Murder in a Good Cause

by Medora Sale

  “I guess I should,” he said, looking slightly worried. “I never thought of the kids. I’ll get a padlock for the room tomorrow. Not that they could blow themselves up, though. Nothing down there is explosive, even if you mix it all together—I think.” He smiled brightly at everyone. “But I wouldn’t recommend eating the chemicals. They might disagree with you. Drastically,” he added thoughtfully.

  “Fascinating though this is,” said Veronika, “Mamma will never forgive us if we’re late. I suggest we escape before Bettl can serve us any more horrors.” There was a sudden scrambling as they all heaved themselves out of their chairs and toward their coats.

  Harriet Jeffries pulled the last prints out of the wash water and set them carefully in the print dryer. Yawning, moving like an automaton, she began to clean up her mess, dumping out the large plastic trays, rinsing them, and putting each one on its own section of shelf. Last of all, she covered the enlarger and looked around her. All finished. Time for bed. She left the darkroom, walked through her bedroom, which occupied the other half of the ground floor, and headed up a flight of stairs that divided her living room from her kitchen area. Bed, but first something to eat.

  Before turning left into the kitchen, she noticed the polyethylene bag filled with clean clothing tossed over a chair. Her light wool dress. The one she had picked up on her way home from Rudi’s because she needed something to wear tonight to Clara von Hohenkammer’s party. Damn! She liked Clara—she enjoyed talking to her—but she was too bloody tired to go out tonight. Even if, especially if, Clara wanted to foist some hopeful young amateur photographer on her for help and comfort.

  She opened up the refrigerator and extracted a couple of radishes. Munching reflectively, she tried to consider the problem. In one sense, it didn’t matter if she offended Clara, who hadn’t, after all, been her client. But then, what’s the point of offending a nice lady, a rich, nice lady, when you didn’t have to? And Clara von Hohenkammer would be offended. She opened the sliding door to her deck and stepped into the warm evening. Suddenly, another factor entered the equation as she leaned over the decorative wooden rail to look down at the garden below. Harriet lived in a structure that had once been the oversized garage to a large house. Some zany or greedy previous owner of the property had built a second floor onto the garage and created instant, rentable living space, adding a second garage onto the structure for good measure. Her car was in the second garage, and its roof had become her deck. The original garage had been turned into her bedroom and darkroom; her kitchen and living room sat on top of it. The resulting creation was odd looking but comfortable. She was rarely aware of her landlords except on those occasions—too frequent occasions—when they had parties. Especially in the summer. And tonight there were unmistakable signs that they were having a party. Her landlord was firing up two barbecues in the back garden. Her landlady was setting bottles onto a table. Might as well try sleeping on a camp bed at the corner of Bloor and Yonge as in her room tonight. Confused guests would be knocking on her door, looking for a washroom. Drunks would be peering in her bedroom window, or worse, crawling through it if she were foolish enough to leave it open. She couldn’t bear the prospect of being kept awake, alone with her thoughts, while mirth and jollification were going on all around her. Might as well go to Clara’s bloody reading.

  The black Porsche pulled up in front of the Goethe Institute and stopped. Milan leaned over and opened the door on his wife’s side. She stayed where she was and gave him a worried look. “I wish you’d come in with me. I’m sure it won’t put Mamma in a very good frame of mind if you aren’t there for the reading.”

  “How will she know?” he said. “Unless you tell her, of course, which would be very stupid.” He put his hands on her shoulders and gave her a light kiss. “I can’t stand these things—you know that. If she notices that you’re alone, tell her I dropped you off and had to go back and park the car, so I sat by myself at the back.” He smiled winningly. “Come on, don’t worry. In a way it’s true. I do have to go and park the car. Only I think I’ll park it at your mother’s and get myself a drink. You can come back with Nikki.”

  Theresa’s face distorted with anger. “I don’t understand how you can be so stupid,” she hissed. “Here’s Mamma putting up the money for some sort of business for Nikki and Klaus—it had to be Mamma, because he hasn’t got a cent—fifty thousand dollars. Did you hear him say that? Fifty thousand dollars. And that will just be the beginning. And do you know why she’s doing it?” She didn’t give him a chance to answer. “Because right now she’s planning to let us go under.” She turned to face him, her hand clutching the door handle. “She worries about money. She’s not going to let a whole lot of it go at once. I’ll bet she has just so much that she figures she can squander on her children and that’s that. She has no intention of being poor in her old age, let me tell you. I know her. If Klaus gets that money, we’ll wait until she drops dead before we get a penny. And she’s very healthy.”

  He gave her a little push toward the door. “You worry too much, sweetheart. I’ll see you later. Just keep acting as though I’m there and they’ll all believe it’s true.” Silently, she pulled her black silk evening wrap around her and got out of the car. The Porsche roared off, then screeched to a halt at the red light on the corner.

  Carlos was sitting on a battered steel-and-plastic kitchen chair in front of a grubby child-sized desk. He held a pen in his hand, poised over a pad of paper. Every once in a while he altered one of the figures in the column on the page and bit his lip as he stared at the result. Beside him, the television flickered gloomily. Its sound was turned off.

  The doorbell rang. Carlos stood up, automatically ducking to keep from hitting his head on the low eaves, and crumpled the paper in his hand. He shoved it into his pocket as he walked over to the door.

  Don was the first to arrive. “Christ, it’s dark in here,” he said. “You can’t afford light bulbs or something?”

  “Go on into the kitchen, then,” said Carlos easily. “Help yourself to a beer while I let the others in.”

  Don shifted his shoulders uneasily and looked up at the taller man, trying to assess what degree of insult, if any, had been intended by those remarks. He hated being towered over, and he hated arrogant sons of bitches like Carlos who always made him feel stupid. The doorbell rang once more, and Carlos ran lightly down the stairs, two at a time.

  Manu came up first, stooping to get through the low doorway. The buru walked in right behind, followed by Carlos. A silent procession.

  “So where’s the fence?” asked Don. He hated silence. “You said you were going to bring him tonight.” It was an accusation, and he stared hard at the buru when he made it. “I want to find out from him what the hell is going on. I work on these jobs, I take the risks, and what happens? The stuff gets dumped off with him”—he pointed at the buru— “and then fucking well disappears. I want to know where it goes, and I want my share of the money. The real money. Not a few thousand for ‘expenses.’ I want to talk to the guy who’s running things, okay?” He headed into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out a beer.

  “I’m running things,” said the buru with a calm voice as he moved into the kitchen after Don. “I ran things at home, and I run them here. Right, Manu?” The tall man nodded. “The fence is just that. A convenience. A necessary and expensive component in this operation. Like Carlos over here. Who doesn’t give a shit who he works for but who knows what to take and what to leave behind.” Carlos smiled, as if he appreciated being viewed in this light. “And the reason for this meeting is not to reassure you,” he said, nodding at Don, “but to deal with potential problems. Sit down.” The buru pulled out a chair on the far side of the table, turned it around and sat, leaning his elbows on the back.

  Manu sat far back from the table on the other side, one long leg bent and perched on his knee. Don squeezed himself into the end nearest the wall. Carlos p
ulled several bottles of beer out of the refrigerator, which he set unceremoniously in the centre, before taking the opposite end.

  “So what’s the problem?” asked Don, once again breaking into the silence.

  “There are many problems,” said the buru. “And the biggest is you. I am canceling the last two strikes. You may not know it, but the police are getting closer and closer. I have had some experience with them—”

  “You have!” interrupted Don incredulously. “Listen, you snot-faced brat. I’ve been dodging the cops since I was twelve, and I know what I’m doing.”

  The buru paid no attention. “The fence becomes increasingly nervous. He doesn’t want to make any more trips for a while, and we cannot afford to pile up too much anymore.”

  “How do we know that?” asked Don. “Or is this just more of your bullshit?”

  “You know because I tell you,” said the buru quietly. “He can hold a little more, but otherwise . . .” He took a small calendar out of his pocket and set it down on the table. “One possibility is that we start moving the goods across the border ourselves, although with our accents Manu and I are likely to be searched. Still, if we . . .” He began rapidly sketching out possibilities on the back of the calendar page.

  Harriet sat entranced as Clara von Hohenkammer stammered out her tormented vision of the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth. Orders tumbled from her lips in a rising tide of guilt and panic: “Wash your hands, put on your nightgown, look not so pale: I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried; he cannot come out on’s grave.” She was standing behind a lectern in the pleasantly civilized room under a bright spot, her hair and sweeping black gown elegant and formal, yet, with voice and expression and gesture alone, she evoked the bedroom, the nightgown, the wild disarray of the distraught queen so strongly, that Harriet could feel the dank chill of the cold castle chamber and shivered. It was uncanny. The earlier readings had been a trial. She could certainly follow Clara’s beautifully enunciated German, but the texts were too old, too complex and difficult for easy comprehension. This, however—this compelled her, in spite of hunger and exhaustion, to feel the actress’s feigned torment. Then Clara came to the last brokenhearted “to bed, to bed, to bed” and a wild surge of applause greeted her. The spell was broken.

  She bowed gravely and stepped out of the spotlight, walking without ceremony toward the chairs in which the audience was seated. There was a slight turmoil in the corners as discreet floor lamps were turned on, and the play suddenly turned itself into a well-behaved party. Clara was immediately claimed by officialdom and the representatives of the German and Canadian governments, while Harriet tried to make her discreet way over to the coffee and biscuits.

  With a cup of strong coffee and a couple of substantial fruit tarts in her hands, Harriet settled into one of the chairs pushed up against the wall and prepared to observe the crowd. About half of it was drifting toward the exit, doubtless strangers who had not been invited to Clara’s “impromptu” party. Harriet finished the pastry on her plate and was considering helping herself to more when suddenly Clara detached herself from the mob surrounding her and began to work her way over toward the exit. A tall woman in a black silk coat clung to her arm with the desperation of a lost child. Suddenly, everyone in the room developed that oh-dear-I-must-be-going look and started searching for coats and gloves scattered around on chairs. Harriet looked at her watch; she was never going to survive another two hours of polite partying.

  And now she was standing in the palatial bathroom next to the guest room and surveying herself critically in the mirror. Too thin, too pale and exhausted looking, she decided, and there was not much to be done for any of it until she managed to get some sleep. She ran a finger lightly over the dark smudges under her eyes and tried to decide whether she had developed more lines since the spring. She had certainly lost weight, weight she couldn’t afford to lose. This dress had been almost provocative looking when last she wore it; it had made her feel charged with desirability; now it hung on her like a particularly unappealing sugar sack. She ran her hands over her bony hips and wondered if John would object to her scrawniness. Or if she would ever see him again. “Dammit, anyway,” she muttered, overwhelmed with tired anger and frustration. She took out a comb and flipped her hair out of her eyes. It made no difference to her appearance, but it gave her the sense that a ritual had been successfully performed; she was prepared to meet the throng downstairs.

  It had been more than three years since she had been in that house. A substantial but conventional—in fact, very ordinary—house that had been tiled, plumbed, carpeted, painted, and curtained into a soft, cool fantasy straight out of a design magazine. She had come in to photograph it right after the furniture delivery men, chasing the last workmen out of the place as she went. She had shifted furniture, borrowed plants, rehung the paintings, created a sort of minimalist clutter, and had begun to feel as if the place were hers. Now curiosity enlivened her, and she ran quickly down the stairs in the direction of the living room.

  The room was lit with many-branching candelabra that soared over strategically placed tables, and a small fire burned cheerfully in the large fireplace in spite of the warm night. There were probably fifty people there, she reckoned, easily swallowed up in the broad space. Amid them all, a tiny army of unobtrusive women in the severe black cotton and frilly white aprons and caps of a local, expensive catering service wove their way through the mob with trays of food and drink. The bar, she decided, must be located in the dense crowd to her right. She drifted over, secured a Campari and soda and a handful of hors d’oeuvres, and then found herself a large, comfortable-looking chair near the back of the room.

  From her vantage point she saw her hairdresser talking to a group of three women—all customers, no doubt. She wondered which of the women in the room was the mother of the famous von Hohenkammer grandchildren. The short, dark-haired girl gesticulating animatedly by the fireplace was clearly a copy of Clara von Hohenkammer, reduced to three-quarter size, but she looked very young to be the mother of two children, the younger of whom must have been more than four; it had been the birth of that child that had impelled the actress to buy a house in the city. She was talking to a taller woman, fairer and somewhat wispy in appearance, who bore a vague resemblance to her. The other daughter. And she, of course, was the black-cloaked creature who had left with Clara. The least interesting member of the family, thought Harriet meanly. Getting bored with long-distance character analysis, she began trying to match everyone up with possible husbands and lovers, but the choice was too great, and the game began to be a chore. What I need now, she thought, is to close my eyes for a few minutes. . . . Suddenly a voice bounced off her eardrums.

  “Harriet, my dear, why are you cowering—that is the right word, is it not?—here in the corner?” She opened an eye and saw her hostess looming over her. “You look splendid this evening. I don’t know how, with your dark skin, you can wear gray and not look dead or jaundiced.” Clara glowed with health and expansive energy.

  Harriet rose politely to her feet. “Frau von Hohenkammer, you were magnificent. I cried over your Lady Macbeth. She was so real, so beautiful, that she was almost painful to watch.”

  This elicited a gratified smile. “You must call me Clara, you know. And you are quite right. I have always done Shakespeare well, I thought. Such a pity he wasn’t German. Or I wasn’t English, perhaps.” She winked at her. “You mustn’t be shocked at my egotism. I can’t help it when I have given a good performance and carried everyone along with me. Even just a small audience like this one. I am drunk with success tonight.” Then she grasped Harriet by the arm. “Now come and see these pictures; you promised me you would, you know. I have a splendid album of them in the library. Bring your drink.” She was propelled at high speed through the door into a small room, softly lit and pleasant looking, just behind the living room. In one corner, at a small round table, there was a pile of old-fashioned photo a
lbums, one of which the actress picked up and spread open. Harriet walked behind the table, pulling a small chair with her, and opened up the next book.

  “These are all of you, aren’t they?” she said. “May I look at them?”

  The actress waved an imperious hand. “Only after you have seen Michael and Mariana; then you may look at them. That’s just a collection of old publicity shots. Rather a mess. The children wanted to see them, or so their mother led me to believe.” Her sardonic expression made Harriet wonder if her devotion to her family was as blind as she permitted people to assume.

  “What is this?” asked Harriet, pointing to a black-and-white of a young and very slender Clara dressed in a black leotard and tights, crouching by a gray plaster rock, staring upward. “It’s beautiful. Superb tones.”

  “The fool,” she said, a dreamy look on her face. “Lear, you know. I played the fool once, at a drama festival in Chichester, when I was young and thin enough to be taken for a boy. The director wanted a girlish voice with an accent—to make the fool seem more vulnerable, he said. It was a lovely part. That picture was taken by—” Her face softened for a second; then she turned abruptly back to the first album, pushing it in front of Harriet.

  “It doesn’t matter. But now that I have you to myself,” she said, “I—”

  There was a knock at the door, and a sour voice murmured, “Frau von Hohenkammer . . .”

  Clara frowned. “Anyway, I shall leave you here, because pictures of children are self-explanatory, and the others are not really improved by being discussed. Don’t go away. I have questions to ask you about my nephew Klaus.”

  Harriet was left alone to plough through the two albums. The children’s pictures were like children’s pictures anywhere and everywhere. She refused categorically and without exception to photograph children herself and found no solace in looking at other people’s work. The subjects themselves were neither surprisingly homely nor surpassingly beautiful. Nice children, no doubt, and a credit to their parents, but as photography, basically dull. She made quick work of that one. The other album stopped her completely. There were publicity shots, extravagantly posed and not quite human. Among them was interspersed a wildly varied collection of pieces, some of them done by people whose names made her pause in awe: of Clara working, face twisted with agony, or clowning for the camera or smiling archly. She was clad in everything from elaborate historical costume to the most casual of rehearsal garb. Hers was a face and body that the camera loved. Harriet smiled. What a hell of a manipulator that woman was, leaving all this temptation lying out on the table. And if I ever had any inclination to do some studies of people, she began, looking at a shot of Clara standing in trousers and a sweater, alone on a stage, desolate in the harsh light of the spot, she’d certainly be— But her thought remained unborn.