Rich, Radiant Slaughter Page 4

  She walked past Phoebe, punched at the up button and then folded her arms across her chest.

  “If that elevator doesn’t come in exactly thirty seconds, I’m going to take it apart,” she said.

  “I thought patience was a Christian virtue,” I said.

  She gave me a look. Then she gave Phoebe a look that traveled right down to the rise in Phoebe’s belly, and made a face.

  “I just can’t spend any more time with that woman,” she said. “She gives me the creeps. And don’t start handing me a lot of crap about charity, because that woman wouldn’t know charity if it walked right up and bit her. And don’t start giving me a lot of crap about clichés, because—”

  “Calm down,” I said. “I wasn’t going to give you any crap about anything.”

  “Why not? What makes today different from any other day?” She stabbed at the elevator button again. “Why I agreed to come on this tour, I don’t know. Evelyn Nesbitt Kleig. Evelyn Nesbitt Kleig gives me the creeps. And this charity of hers—”

  “You have something against helping the homeless?” Phoebe said.

  “Helping the homeless? I’ve got nothing against helping the homeless. But this Ad Hoc Committee thing—had you ever heard of it before this trip?”

  Mostly, Tempesta Stewart only asked rhetorical questions. She had no conversation, only techniques for putting her point across. For once, she looked honestly curious.

  “All Evelyn’s charities come up out of nowhere,” I said. “You should know that by now. And they’ve all got those names, too. Ad Hoc Committee. Task Force. Whatever. It’s the kind of thing that gets her attention.”

  “Well, I’m glad something does. Her work most surely doesn’t. She ever run a tour for you?”

  “Two,” I said.

  “Two,” Tempesta repeated. “Two she’s run for me, too. What am I saying? Anyway, they were a mess. An absolute mess. Charity is all well and good, but the Lord also wants us to do our jobs. That’s what He gave us jobs for.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Don’t give me that,” Tempesta said. “At least Phoebe here understands religion. She practices a dead and discredited one, but at least she understands it.”

  “Did you really firebomb an abortion clinic in Nashville?” Phoebe said.

  “Violence in defense of the unborn is no vice,” Tempesta said. “And it wasn’t an abortion clinic and I didn’t firebomb it. It wasn’t even in Nashville. It was in Montgomery and it was a Planned Parenthood referral office and all I did was set fire to the wastebasket. If it hadn’t been for the totally irrational reaction of that idiotic nurse, it would never have gotten out of hand.”

  There was a freestanding ashtray on the other side of the hall, and no sign of the elevators, so I lit another cigarette. It occurred to me that I’d been smoking too much on this tour, and I smoked too much to begin with. My throat hurt.

  “You notice something?” Tempesta said. “About the tour, I mean. We have hardly anything to do in Baltimore.”

  “You call an autograph party, a television show, a radio hour and four interviews nothing to do?” Phoebe said.

  “Compared to what?” Tempesta said. “Compared to Minneapolis? In Minneapolis, I got less than two hours of sleep. Compared to Sherman Oaks? In Sherman Oaks, I got one, and it was right in that radio studio where we were doing the telethon thing. The microphone passed to someone else, and I just conked out. Now I’ve got nothing at all to do until four o’clock—three, if you count getting ready and getting over to that store—and tomorrow I’ve got this big hole in my schedule I’m going to have to fill talking to that woman’s school.”

  “Evelyn probably realizes how exhausted we are,” I said. “She isn’t that bad at running a tour. We all look like death.”

  “Evelyn’s a fanatic,” Tempesta said, for all the world as if the one kind of person she couldn’t stand was a fanatic. “If it was an ordinary book tour, I could see it. Evelyn never takes all that much interest in ordinary book tours. But this is for one of her charities. For heaven’s sake, she could have set up three more parties in the time we have here.”

  “Be thankful for small favors,” I said. “I’ve got a date with a room service menu and a bed. I’m going to keep it, too.”

  “You do what you want,” Tempesta said. “I say there’s too much crap going on around here. And talk about people giving me the creeps. I think that Jon Lowry is out to lunch.”

  “Well, at least you think he’s out to somewhere in particular,” I said.

  The right-hand elevator hit the lobby, bouncing a little before its doors slid silently open. Tempesta put her hand against the rubber safety piece and stood back to let us get in ahead of her.

  “You two think you’re so smart,” she said. “Just you wait.”

  I would have found out just what it was I should have been waiting for—Tempesta was like that; she abhorred innuendo, mostly because she also abhorred suspense—but just as we got into the car, two strangers appeared out of nowhere and got in with us. The strangers were two older men in business suits. Tempesta and Phoebe and I rode up to the fourth floor without speaking, washed by the sound of masculine voices talking about sales dips and cost-reduction strategies.

  Unlocking our room, I found the bellboy had delivered our bags and whoever—probably a maid—had brought the three extra pillows and two extra blankets I had asked for at the desk. Since Phoebe always traveled with enough clothes to outfit the female half of one of old Mrs. Vanderbilt’s Four Hundred parties, there were steamer trunks and suit bags everywhere, but no immediate sign of my single brown fabric suitcase or my little square makeup case. The makeup case is really my mother’s, the one she used when she was a debutante in New York. I don’t wear makeup often enough to justify buying one of my own.

  I sat down on the bed closer to the window—and farther from the bathroom—and leaned over to extract the room service menu from the pile of service pamphlets on the night table. Phoebe rubbed her eyes, rubbed her forehead and headed for the john. That, of course, was when I should have done it—made an issue of it, demanded my explanations. Instead, I sat on the bed for long minutes, feeling utterly incapable of movement.

  Tempesta had certainly been right about one thing: until Baltimore, the pace of the tour had been crazy. Crazed. My muscles felt like they were melting. My head was pounding. I rummaged around in my tote bag until I found my traveling clock—8:45. If I got to sleep right that minute, I’d be able to stay asleep for over six hours. On the other hand, there were things I had to do. Nick. Phoebe. Adrienne. I checked off the list in my head. I almost always called Adrienne as soon as I got into a new city, even if I had to call her at The Brearley School and haul her out of class to talk to her. Adrienne is a remarkable person, but a child whose mother has been murdered when she’s old enough to understand what’s going on, but not old enough to handle it, is never one hundred percent steady one hundred percent of the time. I liked letting her know where I was so she could get to me if she needed to, and I liked letting her know I was thinking of her. It was good for both of us. As for Nick … Lord, how I missed Nick.

  As for Phoebe …

  I got off the bed and went to the bathroom door. The sounds of retching were thick and awful, making me wince.

  “Phoebe?” I said.

  Thick cough. Muffled moan.

  “Phoebe,” I said again.

  “I’m all right,” Phoebe said.

  “You don’t sound all right.”

  “I am, really. It’s just a little food poisoning, like I said. I don’t need a doctor or anything. I’m just fine.”

  “If you have a little food poisoning, you’re not fine.”

  “I am, really. Or I will be. Don’t worry about it.”

  “That’s like telling me not to be tall,” I said. “Look. I’m dead tired. You must be, too. It would probably do you a lot of good if you got some sleep.”

  “I know.”

  “How long do
you expect to be in there?”

  “Patience—”

  “Never mind,” I sighed. My eyelids were getting heavy. I was finding it very difficult to stay on my feet. Psychology is a strange and wonderful thing. As long as I’d had places to go and work to do, I’d been exhausted but operational. My tiredness had been more like background music than an emergency. Now that I was within falling distance of a bed, whatever self-discipline I had—and it was never much—had deserted me.

  I looked at the bed, broad and covered with blankets and pillows. I looked at something that might have been the corner of my suitcase peeking out from between two of Phoebe’s trunks. I thought about the fact that I usually didn’t like sleeping nude, but probably wouldn’t mind this time. It had to beat dislodging my luggage.

  “Phoebe?” I said again.

  “I’m all right,” Phoebe said.

  “I’m not,” I said. “Listen. If I pass out right this minute, do you promise me you’ll lie down and get some sleep as soon as you get out of there?”

  “Patience, there is absolutely nothing in the world I want as much as I want to get some sleep.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Lie down,” she said. “You must be ready to collapse. You’ve been running around for hours. I’ll be out of here in a minute.”

  “Okay.”

  The sounds of retching started up again. Phoebe was in trouble. Phoebe was my best friend. I had to do something about this.

  The words had no force at all. I couldn’t get them to connect with a course of action.

  I went to the bed, lay down and tried not to close my eyes. I told myself to get up and get out of my clothes. I hate waking up after having slept in clothes. I told myself to rearrange the blankets and pillows. I love blankets and pillows. I told myself to set that damned traveling clock—all I needed was to sleep right through Gail Larson’s meticulously planned champagne tea.

  I drifted. At some point, I don’t know when, Phoebe came into the room. She asked me the time. I mumbled something about the clock. She thanked me. I remember all that perfectly.

  I don’t remember anything else. I should have made myself stay awake. I should have done something about Phoebe. I should have set the alarm. Instead, I took the worst possible course of action.

  I fell asleep.

  Chapter Five

  When I was very young, my mother put a sign in my room, on the wall I faced when I sat up in bed, that said: “Effort Doesn’t Count, Performance Does.” It was one of those things—like Mrs. De Rham’s dancing classes and spending Sunday mornings in a church built before the American revolution and my grandmother’s coming-out pearls—that I never really thought about until I left home for Emma Willard, where a combination of scholarship students and the daughters of new-rich Texas wildcatters made me think the world might be something other than what I’d grown up believing it was. I even went through a period when I tried to make myself something other than I’d grown up believing I was. In fact, I went through several. There was my never-buy-anything-unless-it’s-overpriced phase, nipped in the bud because my mother believed there was something sinful in giving any “child” under the age of eighteen an allowance of more than three dollars and fifty cents a week. There was my solidarity-with-the-people phase. That lasted longer—at least it was cheap—but the people I was trying to have solidarity with all thought I was crazy, and I began to feel uncomfortable. Finally, there was my expressing-my-real-feelings phase. That one lasted very long indeed, except that in a way it never got off the ground at all. I had it in conjunction with my I’m-a-woman-so-I-must-be-oppressed phase, and what it came down to was a lot of shouting about rage on the outside and a lot of feeling like a fool on the inside. I was seventeen years old, and it would be a long time before I understood that being discriminated against and being oppressed were not the same thing. Being a reasonably intelligent seventeen, I had the other two parts of the problem figured out right away. For one thing, expressing rage took a hell of a lot of work. For another: “Effort Doesn’t Count. Performance Does.”

  I turned over in bed, confused. Somewhere a bell was ringing. I wasn’t sure if it was in my dream or out. My dream was about building a jet plane. It was an epic, but it was a recurring epic. I’d had it on and off ever since college. These days, I had it most often when I had a deadline looming and didn’t think I was going to make it. I was standing on a tall ladder next to a plane. The engine casing was open, exposing me to a lot of wires and metal I didn’t understand the first thing about. A catalogue appeared in my hands, and I ordered every part in it, including the pink satin coat hangers. They came. They went into the engine. Nothing happened. I looked in and decided I’d had it all wrong. It was used parts I needed, something somebody else—somebody who really understood these things—had already found out would work. Another catalogue appeared in my hands and I ordered a few things from that one, only the absolutely necessary things. When they came they were rusty and dull and fell apart in my hands. I dropped them on the ground—or what was left of them after whole sections had scattered into flakes of rust—and turned my attention to the power of my emotions. They were mostly negative. They were no work at all. They had not one single effect on that jet engine. “Effort Doesn’t Count. Performance Does.”

  There wasn’t a bell ringing. There were two. I sat up in bed, squinting in the darkness. Phoebe must have drawn the curtains. I didn’t remember doing it, and they were pulled solidly over the broad windows. Outside, I could hear the sounds of rain and wind, violent and blank.

  Phoebe. Where was Phoebe?

  I looked at the opposite bed, empty except for a pile of velvet caftans and a little jumble of matching string bags. I listened for bathroom sounds. There was nothing. I was alone.

  I reached for my cigarettes with one hand and the phone with another, called out “Just a minute” to whoever had been ringing my bell and was now pounding on my door, put the receiver to my ear and said, “Hello?”

  “McKenna?” Nick said. “McKenna, is that you? Are you all right?”

  “Nick,” I said. “Just a minute. Somebody’s at the door.”

  I got out of bed and headed toward the miniature entrance foyer, thankful that I had fallen asleep in my clothes. I felt gritty and wet with sweat, but at least I didn’t have to search around for something to wear. I am not good at waking up, in the morning or at any other time. I need three cups of coffee and half a dozen cigarettes just to remember where I keep my panty hose, and I’ve kept them in the third drawer of whatever dresser I’ve owned since I was sixteen years old. I stumbled over one of Phoebe’s trunks. They had been scattered all over the room—God, I must have been out cold—and this one had been opened. Bits of veiling and odd-shaped lengths of imitation fox fur drooled out of it. Phoebe was the neatest packer I had ever met. She made my mother’s look a mess, and my mother’s would put a Marine DI into terminal orgasm. What was this?

  I opened the door and peered out into the hall at Jon Lowry, looking sheepishly in the general direction of his shoes.

  “Damn,” I said. “Whoever heard of bells on hotel doors?”

  “It wasn’t a bell,” Jon said. “It was this.”

  He held up a little black box, a kind of miniature VCR remote. When he punched at the only button on it, it buzzed.

  “I bought it in Times Square,” he said. “It’s really very handy when you want to—when you don’t want to—you know. When you’re at a door that doesn’t have a bell and you don’t want to knock and make a lot of noise.”

  “You did knock and make a lot of noise.”

  I stood back and let him inside, ignoring his comment about the darkness and his three separate, and increasingly elaborate, apologies for waking me up. I went back to the bed, picked up the phone again and switched on the night-table light. Underneath it was my traveling clock, its green luminous hands fading in the sudden brightness. It said 3:15.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “McKenna
?” Nick said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I overslept. I meant to get up by three and call you.”

  “Call me where?”

  My cigarettes were next to the traveling clock. I wormed one out of the pack and reached for my lighter. Jon Lowry sat down on the chair in front of the vanity table on the other side of the room, being careful to move the pile of Phoebe’s pure silk half slips to the top of the dresser first. I got my cigarette lit. I found an ashtray. I counted to ten.

  “Start again,” I said. “Where would I call you? It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, I’d call you at your office.”

  “I’m at the train station,” Nick said. “In Baltimore.”

  “What?”

  “McKenna, I’m supposed to be at the train station in Baltimore. I mean, we had a little trouble, we’re late. I’m supposed to be at the hotel. But I’m not supposed to be at my office, and you know it.”

  “What are you doing in Baltimore? Why should I know it?”

  “I was right, wasn’t I?” Adrienne’s voice in the background. “She was asleep when we talked to her in St. Louis. She doesn’t remember a thing about it.”

  “I was not asleep when I talked to you from St. Louis,” I said. “I remember that conversation distinctly.”

  “The first one or the second one?” Nick said.

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “Never mind,” Nick said. “We’re here. Just the two of us. Adrienne wanted to bring Courtney Feinberg, and I like Courtney Feinberg, but you know how they get—”

  I grunted. I certainly knew how they got. The Brearley School, where I’d sent Adrienne after she came to live with me, is supposed to be the best girls’ school in New York. If “best” was to be translated as “school with the most intelligent students,” and Adrienne and Courtney were anything like typical, I’d have to give Brearley that. The problem is, two hyper-intelligent eight-year-olds can be a menace, especially when they really like each other. Adrienne and Courtney really liked each other. Over the past year, they had: found a way to travel through the theoretically sealed-off dumbwaiter system in my apartment building; rigged a pulley-and-basket contraption that effectively brought Girl Scout cookies from the cabinet in the kitchen to the bedroom at the end of the back hall Adrienne now called her own; and used the cat in an experiment that had something to do with kites and the penthouse garden. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with the two of them when they got old enough to think about sex.