Rich, Radiant Slaughter

by Jane Haddam

  “Wait,” I said. “Mrs. Keeley was supposed to do all that?”

  “Mrs. Keeley was supposed to do all that and Evelyn was supposed to get the boxes of books unpacked and the money set up. That was part of the deal. I mean, after all, this is not a general bookstore. And you know I love having you, and I wouldn’t have minded having Phoebe either if she were promoting those Sarah English romantic suspense things you two are involved in.” Sarah English had been Adrienne’s mother. “But,” Gail went on, “this is a small business and I can’t afford to hire a lot of extra help just to put on a party for charity. So Evelyn worked it all out, and got Mrs. Harold P. and her organization to do the social part—actually I put Evelyn in touch with the Baltimore Book Lovers Association and then—”

  “Wait,” I said, “I don’t understand—”

  “Oh, I don’t either,” Gail said. “I haven’t understood anything for weeks. Evelyn is a very nice woman,” Gail faltered. “At least—”

  “I’m wondering where she is, too,” I said.

  “Do you figure she killed Mrs. Keeley and took off? Why would she?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But she surely is missing. Jon’s got every reason to be worried. She was never a great publicist, but at least she attended her own tours. And you know how she is about charities.”

  “Everybody knows how Evelyn is about charities. Although what makes her decide if something is a charity, I’ll never figure out. Rightwing stuff. Left-wing stuff. The Women’s Reproductive Rights Defense Fund and the National Coalition for the Rights of the Unborn. You know she collected for both of those?”

  “I’ve stopped paying attention to what she collects for,” I said. “It gives me a headache. All her organizations have titles that sound like bad jokes.”

  “I wonder where she is.”

  I shrugged. The bad with Mrs. Harold P. Keeley’s body in it was going out the door. I was going to be glad to get rid of it. Tempesta Stewart was stalking away from Ms. Barbara Defborn. I wished Phoebe with me, impossible though that was. Phoebe always has a salutary effect on my incipient depressions.

  “Gail,” I said, “did your Mrs. Harold P. Keeley wear eye shadow?”

  “Eye shadow? You must be joking. She wore a lot of lipstick. Brown-red lipstick. You saw her.”

  “I saw her.”

  “Eye shadow would have been like ruffles. She really hated ruffles.”

  “What else did she really hate?”

  Gail didn’t even think about it. “Practically everything,” she said.

  From the other side of the room, Barbara Defborn called out in a voice so clipped and pronounced, it must have been subjected to years of diction lessons.

  “Ms. McKenna? I’ll take you now.”

  Chapter Nine

  I have been through dozens of police interviews. Sometimes, at the very start of a mess, I think I’ve been through hundreds. I walked over to where Barbara Defborn was standing, near a little display of Robert B. Parker paperbacks, expecting the kind of routine I’m usually put through when I have to talk to police officers who don’t know me. Getting a reputation as an amateur detective doesn’t usually do wonderful things for your relationships with professional law enforcement personnel. I thought this session was going to be worse than most. People who live outside New York can be very strange about people who live in it. A lot of them are convinced that New Yorkers think they’re better than everyone else, and smarter than everyone else, and tougher than everyone else. This is especially true of the people who work for the police, fire and social services departments of what they themselves think of as “provincial cities.” I hadn’t found the least thing “provincial” about Baltimore, but I was sure Barbara Defborn would think I had.

  I got a surprise. When I came up to her, she put out her hand, shook mine and smiled. She wasn’t just cordial, she was friendly. She was also younger than I’d thought she was when looking at her from a distance. Her severe black suit and starched white blouse gave off an air of maturity that would have been better suited to a much older woman. She might have been all of five years older than I was, but she couldn’t have been more than that. Her face was relatively unlined. Her hair was only lightly flecked with gray, and obviously neither dyed nor frosted. She’d had sense enough not to add one of those abominable little bow ties to her very elegant suit.

  She glanced around the room, seeming amused. “Real mess in here, isn’t it?” she said. “Wouldn’t you rather go outside?”

  “I’ll go if you want to,” I said, “but it’s cold out there.”

  “And wet,” she agreed. “On the other hand, I’ve got Officer Bradbury stationed at the Elite, and at least we’d be able to talk there without being overheard. I’ve been getting the definite impression that those people”—she nodded toward the romance writers—“eavesdrop as a matter of principle.”

  “Actually, it’s not just those people,” I said. “You’d have to say the same thing about Christopher Brand.”

  “And probably Mr. Lowry and maybe Gail Larson, and certainly half the rest of the people here. Sometimes I think human nature is a terrible thing, especially the natures of humans who are not what my partner would call scum. You know what most of these people are going to do? They’re going to go home and be upset. They’re going to have a hard time sleeping for a couple of days. Then the fear is going to wear off, and they’re going to love it.”

  “Guilty,” I said.

  “At least you’re not just a voyeur. And a mutual friend of ours told me that no matter what else you were, you were definitely somebody who did not go home and start making things up just to make yourself look important. Or for any other reason. He said you had a very good grasp of the nature of facts.”

  “Lu Martinez,” I said. “How do you know Lu Martinez?”

  “I’ve met him at a few law enforcement conventions. He gives good bar. He also happens to give good lectures, so whenever he’s speaking I go. He gave one about you.”

  I winced. “Did he call me a flake?”

  “In the lecture, no,” Barbara Defborn said. “Later, in the bar, he did say something about your being ‘one of those women who make you think Gracie Allen wasn’t joking.’ Shall we go?”

  “Do I get to drink?”

  “You do and I don’t.”

  “I’ll get my coat.”

  We got a few strange looks when we walked out, but I was beyond caring—even though I knew Amelia would come knocking on my door at whatever hour of the morning she got back to the hotel, demanding an explanation. We went out into the storm and fought our way against the wind in the direction of the Elite VIP Lounge. There was a lot of traffic on the street, enough to make me realize it wasn’t as late as I’d thought it had been. Nine o’clock or nine-thirty, I thought. Maybe ten. I clutched at the collar of my coat, bringing it up over the back of my long fall of blond hair. Barbara Defborn didn’t bother trying to protect her own. The weather was an outrage. The snow had turned to freezing rain. The sidewalk was a solid sheet of ice. She slipped and slid along the pavement, bringing all her concentration to bear on staying upright.

  In the Elite, she waved at the uniformed man sitting over a cup of coffee at the bar—Officer Bradbury, obviously—and then took me to a table against the wall. The table was as far away from everyone and everything as we could get in that place. The Universal Law of the Relationship of Weather and Alcohol Consumption operated in Baltimore just the way it did in New York. It was a Tuesday night. If the Elite was like most bars, and I had no reason to think it wasn’t, Tuesdays were probably not a regularly busy time. This Tuesday, the place was packed, and not with a spillover from the TBDI debacle either. I could pick out the three or four people who had been at the party. They were just a little too well dressed. The rest of the crowd weren’t seedy, but they were comfortable. They all seemed to be in jeans and sweaters, the after-work uniform of the American middle class.

  Barbara Defborn signaled to the waite
r, who must have known who she was. He came right over. She pointed to me and said, “I think Ms. McKenna’s usual is Drambuie on the rocks. You can get me a cup of coffee.”

  The waiter nodded and hurried away. I got out my cigarettes.

  “That must have been some lecture Lu gave,” I said. “Or was that in the bar, too?”

  “No, that was in the lecture,” Barbara Defborn said. “He said you drank Drambuie when you were seriously drinking and Baileys Original Irish when you wanted to relax. He said you were anorexic.”

  “I’m not, really. I just forget to eat.”

  “You look anorexic,” Barbara Defborn said. “On the other hand, you don’t look dangerously anorexic. You want to know what we’re doing here?”

  “Give it a second. You must be a celebrity around this place. The waiter’s coming back.”

  The waiter was indeed coming back. He had Drambuie. He had coffee. He put both, and a little pitcher of milk or cream, down on the table. Then he hurried away. I looked at the tables around us, found one other person who was having coffee and determined that that person was drinking it black. That was too bad. I wanted to know if everybody got little pitchers of milk or cream, or if noncelebrities got stuck with those little plastic tubs of nondairy creamer.

  I took a sip of my drink—iced, but not watered. I lit my cigarette.

  “If you want me to interfere,” I said, “you didn’t have to ask. I can’t help myself.”

  “I don’t think interfering is how I’d put it,” Barbara Defborn said. “There are aspects of this mess—How do you think Margaret Keeley died?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I know how I don’t think she died. I don’t think she was strangled.”

  “Very good.” Barbara nodded. “She certainly wasn’t strangled. Oh, I suppose I could be wrong. The coroner’s report could come back and surprise us all. But I don’t think it will.”

  “I don’t either. She didn’t—look right for being strangled.”

  “Very good,” Barbara said. “I’ll tell you something else. Something you probably couldn’t see for yourself. When I looked over the body I found, on the back of her neck, a puncture wound about the size of a—”

  “Oh Jesus,” I said.

  “Nasty,” Barbara agreed. “More than nasty, really, because it suggests a sequence of events I don’t like at all. In the first place, most people don’t carry around the kind of implement that could produce that sort of wound. A knitting needle wouldn’t work unless it was tempered steel, but even that would have caused a lot of muck and mess. This was a very clean wound. I can think of maybe half a dozen items that might have done the job. One of those fine-work awls antique restorers use for close work on wood. Or one of those immense surgical extraction needles made to draw major amounts of pus out of infected wounds. Nothing any of those people back there”—she made a gesture in the general direction of The Butler Did It—“would just accidentally have hanging around in a back pocket or the bottom of a purse.”

  “Premeditation,” I said.

  “At the very least. The other thing has to do with how the wound got there. How it didn’t get there was by someone walking up to Mrs. Keeley from behind while she was dusting the bookshelves. She had to have been unconscious when it happened. If she hadn’t been, there would really have been a mess.”

  “Conked?” I suggested.

  “I’m inclined to say drugged. I didn’t see any bruising around the head. Of course, it’s like all the rest of this. I might be wrong.”

  “Why do I have the distinct feeling I’d rather be in Philadelphia?”

  “Wait,” she said. “It gets worse. What do you know about Margaret Johnson Keeley?”

  “Not much,” I admitted. “She wasn’t a personality type I was inclined to like. Hostile. Nosy. Self-righteous. I think Gail Larson said something about her husband being dead. I don’t know if that’s true or not”.

  “Her husband is most definitely dead,” Barbara said. “Died about five years ago. Her daughter’s in the Peace Corps in Asia somewhere. I don’t think they’ve spoken in years. I know all this already because around the time she was widowed, she got very involved in local good works. The Baltimore Book Lovers Association you know about. She also ran a Support Your Local Police group for a couple of years. The thing is, what can’t have happened here is a family killing. There was no family around to commit it. Which means—”

  “Somebody at the party,” I said.

  “Or somebody connected to the store. Or somebody—I don’t know. But whatever the motive was, it wasn’t the usual sort of thing. Her wallet’s missing, but her money isn’t—”

  “What?”

  “She kept her money in a separate billfold-purse thing—”

  “The kind of thing Coach sells,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

  “It wasn’t from Coach. Mrs. Keeley didn’t have that kind of money. And I shouldn’t say the wallet’s missing. We’ll probably find it at her house. All she kept in it were pictures and minor documents. The certificate she received from her school for being voted Teacher of the Year. That kind of thing. She had stuff like that going way back. That wallet was ancient and it was crammed.”

  “You think somebody may have wanted something that was in there?”

  “I can’t see why.” She looked into her coffee, which was still undoctored by milk and getting cold. She took a sip of it and made a face. “I hate coffee,” she said. “I wish I could find something else to drink. Soft drinks are fattening. Diet soft drinks taste terrible. Perrier is too yuppie …”

  “Club soda has too much salt,” I recited.

  Barbara said, “Mmm.” Then she poured milk into her coffee until the concoction was nearly bone white and took a great gulp. “This Evelyn Kleig who’s missing,” she said. “What do you know about her?”

  I laughed. “You got a couple of hours?”

  “You could stick to pertinent details,” Barbara said.

  “Well,” I started. Then I stopped. There was music playing in the background, but nothing I recognized. I let it slide over me. “You know,” I said, “the odd thing is, pertinent details may be the one thing I don’t have about Evelyn. A couple of hours ago, I thought I did, but then I had this talk with Jon Lowry—”

  “Our reclusive billionaire,” Barbara said faintly.

  “He is a nerd, isn’t he? He’s a nice nerd, though. Anyway, I was talking to him about something else—this was at the hotel, before the party—and he said something about Evelyn having come from Baltimore. I’d always thought she was a native New Yorker. Do you think that has something to do with it? If Evelyn was from Baltimore, she might have known Mrs. Keeley when she was a child—”

  “Nope. Margaret Keeley wasn’t from Baltimore. She and her husband came here about two years before the husband died. He worked for some big chemical company somewhere. I think he was transferred.”

  “From where?”

  “Cleveland?” Barbara said. “Maybe it was Akron. Somewhere in Ohio.”

  “I know why I thought Evelyn was from New York,” I said. “She graduated from Hunter. Practically everybody who goes to Hunter is from the city, or close. It’s that kind of a place.”

  “Well, you may have been right. Maybe Jon Lowry is the one who’s confused.”

  “Oh, Jon’s confused all right,” I said, “but I’d be surprised if he were confused about Evelyn. He dotes on Evelyn.”

  “What about the rest of them?”

  “You mean the tour?”

  “Yes.”

  I lit another cigarette and shrugged. “I suppose most of us were terminally exasperated with her. She was a flake in a lot of ways. She didn’t listen to people. On the other hand … well, you take Christopher Brand.”

  “You take Christopher Brand. He tried to put a hand up my skirt.”

  “He always does,” I said. “Anyway, the thing is, he’s awful on tour. So awful, people refuse to work with him. That’s what Evelyn tol
d me, and Gail Larson told me the same thing later. Apparently, most bookstores won’t have him in to sign. The man’s got a whole army of exwives. That’s an expensive proposition even with the prenuptial agreements he’s always made them swallow. Anyway, if a writer’s popular enough, or famous enough—and Christopher is both—signings can really up the sales of books. And he needs to sell every book. He must have been hurting bad with none of the stores willing to have him. Evelyn put him on this tour and strong-armed half the mystery book store owners in the United States into putting up with his act.”

  “So he’s exasperated but he needs her.”

  “Tempesta Stewart, too,” I said. “The woman’s some kind of terrorist—”

  “We know all about Miss Tempesta Stewart in Baltimore,” Barbara said. “She’s been in before. At some kind of vigilante rally.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I don’t think most of us paid much attention to Evelyn. She was PR. Basically, writers notice PR when something goes wrong with the publicity. Not before.”

  “And nothing has?”

  “The trip has been a dream,” I conceded. “Exhausting. Over scheduled from the word go. But still a dream. You don’t know how wonderful it is to arrive at bookstore after bookstore and always have books to sign.”

  “You’ve gone to sign books at a bookstore and not had any books to sign?”

  “More times than I can count.”

  “Well, I guess that takes care of everything,” Barbara said. “Everything for now. All I want you to do is tell me anything you might find out, accidentally or otherwise. The Baltimore end of this, I’m not worried about. I’ve been around a long time. But those people—Who is that immense woman with the beaded dress?”

  “Amelia Samson.”

  “Amelia Samson who was on 60 Minutes? Who’s got a castle somewhere?”

  “Rhinebeck, New York. I’ve been there. It’s quite a place.”

  “I’m sure it is. Talk to these people, will you, please? In all likelihood, well catch up to your Ms. Kleig somewhere and that will be that, but you never know. I don’t know the types well enough to feel entirely secure about the conclusions I’m coming to. And if you help out, I can always tell Lu at the next convention that I know all about you. You want another drink?”