by Jane Haddam
“You’re not making any sense,” I said.
“No?” Max said. “Try this. Somebody’s trying to kill me.”
“Of course,” I said, thinking of the half-finished mainstream novel on the floor. Paranoia, paranoia. I wondered how drunk Max was. I wondered how drunk he had to be to admit he was a hack.
He stopped next to a cardboard chest of drawers and leaned against it. “I put it wrong,” he said. “I should have said somebody ought to be trying to kill me. As far as I can figure out. Because—”
“Because?” I prompted him.
“It had to be Caroline Dooley,” he said. “It had to be Caroline Dooley trying to sabotage Dana’s line. That’s the only thing I can think of. I figured whoever put the poison in Dana’s office had to be after you.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with Dana’s line,” I said.
“You were bringing her writers,” Max said.
“I brought her a writer she sold to Caroline,” I said. “Why would Caroline try to kill me for bringing a writer to Dana that Dana then sold to her?”
Max sat back down on the bed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
He put his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees and rocked. I watched him, wondering what it was all supposed to mean. The sick feeling in the middle of my stomach was the knowledge that my theory was disintegrating. I could no longer honestly believe Max Brady had killed one, possibly two, people. The police say there is no such thing as a “murderer type,” but Max wasn’t the type. He wasn’t guilty. He wasn’t afraid-of-being-caught. He was just afraid.
“Why?” I asked him. “Why did you rip up Caroline’s office?”
“I was drunk,” he shrugged. “I was furious. I’d found out about the sabotage—God, all this stuff about things getting deliberately misshipped, I don’t know. It was baroque. And I was furious and drunk and—”
“But who told you about it?” I said. “Where did you hear about it?”
“I don’t know. I was drinking with some people. Dana. DeAndrea. What’s her name, Verna’s friend with the beads all over her dresses—”
“Amelia Samson.”
“Yeah, right. Anyway, lots of people. Marilou Saunders came by.” He grinned. “She wanted to see Dana but not me. I’m not supposed to exist. Nothing’s supposed to remind her she didn’t write that dreck herself.”
“Does Dana know?”
“Hell, yes. She got me into this. You’re not supposed to know. This is a deep, dark secret. For real, for once. If that old bitch Dooley knew, she wouldn’t have to kill people. Or so I’m told.”
“Does Dana know you wrote Verna’s book?”
“I didn’t write Verna’s book,” Max said. “Not this one. She didn’t need me.”
“Are you sure?”
“I wrote Verna’s last five books before this one. Of course I’m sure. We had a thing going a while back and it was over, but I still liked the old bat. And the money was good. And the aggravations minimal.”
“Verna wrote her own book?”
“Far as I know. She didn’t say anything about getting another ghost. And she would have. We still talked. She didn’t like having to use a ghost.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “The wrong people are dead to make killing them to protect Dana’s line make any sense. Even if you assume the target in the reception room was Marilou Saunders. Something tells me Marilou’s ego is big enough, she’d sue man or beast who said she hadn’t written her book herself. If Marilou did it, she had to be trying to kill Sarah specifically, and that doesn’t make sense either.”
“Caroline Dooley,” Max said. “I told you.”
I brushed it away. “Somebody told you there’d been sabotage on your book. My Rod Is Hot? That book?”
Max nodded. “Hope springs eternal,” he said.
“What did you do then?”
“Drank,” he said. “Drank some more. Got pissed off as well as pissed. DeAndrea and Dana took me home. I passed out. I got up and drank some more. I got furious again. And—well—” He smiled sheepishly. “I guess I was playing detective. Anyway, I thought if I searched her office I could find the evidence, that she’d screwed me, so I went over there and waited until lunch-time—”
“Hiding a razor in your coat?”
“I’d just bought some new blades. I don’t know. Anyway, I got in there and there wasn’t any evidence, but there was all this romantic suspense. The place was lousy with romantic suspense.”
“So you ripped it up.”
“I guess so. But McKenna, I never went near Dana’s office. That day or any other day. I’ve never been in the place. With my ex-wife’s penchant for hiring detectives, I don’t dare. So I didn’t poison anyone.”
“You could have taken care of Caroline’s office while someone else took care of the poisoning,” I said. “An accomplice.”
“Who?” Max said. “And for what?”
“I don’t know. But Caroline’s keys were stolen. If you didn’t take them, who did? And if you took them, where are they? Did you give them to someone?”
“As far as I know, I never had Caroline Dooley’s keys. The paperweight, yes. It made me sick listening to her go on and on about that paperweight. But as far as I know, I never had the keys.”
“As far as you know?”
“After I left her office, I went out and had a few more drinks.”
“Right,” I said.
“You go ask DeAndrea,” Max said. “He was with me the whole time afterward. I think maybe it was, like, more than one day. Days.”
I sighed. It could have been days, the way Max had been drinking lately.
“And he’ll tell you,” Max said, “that I don’t have anything to do with poisons. I don’t keep them in the apartment. I won’t even kill roaches with them. Just ask him.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll ask him.” This time I was the one biting my lip, rubbing my face, going through the stock sequence of nervous gestures. Poison, poison, poison. Every time somebody said the word “poison”—not arsenic, but “poison”—something went off in my head. Something felt wrong, strangely out of place. Every time it happened, I tried to figure out what it was, and couldn’t.
Maybe I would talk to DeAndrea.
TWENTY-THREE
AS SOON AS I hit the street, I knew I wasn’t going to go looking for DeAndrea immediately. I was exhausted, and confused, and rebellious. I hated the idea that Max’s assault on Caroline’s office had been a fluke, a side issue, with no connection to Verna, or Sarah, or the precise placement of arsenic in Dana Morton’s reception room. Max’s neighborhood didn’t make me feel much better. I made a few halfhearted phone calls from the one working booth at the corner of Eleventh and Thirty-ninth, got no answer at either DeAndrea’s apartment or Bogie’s, and gave up without a qualm. I bought cigarettes in a bodega that should have had a sign in the window saying “No English Spoken Here.” I went hunting for cabs. I had to walk all the way to Eighth Avenue before I found one.
Phoebe had not only taken Adrienne to Eeyore’s, she’d hit the children’s department at Saks, F.A.O. Schwarz, Baskin-Robbins, Laura Ashley, children’s furniture at Bloomingdale’s, and Crazy Eddie. My apartment looked like page 3 of New York magazine’s “Best Bets for Christmas.” My hallway looked like the back end of a grocery store half an hour after a major delivery. My kitchen looked like the art department at Fires of Love, with one exception. The three oversized easels with romantic suspense cover paintings on them—man and girl fleeing gunmen, girl in off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch heels; man and girl scaling Alp, girl in off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch heels; man and girl hiding in bowels of boat, girl in off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch heels—looked right in place, but the pyramid of marzipan frogs in the center of the table looked a little odd. Phoebe had cleaned out my ashtray to put the frogs in, so I made a makeshift one out of AWR letterhead and lit a c
igarette.
Phoebe came out of the back hall and said, “I ordered you a couch.”
“Why not?” I said. “You ordered everything else. What is all this stuff?”
“Furniture for Adrienne’s room.” She sat down in the chair opposite me. “I unpacked it and left it in the living room because I’m too small to move it. Nick’s coming over later.”
I took a very long drag. “Peachy keen,” I said.
“Adrienne and I saw you on television,” she said.
“Let’s not talk about it,” I said. “Let’s especially not talk about it around Nick. He saw it, too.”
“It made the wire services,” Phoebe said. “They’ve heard about it in Russia.”
I made an appropriate groan and decided to chain-smoke. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do. My life was a mess, the case (if that’s what you wanted to call it) was a worse mess, Nick was going to stop speaking to me when he found out what I’d been up to all afternoon, Dana had probably already stopped speaking to me, if she wasn’t pretending never to have heard of me, Marilou would undoubtedly sue me...
“Sometimes,” I told Phoebe, “I think Myrra is watching over me, making sure my life is always interesting.”
“I know,” Phoebe said. “Before Myrra, your life was normal.”
“Normal for Manhattan, anyway.”
“I’ve got bad news,” Phoebe said. “Adrienne may be only seven, but she reads newspapers. She got it from the Times.”
I looked across the living room in the direction of the back hall, feeling guilty at feeling so relieved. Whatever happened now, I wouldn’t have to break the news. I wouldn’t have to watch Adrienne’s face come apart under the impact. The worst had already happened. I could go in there and do what I felt capable of doing—holding the pieces together.
“Pay?” Phoebe said. “Nick said something about—are you going to keep her? Adopt her, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t really thought about it When we were in Holbrook, I just wanted—”
“To get her away from Cassie Arbeth,” Phoebe said. “I know, I know. I don’t blame you. But Pay, I think we should talk about it.”
“About what? Keeping Adrienne?”
“I think maybe if you don’t want to do it, I do. I mean, David and I are fighting right now, but we wouldn’t be if I’d marry him and then all we’d have to worry about is our being Jewish and Adrienne not, that might worry social services, but—”
I gave her a long look. “Does Adrienne want to stay?” I asked her.
“I think so.”
“Does she know who she wants to stay with—you or me?”
“Well, actually, I don’t think she thinks it makes a difference.”
“It probably doesn’t,” I said. “Around here, it’s mostly all or nothing.” I shoved my cigarettes into my pocket and got up. “How’s she doing? Why did you leave her alone?”
“She wanted to be alone,” Phoebe said. “I think she wants to talk to you. As to how she is—” Phoebe shrugged. “She’s a funny kid, Patience.”
“No funnier than I am.”
Phoebe made a face. “Don’t tell me. She reminds you of you when you were a child.”
“No,” I said. “You remind me of me when I was a child. Adrienne reminds me of me now.”
I headed into the back hall.
It wasn’t hard to find the room she’d picked, even in the endless corridor that was the “bedroom wing.” Most of the doors in the “bedroom wing” were open, revealing empty rooms and ancient carpeting. The corner room on the right was shut up tight. I stopped outside and knocked. Nothing at all came from within, not even breathing. I knocked again.
There was, quite literally, the patter of little feet. The door creaked open. A face popped out and stared at my knees.
“You’re home,” Adrienne said.
“Can I come in and talk?”
“Phoebe bought me a television set.”
She turned around and padded back into the room, opening the door as she went. Most of her new furniture was still in my living room, but Phoebe had managed to drag the television in. It stood against the north wall, thirty-six-inch screen staring blankly at the mullioned windows overlooking Central Park, fifty-six knobs polished and winking even in the half-gray late-fall afternoon light, computer clock winking, light meters and sound meters and recording monitors still but ready, double VCR hookups closed against the possibility of dust.
“Dear God,” I said. “You could drive that thing to Connecticut.”
“It’s got a computer in it,” Adrienne said. “I don’t know how it works yet.”
“I wouldn’t know how to turn the damn thing on.”
Adrienne nodded wisely. “You have to be very careful when you tell Phoebe you want something.”
She sat cross-legged on the floor and put her hands in Camille’s fur. Since Adrienne arrived, Camille had shown no interest in me whatsoever. She sprawled in Adrienne’s lap, belly up to encourage scratching in all the right places. I sat on the floor, dancer’s one fluid motion. Adrienne nodded, solemn.
“I saw them do that at school once,” she said. “In a school film. Ballet dancers.”
“It’s not hard,” I said. “I could teach you to do that.”
“Phoebe says you don’t like televisions. That’s why we put it in here.”
I hadn’t had a television since finding Julie Simms’s body in my Eighty-second Street apartment, that was true, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with how I felt about televisions. I had taken nothing, not even clothes, from that apartment. I kept imagining I could smell death on them.
“Mama used to say watching too much television rots your brain,” Adrienne said. “She said that was what was wrong with Mrs. Arbeth and the other people on the street. They watched so much television they couldn’t think anymore, and then they just sat around and didn’t do anything.”
“Ah,” I said.
“I don’t really think it was that,” Adrienne said. She seemed to be working something immensely difficult through her head. “It’s like being good and bad in church,” she said. “Like they tell you in church. I don’t know how to say it.”
I stretched out on my stomach, elbows on the floor, chin in hands, so I was close enough to touch her if she looked like she wanted to be touched. Her face was still screwed into the pain of effort. Her hands were balled into fists.
“Moral and immoral,” I said. “Those are the words. Moral means what you’re supposed to do, and immoral means doing what’s bad. You think what Mrs. Arbeth does is something bad like stealing or telling a lie—”
Adrienne’s face cleared. “Yeah,” she said. “Only I can’t get it exactly. I mean, Mrs. Arbeth doesn’t do anything. Only the not doing anything is as bad as stealing or telling a lie, only I don’t know why.”
“There are a lot of really brilliant people out there who spent a whole lot of time trying to figure that one out,” I said. “Did you used to go to church?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes Mama writes Sundays. She goes to work the rest of the week.” She scowled. “Mrs. Arbeth doesn’t even go to work,” she said. “And she never cleans the house.”
I tugged at her hair. “You want to talk about your mother?”
Adrienne drew her knees close to her chest, squishing the cat. The cat didn’t mind. I lay on my stomach, wondering what that kid’s IQ was.
“Is my mama going to be a book?” Adrienne asked.
“That she is.”
“A real book or a paper book?”
Fine, I thought. A future editor of the Times Book Review. “A real book,” I said. “Maybe a paper book later. Lots of times you’re a real book first—”
Adrienne shook this away. “As long as she’s a real book. That’s what she wanted. She wanted to be a real book and then she wanted us to move away from Holbrook and come to live in New York. Am I going to do what Phoebe says? Live in New York with you and her
?”
“Do you want to? Don’t you have grandparents, or—”
“Oh, we didn’t have those. Mama told me. Her mama died and she was the only one left.”
That might or might not be true, but I didn’t want to upset Adrienne, so I said nothing. Adrienne had tightened her hold on her knees.
“If Mama’s going to be a book and I’m going to live in New York, it’s all right,” she said, frantic. “I mean, not all right, but it’s the important thing. She said—” Adrienne stopped. There were tears. She didn’t want tears. I wanted to tell her it was all right. She was supposed to cry. No seven-year-old had to be in complete control of her emotions. I couldn’t think of what to say or how to say it. I knew how she felt. I hadn’t cried in front of another human being since I was her age. A combination of pride and stubbornness and the fear of vulnerability makes me never want to do it again. I wanted to tell her to let go, but even thinking the words made me feel like a phony. I wouldn’t want to let go. I want to win a victory over tears.
“She wanted something and she went out and got it,” Adrienne said tremulously. “She told me about that. That’s the most important thing. She told me over and over. She wanted something and she didn’t sit around wishing for it or saying there was nothing she could do about anything, she went out and got it. And if she got it, then it’s all right because she said that was the point, the point of—”
I got her a second before she fell. I caught her coming forward, wrapped my arms around her, held her close. There was no answer to this, no explanation, nothing that could ever make it right. That was the truth. That was a truth hard to tell an adult, never mind a seven-year-old child. “What I want,” Adrienne said, “is to bring her back.”
“I know,” I said. “I know. I want to bring her back, too.”