Wicked, Loving Murder Read online

  “Interoffice or outside?” I asked her.

  “Couldn’t tell,” she said. “Whoever was on the other end did a lot of talking. He did a little squeaking. Then he put the phone down and said he had to go down the hall for a minute. Then he disappeared.” She stared at the Scotch bottle. “He looked green,” she said finally. “I mean he actually turned the color green. He had really pasty, unhealthy looking skin, alcoholic’s skin, and it just turned a different color.”

  I put a very considered amount of Drambuie in my glass. The way the day had been going, I was getting pretty woozy. I didn’t want to miss anything.

  “Did he come back?” I asked Ivy.

  “He came back,” she said, “but I better tell you what I did before he came back. I went through the papers on his desk.”

  “What?”

  “I went through the papers on his desk,” she repeated. Then she shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she said.

  “What could he possibly have had on his desk?”

  “What didn’t he have on his desk,” Ivy said. “He’s supposed to be putting out newsletters. He’s got old copies of Vogue. He’s got three pictures of some woman, stark naked yet, lying on a bearskin rug. He’s got a financial report on Writing Enterprises. He’s got cover proofs for four or five paperback books—two-color covers, really garish. He’s got a couple of textbooks stamped ‘Harvard Business School’ and inscribed to somebody with a Polish name. He’s got a whole bunch of letters written on the letterhead of a stock brokerage to someone named Jack Brookfield. It was crazy.”

  “Letters from a stockbroker?” I said. “To Jack Brookfield? Are you sure it wasn’t Stephen?”

  “It was Jack.”

  “Do you remember the firm?”

  “Not one of the big commercials,” Ivy said. “I might remember it if I heard it again. Anyway, I heard a noise in the hall and went back to my chair. A couple of seconds later, he walks in, looking greener than when he left. He doesn’t even sit down. He sticks out his hand, says nice to have met you, but something’s come up and can we talk another time. He got me out of that office and into the elevator in thirty seconds flat.”

  I thought of the reception area, the carpet, the elevators. “Was Janet at her desk?” I asked. “The receptionist?”

  “Nobody was at the desk.”

  “Did you pass someone in the hall?”

  “Nobody saw me leave, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I suppose somebody saw you come in,” I sighed.

  “Somebody was at the desk then.”

  “It figures.”

  “Just one more thing,” Ivy said. “I looked at the wall clock when I got into the elevator. It said five after four.”

  NINE

  WE SHOULD HAVE CALLED Nick—or even Martinez—and put the whole mess in official hands. Janet would remember Ivy Samuels Tree. A blind-drunk psychotic would have remembered Ivy Samuels Tree, and Janet looked like neither a drunk nor a mental defective. One of the things I learned after Myrra was murdered was that, if there is no way out, the best course of action is to find a way further in.

  We finished the liquor instead. We were in no shape to cope with common sense. Martinez was lost in the snow and Nick—according to my answering machine—was at the Knicks game. Nick always calls on Friday to leave his weekend schedule. He calls on Monday to give me the details of basketball games, football games, ice hockey games, baseball games, and nights on the town with his new partner, David Grossman. Nick wants to let me know that, although he refuses to sleep with me, he isn’t sleeping with anyone else.

  At four o’clock in the morning, I got out the sleeping bags. I have six bedrooms but only one bed. I have five common rooms but only one table and four chairs. I write in the kitchen. What Myrra actually left me was the apartment and everything in it at the time of her death. Everything in it, with the exception of the five-by-three-and-a-half oil portrait of Myrra herself, had gone to Sotheby’s for auction. The auction money paid the maintenance on the apartment. It could have paid for much more, but I didn’t want to touch the money. I didn’t want to buy furniture, either.

  Ivy was too polite to comment on the emptiness. Phoebe had lectured me too often to want to take it up again after all that champagne. They took two of my sleeping bags to separate rooms in the back hall and set themselves up in splendor on the floors.

  The snow was still coming down at noon Saturday, when we woke up. Hunan West was delivering anyway. We ordered fifty dollars worth of Chinese food and stayed in to nurse our hangovers. While we were asleep Nick called my answering machine again—to tell me he was going shopping and then straight to a Rangers game.

  When Martinez called me Sunday afternoon we still hadn’t reached Nick. We had come to exactly one decision. Considering how Nick felt about murder suspects, even possible murder suspects, talking to the police without presence of counsel, we would not say anything about Ivy to Martinez until we tracked Nick down.

  Martinez met me in the Copper Hatch at nine. I turned down Drambuie for Perrier and pie. Martinez looked at my eyes and tutted.

  “Rest,” he said. “I told you to get some rest.”

  “All I did yesterday was sleep,” I said.

  “All you did Friday was drink.”

  “I had help,” I said. I saw how interested he was and shook my head. “Phoebe,” I told him. “Nick was at the basketball game.”

  “Why that guy doesn’t dump you is beyond me.”

  “It’s beyond me, too,” I said. “I know why I don’t dump him. He’s six eight and he looks like Christopher Reeve.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  I must have started to look stubborn. Martinez dropped the subject. He pulled a large white business envelope from his jacket pocket and threw it on the table next to my pie.

  “Medical report, lab reports, vet on Brookfield,” he said.

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “You’re going to get fired.”

  “I’m quitting anyway. You’re writing another book.”

  “Not yet I’m not.”

  “Take a look at it.”

  I pushed the envelope away. I was feeling more than a little guilty about Ivy Samuels Tree, still camped out in my apartment. I also didn’t want to break the regulations of the New York City Police Department.

  “Why don’t you just tell me,” I said. “It’ll save time that way. We came here to talk, after all.”

  “Keep the envelope,” he said. “You’ll need it later.”

  I hesitated. Then I picked it up and stuffed it in my bag. Martinez was right. I might need it later. If I intended to go on writing true crime, Michael Brookfield’s murder was an opportunity I wasn’t going to be able to turn down. Besides, Martinez knew me. If I refused that envelope, he’d get suspicious.

  “Medical report’s got no surprises,” he said. “No bruises, by the way. No bruises at all, which they tell me is very unusual. Nothing to say he got pushed into that closet. Doesn’t make any sense he’d have got into the closet without being pushed, but you never know.”

  “He was strangled?” I asked.

  “Definitely strangled. Almost definitely with that typewriter ribbon we found around his neck. Strangled, by the way, not much before you found him. Hour at most. If you can trust the statements we got out of that crew, and I don’t think you can, half an hour at most.”

  “They saw him?”

  “Everybody saw him. Everybody saw so much of him, you’d think nobody had time to do him in.”

  I winced. Martinez didn’t notice.

  “No big deal with the lab report,” he said. “Place used to be a broom closet or something. Half a dozen sets of prints but they don’t mean anything. The vet, however, has a few interesting points. You ready?”

  I nodded.

  “First place, not women but woman. One. Your Miss Brookfield might have thought there were more, but there was just the one. We could turn up something later, but I don’
t think we will. He’d been seeing her for five years and he’d been spending a lot of money on her. She likes to travel. He took her to Greece and Italy five or six times a year. He took her to Switzerland last summer. We got his credit card records from his apartment. You should see his apartment.”

  “Fancy?”

  “Impoverished. It made that dump you were living in on West Eighty-second Street look good. Furniture straight out of the Salvation Army. Carpet a hundred years old. Pullman kitchen. You want to know what he took home working at Writing Enterprises? Fifteen thou a year.”

  “Nobody can live in Manhattan on fifteen thou a year.”

  “Nobody can take women summer skiing in Switzerland on fifteen thou a year, that I know. The apartment was down on Avenue A. Brookfield had this arrangement with Alida Brookfield. She paid rent on the apartment and his bills at Brooks Brothers. Otherwise he was supposed to be living on his salary.”

  “I told you they thought he was cooking the books,” I said.

  “We’re checking it out,” Martinez said. “But he had to be, McKenna. There’s no other explanation for it. Not unless he was running drugs on the side—and before you start, I checked. If he’d been any kind of operator, somebody would have heard of him. Nobody’s heard of him.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So he’s been cooking the books.” He might also have been blackmailing people, but I couldn’t say anything about that without giving Ivy away. Besides, even Ivy didn’t really know if he’d intended to try blackmail. The conversation had never got that far.

  “He had all these wonderful reasons for murdering people,” I said. “Nobody seems to have had a reason to murder him.”

  “Yeah,” Martinez said. He called the waitress and ordered me another piece of pie. He ordered a Jack Daniels for himself. “Trouble is,” he said, “somebody told me that bunch’d murdered someone for kicks, I’d believe him.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “They’re her nephews, by the way,” he said. I looked blank. He explained. “Alida Brookfield. The boys are her nephews, not her sons. According to Miss Brookfield, she’s never been married.”

  I almost explained a few things to him. Like where babies come from.

  TEN

  ALIDA BROOKFIELD’S DRIVING passion was her need to destroy the egos of her relatives, her friends, her subordinates, and her employees. When I got to Writing Enterprises Monday, she was working on poor, fat Jack. I always thought of him as poor, fat Jack. He never stopped trying too hard to please.

  “It’s not enough I’ve got the other two,” she was screaming as I came off the elevator. “It’s not enough I’ve got the police occupying these offices the way a conquering army occupies a defeated country. You’ve got to drag your vicious, deceitful, ungrateful, stupid, excessive—what do you think I work for? What do any of you think I work for?”

  The screeching was replaced by a low murmur. I shifted the newspapers under my arms and made a face at Janet.

  “She ought to shut the door.” I gestured at the corridor.

  “She did shut the door.” Janet stared at my newspapers. She started to say something, thought better of it, and went back to her typing.

  “You’ll put it back,” Alida Brookfield shouted. “You’ll put every last cent of it back. You’ll put it back by Friday. Do you hear me, Jack? By Friday.”

  I considered sitting down in the reception area and reading the papers there. I didn’t want to find myself outside Alida’s office as Jack came hurtling through the door. I didn’t want to be seen in the hall while she was still screeching. The last thing I needed was the staff of Writing Enterprises conscious I had once again Heard Everything.

  “I don’t understand what’s wrong with you people,” Alida screamed. “You were all gassed at birth, I swear to God. The shit that goes on around here—don’t think I don’t know what goes on around here. I give you a simple assignment, I give you directions, you can’t even follow directions. You’re bad, Michael was worse, and Stephen is the worst of the three of you. You can’t do your work, you can’t save your money, you haven’t got sense enough to know truth from fraud—”

  I sighed and started into the corridor. I couldn’t read the papers in the reception area. The Post headline read LOVE GIRL IN NEW MURDER PROBE. The Daily News had my picture on the cover. Only the Times managed restraint. Michael Brookfield’s murder having made the lower left corner of the front page on Saturday, the Times saw no further need to shout. The story had been relegated to the second, otherwise known as the Metropolitan, section.

  With one thing and another, I had never seen the Sunday papers. I was beginning to think it was just as well.

  There was the sound of glass breaking against a wall. I jumped, stared guiltily at Janet, and hurried into the corridor. I couldn’t stand around all day, framed by blowup posters of Writing magazine’s most famous covers, GETTING THE MOST FROM THE LEAST, one cover said. “How to cut down on time—and energy—and still sell the articles you write!”

  I knew a perfect way to save time and energy. All I had to do was catch a cab to Grand Central and a New Haven line train from there to Danbury. My brother would pick me up and take me home. Martinez wouldn’t even mind. He knew me well enough to realize I’d come back if he needed me.

  I was halfway down the corridor, doing my best to stride purposefully, when I first heard Jack.

  “You know who it was, you bitch!” he yelled. “You know who it was and so do I.”

  “I know who does your work,” Alida yelled back. “I know who does it and why you can spend all your time in the men’s room. What do you think I am, blind? I know everything that goes on around here. I’ve always known. You don’t fool me for a minute—”

  Felicity Aldershot was standing just outside Alida’s door. Her head was cocked. Her hands were full of outsized sheets of yellow, orange, and light blue printed paper. She looked up when she saw me and gestured helplessly in the direction of the argument.

  “Do they do this often?” I asked her.

  “Alida isn’t very good with people,” she said.

  “What are those?” I pointed at the colored papers.

  She looked down at the stack in her hand, as if she’d forgotten they were there. Then she straightened them. She needed something to do with her hands.

  “Newsletters,” she said. “Yellow for mysteries, orange for westerns, blue for science fiction. The romance newsletter is pink, but that was in Michael’s office, and the police have that sealed.”

  I was surprised. Someone once stabbed a woman nine times in my apartment on West Eighty-second Street. It had taken exactly forty-eight hours before the seal was off.

  “Are they in my office, too?” I asked her. I couldn’t do anything about the wardrobe if I couldn’t get into the office. Martinez might have left word with whoever was on duty to let me in if I asked. If he had, he’d been stupid. He wasn’t usually. I wouldn’t go near the place under those circumstances.

  Felicity Aldershot was shaking her head. “No, no,” she said. “Your office is okay. It’s Michael’s and Marty Lahler’s they’ve got locked. Though I can’t see what they want—” She stopped, took another look at Alida’s door, and shrugged. “The work has to go on,” she said. “Just because someone’s died, no matter how tragically, doesn’t mean the work doesn’t have to be done.”

  “Right,” I said. I didn’t know if she was right or not. I didn’t even care.

  There was another round of breaking glass. Alida Brookfield said, “I don’t care who did what. All I want is you to fix it.”

  Felicity Aldershot winced. “She doesn’t realize. You have to work with people’s shortcomings, not against them.”

  “Why does she keep them around? If she doesn’t think they do a good job?”

  “Family,” Felicity Aldershot said expressively. She cast her eyes to the ceiling, like a maiden in a Victorian melodrama. “She has very American ideas of family.”

  “You’re all
bastards,” Alida Brookfield said. She sounded like she meant it.

  I decided to leave Felicity’s definition of “American ideas of family” alone.

  “When she’s through with the family,” I said, “could you ask her to come along and see me? I read the articles she gave me.”

  Felicity’s face cleared. Her mouth arranged itself in a Howard Johnson hostess smile.

  “I can help you with those,” she said. “I have everything in my office.”

  ELEVEN

  “I HAVE EVERYTHING IN MY office,” Felicity said. She might have meant that literally. There was a workshop chart on the left wall near the windows, but it was the only sign of Felicity’s assigned responsibility at Writing Enterprises. The rest of the office was crammed with other people’s work—Michael’s newsletters, Jack’s evaluated manuscripts, Stephen’s category line tip sheets. Alida was supposed to be editor-in-chief of Writing magazine, but the plans for the special romance section and the inventory card-file were in Felicity’s office.

  “When do you have time to run correspondence courses?” I asked her.

  She laughed. “Running correspondence courses doesn’t take any time,” she said. “We job out to freelancers mostly. It’s cheaper. It saves office space and they pay their own social security. The conferences are a little more work, but less than you’d think. And that’s only four times a year.”

  “You still have to hire a hall,” I said. “And then there’s the schedule, and the food, and the speakers—”

  “We get the speakers from our own stable,” Felicity said. “They’re not a problem, really. Most of them need the work and the money, so they don’t let us down too often. Special speakers are something else, of course, but there are never more than one or two of those.”

  “And the hall? And the food?”

  “I made special arrangements with the hotels five years ago. They still stand. I made out a master conference schedule eight years ago. I’ve never had to change it. It’s all very simple if you’re efficient.”