Rich, Radiant Slaughter

by Jane Haddam

  The hallway was a long, narrow space with graffiti on the walls, proof positive that life had existed in this part of town once upon a time. It wasn’t mindless graffiti either. There were no Anglo-Saxon declarations of what the reader could do with himself. There were no monuments to Luis 25 or Harold 169. There were pictures, in spray-paint primary colors, of dragons and knights and damsels in mantillas.

  I locked the door behind us as soon as we were inside, just in case the neighborhood was not as deserted as it appeared. There was a single bulb in the hall ceiling, not much help but better than total darkness. There was a door that must have led to the room the ground-floor window had been for. It was boarded over with strips of plywood and had a sign on it that said KEEP OUT.

  I moved to the back and found a set of metal garbage cans, empty, and a fire door with BASEMENT stenciled on it. I turned back to Phoebe and shrugged.

  “There has to be a way up,” I said. “I just can’t find it.”

  “Patience?” Hazel Ganz’s voice floated at me out of the gloom. “Over here.”

  I looked around, confused. There really didn’t seem to be anything else back there. Garbage cans, basement door, pile of plywood sticks like the ones that had been nailed to the door in front. I gave the plywood sticks another examination.

  “Patience,” Hazel said again. “It’s right there. Behind all that junk. There used to be a door but it was stolen.”

  “Don’t shout,” I called up to her. “When you shout, you echo.”

  “Sorry.”

  She’d shouted anyway. I went to the plywood sticks and picked through them. They were piled up so thickly, it was hard to understand how anyone had got past them, but that they could be gotten past, and that there was something to get to once you did, was becoming clear. On the wall behind there was a hole, not door-shaped but ragged. If all that had happened here was that someone had stolen a door, he must have tried to take the rest of the wall along with him.

  I shoved plywood aside with my feet and clambered through. I found myself at the bottom of a flight of thick, narrow stairs, painted red. There was no light in the stairwell. The stairs might have gone up forever or stopped three steps above the last one I could see.

  “Find it?” Hazel called down.

  “Yes,” I said. “Just a minute.” I stuck my head back into the hall and waved at Phoebe. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll help you through.”

  “Are those stairs?” Phoebe asked.

  “You got it.”

  She started slowly toward me, and I ducked back into the stairwell.

  “You’ve got to be nuts,” I said. “You must know she’s pregnant. You must have realized she’d come with me if you left the message with her. What’s gotten into you anyway?”

  “Patience,” Hazel said. “We’ve got an emergency here.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Dead drunk, maybe.”

  That was a relief. I heard the sound of plywood falling and darted back into the doorway to help Phoebe through. She looked like she was about to be sick again, and I didn’t blame her. There was an underlying smell to the place that got to you after a while. It was sweet and wet, like organic maple syrup gone to mold. I put my hand out and let Phoebe use it for a cane. She slid a little, but she made it.

  “What’s going on here?” she said.

  “According to Hazel, Christopher Brand is drunk.”

  “So what else is new?” Phoebe said. “She got us all the way out to this place because of that? He gets drunk all the time. And ends up in the tank. And comes out looking like a bum and talking like a martyr.”

  “Why don’t we just go up and see,” I said.

  Phoebe grunted. “There isn’t any light. I don’t even know if I can fit up those things.”

  There was a rustling at the top and a nasal hum that might have been two voices whispering. Then there was a groan, and Hazel said, “He’s waking up. Oh, dear God in heaven, don’t let him wake up.”

  I climbed two steps. “Hazel?”

  “Get up here fast,” Hazel shouted, “I’m not kidding, Patience, I’m desperate.”

  “Hazel, what are you doing here? What’s Christopher doing here? What am I doing here?”

  “You’re here because I called you,” Hazel snapped. “And I’m here because he called me. What the hell do you think?”

  “Why would Christopher Brand call you?”

  Another groan. Another spate of panicked whispering. Something that sounded like a foot coming in contact with a door.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Hazel said. “Why did he call me? Why do you think he called me? Because I’ve been sleeping with him since Minneapolis, that’s why he called me. Will you two please get up here?”

  She was shouting again. Her nasal Midwestern twang bounced down the stairwell like an accusation made on a xylophone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The upstairs room was in much better shape than what we’d seen of the rest of the building—but that wasn’t saying much. It must have been a dance studio once. The exercise bars were still up on the north wall, and the south wall was solid with mirrors. The rest of the room was given over to a more recent purpose. Stacks of pamphlets and newsletters were everywhere, their banners spelling out THE PEOPLE’S CENTER FOR SOCIAL ACTION in hand-drawn letters. File folders were piled into torn cardboard boxes, some marked in red with KEEP and others in blue with DUMP. There had to be twenty-five or thirty telephone jacks under the line of windows that faced the street. The phones were gone, but when they’d been in the place must have done record Ma Bell business.

  I pushed Phoebe into the room’s only chair and looked down at Christopher Brand, lying at the feet of a woman who looked both exasperated and indignant. She was dressed in the uniform of Young People with a Social Conscience everywhere, right down to the earth shoes and the white socks with the yellow stripe on the cuffs. Her hair was long and colorless and pulled away from her face with a rubber band at the nape of her neck. She had a nail-biting habit even worse than mine.

  I shot Hazel an inquiring glance. Hazel shrugged.

  “This is Darcy Penter,” she said. “She runs this place.”

  “I don’t run this place,” Darcy said waspishly. “I’m just organizing our move. Or I was, until he showed up.”

  “You’ve found new quarters?” It was a silly thing to say. I wished I hadn’t.

  Darcy, fortunately for me, was glad I had. “You can’t begin to understand how hard it is,” she said. “Things change so fast. I never knew that until I started working here. None of us did. We thought we’d go into a bad neighborhood and try to make it better. And we did. But the neighborhoods—the first place we had, the block went yuppie just like that. In less than a year. And now this.”

  “It does look abandoned,” I said.

  “It might as well be the Sahara Desert,” Darcy said. “Our entire constituency just packed up and moved out. They didn’t even move any place we could follow them. Some corporation came and bought up all the property around here, and the city made them pay to move people, and the people all wanted to go to … Well, we couldn’t follow them.”

  “Could we get to the point here?” Hazel said. “Him.”

  We all turned to stare at Christopher once again. He was snoring noisily into the hardwood, looking peaceful.

  “I can’t tell you anything about him,” Darcy said. “He just came bombing up here about an hour and a half ago, asking all kinds of questions, and then he ran off somewhere and must have used the phone. And had about six drinks. The next thing I know, he’s passed out cold and she’s on the doorstep, wanting to know what’s going on.”

  “Did he tell you what he came for?”

  Darcy sighed. “He said it was about that Housing Project thing. The Ad Hoc Committee for Advocacy for the Homeless. But I couldn’t tell him anything. I mean, we did try to do something with that. We’re very concerned about the homeless. We sent away for their literature and we trie
d to do an education campaign, but they were just so disorganized. We’d ask for material and never get it. Or we’d call and try to talk to somebody about getting speakers or slide shows and we’d never find anybody who knew what was going on. By that time we’d listed them as one of our contact organizations, so when the tour came everybody thought we knew something, but we didn’t. We didn’t even want to.”

  “He said on the phone that he had it all figured out,” Hazel said. “He was really ranting, Patience, I’m not kidding. Laughing his head off. He must have been drunk even then.”

  “And you came right out to rescue him,” I said.

  Hazel flushed. “Don’t make me sound like a ninny, I’m not. I’d have come out for anybody I knew. And this did sound strange.”

  “Why? As far as I can tell, it’s just the sort of thing you’d expect from something Evelyn was involved in. None of her organizations was effective. None of them was efficient. Hell, if it ran well, she didn’t want to know about it.”

  “But Evelyn’s missing,” Hazel pointed out. “And that woman is dead. So if there was a scam at The Housing Project—”

  Phoebe and I exchanged a look. Hers had a smile attached to it, but not a very nice smile. I got out my cigarettes, friends in need and refuge of first resort whenever I’m under stress.

  “Hazel,” I said, “Evelyn isn’t missing.”

  “She’s come back?”

  “Why do I always get involved in these things?” Phoebe said. “Why me?”

  Phoebe got involved in these things because she asked to come along, but she knew that. I got my lighter out and lit up.

  “Evelyn’s dead,” I said. “We found her body in the trunk of Tempesta Stewart’s car just a little while ago. It looks like the same kind of thing that happened to Mrs. Keeley.”

  Death had an effect on Darcy Penter that nothing else could have, not even a declaration of solidarity for the people’s struggle for whatever. Whether it was curiosity or sympathy wasn’t clear, but what it resulted in was instant coffee out of a thermos and a glass of Poland Springs water for Phoebe. In no time at all, we were sitting on the floor in a politically correct circle, behaving as if we were out to lunch with our mothers.

  “I’m really not the kind of fool you think I am,” Hazel said. “I know what he is. I knew it from the beginning. That was the point.”

  “Letting him jump your bones and insult you at the same time was the point?” I said.

  “You’re not being fair,” Phoebe said.

  “Sex was the point,” Hazel said. “Oh, for God’s sake. You know how long I’ve been divorced? Seven years. You know how many affairs I’ve had in all that time? Two. Both at conferences. I don’t want to pull that kind of thing at home with the children around to watch me, and I don’t want to do it where my ex-husband can hear about it either. He’s been pushing the custody thing since the day I walked out on him. He started out saying I’d never be able to support them all, but romance took care of that. With sex—”

  “Cleveland is Cleveland,” Phoebe said solemnly.

  “Cleveland is not the back of beyond,” Hazel said tartly. “Oh, who am I kidding? I don’t know what Cleveland’s like with that kind of thing. I’ve never had to face it. And I never intend to. So—”

  “So you got horny and Christopher was available,” I said.

  “Actually, it was Christopher who got horny and I who was available, but I wish you wouldn’t put it like that. Oh hell. Why not?”

  “It just makes me crazy,” I said. “You’re an intelligent woman. You should know better.”

  “Know better than what? I sure as hell know better than to think Prince Charming is going to come along. Why do you think my books don’t sell better than they do? I’m always putting in things about not trusting to true love and God knows what else. But anyway, it wasn’t just the sex. I was beginning to think of him as an interesting psychological type.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” I said.

  “No, really,” Hazel insisted. “He changed after Minneapolis. He really did. Not from sleeping with me. Or not about sleeping with me, at any rate. He—before then, he was all bravado. He’d talk about how he didn’t have to give a shit about anything, not any of the rest of us on the tour or Evelyn or Jon Lowry’s money or the booksellers. But he didn’t mean it. He was scared to death. It’d been years since he’d been on the tour circuit. Nobody wanted him. Nobody trusted him. His publishers were keeping it quiet, but it was really affecting his sales. His last two books made the best-seller lists only because they were released into dead time. In the beginning, he could get right on there with Stephen King and Jean Auel as competition.”

  “And he lost his bravado after Minneapolis?” I said.

  “He didn’t lose it, exactly,” Hazel said. “He lost the fake. He wasn’t frightened anymore. It was like he had something new. Something he could count on.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” She frowned into her coffee, which was decaffeinated and filmy on top. “I can tell you when,” she said. “Almost to the minute.”

  “When he changed?”

  “Uh-huh. You remember when we had that cocktail party, the one the Minneapolis AWR gave?”

  “We ought to,” Phoebe said. “One of Tempesta’s fans told Pay she was a tool of the devil and poured a pitcher full of punch down her dress.”

  “I think that woman had been smoking marijuana,” I said.

  “Never mind the woman,” Hazel said. “The thing is, when we went into that, he was just the same. In fact, he was pushing. He used to do that. He’d get all insecure, and start ranting and railing about how Evelyn was using him, forcing him into things like the tour when she knew he was down, making him do stupid stuff that would embarrass him. That cocktail party really made him mad. He hates being around romance writers. He thinks it hurts his status. Anyway, we were there for about half an hour, and he got a phone call from his lawyer.”

  “How do you know it was from his lawyer?” I asked.

  “He said so when he came back. The cocktail party was in the hotel, and they paged him and he went to the phone. When he came back, he was as high as Lydia gets when she takes those pills. And that’s not all.”

  “Christ, you’d think it would be enough,” I said. “Why is it that with Christopher nothing is ever ‘all’?”

  “Mid-life crisis,” Hazel said dismissively. “The thing is, he’s really obsessive about sex. He wants it all the time. We’d started sleeping together about two days before the cocktail party, and we’d been at it every second we didn’t have to appear in public. Then that night, all he wanted to do was talk on the phone. He must have called everybody he knew. His editor. His regular publicist. His accountant.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Phoebe said. “Everything we’ve ever gotten mixed up in, it’s had accountants in it somewhere.”

  “Yes, well. I thought he was just easing off—and thank God, quite frankly, because I really don’t have that kind of drive. But the next day he was right back at it, just like nothing had happened. Except that he was—different.”

  I thought back. “You know,” I said finally, “you’re right. He didn’t start to needle Jon Lowry until after Minneapolis. In Philadelphia and Boston he just stayed out of Jon’s way.”

  “Oh, Jon Lowry,” Hazel said. “He really hates Jon Lowry. I don’t know what it is. Jealousy over the money, probably. And all that publicity without having to do anything for it. Chris told me once that Jon could get a book on the Times list any time he wanted to, just because people were impressed with billionaires. I was surprised when he started all that stuff, really. Calling Jon a wimp and telling him he’d make a great faggot and all the rest of it. Evelyn protected Jon like—well, all I can think of is clichés.”

  “Evelyn and Jon inspire clichés,” I said.

  “Did she really die just the way Mrs. Keeley did? With that puncture thing on the back of her neck?”
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br />   I nodded. “Barbara Defborn told me the examination of Mrs. Keeley showed an almost perfect puncture—some method they use to kill lab animals for dissection. Except that instead of using whatever it was they use for that—a thin wire thing, I forget what Barbara called it—”

  “A sterile awl,” Darcy Penter put in helpfully. She blushed. “I was very good in biology. Until I realized how scientists are inevitably coopted by the military-industrial complex, I thought I might be one. You have to sterilize the awl because if you don’t you end up with foreign bacteria in the tissues, and when you look through the microscope, you don’t know what you’re seeing.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Whoever it was didn’t use one of those. Barbara says the coroner thinks the weapon was one of those big needles they use to inject doses of poison antidote in emergencies. They’re about eight inches long and the needle is really thick. And hollow. She said that was a good thing and a bad thing, at least as far as killing was concerned. It was bad because the needle is almost too thick. The area of vulnerability back there isn’t very large. It was a good thing because it not only managed to cause trauma going in, it sucked up necessary tissue going out. That way, if the killer didn’t know what he was doing, he could still be fairly sure of causing permanent damage. He’d have taken out enough spinal fluid to cause paralysis and brain damage at the least.”

  “Jesus,” Hazel said.

  “It’s even worse than that,” I said. “They found Mrs. Keeley’s blood loaded with Darvocet. He drugged her first so he could be sure she wouldn’t move.”

  “He or she,” Hazel said. “It could have been Tempesta Stewart.”

  I got to my feet. “It could have been him,” I said, pointing my toe at Christopher Brand. “You’re the one who said he hated us.”

  “Why would he bother to kill Mrs. Keeley? And I didn’t say he hated us. I said he hated Jon Lowry. I think he just thought the rest of us were monuments to the boob mentality of the American reading public. So to speak.”

  “I know another reason he might have used a needle like that instead of a sterile awl,” Darcy Penter said.