A Dangerous Fiction

by Barbara Rogan

  “So you left work and drove up here to check on her. Tell me what you did when you got here.”

  “I looked in the garage to see if her car was there. Then I rang her bell. No one answered, so I let myself in.”

  “Before you got to the kitchen, did you see anything out of order in the house, anything that alarmed you or seemed out of place?”

  “The smell,” I said reproachfully, though that, surely, was no fault of his. I was blaming the messenger again. I’d hated Molly’s oncologist, too, for no fault of her own.

  “After you found her, what did you do?”

  “I called the police.”

  “You called Detective Cullen first, before you called 911. Why was that?”

  I glanced at Sean, hoping he’d object, but he too seemed to be waiting with interest for my reply. “I don’t know why,” I said. “I was panicked. His number was in my phone. I just did. He told me to hang up and call 911.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” the lieutenant said, “considering that you two are old friends.”

  Something in the encouraging way he said this made me wary. Sean cut in. “Hang on, Lieutenant. What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?”

  Rosenbaum looked at him. “If your client is the indirect target of these crimes, as you’ve argued and we now believe, we’re interested in everything about her, including past and present relationships.”

  “If you mean Detective Cullen,” I said, “there is no relationship. He’s just someone I used to know a long time ago.”

  “By ‘know’ you mean . . . ?”

  “We hung out with the same crowd.”

  Rosenbaum let it go and changed the subject. If he’d been a boxer, he’d have been light on his feet. The next series of questions were identical to those asked first by Tommy Cullen, then by the detectives on Rowena’s murder. Did I know what the words on the wall meant? Did I have any enemies? Any spurned lovers, disaffected clients, murderous rivals? No, I said, no and no and no, until finally something snapped. “I’ve been through this a thousand times. Don’t you people talk to each other?”

  “It’s important to go back at things,” Rosenbaum said mildly. “Sometimes people know things without knowing them.”

  Thank you, Dr. Freud. “Where’s Sam Spade? Why haven’t you caught him yet? What kind of investigation are you running, Lieutenant?”

  Rosenbaum stared at me for a long moment.

  “I knew Molly,” he said at last.

  “You did?”

  “We belonged to the same temple. I knew her and I liked her enormously. You couldn’t help it, the kind of person she was. For her to die like that was an atrocity, and it happened on my watch. We’ll get her killer, Ms. Donovan. It might not play out like it does in the novels you sell, but it will happen; and I don’t need attitude from you to motivate me.”

  I muttered an apology.

  “Nah,” he said, “I get it. It’s horrible to have a friend murdered that way. And to find her, as you did . . . Of course you’re angry. But you and me are on the same side here: Molly’s side.”

  He had a sympathetic face. Lots of people would have trusted that face. I wasn’t one of them. “Then why are you wasting time on the people who loved Molly? You’ve got to find this Sam Spade monster before he goes after someone else!”

  “We’ll get your stalker, but we’re not limiting our investigation to him.” He glanced at Sean, then back at me. “There are some indications that Molly knew her killer.”

  “What indications?”

  “No sign of forced entry or a struggle. Molly opened the door and let the killer in. Seems like someone she trusted.”

  I imagined her in her house, tired after our long day. It’s dark outside, and the street is deserted. The doorbell rings. She peeks through the window and sees a strange man. Does she open the door? Hell no, she doesn’t! Molly wasn’t the nervous type, but after what happened to Rowena, there’s no way she opens that door.

  I realized I was shaking my head and stopped. “He must have tricked her somehow. Or maybe he was already inside, waiting. And how can you say there was no sign of a struggle? I saw that kitchen.”

  “Molly was standing in front of the counter when she was shot. She slumped forward onto the counter and knocked over her purse and the bag of apples before falling to the floor. There was no fight, no struggle. Apart from the gunshot wound and some surgery scars, there wasn’t a mark on her body. If it’s any comfort, she probably never knew what hit her.”

  It wasn’t.

  Rosenbaum turned to a new page in his notebook. “Are you aware of a bequest Molly made—”

  “Don’t answer that,” Sean interrupted. “Lieutenant—”

  Rosenbaum raised his hand. “Sorry, Counselor, let me rephrase. Molly left a bequest of eighty thousand dollars to Harriet Peagoody. Was Ms. Peagoody, to the best of your knowledge, aware of this bequest?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “Why do you think Molly left her so much money?”

  “It’s not so much, considering that Harriet worked for her for ten years and stayed on even after Molly left. She deserves it.”

  “What’s your relationship with Harriet like?”

  I felt the blood rising to my face. If I’d had any confidence in the police, it would have been easier to answer that question truthfully. As it was, I feared they’d make too much of anything I said and set off on the wrong path again.

  “She’s a loyal and productive employee,” I said stiffly.

  “That bad, huh?” Rosenbaum said. “You kept us waiting long enough, Ms. Donovan. Least you can do now is be frank. Molly made you partner over Harriet’s head, even though Harriet had ten years’ seniority. Unless the woman’s a saint, and I’ve never met one of those, she had to resent that.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe she did, but she stuck with us all the same. I don’t judge people by how they feel, Lieutenant; I judge them by what they do. Harriet’s been stalwart and kind. I couldn’t have gotten through the last week without her. She was with me constantly, looking after me. On the day of the funeral—” I stopped abruptly, aware I was blathering on. Both men were looking at me strangely.

  “On the day of the funeral . . . ?” Rosenbaum prompted.

  “She gave me a Valium.”

  He looked astonished. “You took a pill from her?”

  “I didn’t, as it happens. The point is, she was trying to help.”

  “What’d you do with it?”

  “I don’t know, shoved it in my pocket, most likely.” I remembered that I was wearing the same raincoat now as then, and felt in the pockets. The pill was still there, soggy but intact. The lieutenant took it from me and dropped it into a clear plastic bag.

  I felt my temper rising again. “If you focus on Harriet, you’ll just be wasting more damn time. Harriet loved Molly as much as I did. There’s no way in hell she could walk up to Molly and shoot her.”

  Rosenbaum leaned back in his seat and regarded me for a long moment before answering. “Molly was killed by the same person who murdered Rowena Blair, but there’s one significant difference. Rowena was facing the perp when she was shot. Molly took a bullet to the back of her head.”

  “What does that signify?”

  “It suggests,” he said, “that whoever did this couldn’t just—what were your words?—walk up to Molly and shoot her.”

  Chapter 25

  The doorman must have been watching. As soon as Sean’s Lincoln glided into the no-standing zone in front of my building, Morris ran out holding a big black umbrella. I kissed Sean’s cheek and stepped into a cold, driving rain. The weather had done what nothing else could have: cleared away the reporters and gawkers. “Some night,” the doorman said as we hurried into the lobby. He summoned the elevator and lingered by my side. “Just wanted to say, ma�
��am, I’m sorry for your loss. Mrs. Hamish was a real nice lady.”

  “Thanks, Morris.” I smiled up at his grizzled, bulldog face. Morris was the oldest of our doormen, semiretired, working just a few weekend shifts.

  “You expecting more visitors tonight?”

  “Maybe, though in this weather . . . Morris, you’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?”

  “Sure have. Thirty-five years in this building, longer than I been married. When I die, they gonna bury me in the lobby.”

  “Do you happen to remember who was living in Mr. Donovan’s apartment before we married?”

  “Ma’am?” he said, stalling. I could see the wariness in his eyes. Doormen have their codes of conduct, as all professions do, and discretion had to be a large part of theirs. No one likes a gossipy doorman; they see too much.

  “Was there a woman living there? With a child, maybe?”

  “Oh, jeez,” he said. “That was a long time ago.” I waited. “I think maybe he had a housekeeper for a while. And the housekeeper had a little one.”

  Of course, I thought. A maid, not a lover. Suddenly it all made sense. “What was her name?”

  “Oh, you got me there, Mrs. Donovan.”

  “And the child? Was it a boy or a girl?”

  He squinted into middle distance. “A little boy, I think. No, a girl, definitely a girl. Or was it a boy?” The elevator arrived while he was still debating with himself, and I rode up alone. It was satisfying to have one small puzzle resolved, but less than it should have been without Molly to enlighten. For me that was the hardest part of her death to absorb, even more than its brutality: the suddenness, which left me choking on all the things I should have said.

  I’d thought we had time.

  • • •

  Though shiva had resumed at sunset, the weather had kept everyone away except Max, who’d brought the baby, and my faithful staff. I found it hard to look at Harriet after hearing Rosenbaum’s insinuations. I knew they were false; I knew the police had tried to pin the murders on me, too. And yet they’d sullied her in my mind, and left me feeling angry without knowing why.

  Maybe that’s why I reacted the way I did to her remark. She wasn’t the first. Others had voiced similar idiocies in my hearing and I’d merely tightened my lips and turned away. But Harriet should have known better.

  Someone had lit a fire in the living room, and we gathered around it, drinking mulled whiskey that Chloe, who’d spent a gap year tending bar in Dublin, had prepared for everyone. The absence of outsiders was a relief. I slipped off my boots and curled up on one of the sofas, while Mingus stretched out on the floor beside me. Jean-Paul asked what the police said, and everyone turned to me.

  “They’re clueless,” I said. “They’re chasing their tails.”

  “You don’t know that,” Max said. He was feeding the baby, who kept falling asleep on the bottle and then jerking awake to suck vigorously for a moment or two before dozing off again. “They’re not going to tell you what they know.”

  “They asked all the wrong questions.”

  “The lead guy, Rosenbaum, is no slouch. I asked around. He was an NYPD homicide detective before he moved to Westchester.”

  Lorna said, “I heard once on TV that if the cops don’t solve a murder within forty-eight hours, chances are they never will.”

  My heart sank, for she’d touched on my greatest fear. As long as the killer was free, I was in limbo.

  “Thanks, Lorna,” Jean-Paul said. “That’s real helpful.”

  She lowered her eyes. “Sorry.”

  “Of course they’ll catch him,” Harriet said in her brisk, English nanny tone. “Molly and Rowena were not some inner-city riffraff killed in a drive-by. They mattered.”

  In the silence that followed this remark, Chloe and Jean-Paul exchanged glances, and Max raised an eyebrow. I knew then that if I quit the agency, Max would, too. Without me, and without the income generated by Max’s and Rowena’s books, the spoils would be meager indeed. Harriet could lose other clients, too. Some writers would be too afraid of losing representation to jump ship, but the most successful ones knew they had choices. An agency is a nebulous thing, constructed of relationships. Harriet might inherit the kingdom only to find it a ghost town.

  “The important thing,” she continued, “is to keep a positive outlook and take comfort where we can.”

  “What comfort is that?” I asked.

  It was a rhetorical question, but she answered it. “Well, I for one find some in knowing that even though the end was sudden, it was relatively painless, and Molly was spared the suffering we all knew was coming.”

  Her words shot through me like a bolt. I sat up, glaring. “How can you say that? Are you really that stupid?”

  Instead of getting angry, she shrank back in her chair. “Jo, please! All I meant is that I’ve seen people die of cancer, and it’s a terrible way to go.”

  “So it was a mercy killing. Maybe we should find this monster and thank him, what do you think?”

  A chorus of protests broke out. “Easy, Jo . . . Harriet didn’t mean . . . no one’s suggesting . . .” Only Lorna was silent, looking wide-eyed from Harriet to me like a child watching her parents quarrel.

  I had the feeling, so familiar of late, of a breached levee within me. Words gushed out of my mouth, as unstoppable as the stream in Leigh’s painting. “Molly could have ended it herself if she’d chosen to. She had the knowledge and the means. That’s not what she wanted. She told me she meant to squeeze every last drop of juice out of her life. She wanted to revisit places she’d loved. She wanted to see her garden bloom and her writers prosper. She wanted one more Shakespeare in the Park. She wanted to see this little baby walk, and maybe she could have. She wanted to spend time with the people she loved. And it was her time to spend. Every day was precious, more precious than a hundred of ours, because she had so few left. That’s what this murdering bastard stole from her. And for this you are thankful!”

  Harriet was hunched over in her chair. One hand covered her eyes, and her spiky gray head bobbed with muted sobs. I came back to myself feeling as if I’d stabbed her with a knife.

  “I’m sorry, Harriet, I’m so sorry!” I rushed over and tried to embrace her, but she pulled away. Then I fled, like the coward I was, down the hall to my bedroom with the dog at my heels. I slammed the door and threw myself onto the bed. Mingus nudged me with his muzzle, his brow contracted in a very human expression of worry. “I’m fine,” I said automatically, then groaned with despair: now I was lying even to the dog.

  A knock came at the door. I ignored it. The door opened, and Max walked in with Molly on his shoulder. He sat beside me on the edge of the bed and shifted her to his lap. When Mingus came over to investigate, the baby gazed back at him with huge eyes and a wide-open mouth. I stroked her fine black hair, soft as dandelion wisps, and felt the steady pulse beneath the fontanel.

  “How are you?” Max said. “And if you say ‘fine’ again, I’m going to smack you.”

  “Is Harriet all right?”

  “Who cares?”

  “I was awful to her.”

  “Yes. It was quite a relief.”

  I sat up. “My losing it is a relief?”

  “You acting human is. I was starting to wonder.”

  “But Harriet of all people. She’s been solid, Max.”

  “It was a moronic thing to say. One of a series from her.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s not. The point is, you’re a Spartan. I know exactly what Molly meant to you, yet all week long I’ve watched you stonewall your grief. It’s admirable as hell; you broke my fucking heart at the funeral. But my God, woman, don’t you know you’re allowed to cry? It’s the one privilege your sex is allowed; you ought to take it.”

  “I can’t,” I said.
“I’m afraid to. Once I started, how would I stop?”

  “It sort of stops by itself. And you can. In fact,” he said, handing me the diaper from his shoulder, “you’re crying now.”

  He held me tight as the last levee collapsed, and murmured in my ear. “It’s OK, let it come. When it’s over, you’ll still be here.”

  “And Molly still won’t,” I gasped.

  “And Molly still won’t.”

  What happens, I discovered, is that you run out of tears. Afterward, my nose was stuffed, but my spirit felt less congested. The body, it seemed, had its own mourning to do.

  Max let go and studied my face. “Better?”

  “If you think one good cry will wash away all my sorrows, you’ve been drinking the water at Disney, my friend.”

  “Now, that’s the Jo we all know and fear! And a good thing, too, because you look like hell. Who’d have guessed you were the type to get all bloodshot and blotchy when you cry?”

  “Everyone does,” I said, wiping my face with the diaper.

  “Nonsense. Your average romantic heroine turns dewy and ethereal when she weeps. I learned this from Rowena.”

  I laughed—couldn’t help it. “What am I going to do, Max?”

  “What everyone does when they’ve lost someone. Go on with your life and fake it till the feeling comes back.”

  The baby had fallen asleep with her fist in her mouth. Max laid her down between us. She had tiny, perfect hands, translucent fingernails the size of diamond chips. I stroked the palm of one hand, and it closed around my finger. I felt a tug inside me.

  “So that’s it?” I asked. “Molly is dead; long live Molly?”

  “What else is there?” Max said.

  • • •

  On Monday I went back to work. Max flew home with Barry and the baby, but only after coming into the office to meet with building security. We were once again on full alert. Visitors would be screened twice, downstairs by security and upstairs by Lorna. Our doors were to be kept locked, our phones were tapped, and the police were on speed-dial. Mingus would accompany me to and from work, and Jean-Paul would escort me anywhere the dog couldn’t. All these precautions created a siege-like atmosphere in the office. But even within the gates, all was not well. Harriet greeted my arrival with a cool stare. “You’re back, then,” she said.