Wicked, Loving Murder

by Jane Haddam

  “It’s not just weirder, it’s impossible,” I said. I put my head in my hands and tried to think. I didn’t want to go to Martinez, not yet. We had not been friendly last time we met, and I didn’t think things were going to get any friendlier soon. I didn’t want to get Stephen in trouble just because he had a drug habit. I can be very moralistic about drugs, but I’m reluctant to make it official.

  “We’ve got to find out for certain what this is,” I said. “That’s the immediate problem, right?”

  “Right,” Phoebe said. She was deliberately imitating me, but I ignored her.

  “Let’s go talk to Nick,” I said.

  “Would Nick know?” Phoebe asked.

  “How do I know if he’d know? He might know somebody who would know.”

  “In the movies they taste it,” Phoebe said.

  I got a wad of money out of my wallet and threw two singles on the bar. One of the advantages of frequenting low-life bars is that they always make you pay when served.

  “I’m going out to get a cab,” I said.

  Phoebe was ahead of me. By the time I straggled out to Columbus Avenue, she had one waiting.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  SCENE FROM AN INGMAR Bergman movie: Three people circling a coffee table. One of them points to an object on the table. Another shakes his head. A third bites her fingernails. Everybody sits down and looks suicidal, or at least hopeless.

  It went on like that for an hour Nick’s apartment is in the Village, on a quiet residential street protected by trees and distance from the commercial circus of Sixth Avenue and Bleecker. He has two rooms and a kitchen. His coffee table had to have been stolen from the Sunday morning garbage outside an East Side high-rise. None of this helped us determine whether or not what was in that glassine envelope was heroin.

  “I could taste it,” he said.

  I pointed out the suggestion had been made before. “Besides,” I said, “aren’t they always cutting it with bicarbonate of soda? Why wouldn’t it taste just like bicarbonate of soda?”

  “I shouldn’t have it here at all,” Nick said. “I’m supposed to be an officer of the court.”

  “Don’t sound like Daniel Harte.”

  “Daniel Harte,” Nick said. “Daniel Harte got bounced from Cravath.”

  This was the first good news either of us had had all day. We went with it.

  “My opinion of Cravath went way up,” Nick said. “If they had sense enough to fire the guy, they can’t be complete idiots.”

  “They should have had sense enough not to hire him,” I said.

  “You know what these places are,” Nick said. “He was on the law review.”

  “You were on the law review,” I said.

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Phoebe said.

  Nick and I stopped, and blushed, and stared at our hands. Then we both got up and started pacing. It was very depressing. A year ago, nothing would have stopped us, not even violence. Now we needed extraordinary circumstances just to get started. I had good reason to be ambivalent about getting involved in a murder case. The last time I’d been involved in a murder case, it had changed everything. Contrary to the assumption that allowed me to indulge in periodic orgies of self-conscious guilt, not all the changes had been for the better.

  “I think the question here,” Phoebe said, “is whether or not we’re looking at a Baggie full of heroin.”

  “It’s not a Baggie,” Nick said. “It’s a tiny plastic bag. A Baggie full of heroin could set you up for life.”

  “It could be cocaine,” Phoebe said.

  I stopped pacing to paw through my bag, hunting cigarettes. I came up with the three Writing Enterprises romance novels and threw them on the table near the envelope.

  “They ought to be arrested for what they do to writers,” I said. “They ought to be stopped, anyway.”

  Phoebe sniffed. “Something like this ought to put a crimp in their business,” she said.

  While she was saying this I was holding a match to my cigarette. I laughed. I inhaled a lung full of sulfur.

  “Shit,” I said, meaning not only the sulfur but her suppositions. “You ought to go down there. It’s like none of this ever happened. Felicity Aldershot is playing Chairwoman of the Board and the rest of them are running around trying to figure out how to keep doing what they’ve been doing. Worse, they’re trying to think of how to expand.”

  “How could they expand?” Phoebe said. “What would they expand into?”

  “The international market plus one,” I said. “Felicity Aldershot took me to lunch. That’s in keeping with her policy, formulated sometime in my absence, that I am to be Kept Happy. Or busy, to be more accurate.”

  “Can you get this done in a week?” Nick said. “Is it possible?”

  “If everything goes right and she gives me time to do the work,” I said. “If the articles come in by Saturday and I’ve got them edited by Monday, we ought to be ready for the printer sometime next Friday, everybody working overtime. Except the printer, because that’s the point. The printer isn’t supposed to work overtime. The staff gets paid straight salary so they don’t get extra for overtime.”

  “Don’t get much straight salary, either, from what I heard,” Phoebe said.

  “We’ve been over this before,” I said. “I’m not getting anything done if Felicity Aldershot keeps taking me to lunch. A two-hour lunch, mind you. At the Oyster Bar, which is halfway uptown. A two-hour lunch with an extra half hour in cabs.”

  “To tell you they’re expanding?” Nick said.

  “Writing Workshops and Correspondence Schools is expanding,” I said. “Overseas. That’s Felicity’s big new idea. They’re going to hold summer writers’ conferences in Europe. Greece, to start with.”

  “A writer’s conference in Greece?” Nick said. “The Greeks don’t read any books. They read fewer books per capita than any other country in Europe.”

  “Think of Sophocles,” I said. “Think of Homer.”

  “Think of the piracy,” Nick said. “I did a case for—what’s her name—Joan Liddell? The romantic suspense lady. Anyway, they pirate everything, the Greeks. They have unauthorized editions out before the authorized ones get into the country, they reprint verbatim in newspapers. You can’t sell anything over there. It’s a nightmare.”

  “It’s a chance to charge a lot of money for very little service,” I said. “The tuition alone is going to be three times what they ask for a conference in San Diego or Houston. And that doesn’t count transportation, or room and board fees, or incidentals like registration and reservation charges. They’re going to make a mint.”

  “It’s going to work?”

  “Of course it’s going to work.” I snatched the books from the table and dumped them on the floor. “You know why I don’t want to turn Stephen Brookfield in? He’s at least honest about it. He’s in a racket and he knows he’s in a racket and he doesn’t try to pretend it’s something nice and respectable.”

  “That sounds—amoral,” Nick said. “It’s the kind of thing a DA would try to prove when he wanted to call someone a hardened criminal.”

  “Call Felicity Aldershot a hardened criminal,” I said. “Or Jack Brookfield. I go nuts every time I talk to either of those two. Jack wants you to punish him. He practically lies down and begs for it. Felicity thinks everything is a problem in applied economics.”

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Phoebe said.

  I started toward the kitchen. “Maybe I don’t want to get anywhere,” I said. “Give me an excuse to get the other two arrested and I’ll want to get somewhere.”

  “Plant this stuff on them,” Nick said. “Warn Stephen Brook-field. Call a cop and start a bust.”

  I took the kettle off the stove, filled it with water, put it back on again, and turned on the gas. Out in the living room, Phoebe said, “This isn’t getting us anywhere” for the third time.

  Nick said, “What do you want from me? I don’t have a lot of
strange friends with offices in Times Square basements and back rooms full of chemistry sets.”

  “You must know someone,” Phoebe said.

  The phone started ringing. I got coffee from the shelf over the sink, put it on the counter, and crossed the room to answer it. I knew Nick’s apartment well: phones in the kitchen and the bedroom, no answering machines.

  Martinez recognized my voice and said, “It’s you.”

  I started searching my pockets for my cigarettes. They were in the living room.

  “Nick’s here,” I said. “I’ll get him.”

  “Yeah,” Martinez said. “Get him. There’s been a little trouble out here.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  HER NAME WAS IRENE Joan Haskell and she had—literally—been beaten to a pulp. “Face and neck,” Martinez said when we got there. “Baseball bat.” “There” was a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, one of those streets where the brownstones have wide squat stoops and the corner store sells sausage grinders and New York’s Best Pizza. Irene Joan Haskell lived almost midway down the block, on the north side. She was gone by the time we got there. What was left was a series of small pools of blood on each of the four top steps of the stoop. It was very cold. A custard skin of ice was forming on each of the pools. Ice was forming on the hands of Ivy Samuels Tree, too. She didn’t seem able to move.

  “Not dead,” Martinez said when Nick asked him about Mrs. Haskell. “Unconscious, yes. Close, yes. But not dead.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Nick said.

  “I wouldn’t even have known about it,” Martinez said. “They put Mrs. Tree’s name in the computer. They got me.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “They would.”

  “I came right away.” Martinez turned to look at Ivy, sitting motionless on the steps of the brownstone next door to Irene Haskell’s, surrounded by four uniformed patrolmen. Her arms were hanging at her sides. Her eyes were staring into space. “She says she was called,” Martinez said. “She’s always saying she was called.”

  He turned his back on us. Nick and I stood silently for a moment, watching him walk away. It was dark. The police floodlights only made it look darker still. There were lights in every window, up and down the street. There were people behind every curtain.

  “We have to talk to her,” Nick said. He said it the way he’d say “grass is green”—as if it were a statement that anticipated no action.

  I pointed across the street. “Phoebe’s talking to her,” I said. Phoebe had pushed through the cordon of police and sat down beside Ivy. Ivy hadn’t noticed her. “Maybe Phoebe can get things started,” I said.

  It sounded lame, and it was. Nick’s head started shaking in an oddly involuntary swing. “Beaten with a baseball bat,” he said. “At least the other two were strangled. That’s not a wonderful way to die, but they didn’t suffer long. But beaten with a baseball bat, for God’s sake. She must have screamed.”

  “She screamed,” I said. “Martinez said that. She screamed and someone in the apartments around her called the police.”

  “That’s nice,” Nick said.

  There was no answer to that. I put my hands in the pockets of my coat to get them warm and rocked back and forth on the balls of my feet. The temperature had to be well below freezing. The wind was very strong. Across the street, Phoebe put her arms around Ivy’s shoulders and patted her.

  “They’ll get a conviction after this,” Nick said. “I don’t think she killed those two people and I don’t think Martinez thinks so either, but they’ll get a conviction after this. Even if we don’t let them introduce the pictures.”

  I wanted to smoke, but I didn’t want my hands exposed to the air. “We ought to talk to her,” I said. “She told Martinez she was called. Nick—”

  “Don’t,” Nick said. “Don’t say it.”

  “It’s relevant.”

  “It’s not relevant to me. It worked last time, I admit it, but I didn’t approve of it. And even now I don’t think it was necessary.”

  “I’m not talking about something that worked,” I said. “I’m talking about something that is.” I started flapping around in the air, trying to get warm, trying to think. Too much had been happening too fast. I was emotionally numb and mentally dull. The landscape didn’t help. This neighborhood didn’t look like New York at all. It looked like a small industrial city in Pennsylvania, one week before the factories started moving out.

  “Two things,” I said. “In the first place, she was called. Somebody’s trying to set her up. Maybe someone has been trying to set her up all along. That first letter—”

  “Was written by Michael Brookfield, who is dead.”

  “Written by Michael Brookfield,” I said. “Maybe not inspired by Michael Brookfield. And it didn’t mention blackmail, you know. It didn’t even hint at it.”

  “Dortman and Hodges suspended her contract,” Nick said. “We can’t even get them for race discrimination. They can say they did it because of the murders.”

  “Stephen said Michael was like Jack,” I said. “Eager to please. He could have sent that letter because someone suggested he send that letter.”

  “Find the someone who suggested the letter. Prove they suggested it.”

  “She had no reason to hurt Irene Haskell,” I said. “The only thing Irene Haskell’s done recently to cause trouble for someone is—” I stopped. “Wait a minute,” I said. “The audit. She threatened an audit.”

  “You have audits on the brain,” Nick said. “Last time it was an audit. This time you want an audit, too.”

  “But it hooks up with Michael Brookfield,” I said. “Michael Brookfield was embezzling.”

  “Michael Brookfield is dead,” Nick said. “He couldn’t have bashed up Mrs. Haskell for asking for an audit that might reveal his embezzling. Never mind the fact his embezzling had already been revealed.”

  “Michael Brookfield was embezzling,” I said, “which could have caused an audit.”

  Nick ran his hands through his hair. “Difficulties,” he said. “You’re always causing difficulties. You want me to tell you how to get out of these difficulties? You want the simplest explanation?”

  “Nick,” I said.

  “Don’t ‘Nick’ me,” he said. “Look at it this way. Two people dead. Both times, Irene Haskell accidentally on the scene. Ivy knows Mrs. Haskell knows something, anything. Maybe Mrs. Haskell even calls and says she knows something. Superfluous. Ivy—”

  “Do you think Ivy did it?”

  “I think they’d better be right when they say Harvard’s the best law school in the country,” Nick said. “I’m going to need something going for me.”

  He had nothing going for him, and neither did I. We didn’t even have Ivy.

  Phoebe stood up when she saw us cross the street, patted Ivy once more on the shoulder, and gave us an exaggerated shrug. As far as anyone could tell, Ivy had never known Phoebe was there. She hadn’t moved. She hadn’t spoken. When they made the formal arrest, she gave no indication she knew what they were doing. She went docilely enough when a uniformed patrolman took her arm to guide her to a police car, but she looked like an automaton.

  She was booked somewhere in Brooklyn, in a large, dingy building that looked as if it might once have been a prison, or a meatpacking house. It was completely deserted. We stood in a knot in the center of a large room and watched them fingerprint Ivy. They’d have aroused more emotion in a wooden Indian. Ivy made them very, very nervous.

  “Ambulance,” Tony Marsh said. Martinez had brought Tony with him. Martinez’s regular partner—a nonentity whose face I could never remember and whose name I had never known—was off duty and temporarily out of contact. It was against regulations to be out of contact. Martinez was usually very big on regulations. This time he didn’t seem to mind.

  “We ought to get her to a hospital,” Tony Marsh said. “She’s outta her head. She isn’t seeing anything.”

  “It’s just shock,” I said. “Emotional sho
ck. She needs some tea and a shot of brandy and a long rest.”

  “Sugar’s good for shock,” Tony Marsh said. Then he gave me an odd look. “Don’t you want her to go to the hospital? I thought she was a friend of yours.”

  Second time, I thought. This time I didn’t go into an explanation of how and why I’d met Ivy Samuels Tree. I said, “They won’t let her go into the hospital. Not unless Nick gets a judge and the judge makes them. Extreme emotional disturbance.”

  Tony Marsh grunted. Extreme emotional disturbance is a legal defense in murder cases in the state of New York. It means exactly what it says. If you were a victim of extreme emotional disturbance at the time you committed a murder, you can’t be convicted of it. That was the law that got Richard Herrin off in the Bonnie Garland case—after he’d caved her head in with a hammer.

  “I came over to tell you the lieutenant wanted to talk to you,” Tony Marsh said. Then, as if this weren’t enough, “I guess I ought to tell you.”

  I looked around for Martinez. He had taken a seat at an empty metal desk in the far corner of the room. He was smoking a cigarette and tapping his fingers against the armrests of his chair. When he saw me looking at him he nodded and motioned me to him.

  I went. I didn’t hurry. Martinez had not only given me no indication we were back on friendly terms, since I left him at the Lincoln Square Coffee Shoppe he had yet to say hello to me. Of course, Nick wasn’t happy with me either, so staying close to the knot of people around Ivy wasn’t much safer than crossing the room to talk to Martinez. I wound my way through the desks, running my hands across their tops like a kid running a stick down a picket fence.

  “Can’t talk to him,” Martinez said when I got to his corner. He made a jerking head motion at Nick. “They wouldn’t love me for talking to the defense attorney. Have to talk to you.”

  I got a chair from a nearby desk, dragged it over, and sat down in it.

  “You think she’s some kind of nutcase?” Martinez asked me.

  “I don’t know her,” I said. “From the few times I’ve talked to her, I wouldn’t have thought so.”