to stand guard over.

  When I got down to Martinez, I was wearing ragged jeans, a ten-year-old nylon turtleneck (I’d never found another turtleneck that hugged me quite that way), an extra-extra-large gray wool sweater that hung to just above my knees, and mismatched socks. Martinez noticed the socks.

  “We’ll get a cab,” he said. “I’ll take you to work. I’ll tell you all about it. Fascinating group you’ve got there.”

  “For God’s sake,” I said.

  “Anybody’s sake you want, sweetheart.”

  “It’s quarter to eight,” I said. “I can’t go down there at quarter to eight. Nobody will be there.” Except Marty Lahler, I thought. If I went down to Writing Enterprises at some ridiculously early hour, Marty Lahler would be waiting for me just beyond the elevator doors. He’d be there even if he’d never been that early for work in his life.

  “Besides,” I said, “I don’t want to go down there. If I could skip it today, I would.”

  “You had any coffee yet?”

  “No.”

  “Cigarettes?”

  I was holding a lit cigarette in my hand. “Number two,” I said, waving it.

  Martinez put his hands in the pockets of his down jacket “I’ll buy you breakfast at the Lincoln Square Coffee Shoppe,” he said. “When you get to your third cup of coffee, I’ll start talking sense.”

  I do not like people doing these things to me. The Lincoln Square Coffee Shoppe is directly across what looks like a six-lane highway from Lincoln Center. The six-lane highway is really the merging of Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. The Lincoln Square Coffee Shoppe has very strong coffee and large plate glass windows looking out on the city. I love the Lincoln Square Coffee Shoppe.

  I started tramping west along Seventy-second Street, determined to give in with bad grace. A thin wash of snow was coming down in the not-quite-dawn. The brownstones had frosted windows and small piles of snow on the windowsills. There was no traffic. I comforted myself with the thought that I didn’t really like New York without traffic.

  Martinez caught up to me when I turned south on Columbus. Seventy-second Street and Columbus combines East Side architecture with West Side outrage. Through the smoke gray windows of Betsey Johnson, I could see a group of mannequins dressed in red and black polka-dot versions of what Victorian prostitutes probably wore for underclothes.

  Martinez caught up to me at Sixty-eighth Street and started pushing me down the block.

  “Stephen Brookfield,” he said. “I’ve been over and over it, and Stephen Brookfield is the key.”

  We got to the door of the Lincoln Square Coffee Shoppe. I marched inside. Since it was nearly deserted, I marched to the booth farthest from the door but still against the windows. The waitress must have seen my face as I walked in. She arrived with coffee before I had a chance to sit down.

  “Stephen Brookfield,” Martinez repeated, sliding into the bench on the opposite side of the booth.

  I drank half the coffee. I motioned for the waitress. I drank the other half of the coffee while she stood over me. Then she gave me a refill.

  I lit another cigarette and said, “Michael Brookfield. The key to this whole thing is Michael Brookfield.”

  Martinez shrugged. “What do you want to know about Michael Brookfield? He was an asshole. He was an embezzler. He’s dead.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “He was even an asshole embezzler,” Martinez said. “You know what he did? He ran that division, that newsletter thing. People sent in subscriptions for newsletters. Some of them sent the money in cash. He took the cash. It would have taken a genius to cover tracks like that. He was no genius.”

  “He didn’t cover his tracks,” I said. “Everybody knew about it. I mean everybody. And what about his girlfriend?”

  “She’s been in St. Moritz since December. She’s found another Michael Brookfield. This one has family money.”

  “Bully for her,” I said.

  Martinez let out an exaggerated sigh. “Do you want to hear what I’ve got to tell you? Are you going to listen to me?”

  The coffee had woken me just enough to give me access to my long-term memory. I dragged a few things out of there: pictures at a police exhibition, tableaux of a lecture course on the art of murder.

  “ ‘The key to a murder is always in the life of the murder victim,’ ” I recited. “You told me that.”

  “I know I told you that. It’s true ninety-nine percent of the time. This is the other one percent.”

  “How do you know it’s the other one percent? He must have done something to get himself murdered.”

  “Michael Brookfield was an embezzler and an expensive-woman addict. No one is going to murder him for embezzling. The expensive woman is in St. Moritz.”

  “Then it’s something else,” I said.

  “Of course it is,” Martinez said. “Something he saw, or heard, or read. Something to do with that—that situation down there.”

  “Did you make Janet what’s-her-name keep her mouth shut about Ivy?”

  That made Martinez sit up straight. It made him do more than that. He lit a Camel. He put it out, took out a second, and lit that. He drummed his fingers on the table. I sat and watched him, wondering what it all meant. I had never seen him nervous before. Even when he was handing me police department information I had no right to have, he wasn’t nervous.

  He looked out the window at Columbus Avenue. “I thought she was a friend of yours,” he said.

  “I met her for the first time Friday. And that’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  I was on my third cup of coffee. I was awake. My mind was working double time. My paranoia was to the front and pumping. The things Martinez was doing only made sense one way. The way they made sense made me think I’d never really liked him at all. It reminded me I hadn’t liked him in the beginning.

  Make it simple, I thought. Martinez himself had told me that. Make it simple. Martinez was making it more complicated. Every time he talked to me about the murder, it got more complicated.

  “I think you’re setting me up,” I said.

  He got very stiff. “What do you mean, setting you up?”

  “Ivy was there at the right time. There are suggestions of blackmail. Nobody would murder Michael Brookfield because he was an embezzler. The girlfriend is in St. Moritz. But someone might have murdered Michael Brookfield if he were a blackmailer.”

  Martinez got even stiffer. “There isn’t any evidence of blackmail,” he said. “Don’t think we haven’t looked for it, either. There isn’t a dime in his bank account that can’t be explained by his salary or his embezzling. Not a dime.”

  “You knew Ivy had been there. Janet knew Ivy had been there. Everybody at Writing Enterprises is a gossip, as far as I can tell. Janet hasn’t said anything to anybody.”

  “I didn’t ask anybody named Janet not to say anything to anybody.”

  “Right,” I said.

  He put his cigarette out. His eyes were very dark and very cold. “Do you intend to tell me what I’m supposed to be doing? Or am I supposed to
guess?”

  “You keep telling me things,” I said. “Things about the Brookfields, about the ‘situation’ at Writing Enterprises. You want to focus my attention on that. You don’t care about that. If I concentrate on the Brookfields, you can concentrate on Ivy. You can build a case and make an arrest and not worry about any interference from me.”

  “Shit,” Martinez said.

  “That’s exactly what I think it is,” I said. “Shit.”

  “Just tell me this,” Martinez said. “Stephen Brookfield is clean. He makes fifteen grand a year, he lives in a rattrap, and he’s clean. Does that make sense to you? Jack is stealing the petty cash, Michael is cooking his books, but Stephen is clean. Does that make sense to you? Tell me. Just tell me.”

  SEVENTEEN

  I DIDN’T WANT TO tell him anything. I left him with the coffee and the bill and ran out to hail the first cab cruising south. I got one very quickly. If I hadn’t, I might have started to walk. I didn’t want to stand out on the street, waiting for Martinez to catch up with me.

  I was more than halfway to Gramercy Park before I realized I’d started a fight for no reason at all. I’d started a fight because I wanted to start a fight. Not that I wasn’t suspicious—God only knows Martinez wasn’t making much more sense than anyone else—but I wasn’t being fair, either. I didn’t want to be fair. I wanted—

  —an out. It hit me just as I was paying off the cab driver on Park Avenue South. From the beginning all I’d wanted was an out. I didn’t want to play detective. I didn’t want to write a book about the second murder case I’d been involved in. I didn’t want to see any more pictures of myself in the New York Post. I didn’t like murders and I didn’t like murderers and I didn’t like this feeling that everything was coming down on my head. Last time, I explained the roof-caving-in feeling as a result of being suspected of the crime. This time, no one suspected me of anything, unless you counted the main crime reporter for the Post, which I didn’t. If the roof was caving in, it was because I wasn’t suited for this work. I might be suited for researching and writing up crimes after they’d happened, but I had no business involving myself in ongoing investigations.

  If I wanted out badly enough to start a full-scale war with the detective lieutenant in charge of a murder case I was even marginally connected with, I ought to get out.

  I got into the one working elevator just before the doors closed. I leaned against the door and lit a cigarette under the No Smoking sign. The only way to get out was to quit my work with Writing Enterprises. I couldn’t see any way to do that. Phoebe and the rest of them had a legitimate problem. They had a legitimate lien on my time and energy. I owed those people. Some of them had helped when I was first starting out in New York and making no money. Some of them had helped when I was suspected of murdering Myrra Agenworth. Some of them had helped afterward, when I was first trying to write the book for Doubleday and coming apart at the seams every time I approached the material.

  The elevator stopped on twenty and I got out. The reception area was empty. Either I was early or Janet never spent any time at her desk. I decided both halves of that statement were true.

  I started down the hall corridor, half-walking, half-running. Felicity Aldershot was in her office. She looked up as I came by, waved, and went back to the papers on her desk. I had a pile of articles on my desk, all with questions penciled in the margins. I would have to take the questions up with Alida and Felicity sometime. I would have to check the mechanicals. I would have to fight about the placement of ads. I could not just stop coming in to the office.

  There was a light in Jack Brookfield’s office. The door was open. Inside, a voice I recognized was going on and on, filling the air with pointed little jabs.

  “I’ve got a lawyer,” the woman was saying. “I’ve got a lawyer and I’ve got evidence and I’m going to sue.”

  It took me a while to place her. Then it hit me. The woman with the social worker’s face. Mrs. Haskell. The woman who’d sent her manuscripts to Literary Services and thought she’d been cheated.

  “I assure you,” Jack Brookfield was saying, “everything has been done in accordance with our contract. No matter how eminently publishable your manuscript is, there is no way to guarantee publication. Publication depends on editors. Editors have their private tastes and opinions, just like anyone else. Publishing is not a monolithic—”

  His voice trailed off. I rounded the corner and stepped into the back corridor. Marty Lahler was just coming out of his office. I did a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and headed back in the direction I’d come.

  There had been a light on under Alida’s door when I first came in. Alida was probably at her desk. I’d learned a few things from my short association with Writing Enterprises. One of the things I’d learned was that Alida Brookfield was cheap.

  I couldn’t stay away from the office forever. I might, however, be able to stay away for a while. Long enough, for instance, to let Martinez get the murder cleared up. Mechanicals and advertisements had to be handled in the office. Manuscripts I could edit sitting in a bath.

  “Publication,” Jack Brookfield was saying, “is difficult to achieve at the best of times, because the publishing community, at least in its national incarnation, is so limited and close-knit. Now, if you try—”

  Felicity Aldershot was on the phone. “… figures for the first half of last year,” she was saying, “giving us an idea of the overruns and the distribution…”

  Stephen Brookfield passed me in the hall. He looked more deathly pale than usual.

  I got to Alida Brookfield’s door. I knocked twice and got no answer. I knocked again. That time, the door pushed open, creaking on its hinges. It was so much like an American International horror movie, I almost giggled.

  Instead, I stifled nerves and merriment and stepped inside. Alida was sitting in her swivel chair, her back to the door.

  The ends of the typewriter ribbon were dangling over the chair back, blowing in the slight breeze from a partially opened window.

  I didn’t feel, or think, or react. There was nothing to feel or think or react to.

  Even when I had backed out of the office and turned to face the hall, even when I had seen Ivy hesitating midway down the corridor to the reception area, I wasn’t able to feel anything but numb.

  EIGHTEEN

  IT WAS WORSE THAN the first time—faster, colder, more efficient. The police seemed less like an invading army than a continuous presence. The hallway was cordoned off. The staff was pulled out of its offices and herded into the reception area. The fingerprint men and the photographers and the man from the medical examiner’s office went back and forth, making notes in pocket notebooks.

  Martinez wasn’t talking to me. He brushed by me twice without even looking at me. He finally handed me over to Tony Marsh. Tony Marsh’s Boy Scout face looked shell-shocked.

  “He doesn’t seem to want to ask you any questions,” Tony said. “I’m supposed to ask you questions. I don’t know what questions to ask you.”

  “Maybe I should just make a statement,” I said. I was having a hard time keeping my eyes up. My head wanted to fall to my chest. My body wanted to go slack. My exhaustion had to be emotional, but that didn’t make it feel better. I was physically sick with it.

  Tony was pleased with the idea of taking my statement. He knew how to take a statement. He spread his shorthand notebook on Michael Brookfield’s desk, picked up his pencil, and waited patiently.

  Michael Brookfield’s office had been under police seal. I had never seen it. I looked around and decided I hadn’t missed anything. It was a medium-sized office, neither shabby nor spectacular. It was absolutely clean. There was no evidence Michael Brookfield had ever done any work here.

  “Did you clean it out like this?” I asked Tony. “It looks barren.

  “It was barren,” Tony said. “I mean, everything’s here that was here in the beginning. In the beginning of the investigation, that is. We didn’t tak
e anything out.”

  “Maybe she was right,” I said. “Maybe Michael didn’t do any work.”

  “Who said Michael didn’t do any work?”

  “Alida.” I waved my hand toward the hall. “The one who got it this time.”

  Tony Marsh frowned. He had been on the force one year and three months. His first major case involved a corpse found on the floor of my old one-room apartment. He had been attached to the twentieth precinct. Now he was attached to some other precinct—I had no idea which one took in Gramercy Park—and here I was again. Asking questions. Not giving a regular statement. He gestured at his notebook.

  “Maybe you ought to start from the beginning,” he said. Tony Marsh, being a Boy Scout, is always very polite.

  “There isn’t any beginning,” I told him. “I knocked on her door. It opened by itself. I walked in. She was sitting in the chair.”

  “You didn’t touch her.” Statement, not question. He was learning in the police department

  “I did not touch her,” I said.

  “How did you know she was dead?”

  “I saw the typewriter ribbon,” I said. “The ends of it were dangling over the back of the chair.”

  “Over the back of the chair?” Tony Marsh said.

  “I don’t understand about the typewriter ribbon,” I said. “How can you strangle anybody with a typewriter ribbon? Why doesn’t it break?”

  “Silk typewriter ribbon,” Tony Marsh said. “The lieutenant thought the same thing but we tried it out. We didn’t strangle anybody, you know, but we tried it out. Pulling it. It doesn’t break.”

  “Somebody killed two people with them,” I said, “so I suppose they don’t break.”

  “You said you saw it hanging over the back of the chair,” Tony Marsh said again.