Rich, Radiant Slaughter

by Jane Haddam

I finished the registration card, put the pen down and pushed the whole mess toward the clerk. I decided not to say anything about the fact that a man with a Pulitzer should be able to come up with something better than the old insult about golf scores. Instead, I said, “You going to do that new tax thing they’re making us do, with the expenses?”

  “What? Of course I’m going to do it. I have to do it. Everybody has to do it. Christ, that’s all I’d need. Ending up in tax court.”

  “Do you understand it?”

  “Patience,” he said, “nobody understands it. Even my accountant has a hard time understanding it. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It may not make sense, but they understand it.” I nodded to the little clutch of people that included Phoebe, Hazel and Amelia. “They don’t like it, but they do understand it. And they can explain it in plain English. And they can give you the court cases that make them think we’ll eventually get rid of it.”

  “Patience, what’s all this supposed to mean?”

  “Oh,” I said, “I don’t know. I guess it’s just that I feel like an idiot when I don’t understand things, and I have a hard time calling people idiots when they can understand things I can’t, so—”

  “You’re a bitch,” Christopher Brand said. “Do you know that?”

  “I don’t just know it, I work at it.”

  “Yeah, well. If you don’t—” He stopped. His face got that suckinglemons look he’d become famous for, the one that made his eyes screw up into little pellets, like a pig’s eyes. He made a gesture in the air that I recognized only because I’d spent some time playing poker with a few of Nick’s less than well-mannered old friends from Queens, and said, “Jesus Christ. What’s she doing here?”

  I looked over his shoulder and caught her: Mrs. Harold P. Keeley, a felt-and-net hat over her indestructible hair, marching up the line importantly with a clipboard in her hand. I think I managed a sucking-lemons look of my own.

  “I take it you’re not going to defend her,” Christopher said. “God, I hate women like that.”

  “I’ll admit she isn’t the type to bring sweetness and light,” I said.

  “If you go all feminist on me, I’ll kill you,” he said. “There’s always one of them, you ever notice that? Always. Cold-boxed little—”

  “Do you really have to talk like an anatomy book written by a motorcycle gang? All the time?”

  “Can it. Women like that have ruined my life. If it hadn’t been for—”

  “If it hadn’t been for what?”

  “Never mind. I keep forgetting you’re consorting with the enemy.”

  Romance writers are some of the best-natured people on earth, nothing at all like the Mrs. Harold P. Keeleys. Given the deluge of rot they have to put up with, they have to be. I thought about telling Christopher Brand all that, and decided not to. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, and he’d gone to work on his registration form anyway. I took back my American Express card, tucked it into the zippered compartment on the inside of my tote bag—like many New Yorkers, I never carry credit cards in anything that can be easily lifted or hidden in a pair of jeans—and drifted away.

  I was halfway down the line when Mrs. Harold P. Keeley caught up with me, clipboard and all. Behind her was someone I hadn’t noticed before, probably because she was slinking: Gail Larson. I gave Gail a little smile, letting her know I remembered we’d met before, and turned my attention to Mrs. Harold. I thought I might as well get it over with. At the end of the line, the romance writers were looking murderous.

  “McKenna,” Mrs. Harold P. Keeley said, checking something off on her board. “Patience Campbell McKenna.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Do you always call yourself Mrs. Harold P.?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Mrs. Harold P.,” I said again. “Instead of your given name. I mean—”

  “I haven’t asked you to call me by my given name,” she said.

  “Margaret,” Gail Larson said, sounding more than a little desperate. “Her name is Margaret.”

  “I’m twenty years older than you,” Margaret Keeley said, “and I haven’t asked you to call me Margaret.”

  “You asked me to call you Margaret,” Gail Larson said. “Pay’s been a very good friend to the store. So if you’ll please—”

  “It’s what happens to people when they live in New York,” Margaret Keeley said. “They get the wrong idea about books.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand—”

  “Never mind,” Gail Larson said. “Nobody understands.”

  “You ought to understand,” Margaret Keeley said. “You ought to be more like that woman.” She pointed across the lobby at Tempesta Stewart, struggling with a Mount Everest of Gucci bags a few feet away from the Christmas tree. “Miss Stewart is my very favorite writer. You don’t know how thrilled I am to be able to meet her. If she hadn’t been part of this, I’d never have gotten involved in it myself.”

  Gail sent her eyes ceilingward. I choked back a cough. Since there was an ashtray at my elbow, I got out my cigarettes and lit up. Margaret Keeley seemed about to deliver a lecture on the evils of smoking, and then to change her mind. She looked down at her clipboard again and frowned.

  “You write true crime?”

  “I write about historically true murders, yes,” I said.

  “Ordinary murders, or the—the sordid kind?”

  “I suppose all murders are sordid,” I said, “I’m not sure I know what you’re getting at, Mrs. Keeley.”

  “Sex,” Gail Larson said. “She’s getting at sex.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I’m not getting at sex,” Margaret Keeley said, “I’m simply trying to determine who will and who will not be suitable for the Cardington School. I teach at the Cardington School.”

  “What’s the Cardington School?” I said.

  “I’ve told her and told her,” Gail Larson said. “Margaret, these people just don’t have the time to give a speech at—”

  “Miss Stewart has the time,” Margaret Keeley said. “She told me so herself. As for the rest of these people—” She looked me up and down, making me feel like a Maypole inexplicably decked out in off-the-rack Gloria Sachs. “The Cardington School is a character-forming institution. We try to mold our students into moral, industrious, upstanding citizens of the community. We are trying to combat—not that it always works, of course.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t suppose it does.”

  “Some people,” Margaret Keeley said. Then she faltered a little, as if she’d just been reminded of something that blew all her assumptions out of the water. She looked down at her clipboard and tapped it once or twice with her pen. The pen was one of those silver-plate models that come in gift boxes with matching silver-plate pencils. Margaret Keeley rolled it between her fingers and scratched at its surface with a single blunt, clear-polished nail.

  “Well,” she said. “I don’t suppose it matters. I don’t think you’ll do at all.”

  “For the Cardington School?” I said.

  “Exactly,” she said. She turned to look at Christopher Brand, still working at his registration form. He seemed to be having some kind of argument with the clerk, but it was hard to tell. Christopher Brand always seemed to be having arguments with everybody.

  “I don’t suppose he’ll do either,” she said, “but I might as well go talk to him. If I didn’t talk to him, it would look funny, wouldn’t it? Him with a Pulitzer Prize and everything. In my day, they didn’t give prizes to people who used that kind of language. They didn’t print that kind of language.”

  She tucked her clipboard under her arm and went marching off, a dumpy little pouter pigeon with heavy legs.

  Gail Larson let out a great gust of air, making her fine blond fringe ripple. Normally, she is one of the most energetic women on earth, the kind of person who seems to be able to move without stopping, or even slowing down, for days at a time. Now she seemed deflated
and depressed—and exasperated to the point of eruption.

  “Oh God,” she said. “That woman.”

  “Who is she exactly, anyway?”

  “Oh,” Gail said, “that’s hard to tell. I mean, she’s got this husband, but you practically never see him. And she’s got the Baltimore Book Lovers Association, but she’s had that for years, and nobody ever paid attention to it until Evelyn heard about it. And it’s all my fault. Evelyn heard about it through me.”

  “Why through you?”

  “Margaret,” Gail said, “is The Butler Did It’s best customer.”

  “Margaret Keeley buys mystery books?”

  “Six or seven hundred dollars’ worth of them a month.” Gail stared at Margaret harassing Christopher Brand and frowned. “Do me a favor, will you? Don’t tell anybody her name is Margaret. She makes such a big thing out of being called Mrs. Harold until she asks somebody to use her Christian name. And believe me, it’s her Christian name. I’ve been deliberately not telling anybody all day. Especially people like Christopher Brand, and Evelyn. God, who’d believe so many people would have such a hard time keeping their mouths shut?”

  “I think it’s part of the collective unconscious, or the primary material of DNA, or something,” I said. “Can I tell Phoebe?”

  “No. I only told you because I just couldn’t stand it anymore. She gave Amelia Samson a little lecture on how she ought to be more careful to make sure her heroines got married by a minister. Or ministers. Whatever. And Amelia said—”

  “I can just guess.”

  “Yeah, well. Margaret’s a problem. Excuse me, Mrs. Keeley is a problem. And for some reason—don’t ask me what—she’s been worse than usual today.”

  “Worse than usual how?”

  “Edgy, sort of. Combative. Of course, Mrs. Keeley is always combative. That’s what she does with her life. But she’s been—and that’s weird, too, when I think about it. We came down to the station together in her car. And in the car, she was better than usual.”

  “What’s better than usual?”

  At the reception desk, Christopher Brand had (par for the course) done something to get Margaret Keeley’s back up. She was haranguing him, pounding her right fist into the countertop, shaking her head vigorously. Christopher wasn’t pounding, but his face had gone black. It was a scene almost calculated to make me nervous. There was something about Margaret Keeley that made her vulnerable to being trivialized. There was nothing like that about Christopher Brand. He looked murderous in the literal sense: as if, at any moment, he might reach out and snap Mrs. Keeley’s neck in his hands.

  Gail had been looking at them, too. Now she shuddered a little and turned her back to them.

  “Scary, isn’t he?” she said. “I didn’t really know much about him when Evelyn asked me to give the party. Then I started hearing things. Did he really stab somebody? In a bookstore?”

  “Evelyn told me he did,” I said. “I know he went to jail once for beating up one of his wives. The Spanish painter one, I think.”

  “Well, I don’t like him. And after I’d signed up for this thing, I went out and got one of his books, and I didn’t like that either. Is that really what they’re calling literature these days?”

  “There’s some talk they’re going to give him a Nobel,” I said. “On the other hand, he probably started it himself.”

  “Mmm. Well. It’s too bad, you know. Because she really was better than usual this morning. All excited. I’ve noticed that at the store. You get these people who think they’re sophisticated, and jaded, and God only knows what else, and you put them in front of a Real Live Author, and they turn to mush. I suppose it’s different in New York. You’ve got writers everywhere there.”

  “Baltimore has Anne Tyler,” I said. “God only knows, she’s a better writer than Christopher Brand.”

  “Oh, we’re used to Anne Tyler. We’re impressed with her, but it isn’t the same. I wish I knew what got Margaret started this morning. I’m telling you, everything was fine. And then we walked into the station, and we set up the table, and—”

  “And what?”

  Gail rubbed the side of her nose pensively. “I didn’t realize it before. It was when she was talking to what’s his name, the millionaire.”

  “Jonathon Hancock Lowry?”

  “That’s right. Everything was fine. Then the train came in, and people started to get off, and the first person who got off that I knew was Evelyn. And Evelyn was with this Jonathon Lowry. Anyway, I marched Mrs. Keeley over, and I introduced her, and everything was still fine. Then Evelyn and I went to fuss with the arrangements for the press conference. Then we came back, and Mrs. Keeley was talking to Jonathon Lowry—and she was like that. Edgy, like I said. Combative. Weird, isn’t it?”

  “The idea of Jon Lowry getting anyone upset is weirder than weird,” I said. “The man’s a mouse.”

  “Mmm. And hardly the last of the red-hot lovers or any of the other things that get Margaret upset. And he wasn’t being rude. When I got over there, he was ‘Mrs. Keeley-ing’ her this and ‘Mrs. Keeley-ing’ her that. If any of her students gave her that kind of respect, she’d have an orgasm for a week.”

  “Do you use the word ‘orgasm’ around Mrs. Harold P. Keeley?” I said.

  “Not when I’m thinking straight,” Gail said. “That’s Phoebe looking for you. You’d better go. I’ll see you at four.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Tell Phoebe to get some rest,” Gail said. “She looks a little under the weather.”

  Gail clumped off in the direction of Mrs. Harold P. Keeley and Christopher Brand, and I started toward the end of the line and Phoebe.

  Chapter Four

  What Christopher Brand and Mrs. Harold P. Keeley were arguing about wasn’t morality, or profanity, or any of the other things I would have expected, but Mrs. Jenna Lee Haverman. Jenna Lee Haverman had been Christopher Brand’s third wife, out of five or six. It was hard to keep track, because Christopher’s “relationships” only lasted eight or nine months, and he didn’t marry all of them. Even the ones he didn’t marry had developed penchants for going to court. Palimony has provided not only a probably necessary protection for overly trusting women, but a window of opportunity for every world-class gold digger on earth. Christopher Brand had what amounted to a mania for gold diggers. He could have found one willing to marry him in a lesbian commune.

  According to Mrs. Harold P. Keeley, Jenna Lee Haverman was not a gold digger—or hadn’t been one until Christopher Brand turned her into one. When Mrs. Keeley got really angry, her voice turned into an air-raid-siren whine, sharp and hard and stabbing. Christopher’s voice was a bass bellow, full of deep-throated rumblings that sounded very much like the thunder rolling by outside.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said at one point, “that little bitch was a liar and a cheat from the day she was born.”

  “She was telling the truth,” Margaret Keeley screeched. “She was telling the truth and any good lawyer could prove it.”

  “Telling the truth about what?” I asked Phoebe, as I propped her up next to the elevators. Phoebe was going into her nauseated-beyond-endurance state. Propping her up was necessary. If I hadn’t, she probably would have fallen to the floor.

  The elevators were in a bank in their own private hallway. If we’d moved down a few feet, we wouldn’t have been able to see the reception desk at all. From where we were standing, we could see not only the desk but Christopher and Mrs. Keeley, too. Phoebe leaned over to get a better look and shook her head.

  “As far as I can tell, Jenna Haverman went to some school Mrs. Keeley is connected with—”

  “The Cardington School,” I said.

  “Whatever,” Phoebe said. “Anyway, Mrs. Keeley’s known her forever. And Mrs. Keeley says Jenna’s a perfect little angel, and telling the absolute truth when she says she never signed a prenuptial agreement, and Christopher cheated her out of the alimony and settlement she should have had. And Christop
her says—”

  “I can guess what Christopher said,” I said. “If it hadn’t been for those prenuptial agreements, he’d have been broke by now.”

  “Especially with Jenna. She’s the one he locked in the dog kennels all night in a blizzard or something. I don’t remember. I do remember she got frostbite and lost four of her toes.”

  “Why didn’t she sue him for damages?”

  “I think she did. I think they won’t let husbands and wives collect damages from each other. Or something.”

  “Peachy bird, our Great White Hope of American Literature.”

  “Well, she’s peachy, too,” Phoebe said. “She told me—” The blush spread over her face, and she turned to stare at the elevator doors, as if they could tell her something. They were very modern elevators. They wouldn’t even tell her what floor they were on.

  She kicked at the sides of them with the toe of her foot, sighing. “Did I see you pick something up at the reception desk? I thought I—”

  “Yeah,” I said. I rummaged around in my tote bag and came up with a plain white business envelope. “The clerk called me back just after you headed out here. Somebody left a message, I guess.”

  “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  “Why? It can’t be from Nick or Adrienne. It wasn’t mailed and it isn’t a phone message. It had to have been hand-delivered. And you know what that means. Some fan who wants to tell me how he strangled his cat in the third grade.”

  “Yuck. Do they really tell you things like that?”

  “All the time. They think I write about murders, I must get a kick out of murders. The gorier, the better.”

  “I write about sex. Nobody ever sends me letters about that. And even if it is from some nut, I think you should—”

  Tempesta Stewart came chugging around the corner, carrying nothing but her six-inch-square, practically useless pocketbook. The woman didn’t look entirely real. She dressed like a model in the kind of magazine that bills itself for “successful career women” and is really aimed at high-level secretaries and ambiguously titled “personal assistants.” Her hair stuck out in unlikely places, but in the right unlikely places. Her makeup was as smooth and precise as if she’d put it on half a second before. She had come through a hailstorm after riding all night on a train, and her mascara wasn’t even smudged.