by Jane Haddam
“You’re a public personality,” Nick said. “You’ve got a reputation for getting involved in crime.” I started to look indignant, but he frowned me down. “You get involved in the right end of crime, but that’s not the point. The juvenile authorities are very conservative. They still think of the perfect family as a clone of ‘Father Knows Best.’ If you really want to play foster mother to this kid, assuming we can untangle the legal ramifications of your taking her across state lines in the first place, which I doubt—”
I got up and walked away from him. There was activity in the street: two blue-and-whites and an unmarked car I knew was a police car only because Tony Marsh got out of it. A beefy, hangdog-looking man got out of it with him. I had never seen Tony’s partner before.
I didn’t really know I wanted to keep Adrienne with me. I just knew I had to get her out of Cassie Arbeth’s house. And I did.
On the other hand, keeping her with me did not sound like a bad idea, now that I’d thought of it.
I pointed into the street. “They’re here,” I told Nick, although he was perfectly capable of seeing them himself. “God, I wish I knew what was going on. This whole thing is so crazy.”
I rubbed the flat of my palm against my lips. The scene outside had turned into a dance. Our two patrolmen stood just outside the door, hands folded over their chests. Four more patrolmen paced in the street. Tony Marsh and his partner leaned against the unmarked car, staring into the sky. I wondered what they were saying to each other out there.
“I couldn’t have left her there,” I told Nick. “You should have seen that house. You should have met that woman.”
“Pay—”
“Maybe you had to be there,” I said.
Outside, the dance came to an end. The patrolmen made a wedge and let Tony and his partner through, as if protecting them against the ghost of popular resistance. The door opened. The patrolmen flattened themselves against the inside wall. Tony and his partner came in, bride and groom in a parody of a military wedding.
Tony looked around the lobby, spotted me, and said, “Miss McKenna. Miss McKenna.”
It took half an hour to get it straight—times, people, places, conjectures. Tony’s partner crossed the lobby to talk to Caroline and John Robert Train. Tony didn’t seem to be interested.
“We got the body down to the ME’s office and put a rush on it,” he said. He looked proud of himself for saying a sentence like that. “They’ll call us here and give us the results if they get them in time.”
“Are you going to go up and photograph things?” I asked him. “Are you going to take fingerprints?”
“Probably.” He shrugged. “With all the moving around and the fire hoses and things, I don’t see what good it’ll do, but we’ll do it. Have to keep up the form.”
“Of course,” I said.
“It could still have been a nut,” Tony Marsh said. “You ate Halloween candy. She ate Halloween candy.”
I snorted. “Why move the body?”
“The body could have moved itself,” Tony said placidly.
I got up and headed for the elevators. “I’ve heard all this before,” I said. “It didn’t make any sense before and it doesn’t now.”
Caroline glared at me from across the lobby. “It’s all her fault,” she said. “She’s some kind of nut.”
I stabbed at the elevator button. Tony and Nick caught up to me, Tony puffing, Nick’s eyes doing the whirligig that announces imminent explosion. I didn’t care. I’d been listening too long to this rigmarole about accidents and crazy people. I knew what kind of case Tony wanted it to be. I knew he didn’t want to get tough with Marilou Saunders. I knew he was embarrassed at the possibility that he might have been wrong. None of that changed anything, any more than Nick’s not wanting me to be involved in another murder case changed anything.
“You can’t go up there,” Tony Marsh said.
“Yes, I can.” The elevator doors slid open. I held them for Tony and Nick, stepped in myself, and punched “14.” The doors slid shut again. “There’s something I want to show you two, and then I’m going to tell you both a story. If you don’t want to. listen, you can both go to hell.”
“You’re interfering in a crime scene,” Tony said, a little hysterical.
“I thought maybe there wasn’t any crime scene,” I said.
The doors slid open again. We got out, threading our way through a knot of people waiting to go down. The will to privacy had been breached. All along the hall, doors were open, tenants were gathered in clusters, pets were free to scratch and mark and excrete on the hall carpet. As we approached Caroline Dooley’s door, a thin blond woman in white silk lounging pajamas and gold wedgies broke away from her group, held a pointing finger in the air, and screeched,
“That’s her. That’s the dead girl.”
I took the keys from Tony Marsh’s hand, found the one for Caroline’s apartment, gave myself a few seconds to be impressed with the car key (it costs more to keep a car in Manhattan than it does to rent an apartment most other places), and let us in. The blond woman had come to a halt about five feet from us. I didn’t want to give her a chance to get moving again.
I pushed the two men into the lingering smoke and shut the door behind us. The air was much clearer than it had been. It was damp and cold, but not suffocating. I looked at the cleat marks on the carpet and the piles of blackened papers and the streaks of gray and dirt on the once-white walls.
“Look at this place,” I said. “Just look at it.”
Tony Marsh shrugged. “It’s a mess. I expected it to be a mess.”
“Sarah English was dead before she got here,” I said. “Dead for days. The ambulance men have been saying that over and over. Don’t try to hand me anything.”
“She could have died here,” Tony Marsh said dubiously. “Days ago—”
“And Caroline Dooley lived with a corpse in her apartment for days? It makes more sense to say she died somewhere else and someone brought her here and set fire to the place. To her.”
“He can’t say that until he knows,” Nick interrupted, “and he isn’t going to know until the fire department gets finished with—”
“Bullshit,” I waved my hand at the room. “Look at the place. Three piles of paper on the floor. Bills. A manuscript. Something else. Those are burned. The couch is a little scorched. Everything else is messed up from smoke and fire hoses and people’s shoes. Somebody set fire to three piles of paper and that was it. And if the fire department doesn’t agree with me, I’ll go to New Jersey.”
Tony was frowning, thoughtful, childlike, disturbed. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “If what they wanted to do was conceal the body, three piles of paper isn’t going to set a serious fire fast enough—”
“I don’t think anyone was trying to start a serious fire,” I said. “They’d have used lighter fluid, or kerosene, or something. I think somebody was trying to get the body found.”
“All they had to do was leave it here,” Tony Marsh said. “Miss Dooley would come home and find it.”
“Right,” I said. “Okay. I don’t have an answer to that. But consider this. Caroline was talking before about her office being vandalized last Friday afternoon. Which means she couldn’t have been there, which means she could have been somewhere else, which means she could have been in Dana’s office—”
“Whatever for?” Nick said. “Whatever for?”
I retreated. “I don’t know whatever for,” I said.
Tony looked around the room, staring at the blackened piles of papers. They were the only things seriously burned. Everything else just looked wrecked.
He stepped across the carpet and planted himself directly over the sodden pile of burned bills.
“Crumple up a lot of paper and drop a match in it,” he said. “It’s possible.”
“It still comes down to whatever for,” Nick said stubbornly. “You’ve got a murder. You’ve got a removal of the body. You’ve got
a fire. You might—”
“We might have two murders,” I said. “And we might have whatever happened to Caroline’s office.”
Nick glared at me. “You’re getting baroque,” he said stiffly.
“What I think,” Tony Marsh said. The intercom buzzer went off. Tony looked both Nick and me up and down, as if wondering if we were likely to tamper with evidence. Then he plodded heavily to the squawk box. He fiddled with the switch, talked into it, then held his ear against the grate to listen. He needn’t have worried about our overhearing. It’s hard enough to figure out what’s coming over those things when you’ve got your ear to them.
“Keep her down there,” he said into the grille. “I’m on my way.”
He released the switch and looked at us.
“We’ve got a preliminary,” he said. “It’s not definite, you understand, but it’s a start. Dead four days. Arsenic poisoning.”
SEVENTEEN
“IT WAS THE MANUSCRIPT,” Caroline Dooley wailed. “All I wanted was the manuscript.” She looked around the group of us in the lobby, partly furious, partly despairing. She must not have liked what she saw. Her face went red, her eyes dark.
“For God’s sake,” she said. “Somebody ripped up my office; I called looking for another copy of her manuscript. That’s all.”
“Somebody ripped up Sarah’s manuscript?” I said.
“Somebody ripped up all the manuscripts,” Caroline said. “Also the files, the scheduling sheets, the art notes—everything. Came in with a razor, according to the police.” She gave the police a contemptuous glare. “Shredded the place. Even the carpet. If I didn’t know where Dana Morton was at the time, I’d—”
“Why Dana Morton?” Tony Marsh said. “What does Dana Morton have against you?”
“Oh, don’t be naive,” Caroline said again. She stared at the pack of cigarettes I had taken out of my pocket, reached over, and took it from me. She lit up like a veteran. She threw the pack back to me and started blowing smoke rings. “You’re not in the business,” she said to Tony Marsh, “so I suppose I’ll have to explain it to you. I’m putting out a line, a packaged series, of romantic suspense novels. So is Dana Morton.”
“That should make you colleagues,” Tony said.
“That should make us enemies,” Caroline said, “and it would, except we have to do business when Dana’s playing agent, so we stay polite. There’s just so much room and no more in romantic suspense, and there are a lot of people out there with losses in straight romance trying to recoup. Writers under contract we can’t get rid of because they have agents smart enough to take us to court. God only knows who ripped up my office, but whoever it was is doing romantic suspense and I tell you, I’ve had it. Just had it. I don’t mind dog-eat-dog competition, I don’t even mind out-and-out negotiating ruthlessness, but this is getting ridiculous. Somebody tried to hijack one of our trucks last month.”
The truck was too much for Tony Marsh. He no longer looked confused. He looked obliterated.
“Somebody tried to hijack your truck,” he repeated.
“Somebody tried to hijack one of our shipments. This isn’t publishing anymore.” She looked as if the enormity of it all had suddenly hit her. “This is bootlegging.” She gave me a wry look. “Just think how shocked we all were when Fires of Love turned out to be a scam,” she said.
“I’ve got a copy of Sarah’s manuscript,” I said. “I’ll send it over tomorrow.”
“Make copies,” Caroline said. She sighed. “This is going to set us back weeks. Maybe even months. And you know what that means.”
Tony raised his eyebrows.
“Dana will get on the racks first,” I explained. “That gives her an advantage.”
“She already has an advantage,” Caroline said. “Maybe she wouldn’t have ripped up my office—I mean, God help us, what for? Everybody wants that line of hers, and those celebrity adventures. Written by and starring in, for God’s sake. Marilou Saunders. That actress with the huge breasts and that television person who does the cat food commercials and—”
“I keep hearing about that,” I said, “but I don’t believe it. She must have got Marilou a ghost.”
“No chance,” Caroline said. “Gallard Rowson coughed up twenty thousand in advance for Marilou alone. Ten thousand for Verna. They have to write them themselves, it’s part of the deal. Part of the selling strategy. First-person adventures by your favorite writers, actresses, pets—God only knows what. You know what Gallard Rowson is like. Literature. Honesty. Integrity. Horse manure.”
“They’d rather put out the piece of excrement Marilou Saunders is going to write than a good book by a ghost?”
“That’s what I hear.”
“They’re crazy.”
“Isn’t everybody.” Caroline dropped the butt end of her cigarette on the floor and ground it under her heel. Tony and Nick were staring at her, but they no longer made her nervous. She looked almost amused. “I really couldn’t have started this thing, you know. I was in the Oyster Bar until we came up here in the cab, and by the time we got here the fire department was here. You can check.”
Tony was solemn. “I’ll check,” he said. “I’ll check carefully.”
“You do that,” Caroline stood up. “I’m going to check into a hotel.” She looked at John Robert Train. “Or make other arrangements.” She dismissed the rest of us with a wave. “Tomorrow I have to reconstruct my life and my work. Leave me alone.”
EIGHTEEN
“NOTE FOR YOU ON the chalkboard,” Phoebe said when I came in. “I’ll heat up the chicken.”
I dumped my peacoat in the hall closet and wandered into the kitchen. Phoebe was perched on a chair at the kitchen table, romantic suspense posters and American Writers of Romance letterhead spread out before her. The chalkboard (ordered from Santini’s, probably; it hadn’t been in the kitchen when I left) said “Limo Will Pick You Up at 4 A.M.!!!” in green. I opened the refrigerator and rummaged through the neatly repackaged groceries—for some reason, Phoebe takes every item out of its wrapping as soon as she gets it home from the store and redoes it in Baggies and Saran Wrap—and found a decaffeinated Diet Coke. The Coke was sitting next to a twenty-pound turkey. I didn’t have the faintest idea how to cook a twenty-pound turkey.
“What did you do with Nick’s socks?” I asked her.
“I put them in a Baggie in the freezer,” Phoebe said. “I put Adrienne to bed in your bed and I gave her a teddy bear I found in one of your closets. It’s after twelve o’clock, McKenna.”
“Got here as soon as I could.” I took a kitchen chair and sat with my feet curled up under me, lotus fashion. It was just as well Adrienne was asleep. I was going to have to tell her her mother was dead one of these days, but I was in no hurry. I got the ashtray from the middle of the table and my cigarettes from my jacket pocket and looked at Phoebe’s poster collection. “Dangerous Liaison,” the top one said. A man and a woman stood on a narrow ledge on the face of an otherwise sheer cliff, embracing. Water rushed below them. Storm clouds raged above them. The woman was in an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch high-heeled sandals.
“You want to see one of Dana’s?” Phoebe asked. She pushed the poster to me. This one was called “Storm Warning.” A man and a woman stood at the helm of a boat tossed in a bad sea, embracing. The deck was wet, the spray was half a foot over the side. The woman was in an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch high-heeled sandals.
“We’re doing a romance fair,” Phoebe said. “At the conference. Conference time coming up again, you know.” She smiled brightly, but without much hope. The only time I’d attended a romance conference, I’d been arrested for second-degree murder. I wasn’t likely to go again.
“Let me tell you a story,” I said. I gave her an outline of everything that had happened at Caroline’s. It wasn’t much, but it was more than Nick had told her. She nodded sagely throughout, looking like a bright little bird humoring a human who wants it to t
alk. Phoebe is curious but not intrusive. If I’d announced I was going to bed without telling her anything, she’d have forced a chicken breast and three potatoes down my throat and sent me off.
Now she pushed the American Writers of Romance letterhead away and said, “Am I crazy, or does none of this make any sense?”
“It makes a kind of sense,” I said. “Somebody poisoned something in Dana’s office, Halloween candy or coffee, still undecided. Maybe trying to kill Sarah, maybe trying to kill Marilou Saunders. I can think of two dozen people who’d like to kill Marilou Saunders.”
“Marilou Saunders doesn’t drink coffee,” Phoebe said. “She says so all the time, even on television. And she can’t eat candy and stay that thin.”
“I can.”
“You’re abnormal. And Marilou Saunders isn’t dead.”
“Point taken. Somebody nearly killed me. Somebody killed Sarah, took her body out of Dana’s reception room, hid it somewhere, dragged it up to Caroline’s apartment—” I caught the look on Phoebe’s face and shrugged. “Ridiculous, I know, but not impossible. She was a small woman. There are back entrances, back stairs.”
“Somebody dragged that body through Dana’s offices and out the service elevator?”
“Somebody had to. The police searched.”
“Without Dana hearing it?”
“Maybe she was engaged at the time.”
“Maybe she did it herself.”
“She was there when 911 arrived,” I shook my head. “She didn’t have enough time to get the body out of the offices—off the floor—and get back to greet the ambulance. Not unless you people have the times messed up.”
“The times,” Phoebe said, “are part of the official record.”
She got up to get the chicken out of the oven. Her bright yellow bathrobe flapped over her bare feet, making her look like a particularly exuberant monk. I wondered who had been doing errands for her—Nick? My super? Phoebe always manages to get people to do errands for her they wouldn’t do for anyone else.