Wicked, Loving Murder

by Jane Haddam

  “You keep saying ‘they’.”

  “It could have been any of them,” I said. “Felicity sent Janet away from her desk and took Ivy in to Michael, but as far as I can tell, it would have been better to leave Janet at her desk. Wait. No. You don’t want Janet to see Ivy leave. You couldn’t count on her not seeing Michael after that.”

  “It was Felicity Aldershot?”

  “Can’t tell,” I said. “Could have been. Could have been Jack. Could have been collusion. Anyway, then the police decided to attach the records and they got worried Alida would find out about it anyway. So they killed Alida. All it took was a call to Ivy. Then Mrs. Haskell—you see, it wasn’t the audit. It was the attachment. They didn’t want some smart lawyer looking through the records of what went where and why. With the police in and out they probably didn’t have time to fix whatever they needed to fix. So they had to put Mrs. Haskell out of commission for a while. They didn’t have to kill her. They didn’t kill her.”

  “No,” Martinez said, “they didn’t kill her. She’s still in a coma, but she’s looking up. Last I heard, anyway.”

  “See,” I said. “The attack on Mrs. Haskell makes me think it’s Jack. It’s the kind of thing Jack would do. He gets emotional. The other two aren’t emotional. I think one of them did it and the other two don’t necessarily know who it was. That’s why everybody over there seems like they’re on an amphetamine high. That’s why Jack—Jesus Christ,” I said. “Jack.”

  “Jack what?” Martinez said.

  “Jack’s going to commit suicide,” I said.

  THIRTY-SIX

  MARTINEZ STOPPED TO PAY the bill. He got out of the Park Luncheonette a full minute after I did. I didn’t stop for anything. I didn’t button my coat or wind my scarves around my throat. I stuffed my gloves in my pockets. My hands were once again smeared with black. I didn’t bother trying to rub them off. I didn’t have time.

  “Jack Brookfield’s going to commit suicide,” Martinez said, catching up with me. “Are you crazy? Even if he murdered those people, we’ve got Ivy, we can’t get rid of Ivy without proof, we haven’t got proof. I don’t care how good your theories are. We haven’t got proof.”

  “They’re going to make him commit suicide,” I said. “The gloves. That’s what happened to the gloves.”

  “McKenna—”

  “I left my gloves in his office. On the radiator. He had a lot of pairs of gloves, over a dozen, all black. They looked almost exactly like mine. Hell, as long as they were black and on that radiator, I don’t think it would have made any difference, not if whoever it was was in a hurry.”

  “In a hurry to do what?”

  “To put typewriter ink on the gloves,” I said. “Jack went out to lunch. He and Felicity went out at the same time but I don’t know if they had lunch together. Stephen was wandering around the office by himself. It couldn’t have been Marty Lahler because he was helping me with the wardrobe.”

  “Who’s Marty Lahler? How does he come into this?”

  The accountant,” I said. “Queens. Forget it. It’s a long story. It had to be while Jack was out, though, and they wouldn’t know how long he’d be out, so they’d be in a hurry. They came in and grabbed a pair of gloves and put typewriter ink on them. Just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  “Just in case being half a million dollars in the hole and in violation of the securities laws wasn’t enough to make his death look like a suicide.”

  We reached the door to the Writing Enterprises building. I pushed it back so hard it knocked against the concession stand and made the candy jump. The single working elevator was on the eighth floor. I pushed frantically at the button. Then I leaned against it. The elevators were the old-fashioned kind. When you pressed the call button, bells rang in any car off the call floor. They sounded like burglar alarms.

  “That man I heard in Jack’s office today,” I said. “He was talking about them ending up in Leavenworth. Jack’s been speculating in securities and he’s in a hole and he’s in a big enough hole his broker thinks they’re both going to go down and that means an SEC investigation and that means—”

  “I see what it means.”

  The elevator started gliding downward.

  “They can’t have this kind of trouble,” I said. “Not so it touches them. If Jack panics and kills himself, it won’t touch them. Nobody will press it.”

  “How’re they going to get him to kill himself?”

  “Writing Enterprises,” I said, “is twenty stories up.”

  Martinez said, “Jesus Christ,” for what felt like the millionth time.

  The elevator hit the lobby and let out an irate fat woman in purple tweeds.

  The elevator that gets you to work in the morning goes much too fast, unless you’re late. When you’re late, it hardly seems to move at all. This was one of those elevators that hardly moved at all. I swear to God it took the better part of two hours to get to the twentieth floor.

  We stopped on every floor in between. Every time we stopped someone got in, said “Oh, you’re going up,” and got out again. “Look at the arrow,” I said, the third time it happened. “Look at the arrow. It’s green. It points up.”

  Martinez tried to calm me down. He told me it was all conjecture. He told me that even if my conjecture was accurate, nothing said they had to force Jack to suicide tonight.

  “Of course it has to be tonight,” I said. “That Dunne person was in the office today. The further they get away from that the less plausible the suicide is.”

  “Felicity Aldershot or Stephen Brookfield,” Martinez said.

  “I’ll bet on Felicity Aldershot,” I said. “That bitch.”

  “Now, now,” Martinez said.

  “Can’t they make this elevator go faster?” I said.

  “What do you want? Four on the floor?”

  We got to the twentieth floor. The elevator doors opened. We couldn’t get out.

  The entire reception area of Writing Enterprises was full of people. Pink tissue paper hearts hung from the ceiling. Pink tissue paper streamers were tacked to the walls. A mouse-faced editorial assistant peered at Martinez and me and said drunkenly, “People in the elevator! Look! People in the elevator!”

  “Keep your head down,” Martinez said. “Act like they aren’t there.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders and pushed. I went flying into the crowd, bumping against heads and shoulders and knees. A few people swore at me. Most of them laughed. I came up short at the desk and found myself looking down at a huge crystal punch bowl full of something green. Someone I didn’t recognize filled a paper cup with the green and handed it to me.

  “Should have been pink,” she said. “Got drunk on the way to Woolworth’s. Got it mixed up with Saint Patrick’s Day.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Which way?” Martinez said.

  I pointed through the mass of people to the corridor.

  “His office,” I said. “That would be the logical place. His office.”

  “Come on.” Martinez grabbed my arm and started dragging me through the people, using me as a shield to keep them from crowding in behind him. The corridor wasn’t much better than the reception area. It had become a public lover’s lane. Pairs of every possible description were lined up against the wall, locked together in a kind of rigor coitus.

  “You’d think sex was complicated enough,” Martinez said. “People have to make it more complicated. People have to get fancy.”

  We got to the first office corridor and ran down it, glad of the air and the space. We turned the corner and came to Jack Brookfield’s office. Martinez stopped dead in front of the door.

  “If I was in the hole for half a million dollars,” he said, “I’d jump out a window myself.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.

  “It means maybe they’re making him commit suicide and maybe they’re not, but one thing is for sure. He’s got a good reason t
o put himself out a window. If he is putting himself out a window, without help, then the last thing we want to do is bust in on him.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “What brought that up?”

  “Listen,” Martinez said. “You won’t hear anything.”

  I listened. No sound at all came from Jack Brookfield’s office.

  “Maybe it’s over,” I said. “Maybe they’ve done it already.”

  “There’d have been some reaction by now,” Martinez said. “It took us long enough to get up in that elevator.”

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “Trust me.”

  I tried the doorknob. It turned easily. I pushed the door in on darkness. I felt along the wall and hit the light switch.

  Jack Brookfield’s office was empty. The windows were closed. The desk was clear. Martinez let out enough air to power a windmill for a month.

  “Damn,” he said. “Damn. All for nothing. Crap.”

  “No,” I said. “Listen.”

  Martinez wanted to believe I’d invented the whole thing, but he couldn’t help hearing the sound I heard. Someone was tapping against glass.

  I went back into the first main corridor and listened. The tapping was louder. A voice said, “Stop.” The tapping stopped.

  Martinez pointed to a door. “In there,” he said.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I told him.

  He shrugged. “Sense or no sense. In there. Get around the corner and stay out of sight. I don’t want you anywhere near this.”

  This was more arrogance than I could handle in one day. Especially that day. I wasn’t going to take it like a girl. I brushed past Martinez, said, “Crap,” in my loudest voice, and kicked in the door.

  It was a good thing I did. When that door swung open, Stephen Brookfield was halfway out his office window. Standing right behind him, holding a gun to his back, was Jack.

  There was an explanation, of course. There always is. I didn’t get it for a while. Instead of doing what everybody expected him to do—drop the gun and run—Jack headed straight for Stephen and pushed. If he’d been a second faster, he’d have got what he wanted, though what he expected to pin from it was beyond me. Stephen, seeing us, had pulled just a fraction of an inch back into the room. It was enough to let him keep his balance when Jack came hurtling at him. Jack bounced off him and hit the floor. Then Martinez went to work.

  Martinez is very good at what he does. He got the gun away from Jack with only one shot fired. The one shot went into Stephen Brookfield’s desk, shattering a desk leg. The desk buckled, teetered, and fell over. Stephen said, “Good riddance,” and started to laugh. Martinez motioned me to the phone. I called the cops. While I was calling, the party wandered into the corridor and to the edge of the door, bringing punch. It was very good punch, .0001 percent green food coloring and 99.9999 percent straight vodka. Even Stephen took some. He raised his glass to me in a toast and said,

  “Felicity’s going to kill him. This is the fourth one he’s screwed up.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  “SHE WOULD HAVE KILLED him,” I told Martinez, when the uniformed police had taken their positions and the crowd had been dispersed and Jack Brookfield was safely in custody. “I would say she would have killed him ‘too,’ except she hasn’t actually killed anyone yet.”

  “Jack did it all?” Martinez said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Jack did it all.”

  I reached for my cigarettes and found an empty pack. Stephen got out a pack of his own—Trues—and tossed them over to me. He’d disappeared into the bathroom some time ago and emerged very calm. He was still very calm. The idea of all those policemen and all that dope in the same place at the same time didn’t bother him at all.

  “Everybody thought Alida was nuts,” Stephen said. “Alida wasn’t nuts. Felicity was nuts. Alida didn’t trust us and she was right.”

  “Alida trusted Felicity,” I said.

  “We all make mistakes,” Stephen said.

  “Will somebody tell me what’s going on?” Martinez said.

  Stephen patted my arm. “You’ve got to watch him,” he said, pointing to Martinez. “If you don’t give him what he wants, he can lock you up. Or harass you. Or—”

  “Or tell her boyfriend what she’s been up to,” Martinez said. “That ought to make me an accessory before the fact in a homicide case.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “I called him. I called Nick. He’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Tell me,” Martinez said. “Then I won’t tell him. Much.”

  Stephen and I were stretched out on the carpet, our backs against the pasteboard wall. We were side to side, shoulder to shoulder. He reached out and patted my knee.

  “Miss McKenna was ahead of herself,” Stephen said. “Felicity had to get rid of Jack because Jack had not only killed two people and battered a third, he knew he’d done it because she asked him to. Told him to, more likely. She found out about Ivy Samuels Tree—I remember when she told us about that. She didn’t tell us what she was going to do about it, but she told us. She thought up the typewriter ribbons. She—”

  “I thought you didn’t know any of this,” Martinez said. “I thought you weren’t in on it.”

  “I wasn’t,” Stephen said. “I’m not an idiot, Lieutenant. Jack was an idiot. Michael came close. Felicity was smart enough to be sure she couldn’t be caught for any of this, though I didn’t know she was using Jack until he tried to force me out a window. And I know he screwed them up. Felicity would have been smart enough to know one murder in the office was enough, and that should be done as unexceptionally as possible. Not in a wardrobe in a newly cleaned out broom closet. And then the money—”

  “The money?” Martinez said.

  “The money in Alida’s purse,” Stephen said. “Jack went in and took it after Miss McKenna here found the body. He asked me for five dollars that morning, and that afternoon he had enough to take himself out to MacArthur Park for a serious lunch. Felicity sure as hell wasn’t going to give it to him, no matter what he’d just done for her. Felicity can hang on to a dollar better than the Internal Revenue Service. And then you started asking about the position of the chair, and the money in the wallet, and Felicity started looking like she’d swallowed a worm. Like I said, stupidity was never my problem.”

  “Except in one area,” I said.

  He gave me a look that said, “Skip it.” “She had to get rid of me before she got rid of Jack,” he said, “because I kept going around doing things. I accidentally left a certain article in a book I gave Miss McKenna—”

  “Just McKenna,” I said. “Or Pay.”

  “Patience?”

  “Never Patience,” I said.

  “Anyway, I left a certain article in this book,” Stephen said. “Then when she came to give, it back, I gave her hints. The hints were overheard. Miss McKenna and I were in the—ah, yes, the men’s room.” Stephen smiled at the look on Martinez’s face. Martinez thought this was a bit much, even for me. “Felicity was in the ladies’ room next door. The walls around here are paper.”

  “Marty Lahler said she’d gone out to lunch,” I said.

  “She did. Just after. She took Jack with her and had a nice long talk.”

  “What about the ink on McKenna’s gloves?” Martinez said. “We had that all worked out as being a way for making Jack look like the killer. In case suicide because of financial ruin didn’t work. Except Jack was the killer.”

  “If you go through the gloves on his radiator, you’ll probably find a pair with ink dried on them,” Stephen said. “Maybe two pair. Jack never could keep his gloves straight. He used Miss McKenna’s gloves to ink up my raincoat. Just in case, as Patience would say.”

  “Don’t call me Patience,” I said.

  Tony Marsh stuck his head in the door and said, “They picked her up. She was at home. Watching a videotape of Gone With the Wind.”

  “Gone With the Wind,” Martinez said. “Jesus Christ.”

>   “Says she doesn’t know anything,” Tony Marsh said.

  “Tell her we took Jack Brookfield alive,” Martinez said. “That ought to change her story.”

  “That’ll end her story,” Stephen said. “She won’t say a word until her lawyer gets there.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Martinez said.

  “She has a very good lawyer,” Stephen said.

  Martinez shrugged. “This time, Jack Brookfield being Jack Brookfield, I don’t think I care.”

  “Jack Brookfield being Jack Brookfield,” Stephen agreed. “You know, he should have known. As long as Alida was alive, Felicity needed us to cover for her. With Alida gone, Felicity was in charge. She not only didn’t need us, she couldn’t afford to keep us around. All Jack could think about was the money he owed Tommy Dunne and what people would think of him if there was an SEC investigation. All Jack could ever think about was what people would think of him.”

  “So he killed two people, bashed up a third, and tried to force you out a window at gunpoint?” Martinez said.