Canary

by Nathan Aldyne

  “B.J.? You mean Betty Jordan? Even if my name was Betty Jordan, I wouldn’t go by the initials B.J.,” remarked Millie. “You think she knows what those initials stand for?”

  “How long has she been coming here?”

  Millie thought a brief moment. “Since last May, I think.”

  “How often does she show up?”

  “I’m not supposed to talk about our clients.”

  “Of course you’re not,” Clarisse said, “but if you do tell me what I want to know, I promise I won’t sue the spa for allowing me to be locked in the steam room and suffer physical and psychological trauma. Now, how long has Betty Jordan been coming here?”

  “Since May. She takes all her classes from Newt. She comes in twice a week just to use—” Millie’s voice halted.

  “The steam room?”

  Millie nodded slowly.

  “Would I be too far off guessing this is one of her steam days?”

  “Yes, but—” Millie began, confused.

  Clarisse walked away from her toward the locker room. “Thanks for saving my life,” Clarisse tossed back over her shoulder.

  Chapter Seventeen

  AT NINE-THIRTY THAT EVENING Clarisse swept into Valentine’s office above the barroom, banged the door shut behind her, and announced, “Somebody tried to kill me this afternoon—I think.”

  Valentine glanced up from his newspaper. “Who is somebody, and did they or didn’t they?”

  Clarisse threw herself into one of the two wingback chairs facing the desk. She crossed her legs, rearranged her skirt, and folded her arms. Sitting in his swivel chair, Valentine was framed by the two-way mirror overlooking the barroom.

  “‘Somebody’ is B.J. I think she had some help doing it.” Clarisse paused, took a breath, and then said reluctantly, “Newt…”

  Valentine raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  Clarisse detailed for him her visit to the Universal Women’s Health Spa.

  “After it happened, I came directly back here to tell you, but when you weren’t here, I decided to have a nice quiet dinner at the Club Café and think things over. Where have you been all day, anyway?”

  “Maybe it was just a practical joke, like the receptionist said.”

  “It was no joke, Val. I told you, B.J. was eavesdropping outside the door when I was talking to Newt.”

  Valentine put his newspaper aside. “So obviously you’re thinking B.J. killed Ruder and Cruder? Clarisse, she may be strong, but could she kill two men, both of them bigger than her?”

  Clarisse shrugged uneasily. “Newt and B.J. were together the night of the murder. The building where Ruder and Cruder were killed is only a block away from Newt’s apartment.”

  “We’ve established that. Have you done any work on motive?”

  “Not yet,” Clarisse admitted. “But remember, Newt knew other necktie victims. Jed. He had a date with All-American Boy. He knew the Shrimp, too.”

  “I knew all those people, too; at least by sight. So did Niobe, and Sean.”

  Clarisse leaned forward. “What earthly reason would Newt have to be so defensive about B.J. when I questioned him about her?”

  “How would you react if someone asked you specific questions about the last time you had sex?”

  “Okay,” Clarisse conceded, “you have a point, but Newt has never been one for discretion, especially as far as his sexual exploits go. Also, I’d like to find out just how well those two knew each other. Now, Newt told us he’d talked to B.J. in the bar a few times, but the receptionist told me she’s been going to the spa for months.”

  “Maybe Newt didn’t talk to her at the spa for a long time. She may have been going there for months, but how long has she been taking classes from Newt?”

  Clarisse paused a moment before replying. “I think Newt still has some questions to answer. I think we should talk to him, and to B.J. If they won’t give us what we want, we’ll go to the police.”

  “I love how you so casually interchange ‘I’ and ‘we’,” Valentine remarked dryly.

  “You are going to help, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, of course, but you realize that if we’re wrong, Newt will never speak to us again, and Niobe will quit her job.”

  “I’ll feel worse if somebody else gets murdered and you and I haven’t done anything to prevent it.”

  “Who do we grill first? Newt or B.J.?” Valentine asked.

  “Newt,” Clarisse said without hesitation, “just because he’s closer. B.J. lives in Cambridge, near Porter Square—I looked it up in the telephone book.”

  Valentine picked up the telephone receiver and punched the intercom button connecting to the bar. He swung about in his chair to look through the two-way glass at Sean answering the phone next to the cash register.

  “Sean, something’s come up, and Clarisse and I have to go out for a while. Would you mind working a little double-time until we get back? We shouldn’t be more than a couple of hours.”

  Sean glanced up toward the window and nodded agreement to Valentine’s request.

  “For Niobe’s sake,” Valentine said as he hung up the telephone, “I hope our suspicions are wrong.”

  “You never did tell me what you were up to today,” said Clarisse.

  “Same thing you were—snooping around in things that didn’t concern me.”

  “Really?” Clarisse asked in a delighted voice as they left the office. “Where did you go? What did you find out?”

  Valentine locked the office door behind them. “Remember Newt’s leather wristband, the one that just happened to slip off his arm and fall in the hibachi yesterday?”

  “The one the carpenter supposedly found.”

  They moved down the stairwell.

  “I decided to talk to his carpenter friend myself,” Valentine said. “I went to that building today. I pretended I was interested in buying one of the condos. I got them to let me look around. I found the carpenter Newt knows.”

  “And—” Clarisse urged anxiously.

  “The carpenter didn’t know anything about it. He said he hadn’t given anything to Newt.”

  “Do you think the carpenter was telling the truth?”

  “He had no reason to lie.”

  “Then why would Newt make up a story like that?”

  “Good question.” They reached the first floor, and Valentine followed Clarisse out to the street. The evening was warm and windless, and the last vestiges of twilight showed in a deep indigo sky free of clouds. They decided to walk to Beacon Street, a quarter of an hour away.

  When they got there, they saw that Newt’s apartment windows were lighted, but he didn’t answer his intercom when they pressed the buzzer.

  “Want to try Niobe?” Valentine asked.

  Clarisse nodded and pressed Niobe’s bell. “We’re here to see Newt,” Clarisse declared when Niobe responded, “but he’s not answering.”

  “I’m not his secretary,” Niobe answered sharply. “I’m not his doorman. He’s home. Ring longer.”

  They rang twice again, then buzzed Niobe again, who unlatched the door without speaking.

  As they mounted the stairs, Valentine and Clarisse found Niobe beating on Newt’s door and shouting, “Turn that stereo off, you lying two-faced sneak!”

  Loud rock music issued from Newt’s apartment.

  “You’re sure he’s here?” Clarisse asked.

  “Who else in the building would play a record five times straight through at top volume? He always bangs the door shut when he goes out, and he hasn’t gone out.” She fished a key out of her pocket. “He doesn’t know I have a key. He changed the locks when I moved out, but I bribed the locksmith. Just in case I ever have to gather evidence for our divorce case.”

  She pressed the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed open the door.

  The hallway door opened on to the long living room of the apartment. The dim room glowed with the failing light of the sky over the Charles. Newt sat motionless on the couch,
staring toward the back windows overlooking the river.

  Niobe, in a long breath of imprecations against Newt’s rudeness, marched across the carpet and pushed the stylus gratingly across the turntable. Newt did not protest. In the sudden silence, Clarisse flicked on the light. Then they were able to see the dark silk necktie wound tightly about his neck and Newt’s glassy, sightless stare.

  PART FOUR

  Labor Day

  Chapter Eighteen

  “OKAY,” VALENTINE SAID as he pushed the door all the way open, “what’s the crisis this time?” He stepped over the threshold onto the gravelly surface of the roof of Slate.

  Clarisse sat, arms folded, on the low brick wall dividing Slate’s roof from that of the adjoining building. She wore a dove-gray sweatshirt with pushed-up sleeves, a pair of blue jeans, and dark gray Adidas running shoes. Her hair was covered with a red bandanna. She was staring toward Boston’s Back Bay. It was past six o’clock, and the days at the end of summer were noticeably shortening. The lowering sun reflected blindingly off the dark glass walls of Hancock Tower.

  Clarisse said nothing when Valentine came over and sat down beside her.

  “You called me up here so you could give me the silent treatment?” he asked.

  “I’ve been cleaning my apartment,” Clarisse said, still not looking at him.

  “Uh-oh,” Valentine said darkly, “that means you’ve been thinking. I remember that just before you decided to change careers you cleaned your old apartment on Beacon for a whole weekend. It was nearly as bad as the time that airline pilot asked you to marry him.”

  “Cleaning clears my mind,” Clarisse said. “I’ve been thinking about this place.” She unwrapped her arms and waved one of them about.

  “The roof?”

  “No, idiot. Slate. Our lives here.”

  Valentine leaned aside and wiped away a handful of loose mortar from under him. “Oh?”

  “I was thinking that we were in trouble. That maybe I’ll have to drop out of law school and go back to real estate and you’ll have to go to work for somebody else again. As soon as Niobe gets back, you know, Sean is quitting. He says he can’t bring in decent tips here anymore.”

  Niobe had been in Hawaii for more than six weeks, “working out her grief,” as she put it.

  “Sean gave me his notice yesterday,” Valentine told her. “He didn’t say, but I think he got a job down the street at Fritz. I don’t think Niobe will stay, either. In fact, I think she’s coming back to Boston just long enough to pack up and move. I don’t blame either of them. They’ve been loyal to us and to Slate, but they can obviously make more money somewhere else. I take it you spent the afternoon slinging Ajax and Endust and entertaining visions of the poor house.”

  “More or less.”

  “Remember, though, it’s the August slump.”

  “Is that like the July slump we experienced?”

  “Things’ll pick up in September when everybody comes back to school. I know they’ll pick up when they catch the necktie murderer.”

  “Nobody’s died in the past six weeks,” Clarisse said. “That’s something.”

  “Nobody we know of,” Valentine amended.

  “We’d have heard,” Clarisse said. “But no matter if the killer has stopped or not, our customers have not returned. I’ll bet they just got out of the habit of coming to Slate. We’ve been in business less than a year, and we put so much money into it…”

  “So,” Valentine said with a sigh, “when you were downstairs scrubbing the linoleum, did you give any thought to the murders?”

  “Yes,” replied Clarisse seriously, “I was thinking about Newt. His death has really bothered me, because he’s the one I knew best.”

  “He was fully clothed, and unlike all the other victims, Newt was killed in late afternoon instead of the middle of the night. Do you think a copycat killer got to him?” Clarisse nodded, and Valentine went on: “Then it was probably someone he knew and let into the building, or it was somebody who was already inside waiting for him when he got home. You think?”

  “Yes, and I’ll bet either way it was a woman. Suspect number one: Niobe Feng,” replied Clarisse firmly. She couldn’t read Valentine’s expression but felt he was probably skeptical. “Well, she was at home all afternoon and that evening,” she emphasized. “She could have gone down to talk to him and they got into one of their fights. Who would hear it? All the neighbors were at work. Niobe overpowered him in a fit of passion, and that was the end of Newt. Just as she was finishing him off, his door buzzer sounded. Niobe fled in a panic back to her place. We rang, and she let us in. The three of us went to Newt’s apartment to find out why he wasn’t answering his bell or the door, and there he was. What do you think?”

  “Are you saying that Niobe committed the other murders?”

  Clarisse frowned. “Perhaps—out of jealousy. Newt had gone to bed with Jed, also with the Shrimp, and we know he had a date with All-American Boy. All those men are dead.”

  “But Niobe wasn’t jealous of the men Newt went to bed with. She only got upset when she discovered that Newt had gone to bed with B.J.”

  “Which brings us to suspect number two,” Clarisse said.

  “Convince me.”

  “Newt was killed on the same day I questioned him at the health spa and the same day B.J. tried to steam me to death—”

  “What if it wasn’t either one of them, but just some strange person’s idea of a practical joke?”

  “It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that they left the spa together. Maybe they went back to Newt’s apartment.”

  “Then B.J. killed him?”

  Clarisse left the wall and paced about on the gravel, thinking. “Together they were the necktie murderer!” A jumbo jet rose suddenly above the downtown skyline. The roar of the engines was deafening, but when the noise subsided, Clarisse turned back to Valentine. “They did the killings together, taking separate victims. Somehow one initiated the other into it. At the spa, B.J. thought I was onto them and tried to kill me. They went to Newt’s apartment to talk it over. Maybe Newt was getting paranoid. B.J. thought he was going to blow their cover, and she killed him. The woman’s no slouch. She’s got a good body under all that leather, and we know she’s been working out.”

  “What about motive—sexual thrills?”

  “Yes. That and cover-up,” said Clarisse. “The earlier killings were the kicks. Ruder and Cruder were probably just cover-up, just as Newt was cover-up. Trying to get rid of me was an attempted cover-up.”

  Valentine thought this through for a few moments and then said, “Do you notice a slight difficulty with these two suspects?”

  “No,” said Clarisse definitely. “I’m voting for B.J.”

  “We’re talking about a string of murders of homosexual men, but your two major suspects are heterosexual women. Doesn’t that strike you as a mite improbable—not to mention that now you’ve got more cover-up crimes than original murders?”

  “I don’t think it’s improbable,” said Clarisse, but uncertainly. She brightened suddenly, “There’s something else! How long has it been since the last murder?”

  “Newt died on July fifth,” said Valentine. “No murders since then.”

  “Niobe’s been out of town since Newt’s funeral,” Clarisse pointed out.

  “What about B.J.?”

  “B.J.’s been in Provincetown. She’ll be back Labor Day weekend. I did my homework—”

  She broke off as she glanced toward the Warren Avenue side of the building and moved closer to the edge.

  Curious as to what had drawn her attention, Valentine joined her and saw a Boston Gas repair truck just rounding the corner from Berkeley Street.

  “Did you know that Bander was seeing Sean again?” Clarisse asked suddenly.

  “No,” said Valentine, genuinely surprised. “Is this rumor or fact?”

  “Sean told me. He wouldn’t tell you because you’ve made it abundantly clear what you think
of Bander.”

  “How long have they been seeing each other?”

  Clarisse thought for a moment. “He didn’t say exactly, but I got the impression it’s been a while. Over a month, at least.” Then her brow wrinkled. “That means that Bander has been out of circulation for a while, too—just like Niobe and B.J.”

  “Clarisse, please tell me you don’t have this theory about the necktie killer being an unhappy and unpleasant homosexual Boston Gas repairman desperately looking for a lover but every time he falls for someone they reject him and he strangles them. Please say that’s not what you’re thinking.”

  “Well…” Clarisse hedged. “Something like that. Anyway, who said murder couldn’t be romantic?”

  Valentine rolled his eyes. “So why aren’t we accusing Father McKimmon?”

  “Father McKimmon?”

  “That’s right, Lovelace. I haven’t seen him once since July.”

  “Oh, God.” Clarisse sighed. “I’d forgotten all about Father McKimmon. He knew Newt, and he knew Jed and the Shrimp and…”

  “Do you think this roof is wired?” Valentine asked suddenly.

  “Wired?”

  “You know—bugged. State-of-the-art listening devices disguised as gravel or something.”

  Clarisse turned and looked up at the moon, visible this late afternoon. “It’s not even a first-quarter moon yet and already you’re acting strange.”

  Valentine leaned slightly forward. “Look down at the police station. Third floor left window. There’re two of them with binoculars, and they sure aren’t star gazing.”

  “Oh, them,” Clarisse said calmly. “They’ve been there since I came up here a while ago. You know, I think they probably suspect that you and I committed all those murders.”

  Valentine looked directly into the window of the police station, and bared his teeth in a broad grin.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “OH, MY GOD, VALENTINE!” Clarisse screeched as she clambered up onto the car seat and squeezed herself though the open skylight of the rented Thunderbird. “It’s beautiful here!”