To the Manor Dead

by Sebastian Stuart

  Vince led me to a corner of the dining room,“What’s up?”

  I took out my cell phone and played Marcus’s message to Esmerelda for him.

  “That came off of Esmerelda Pillow’s answering machine,” I said.

  “I don’t understand what this has to do with me.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Look, I don’t make trouble, I don’t need trouble. I’m going to own this valley. Do you really think I’d risk it all to knock off some old lush who would be dead in a few years anyway?”

  Just then Marcella appeared, looking gorgeous, glowing, but just a bit disheveled.

  When she saw me, she said, “What’s she doing here?”

  “Being a pain in the ass.”

  Marcella narrowed her eyes and looked at me. Then, like a switch, she gave me a big warm smile, followed by an air kiss on each cheek.

  “Janet, why don’t you come listen to the presentation? We’re going to serve champagne and lobster rolls. I’m president of the new cultural center, we want to be on par with Dia Beacon and the Gehry at Bard. It’s all terribly exciting and we’d love to have you onboard—it’s going to turn Sawyerville into a world-class destination.”

  “Is Marcus around?”

  Something flashed through Marcella’s eyes but it was gone before I could figure out exactly what it was. But I had an inkling.

  “I think he’s somewhere. Have you seen him, Vince?”

  “Okay, this meeting is over,” Vince announced.

  “I’m not leaving until I talk to Marcus.”

  “I could have you thrown out,” Vince said.

  “Oh, darling, don’t be silly. Why don’t you let me handle Janet?”

  “She’s all yours,” Vince said, walking away.

  “Now, what’s this all about?” Marcella asked.

  “It’s about the murders of Daphne Livingston and Esmerelda Pillow, Amber.”

  She went dead still—for just a nanosecond. Then she tossed her hair and said, “Marcella suits me much better, don’t you think?”

  “Amber by any other name.”

  “Vince knows all about my background, in fact he respects me far more than if I were to the manor born.”

  “Does he know that a hypodermic discovered near Daphne’s body contained traces of recuronium?”

  This time it took her slightly more than a nanosecond to recover.

  “That’s fascinating news, I’m sure, although I have no idea what recurionium is.”

  “Let me educate you: it’s a paralytic agent commonly used as a surgical anesthetic. At places like, say, Benedictine Hospital.”

  I noticed a faint thread of sweat along her hairline.

  “I’m about to join the Benedictine board.”

  “How much is that going to cost Vince?”

  “While you’re calculating costs, you may want to consider the price of this little visit.”

  “Justice rarely comes cheap.”

  “But wild-eyed theories do. Proof, on the other hand, is sometimes impossible to come up with at any price.” Marcus appeared in the doorway. “Marcus, would you show Ms. Petrocelli out?”

  “We’re not done,” I said.

  “Oh, but I think we are.” She walked toward the living room, then turned and smiled. “Do help yourself to a lobster roll on your way out.”

  Marcus took my elbow and led me down the hallway, through the kitchen, and out a back door to a small landing. Just as he turned to go back into the house, I played him his message to Esmerelda.

  “Either you talk to me, or to the police.”

  He cocked his head.

  “Name your price.”

  “The truth.”

  “I had some business dealings with Esmerelda.”

  “What kind of business dealings?”

  “Daphne had certain needs. I made sure they were met.”

  “So you paid for her heroin? And when she was hooked, you laced that heroin with poison and then strung her up from the rafters to make it look like suicide?”

  He turned and walked back into the house.

  But not before I noticed a smudge of lipstick on his left ear.

  “Unfortunately the evidence is all circumstantial,” Chevrona said to me on my cell as I drove home.

  “Haven’t killers been convicted on circumstantial evidence?”

  “They have, but it’s tough. And Daphne’s body has been cremated, which means it’s impossible to prove that she was exposed to the recurionium. And even if Marcella was paying for Daphne’s heroin, that doesn’t make her guilty of murder. Add to all that the fact the death was ruled a suicide and the DA over in Dutchess is very disinclined to pursue the case, and you have a deck that is seriously stacked against us.”

  “Are you saying it’s all over?”

  “I’m saying we need some hard evidence.”

  I made a U-turn and headed back down to the lighthouse parking lot.

  I found Mad John sitting on the riverbank, fishing. He looked subdued, almost pensive.

  “Can you take me back down to Esmerelda’s tonight?” I asked.

  He gave me a sad smile and nodded.

  I went to the hardware store and bought two metal saws and a fresh supply of flashlight batteries. If there was recurionium in that drawer in Esmerelda’s kitchen, it might have Marcus’s fingerprints on it. And if I got really lucky, Marcella’s. Maybe it could be traced back to its supplier and proven to have come from the surgical cart at Benedictine.

  At a little after eight, just as darkness descended, I grabbed the saws and two flashlights and headed down to the river.

  Mad John wasn’t at home. I looked around at his scavenged bounty. Something in the pile of electronics, dead computers, and old cameras caught my eye—just as I was trying to make the connection, Mad John appeared through the reeds, stealthy and silent, like an Indian guide. He was still in a strange mood. His eyes were darting around and he kept tugging at his beard.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  He just gave a miserable shrug.

  We headed down to his inlet, climbed on board the raft, and he pushed off. It was a clear dry night, cooler, moonless and very dark. I was keyed-up, fighting down my anxiety, but I was way past the halfway point in this tunnel and backing out butt-first was out of the question. I needed answers.

  “No singing tonight?” I asked Mad John.

  “Bad night,” he said, looking out at the river.

  As we made our way down river, the red running lights of the boats looked like warning lights. The river was still and smooth as glass, black glass. As I looked out over the water, it came to me—what I’d noticed in the pile of detritus back at Mad John’s was an old Polaroid camera. I thought of the photographs of Daphne that I’d discovered under her mattress, the lost desperate lust. Taken with an old Polaroid. Then it came back to me—that faint swampy smell in Daphne’s bedroom.

  “Mad John, are you sure you didn’t know Daphne Livingston?”

  He looked at me from across the raft, his eyes shining in the darkness. Then he turned back to his rowing.

  We were silent for a little while, then I said, “She was an amazing woman, wasn’t she?”

  The oar moved steadily through the water, then I heard his barely audible voice. “I loved Daphne.”

  “Did you?”

  “I loved her so much.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “One day last summer I was across the river on my raft, just, you know, noodling around, and there was this woman up in the gazebo and she waved at me and I waved back, and then she walked down the grass and came over the railroad tracks and she said ‘hello’ and laughed, and her laugh was life itself and she offered me a glass
of wine …” He just kept rowing but I could hear him crying. “She was so kind to me, she knew me, who I really really was, and she loved me for that … oh, and she was wild, wicked and wild, my baby-lady, we had fun times … me and my baby-lady.”

  Mad John started to moan, a low breathy keening. Then he put down his oar and curled into a fetal position. “I did a bad bad thing.”

  “What bad thing did you do, Mad John?”

  “She met the witch and the witch got her hooked and kept her fed, fed with death.”

  “… and so you killed the witch.”

  The raft was starting to drift out into the middle of the river.

  “Daphne was my baby-lady,” he wept.

  We floated down the black river in the black night and I felt hollowed out, numb. The world was quiet and there was only grief.

  We both heard it a split-second before we saw it: the boat that tore out of the night and rammed into the raft, splitting it in two, sending us flying into the water. The wind was knocked out of me. I swallowed river water, sputtered, and struggled to stay afloat. Then Mad John was next to me, holding me up.

  “Take off your clothes,” he ordered, “or they’ll take you down.”

  I reached underwater and frantically pulled off my sneakers. My jeans felt like a layer of lead. I peeled them off as Mad John buoyed me. Suddenly I was lighter, could kick and keep my head above water.

  “They’re coming back!” he said. “Stay low!”

  We watched with alligator eyes as the boat came closer. It was a speedboat and I made out the outline of a single figure at the wheel … a man … Marcus. He killed the engine and as the boat glided closer he leaned over the edge, scanning the water. Something glinted in his hand—a gun.

  Mad John disappeared underwater. It grew calm for a moment and then he shot up out of the water and grabbed the gun from Marcus’s hand. Then he disappeared.

  “Fuck!” Marcus cursed.

  Marcus picked up a crowbar and scanned the water. He spotted me and turned the wheel in my direction. Mad John vaulted himself up and over on the other side of the boat, screaming, “WHAAAA!” He tackled Marcus. I swam over and clambered onboard. They were rolling around on deck and I grabbed the crowbar and yanked it out of Marcus’s hand, threw it overboard. They were up on their knees now, Marcus was twice Mad John’s size and he got a grip on him, picked him up, and tossed him overboard. Then he turned to me.

  I was ready. Before he could stand up I kneed him under the jaw and his head flew back. Then I kicked him in the chest, then the stomach. He was stunned. I grabbed a flashlight and brought it down on his skull.

  Knocked the motherfucker out cold.

  “I want the truth, the whole story,” I said to Marcus. He wasn’t in much of a position to argue, what with him being down on the ground with his hands tied behind his back. We were in a small swampy clearing near Mad John’s moorings.

  “The whole story!” Mad John cackled, jumping up and down.

  “Fuck you,” Marcus said.

  “I’m cold and wet and pissed,” I said, kneeling down and looking him in the eye.

  He spit in my face.

  “Now that was uncalled for,” I said. “You’re just lucky I’m a pacifist. Mad John, you have a bucket handy?”

  Mad John gave a leap of assent and then disappeared into the reeds.

  “I’m figuring Vince and Marcella have set you up nice and clean to be their fall guy. Hey, you want to end up in prison while they party, that’s your business.”

  Mad John reappeared with a big plastic bucket.

  “Fill it with river water, and make sure you get some muck in there,” I said.

  Mad John dunked the bucket into the Hudson and carried it over.

  “Tip it on big boy here,” I said.

  Mad John tipped the bucket over Marcus’s head, coating him with mud and slime. He winced and sputtered and writhed.

  “I think one more bucket will do it. See if you can find any snakes.” I knew from my practice that a lot of men had a primal terror of snakes—it was a whole phallic thing.

  Mad John crouched down on the bank and scooped up a bucket that was more muck than water, sifting through it with his hands. “I got one! I got one!” he said, proudly holding up a long wriggling snake.

  Marcus’s eyes went wide with fear. “Keep that fucking snake away from me!”

  “Then talk.”

  He didn’t.

  “Why don’t you introduce them?” I said.

  Mad John held the snake close to Marcus’s face—it writhed in the air and brushed his cheek.

  “Okay, I’ll talk!! Just get that thing away from me!!”

  Mad John pulled back. Marcus took a deep breath, exhaled, and his face slackened in resignation.

  “First rule of my job: don’t touch the boss’s booty. I’m such a fuckup,” he said bitterly. “Bitch started parading that body around in front of me.”

  “So you started screwing Marcella,” I said. “Then what?”

  “She’s talking to me about her big plans, to become a celebrity and all that. Says she’ll always take care of me. So she sends me out to make nice with Esmerelda. Man, was she a freak.”

  “Then Marcella booted the poison at Benedictine Hospital, and Esmerelda put it in Daphne’s heroin,” I said.

  “Marcella paid her fifty grand. Well, she paid her half and then when Daphne was dead she didn’t want to pay the second half.”

  “And so the piper sang …” I said.

  “Yeah, whatever, will you untie me please,” Marcus pleaded.

  “Not so fast,” I said. “So you waited in the woods until Daphne shot up the bad heroin, then you ran into the summerhouse and strung up her body.”

  Marcus nodded miserably.

  “What about Vince Hammer?” I asked.

  “Far as I know, that slick bastard is clean. This was all Marcella. The conniving bitch. But listen, I didn’t kill that old hag. She was already dead.”

  “I think you’re what’s known as an accessory to the murder.”

  There was a pause and Marcus suddenly looked like a very sad little boy.

  “I’m royally fucked, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah, I think you are.”

  “I just found a new friend,” Mad John said, as the snake slithered around his neck.

  I was sitting in Detective Chevrona Williams’s office at the State Police barracks, wrapped in a blanket. Chevrona walked in, handed me a cup of undrinkable coffee, and said, “Not smart.”

  I tried to look contrite.

  “But effective,” she said. “Marcus Randall just signed a full confession. Marcella Sedgwick is also in custody. She’s not talking, has hired a big-shot lawyer, and will be out on bail in about half an hour.“

  “What about Vince Hammer?”

  “It looks like he’s clean, completely clean,” Chevrona said. “This was Marcella’s baby, her ticket to Hammer, the estate, and who knows what from there.”

  “The statehouse, the White House, the history books, I think she’s one of those women whose ambition is beyond measure. She’s pretty fascinating—Lady MacBeth in a yogatard,” I said. “Thanks to Josie, I found out that Marcella grew up in a shack in rural Tennessee—her real name is Amber Lundy. She’s brilliant, all her degrees are real, she could have made a name for herself without resorting to murder, but whatever it is that’s driving her got the best of her.”

  “What would you guess that is?”

  “I’d have to get her on the couch to know with any certainty, but I’d say the key here may be a profound narcissism. Kids who grow up in desperate situations learn at an early age to find their solace and strength in themselves, they retreat from the pain around them and create their own self-centered world. It�
��s a survival mechanism, and a healthy one up to a point—Marcella went way past that point. Add to that a deep shame at her background, and rage and envy and craving of privilege. Then there’s her beauty and sex appeal—this is a woman who has been turning men’s heads her entire life. This sexual power and confidence is very real and very heady. It took her a lot further than her degrees. But it also may have led to her grandiosity and hubris, which in turn led to her fatal mistake.”

  “Not paying Esmerelda the second half of her killing fee?”

  “Yes.”

  “She wanted to be the Queen of the World. Now she’s going to be the Queen of Cellblock Sixteen. But I still want a few answers from you. What the hell were you and that lunatic up to out on the river?”

  “I was determined to find out who killed Daphne. You might say it turned into an obsession.”

  “You, of all people, should know that obsessions can be very unhealthy. And breaking and entering is illegal.”

  “We never actually broke and entered. How is Mad John doing?”

  “He’s on his second dozen donuts, and he keeps asking how you’re doing. He seems really concerned.”

  “Tell him I’m okay.”

  “You can tell him yourself, we’re going to release you both as soon as we finish taking your statements.” Chevrona eyeballed me in her Clint Eastwood way. “Why do I have the feeling that you’re holding out on me?”

  “Maybe because I’m wet and hungry and in shock.”

  “You figured out who killed Daphne. Any luck with Esmerelda?”

  “I haven’t been trying to figure out who killed Esmerelda.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  I took a sip of coffee. “Could I get a donut?”

  Chevrona got up. “Frosted?”

  “Pink, please,” I said, crossing my legs.

  While she went to get the donut, I tried to figure out what to do. Mad John had brutally murdered a human being. Not good. But Esmerelda was a heartless drug dealer who had helped ruin the lives of hundreds of kids. She’d let heroin she knew was tainted hit the streets. And she had been a paid accomplice in Daphne’s murder.