Wicked, Loving Murder

by Jane Haddam

  Dollar bills fell out of it like confetti from a party popper.

  “It’s the repeat performances,” I told Janet, trying to stop laughing. I had been laughing for a long time. “You can never do anything once at Writing Enterprises. Two typewriter ribbon murders. Two stuffed publications.”

  “Two stuffed publications?” Janet was picking up the money and stacking it in piles of ten. She should have been in business school. She had such an exaggerated respect for the sheer physical fact of money.

  “I took a romance book home from there,” I said, “and it had a little envelope of dope in it. By accident.”

  “There’s eight hundred dollars here so far,” Janet said. “You can’t tell me somebody put eight hundred dollars in that magazine by accident.”

  “No,” I said. I could feel myself quietening. “This time it wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t negligence, and it wasn’t stupidity. She put them there because they belonged there.”

  “Nine hundred,” Janet said, “it’s going to be an even thousand. Somebody put a thousand dollars in a magazine and gave it to you on purpose?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “She didn’t give it to me. In fact, she did her best to keep it away from me. I stole it.”

  “You stole it.”

  “I didn’t know it was going to have a lot of money in it,” I said. “I thought it was just a magazine. She was annoying me, so I took a magazine from a box she told me not to take a magazine from. They’re all in on it,” I said. “It’s the only way it makes sense.”

  “The only way what makes sense?” Janet tapped the last stack. “One thousand.”

  I had been lying on my back on the floor, smoking and staring at the ceiling. Now I sat up and looked around for my coat. “Think about the piracy,” Nick had said, telling me why he thought holding a writer’s conference in Greece was a bad idea. “We always underestimate,” Marty Lahler had said, talking about supplying genre books to Europe. And that peephole. No one was interested in Marty’s financial figures. There was nothing wrong with them. I was sure every penny was accounted for, every fraction of a percent of tax paid. I knew why Michael Brookfield wanted the distribution figures as fast as he could get them. I knew why Stephen Brookfield got his little glassine envelopes without paying for them. I even knew why Michael and Alida had to die and why Irene Haskell had to be got out of the way. The only thing I didn’t know was who had done the killing.

  I didn’t know how I was going to prove any of it, either. I decided it wasn’t my problem. I would dump the whole mess in Lu Martinez’s lap and let him take care of it.

  I spotted my coat thrown over the back of the orange crate chair. I got up, put it on, and shoved my hands in my pockets.

  “I will explain all this,” I told Janet. “I promise. As soon as I’ve talked to the police.”

  “I’ll get you a bag for the money,” Janet said. “It won’t be as easy to carry in stacks like that.”

  I brushed the hair out of my face and started searching for a cigarette.

  “What’s that you’ve got all over your hands?” she asked me. “They’re black.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I CALLED IVY BEFORE I called Martinez. Actually, I called Nick to ask about Ivy. She was still the key, even if she didn’t have evidence that would save her or prove someone else guilty. She had been set up, not once but three times. The first time, someone had gone to a lot of trouble over a considerable period to ensure her presence in the right place at the criminally necessary moment. If I could prove that, Ivy would have nothing to worry about. I couldn’t prove it. The best anyone could do was prove which typewriter had been used to type Michael Brookfield’s letter to Ivy. I had a feeling the answer would be uninteresting.

  “Get hold of it and keep it anyway,” I told Nick. “Just in case.”

  He was not optimistic. “If it came from Michael Brookfield’s typewriter,” he said, “it could do us more harm than good.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “She’s in the hospital now,” Nick said. “It’s not as bad as before. She answers to her name and she eats and you can make conversation with her. Sort of.”

  “What’s ‘sort of’?” I asked.

  “She’ll talk about her children,” Nick said. “She’ll talk about the newspapers and what she sees on television and how she likes the hospital. If you try to ask her about what happened, she tells you she must have been sleepwalking.”

  “Dear Jesus,” I said.

  “I know,” Nick said. “It’s a crazy situation. The DA’s office has lost all interest in the case. There’s too much shrink evidence. They’re never going to convict her and they know it. They may get her put away in a hospital for the criminally insane.”

  “That’s worse,” I said.

  “That’s worse,” Nick agreed. “We may have an out on violence. She’s showing no evidence of violence. Why should she? She was never violent to begin with.”

  “They won’t believe that.”

  “The DA’s office won’t, no. Oddly enough, I think the police might.”

  “You think the police think she didn’t do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Nick said. “I’m not being very coherent. Nothing’s being very coherent. I try to work on the case and there’s nothing to work on. I don’t have a client in any way that matters. I can’t decide on the best approach. Hell, what’s the best approach? No matter what I do, the only end I see is them putting her away. And I don’t think she’s snapped for good. Neither do the doctors.”

  “What do the doctors think?”

  “Extended shock.”

  “Meaning they don’t know.”

  “They can describe it,” Nick said, “but they can’t explain it. They can’t cure it, either.”

  “That’s bad,” I said.

  I had said nothing in particular and he responded by saying nothing in particular back. We went on like that for a while. There was nothing more to say. I could have explained things to him. He didn’t want to hear it. He could have given me the technical details of Ivy’s possible defenses. He knew I wouldn’t understand them. I was making the call from a booth on lower Madison Avenue. The wind was going right through me. Neither of us seemed capable of getting off the phone.

  Finally, Nick said something about having to meet Phoebe, and I said something about having another call to make. We listened to each other’s silence.

  “Maybe I’ll come over tonight,” Nick said. It was a concession. He’d been coming over much more often than he liked in the past month.

  “Maybe I’ll make curried chicken,” I said. That was a concession, too.

  Martinez agreed to meet me at the Park Luncheonette in half an hour. He gave me none of the trouble I’d anticipated. Expecting a good quarter hour on the phone marshaling arguments and storming barriers, I’d walked from Madison Avenue to the Writing Enterprises building, thrown the alcoholic concessionaire out of his phone booth, and settled into the warm. I was out again in less than a minute. Martinez not only agreed to talk to me, he admitted he was eager to talk to me. He’d been wanting to talk to me for days.

  He’d talked to me the night before. I didn’t make an issue of it. I got off the phone and considered the fact that I spent a lot of my time with Martinez not making an issue of things. Having a homicide detective for a friend is like having a very famous person as a neighbor. You efface yourself. You accept their version of reality as axiomatic. You never push.

  You’re always a little embarrassed to be seen with them in public.

  I returned the phone booth to the concessionaire and walked down to the Park Luncheonette. It was deserted. I slid into a booth. I decided that, under the circumstances, meeting Martinez in a Greek coffee shop was very appropriate.

  The waitress came up to take my order for hot chocolate.

  “What’s the matter with your hands?” she asked me. “They’re all black.”

  There were smudges on both my palms. I looke
d at them and tried to think. There had been a smudge on one palm when I finished moving the wardrobe. Both my hands had been dirty at Janet’s. I had washed them clean at Janet’s.

  Back up, I thought. There had been a smudge on my palm when I finished moving the wardrobe. There had been smudges on both my palms when I finished talking to Felicity Aldershot. There had been smudges on both my palms when I was at Janet’s. Then I had washed my hands. Until I washed my hands, I could blame the smudges on the wardrobe. Where were they coming from now?

  “It’s not the end of the world,” the waitress said. “I’ll get you a Handi-Wipe.” She hurried off, reminding me of Nick’s mother. All the waitresses at the Park Luncheonette remind me of Nick’s mother.

  I reached into my pockets, pulled out my gloves, and laid them on the table. They were my gloves. I hadn’t picked up a pair of Jack’s by mistake. Jack couldn’t have crammed his short, pudgy fingers into my cashmere-lined Saks Fifth Avenue specials.

  The waitress came back with the Handi-Wipe. I took it out of its plastic-coated foil wrapper and cleaned myself off. Then I picked up the gloves again. When I looked at my fingers, they were smudged with black.

  “You’ve developed a new method of fingerprinting,” Martinez said, sliding into the other booth bench. “Do it yourself.”

  “Pick up the gloves,” I told him. He gave me an odd look. I hadn’t even said hello. I probably looked very white. He picked up the gloves and dropped them again.

  “Look at your hands,” I said.

  “What’d you get on them?” Martinez said. He rubbed his black-smeared fingers together, as if that would clear them. “They must be filthy.”

  “Something we didn’t think of,” I said. “Somebody strangled two people with typewriter ribbons. Typewriter ribbons are inky. Why didn’t anyone have ink on their hands?”

  “I thought of gloves,” Martinez said. “I didn’t find any gloves.” He tapped mine. “These are the gloves that were used in the murders?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Those are my gloves. They were fine this morning.”

  Martinez took a deep breath. He was holding on to his temper. He may even have been holding on to his sanity.

  “Let’s start again,” he said. “Hello, McKenna. I take it you’re speaking to me again.”

  “You were the one who wasn’t speaking to me,” I said.

  “It was mutual. Let’s not argue about it.” He pointed to the gloves. “That what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “Oh,” I said. It started coming back to me. Janet. The money. I reached into my bag and came up with the plastic one. I pushed it across the table to Martinez. “That’s what I called you about,” I said. “Look inside it.”

  He looked inside it. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “How much have you got in here? Where did you get it?”

  “I got it out of this.” I gave him the first (box) Greek edition. “It was in there, laid out between the pages. Page by page. I think. I mean, most of it fell out before I looked.”

  “Patience,” Martinez said, being very patient. “You are not making any sense.”

  “I’m making perfect sense,” I said. “Michael Brookfield was cooking his books. Jack Brookfield was stealing from petty cash. All of that’s fine, you see, except it doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t explain enough. Like the fact that Stephen Brookfield’s financially clean—he just about told me we could look forever and not catch him stealing anything—but he’s a heroin addict and he takes a lot of it and he doesn’t have to pay for it. Explain that. And Jack Brookfield is into a brokerage house for half a million dollars and he couldn’t even get margin for that out of petty cash.”

  “Jack’s into some brokerage house for half a million dollars?”

  “Waycroft, Hammer and Dunne,” I said. “They’re a very respectable house. And I figured out the wardrobe.” I told him about the wardrobe. “So you see,” I said, “it doesn’t make sense except one way and that explains everything. Especially if you start with the money in the magazine, because the magazine was going to Greece, and all that money was going with it.”

  The waitress came up. Martinez asked for coffee and a bran muffin. The waitress beamed at us. Like Nick’s mother, she enjoyed seeing young love in flower.

  “Go very slowly,” Martinez said. “From the beginning.”

  “All right,” I said. “Start with two facts. First, Stephen Brookfield is a dope addict without the usual financial difficulties of dope addicts, a situation that cannot be explained by either his salary or an assumption of theft. He isn’t stealing anything. If you check around, you’ll find he’s been telling me the truth.”

  “We have checked around.”

  “Next, there’s a lot of loose cash floating around Writing Enterprises. Put one and one together and make two.”

  Martinez has always been good at this kind of thing. “Two,” he said. “Someone’s supplying.”

  “They all are, I think. They must be. It’s too complicated an operation for one person.”

  “But we checked,” Martinez said. “When Michael Brookfield died.”

  “You checked Michael Brookfield,” I said. “Did you check, oh, Felicity Aldershot?”

  “No,” Martinez said. He flushed. “No.”

  “Maybe you should,” I said. “Later. Right now, tell me something. Say they’re low-to middle-level drug suppliers. What’s the easiest way to catch them?”

  “The easiest way?” Martinez said. “If you’re not particular about what they’re convicted of—and I’m surely not—then the easiest way is to hope the tax boys get them. That’s the only truly wonderful thing about the Internal Revenue Service. They can put people away we couldn’t touch otherwise.”

  “Add two and two,” I said. “That money was going to Greece, in cash. The magazine has a big circulation in Greece. It isn’t doing too badly in Italy, either. Except Nick was telling me something about Greece the other day. Non-Greek publishers do lousy in Greece. The Greeks don’t read much and what they do read they read in their own magazines and newspapers and if they want something foreign some domestic company just pirates it.” I tapped the table. “If you check, you’ll probably find the same thing about Italy. And Spain. And some of the Latin American countries.”

  “Some of the magazines go to Italy?”

  “The magazines go all over the place,” I said. “Big boxes of them. Say there are forty magazines to a box, that’s about standard in the business. One thousand per magazine, forty thousand per box. At least to Italy and Greece, Lu. Maybe to other places as well. Like I said, there were a lot of boxes.”

  Two and two was harder than one and one. “I know what you’re saying,” he said. “They’re laundering it. It’s going out as United States currency and it’s being returned as foreign earnings on the sale of magazines—”

  “Probably also literary service fees and paperback book sales,” I said. “And they’re holding a Writer’s Conference on Kos this summer. Some of it will probably come back from there.”

  “But how will it come back? You can’t just walk up to some bank in Athens and deposit forty thousand American dollars.”

  “You don’t,” I said. “There’s a huge black market money system in Greece and Italy and places where the local money is highly inflationary. The black market gives better rates than the banks do. You get your money changed there—not too much of it, not in too-large bills, not with the same people over and over again, if you want to be careful—then you bring the drachmas to the bank and get them changed back. You probably make money on the deal.”

  “It’s still a lot of floating cash,” Martinez said.

  “I know it is. They probably don’t send a shipment every month. They couldn’t, not if I’m right about how they’re distributing it when it’s here. And every time they need to increase the amount they send, either they increase the countries they sent it to, or increase the sales figures for some countries, or they expand the operation
. First the magazine went international, then Literary Services, then Newsletters, then Publishing. Now it’s Writing Workshops and Correspondence Courses.”

  “Where do you get this information?” Martinez said. “What do you do when I’m not around?”

  “Write for magazines,” I said. “Believe it or not, I did a how-to article on tourist use of black markets a few years ago. Lu—”

  “What about the people?” Martinez asked. “You’d need to bring more people into it.”

  “One per country,” I said. “And you can check up on them. How many times did Michael go to Greece in the past two years?”

  “Six times to Greece,” he admitted. “Three times to Italy. Once to Spain.”

  “Until Alida cut him off,” I said. I paused. It was like looking at a nonrepresentational painting. If you held it one way, then started to turn it around, you got—differences. Sometimes you got a whole different picture. “You know,” I said, “when I first thought of this, I thought they were all in on it. But if Alida wasn’t in on it, then it would explain the murders.”

  “If Alida wasn’t in on it,” Martinez said, “nobody was making any money. Except the company, and why would the rest of them do it to just make money for the company?”

  “Felicity Aldershot was making money,” I said. “She has an employment contract that guarantees her a percentage of the profits from any expansion she initiates. It was her idea to go international in the first place. All she has to do is rig the laundering so her bonuses equal her shipments, then she can pass the money out to the others. She can pass money to Michael and Jack, anyway. She passes dope to Stephen.”

  “This explains the murders?” Martinez said.

  “Of course it does,” I said. “Alida cut Michael off. Let’s assume this was all Felicity’s idea. She’s got the brains to figure this out. So does Stephen, but he doesn’t have the drive. Anyway, she picks up most of the income and the others get less, but still a hefty monthly addition to the ridiculous salaries Alida paid them. Maybe Alida had a point. Even when they got money they couldn’t hang on to it. Anyway, Michael was still spending more than he was bringing in, so he started embezzling and Alida found out about it. The others got nervous. The last thing they wanted was Alida figuring it out and booting them or taking a cut or whatever, so they cut him off, too. To punish him. And Michael started getting crazy. He rigged that thing up in the wardrobe so he could see how many magazines were going out. How many would tell him how much money was coming in, the two things would have to be tied. But punishing wasn’t working. He kept getting crazier. That peephole was crazy behavior. One of them found out about Ivy Samuels Tree and the contract—Phoebe said it’s more or less common knowledge in the business—and wrote a half-innocuous letter to her. They probably told Michael it was for real. He was supposed to play the great crusader and protest against the injustice done her. From what I’ve heard about Michael he would have liked that. Then when Ivy came one of them called Michael on the interoffice phone and told him something that scared him—scared him enough to make him head for that wardrobe. He got Ivy out of his office and went to look and they killed him.”