Rich, Radiant Slaughter Page 9

  “I think I’d rather get back and see how Adrienne is doing.”

  “Good idea. Tell Miss Damereaux and Mr. Carras I’ll talk to them in the morning.”

  “We’re not suspects?”

  “Well,” Barbara said, “as far as I can tell, Mr. Carras was with an eight-year-old child all afternoon and Miss Damereaux couldn’t have stopped throwing up long enough to kill anybody. As for you—”

  “Yes?”

  “Lu says it always surprises him you eat meat.”

  Chapter Ten

  I should have expected Adrienne to be waiting up for me when I got back to the hotel. Even with nothing in particular going on, she tends to keep watch until she knows I’m safely home and in bed. I knew for a fact that while I’d been on this tour, she’d never gone to sleep until after my nightly call. It was as if she needed to continually anchor me, to prove to herself that I was solid. I wished I knew whether she had always been like that, or had only become like that after her mother was killed. I didn’t pretend to understand what effect the murder of a parent would have on a child. Most of the time, she seemed stable, intelligent, good-humored and normal. That was all I asked. When the nightmares came along—and they still did, although less frequently than they had the year before—I took care of them the best I could.

  She was sticking her head out the door of a room halfway down the hall when I got off the elevator, not the door to the room I thought of as “mine.” She saw me right away, and started gesturing frantically. Behind her, the room she was leaning out of was in darkness. Her hair was unbraided and pulled back off her forehead with a rubber band. I guessed that when I got to her I’d find her in one of the elaborately embroidered nightgowns she loved so much. I have a lot of deeply held convictions, inherited from my mother, about the kind of money that should and should not be spent on children. Ninety-dollar nightgowns are obviously an extravagance that properly belongs to adults. I bought them for her anyway. If I hadn’t, Phoebe would have.

  She slipped into the hall and I approached her, shutting the door behind her with an almost undetectable click.

  “Shh,” she said. “Phoebe’s sleeping. She’s going to have a baby and she needs a lot of rest.”

  “Who told you Phoebe was going to have a baby?” I kissed her on the cheek.

  “Anybody can tell Phoebe is going to have a baby,” she said. “She throws up all the time. And I mean all the time. I thought morning sickness was supposed to happen in the morning.”

  Since Adrienne and I have conversations like this constantly—God only knows where she and Courtney pick up these things—I decided to let the exploration of just where she’d picked up her information about morning sickness slide. Adrienne and Courtney are not your ordinary eight-year-olds. If they want to know about something, they don’t dither around resenting the fact that there’s no information in the latest issue of Sesame Street Magazine. They go down to the Forty-second Street branch of the New York Public Library and look it up. They have a facility with card catalogues that would turn a DLS green.

  “Morning sickness can happen any time,” I told her, figuring information was better than misinformation, and she knew half this stuff already. I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall. My back ached. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay, I guess. I think it’s a good idea for Phoebe to have a baby. Phoebe is the kind of person who ought to have a baby.”

  “I’m with you,” I said.

  “The only thing that worries me is, I think Phoebe’s baby is going to have the entire contents of F. A. O. Schwarz by the time it’s two months old.”

  “Why not?” I said. “You have the entire contents of F. A. O. Schwarz, and a personal computer, and a closet full of designer sneakers, and a new dress. I liked the dress.”

  She eyed me warily. “You going to yell at me about that?”

  “I’m not even going to tell Nick just how much more expensive it was than all your other party dresses.”

  She blew a stream of breath into her bangs. “Thanks,” she said.

  “No problem,” I said.

  “I’m sleeping in here with Phoebe,” she said. “Nick’s down in your room. Phoebe’s clothes are all down there, too. Nick offered to move them, but Phoebe was too sick to supervise.”

  “That’s okay. We’ll get to those tomorrow. Don’t you think you ought to be asleep?”

  “Maybe,” she said. She looked toward the floor, at her long toes peeking out from under her nightgown. I knew the signs. Adrienne always gets like that when she wants to ask a Really Serious Question. For Adrienne, all Really Serious Questions concern the life and death of Sarah Caulfield English, her mother.

  “Patience,” she said. “That woman who died, tonight at that store, did she—I mean, was it the same way as my mama?”

  “That depends on what you mean,” I said.

  “I know she was murdered,” Adrienne said. “That’s all over the hotel. I mean, was it—the same thing?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “The coroner—do you remember about the coroner?” She nodded. “The coroner has to do tests,” I said, “and then we’ll know for sure. But people often look different ways when they die different ways. Sarah—your mother—What am I trying to say?”

  “She looked different when she died.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Did you see Mrs. Baumgarten from upstairs from us when she died?”

  “Mrs. Baumgarten? Why do you want to know about Mrs. Baumgarten?”

  “Because she died the way she was supposed to,” Adrienne said. “She was old and she went to sleep and she never woke up again. And I was wondering what that looked like. People hardly ever seem to die the way they’re supposed to. It ought to be the easiest thing in the world, but it just doesn’t happen. People always seem to be—to be—”

  “Killing other people?” I said.

  “It’s not just this woman in the bookstore,” Adrienne said defensively. “And I know Reverend Patcher is full of it with all that about our universal responsibility for violence or whatever—I talked it over with Courtney and we looked it up in Aristotle and we know it doesn’t make any sense—”

  “You’ve been reading Aristotle?”

  “I don’t think we understood it all,” Adrienne said.

  “Right,” I said.

  “But the thing is,” Adrienne said. Then she sighed, “I’m not making any sense, am I?”

  “You’re making perfect sense,” I told her. “I just don’t have the answers you need. I’m not God, Adrienne. I’m not even Aristotle.”

  “Well, if God does have the answers I need, He’s going to spend a lot of time talking when I finally get to heaven.” She turned around and looked at her door. “I guess I’d better go to bed. I did promise Nick I’d go right to sleep. And he was really good about the dress.”

  “Want me to tuck you in?”

  She shook her head. “Just about anything wakes Phoebe up,” she said. “And I mean anything. And as soon as she wakes up, she starts getting sick again.”

  “Know where I am?”

  “Yeah. I’ll come knock if I need you. Night.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  She put her arms around my neck and kissed me, hard. Then she grabbed for the knob and disappeared through the door.

  I sat there for a few minutes, watching the blank slab of wood. I don’t remember what my life was like before I had Adrienne for company. I often wonder if I’m any good for her. What I know about children, beyond the fact that they probably shouldn’t have couture Dior until they reach the age of eighteen, wouldn’t fill the back of a business card.

  I sat in the hall much longer than I’d intended to. I was in one of those states of waking coma we used to call “veging out,” and when I finally did make myself get up and get moving again, I was completely out of it. It had been a long day. The two days coming up looked to be longer still. I wandered in the direction of my room think
ing about the most trivial things, like where Nick was keeping his socks. Back in New York, he keeps them in my refrigerator. He says he likes the coolness on his feet when he first gets dressed in the morning. Since the hotel room had no refrigerator, I had to assume he was going to do without the coolness or risk getting them wet by hanging them out the window in a little plastic bag.

  I found my key, let myself into the room and walked to the end of the entrance foyer to find Nick lying on his stomach on the bed that had been Phoebe’s, Walkman earphones over his head and a lot of legal-sized paper spread out over the pillow. He held up a finger to tell me it would only be a minute—Nick is always working on something— and I walked over and took the earphones off his head. Chuck Berry, doing “No Particular Place to Go.” I threw the earphones on his ass.

  “Talk to me,” I said. “It’s been a long day.”

  He turned over on his back and put his hands behind his head. Adrienne says he looks like Christopher Reeve, and that’s true—although he’s both taller and heavier—but there’s something about him that lets you know he could never be an actor. Everything in Nick is linear, solid, logical. He once told me there were only two ways anyone ever worked their way out of poverty: crime, or a commitment to rationality so profound that the mere possibility of the existence of anything else dropped right out of your head. Nick did not play the lottery, bet on Rangers games or watch the sort of television game show where winning was determined by tosses of the dice or spins of the wheel. He had erased the word “luck” from his vocabulary. There was only work. The results of work were invariable. Do it hard enough, long enough, and you got where you were going.

  Since Nick had obviously got where he was going—I’d only recently convinced him to buy a decent suit, but his lack of one hadn’t been the result of an inability to afford one; he just hates buying clothes—I left all discussion of the true nature of the universe at the door of whatever room I met him in. Besides, his outlook was a comfort to me. My world often seems to be made up of nothing but luck.

  I shoved him over on the bed and sat down beside him. “I was just talking to Adrienne. She’s taking this better than I thought she would.”

  “She’s a solid kid,” Nick agreed. “Do you want to strangle David first, or are you going to let me do it?”

  “Oh well.”

  “There’s no ‘oh well’ about it. I told him when he first started hitting on Phoebe—Of course, we’d have to find him first, there’s that. At the moment, I’d most dearly love to find him.”

  I shrugged off my coat, tossed it in the direction of the vanity table, and missed. I thought about going over to pick it up and decided not to. Then I leaned down and started getting out of my shoes.

  “What did you mean, he disappeared?” I said.

  “I came in this morning, I found a note on my desk. ‘Sorry about the inconvenience. I’m going out of town. Maybe I won’t be back.’ He had a full client schedule today, too, and I was coming down here. Janet just about freaked. I went into his office and found his desk half cleaned out. His pictures of Phoebe were gone. His case files and stuff were still there.”

  “Did you call his apartment?”

  “Three times, once from Philadelphia. I even talked to his super. He left last night around eleven. One overnight bag. Didn’t tell anybody he was going. The super knew because David knocked on his door and asked to have his mail picked up. For about a month.”

  “It’s got to have something to do with Phoebe,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

  “I’m sure it’s got something to do with Phoebe,” Nick said. “What, I don’t know. Where, I don’t know either. At the moment, I don’t know how much I care. I’d like to break the little bastard’s neck.”

  “Maybe he was on his way here.”

  “If he was, he’d already be here. And we’d have heard from him by now.”

  “All right.” I stood up and pulled my sweater over my head. “This day just keeps getting worse and worse,” I said. “I had a talk with that police detective, Barbara Defborn.” I told him what she’d said about the weapon, or instrument, or whatever I was supposed to call it. “And if that isn’t bad enough,” I finished, “Evelyn’s missing. Which makes it look awful for Evelyn. I like Evelyn. Or at least I don’t dislike her. Anyway, I’d rather have it work out some way that makes emotional sense for once.”

  “You mean, so the murderer is someone you hate?”

  “How about Christopher Brand?” I asked him. “I could see him locked up without a moment of regret.”

  “You and half a million other people. Why would Christopher Brand kill the president of the Baltimore Book Lovers Association?”

  I had just let my skirt fall to my ankles. I started bending over to pick it up, and stopped. The odd thing was, I had an answer for that one, or the beginnings of an answer. Why it hadn’t occurred to me back at the store, I’d never know.

  “Jenna Lee Haverman,” I said. “When I was talking to Gail Larson, I remembered Christopher and Mrs. Keeley fighting, but I didn’t remember what they’d been fighting about. Now I do. They were fighting about one of his ex-wives. Mrs. Keeley was saying she knew he’d tricked this ex-wife out of the settlement he owed her, and she could—No, she didn’t say she could. She said any good lawyer could prove it. Well, maybe any good lawyer could. Maybe she knew something that could get that decision reversed. Everybody knows how hard up Chris is for money. He spends it like crazy and the ex-wives bleed him even with the prenuptial agreements. If Mrs. Keeley had a way—”

  “Patience,” Nick said.

  “It’s not that bad a theory,” I insisted.

  Nick sat up. “Braverman v. Brand, Superior Court of the State of New York, January 1972.”

  “You know the reference?”

  “I ought to. That’s one of the most famous cases in New York State divorce law. You can’t pass the bar without answering three questions about it. Believe me, that thing is airtight. It established a precedent that’s been used ever since. And it took nearly three years to tie up, with both sides hiring private detectives right and left. There’s nothing about either of them, or their relationship, or that agreement, left to find. You look at the file sometime. They’ve got everything in there but each other’s blood types.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely positive. Of course, David’s our expert on divorce, and under the circumstances—”

  “Do you think he’ll ever come back and do the right thing by Phoebe?”

  “I think the only right thing he could do by Phoebe now is to leave her the hell alone. Come to bed, McKenna. It’s late and I’m tired.”

  “I want to take a shower.”

  Nick retrieved the earphones and put them back on his head.

  I went down the hall to the bathroom, turned on the light and shut myself inside. I turned on the water and adjusted the shower nozzle until I had a hard, driving spray. Then I got out of the rest of my clothes and leaned up to the mirror to check for wrinkles.

  If I’d found any wrinkles, I might not have found the other thing. I am firmly convinced that the first time I see a line on my face, I am going to descend into a neurotic spasm. My genetics were holding out. My mother hadn’t had a wrinkle until she was sixty. My body seemed to be taking its cue from her.

  It was while I was pulling back the shower curtain to step into the bathtub that I saw it, and the fact that I saw it at all was one of those accidents Nick spends so much of his time pretending don’t exist. A trick of the light. An awkward move in the wrong direction. I saw the flash of matte blue and pulled my hands back before they were touched by water.

  It was right there in the creases between the ends of my fingers and my palms, on both hands, a thick powdered line of blue turning to paste from my sweat. I touched the tip of one of my fingers to the line on the opposite hand. The blue smeared. I thought of the line of blue above Margaret Keeley’s jaw. When I turned my hands so that the
light shone directly on the line, it looked bright, too.

  It felt gritty.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Listen,” the voice on the phone said the next morning, “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’m not going to fall for it. I’m not.”

  I raised my head off the flat of the bed—for some reason, although I go to sleep with a million pillows under me, they’re always on the floor by the time I wake up—and caught Nick, already awake and dressed, working through papers on the other side of the room. I wondered vaguely if they were the same papers he’d been working on the night before. I wondered what time it was. One of Nick’s peculiarities is that, barring forcible wakening by a determined outside agent, he always sleeps for exactly eight hours straight. Since he’d dropped off just about eleven, it had to be after seven. Since no matter what time it was, I was going to think it was too early, I decided not to bother with something that was only going to start an argument.

  With somebody.

  I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around. My cigarettes were in plain sight, but Nick hated it when I smoked first thing in the morning. In fact, Nick hated it when I smoked. So did Phoebe. So did Adrienne. I turned my head and saw that Nick had pulled the curtains, opening the room to the day. The day didn’t have much I’d want to be open to. Black clouds. Gray air. Wind. Little dots of something that might have been snow. One of the things Evelyn had been careful to do for this tour was to keep a supply of guidebooks and Chamber of Commerce handbooks ready, just in case any of us wanted to be sensible enough to read them. It was a good idea. Local media love it when New York Writers (note capitals) can enthuse knowledgeably about the surrounding territory. A serious newspaper like the Baltimore Sun tended to be above that sort of thing, but smaller papers in smaller towns had been known to run very good reviews of a visiting writer’s book just because the visiting writer had been able to call the mayor’s husband by his first name and spell Chicadiggawa Pond without a hitch. Phoebe always checked those guidebooks. I never did, except to look at the weather charts. The weather charts for Baltimore had been heartening. Almost always mild. Almost always sunny. What was this?