by Jane Haddam
“I wish I could be sure that was significant,” I said. “Unfortunately, it sounds just like Christopher Brand.”
“Turd,” Tempesta repeated helpfully.
“Don’t you think we ought to go in if we’re going?” Nick said.
Tempesta brushed past him, pushed me aside and went to the door. It unlocked with a computer card instead of an ordinary key, for which I’d been grateful for all of my stay. The hotel in New Orleans had had ordinary keys. I’d never actually managed to get through my door by myself. If Phoebe and I were together, she got us in. If I was alone, and Phoebe out, I had to call the desk to get someone to work the thing for me.
Tempesta pushed the door open, hesitated and then walked in ahead of us. I wondered what her hesitation was about. I didn’t wonder about my own.
I came in last, after Nick, and looked around. Tempesta’s room was a clone of my own, except that her wall of windows looked out on what appeared to be a cluster of other buildings, instead of the harbor. That didn’t matter particularly. The weather was so bad, it was the only view in town.
Tempesta got out her cigarettes again. “Here it is,” she said. “What you expect to find in it, I don’t know.”
I knew what I expected to find, but as I looked around I began to doubt I would. There was no mess of luggage here. Tempesta’s single suitcase was lying on the far bed, open and empty. Through her open closet door, I could see a long hanger rod barely occupied by the perfect pack-light travel wardrobe. There was a multiple skirt hanger with five of Tempesta’s favorite print dirndls on it. There were two other cashmere blazers, in navy blue and white. There were six white shirts with high collars still in their dry-cleaning plastic wrap. On the floor were four pairs of shoes, laid out with precision in a Prussian line.
I walked over to the closet and looked inside. Nothing.
“Did you go out this morning?” I asked Tempesta.
“Of course I went out,” Tempesta said. “How do you think the bed got made? Maids hate to work with people in the rooms. How do you think I got that note? I picked it up in the lobby, of course.”
“Did you get a call about it?”
“A call about it?”
“When hotel clerks have messages for guests, they usually set the message light blinking on the room phone. You call them up and they tell you to come down and get your envelope.”
“I know that,” Tempesta said. “I’m a Christian, not a hick. And no, there was no message light on on the phone. I checked last night and I didn’t get a call this morning.”
“How long were you gone?” I felt foolish, but I had to do it. I got down on my hands and knees and looked under the bed.
“I was gone about an hour,” she said. I could just feel the odd look she was giving me. “I just went down to have breakfast. I brought my manuscript with me. It’s due in a couple of weeks. I never got to work on it, though. I ran into Amelia Samson, and you know what Amelia is like. She spent the whole time babbling about the sorry state of romance fiction and then Hazel Ganz came along and started lecturing me about warranty clauses.”
“Did you pick the note up before or after breakfast?”
“After.” She bit her lip. “You know, I don’t think it was there before breakfast. I spent all yesterday morning making conversation with that clerk they’ve got down there. She knows me. I passed her when I first came down and said good morning, and she never said a thing about a note.”
“But she did when you were on your way back?”
“Yes. Of course, she might just have forgotten. And I must say, I thought this was a good hotel, but how they could let something like this go on—”
“Tempesta, no decent hotel reads its guests’ private messages. Don’t be absurd.”
“But this kind of thing—”
“Death threats don’t smell any differently than love letters,” I said. “The clerks could probably get canned for invading the guests’ privacy. If I knew one had invaded mine, I’d demand he get canned.”
“Do you intend to lie on the floor forever?”
I got up, brushing off the part of my robe that had been in contact with the carpet, although it didn’t need it. The vacuum cleaners that hotel used must have been the next-best thing to black holes.
“This doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“It surely doesn’t,” Tempesta said. “But that’s all right. None of you people make sense. If I’d had any idea, when I was voted onto the board—”
“Tempesta, if you had any idea about anything, you’d have to join a convent. Have you been in your bathroom since you got upstairs?”
“I haven’t even been in here,” she said. “I got that note and read it in the lobby. I called you from there.”
I went down her entrance foyer and into her bathroom, a clean white place that smelled pleasantly of sachet. The Inner Harbor was the only Sheraton I’d ever stayed at, but if they were all like this, I thought the chain must be doing pretty well. The smell of sachet. A shine on the floor that would have made my mother proud—and my mother is one of those women who insist on bathroom floors clean enough to do neurosurgery on. I walked over to the bathtub and pulled back the shower curtain. Nothing.
“McKenna?” Nick came up behind me.
“There isn’t a single place to hide anything in in here,” I said. “I can’t believe it.”
“There are a million places to hide something,” Nick said. “Depending on what you want to hide. Look at all that closet space. Look at all those cabinets.”
“Spaces aren’t big enough.” I sat down on the edge of the bathtub. Now that the danger of imminent revelation was past, both my anxiety and my panic were draining out of me. The whole thing felt like a logic puzzle again. I reached into the pocket of my robe for my cigarettes—Tempesta was smoking herself, after all—and got one out. “It’s got to be here somewhere,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense any other way.”
“What doesn’t make sense?” Nick said.
“She never makes sense,” Tempesta said. “It’s like I said before. None of them do.”
I ignored her. “Assume that what did happen was supposed to happen,” I said, pretending I was talking only to Nick. “What did happen was that a note was delivered to me yesterday morning just as I started to come up to the room. It could have been there all along, but I’ll bet if we ask the desk clerk we’ll find it was left on the counter after I came in—”
“How could it be left on the counter? Somebody must have spoken to the clerk. The clerk wrote your name on it,” Nick said.
“Okay,” I said. “Somebody may have spoken to the clerk, but I bet it didn’t happen that way. Maybe someone handed it to a bellboy or just put it in my box—”
“There were clerks working back there,” Nick objected. “There were people standing in line waiting to register.”
“There weren’t either by the time I got that note,” I said. “That’s a very efficient check-in operation they’ve got down there. We came in. Three people appeared out of nowhere to check us in. The line dispersed almost immediately. Phoebe was at the very end of it and she was done almost as soon as I was. We’ll have to check it out, but I’m pretty sure that after everybody was taken care of, the clerks went to the back again. And stayed there until they were needed.”
“Meaning someone could have gone around the counter and put something—where? I didn’t see pigeonholes.”
“There’ll be something,” I said. “Trust me. There has to be. Anyway, after that a clerk came through and found it and gave it to me, but it didn’t really matter if it happened then. I could have got it anytime before the party.” I poked my head past him to get a better look at Tempesta. “What do you usually do with hate mail?” I asked her.
“You mean genuine hate mail?” she said. “I do what you do with it. If there’s an actual death threat, I call the cops.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And if I hadn’t been so damn tired, I’d have called the
cops, too. And then, later on, when I found the body, it would all look connected.”
“Like somebody had it in for you and had gone really nuts,” Nick said. He brightened. “Not bad. But how could he be sure you’d find the body?”
“I keep telling you,” I said. “It was rigged that way. That’s what I meant about the books. Gail said there was a schedule for the signings, but Evelyn didn’t put much faith in it, because Christopher and Amelia and—other people—were always jockeying for position and messing the whole thing up. What the murderer did was make sure this couldn’t be messed up. I was the best target. The Butler Did It is a mystery specialty bookstore. Gail carries my books on a regular basis. She doesn’t normally carry anything by anyone else on the tour. Even if none of the books could be found right away, I’d be the likeliest one to sign first, because at least some of my stuff would be available. Then he moved things around in the back room so Gail really couldn’t lay hands on anybody else’s work. And there I was.”
“And here we are,” Tempesta said. “And as you can see, the room is empty. If you expected to find a body in it, you should have told me. I would have told you it wasn’t possible.”
“Even though you hadn’t been back here since breakfast?”
“Patience, this is a good hotel. You said so yourself. The maid must have come in as soon as I left the room this morning. And the door was locked.”
“There was yesterday,” I said. “You were out yesterday. Phoebe was out, too. She saw you sitting in some storefront religious center.”
“The American Army for Christ the King. Yes, I was out yesterday. I was out all afternoon. Do you really think I could have failed to find a body between then and now? In here?”
“No,” I said. I wasn’t happy about it.
Tempesta sighed. “I think your theory is just lovely, but I think it’s all bunk. There’s a flaw in your reasoning somewhere. Whoever killed Mrs. Keeley, it wasn’t one of us. What reason would we have? And the letters—Christopher Brand, take my word for it.”
“I never said the letters hadn’t come from Christopher Brand.”
“That man hates every woman who won’t commit an indecent act with him. Now, if you don’t mind, I have things to do today. I have a car running up a parking bill—”
“Car?” I said. A light went on in my head. Tempesta had a note. A body had to be hidden somewhere.
“Oh boy,” Nick said.
“You may want to spend your time in this city chasing after buses and hailing cabs, but I have work to do. I rented a very nice little Mazda.” Tempesta smirked. “I know a very good rental agency in this city. A Christian one. You’d be amazed how much easier your life gets once you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior.”
I must have spaced out for a minute there. The next thing I remember is Nick grabbing my arm and shaking it, pumping away just above my elbow as if he wanted to break it off. The same light that had gone off in my head had gone off in his.
“McKenna,” he kept saying. “McKenna, go get dressed. We’ll meet you downstairs.”
I went back to my room. I pulled on an old pair of jeans and a turtleneck and one of Nick’s best sweaters. I went downstairs. I even almost got lost. For some reason, I couldn’t talk myself out of the idea that Tempesta had parked her Christian car in the Sheraton’s garage. She’d told me otherwise. I should have known better.
By the time I got there, the trunk was standing open and Nick was beside it, looking angry. There was no sign of Tempesta, but I knew she had to be somewhere on the phone, calling Barbara Defborn back to us.
I walked up and peered into the thing. The light was dim. The bulbs and fixtures overhead were filmed with grease. There were no windows. I sent up a heartfelt thanksgiving that it was so difficult to see. The lighting at The Butler Did It the night before had been strong enough to shoot a movie in. I can do without that kind of clarity when I’m looking at a corpse.
Stuffed into the trunk, folded and twisted and packed down so it would fit, was the body of Evelyn Nesbitt Kleig.
On the small patch of skin under her earlobe and above her jaw was a thick slash of blue.
Chapter Fourteen
All crime scenes, like all murders, are alike. That may seem like a ridiculous statement—what in the name of God does a Mafia execution have in common with a domestic homicide?—but there’s more truth to it than anyone but a cop realizes. Barring the essentially accidental, like a deer rifle that goes off in the middle of a family argument, murderers all think the same. The only difference between the mental machinations of a Mafia hit man and a wife who kills her husband for his insurance is in their assumptions about the inevitability of habit. The Mafia hit man accepts that killing is something that has to be done again and again. The wife convinces herself she will need to do it only once. Both of them believe in the justice of what they’re doing. Both of them are convinced the cops are stupid. Neither of them realizes that self-defense is not an infinitely elastic concept.
For a while after the forensic team arrived, I sat on a concrete abutment in a corner, feeling as if I’d wandered into some cosmic version of an infinite loop. The garage had been empty when I first arrived, but it had filled up quickly. Tempesta’s car had been parked at ground level and people had wandered in off the street in droves. The sight of them blocking the entrance and exit ramps made the place feel claustrophobic, as small and overstuffed as The Butler Did It had been during the investigation. The arc lamps made me think of Margaret Keeley. The arc lamps are portable. They are the property of the police department. It makes sense that they get packed up and carted around to wherever they are needed. For some reason, when I see them standing and lit, I can’t help thinking of them as permanent additions to whatever territory they’ve invaded.
I reached into my pocket for cigarettes, realized I had a young patrolman staring at my hand, and left the pack abandoned in my jeans. Cops hate smoking at crime scenes. The only reason I’d been allowed to get away with it the night before was that, in the confusion, no one had noticed me. Stray cigarette butts are evidence. If an investigator or an innocent spectator leaves one near a dead body, it has to be followed up just as carefully as any real clue. It wastes everybody’s time and everybody’s money, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to guard against. Long before the Surgeon General found cause to label packs of Marlboro menthols dangerous, police departments all across America were establishing no-smoking sections of their own.
I went to sit on the abutment after I’d talked to Barbara Defborn, meaning after I was free to leave. I knew she assumed I wouldn’t leave. God only knew, I’d hung around until the bitter end the night before. Barbara Defborn’s mind worked the way it had to—like a good policewoman’s, which was what she was. To her, a crime scene was like a back garden plot planted for a treasure hunt. It was full of little chips of silver and gold, waiting to be found, and pored over, and stored for future use. She liked fabric threads and stray hairs and finger-oil smudges on the waxed surfaces of painted metal. All those things meant something to her. They did not, however, mean anything to me.
“It’s going to be too close to tell,” she’d said when she was ushering me out of the garage owner’s cramped little office and giving me permission to go, “but I’ll bet this one was killed first. I’ll just bet.”
“I will, too,” I said. “The times add up that way, when people saw her, when they didn’t. And I don’t think she ever got to the store. None of her work was done.”
“At least this time we’ve got a car,” she said. “Cars are a lot better to work with. Especially rental cars. They get vacuumed out regularly. Whatever we find in that trunk is likely to be pertinent, and we’re going to find.”
I murmured something that amounted to an expression of polite interest and moved away. I was cold and sweaty at the same time. Like most tiered garages, this one guarded against employee suffocation by having concrete walls that went only halfway up each story. Wind
and rain and cold came pouring through the oversized cracks, drenching the hoods of the cars that were parked along the perimeters and making the oil-slick asphalt underfoot look clean. The place smelled anyway—of carbon monoxide and raw gasoline, of human sweat and the acrid dryness that warns of space heaters left on too long. It was a thoroughly uncomfortable place, and I wanted more than anything to be out of it.
After a while, I stood up, went to the wall and looked out to the street. I was at the bottom of a gently sloping ramp, not quite level with the pavement. I tried to see through the moving masses of umbrellas and raincoats to something that might be Nick. Nick had been the person Barbara talked to first, maybe because she hadn’t had a chance to talk to him before. When he was finished and I was on my way to getting started, I asked him to go back to the hotel and find Phoebe and Adrienne. All I needed was to have Adrienne hear about this on the radio, or from some stranger in the hotel’s lobby. I still wasn’t sure how I was going to get her through the trouble she already knew we were in.
I stood on tiptoe, grabbed the top of the half-wall and leaned out as far as I could go. Nick was nowhere in sight, but even with rain drenching my hair I felt I’d manufactured myself an advantage. For one thing, I could breathe. It might be cold on the streets of Baltimore, and wet, but it wasn’t suffocating. They seemed to be doing a better than fair job of keeping the pollution problem under control. For another thing, as long as I was leaning out, I couldn’t see back in. Every time I looked back in, I got a clear view of the bulletproof plastic front wall of the manager’s office, and through it of the wall at the back. That one was plastered floor to ceiling and side to side with bumper stickers that said HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS.
The weight of the rain and the strength of the wind dragged a large part of my hair across my eyes. I winced against the sting and clawed at it, pulling it back. I tucked it under the collar of Nick’s sweater, soaking my shirt. Then I started rubbing my eyes to get the water out.
