A Killer's Guide to Good Works

by Shelley Costa

  The street was clogged with cabs and delivery trucks, maybe half an hour before rush hour reached the hysterical honking stage. A New York tradition. The only outlet for expressing a shared outrage over a situation that, clearly, insistent honking wasn’t going to help. She checked the time on her phone—7:43 a.m.—and debated taking a run up to see whatever it was Adrian was so excited about. Euphorbia milii.

  A quick Google search sent her to Wikipedia, where she gleaned about as much information as she could handle at 7:43 in the morning before she got her hands on a second cup of dark roast coffee: Euphorbia milii (crown of thorns, Christ plant, Christ thorn), is a species of flowering plant…introduced to the Middle East in ancient times, and legend associates it with the crown of thorns worn by Christ.

  Val clicked on her calendar. Nothing in the office until a ten a.m. meeting with the Digital Design geeks, who wanted to discuss branding the exciting new Words on Fire, such a stellar improvement over poor old decrepit Fir Na Tine. “I mean,” the head of the department rhapsodized, “how do you brand a foreign language like Welsh, like we’re not Bob effing Dylan, please.” At which Val gave the two ambassadors sent to her to “sched” the meeting a wide, bright smile, spending only a slip of a second feeling bad for both Dylans who had suddenly become interchangeable commodities, apparently.

  But she went right ahead and scheduled the meeting with the Digital Design geeks because she liked their repressed energy. They were the closest the company could come in age and look to a college chess club. Up to the Coleman-Witt and back in an hour, factoring in rush hour and time to slip into her ghastly moccasins—she walked the long block to Fifth Avenue, stepped off the curb, and raised an arm in the general direction of anything yellow that was moving and empty.

  A yellow cab finally slid to a stop in front of her, and Val flung herself inside, giving the driver—an inscrutable woman who wore a gray burka—the address of the Coleman-Witt. The wordless driver imperturbably swung their way through what to Val appeared to be total gridlock. When they got to W. 73rd, up ahead Val saw a red and white FDNY ambulance with its rear lights strobing, blocked in against the curb by three patrol cars. Plus a late model black Chevy sedan disgorging two police detectives.

  Muttering thanks, Val thrust a twenty-dollar bill at the driver and slid out of the cab without waiting for change. She loped her way up the sidewalk, shouldering past the dog walkers and joggers who were clutched together, arms crossed, waiting for something to happen. A forty-something woman with light brown hair rubber banded into a ponytail, wearing pale blue nylon shorts, started shaking her head. “That’s the murder squad,” she said to no one in particular, although everyone around her turned and gasped. “Well,” she added defensively, “it is.”

  As Val turned onto the walk that led to the back entrance of the office wing, she was cut off by a cop who looked like he had given up a lucrative career as a digital designer in favor of a better wardrobe. “Ma’am, you can’t go in,” he told her, barring her with an arm.

  Val looked wistfully at the door, where another uniformed cop stood in the entrance. She was no more than fifty feet away from Adrian who had a fine example of a flowering plant to show her. Val’s legs started to shake. “I have an appointment,” she said finally, her voice sounding strange to herself. “With Adrian Bale.” Why is this dread the only thing we ever know with certainty? Not love or beauty or how hummingbirds make it all the way to Central America for the winter. And when the cop pressed his lips tight and shook his head, Val knew the truth.

  Later she would remember how she had to step wide to stay steady on her feet, and even then the cop had to grab her arm. Later still she would remember the Mexican jumping beans Adrian had sent away for sophomore year as a silly gift for Val who was having fits over studying for the History of Western Civilization final exam. The beans popped and flopped in her sweaty palm as she sat in the lecture hall with a blue exam book open in front of her. And her poor heart had felt like nothing more than beans as it trembled inside her—even all these years later, all these years later, when she didn’t know what happened to the silly beans and she didn’t know why the Coleman-Witt Museum was dissolving into vapor before her very eyes…and she didn’t know what in the name of everything sweet she would ever do without Adrian Bale.

  In the end, Val waited until they brought out the body. Someone had told her to go home. Someone else told her to go to work. Yet someone else advised a good stiff drink, and she lifted her chin, mildly interested. “Maybe the Beacon Bar on Broadway is open?” added the guy who had advised a drink. He had a flat, kind face, his hands stuffed into his Yankees jacket. She felt her eyes slide away from him as the Eyewitness News Channel 5 van pulled up and sleekly double-parked. Out rolled the A team, taking charge of the bloody event in a way that was making the crime scene techs bristle.

  “No good could come of sticking around here,” said one of the cops to Val after they got her contact information. She sat hunched on the edge of a low stone wall around the museum, her legs splayed like a bag lady, and she didn’t give any kind of a damn. On the sidewalk the crowd got bigger, although some of the early dog walkers dipped their heads—sad to watch, sad to go—and went on their way. Dogs trotted, unfazed. Murder was a good time to be a Dachshund, thought Val, when no one could hold you responsible.

  “I’ll wait,” said Val, although she wasn’t sure anyone was listening, her ribs collapsing in on each other when she watched the agitated guards pull at their hair, saying Adrian Bale was a goddamn mess, that was for shit sure. Such a nice gal, always brought them fudge at Christmas. The kind with walnuts pressed into the top. The two of them had come running when the number five security camera was shot out. One added something low and quaking that might have been head blown clear to New Jersey, but the only way Val could swallow a scream was to think he said get to go cheer for New Jersey. Yes, that had to be it. Nets, Giants, some team always playing.

  Inside her tote was an apple that she should have eaten days ago, that much she knew, and she’d have to be sure to tell the landlord about the silverfish in her bathroom. Maybe she should take a closer look at James Killian’s manuscript. You can never be too sure about shocking tales of plumbing. And just that morning she had used up the very last of the hotel shampoo sample she had tossed into her suitcase at the end of her trip to Havana last September with Adrian. The last of the shampoo. The last trip together. The last of Adrian.

  Head blown clear to New Jersey.

  Val would have to face it.

  Have to face it.

  Only how?

  The crowd got noisier as the cops pushed back to let the wheeled stretcher come through. At that moment, the director of the Coleman-Witt showed up, looking dazed. Adrian had introduced Val to Eva Toscano at the opening a month ago for the illuminated manuscripts exhibit. Now the sharp-beaked redhead was shoving her way through the television crew and gawkers. “Terrell!” she called out to one of the guards. Even what Adrian had told her was the mighty Eva was sounding shaken. “Tell me what the hell happened—” she demanded, as though she was trying to figure out what she was accusing him of. But Terrell didn’t get a chance, because the coroner’s van attendants rolled the body noiselessly along the walkway. Val pushed herself off the wall. Under the taut sheet smeared with blood was what was left of her best friend.

  She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. There was something comforting in how some tech had wrapped Adrian tight, a child tucked in at last for a long and final night. As the van doors closed behind the stretcher, Val made a weak swipe at the handles of her tote, and she realized the strange keening as she shambled down 73rd Street in the direction of life, or just elsewhere, was her own. Come see the finest example of a Euphorbia milii, Adrian had tempted her early that morning. Everything left her, every gnawing truth about her work life, every twinge in a joint, every dark worry about how to skirt the strangers she didn’t tr
ust, a list that could now populate Tokyo. Even dread rolled clear off her. Because Adrian was dead.

  As Val made her way over to Broadway on legs she couldn’t feel, it occurred to her that for the first time since high school, she was fearless. Her jaw tightened up, but it was good. At that moment in time, Valjean Cameron was dangerously at home in the world. She would go and do whatever she had to. But first, on this day she would never quite be able to put behind her—and why should she?—she had to think. At the light, she ran across the street toward the entrance to the subway. Was the crown of thorns plant left trampled in the wreckage of Adrian’s office? Not everything gets wrapped kindly and wheeled away. Are we all just lost and beautiful things? Who had her friend surprised that morning at the museum? In the act of…what, exactly?

  6

  The NYPD homicide detective at the 20th precinct who explained she “caught” the Bale murder was Lieutenant Shay Cleary, and Val had agreed to stop by the precinct house over her lunch hour. For Val, no contest: no food. The idea of eating with a homicide detective while the medical examiner was off somewhere disassembling Adrian felt entirely too casual. But after a morning spent staring at a red push pin on her bulletin board behind the closed door of her office, Val took a cab up to the address on W. 82nd Street that the detective had given her.

  Cleary’s handshake was surprisingly strong considering she had hands the size of a twelve-year-old. As they both sat, Cleary tugged at the creases in her belted khaki pants. She had a small-breasted, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped kind of body that looked good in nearly anything, especially beachwear, but her face was plain. Cleary dyed her straight hair a tarry black, parted it with a laser, and pulled it back severely behind her ears with what was actually a pink rubber band at the back. Her eyes were narrow and dark, and freckles scattered over a short nose.

  Sitting in front of her on her old wood desk that had been tortured decades ago with cigarettes was a meatball sub. While the homicide detective smoothed out the creases in the wrapper with her small, precise fingers, she said, “We’ve been in touch with the victim’s next of kin, who lives out of the country.” She lifted the sub. “He’ll be making final arrangements once the ME releases the body.

  Antony.

  Val exhaled hard. Poor Antony. She had forgotten about him. Maybe not forgotten, exactly. He was such an abstraction for her, like quadratic equations or a book by Tolstoy. But she realized Antony Bale was even a greater stakeholder in the death of Adrian. By law he was contacted to handle the “arrangements,” and by custom he might even be conducting the services. He’d be the one going through Adrian’s closets. Closing out her bank accounts. Notifying all her friends. At least, thought Val, he wouldn’t have to notify her.

  Suddenly it felt powerfully sad to her that she had been such a bitch about meeting her best friend’s brother the monk. How bad could it have been? Why was she such a bigot when it came to clergy?

  For Adrian she should have done it, should have met the damn brother, no matter how blind Adrian had to be about him. And as she sat in a hard plastic chair there in Precinct 20 of the NYPD, Val realized that for a long time to come she’d deal with a lot of regret.

  “That’s right,” she told Cleary, after the detective took notes on Val’s home and work addresses, any phone that could possibly reach her, and the nature of her relationship with the victim. Best friends, seventeen years. Then: “Adrian called me at 7:08 this morning. It went to voicemail.” She sat up straight in the creaky chair just to help keep her thoughts together. She wanted to be useful to Adrian. She wanted to get it right.

  Cleary eyed her, then dug into the sub. “That typical?” she spoke out of the side of her mouth.

  Val shrugged. “Yes and no,” she answered. “We were used to talking to each other at odd hours.” Trashing bad boyfriends or processing a screwy dream. Old college habits hadn’t changed even as they moved along in their careers—and aged.

  “Today—?” Cleary dabbed a napkin at her lips.

  Val pulled out her phone, clicked through to the voicemail from Adrian, and put it on speaker. As her friend’s voice sailed out into the air between Val and the detective, Cleary set down her lunch. Val, said Adrian, maybe less than an hour from her murder, I don’t care what you think your lunch plans are for today, I want you to change them. No, make that your breakfast plans. Come to the museum if you want a once in a lifetime chance to see—a brief silence—the finest example of Euphorbia milii in the known world. I can’t hang on to it very long. When Val set down her phone, she looked at Cleary, who was frowning.

  “I’ll need that voicemail,” she said, tipping her head toward Val’s phone.

  So will I, thought Val. The last of Adrian’s voice. On her phone she pressed through to all of her voicemail messages, waited ’til the 7:08 a.m. message from Adrian ended, followed the prompts and tapped in Lieutenant Cleary’s cell phone number.

  They gave each other a tight-lipped nod, as though something great had been accomplished, then Val dropped her phone back into her purse. Adrian was increasingly becoming the property of the NYPD. A matter of reports. Evidence bags. Theories.

  Cleary leaned closer to Val. “What did she want you to see?”

  “I had to look it up,” said Val. “A crown of thorns plant.”

  Cleary wrinkled her short nose. “Crown of thorns?” she said skeptically. “Like Jesus or whatever?”

  “From what I read.”

  “So it’s a plant—” said Shay Cleary, pointing her lunch at Val “—named because it resembles—”

  “The Crown of Thorns, apparently.” Why was this such new information for Homicide? Then it struck her. “Didn’t you find it near—Adrian?” She couldn’t bring herself to say the body.

  But Cleary ignored her, seeming to collect her thoughts from the water-stained soundproofing panels on the ceiling. “Adrian Bale was a curator of Egyptian—”

  “And Sumerian.”

  “Excuse me. Egyptian and Sumerian art—”

  “Ancient southern Mesopotamia.”

  Cleary smiled. “In other words,” said the detective, “Iraq. I do know that.”

  Val was beginning to feel they were paying attention to the wrong things. But it was a day when everything was now precisely all the wrong things. From starting the day at Greta’s with chocolate croissants that now seemed unbearably sweet, Val was gliding numb and very nearly insentient in the aftermath of Adrian’s murder.

  Was it possible her death had anything at all to do with the new exhibit she was curating—what was it called?—that would open in a year? Adrian hadn’t mentioned any snags in acquiring the pieces on loan from their permanent homes. But there was the problem of the provenance of those bronze figures from the first century B.C. that the museum—on Adrian’s advice—had bought. Since the first Gulf War, the market for fake Sumerian antiquities had flourished. Had Adrian got caught up in it somehow? Did it lead to her murder?

  Val didn’t believe it. It didn’t feel right. If Adrian had been dealing with a jealous colleague or a grudging dealer or exposed forger, she hadn’t mentioned it to Val—besides, that purchase had taken months, plenty of time for plotting dire action aimed at Adrian Bale. So…why today? What series of events rolled suddenly and inexorably to this shooting death—today—of her best friend? She had no answers, and looked helplessly at the lieutenant.

  Cleary chewed reflectively. “Can you think of any reason this plant would fit into her work at the museum?”

  It was a good question, maybe—aside from who pulled the trigger—the only question. “No.”

  Studying her sandwich, Cleary sat back. “This Euphorbia,” she said finally. “Is it a houseplant?”

  “I suppose,” said Val, finding it hard to imagine why Adrian would leave such an excited message over a simple houseplant. “I think they’re pretty common.”

  “Why would
the vic—Ms. Bale leave you that message?” Then: “Just for you to come see a houseplant.” That was indeed the point, and Val couldn’t explain it.

  Cleary studied the label on the Diet Coke and then started to pick at it. “But,” she said slowly, “you went.” Which was when she eyed Val, seeming to imply something that wasn’t quite clear.

  Val felt herself starting to get wound up. “I figured it was something strange,” she explained, a little too loud, “or funny, or really exciting somehow. Like a private joke between Adrian and me.” But why would Adrian have called it a once in a lifetime chance…?

  “Where do you suppose she got this fine example of Euphorbia?”

  “I don’t know. I had the feeling from the way she sounded that—it just showed up. That it was a surprise.” It struck her: “Is there a delivery log?”

  Cleary pushed away the rest of her lunch. “Not at seven in the morning.”

  Val was wishing for a three-shot espresso. “Was there anything attached to it?”

  “Like what?” Cleary blotted at a wet ring on the desk.

  Val’s hand flopped in her lap. “Like a card, an invoice, some watering instructions—” How much more lame could she possibly get?

  Cleary jerked her chin at her. “How would we know that?”

  Was there something she was missing? “You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”

  “The Euphorbia? As a matter of fact, Ms. Cameron, we have not.”

  How could that even be? Val felt mystified.

  And then she watched Lieutenant Cleary switch directions. Even her voice changed, as if everything they had discussed up to that point had been idle. Place markers for the real substance. “Do you know of any reason someone may have wanted Ms. Bale dead?”