Rich, Radiant Slaughter

by Jane Haddam

  When I was finally able to see again, the street looked different. I went through all the usual explanations—thinner traffic, people getting in out of the weather, a change in the luminosity of streetlamps—and came up dissatisfied. Even if all those things had happened, I probably wouldn’t have noticed a difference. I am a noticing person, but not in quite that way. I turned my head from side to side, checking out different colors and styles in rain boots. I looked down at the police car blocking the garage’s entrance and cutting off my view to the north. I started to look away again and stopped.

  The police car was still where it had been when I’d first started looking over the halfway, but the two policemen weren’t. They had been inside their vehicle, safely out of the wet. Now they were standing on the pavement at the very far edge of what I was able to see, and it was obvious they’d got out there in a hurry. Baltimore police are provided with those same space-agey rain suits police in New York have. I’d seen half a dozen officers wearing them at Gail’s. These two hadn’t waited to put theirs on. One of them—the short blond one—hadn’t even taken the time to grab his hat.

  I hoisted myself up as far as I could go and leaned over until I was about to pitch onto the heads of passing pedestrians. Nothing. I lowered myself back into the garage and looked at the ramp I was standing on. Height or distance, that was the decision. I was never the world’s best physics student. I couldn’t remember which would give me the better view of what I wanted to see.

  I tried height first, proving one of the great principles of my life: I always start out doing the wrong thing. All getting closer got me was cut off completely. By the time I was halfway to the payout booth, I couldn’t see the police car or the entrance booth at all. I backed up and went toward the opposite end of the room. The ramp’s incline started out gentle, but it got steeper almost immediately. I climbed all the way to the turn and leaned over the wall again. I’d gone just far enough.

  Standing about five feet away from the two uniformed patrolmen was a man in a heavy, oversized winter coat, his hair sticking up from his head as if it had been greased and wired, his hands moving up and down and up and down as if he were having a psychotic break. Every stranger on the street probably thought he was a wino with the DTs and maybe better than average luck at the Salvation Army store. He looked like one. He behaved like one. His coat was so blatantly expensive, the cops were undoubtedly wondering where he’d stolen it.

  I, of course, knew he was Jonathon Lowry.

  I stuck my hands in my pockets, said a very rude word and headed for the street.

  If the cops had been where they belonged—meaning in their car, guarding the entrance to the garage—I would never have gotten out without being questioned. That’s another prime rule of scene-of-the-crime investigation. You never let anyone you don’t know get away from you. When I came down the entrance ramp, the cops were still busy with Jon. I could have moved Patton’s Third Army into that place without anybody official noticing.

  A crowd of spectators had begun to form, stopping pedestrian traffic in both directions. I weasled through the sparse line at the back—it was, after all, raining hard enough to cause flash floods—and came to a stop behind the short blond policeman. The taller one had moved forward a little, as if he’d had enough of this. He probably thought Jon was getting violent.

  Jon was as violent as I’d ever seen him, or ever expected to—which meant not very. He was hopping from foot to foot, the hops getting shorter and less frequent as the water soaked into his coat and made it heavier. Every once in a while he shouted something, mostly made incoherent by the wind. I heard “You’d let me in if she were my wife” and “All I want is to know what’s going on,” but nothing else.

  I tapped the short blond policeman on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me.”

  “Police business,” the officer said, not bothering to turn around. “We have this situation under control.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said, “but I’m Patience Campbell McKenna. I was just in there talking to Barbara Defborn.”

  That got his attention. He swung his head around and gave me that look new men give me so often, and that I try to ignore. He seemed to be trying to decide if I was a figment of his imagination. Six feet tall. A hundred twenty-five pounds. Big blue eyes. Honey blond. I had to be kidding.

  Five feet away, Jon Lowry stopped hopping, stuck his neck out as far as it would go and blinked. “Patience!” he said. “Patience! You tell them! You tell them they have to let me in there!”

  The taller of the two turned toward me then. “You know this guy?”

  “Slightly,” I said.

  Jon Lowry ran straight toward us, blasting through the arm the taller policeman put out to stop him without even noticing it was there.

  “God, I hate this,” he said. “It’s just like my bankers. Just like them. Everybody knows what’s good for me. Everybody knows what I ought to be doing. Christopher Brand said she was dead. Is she dead? She can’t be dead. She was immortal.”

  “Jon,” I said.

  “And them,” Jon said. He whirled around, flapped his arms at the cops and whirled back to me. “They’re all the same, you know. People who’ve got official positions. They’re all alike. God, you wouldn’t believe what some of these assholes have done to me. Had me spied on. Had my apartment bugged. Did I tell you one of my lawyers had my apartment bugged? He did. I found the damn thing by accident. Think I’m crazy. These two idiots think I’m drunk.”

  “Are you?”

  “Of course not. I just want—I just want—” He deflated so fast, he might never have been there at all. One minute he was all fire and energy and righteous indignation. The next he was staring at his shoes. “Is she dead?” he said. “Christopher said—but you know Christopher. Christopher will say anything.”

  “I’d like to know how Christopher knew,” I said.

  “It’s true?”

  “Jon—”

  “Oh, never mind. Don’t treat me like a two-year-old. I’m not a two-year-old. And I knew it was true. Christopher’s a bastard, but he wouldn’t make up something like that.”

  “I don’t suppose he would,” I said.

  Jon pointed toward the garage. “I want to go in there,” he said. “They can’t keep me out, can they? I want to go in there and see her one more time.”

  I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see the tall cop waiting to speak to me, looking polite and expectant and just as if I didn’t have anything to do with this lunatic he’d run into. I told Jon to wait a minute and edged off. I know a signal for a private conversation when I see one.

  The tall one had about an inch on me. He glanced over my shoulder to make sure Jon was staying put and said, “He says he’s Jonathon Hancock Lowry, that billionaire guy. Is he?”

  “He certainly is.”

  “Shit,” the officer said. “Excuse my language. But—shit.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about the usual sort of trouble,” I said. “He doesn’t know how to cause it. And God only knows he looks just like what you thought he was.”

  “A nut,” the officer said.

  “At least a burn,” I said.

  The tall officer shook his head. “I’ve been looking at bums all my life. I used to have vagrancy detail when there still was such a thing. I can smell cheap booze a hundred miles away. I thought he was a schizo.”

  This time, I was the one who looked back to be sure Jon was staying put. If there was one thing I’d learned about Jon Lowry on this tour, it was that you didn’t throw the word “schizo” around in his presence unless you really wanted to cause trouble. His crazy Aunt Gertrude had been “schizo.”

  “Look,” the tall officer said, “I’m not going to do anything here. I’m not going to haul him in. I’m not even going to go on telling him he can’t go in there. Hell, if he was as close to that woman as he’s been trying to make us believe, Defborn would probably love to talk to him. Woman yaps her lif
e away anyway. But, and this is my big but, in general, what we’ve found is, it’s not so good to let relatives and close friends get a look at a corpse unless they’ve already seen it. If you know what I mean.”

  “You mean unless they’re the ones who made it,” I said.

  “Yeah,” the officer said.

  “Well, I don’t think he made this one. He was—never mind. That’s not proof anyway. I’ll talk to him.”

  “Talk him out of going up there. At least until the body’s out.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Shit,” the officer said, “any other time, I’d be trying to get him in there. Just to make sure she could question him before he got away. But she says—”

  “We’re all safely ensconced in the hotel,” I said. “He isn’t going anywhere at the moment. I’ll get him out of here.”

  “Good. And in the meantime, try to explain to him that all acting like a crazy is going to get him is locked up. You hadn’t come along, another five minutes we’d have taken him out for observation.”

  “He’s just a little distraught,” I said.

  “Shit.”

  He stalked away from us, and climbed back into his cruiser. His partner followed.

  “Patience?” Jon said.

  I went up the street to him, wishing like hell that Jon had decided to stage this little drama somewhere sensibly protected from the rain. I was as thoroughly soaked as if I’d jumped fully clothed into a pool. I had been able to ignore the weather as long as the fireworks were going on, but now I was miserable. And wet. And achy. I was sure I felt a cold coming on.

  I took Jon’s arm and started to edge him, gently, toward the hotel. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get in out of the cold. I need a drink.”

  Jon stood his ground. “Did that policeman tell you I was crazy?”

  “No,” I said. “He told me it wasn’t a good idea for you to go in there, especially if you were who you said you were—”

  “Jonathon Hancock Lowry, boy billionaire?”

  “Jon Lowry, friend of the deceased. He was right, Jon. That’s nothing for you to see. Believe me. Let’s go back to the hotel, and have a drink, and calm down. All right?”

  Jon Lowry folded his arms across his chest, stuck out his lip and said, “No.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  It would have been different if I’d won that argument. Winning always makes everything different. I’ve noticed that right along. In this case, I stood in the street with the rain pouring down on my head and rising in puddles at my feet, getting nowhere. I was also becoming more and more aware that the things I was seeing, when I took time away from Jon’s ranting and his two-year-old insistence that everything had to go his way or not at all, lacked context—at least for me. I know New York well enough to pick the usual from the extraordinary, the mundane from the dangerous. I know what a potential mugger looks like, but I also know what a SoHo poseur looks like, and I can tell them apart. Here, anyone on the street could have been Jack the Ripper or Santa Claus. I didn’t know enough about Baltimore, or Baltimore style, to tell. Now that Jon was ranting again, he was getting his audience back. We kept collecting little knots of middle-aged ladies with hard-leather pocketbooks and men in uniform overalls and rain gear. In New York, we would also have collected a running commentary. People were more polite here. The only thing I heard, the whole time I stood there, was a soft feminine voice saying, “Dear, dear. He’s going to catch such an awful cold.”

  I also heard Jon. He was much angrier at me than he had been at the cops, maybe because he knew me. I suppose he might have thought I owed him acquiescence—what he would have called “understanding.” People make that switch so often, I’ve ceased to complain about it. Whatever his reasoning, he had kicked his voice box into high and was letting me have it. I could hear him so clearly, I thought the wind had died down. Then I saw the way it was pulling against his hair and realized it had actually gotten worse. So had the thunder. Yesterday, slipping and falling on sidewalks painted with ice, I had wished for warmer temperatures. I had gotten them. I was standing in the middle of one of the great electrical storms of all time.

  “Jonathon,” I said, “you’re going to kill us standing here. Let’s get out of the storm.”

  He seemed not to have heard me. After my first annoyance passed, I conceded he might not have. I have dealt with a number of crazies in my time—real ones, and the temporary kind concocted by stress and circumstance. When I talk to them, I almost instinctually modulate my voice and slow the meter of my speech. I think it has a soothing effect, which it might. The only effect it had here was to make me inaudible. Couples halfway up the block who only wanted to discuss bus schedules were shouting at each other.

  I grabbed Jon’s arm, tried dragging him again, and got nowhere. In the interests of not getting a serious respiratory disease, I turned around and tried dragging him in the opposite direction, toward the garage. This time, he came, although slowly. He had reached that point where what happened mattered less to him than who initiated the happening. He wanted to get onto the crime scene, but he didn’t want me to be the one who got him there.

  I dragged him up to the entrance ramp, shrugged at the two cops in the cruiser and pushed Jon so that he stumbled just under the concrete portico. Then I marched past him, up the incline, until I was entirely out of the rain. He might be willing to risk a hospital stay to prove how iron-willed he was. I was not.

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said. “I don’t blame them for treating you like a crazy. You’re acting like one. I gave you some sensible advice. If you didn’t want to take it, all you had to do was say so. My nephews had more sense when they were going through the terrible twos.”

  “You were pushing me,” he said.

  “I took your arm,” I corrected. “It’s a common practice of courtesy. I won’t do it again.”

  “People are always pushing me,” he said. “Pushing me or trying to trick me. People are always—” He looked down at his hand. The dye in his coat was running, sending a rivulet of gray down the length of his fingers. He must have been out there getting wet for even longer than I realized. A coat that expensive would take a lot of abuse before it ran. “Shit,” he said.

  “You’ve only got yourself to blame,” I said.

  “I want to go up there and see her,” he said. “I want to talk to the police. I want to know what’s going on. It’s important to me.”

  “Evelyn was important to you,” I said. “I know.”

  “Everybody tries something,” he said. “People think I’m a wimp, I’m not a wimp.”

  “I never said you were.”

  “We were out all afternoon yesterday,” he said. “I told you about that. She knew the city really well. And then when I got back to the hotel, I came up to see you, and since then—She died before the party, didn’t she? If she hadn’t been dead she would have come. Evelyn always did her work.”

  “They won’t know that until they’ve done what they have to do,” I said, “but you’re probably right. What time did you get back to the hotel?”

  “Yesterday? About three. I came right up to see you. To see Phoebe, I mean. I like Phoebe.”

  “Everybody likes Phoebe.”

  “I don’t think everybody likes anyone. Some people don’t like anybody at all.”

  I pointed up to the garage. “Are you going to be any help in there? Do you know anything? Do you know what Evelyn was going to do after she left you?”

  “What she was going to do? She had to go over to the store. To put books out, you know. And then she was supposed to come back to her room and get dressed. She’d bought a new dress for the party. That wasn’t like her. She almost never bought clothes. Maybe she thought it was the last party on the tour and everything—”

  “Mmm,” I said.

  “You never understood Evelyn,” he said. “Nobody ever understood Evelyn.”

  I said “Mmm” again and backed up a little. At the far end of the r
oom, the lab boys were packing up. The arc lamps had been taken down and folded up and tucked into nylon bags. Barbara Defborn was standing near the garage’s office door, talking to an agitated Tempesta Stewart. There was no sign of Evelyn’s body. I tried to remember if I’d heard anything that might have been the coroner’s wagon arriving or leaving—it was the kind of thing I could have missed during the fuss out there—but came up blank. The garage no longer looked like a crime scene. What it did look like was a location shot for Hill Street Blues. Sitting in the middle of it, looking for an excuse to get out, I’d been aware of the dirt. Now I was assaulted by it. Everything in the place was covered by a thin film of grease, and all the grease looked lumpy.

  I backed up a little. “Barbara’s probably coming right over to the hotel,” I told Jon. “She’d have gone to your room first thing. She wants to talk to you, for God’s sake. You could have asked her anything you wanted then.”

  “I’m going to ask her anything I want to now. Get out of here, Patience.”

  “Right,” I said.

  He turned his deep brown eyes on me. “It’s all your fault, you know. You and all the rest of them. You people ask for things like this.”

  “What?”

  “She told me all about you. All about all of you. It’s all your fault.” He turned around and started to walk away from me, toward a very surprised Barbara Defborn and a Tempesta Stewart who looked ready to kill him.

  I went back to the hotel, but beyond that I showed no common sense at all. I should have gone straight up to my room and changed my clothes. Even if I was willing to stay wet for a while, I should have gone in search of Nick and Adrienne and Phoebe. The cops have the perfect excuse for dropping everything and running off to investigate a crime. They get paid for it. I have responsibilities.

  This time, at least, I wasn’t dumping my responsibilities out of sheer curiosity. I was boiling. On the walk back to the hotel, I kept thinking about Jon Lowry and the scene on the street, and the more I thought the more I came up with a scenario I didn’t like. Christopher Brand had told Jon Lowry that Evelyn was dead. I could almost hear him doing it, choosing his words with all the care he would have needed if he’d wanted to be kind—except that he wouldn’t have wanted to be kind. He’d have wanted to score. Christopher always wanted to score. He wanted to score with women. He wanted to score with books. He wanted to score with arguments. He could turn a conversation about the weather into a contest.