Wicked, Loving Murder

by Jane Haddam

  “Do you know what she did?” Martinez asked. “Only a nutcase could do what she did. She stayed there, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Stayed there?”

  “She was there when the officers got there. Walking up and down those stairs. Picking up that goddamned baseball bat. She was just wandering around.”

  “Like that?” I motioned to the other side of the room.

  “Almost,” Martinez said. “Not quite so bad. She told us she’d got a phone call. Said this woman introduced herself as Martha Haskell—” Martinez blinked. “Martha Haskell,” he repeated.

  “She was set up,” I said.

  Martinez shrugged. “Or she came on her own, without any phone call. Didn’t know the woman’s name.”

  “All right,” I said.

  Martinez was still kicking it around. He came to some decision, sealed it by straightening his tie, and said, “What she told us. Some woman called and said she was Martha Haskell. Said she knew Mrs. Tree was being framed. Said she could prove it and would prove if only Mrs. Tree had to see her right away. So Mrs. Tree, being one of Nick Carras’s standard criminal clients, got herself on a train and came to New York. Without calling her lawyer for advice. Naturally.” Martinez made an attempt at what could only have been a smile. “You never asked for advice either,” he said.

  I didn’t want to talk about myself. “Did she tell—whoever it was—that she had to take a train? Did she say anything about how long it would take her to get here?”

  “I don’t know. She got—like that—before we had a chance to ask any questions. Hell, by the time I got on the scene, she was like that. I’m only telling you what the officers told me.”

  “That she said she’d been called.”

  “Exactly.”

  I gave him my best journalist’s search. There was nothing to see in his face.

  “Do you think she did it?” I asked him. “Do you think she killed two people and bludgeoned a third one into a coma?”

  “I arrested her the first time,” he said. “I would have arrested her for this.”

  “That doesn’t tell me anything.”

  “Intelligent of you to realize it.”

  I got out my cigarettes and, finally, lit one. It felt like hours since I’d had any nicotine. Maybe it had been hours. I had no idea how long we’d stood in the cold on that Brooklyn street.

  I wanted to ask him if he had set me up, if he’d wanted to arrest Ivy all the time and fed me information meant to distract my attention from the true course of the investigation. I couldn’t. It felt too good just to be talking to him again.

  “Is this what you wanted me to tell Nick?” I asked him. “That she said she’d been called, by Martha Haskell?”

  “I wanted you to tell him the facts,” Martinez said. “The fact that she was found standing over the body with that baseball bat in her hand. The fact that the blood was fresh. The fact that we aren’t going to be able to let her out on bail this time.”

  “Can she be denied bail? On an assault charge?”

  “If I work at it.”

  “And you’re going to work at it.”

  “Yeah,” Martinez said. “I have to work at it. If I don’t work at it, someone’s going to have my head.”

  We both looked across the room at Ivy. They had finished taking her fingerprints. They had washed her hands and folded them in her lap. She was sitting motionless, oblivious.

  While we were looking at her she raised her head, stared at no one and nothing in particular, and said, “Maybe I’m sleepwalking. Maybe I’m doing it in my sleep.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  POLICE WISDOM: IT IS easier to find something if you know what you’re looking for. It is impossible not to find something if you know exactly what you’re looking for.

  I knew what I was looking for. I needed something Michael Brookfield, Alida Brookfield, and Irene Haskell had in common, beyond the fact that all of them had been victims of violence. I needed other things as well, but they could wait until later. Why, for instance. I would have liked to know why whatever it was they had in common made them candidates for violence.

  Unfortunately, what I was looking for did not seem “impossible not to find” or even “easy.” Nor was the situation helped by Phoebe’s determination to play Nancy Drew and Nick’s to play ostrich. Nick not only wanted to play ostrich, he wanted everyone to play ostrich with him.

  “We’ve been over this before,” he said, when I finally got him out of Brooklyn and into my apartment. “Interested parties in a murder case shouldn’t run around investigating on their own. It gets them into trouble, not out of it.”

  “It got me out of it.”

  “Not until after you’d been arrested for second-degree murder, it didn’t. And you’d never have been arrested in the first place if you’d kept your nose out of it.”

  “That isn’t true and you know it.”

  “I don’t know what I know.”

  I gave him a shot of whiskey and put him to bed with my best down comforter. He got into bed wearing jockey shorts, warm-up pants, three pairs of socks, and a zip-up Harvard sweatshirt. Nick is very serious about No Sex Without Commitment. Proximity, being dangerous, can be tolerated only under conditions of maximum preparedness.

  I waited until he was safely settled with a copy of the latest David Halberstam exposé (in hardcover—Nick carries David Halberstam hardcovers in his briefcase) and went to the kitchen to phone Phoebe.

  Phoebe, being Phoebe, was up. Phoebe is always up.

  “I’ve started on those lists you mentioned,” she said. “You know, Events. And Suppositions.”

  “Forget about the lists for a minute,” I said. “I want to know something. How many people knew about Ivy?”

  “How many people knew what about Ivy?”

  “That she was black. That someone was going to a lot of trouble not to let the general public know she was black.”

  “Everybody,” Phoebe said.

  “Everybody?”

  “You know what I mean. It was an open secret. Even the contract was an open secret, really. Hazel knew about it.”

  Hazel Ganz was a category romance writer and rights officer of the American Writers of Romance.

  “That contract sucks,” I said. “I can’t see Hazel letting it go. It’s just the kind of thing she likes to start a fight over.”

  “Hazel had to let it go,” Phoebe said. “She couldn’t do anything about it unless Ivy wanted to do something about it, and Ivy couldn’t do anything about it because she couldn’t afford to, so—”

  “So,” I said. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. If ‘everybody’ knew about it, it wouldn’t have been hard for someone at Writing Enterprises to find out about it. It probably just came up.”

  “Probably,” Phoebe said. “So what?”

  “So what,” I repeated. “The ultimate question. What did Janine used to say? If you haven’t got an answer, you haven’t got a book.”

  “Let’s not talk about Janine,” Phoebe said.

  “No,” I agreed. “Let’s not talk about Janine. I was just hoping it was difficult to get that information. So we could trace how it got to Writing Enterprises. It could have given us a handle.”

  “Are you reading Nero Wolfe again?”

  “Jack Webb. Never mind. Go to sleep.”

  “Eat something,” Phoebe said. “Then go to sleep yourself.”

  I dreamed of a Writer’s Conference, set on a hill. Everyone was there. Even people who’d been dead more than a year were there. Myrra gave a lecture on The Art of Love. Phoebe gave one on The Act of Love and illustrated it with diagrams projected on a screen. People came in one end, wandered through miles of alleys past a confusing conglomeration of exhibits, and wandered out into the arms of Alida Brookfield. Alida Brookfield had a sign oil her forehead that said HOW TO GET PUBLISHED THE EASY WAY. She had very large, sharp teeth.

  I got up and looked at the alarm clock. Quarter to five. I turned off the alarm
and put it under the bed. Once I’m awake, I’m awake for hours, no matter how little sleep I’ve had. Even when I’ve been drinking, I can’t close my eyes after opening them and get them to stay closed. I got out of bed and headed for the kitchen, not bothering to be careful not to wake Nick. It is not possible to wake Nick.

  There was nothing in my refrigerator but a quarter pound of butter, a pint of Devon cream, and some leftover take-out Chinese from last Thursday. I threw out the Chinese. I looked in the wooden breadbox Phoebe had given me for my birthday (hope springs eternal) and found a loaf of whole wheat, moldy, and half a dozen bagels, stale. I looked into the refrigerator again. The cream cheese was in the freezer. I took it out. I started the oven. I cut two of the bagels in half, threw water on them, and put them in the oven to de-stale. Then I started the coffee.

  “Hundred and nine,” I said. “No wonder I weigh a hundred and nine.” I reached down to scratch the cat. Camille was weaving in and out of my legs. If my breakfast was going to be early, her breakfast was going to be early.

  “Too many characters in this play,” I said.

  I stopped. Camille butted her head against my hand. Scratching was not supposed to stop until she wanted it to stop. I picked her up and put her in my lap.

  “Not too many characters in this play,” I said. “Six. That’s the point.”

  There were pencils and pads on the sideboard. I leaned over and got one of each. I wrote:

  Michael Brookfield—girlfriend—embezzling

  Jack Brookfield—stock market?—stealing

  Stephen Brookfield—heroin?—?

  Felicity Aldershot—ambition—takes over everyone’s job, makes sure A.B. knows it

  Alida Brookfield—money—anything she can think of

  Martin Lahler—?—?

  I considered this list, then divided it into subsets. I put Michael and Alida to one side. I put Jack, Stephen, Felicity Aldershot, and Martin Lahler to the other. On the bottom of the page I wrote: Irene Haskell, Ivy.

  In a terrible way, the attack on Irene Haskell simplified things. Until that happened, she could, possibly, have figured as a suspect. As a victim, she was of interest to the people at Writing Enterprises for one reason only. She was going to sue them. She was going to attach their business records and force an audit. One of those four—Stephen, Jack, Felicity, Martin—didn’t want those records attached.

  The obvious suspect was Martin. Fiddling accountants are a capitalist cliché. Besides, Martin was the only one not solidly connected. Stephen and Jack were family. Felicity Aldershot, from what I had seen of her relationship with Alida, was better than family.

  Martin Lahler didn’t interest me for the moment, however. It was Stephen Brookfield I wanted to talk to.

  Stephen and a receptionist named Janet.

  THIRTY

  NO ONE AT WRITING Enterprises had heard about the attack on Irene Haskell. I should have expected it, but I didn’t. I had spent so much of the night thinking about Ivy, talking about Ivy, dealing with Ivy—and so little of it asleep—it would have surprised me if my dry cleaner hadn’t heard about it.

  Writing Enterprises was in the grip of a New Enthusiasm. Felicity Aldershot actually called it that, as if she were the PR woman for a children’s camp. The reception area, still minus receptionist, was filled with large pieces of posterboard. Hijacked Art Department assistants were bending over the posterboard, drawing schematic designs for everything from a new cover logo to a new table of contents format. Writing: The Magazine for Professional Freelancers was getting a face-lift.

  “Image is so important,” Felicity said, when she caught me emerging from the elevator. “Alida could never understand that. People look at your product and feel you’re first class—or they don’t.”

  “Is this new enthusiasm going to extend to the articles?” I asked her. “Are you going to start suggesting honest research and New York agents?”

  “The purpose of a magazine,” Felicity said, “is to deliver its readers to its advertisers.”

  This was conventional magazine-publishing wisdom. People who own magazines actually believe it. I didn’t think it meant anything in this case. I said so.

  “It means exactly what it says,” Felicity told me. “I know my advertisers. I know what they want from me and the readers they want to see me deliver. This is not Sophistication. This is not an upmarket publication. We’re read by the failures of this world, Miss McKenna, and we give them hope.”

  I could have untangled this logic if I tried: I didn’t.

  “Actually,” Felicity Aldershot was saying, “we’re getting a lot more militant. I’ve got an article on my desk—it came in last week but I just got to it this morning—on how to manage subsidy publishing.”

  “Subsidy publishing? You mean a vanity press?”

  “It’s the only way some of these people are going to get into print,” Felicity Aldershot said.

  “It doesn’t count,” I said.

  “Quite a few very successful writers started out printing their own books,” she said.

  “Not lately. Lately, the only self-published book I can remember getting any real press was On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors. And that was by an experienced writer, who started with a contract from Playboy Press, and the reason it ended up self-published had to do with legal questions. And he didn’t put it out through a vanity press, either.”

  “They want to impress their friends and relatives,” Felicity Aldershot said. “Their friends and relatives won’t know the difference.”

  “They get told they’re going to make a lot of money,” I said. “They don’t get told the bookstores won’t handle their books and the reviewers won’t read them, never mind review them, and—”

  “Didn’t you say there was something you wanted to talk to me about?”

  It was a good move. I’d come in intending to find out what she knew about Irene Haskell. I’d forgotten all about it. Now I had to shift gears.

  Felicity wasn’t interested in what I wanted to say, only in keeping me off balance. “I have something to talk to you about,” she said. “Come into my office.”

  She turned away and headed down the corridor. I stared after her. I had a head full of Irene Haskell and Ivy Samuels Tree. I had a nascent ulcer full of vanity presses. I had a three-foot walk to a Rolodex that undoubtedly contained, among other things, the phone number of an ex-receptionist named Janet.

  I tried to put it all out of my mind. Unless Janet was the kind of person who wrote her own address and number under “Me,” I would have to know her last name before I could look her up. There was no point in thinking about vanity presses. That was an argument I couldn’t win in this office. As to Irene Haskell and Ivy Samuels Tree—I couldn’t ask Felicity questions about them unless I was talking to Felicity.

  I hurried down the corridor until I got to her office. When I came in, she didn’t rise, and she didn’t suggest we go to the conversational grouping. She sat behind the mahogany desk, frowning at her telephone pad.

  “I got a call this morning,” she said, “from a Miss Amelia Samson.”

  She looked at me as if expecting explication. I didn’t give it to her. Amelia Samson “writes” a romance book a week, all of which come out in her own line, called Amelia Samson’s Love-lines, from Dortman and Hodges. She’s got the world’s definitive collection of Worth gowns. She appears on every major television network and in every national magazine at least twice a year. Johnny Carson makes jokes about Amelia on the Tonight Show. Felicity knew who Amelia Samson was.

  “Miss Samson,” Felicity said, “wanted to talk about pseudonyms. She wants to write her article on the importance of pseudonyms—picking them, that is, and suiting them to the kind of romance book you write.”

  I shrugged. “She should know,” I said. “She’s very good at what she does.”

  “Writing magazine,” Felicity said, “does not approve of pseudonyms.”

  It took me a minute to take this in
. My mind was still half on Ivy, and wandering around the problem of how to find Janet’s last name. Then I realized Felicity was not opening a negotiation. She was making a categorical statement.

  “What do you mean you don’t approve of pseudonyms?” I said. “People use pseudonyms. Amelia Samson didn’t start out being called Amelia Samson.”

  “I’m aware people use pseudonyms,” Felicity Aldershot said. “I said Writing doesn’t approve of them. We don’t approve of them under any circumstances, but we especially don’t approve of them when they’re owned by the publishing company.”

  “Neither does the American Writers of Romance,” I said. “At least, they don’t approve of the names being company-owned rather than author-owned. They’ve been negotiating the point for the past five years. What are you going to do about it?”

  “We’re going to advise them to turn down any agreement that would require them to publish under a pseudonym exclusive to a particular house or line.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Then they don’t publish with any of the major lines, and they don’t work for any of the major companies.”

  “Writing magazine has always stood up for the rights of writers,” Felicity said.

  “Crap,” I said.

  Felicity raised her eyebrows, but she wasn’t disturbed. She had made her nonnegotiable demand. I would have to live with it.

  I ignored it instead. “Do you remember Irene Haskell?” I said. I could have asked her if she were personally acquainted with the man in the moon. “The woman who wanted to sue you over Literary Services.”

  “Oh,” Felicity said. “Yes.”

  “She was beaten up outside her apartment last night,” I said. “Somebody tried to take her head apart with a baseball bat.”

  I was being as brutal as I could manage. It wasn’t working. Felicity said, “How terrible,” in a way designed to let me know she had only said it because it was expected of her. I sat on the other side of her desk and waited in vain for guilt to make her tremble.

  “Didn’t you say you were writing an article on line marketing?” she asked.