by Jane Haddam
“You must give a shit,” I said. “If you really wanted to commit suicide, you’d just do it.”
“What for?”
“What do you mean what for?” I said. “Because you wanted to.”
“I don’t have that violent a temperament,” Stephen said. “I don’t hate myself. I’m not facing financial or social ruin. I’m not morbidly depressed. I just don’t care. Why should I jeopardize—any more than I have to—a situation that has almost nothing but advantages for me?”
“Because it has almost nothing but advantages?” I suggested.
“Very good,” Stephen said.
He dropped his half-smoked cigarette to the floor and stepped on it. He was completely relaxed. It had to be heroin, I decided. Heroin relaxed you, and it lasted a relatively long time. All the reports I’d heard about cocaine said it speeded you up and was over very quickly.
I thought about that scene in Jack Brookfield’s office. Stephen had needed calming down then.
“ ‘It’s going up like Vesuvius,’ ” I quoted. “What did you mean?”
“It was a description,” Stephen said. “A very apt description.”
“Talk sense,” I said.
Stephen shook his head. “You ought to get out of here. Somebody’s going to want to use the facilities soon and then…” His voice trailed off suggestively. He almost leered.
I wasn’t ready to give up.
“If you want me to figure it out, you have to give me more,” I said.
“I’ve given you everything you need,” he said. “First, figure out who’s giving it to me. Then,” his smile was full and clear. “Then figure out why.”
“God damn you,” I said. I felt as if I’d been saying it all morning.
Stephen made a clucking sound. “I’ll leave you with one more thing,” he offered, “in case you do the obvious thing and start worrying about my motives. Like all suicides, I’m very possessive about my death. I don’t intend to let God determine it. I don’t intend to let anyone else determine it either.” He grabbed my elbow. “The door,” he said. “I’ll be a gentleman and make sure the coast is clear.”
THIRTY-TWO
THE COAST WAS SO clear, I wondered if Stephen Brookfield had kept me in the men’s room long enough for everybody else to abscond to Brazil. Marty Lahler’s door was shut. The lights were out in the Art Department. I hurried down the hall to my office, not waiting to see if Stephen came out behind me or which way he went if he did. I slipped inside, turned on the overhead light, and shut the door. Then I pulled the desk to block the door, just in case. Peace and quiet, finally.
The wardrobe was heavier than I’d expected. Worse, what had been a bulky piece of furniture in the first place had been made more recalcitrant by the swelling and warping of the wood. Every time I pushed it it moved, but only slightly. It made a high, nerve-sanding whine.
After three of those whines, I sat down, lit a cigarette, and reconsidered the project. The inner walls were all pasteboard. The sound of the wardrobe against the linoleum had to be clear as far away as Felicity Aldershot’s office. If I continued trying to move that monstrosity, somebody was going to come just to find out what the terrible noise was.
I put my cigarette in a tin ashtray on the floor, got up, and tried pushing it again. This time I managed to move it three quarters of an inch. I also managed to produce a sound like a buzz saw attacking steel. I stopped, held my breath, and waited. If no one came this time, there was no one to come. The first of my possible explanations for the wardrobe had to be the right one. There had to be something special about it in its original position. No one would rig it so that it had to be moved to be of use. If, of course, it had had any use besides serving as a place to store mops. If it hadn’t, what had Michael Brookfield been doing in it?
I closed my eyes and counted ten. If no one came before the end of the count, I would move it another half inch.
There was a knock on the door.
“Miss McKenna?” Marty Lahler said. “Are you all right, Miss McKenna?”
Of all the people to show up now, it had to be Marty Lahler. After the Russian Tea Room fiasco, there would never be a good time for him to arrive, but there was something very fitting about his picking the worst possible moment. I moved the desk away from the door by picking it up and carrying it across the room. I didn’t want it making its own sounds on the floor. I didn’t want Marty to know I’d barred the door.
I tucked a pile of manilla envelopes under my arm (to give the impression I’d been working on the section) and let him in.
“You are all right,” he said when he saw me. “I heard—I mean, I thought—you weren’t screaming?”
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t screaming.”
“Oh,” he said. Then, “Your hands are all black.”
I looked at my hands. There was a thick stripe of grime across one palm. The other was clean. I rubbed the dirty one against my pants.
“Is something wrong in the office?” he asked.
I made up my mind. Marty Lahler was too stupid to have committed the murders. He was too naive even to consider the possibility that someone he knew might have committed the murders.
“The wardrobe’s out of place,” I told him. “The police must have moved it. I was trying to put it back.”
“The wardrobe?” Blink, blink. Think, think. I wanted to wring his oblivious little neck. The wardrobe took up half the room.
“It’s made indentations,” I said. “See?”
He came over to consider the indentations. The consideration took a long time. Finally he said,
“I could help you move it. Or you could wait till the Art Department got back from lunch. Maybe you should wait.”
“I can’t wait,” I said. “It’s driving me crazy.”
“There are very big boys in the Art Department,” Marty Lahler said. “Strong. They could pick something like this up.”
He could only say that because he hadn’t tried to pick it up himself. I’d have been surprised if Nick could move it without effort, and Nick is the biggest person I know. I did not, however, want to give Marty reasons to leave the manual labor to the “big boys” in the Art Department. I wanted that wardrobe moved.
“If we do it together,” I said. “It won’t be that hard.”
He looked as if I’d told him I believed in the Tooth Fairy.
“I’ve already got it halfway there by myself,” I said. “It’s only a little farther. A couple of pushes.”
He went to the far side of the wardrobe and stood there, awaiting execution.
“I suppose this is what you’re like,” he said. “I mean, when you want things done, you just get up and do them yourself.”
“I take my clothes to the dry cleaner,” I said. “Just like anyone else.”
“Oh, so do I, so do I,” Marty Lahler said. “That’s not what I meant. You know what I meant.”
“Place your hands here.” I indicated a place on the wardrobe. “Brace your feet. On the count of three, push. Ready? One, two, three.”
We moved it an inch and a half. We also moved it a little away from the wall. I went around to the front of it and kicked it back. It was far less difficult to move back to front than side to side.
“It would be a lot easier if they hadn’t gone out to lunch,” Marty said. “I mean, Miss Aldershot and Mr. Jack Brookfield went out to lunch, I saw them leave. Mr. Stephen Brookfield just disappeared. He does that sometimes. But with all of them gone, everybody else went too.”
“What?”
“The staff. With nobody to watch over them, they went. Out. To lunch. I think some of them went to bars.”
“Get in position again,” I said.
Marty complied. “They leave me with all the papers,” he said, “and half the time I can’t figure them out. They’re in all kinds of languages. What I say is, if they want to be international, they ought to hire some extra people who know languages. I don’t know any languages.”
“You know
English,” I said.
“That’s right,” Marty said.
I didn’t give him time to work this out. “Get ready,” I said. “One, two, three.”
We moved it another inch and a half. Marty beamed. He was more than just proud of himself. He was acquiring self-confidence. For Marty Lahler, self-confidence was a license to complain.
“It was bad enough when it was just the magazine,” he said. “When I started out here the magazine just went to the United States and Canada. Then it went to England. That wasn’t so bad. Then it went everywhere. It seemed like every week there was someplace else, and the someplace had a different language or a different alphabet and they all had different money.” He looked at me wisely. “It’s the money I have to be concerned about,” he said.
“One more push,” I said.
He nodded and got into position. “And then it wasn’t just the magazine anymore,” he said. “First it was Newsletters. Then it was Literary Services. Then it was Publishing. Now it’s Writing Schools and Correspondence Courses.”
“Felicity told me about it,” I said. “One, two, three.”
This time we gave a long shove. I felt the wardrobe shudder, teeter, then settle into the indentations. I stepped back and looked at it. Marty looked at it, too. He looked as if he loved it so much, he would marry it.
“Well,” he said. “That wasn’t so hard.”
He had red welts all over his hands, but I didn’t mention them. I thought it would do him good to play macho.
“Now I can stop worrying about it,” I said. “I hate it when things are out of place.” In truth, I never know when things are out of place. I’m one of the world’s untidiest, most disorganized people. Except about work, and I get paid for that.
Marty took my self-evaluation as gospel. “You’re just like Miss Brookfield,” he said. “She liked a place for everything and everything in its place.” I wondered what Marty Lahler’s childhood had been like. “The international stuff drove her crazy, too. She wanted to keep an eye on everything and she couldn’t. When Mr. Michael Brookfield went to Europe he was supposed to stop in at our places and see how we were doing, and he always said he did, but she didn’t believe him. She didn’t trust him. She wanted to see for herself.”
“Why didn’t she?” I dropped into the chair and lit another cigarette. That Alida Brookfield had not trusted Michael was not news. If Marty couldn’t give me news, I wanted him out of my office. In another time and place I might have been more charitable. In that time and place I wanted to climb into the wardrobe and look around.
“Miss Brookfield was afraid to fly,” Marty said. “She didn’t trust airplanes.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Miss Aldershot went once,” Marty said. “She took a tour. But mostly it was Michael. And Michael always went with—um—a friend, you see.”
“Yes,” I said. “I see.”
Marty Lahler clasped his hands behind his back, stared at his feet, and took a deep breath. I knew what was coming. I couldn’t keep myself from wincing.
“You haven’t had any lunch,” Marty announced. “Would you like to have lunch with me?”
“Well,” I said. What was I supposed to say? No? I prayed to the god of the Russian Tea Room and said, “I’m meeting a friend for lunch. I’ve got a few things to finish up here and then I’m leaving for the day.”
“Oh,” Marty Lahler said. The macho was gone. “You must have a lot of friends.”
He meant, “You must have a lot of lovers.” I almost told him to say so. Instead, I took him by the arm, pressed vigorous thanks in his ear, and led him to the door.
“I’ll be here another week and a half,” I said. “Maybe you’ll give me a raincheck.”
“We could go tomorrow,” Marty said.
“I don’t know about tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ll be in.”
“I can’t Thursday,” Marty said. “Thursday I have a financial meeting. We all have lunch in Miss—Miss Aldershot’s—office Thursdays.”
“We’ll talk about Friday when it gets here,” I said, getting him into the hall. Then I thanked him again, shut the door in his face, and headed across the room to the wardrobe. As I crossed the floor, I said a grace prayer so perfect, God was going to expect me to sit down at a seven-course banquet for twenty and finish it myself. I got all the way to the end of it before I realized I’d forgotten something.
I opened the door, stuck my head into the hall, and yelled, “Marty!” at the top of my lungs. He came running. The look on his face increased my guilt the way helium increases the size of a balloon. If I had to look at him much longer, I was going to explode into expiation.
There was no point in being polite. “You remember Janet?” I asked him. “The receptionist?”
He nodded, very slowly. This was not what he expected. He didn’t know how to maneuver the conversation around to what he expected.
“Do you remember her last name?” I asked him.
He said, “Miss Grasky,” and waited. He wanted an explanation. I had none to give him.
“I hate thinking of her as just ‘Janet,’ ” I said. “It’s so impolite.”
This was no explanation at all. He was going to ask questions.
I wasn’t going to wait for them. I gave him another “goodbye” and another “thank you” and another door in his face.
I fit easily into the wardrobe, even with the door closed. Most people would. Jack might have some difficulty because of his girth, but anyone else at Writing Enterprises could lock themselves in that portable closet and camp out for a week. I should say hide out. The point of locking yourself in a closet has to be not to be seen.
I put my finger through what I thought of as the peephole and hit something hard and smooth. Glass? I leaned over to look, bumping open the wardrobe door. I had a clear view into Marty Lahler’s office, a much clearer view than I should have had. The hole in the pasteboard wall that lined up with the peephole had been plugged with glass, all right. Magnifying glass. The piece in the hole must have come from something larger. The view was jagged and distorted at the edges. In one small area near the top, there was no visibility at all. Where I could see, however, I had better than perfect vision.
It was what I could see that bothered me. I’d expected Marty’s desk. I got the right side of Marty’s assistant’s desk. A sheet of paper was taped to the gray metal desk top. Typed at the top was
DISTRIBUTION BY DIVISION—February. Underneath were lists. The Writing magazine list went:
Australia 56,462
Belgium 44,224
France 57,982
Germany 77,648
Great Britain 78,264
Greece 92,267
Ireland 45,231
Italy 96,341
The Netherlands 22,481
Sweden 31,672
Switzerland 21,484
I backed out of the wardrobe. Distribution figures? Why would anyone want to know how many copies of Writing magazine had been shipped to Switzerland in February? And why go to all this trouble to read Marty’s assistant’s list? Distribution figures are not like financial information. No one goes out of his or her way to make a secret of them, unless they’re phenomenally bad. Writing Enterprises thought their distribution figures were wonderful. Writing Enterprises included their distribution figures in their press releases. Writing Enterprises kept a running count on the circulation of Writing magazine on a chalkboard in the lobby. Cramming yourself into that wardrobe and squinting through the peephole wouldn’t get you one piece of information you couldn’t get more easily somewhere else. Especially if you were Michael Brookfield.
I sat down, lit a cigarette, and tried to make it make sense. I couldn’t. I told myself Michael Brookfield was a stupid man who’d made a stupid mistake. I couldn’t believe that either. Then I came up with a brilliant idea. Marty’s assistant had to have those distribution figures long before anyone else. She’d get them, type them up, and send them around as m
emos. She might even be the one who put the figures on the chalkboard. If someone wanted those figures before anyone else saw them, or maybe just earlier than they’d be released, the peephole would make sense.
That is, it would have made sense if I’d had the answer to a very simple question.
Whatever for?
In the office next door, Marty started humming “As Time Goes By.” He was very, very off key.
I got the marble-based imitation Rolodex from my bag. If I couldn’t make sense out of the wardrobe, maybe I’d do better with Janet Grasky.
Janet Grasky’s name was not filed under Grasky. It was filed under Janet.
THIRTY-THREE
JANET GRASKY LIVED IN Brooklyn. I spent a futile minute wondering if she lived near Irene Haskell and, if she did, what that would mean to the case. It would mean nothing. Everyone in New York lives near everyone else in New York, more or less. There isn’t anywhere you can’t get to by taxi, bus, or subway.
I spent another futile minute searching my office for my coat, gloves, and scarf. Then I remembered I hadn’t had them when I left Jack Brookfield’s office. I visualized the pile of scarves and gloves on Jack’s radiator and nearly kicked myself in the ankle. I was tired of wasting time. If I got within five feet of Jack, I’d lose another half hour. Charts, statistics, graphs, projections, or the Philosophy of the Unpublished Writer, Jack would think of something.
Outside, it was below freezing and windy. I had no choice. I did my best to develop a hostile mien (on the theory I could scare him off) and marched down to Jack’s office.
When I got there, I was brought up short. Jack’s door was closed. A strange man’s voice was coming through the thin wood.
“Five years,” the man said. “For God’s sake, Jack, five years.”
Jack mumbled something I couldn’t hear.
Whatever it was made the stranger very angry. “I know the issue’s late,” he said. “I know it’s only come in today. I’m not talking about today, damn it. I’m talking about five years.”
Mumble, mumble, from Jack. Snort, from the stranger.
“You know what I’m carrying on you? Over half a million dollars. Christ, Jack, it isn’t even legal. I’m your friend, I’m your friend—I’m as much your friend as anyone could be—but I can’t carry half a million dollars. I can hardly carry it when you’re paying up on time, there are laws about margin. Jack, and you’re breaking every one of them, but when you’re paying up I can cover it. I can make it look all right. Right now it stinks and my boss is beginning to smell it. If you can’t come up with something, I’m going to have to shut you down.”