Murder and Gold

by Ann Aptaker

  We’re seated opposite Adair’s desk. Winnie, elegant in a dark brown suit that gives his enormous bulk the dignity of a mountain, stands beside me. He says, “Sergeant Adair, on what evidence did you arrest my client, Cantor Gold?”

  “Ask the prosecutor. He’s obliged to share that information. My job was to haul her in.”

  “On whose instructions?”

  Adair leans forward across his desk. The grin on his tough-as-nails face should be in a horror movie. “Ask the prosecutor that, too.”

  I say, “While we’re all waiting breathlessly for the prosecutor to fork over, suppose you tell me just how Huber was killed.”

  “You shot him, Gold. In the back, like the cowardly scum you are.”

  I start to ask another question, but the door to Adair’s office opens and a well-tailored gent walks in. “So sorry to be late. Friday traffic is wretched.” He’s one of those gray-at-the-temples types, with a thin, chiseled nose that always seems to sniff at the world. “Hello, Vivienne,” he says. “They told me downstairs that you’d already been sent up here. Let’s go.”

  Adair says, “And just who might you be?”

  The guy whips a card out from his breast pocket, hands it to Adair. “I am Arthur Henley of the firm of Henley & Crown, Miss Parkhurst Trent’s attorneys. The paperwork for her release is being signed as we speak. Hello, Winston,” he says to Winnie in an offhand way that lets us all know he doesn’t count Winnie among his more beloved courtroom comrades. “Vivienne, I have a cab waiting.”

  Vivienne stays in her chair. “Just a minute, Arthur. Cantor was about to ask the sergeant something, and I want to know what it is.”

  Henley says, “As your attorney, Vivienne, I advise you to have nothing to do with Mr. Maximovic’s client or the charges against her.”

  Vivienne shoots me a look that carries tenderness and insolence at the same time, the eternal pairing of her aristocratic and savage bloodlines. “It’s too late for that, Arthur.”

  Winnie says, “Yes, Arthur, it is rather late. I have an appointment at City Hall, which I should not miss. It would dearly disappoint the councilman.” The hint of bite in Winnie’s courtly delivery puts the hoity-toity attorney in his place, while Winnie’s smile could charm a schoolmarm into stripping naked. To me, he says, “You were saying, Cantor?”

  “Oh yeah,” I say with a side-eye at Henley. “So tell me, Sergeant Adair, just where did Huber’s killing take place?”

  Adair gives me a frown and a disgusted tsk. “Keep pushing your luck, Gold, and I’ll send you back downstairs so fast you won’t even know you’re outta that chair.”

  Winnie says, “Just a moment, sergeant. I am Cantor’s attorney. You are obliged to inform me of the reason for her arrest and the nature of the resulting charges against her. So let’s address that question again, shall we? I want to know where Lieutenant Huber was killed, the weapon used, and the hour of the crime. If you do not cooperate, I will be forced to file a complaint. Actually,” he adds with his most winning smile, “I can do that while I’m at City Hall this afternoon. I’m sure the councilman can hurry the process.”

  That’s why I have Winston Maximovic as my lawyer. High-priced, fancy attorneys like Henley might play the legal and courtroom games with panache, but Winnie Maximovic plays the game of power. It saves me every time.

  It won this round with Sergeant Adair, who uncomfortably nods his cooperation. “Huber was coming out of the coffee joint down the block. He liked to get his mid-morning bagel and coffee over there. He said the walk helped clear his head. He was on his way back here when a bullet found him. Your bullet, Gold.”

  Winnie says, “How do you know the bullet came from my client’s weapon? Was there a ballistics check on a gun you never recovered or that we never turned over to you? And did anyone at the scene identify my client?”

  I jump on Winnie’s bandwagon. “And while we’re at it, what time did all this happen?”

  Adair looks like his birthday cake’s been rained on.

  Winnie presses. “Answer the questions, please, sergeant. I do not want to keep the councilman waiting.”

  Adair leans back in his chair, loosens his tie, stares into space with the worried expression of someone watching his career shred in front of his eyes. “There are people,” he says, looking quickly at Winnie, then at me, then at nothing again, “people who make decisions. I don’t know who those people are. If the brass does, they’re not telling. They just pass those decisions along, and guys like me are ordered to carry them out.”

  I say, “And I was one of those decisions.”

  Henley says, “And so was my client, Miss Parkhurst Trent. Tell me, sergeant, was any of this meant to stick? Or was it all just a warning.” Henley’s finally convinced me he’s a savvy lawyer.

  The question angers Adair. “When I make an arrest, counselor, it’s meant to stick.”

  I say, “In that case, sergeant, let’s see what you can do with the murder charge you’ve tacked onto me. What time was Huber gunned down?”

  “Shortly before ten this morning.”

  “How shortly before?”

  “Well, 9:56,” he says. “If you’ve got an alibi, Gold, it better be solid.”

  “Solid as they come, sergeant. I’d just arrived at a funeral, burying Huber’s previous case.”

  If Adair’s sigh was any deeper, he’d be pulling air up from between his toes. “Lamarr,” he says. “Alice Lamarr. I guess if I check, someone can confirm you were there?”

  “Would you doubt the word of a chaplain?”

  Adair shakes his head. “Huber said he didn’t buy Lamarr’s suicide. Do you?”

  I answer with a shrug. That’s all I’ll give him. After my Devil’s bargain with Huber, I learned my lesson about sharing anything with cops.

  “Play it smart, Gold,” he says. “Maybe we can clean this thing up together.”

  “Listen, Adair, the last time I made a deal with a cop, he wound up dead and I got arrested. Don’t be nice to me, sergeant. We both might not survive it.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Vivienne and I take Henley’s waiting cab, leaving the flabbergasted attorney on the street.

  I’d given Vivienne my coat when we walked out of the police station into the chilly September afternoon. Even in the cab, she keeps it wrapped close around her. By the time we arrive at her place, she’s not shivering too much.

  George looks like he’s been given the go-ahead to breathe again when he opens the door. “Oh, Miss Vivienne, I’m so glad you’ve returned safely.”

  She says, “Thank you, George,” with deep and genuine warmth, borne probably of being taken to the park by the faithful butler when Vivienne was a toddler and her parents were busy being New York swells. After George takes my coat from his mistress’s shoulders and hangs the coat and my cap on the hall rack, Vivienne asks him to bring a pot of hot coffee and a tray of sandwiches to the living room.

  George gives a dignified “Of course,” and trots off to the kitchen. I follow Vivienne to the living room, enjoying the sway of her pale blue silk dress flowing around her with every step. Vivienne’s curves know how to carry silk.

  In the living room, Vivienne, exhausted from her jailhouse ordeal, floats down to the sofa with the delicacy of a shredding cloud. I head for the liquor table behind the sofa and pour us each a shot of scotch.

  “Here, this’ll stiffen your bones and warm your blood until the coffee gets here,” I say and hand her the drink.

  She nods her thanks, downs the scotch, puts the glass on the coffee table, then leans back against the sofa cushions and closes her eyes while the whiskey courses through her. The color comes back into her cheeks.

  I watch all this from the chair opposite the sofa.

  Vivienne opens her eyes, sees me watching her. She smiles a little. Just a little.

  “Welcome back,” I say.

  “I didn’t go far,” she says. “Cantor, thanks for getting me past that dragon of a police matron.
”

  “Then we’re even,” I say. “It evens us up for getting me past Huber the morning Eve was killed.”

  “Huber.” Vivienne says the name as if she wished she’d never heard it or ever laid eyes on its owner. “Who would be crazy enough to gun down a policeman?”

  “Someone who thinks they’re safe enough to get away with it,” I say. “They almost did.”

  The reality of what I just said works its way through Vivienne like a bitter pill dissolving slowly. She looks at me through widened eyes, sees me as one of the Law’s condemned. “Cantor, how do you . . . I mean, when the police . . . Cantor, how do you survive?”

  “I survive because I have to. I survive because I don’t like getting pushed around just for living my life.”

  “And for who you take to your bed.” She says it softly, almost sadly. I hope it’s not regret for our one shared night.

  I repeat, just as softly, “And for who I take to my bed,” but there’s no sadness when I say it at all.

  “You’re your own army,” she says. “An army of one?”

  “If I have to be,” I say, shrugging it off. “Could be that army might get bigger. There’s talk about organizing to get the Law off our necks, or so I’ve been told.”

  That prospect seems to please Vivienne. At least it kicked her sadness aside. She’s the comfortably regal, elegantly alluring Vivienne Parkhurst Trent again. “I think that’s a marvelous idea,” she says. “Maybe you wouldn’t have to hide anymore.”

  “I don’t hide now,” I say.

  “Which is one of the reasons you have those scars on your face. For heaven’s sake, Cantor, wouldn’t you want a life less chancy, less threatening? Maybe even a life where you could fit in with the world?”

  “Fitting in might turn out to be a straitjacket.”

  George comes in with the tray of coffee and sandwiches, saving me from a discussion I’m not in the mood for. Right now, the hard realities of Sig’s threats, the cops on my back, and the murder of three women loom larger than a hazy political future which might frown on the way I live as much as the straight-backs who frown on it now.

  George asks if we require anything else, and when Vivienne gives him a pleasant, “No, thank you,” he leaves us alone in the living room.

  Vivienne takes up hosting duties and pours us each a cup of coffee.

  The coffee’s good and strong, the sandwich— I’ve picked up a roast beef on rye— takes care of the lunch abruptly postponed by Sergeant Adair and his uniformed sidekick.

  “Okay, Cantor,” Vivienne says after thoughtful bites of her ham sandwich and sips of coffee, “what are we going to do about the Garraway and Huber situations? They’re really making a mess in both of our lives.”

  “We? Five minutes ago you were all knotted up about the danger in my life, and now you want to get involved in two murders?”

  “Five minutes ago I was tired and hungry. Well, the coffee’s perked me up, the food is comforting, and I don’t like being pushed around anymore than you do. That sergeant and that police matron pushed me around, and I won’t stand for it. And besides, you know I can handle myself in a tight spot. You’ve seen it.”

  Yeah, I have, when Vivienne made a crack shot across a room and saved my skin.

  But this is different. This time there’s at least one sharp killer out there, maybe two, and hovering over it all is Sig, who might not take kindly to interference by this scholarly curator. Sig has ways of taking care of people who interfere.

  “Vivienne, I’ve got to handle this alone.”

  “Well, that’s insulting,” she says. “Your life isn’t the only one that’s on the line here, Cantor. I have a life and career to salvage, too. This scandal could sink me at the museum. And you can’t cut me out of whatever you’re planning to do because like it or not I’m already in the thick of it. So now tell me, who do you think killed Lieutenant Huber? Do you think it’s the same person who killed Eve?”

  She’s sitting up straight, a woman with a hunter’s heart and a marksman’s eye, and the impatience to use both. In other words, it’s Vivienne Parkhurst Trent at her most impressive. And her most beautiful.

  She says, “What’s so funny?” in response to the grin I can’t control.

  “I’m imagining you as a medieval warrior queen, galloping on your horse with your sword and your shield, determined to smite the invading barbarians.”

  “I’m certainly ready to smite the barbarians who’ve invaded my life. More coffee?” The Trent huntress and the Parkhurst hostess in the same magnificent skin.

  I nod for the freshened coffee, watch the steady hand pouring from the silver pot, the same steady hand that can ease back a shotgun trigger with the delicacy of a tickle.

  “I’m not sure who killed Eve or Huber,” I say. “The police think James Atchley did the Garraway killing.”

  “Yes, I know. Dierdre phoned me after his arrest. She was furious.”

  “How furious?” I ask.

  “As furious as a mother can be when her offspring is threatened, which is pretty furious. Oh! Cantor, you don’t think—”

  “I do think. But that’s it, just lots of thoughts but no facts. Do I think Dierdre Atchley is capable of killing Huber in revenge for the arrest of her son? Sure. Do I think she’s fool enough to do it on her own? And in broad daylight? Down the street from a police station? Maybe she hired someone to do it. I wouldn’t put it past her. I don’t know her well enough to answer those questions. But you do.”

  Vivienne relaxes back in the sofa again, at home in the familiar territory of discussing her social circle. “Let me ask you something, Cantor. If you lost everything that mattered to you, everything that shaped your life, made life worth living, how far would you go to get revenge on whoever caused your— well, heartbreak?”

  There it is, the wound that won’t heal, the pain I try to drown with women, whiskey, and the thrill of my criminal life. The wound won’t heal because my vengeance failed. I couldn’t save the woman who was everything, the woman who gave shape to my life, who made life worth living. The woman whose name I won’t say because saying it crashes the scaffolding I’ve built to keep me standing.

  “Cantor?” My name comes to me as if from far away. “Cantor?” Vivienne says again, luring me out of the wilderness.

  “Yeah, Dierdre Atchley,” I say, letting the feel of her name in my mouth be the final snap back into the here and now. “Furious mother taking revenge. Okay, maybe. But only maybe.”

  “Here’s the part you’re missing, Cantor. If Dierdre killed Huber out of revenge, it wasn’t just vengeance for James’s arrest. It was also revenge for what that arrest did to her life. If Eve’s takeover of the Atchley banking empire had been successful, it would have embarrassed the Atchleys, taken them down a peg, but they would have adapted. They would have survived.”

  “Even while being snubbed?”

  “Sure, the family would be snubbed in certain circles. It would hurt their pride. But the Atchleys would still have the power of their lineage, not to mention all that money. It could cushion the blow a bit. It’s Eve, the pushy social climber, who’d be the villain in high society’s eyes. But if the Atchleys have a family member arrested for murder? Maybe convicted? Condemned to a sordid death in the electric chair? A scandal of that magnitude would destroy the Atchleys. No amount of lineage or money could save them. They’d topple from the pinnacle of society to the gutter of the disgraced, well-upholstered as that gutter might be. Diedre Atchley would not tolerate being disgraced. She’d sooner die.”

  “Or kill.”

  Vivienne gives that a heavy nod, the sort of nod that accepts rotten news.

  I say, “But let’s not hang her yet. Just because she could do it doesn’t mean she did. Like you said, who’d be crazy enough to kill a cop? Dierdre Atchley doesn’t strike me as crazy.”

  Vivienne says, “Yes, you’re right,” with the relief of grabbing a lifeline. “She doesn’t strike me as crazy, either. She’s
one of the most calculating women I’ve ever met.”

  Now, there’s a new spin. Dierdre Atchley may not be crazy, but maybe she’s calculating enough to figure her odds in getting away with taking revenge on a cop. The kicker of it is, the odds just might be in her favor, because the city’s high and mighty string-pullers just want the whole Garraway business to go away, Huber included.

  Funny, the only two people who might have plans for either revenge or deadly justice are Dierdre Atchley and Sig Loreale. I’d laugh if the idea didn’t make my skin crawl.

  “Listen, Vivienne, thanks for the lunch, but I’ve got to go.”

  “What are you planning to do, Cantor?”

  “I have to talk to Dierdre Atchley again.”

  Vivienne waves the idea away. “You can’t be serious. I doubt she’ll see you.”

  She’s right. I have to get around that. The question is how. I work through a number of possibilities, all of them dead ends. And then I realize that the answer I’d been avoiding, the answer that scares me with its risk, is sitting right in front of me. “You’re a friend of Dierdre’s, Vivienne. Any chance you could get me in to talk to her?”

  “Are you asking me to come along?”

  “It’s against my better judgement, but I guess I am.”

  There are very few sights in life as pleasurable as seeing Vivienne Parkhurst Trent get her way.

  • • •

  I give the cabbie my address, explain to Vivienne’s puzzled expression that I have to pick up a few things before going to the Atchleys’ apartment.

  When we reach my place, I help Vivienne from the cab, take her arm to escort her into the building.