The Horse You Came in On

by Martha Grimes

  Melrose considered this. “It’s a good point. But one would have to know Miss Brown’s mind to bring up the prints, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Maybe it’s not so subtle as the permutations or colors of her mind. Maybe the fingerprints are in the details of the story. Details that only Beverly could have put in and that Poe simply couldn’t’ve.” Ellen shifted her book bag from one shoulder to the other. “For instance: Sweetie was opening a white candy box just a while ago, and it wasn’t until we were getting our coffee that I realized a white candy box has been sitting on the counter by the cashier for days. It registered on my unconscious, and I guess when I was trolling through it, I pulled up the white candy box.” Ellen stopped and looked up at the slate-blue sky. “Well, what if that sort of thing is almost unavoidable? What if there’re things in Beverly’s story like that?”

  “Difficult to determine, isn’t it?”

  “It might be impossible. But then again, what if there’s a ginger jar in her rooms? That’s just an example. What if there were something she looked at every day, perhaps without realizing it, and it crept into the story?” Melrose held the door of Gilman Hall open for her, and a little flood of students rushed out like lemmings. “I wonder if we could get into her apartment,” Ellen mused. Then she added, with a sigh, “Of course, the authenticity of this manuscript isn’t going to help find her killer.”

  Melrose was thoughtful. “It might. It might suggest something more about motive. Incidentally, we’ve been so busy getting you unchained and then talking about reductive symbolism, I forgot to tell you: I met the little girl, Jip—you know, the little girl in the antique shop. She was there when Beverly Brown bought the trunk. The trunk stayed in the shop for a day after she purchased it. Jip looked in it.” Melrose stopped, frowning. Was this one of those secrets he couldn’t keep? He felt unpleasantly ashamed of himself.

  “Really? Well?”

  “She couldn’t remember clearly. But it’s my impression that she knows something, I’m sure of it.” Melrose frowned again and shook his head. “Anyway, we had a long talk.”

  “About what?”

  Melrose paused and changed the subject. “What about the rest of that so-called Poe manuscript? Are we going to see it?”

  “I’ll bring it along this evening.”

  “I believe Richard Jury is supposed to be seeing Professor Lamb when he comes back from Philadelphia. Incidentally, how is your book coming along?”

  She winced. She hated that question. “Pretty bad.”

  They were walking down the corridor toward her classroom, and Melrose said, “What I can’t understand”—among many other things, he didn’t add—“is why Sweetie’s writing him a letter after she’d just seen him lying in a pool of blood at the end of Windows.”

  “Who says it’s blood?” Ellen stopped outside her classroom, nodded to a few students who appeared to be straying in rather than going in intentionally.

  It was clearly hopeless, getting Ellen to tell him anything. “What’s the title of this one?” That might offer up a clue.

  “I told you. Doors.”

  That was no help. “What about the third one? Have you got a title for it?”

  “No.”

  “Hallways? Porches?”

  Ellen turned to give him an evil look.

  Still intent on investigating Maxim’s debatable end, he said casually, “I expect you begin Doors with what happened to Maxim?”

  “Why? Everyone knows what happened to Maxim.” Ellen sailed into the classroom.

  18

  The sound of convulsive sobbing came from behind one door; through another, obviously a lab, three technicians moved between their equipment and blood-stained clothing spread out on a table. Jury walked down the corridor, paint fading from its walls, lino chipped along its floor, past a couple of secretaries stamping numbers on empty binders. The numbers were running into five or six figures. Unsettling to Jury that the binders were empty; it was as if Fate were about to step in out there on the streets, interrupting some simple errand of a man, woman, child—a trip to the mall or the market—and deliver that person up to another empty binder that would start filling up with police reports and morgue shots.

  He passed a big plate-glass window, behind which sat a selection of witnesses (at least, Jury assumed they were), some hard-faced women on a vinyl couch, sending out a few bales of smoke between them from their cigarettes; sending out signals, too, to whoever was available to pick them up. A couple of black kids with fade haircuts looking by turns very pleased with themselves or very scared, depending on which witness a detective picked to escort out; a half-dozen more blacks in high-tops rapping coolly over to one side, as if they’d just been cornered on the basketball court; an elderly man tossing his arms about and demanding his rights; a few others contributing to the squall of noise. A pretty young woman came out accompanied by a police officer; a less pretty one, also with an officer, went in. Back and forth the witnesses moved, none looking happy about it. Their escorts looked even less happy. Bad food, eaten at bad times, in bad company, at bad hours, could do that to a person. Washed-out lighting, weary detectives, snarling witnesses—all familiar. Familiar, too, was the sound of a raised voice coming from one of the officers off somewhere that he couldn’t see, shouting (probably to one of the inmates of the fishbowl Jury had just passed), “Stop BULLSHITTING me, lady!” This line had variants, at least six of them—different emphasis on words, different arrangement of epithets—but the shouter was making his point. The interrogation room production, thought Jury, smiling slightly: a performance sometimes as lavishly staged as a West End musical, with its entrances and exits, the detectives playing their roles, knowing their lines, the witness-suspect playing too, only without a script.

  Then out of one of the doors behind Jury burst a tallish, wiry detective who moved past him like a case of whiplash and was now shouting back to “CHARGE her ASS with first-degree,” hastening along, turning again, shouting back, “NUKE her if she don’t talk!,” and who then cut directly in front of Jury and walked through the door Jury had been about to open, the one with PRYCE stencilled on it.

  “Jack Pryce?”

  The detective turned, said, “Oh—hi,” in such a marvellously pleasant tone Jury wanted to laugh; he would have thought Pryce never had to toss threats at zipper-lipped witnesses. “You’re the Scotland Yard detective? Come on in.”

  Jury, who was expecting to get a little nuking himself, was relieved he wasn’t going to have to deal, apparently, with some egocentric bastard who wouldn’t want to share a single photo or bit of forensic evidence.

  “You’re working on a case in Philly, right?” Jack Pryce picked up some teletypes, scanned them, muttered something about fucking Florida, a couple more homicides in Florida and the perp last seen in D.C. “Is this D.C.?” he asked Jury, rhetorically.

  Pryce put the papers aside and picked up a pencil. He chewed along the length of the pencil like a man eating a cob of corn. Pryce’s office was awash in maps, morgue shots, aerial photos tacked up on a bulletin board and spread across his desk and a couple of tables. Black-and-white shots of a dead girl’s face. Not Beverly Brown—that case would not be recent enough to be spread around the office. These photos were of a girl little more than a child.

  “Not in, precisely.” Jury told him about the death of Philip Calvert, about his conversations with both Hester and the sheriff. To Pryce’s question about the connection, Jury could only shake his head. “I don’t know.” He told him about the notes, the list of initials Ellen Taylor had found in Beverly Brown’s papers.

  “Yeah, we talked to her. Teaches at Hopkins?” He dragged several binders out from the mess on his desk, flicked through some office reports, found what he wanted. “Bunch of people at Hopkins I talked to, but none of them seemed to be really intimate friends. Except for a couple of guys, I got the impression she didn’t really have ‘intimate friends.’ ” Pryce made a note. “I’ll check with Sinclair.
”

  “What guys?”

  Pryce chewed his pencil, tossed it down, picked up another. “Well, there’s one here that everyone seems to think needs special handling—he’s rich, he’s got influence.” Pryce shrugged away the special handling. “He was sleeping with her. Since he’s a part-time teacher and she was a student, I don’t know how well that went down with the powers that be, but hey, big deal, right? His name’s Patrick Muldare. Then there’s this Hopkins professor—Owen Lamb—that she worked with, or was assistant to; then a jerk named Vlasic—Alejandro Vlasic—who was directing her thesis; he’s another professor. Then there’s this weirdo shop on Howard where she worked that’s run by Muldare’s half-brother . . . no, stepbrother. Alan Loser.” Pryce bit the yellow pencil and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. “There is a connection.”

  “What?”

  “There’s this homeless guy—we used to call them ‘bums,’ but no more—hangs out around this shop; it’s sort of his permanent spot. Name of Milos—first? last? who knows? This guy claims he found the body of the Cider Alley victim. . . .” He paused, looked down at the binder.

  “John-Joy?”

  “Yeah. Anyway, he’s deaf and blind. Great witness, right? One of these days we’re gonna get ordered to Mirandize in braille. This Milos isn’t dumb, though. I mean, he can talk. Christ, could he ever yell! So he says he’s hanging around there, Cider Alley, when the cops came. But he wasn’t. No one was around there when those two blues stumbled on the body. We canvassed the block, but who’s to question? It’s not residential around there.”

  “Strange. How’re you getting information from this Milos, anyway, if he’s blind and deaf?”

  Pryce’s brief laugh was more of a grunt. “That’s the whole point. It takes forever, because you got to write on his fucking hand. He’s pretty practiced at it, I’ll give him that, but Christ! Now, what he said was that someone wrote in his hand that he—the someone—was the police. Well, obviously, it wasn’t. The guys who found the body sure as hell didn’t. This Milos wasn’t even around. We found him a couple days later because he kept telling people he’d found this body. So we questioned him. More or less.”

  “You mean the murderer wrote on his palm?”

  “Uh-huh. What I figure is, Milos must’ve caught him in the act, or come on him before he had a chance to make off. Started yelling for the cops. Why the killer didn’t just run I don’t know. Must’ve had nerves of steel.” Pryce shrugged. “But go figure. If it wasn’t a cop and this bum’s not lying, then who else?”

  “Yes, who else?” Jury thought for a moment and then asked, “Is it all right with you if I talk to some of these people? I don’t want to mess with your case if you don’t want—”

  Jack Pryce said, “Listen, you can make this case go down, be my guest. We’ve come up with zilch on Beverly Brown. I had witnesses couldn’t identify their own faces in the mirror.” He pushed one of the binders towards Jury.

  It was full of color photos stapled to pages. Jury looked down at the dead face of Beverly Brown. She was beautiful. Had been beautiful. The ligature mark circled her neck, crisscrossing just below the base of the skull.

  “Nothing. No fingernail scrapings even for DNA or blood typing. Was there a struggle? Can’t tell. A few hairs, Caucasoid, found on her coat. Trace evidence—but the integrity of the trace evidence is questionable. Look.” His tone became slightly defensive, as if perhaps Scotland Yard could do better about keeping evidence sterile. “Autopsy surroundings could be better, right? Things are crowded. We got bodies stacked from here to Sunday. Some of that trace ‘evidence’ could’ve come from the ME’s investigators, from the paramedics—hell . . .”

  “We’ve got that problem, too. What about the man in Cider Alley?”

  “The ME says probably a lead pipe to the skull. Cuts, abrasions, contusions. Lots of bruising.”

  “Different MO.”

  “Yeah. But that doesn’t mean a different perp, necessarily.”

  “Why was Beverly Brown in this churchyard?”

  “The thought on that is, she probably went along like a few others to the churchyard on Poe’s birthday to keep a watch out for the messenger with the flowers. You heard about that?”

  Jury nodded. “Strange place for a murder. So public. And with several people there for the express purpose of keeping watch. . . .”

  “Go figure.” Pryce shrugged again. “I think this is someone absolutely relishes putting it over on the next guy. He or she had a clever little plan. In a way, the fact it was public, I think that’s an advantage. It’s got the benefit of being totally unexpected, and the environment, unless you screw up with prints and so forth, is foreign to you. Smoke someone in your home or his and you got all sorts of things that can go wrong. And he didn’t have to make an appointment, did he? Knew she’d be there. Him or her, I mean. Could’ve been a woman.”

  “No motive?”

  “Muldare might have had one, maybe. Jealous lover, that kind of thing. Of course this fancy-pants stepbrother of his might have had the same motive. Nothing else, nothing suggested.”

  “What about this alleged Poe manuscript?”

  Pryce rocked his hand back and forth. “Very iffy. Valuable if it was real; but was it?”

  Wiggins’s point.

  “And she didn’t have it, so . . .”

  “No, but . . . who might benefit from the scholarship?”

  “Vlasic. Alejandro. Alejandro, for shit’s sake—what a name. My guess. Or maybe anyone at Hopkins. He was supposed to be the thesis advisor, that’s all.”

  “This derelict, John-Joy?”

  “Nothing there. That’s even harder, because it’s like a vacuum. He had buddies in the alley, but . . . Cider Alley—” Pryce grimaced—“that’s too close to Harborplace for my money. You don’t want to smoke someone at Harborplace.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Mayor don’t like it.” Pryce flashed a grin and chewed his pencil.

  Jury rose. “Thanks. I appreciate your help.”

  “My help? Let me tell you something: the homicide rate in this city is something like between two, three hundred a year. The clearance rate in my squad on homicides is one-third, thirty-three percent.” Pryce flicked the edges of a stack of files. “Seventy-two cases. Fifty-five open files. Bad.”

  He looked so bleak, Jury said, “Lies—damn lies and statistics, Detective. What kind of homicides? Drugs? Domestics? It makes one hell of a difference.”

  “Drugs, mainly. Fucking right it makes a difference. Domestic, you know who the shooter or the guy with the knife is—he’s sitting right there having his dinner. But like I said—statistics, lies or not, are what gets your ass in a sling. If there’s a conviction, the death’s down, correct? Makes no difference the perpetrator walks a week later; it’s still down.” Pryce sighed and tossed the chewed pencil on the table. “Christ, I should complain. At least it’s not D.C. That place is unbelievable. We get detailed over there sometimes. But we’re catching up; Baltimore’s getting almost as bad. Jamaican drug wars. Southeast and Northeast D.C.’s a war zone, believe me. If the devil stepped through that door and gave me a choice between a detail in D.C. or a detail in hell—”

  “You’d take hell.”

  “You better believe it.”

  19

  The shop was called Nouveau Pauvre.

  The name was painted in an unravelling web of spidery black cursive on a white oblong sign screwed into the red brick. Beneath the wrought iron steps that formed a canopy above him sat a bearded man of uncertain age, bundled into a heavy coat fastened around the middle by a rope. His hands buried in his sleeves, he appeared to be dozing. Above him another sign was hand-lettered: “MILO’S GRATE. DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT.”

  “About what, I wonder?” asked Wiggins.

  A dog, also of uncertain breed and also apparently dozing, lay with its head on its paws beside a white plastic Hardee’s cup with some token change in it. The dog had the baleful f
ace and long ears of a basset.

  When Jury and Wiggins stopped there on the pavement, both man and dog sprang awake, the dog whining and thumping its tail, the man holding out the cup beside him in a blind side-to-side movement of his hand. “Quarter! Got any change? Quarter!” It was more of a demand than a request It was certainly yelled rather than spoken.

  “You’re Milos?” asked Jury.

  No answer.

  The man’s barked request had momentarily made Jury forget Milos was deaf.

  Milos shot out his hand and commanded, “Write it!” He pointed to his palm, then drew his forefinger along it in a simulation of script.

  Jury sketched “MILOS”—with a question mark.

  “No. Madonna.” With a look of absolute disgust, he lifted the hand with the cup and indicated the sign behind him.

  Jury took the hand again, tried to work out some simple way of identifying himself, could think of nothing. He traced his name; Milos frowned. He traced the word “COP.”

  Milos snatched back his hand. Then he retreated into his Buddha-like doze, hands snuggled back into frayed coat-cuffs, head inclined.

  Even the dog snarled, as if it wanted to know if they made fun of hound dogs, too. Then it tucked its snout into its paws.

  Frustrated, Jury touched his arm.

  “Fuck off.”

  “They could do,” said Wiggins, as he and Jury climbed the staircase, “with a bit of smartening up.”

  • • •

  The youngish man who had tented the book he was reading on the counter was in no need of smartening up. He bore a strong sartorial resemblance to Marshall Trueblood, though dressed in colors far less ripe and blinding. His oyster-colored trousers ballooned slightly at the hips, and the cuffs were both turned up and nipped in at the ankle; his creamy-rose cotton jacket was deconstructed enough for Trueblood and Armani; and also, like Trueblood, he wore a silk scarf, but neatly tucked into the open neck of his shirt, and of a pale, pale yellow.