by Jane Haddam
“What about Christopher Brand?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. We haven’t seen him.”
I swallowed hard. “I think I’d get out of here if I were you,” I said. “He’s got no reason not to blow it. Not a single one.”
“What about staying alive?”
“Not in this case. The whole thing happened in the first place because he has a pathological need not to get caught doing things he doesn’t want people to know he’s doing. Sort of.”
“Oh, fine.”
She dropped the hand mike and walked away. Moments later, she was talking to one of the firemen, gesticulating wildly and marking her points by stamping her foot.
I moved away from the patrol car, toward the barrier rather than away from it. I might not have gotten very far, but the patrolman at that point in the line was one of the ones I’d already met and he let me approach. Behind me, I could hear Nick’s deep-throated bass booming into the silence.
“McKenna! Get away from there! What do you think you’re doing?”
I got as close as I could. I wanted a good look at The Butler Did It’s front windows. Barbara had said Jon Lowry was in there, but I could see no sign of him. The store was dark. The streetlamps reflected into the plate glass. I squinted and turned my head and tried a half dozen different angles, but either there was nothing to see or I just couldn’t see it. My arms and legs and back and neck were going through agonies of spasms. I tried shaking them out, and then did what I always did when I got too scared to do anything else. I took a deep breath.
It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I’ve seen half a dozen B movies with gas spills in them, but never one that let on what the fumes were like. They didn’t just smell awful, they hurt. They ripped right into my lungs as if I’d tried to breathe sandpaper. I gagged and choked and shut down respiration as far as I could. My body wanted air. It kept trying to get it. It got more sandpaper instead.
I backed up automatically. I couldn’t help myself. I stumbled over a wandering cop and accidentally kicked the shins of a stray fireman. The fireman had a gas mask on, and an oxygen tank. I didn’t blame him.
I hit one of the patrol cars and came to a stop, my eyes tearing. I’d never felt so awful in my life. I would have thrown up if I could have, but I hadn’t eaten anything all day. There was nothing in there to heave. I sat down on the patrol car’s bumper and put my head between my legs, just to see if it would work. It didn’t.
When I came upright again, Nick was standing beside me. He looked exasperated.
“Don’t put your head down there,” he snapped. “The fumes are heavier down there. You’re going to make it worse.”
“Thanks for telling me,” I said. “Christ, Nick, how can he still be alive in there? Why hasn’t he suffocated yet?”
“Just look at him.”
I followed Nick’s pointing finger. This time, I found Jonathon Hancock Lowry with no trouble at all. He was hanging off The Butler Did It’s six-foot-tall sign, wedged up there between the ground floor and the second by what looked like sheer force of will. I supposed he had to be holding on to, or sitting on, something. I just couldn’t see what.
“He’s just far enough up so the wind’s pulling most of it away from him,” Nick said. “He could stay up there damn near forever.”
“But what’s he doing?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know?”
“Do you know anything?” I asked him.
“I came with you, McKenna. I know if he starts screaming ‘top of the world, Ma,’ I’m going to duck.”
“There’s Gail Larson,” I said. “She looks bad.”
He stepped aside to let her come between us, and she smiled at him in a distracted way that said her manners were glued on but nothing else was. I’d always thought of her as a pretty woman, but she’d lost it in the crisis. Her blond hair was thick with sweat and hanging down the back of her neck. The skin on her face was red in patches and dead white in others. She was shaking crazily under a thick coat that looked like it could have kept out the cold in an Alaskan blizzard.
“My God,” she said, “I don’t even know if I’m insured for this.”
“You can sue his estate,” Nick said drily. “I’ll even represent you. Christ knows, the money will be there to collect.”
“What’s that?” Gail said.
We all turned to look, but we needn’t have. Christopher Brand had a voice as deep and loud as Nick’s, and stronger. It exploded over the block like something coming through a bullhorn. Christopher Brand had no bullhorn. He just had himself, and the crazy recklessness that had been the shape and tenor of his life.
“What’s wrong with you people?” he shouted. “What are you standing around for? He’s going to blow the place up!”
I jerked my head around to look at the sign and caught Jon Lowry just as he moved. He didn’t move so much as convulse. His body bent double and jackknifed straight again. For a few long seconds, he looked as if he were standing on thin air.
Jon Lowry did not have a deep voice. He did have panic, and craziness, and fear.
“You’re dead,” he screamed. “You’re dead you’re dead you’re DEAD.”
“You’re NUTS,” Christopher screamed back.
Jon clutched at his clothes, fumbling and clawing at himself. Somebody switched on a searchlight and pointed it straight at him. Suddenly, I could see him plain, the metal bar he was standing on, the way his body was wedged against the brick. He couldn’t see anything at all. The light poured into his eyes and he blinked, squinted, shuddered. He clutched at his face and shook his head, as if that would help. Most important of all, he started to slip.
Christopher Brand saw it first, and for once in my life I didn’t condemn him for the reflexive thoughtlessness that had been the contrapuntal theme of his life. I would have blown it—thought the whole thing through, wasted time, thrown away my chance. Christopher Brand just moved. He was surprisingly fast for a drunk with a pipe and cigarette habit, surprisingly fast for anyone. He went running up under the sign and jumped.
I didn’t think he was going to make it. For some reason, I assumed he’d have to get high enough to get a firm grip and tackle Jon from there. The sign was well off the street. I was as tall as Christopher and Nick was taller, and I didn’t believe either of us would have made it.
Christopher Brand was smarter than I was, that time as well. He wasn’t trying to get a hold. He was just trying to make himself a nuisance. The first time up he slapped his hand against the sole of Jon Lowry’s shoe. The second time he caught a lace and tried to pull. Jon kicked air, ruining his balance even more than he had when he’d jerked out of control under the assault of light.
“Get DOWN off of there,” Christopher was yelling. “Get DOWN. What the HELL do you think you’re DOING, you little SHIT?”
“Oh God,” I heard Barbara Defborn say, her voice coming out of the darkness as if from another room. “He’s going to blow it. We’re all going to end up on the moon.”
“CRAP,” Christopher Brand said.
He took one more leap into the air. He put both his hands out this time, and managed to get Jon on the shin of his right leg. In the searchlight’s glare I could see the pack of matches, held aloft as if they were what Christopher was reaching for. The hand that was clutching them flailed, hit the brick of the building and swung forward. The arm the hand was attached to wrapped itself around the edge of the sign and went rigid. Christopher Brand jumped one more time and Jon jerked, even though he hadn’t been touched. His match hand cramped and uncramped, cramped and uncramped, and I saw it. It looked like a plain square pack of matches of the size sold by the hundred in boxes in novelty stores, and it went floating to the street like an oversized flake of snow.
Christopher Brand walked over to it and picked it up. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What’s wrong with you people? This guy has to be some kind of lunatic.”
It would have been the anticlimax of all
time, except that that was when the sirens started up.
Maybe they should have turned them on at the beginning. As soon as he heard them, Jonathon Hancock Lowry fainted dead away.
Epilogue
Just about a week later, on the day Adrienne and I were getting ready to leave for the country, David Grossman came to my door looking for Phoebe. When the bell rang, I thought it was my mother’s driver—again. Phoebe had recovered sufficiently from morning sickness and depression by the time we got back to New York to help Adrienne pack. Because of that, Garrison had already made six trips between car and apartment and was likely to make six more. I was standing in the kitchen with the door to the hallway shut tight, looking down at the stack of New York Posts my mother had sent up with the car and trying to tell Phoebe and Nick what Barbara Defborn’s phone call had been about. Barbara Defborn had woken me up at six forty-five that morning. It was an event strangely in keeping with all the rest of it: to have anything to do with Evelyn Nesbitt Kleig, at any time or for any reason, was to be denied the comfort of sleep.
The Posts were the ones I hadn’t seen, the ones that came out when we were still in Baltimore. The headlines said: KILLER FIEND LOOSE. The explanatory banners said: NEW YORK’S LOVE GIRL DETECTIVE TO HELP BALTIMORE POLICE SOLVE MOST DIABOLICAL CRIME IN CITY’S HISTORY. I kept trying to figure out how they’d managed to get that immense sentence into such large type and still fit it onto the page. Of course, there was nothing else on the page but the short headline and a large picture of me, but the Post thought I was a celebrity.
I pushed the papers away across the kitchen table. “I think I liked this thing better when Rupert Murdoch owned it,” I said. “At least Murdoch’s people got the facts straight.”
“How can you say Murdoch’s people got the facts straight?” Nick said. “Last year they were saying you were dead.”
Out in the hall, Adrienne was telling Garrison to hide that box in the trunk because it was a surprise. The hall door clicked open and clicked shut again. I took my mug and sat down.
“Anyway,” I said, “I got a couple of the details wrong, but Barbara doesn’t seem to be noticing. She thinks I’m a genius. Or maybe a witch. But they found out where he got the needle—actually, a plunger and a supply of needles. He just walked into a doctor on some Godforsaken side street in St. Louis and asked for a prescription for wasp-sting antidote. Makes me think Darcy Penter should give up politics and go back to biology.”
“Everybody should give up politics and go back to biology,” Phoebe said. “Or give up politics and not do anything, I’d be willing to support the entire United States House of Representatives for life if they just promised to go home and not do anything ever again.”
“Especially to the tax code,” Nick said.
“I didn’t think about the politics thing until we were practically home,” I said. “Maybe that’s because thinking about how Evelyn took us in makes me feel like an ass, and the more obvious it was, the more of an ass I feel. I mean, nobody on earth collects money for right-to-life and right-to-choose.”
“I figured that out,” Phoebe said. “It was something Tempesta said. That she never trusted Evelyn because all the conservative groups Evelyn was involved in were ones she hadn’t heard of. She said the conservative charitable community is actually fairly small. Everybody knows everybody. But she never knew Evelyn except as a publicist.”
“What’s Tempesta doing these days?” I said.
“Trying to convince her husband to send his bodyguard to a—I don’t remember what they’re called. For mentally retarded adults, where they live in a house with a lot of other mentally retarded adults and a normal-intelligence caretaker.”
“A community house,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“That was the business with all the vandalism she kept taking the rap for and didn’t do,” Nick said. “It was driving me crazy. So I got her alone and found out. Her husband has this bodyguard who’s sweet enough most of the time, but he’s not bright and he can’t really think things through. So he hears the Downtown Church is a bad, evil place and he gets all worked up and goes hauling off to do something about it. The same with the abortion clinic. Tempesta likes the man. She didn’t think it was fair for him to get into serious trouble when all he was doing was trying to do the right thing. So—”
“I think I’m going to have a headache,” I said.
“The chalk,” Nick said.
“Right. Well, you were right and I was wrong. That was put on the money in New York, at the Toliver-Campion Trust. Actually, it was done years ago, when Jon first converted his money to cash. You were the one who told me how crazy his trust officers got about it. One of them was this really old man who’d been with the Trust since the Depression. He remembered the chalk from the days they’d tried to use it for kidnappers. When Jon put all that money in his safety-deposit boxes, this man just had it all dusted. It had been lying around waiting to go blue for ages. Barbara said it was a good thing Jon turned out to be crazy after all.”
“Well, the bank could have had a little trouble with lawsuits if he hadn’t,” Nick said.
“If it had been on the money all that time,” Phoebe said, “why didn’t Jon know about it?”
“He did. He just never thought it was anything but a nuisance and an insult. He really took incredible chances. You know the prescription dope he drugged Margaret Keeley and Evelyn with?”
“I knew we’d get to that,” Nick said.
“There’s nothing to get to,” I said. “The doctor he got the wasppoison antidote from had a locked cabinet in his examining room, full of the stuff. Jon just waited for him to go out of the room, busted into the thing—and it wasn’t subtle, from what I hear. He just broke this little glass window it had and took a handful at random. They found the rest of the stuff in one of his suitcases. Butazolidin. All kinds of nonsense. And—There’s the door again. Adrienne must have locked herself out.”
I put my coffee cup down and went into the hall, not particularly worried about the fact that I was dressed in nothing but a calf-length T-shirt sleep thing from Saks and one of Nick’s flannel shirts. Garrison had watched me grow up, and everybody else was family.
I stepped over cardboard boxes full of wrapped gifts and suit carriers full of Adrienne’s party clothes and an unidentifiable soft package wound with silver wrapping paper with a bow on top. I also stepped over the cat, who was trying to take up residence in an open hatbox. What I was doing with a hatbox, or why it was open, I didn’t know.
“I put that key on a ribbon so you’d wear it around your neck,” I said as I swung the door open. “I don’t want to worry about you—Oh Christ.”
“Hello, Pay,” David Grossman said.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Looking for Phoebe.”
I sighed. Like Phoebe, David was short and roundish and cherubic-looking—most of the time. At the moment, he seemed close to suicidal. His plain blue suit was wrinkled. His plain white shirt had a yellow stain on the collar. His tie was something he should have been talked out of buying in the first place. A large part of me wanted to haul off and kick him hard enough to crack his kneecaps. He deserved it. He did not, however, look like he deserved it. He looked like he was going to sweat himself into dehydrated death.
“Pay?” he said.
“Look,” I said. “I’m going to close this door. Then I’m going to go into the kitchen. If she wants to let you in, I don’t suppose it’s any of my business.”
“It’s your apartment, Pay.”
“You couldn’t prove it by what goes on around here.”
I swung the door shut, stared at it for a moment and then marched back into the kitchen. The cat had preceded me. She was sitting in Phoebe’s lap, licking drops of cream from Phoebe’s extended index finger. Nick was sitting on the far side of the table, reading the Post story about me and laughing silently and convulsively. I snatched the paper out of his hands and threw
it on the floor.
“You,” I said to Phoebe. “The doorbell was for you.”
“David?”
“I shut the door in his face. I think he’s still standing in the hall, waiting to be let in.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t do it,” Nick said. “He’s a jerk.”
Phoebe got up and left the room. We heard the door open in the hall, and the low murmur of voices, and the sound of footsteps going toward the living room.
Nick said, “Whoosh.”
My coffee cup was nearly empty. I refilled the kettle with water and put it back on the stove.
“Does he have anything like an explanation for why he’s been behaving the way he’s been behaving?” I said.
“I don’t know, McKenna. I haven’t been talking to him.”
“Not at all?”
“I’ve cursed him out once or twice. I’ve made some statements on what I consider to be the state of our partnership, meaning over. Pay, I’ve known Phoebe all my life. We both came up from the same place in the same way, and we kept each other from going crazy in the years we were adjusting to not being poor anymore. Which is a hell of a lot harder to do than you’d think.”
“You tell me that once a month,” I said. “Usually when my mother comes in to take Adrienne for lunch.”
“Your mother runs around in a 1936 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost with a uniformed driver. It’s a good thing she’s a nice woman.”
“What does this have to do with David?”
“Nothing. But you ought to be glad I’m a pacifist sort. He’s out there in the living room and I’m not wringing his neck.”
The whistle went off on the kettle. I took the kettle from the stove and poured the water into my not quite automatic coffee machine. It was made of wood and looked pretty, but it was just as much trouble as the old grind-and-drip.
“I wonder how the baby really is,” I said.
