Rich, Radiant Slaughter Read online

  “Patience—”

  “Phoebe, I’m sorry. Don’t cry. But for God’s sake, we tell each other everything. The first time you ever slept with David you called me up while he was in the bathroom to tell me you’d—I just don’t understand why you haven’t said anything.”

  “David,” Phoebe said.

  “You’ve been driving me crazy,” I said.

  Phoebe’s eyes filled with tears. Her breath began to come in great, gulping hitches, as if there would never be enough air. “Oh God,” she said. “David. You’ll tell David, won’t you? Tell him that I tried? Because I did try, I really did. I went all the way down there, I really did, and then when I got to the place I—but I did try. I really did. And I understand—”

  “Tried what?” I said. “Understand what?”

  Phoebe flushed. “I tried,” she repeated. “You know. I tried to get it aborted.”

  I sat straight down on the floor. It should have hurt. I didn’t feel a thing. “What did you say?”

  “I tried to get it aborted,” she exploded. Then she leaped to her feet and started pacing, furious, the old Phoebe, unhampered by hormones or lack of sleep. “He told me to get it done and I thought about it. I thought about it the whole three weeks. And I—I love him. I really do. I love him more than I’ve ever loved anybody except maybe my mother. And I understand this. I know what he’s worried about. I don’t even blame him. So in St. Louis I decided I’d get it done here. I mean, he has reason on his side, Pay, he really does. So—you know those phone books Evelyn carries around with her all the time?”

  “I think so.”

  “She’s got one for every city on the tour. So she can phone ahead for things. Anyway, I borrowed the Baltimore one and got a referral from Planned Parenthood and then I—I made an appointment. Not with Planned Parenthood but with the clinic they gave me the name of. The doctor. I don’t know. Anyway, I explained the whole thing sort of and I made the appointment for today because I thought I’d—I’d get it done and then I’d have the party to take my mind off it and all the interviews and things—”

  “We don’t have all that many interviews in Baltimore, Phoebe.”

  “We have some,” she insisted. “And it would be better than having it in New York and then being at home and everything. Well. You went to sleep and I went there. I did. I went.”

  “And?”

  “I couldn’t do it. I don’t want to do it. I won’t do it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Don’t get hysterical. You didn’t do it. It’s all right.” “No, it’s not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when David finds out about it, he’s going to leave me.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “When Nick finds out about this, David isn’t going to have to leave you, because David is going to be dead. How can you defend that son of a—”

  “Patience, I’m more pregnant than you think I am. Nearly five months.”

  “So?”

  “So, I had one of those—what do you call them? With the needle. Amnio—”

  “Amniocentesis.”

  Phoebe brightened. “He’s a boy.” Her face fell again. “He’s got that thing—spina bifida.”

  “Oh Lord.” I leaned back until I was touching the wall and blew a stream of breath into the air. “Oh, Phoebe, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too. But not so sorry I want to kill him.”

  “Is that how you think of it, killing him?”

  “There are people who say they know before they ever have to make a decision. Tempesta. All those nurses at that clinic. I don’t think that’s true. I think you have to be here. And I am here and I do think it would be killing him. And I’m not going to change my mind about it no matter what.”

  I leaned forward again. “Throw me my cigarettes,” I said. “You don’t have to change your mind about it. If it makes you feel any better, I’m not deliriously happy with that particular activity myself.”

  “I looked up spina bifida,” Phoebe said. “And it’s not so simple. It’s not like I know already he’s going to be a vegetable or die a couple of days after he’s born. He could just have a mild case and be fine once they did a little fixing up. He could be physically handicapped but okay otherwise. There’s that big physicist at Harvard who has that genetic muscle disease and has to be in a wheelchair, but he’s going to get a Nobel Prize anyway. It doesn’t make any sense to me to kill him because he’s sick and maybe it’ll take a lot of time and money to take care of him. It doesn’t make any sense. If I had him already, I wouldn’t do that. I think of that Baby Doe case where they let that child starve to death just because she was retarded and I want to—I want to—he’s my Benjamin.”

  “Benjamin Damereaux?”

  “Benjamin Weiss. It was going to be Benjamin Weiss Grossman, but—”

  “Throw me my cigarettes,” I said again.

  She got my cigarettes off the night table and threw them randomly into the air. I had to crawl across half a foot of carpet to get to them. When I sat back down, I saw that Phoebe had begun to gather up pieces of her Damereaux costume.

  “We’d better go,” she said. “We’re supposed to be there already.”

  “Could you tell me one thing?” I asked her. “It couldn’t have taken you six or seven hours just to go to an abortion clinic and walk right out again. What were you doing?”

  She shrugged. “Walking around. It took me about half an hour to get there, and then I sat in the waiting room for a while. Read pamphlets. Got sick. Then I just sort of drifted. I took a couple of buses. And I kept running into people. It was like fate or God or something. I was walking around this good-sized city I’d never been in before, and everywhere I went I ran into people I knew. I mean, I know we all came here together, but—”

  “Who did you run into?”

  “What? Oh, Evelyn and Jon Lowry. Holding hands, yet. They were on the other side of the street, so I didn’t have to do anything to keep them from seeing me. I think they were going into some kind of museum. And Tempesta was sitting in the front room of this storefront building, the American Army for Christ the King. And Christopher Brand was coming out of a bank. And then there was that woman, Mrs. Harold P. Keeley.” Phoebe made a face. “I had to duck behind a No Parking sign to make sure she didn’t see me. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to anybody, but her—”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “I don’t think she has any children. I think she ate her young. And I really had to worry about her, too, because she was looking for somebody. She kept checking her watch and peering into the distance and making these little clucking noises at the back of her throat. Are you going to get dressed?”

  “In a second. Tell me one more thing. Did you tell Jon Lowry about any of this?”

  “Jon Lowry? No, of course not. Why would I?”

  “He came up here saying he’d promised to do something for you. And then you burst into tears and he said it was all his fault.”

  “Oh, that.” Phoebe reached to the floor and picked up her purse, the leather one she used when she was being, as she put it, “an ordinary person.” She fumbled through it until she came up with a manila envelope. She threw the manila envelope in my lap. “There,” she said. “That’s what that’s all about. He probably thought I’d lost it and got all upset.”

  “What is it?”

  “Money.”

  I opened the envelope and looked inside. There was indeed money. There was, in fact, a great deal of money. I dumped it onto the floor and started counting fifty-dollar bills. When I got to three thousand without making a dent in the pile, I stopped.

  “He’s nuts,” I said.

  “Fifty thousand five hundred,” Phoebe said. “And as far as I’m concerned, he is nuts. I think he does everything in cash. Anyway, he asked me to hold it for him this morning, and he was supposed to come get it around one. I take it he was late.”

  “By a couple of hours.”

  “Can you imagine someone r
ich enough to be a couple of hours late picking up fifty thousand dollars in cash?”

  “I think I agree with his lawyers. He ought to be committed. We have to give that back.”

  Phoebe shrugged. “He’ll be at the party. We will be, too, if you’d hurry up. I’m surprised you’re not dressed already. You haven’t seen Nick in three weeks. And Adrienne.”

  I stuffed the money back into the envelope and got to my feet.

  Apparently, I was the only person on earth who didn’t remember Nick’s second phone call to me in St. Louis.

  Chapter Seven

  Gail Larson’s mystery bookstore, The Butler Did It, sits in the middle of a block on North Charles Street distinguished chiefly for its contradictory architecture. Most of the buildings, like the one whose first floor is taken up by The Butler Did It itself, are converted row houses. The row houses each have two tall windows facing the street, and what we in New York would call stoops. I don’t think “stoops” was the word for them in Baltimore. The street had started out to be too elegant for stoops, all brick facing and graceful curving latticework. The occupants of the row houses were evidently attempting to keep it that way. They were fighting an uphill battle. It’s difficult keeping a block elegant when the middle of one side of it is taken up by a gas station, which this one’s was. It’s even more difficult in the face of the existence of something that calls itself the Elite VIP Lounge. I looked out the window of the cab and wondered who I’d root for. I understood the aspirations of the row-house people. City real estate is expensive to buy and even more expensive to maintain. Existing “good” neighborhoods are almost always beyond the reach of the urban-oriented young middle class. On the other hand, I have a real weakness for bars like the Elite VIP Lounge. They’re definitely the best places to get drunk in, and they always have great jukeboxes. Kenny Rogers doing “The Gambler.” Tammy Wynette doing “D*I*V*O*R*C*E.” Linda Ronstadt doing any one of a hundred songs that make the course of true love sound like a bed of nails. In a world where all popular music seems to be performed by twelve-year-olds herding together to found tone-deaf bands called “The Entrails of Satan’s Cat,” there is a real need for places like the Elite VIP Lounge.

  The storm that had started out as wind and sleet that morning had turned to snow: gentler, but no easier to drive through. Our cab came to a sliding stop in front of the six-foot-tall butler sign that hung before the store’s two windows, and the driver cursed. Then he looked at us in the rearview mirror with the same expression he’d had on his face when he’d picked us up at the hotel. To say he wasn’t sure he wanted us in his cab was putting it mildly. He thought we were nuts. If Phoebe hadn’t been so short, he would have suspected her of being a transvestite.

  If Phoebe hadn’t been so short and so pregnant. Now that I knew—or maybe I should say knew I knew—I was no longer surprised that Tempesta Stewart had guessed. I wasn’t surprised that the cabdriver had guessed. There is only one condition that gives that particular kind of roundness to a face, or turns a woman all those odd colors. I reached into my pocket and found a handful of saltines.

  “Here,” I said. “You’re going green again.”

  “Those aren’t working, Patience. They’re really not.”

  “Eat them anyway.”

  “You want to pay up and get out before one of those drunks dents my cab?”

  I dug into my tote bag and came up with my wallet. The drunks in question were not denizens of the Elite VIP Lounge. Those people all had sense enough to stay in out of the snow and a windchill factor that must have brought the temperature down to about twenty degrees. These people belonged to the party at The Butler Did It. They were all carrying little plastic champagne glasses. They had ditched their coats somewhere inside. They slid up and down the steps leading up to TBDI’s front door in silks and fine winter wools. All of them looked cold.

  I popped the door, got out onto the street and held back for Phoebe. She stuck her nose into the air and surveyed the scene.

  “They must have been early,” she said. “They couldn’t have gotten into this condition in only an hour.”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said.

  “Do you see Nick and Adrienne?”

  “The only person I see that I know is Jon Lowry. He doesn’t look happy.”

  Phoebe slid onto the sidewalk—it’s hard to do anything but slide out of a car when you’re wearing a floor-length dyed-white chinchilla cape—and peered into the crowd. Jon Lowry was at the top of the steps, on just this side of the door. He looked depressed enough to commit suicide.

  “I wonder what’s wrong with him,” Phoebe said, as if she didn’t care.

  “Maybe it’s the money,” I told her.

  She checked her bag, found the envelope and nodded. “We’ll be able to cheer him up, then. I wish I could see Nick, though. I really, really want to talk to Nick.”

  I said, “Mmm.” Around the time we’d asked the doorman at the Sheraton Inner Harbor to get us a cab, I’d remembered something: Nick telling me that David Grossman had “disappeared.” I hadn’t told Phoebe about it because I hadn’t wanted to upset her any more than she already was. She had managed to get control of herself, but the tears and hysteria were still just beneath the surface. Still, it worried me. First he tells her he wants her to have an abortion. Then he takes off without a word to anybody. I knew Nick. Nick never panicked, or jumped to conclusions, or used words carelessly. Law school had drummed both cautiousness and precision into his very bones. If he said David Grossman had disappeared, that was exactly what he meant. Not that he simply couldn’t find the man. Not that David had missed an appointment or forgotten to keep a date for lunch. I wondered what the hell was going on.

  Wonder about Jon Lowry, I told myself. That’s at least something you can do something about.

  I grabbed Phoebe’s arm and started to guide her up the steps, moving slowly so that she didn’t topple off her shoes. Like too many short women, Phoebe absolutely insists on wearing four-inch spikes whenever she has to be in the company of tall people. Since I am definitely a tall person, and since she’s almost always in my company, she wears four-inch spikes almost all the time. Even under her bathrobes.

  “We’re going to have to go out and get you some new shoes,” I said.

  “Phoebe,” Jon Lowry said. “Miss McKenna. Do you know where Evelyn is?”

  It was like that old actor’s dream about going onstage only to find yourself appearing in the wrong play. Neither Phoebe nor I could think of a single thing to say. Evelyn. Money. Envelopes. Evelyn. It just didn’t make sense.

  It made sense to Jon, the wrong kind.

  “Damn,” he said. “I was sure she was with you. You were so late, I figured she must be chasing you around. To be sure you got here.”

  “She’s not here?” I said, and thought: stupid.

  “She hasn’t been yet. God, Gail Larson is tearing her hair out. I’m serious. There’s all this stuff—book boxes and pens. I don’t know. Stuff that was supposed to be done to set up. And none of it got done. And you know Evelyn. She gets a little distracted sometimes, but she doesn’t not show up.”

  “I’ve got your envelope,” Phoebe said. She took it out of her purse and handed it to him.

  Jon Lowry said, “Oh,” folded it up and stuck it into the loose waist-band of his jeans. He would have been more worried about the fate of a dozen Watchmen comics than he was about all that money.

  I edged past him and looked into the store. It wasn’t as packed as it had seemed from the street, but it was pretty full. The only entirely empty corner in the place seemed to be around the table in the back. It was covered with a blue linen tablecloth that reached to the floor and equipped with pens, plastic champagne glasses, ashtrays and two little piles of cigarette boxes: Marlboros for Christopher Brand, Carltons for me. Obviously, this was where Gail had intended to have authors sign books. Instead, the authors were scattered into every other corner of the oversized room. So were the book
s. I caught sight of a pile of Blood Red Romance, hardcover edition, near a little display of the complete works of Dorothy L. Sayers.

  The authors weren’t all that hard to find. Amelia had established herself near the Raymond Chandlers and was holding court, assisted by both Hazel Ganz and Lydia Wentward. Christopher Brand had been backed into a corner by a blousy woman in a synthetic green satin dress cut down to her navel. His square jaw was working compulsively, as if he were chewing a cud. Tempesta Stewart was sitting on Gail Larson’s checkout desk, giving a little lecture to a group of desperately respectable-looking young women who nodded frantically at every word she said. I looked around a little more and found Nick and Adrienne, stuck behind a pair of fat men engaged in something just one step away from a physical fight. They jabbed forefingers in the air and into each other’s chests. Adrienne’s dress was beautiful. I revised my estimate of just how much she’d talked Nick out of upward, to at least a hundred fifty dollars.

  Nick saw me, smiled, pointed at the two fat men and shrugged. I shrugged back and waved.

  Phoebe ducked under my arm and into the store. “There they are. Maybe I should go rescue them.”

  “Maybe you should,” I said. “I’ll try to find Gail and see if I can help.”

  “I’m right here.”

  I looked behind me to find Gail struggling with a large box marked AST—BLOOD. I took it out of her hands. It was heavy enough to kill somebody.

  Gail brushed blond hair out of her face. “Thank God you’re here. You don’t know what I’ve been going through. It would be one thing if all these people were mystery writers. I’d probably have had enough books to get started. Instead, they’re all sorts of things and I didn’t have any of the books on the floor but yours, and you weren’t here.”

  “The books didn’t show up?” This was a common problem with signings. For some reason, it is impossible to explain to any publisher’s shipping department that an autograph party without books for an author to autograph doesn’t quite cut it.