Bride & Groom

by Conant, Susan

  The news of Elspeth’s murder reached me on Dogwriters-L. Elspeth had been planning to attend the annual conference of the Cat Writers Association, not only because she occasionally wrote about cats, but because the Dog Writers Association of America cosponsors the event with the CWA. This year’s conference was to be held in Houston, Texas, in November, and one of the organizers had placed a call to Elspeth to ask her to fill in for a scheduled panelist who’d just cancelled. Anyway, the cat-writing conference organizer had spoken to a brother of Elspeth’s, who’d answered her phone. After that, the news had spread to Dogwriters-L. The post announcing Elspeth’s murder contained no details— it said only that she had been killed—and the responses to the original post were expressions of shock and horror, together with requests for the names and addresses of relatives who should receive condolences. Although I still thought that Elspeth had been wrong to do a book about an elephant named Zazar, I felt guilty about the E-mail I’d sent to Mac and hastily sent him a message saying only that Elspeth had been murdered.

  As I chopped tomatoes, fresh basil, and mozzarella, and washed salad greens, I kept switching the radio back and forth between WBZ, an AM news station, and WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station. I first caught the story about Elspeth’s murder on one of WBUR’s news summaries. The announcer reported that the killer responsible for the deaths of two women in Cambridge and one woman in Brookline had struck for the fourth time. The victim, Elspeth Jantzen, had been killed outside her home in Belmont the previous evening. On WBZ, a reporter interviewed a gravel-voiced Belmont police spokesperson who gave brief answers. The police were cooperating fully with all authorities and agencies charged with investigating the serial homicides. Yes, the perpetrator had again used a blunt instrument to deliver a crushing blow to the head. Yes, the medical examiner had identified an injection site on the body, but the results of the autopsy were not yet available.

  In between feeding my dogs and Steve’s, and giving all five their turns in the yard, I finished dinner preparations and spent a little time searching the web. While the dogs were outdoors, I kept watch over the new picnic table, which I was determined that Steve and I would get to enjoy this one time before it got marked by dogs and had to be washed. Far more than the previous murders and more than my own Saturday-night scare, Elspeth’s murder frightened me in a personal way. I had known her; on Friday, she’d sat at my kitchen table. We’d been members of the same profession. We’d had acquaintances in common. Ordinarily, it would never have occurred to me to lock the wooden gate in the fence that led to the driveway. Now, while I scooped up after the dogs and carried out a tablecloth, plates, and silverware, I not only kept that gate locked but kept India at my side as I went in and out. Although the German shepherd dog is a popular choice for protection work, India’s education had consisted of training for the American Kennel Club obedience ring, where anything even remotely like protective or aggressive behavior would have been highly unwelcome. Good girl that India was, she excelled in obedience. In daily life, she showed her breed’s normal desire to watch out for her owner and his belongings, but she’d never been taught or even encouraged to protect Steve, never mind me. Still, I trusted India to inform me if a stranger approached the gate, and her strong, intelligent presence gave me the welcome sense of having a powerful ally. Also, unlike my own malamutes and Sammy the pup, India could be relied on to keep her jaws and her bodily fluids off the new table, and she wasn’t a food thief. If anything, she did her job too well to suit me. Sensing my need, she glued herself to my side, gazed at my face, and cocked her head to listen for sounds of threat. I was used to Rowdy and Kimi, who never worried about anything because they assumed that if trouble arose, a fight would ensue, and they’d win. Period. They made the same flattering assumption about the inevitability of my own victory in all possible situations.

  When Steve got home, I was putting candles in wedding-present candleholders. He’d never looked better, and I’d never been happier to see him. My love for him really had been of the at-first-sight variety and was as wholehearted as my love for my dogs. I’d often told him just that. How many men would have been pleased to hear such a sentiment? Damn few. A man like that was worth marrying. Anyway, I threw my arms around him, clung to him, and felt myself tremble.

  “I heard about Elspeth Jantzen,” he said softly. “You should’ve called me.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Ms. Malamute.” Steve understood the limitations of words and the power of touch; he was, after all, a vet. He held me as if he held a dog in pain, as if he had the rest of his life to keep me in his arms, as, in a sense, he did.

  Finally, I said, “I’ve made dinner. Your uncle Leon sent us a picnic table from L.L. Bean. It’s in the yard. I thought we’d eat out there. I need to keep doing normal things. We can eat whenever you want. No rush. I’ve fed all the dogs, and they’ve all been out.”

  “I’ll open a bottle of wine,” he said as he belatedly greeted the faithful India.

  A half hour later we were where I’d envisioned us, seated across from each other at the new picnic table eating linguine with fresh tomatoes, basil, olive oil, and mozzarella, the pasta accompanied by a green salad and French bread. The wholesomeness of the food felt defiantly at odds with the murders of people I’d known. India had settled herself under the table. In her own dignified way, she was affectionate, but she wasn’t cuddly. With some hesitation, I’d slipped my toes under her, and she was tolerating my need to draw on her warmth and strength. To avoid having the new floodlights transform the evening into an Alaskan summer, we’d turned off the lights in the side yard and were dining, as planned, by candlelight.

  “You want to talk?” Steve’s question was genuine. Still, I could hear Rita’s influence in it. She’d been a good friend to Steve throughout his divorce and during the early stages of our reunion. “You don’t have to,” he added.

  Mindful of talks I’d had with Rita, instead of pouring out everything on my mind the second he walked into the house, I’d given him a chance to make the transition from work to home. Now, we’d each had a glass of wine, and I did need to talk and to hear what Steve had to say. “When Elspeth was here on Friday,” I began, “she told me she’d had an affair with Mac.”

  “You told me. A one-night stand.”

  “It really couldn’t have been more than that. It was at some conference a long time ago. At that bookstore where Mac and I did our talks, he didn’t remember her at all. I was right next to him, and I could tell. I’m sure that Elspeth didn’t look even vaguely familiar to him.”

  “They kept the lights out. Or he was drunk, and they kept the lights out.” His face a bit stiff, he added, “You sure Mac’s never come on to you?”

  “Never. With me, he’s brotherly. Collegial.”

  “Any chance Elspeth was lying? Or imagining things?”

  “She imagined that a one-night stand was something more than that. And she imagined that Mac would remember her. And naturally, she was insulted that he obviously had no idea that he’d ever seen her before. She was furious. Anyway, in a sort of half-joking way, or what I assumed was a joking way, she said that Mac knew Victoria Trotter and maybe the other victims, too. Knew in the Biblical sense. And that maybe he’d murdered them all.”

  “You’re sure she wasn’t serious?”

  “I didn’t take her seriously. And Mac? I know Mac. We both do. Steve, you’ve read those profiles of serial killers. Mac doesn’t even begin to fit the picture. He’s anything but some isolated, frustrated daydreamer. He’s not depressed. He has a good opinion of himself, admittedly, but he’s not grandiose in the psychiatric sense. His books are successful. He’s successful. He has a very successful wife and two grown children. Even if he knew all the victims and slept with all of them, it’s impossible to see Mac as some sort of deranged human male insect who devours his sex partners. And years afterward?” I turned my hands palms up and gave a little laugh. “Mac as a homicidal sex fiend? The whole ide
a is a bad joke.” I paused. “But before you got home, I did check on the web for a minute, and this is freaking me out. Bonny Carr had a web site, and Mac is quoted on it. Some kind of endorsement of her methods. I forget exactly. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he’d ever met Bonny. He’s not discriminating about what he endorses. Maybe she E-mailed him, he visited her web site, and he E-mailed back what’s there. Now that sounds like Mac.”

  Steve refilled our glasses. “Kevin said that Victoria Trotter had a lot of men in her life. Mac could’ve been one of them.”

  “Victoria? With Judith at home?”

  “It doesn’t have to work that way.” He didn’t mention his ex-wife, Anita, one of whose lovers had looked like a toad, or so Steve had once confided to Rita. “There was Elspeth. And what we know is that this is a guy who knew a lot of women who’ve died.”

  “Who’ve been murdered.”

  “At The Wordsmythe. At your launch party. Mac was talking to Claire, and... you remember Claire? She’s a veterinarian. Claire Langceil. Skinny blond.”

  “Actually, I ran into her in the Square the other day. She and her husband are going to be at dinner at Mac and Judith’s this Saturday. They’re friends of Mac and Judith’s.” Steve said, “I wish we weren’t going.”

  “We could get struck down by the flu. But you were starting to say—”

  “Mac knew Victoria Trotter. Elspeth. And maybe Bonny Carr.”

  “So did I.”

  “You know him, too.”

  “Not the way they knew him! Or may have?”

  “Good,” Steve said. “Keep it that way.”

  CHAPTER 27

  It’s one thing for a man to have other women, but quite another for him to kill them off. By the time Steve and I were halfway to Mac and Judith’s house in Lexington on Saturday evening, I wished that we’d excused ourselves by pleading illness. I almost wished that one of us would actually begin to throw up.

  “We don’t have to do this,” said Steve, who was reluctantly at the wheel of what he considered to be my ill-gotten Blazer, which we’d chosen because it hadn’t yet acquired the full doggy miasma and ineradicable coating of dog hair so notable in Steve’s van. Dog vehicles are like pieces of meat: They take a while to ripen to gaminess.

  “We do,” I said. “It’s too late to cancel, and each of us is a worse liar than the other.”

  Our knowledge and suspicions about Mac’s infidelities might’ve made the occasion something of a minor social challenge. What made the prospect of the dinner almost intolerable wasn’t just the speculation we’d engaged in immediately after Elspeth’s murder, but new information yielded by the autopsy, which was that Elspeth had been injected with a drug familiar to all veterinarians and to many dog owners: acepromazine. An old-time and still popular veterinary sedative, ace was so widely used that dog breeders and show types shifted the word’s grammatical gears from noun to verb, and routinely spoke of “acing” dogs. In effect, its presence in Elspeth’s body proclaimed her death to be a dog murder.

  I continued. “What do you want me to do? Call now and say, ‘Sorry to cancel at the last second, Judith, but we think that your husband’s been murdering his mistresses’? Steve, when I say it to you, it sounds preposterous. I’m not about to say it to Judith, and if I make up some excuse now, that one’s going to hang in the air. I am not a good liar!”

  “We could’ve sent E-mail. We should’ve cancelled before.”

  “But we didn’t. We’ve been over this! We don’t know anything! We just wonder. On the basis of freakish ideas we’re going to shun someone who’s been generous to me? Mac has done more to help me promote my book than everyone else combined, and Judith and Olivia have been perfectly nice to me. And Ian is doing the music for our wedding. And Olivia and Ian are going to be at dinner. And it’s your next left!”

  Our spat was still going on two minutes later when Steve parked in a wide area at the end of Mac and Judith’s long driveway. Their house, which I’d visited before, sat in the middle of a large wooded lot. Like my house, this one had three stories. Alas for Steve and me, there ended the resemblance. This place had lots of floor-to-ceiling windows, exposed beams, cozy balconies, and spacious decks.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “We don’t want to live in Lexington, anyway, and if this place were in Cambridge, it would go for four million plus.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Steve, look. I wish we’d begged off, too. I’m sorry. We’ll get through it and leave early.”

  As we were about to get out of the car, a silver Volvo station wagon pulled in next to us, and out of the passenger seat popped Claire Langceil, the skinny, wiry, wire-haired blond veterinarian who’d been at the launch party at The Wordsmythe. With relief, I said, “Claire’s here. You like her. And she never shuts up, so we won’t have to say anything at all.”

  Before Steve had opened his door, Claire was rapping on the glass, smiling brightly, and saying, obviously to him, “Hey, you’re here!” Even after I was out of the car, Claire continued to address Steve. “Daniel and Gus are with me.” She nodded at a man and a boy who’d also emerged from the Volvo. “Daniel loves Judith’s cooking.” Claire somehow sounded as if she were revealing a character fault.

  “Hi,” I said to the man and the boy. “I’m Holly Winter. And this is Steve Delaney.”

  “Daniel Langceil.” The man shook hands with me and then with Steve. Daniel was short and round-faced, with curly brown hair, dark eyes, and an air of warmth and amiability.

  “And Gus the Great!” Claire exclaimed.

  Gus had curls, lighter than Daniel’s and darker than Claire’s. He had his father’s dark eyes and a shy manner that he hadn’t inherited from his mother.

  “Gus the Great!” Claire repeated.

  Although Claire’s grand epithet for her son was neither witty nor funny, Steve and I compliantly responded to Claire’s expectations by looking as if we found it clever and hilarious. Daniel’s expression was unreadable. Gus looked miserable.

  “Hi, Gus,” Steve said quietly. “You want to go into the house now?” Accustomed to soothing nervous animals, Steve was wonderfully casual. The boy’s face brightened. He silently moved to Steve’s left and walked toward the entryway in such perfect heel position that Steve would have been justified in popping a treat into the child’s mouth and saying, “Good Gus!” Steve did no such thing, of course; his kindness consisted of allowing Gus to meld with the group instead of find-! ing himself singled out.

  The rest of us tagged along. The house had a lovely front entrance. Glass panels framed a door made of teak and adorned with a brass knocker and a brass handle, both pol^ ished with Gilbertian care. Claire rang the bell, rapped the knocker, and then pressed her face against one of the glass panels and tapped eagerly. Dog person that I am, I assumed that she was in a desperate hurry to empty her bladder. When Mac opened the door, however, she didn’t rush past him, but stayed with the rest of us. As we entered, Ian returned from walking Uli. The sweet old Bernese gave a soft woof and wagged his tail.

  The foyer was a long, wide landing with a flight of stairs: on the left that led down to the ground floor, where, as I knew from previous visits, Mac had his office. Four or five years earlier, he’d sold his prosperous veterinary clinic to a national corporation. By agreement, after the sale, Mad had continued to see a few old dogs and cats that he’d treated throughout their lives, but his one-man, home-based practice otherwise focused exclusively on behavioral consultations. Also, of course, he wrote articles and books. Anyway we didn’t go down to Mac’s office, but ascended the flight of stairs on the right, which led to the main floor of the house! Judith appeared and began to welcome everyone. As always, Mac radiated vigor. Judith was infinitely elegant and slimmer than ever in a loose black top over close-fitting black pants. Hearing Ian’s voice behind me, I turned to see that he was murmuring to Uli as he gently supported the dog’s hindquarters to help the old fellow climb the stairs.
Claire, obviously watching, too, announced, “Time for a puppy, Judith!”

  Judith’s back was turned, not, I should add, in reaction to Claire’s remark. Rather, our hostess was leading the way to the living room, which had more than enough square footage to accommodate a couple of showrings. There was a fireplace at one end. At the other, next to a wall of glass, was the dinner table. The furniture was all shiny wood and Scandinavian fabric. Oil paintings depicted bright, life-size poppies, peonies, and nasturtiums. Nothing in the room even began to hint at animals. There wasn’t a cat or a birdcage or a fish tank anywhere. I couldn’t even see a single strand of pet hair.

  Seated on one of the two couches that flanked the fireplace was a man of thirty or thirty-five who locked so amazingly like Judith that I assumed he must be a close relative of hers. A nephew? Unless Mac was Judith’s second husband and this was a son from her first marriage? To my surprise, however, when Olivia appeared with a tray of appetizers, she introduced the man as her husband, John. To avoid mystification, let me state that John Berkowitz did not turn out to be some love child of Judith’s whom Olivia had married without knowing that he was her half brother. Although John was entirely unrelated to Judith, he nonetheless had his mother-in-law’s prominent cheekbones, blue eyes, and full lips. His individual features were Judith’s, as was his overall look. He even had a manly version of Judith’s lean elegance.