by Jane Haddam
The state Jon had been in in front of the garage was not natural to him—or at least not natural to him as he had been since I’d known him. That wasn’t very long, but the circumstances were unusual. We’d been living in close proximity for weeks. Surely, if he was prone to this kind of thing, I’d have seen it before.
I ducked under the hotel canopy, pushed through the great double doors and shook myself out on the carpet. I felt claustrophobic almost immediately. Staying in hotels always does this to me, no matter how good the hotel or how large the rooms or how pleasant the staff. I always feel confined, and after a while I’m willing to do anything to get out into an unfamiliar space.
The claustrophobia slowed me up a little. I looked toward the reception desk. The clerk there was young and perky and very professional, more like a high-powered secretary than a receptionist. She was not, however, anybody I remembered seeing before. She stood in front of her computer terminal in a uniformlike suit, tapping away at a keyboard while she kept a smile plastered to her face. The man in front of her looked almost as bedraggled as I knew I did. He had a brown fabric suitcase that seemed to have soaked through.
I turned away from them and headed for the elevator bank. The little hall in front of it was full of people. A gaggle of what seemed to be schoolteachers stood off to one side, rehashing a trip to some monument somewhere and worrying about their slides.
“It’s the light,” one of them kept saying. “My slides always come out all right if I’ve got enough real light, but when I have to work the light out for myself, you know, with bulbs—”
“I can’t believe you haven’t figured out how to work an automatic flash,” another one said. “After all this time. They wouldn’t let us out of college without knowing how to do that. Of course, that was when teachers college meant something. That’s when we called a teachers college a teachers college. What’s going on now—”
“They wanted to give one of those competency tests but they had to back off. They gave it the first time and a third of the teachers in the system didn’t pass …”
I went to the wall and pushed the up button, mostly to give myself something to do. It was already lit.
I stepped back into the crowd—well back, so no one would think I was trying to jump them and force my way onto an elevator I hadn’t paid my waiting dues to get. As I did, I bumped into somebody’s suitcase, the hard-edged kind with sharp corners. I felt the scrape of metal against the denim of my jeans and then the sting of a twisted thread of it going right through to my skin. I jerked forward, clamping my teeth down so my ouch wouldn’t be too loud. Suitcases with that kind of frame always end up spouting metal threads like porcupine quills. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and I was in no mood to be apologized to.
The moving hadn’t helped. The metal was still sticking into me. I twisted, looked down the length of my leg and saw that my jeans were caught on the corner of a square, hard-sided synthetic-shell case, bright red. The woman it belonged to had put it on the floor and taken her hand off it. She was indicating ownership by keeping one nylon covered leg against the side. Late twenties, mousy brown hair in one of those California cuts, rigid set to the lips. She might or might not have belonged to the schoolteachers’ tour, or whatever it was, but she was definitely not someone I wanted to know. Or get an apology from. I bent over and started to work the denim free with my left hand.
It is one of the great inconveniences of my life that I am about as far from ambidexttous as I can get. My left hand might as well be inoperative. I can’t do much with it beyond propping things up and pushing open swing doors. The metal thread was thin and crooked and firmly embedded in the fabric of my jeans. My fingers fumbled against it without doing any good. I stood upright again. The man on the other side of the woman with the suitcase caught my eye and smiled.
“Help you?” he said.
“Can’t,” I said.
He looked at our mutual problem and shrugged. I decided I liked him. He was very young and looked uncomfortable in his suit. Very young men ought to look uncomfortable in suits.
The elevators were taking forever to get to the lobby. A woman at the front was poking at the up button again and again and again. On some older elevators, doing that will make a bell ring in the cab. Whether the newer variety did that or not, I didn’t know. I was hoping it didn’t. The crowd had been thick enough when I first arrived. Since then, there had been a veritable population explosion. The utility hall was very wide, but not wide enough to accommodate all this. I had been wedged in. In the hope that I’d been mistaken about the woman with the suitcase—I had Margaret Keeley on the brain; maybe I just thought this stranger was the same type—I looked back and reassessed. There was nothing to reassess. She was positively scary.
The young man tapped me on the shoulder and cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m stuck on this woman’s suitcase,” I said.
“I know that.” There was a grinding in the elevator shaft and we all looked expectant. Nothing happened.
“Why I want to know if you’re all right,” he said, “is that you seem to have injured your hand.”
I looked down at my left hand. That was the one I’d been using to try to extricate myself from the suitcase, and it was also the one closer to the young man. It looked all right to me. My clear nail polish was chipped—something only I would have noticed—and my knuckles were still beaded with rain, but there was nothing I would have described as “looking injured.”
“It seems to be all right,” I said.
“Not that one,” he said. “The other one. I thought that might be why you weren’t using both hands. Because your right one was injured. And if it was, you see, I thought of a way to deal with this, you know, that wouldn’t get you into a lot of hassle.”
Against the wall, a light went on over one of the elevators and a pinging noise announced it was about to open its doors. Pavlov-like, the whole crowd of us looked up to watch it happen. The woman whose suitcase I was stuck on moved forward aggressively, apparently oblivious to anything but her need to get to her room at the soonest possible moment. I didn’t believe it. I was sure she’d been listening to everything the young man and I had said, and just didn’t give a damn.
I looked down at my right hand. More chipped nail polish, more beads of rain. I twisted my wrist back and forth, trying to get a look at it in every possible angle of light. And then I caught it.
It ran across the soft web of skin between thumb and forefinger, in a curving line that was blurred at the edges, like frostbite that had started to spread. If I hadn’t been dirty as well as wet, I’d have seen it right away. In certain kinds of fight, it bled into the grease I’d picked up in the garage.
A streak of blue wash, like ink.
“Oh hell,” I said.
“Pay?” Phoebe said. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Are you all right?” the young man said.
“I’m fine.”
In front of me, the woman with the hard suitcase grabbed its handle and charged for the open elevator doors. As she did, she tore a hole in my jeans from the top of my calf to my ankle.
Chapter Sixteen
Phoebe didn’t want to let me change my clothes. It was so out of character, I chalked it up to pregnancy. I was sopping wet, and she must have realized I hadn’t had a thing to eat. Food, clothing and shelter have always been Phoebe’s priorities. In the face of imminent nuclear war, she would stop peace negotiations to determine whether everyone at the bargaining table had had enough breakfast. Now she trailed me up to our floor, protesting all the way.
“You don’t understand,” she kept saying. “Hazel said it was urgent. Really urgent. Send out the alarms.”
I unlocked the door to what had been our room, gave my hand another look and headed for the luggage. Phoebe’s luggage was still all over the place. There was no sign of Nick. Or Adrienne.
“I’m not going anywhere l
ike this,” I said. “I look drowned and I’m tom. That woman. What’s this stuff on my hands?”
“You keep asking me that.”
“I know I keep asking you that. I want to know. It was on Margaret Keeley’s face when we found her body. It was on Evelyn’s.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of mark,” Phoebe said. “Like death in that story on The Twilight Zone. Just before the people would die, they’d get a mark—”
“Thanks a lot, Phoebe.”
“You shouldn’t be so concerned with fashion,” Phoebe said. “Nobody will notice where we’re going anyway. Hazel said she was down at an Ad Hoc center.”
“I’m just getting into a new pair of jeans.”
Actually, I was getting into a new pair of jeans, a new shirt and another of Nick’s sweaters, I’d bought him the one I’d been wearing, and it was ruined. I took it off and threw it in the bathtub, so it wouldn’t do anything permanent to the hotel’s bedspreads. Then I started searching for clean underwear.
“What’s Hazel in such a panic about anyway?” I said. “And what’s she doing at an Ad Hoc center? I didn’t even know they had an Ad Hoc center in Baltimore.”
“I didn’t either. I thought the only one was in New York. And I don’t know what she’s in such a panic about. I just know she’s in a panic. And—”
“Yes?”
“Well. It has something to do with Christopher Brand.”
I put down the shirt I’d been considering. “Christopher Brand?”
“Nick said to tell you he talked to his friend at the IRS. He said he’d know what it was all about by this afternoon.”
Phoebe does this sort of thing all the time. As usual, I was left gasping for context. I ran it through my head once or twice and then remembered the penultimate kicker on the phone when Nick had arrived the day before. The last thing he’d told me was that David was missing. The second-to-the-last was that I’d had some kind of letter from the IRS. I dumped this where it belonged, meaning right out of my head. Writers are always getting letters from the IRS, because the IRS always thinks we’re cheating. Most of us aren’t, but most of us are doing something the IRS thinks is just as bad—not understanding our tax forms. This should come as no surprise to anyone. Even the IRS doesn’t understand the tax forms, and the rules they apply to writers have all been formulated for other kinds of businesses, most of which operate nothing at all the way writers do. Add to that the simple fact that the IRS doesn’t have to worry about the Constitution at all—Jon Lowry was right about that—and trouble is practically inevitable, I’d spent nearly two solid weeks with my accountant trying to figure out how to deduct business expenses the way these people wanted me to under the new act, and neither he nor I had any idea if we’d done it right. It had gotten to the point to figure out how to deduct business expenses the way these people wanted me to under the newnt where I didn’t worry about it. The government had decided it had more right to the money I worked for than I did. It had also decided that it could spend that money any way it wanted to, and I had no right to complain in any effective way. If I spent any time thinking about this stuff, I started wanting to emigrate to Switzerland. I hate Switzerland. If I’d inadvertently messed up my forms, the IRS would send me a bill.
I found an oxford button-down I must have had since I was at Emma Willard and put it on.
“Forget my taxes,” I said. “Talking about my taxes gets me agitated. Are you sure you don’t know what that blue stuff is?”
“I’m sure. And I don’t know what Hazel wants, but we’d better go. She really was frantic, Patience.”
“Okay.” My clean jeans were in my suit carrier, on a hanger. God only knew why. “What about Adrienne?” I asked.
“She’s out at lunch with Nick,” Phoebe said. “I was going to give her lunch in the hotel, but he knew a place on the harbor, and I was feeling sick again. When they’re done, he’s going to call New York and see if there’s been any word about David at the office.”
“Do you want him to find David?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s what I’ve liked best about this trip,” I said. “Everybody’s been so damn decisive.”
I grabbed a folding traveling umbrella from one of Phoebe’s open trunks and headed for the door.
Half an hour later, the cab I’d managed to find after another good dousing pulled up at the address Hazel Ganz had given Phoebe, and all I could think of was that if this was the Ad Hoc office in Baltimore—or anywhere else—then the Ad Hoc was in a lot of trouble. Every city has sections its Chamber of Commerce would prefer visitors not to see, and this was definitely Baltimore’s. The street was full of potholes. At least half the streetlamps seemed to have had their glass fixtures cracked by flying rocks. Most of the buildings on the block looked like they’d been built for some kind of industrial use, but not inhabited for years. They were all cement-block and factory-plant brick, dinosaurs of the Industrial Revolution.
I looked quizzically at Phoebe. She checked her three-by-five card and nodded. I shrugged and climbed out onto the pavement.
The ride over had been silent and mostly unenlightening. Phoebe was feeling sick again. I couldn’t think of a thing to ask her. Now, of course, I could think of a hundred things I should have. Like why the Ad Hoc Committee for Advocacy for the Homeless would have a Baltimore office. Why not do what they said they did almost every place else but in New York, where the national headquarters were—meaning operate out of people’s living rooms?
At least the rain had eased off. I drew in close to no. 1464 to get out of the wind, and waited for Phoebe to catch up to me.
“Well,” she said, “it makes sense. I mean, you wouldn’t have an organization for the homeless on Park Avenue, would you?”
“Does Baltimore have a Park Avenue? Is it a good address?”
“Don’t quibble, Patience.” She walked up to the door and stood on tiptoe to get a peek through the small window at the top. The window was double-paned and wired, the way the windows in fire doors and buildings in high crime areas always are. I wasn’t sure if this was a high crime area or not. It looked like it ought to be, except there wasn’t anybody around to play criminal or victim.
Phoebe stepped away from the door. “Maybe there’s a buzzer. That’s a hall in there.”
“You’re absolutely sure this is the right address?” I asked her.
Phoebe snorted. “I know I’m a little distracted these days, Patience. I had her repeat it twice. Then I wrote it down. Then I read it back to her. This is the address.”
“And she didn’t say what it was about?”
“She called Christopher Brand a son of a—”
“Never mind.”
“She called him that six times, Patience.”
I checked the door, but there was no buzzer. I pulled on it, just in case I’d been wrong in assuming it was locked. It wouldn’t budge. I walked to the left and tried to get a peek through the window, but I had no joy there either. That window was also double-glassed and wired, but at some time in the past it had been breached. Its surface boasted a spiderweb of cracks in one corner and two holes the size of fists in another. It had been backed with a piece of warped and discolored plywood.
“Nothing?” Phoebe said.
“The place looks entirely uninhabited,” I said. “And it doesn’t look too safe. God, if Evelyn was going to have a Baltimore office, she could have done better than this.”
“Maybe they’re upstairs.”
Phoebe backed up, all the way to the end of the pavement. Like the street, the sidewalk had been almost viciously neglected. It was full of holes, and its edge was uneven, as if it had settled into soft ground.
Phoebe tottered a little, looked down at the mess she was in and then stepped onto the asphalt. There wasn’t any traffic in sight.
She shielded her eyes with one hand and gazed upward. “Patience?” she said. “Maybe you should come look at this.”
“What?”
“Third floor.”
I went to stand beside her, and immediately found out why she’d shielded her eyes. There was no sun, but there was still a lot of rain. Without my hand to protect them, my eyes kept filling up with water. I made like an Indian scout and squinted at the windows on the third floor.
My height gave me an advantage. What Phoebe had probably seen was Christopher Brand’s body, seeming to float by itself in the air. What I saw was not only the body but the two women carrying it. They were staggering.
“My God,” I said.
“Is he dead?” Phoebe said. “He looks discorporeal.”
“I don’t know.”
I leaned over, got a piece of indefinable rubble from the street and chucked it upward. I missed. I got another and tried again. This time, I must have hit something, although I didn’t see it happen. The two women stopped struggling and turned toward the window. I got a third piece of rubble and tried again.
“This is weird,” I said. “You know what I was doing when you found me? I was on my way to Christopher Brand’s room.”
“Wet like that?”
“Here they come.”
Actually, only one of them was coming, but that was enough. Hazel Ganz had her hands around Christopher’s feet. She didn’t let go. She just swung herself around and drew closer to the window, looking down.
A second later, she dropped the feet, rushed to the window and threw it open.
“Thank God,” she said. “We’ve been going crazy. Come to the door and I’ll buzz you in.”
“Hazel,” somebody said from behind her. “You let go of him. He fell on me.”
