Wicked, Loving Murder

by Jane Haddam

  I was not defeated. I came out of Felicity’s office still wearing my coat, my gloves, and all my scarves. If I hadn’t been so busy trying to steal her expensive imitation Rolodex, I might have had time to get myself unwrapped. Instead, I had the Rolodex. It had a marble base. It weighed over five pounds. It was lying in the bottom of my shoulder bag, furnishing proof that the lady at Bloomingdale’s had not been lying when she told me that bag was made of “the finest, softest, strongest leather in the world.”

  If I could get to my office and shut myself in, I could move the wardrobe and look through the Rolodex. I could answer two of my questions in one morning. If the Brookfields and Felicity left me alone.

  The Brookfields had no intention of leaving me alone. Jack Brookfield was waiting for me outside the door to his office.

  “Miss McKenna!” he said as soon as he saw me. “Miss McKenna! Please come in! We have something to show you!” He bounced up and down on the soles of his feet, making his soft body ripple under his clothes. “We’re very excited about this,” he babbled. “Very, very excited.”

  Through his open door I saw Stephen Brookfield and a rumpled collection of overworked peons meant to represent Staff. I hesitated. The weight of my shoulder bag was an insistent reminder of what I was supposed to do, what I had promised myself to do.

  “We’ve spent all morning putting this together,” Jack Brookfield said.

  People who are eager to please are often just as eager to induce guilt. Jack Brookfield was no exception. He stood away from the door and made a flourishing gesture inviting me inside.

  “We have coordinated our efforts on the romance project,” he said.

  “I’ve got work to do,” I grudged. “I can’t stay long.”

  Jack got me a chair. “We’ve worked out a schedule that will use all our divisions at once,” he said. “We’ll have a month of romance. We’ll celebrate romance.”

  “Should have done it for Valentine’s Day,” I said. I slung my bag over the back of the chair he was holding for me—anything to keep it off my shoulder. Then I saw a pile of gloves and scarves on the heater near the window and walked over to it. I started to unwrap. There were many more gloves and scarves than people in the room. Jack, I decided, was the kind who was always forgetting his gloves in the office and having to stop for a new pair on the way home.

  “Literary Services,” Jack said, “is sponsoring a special romance novel—uh—sale.” The word “sale” seemed to defeat him. “For the whole romance month,” he said, “we’ll evaluate any new romance manuscript at half our usual cost.” He beamed.

  Stephen Brookfield snorted. The Staff moaned.

  “What are those?” I said.

  I was pointing to the wall behind him. Jack turned to stare at the sixteen framed Writing magazine covers, as if he’d never noticed them before. I’d noticed them as soon as I walked into the office. The first two in the first row were in English. The rest were in an assortment of languages and alphabets. Writing magazine was apparently published in Chinese, Japanese, Creek, and Turkish as well as English, French, and German. Jack Brookfield turned back to me. “Aren’t you interested in romance month?” he asked.

  “Maybe she wants you to talk sense,” Stephen said. “Are you capable of talking sense?”

  “What doesn’t make sense?” Jack said. “I’m talking about a great opportunity, for ourselves and for our clients. Romance is a very big area of publishing.”

  “Getting smaller all the time,” Stephen said.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Jack said.

  “Look,” I said, “in the first place, what do you know about romance novels?”

  Stephen saw immediately what I was doing. He sat back in his chair and gave me his Richard Burton smile. Jack was completely mystified.

  “We publish a romance line here,” he said. “And we study the market. That’s our job, you know. Studying the market.”

  “You publish a fourth-rate romance line here,” I said. “You couldn’t get the things you publish past an editorial assistant at Second Chance at Love or Silhouette. You’re still using the bitchy, sophisticated Other Woman. You’re five years out of date.”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” Jack said. He didn’t tell me what he wouldn’t know. The sentence had so little connection with anything that had been said, I assumed it was just an excuse for making noise.

  I looked around the room at Stephen and the Staff, trying to decide how to go about saying what I wanted to say next. The Staff was bored. They were used to having an idiot for a boss, used to taking the consequences. Stephen Brookfield was expectant. He thought I was going to discourse at length on what I thought Jack Brookfield should have had as qualifications for his job.

  I took a deep breath. “I could spend the rest of the day arguing with you about romance,” I said, “except I haven’t got the rest of the day and I don’t have the stomach for it anyway. That Mrs. Haskell who was giving you so much trouble got beaten into a coma last night, I’ve spent twelve of the past twenty-four hours talking to police and lawyers, and I’m dead tired. All I want to do—”

  “It’s going off like Vesuvius,” Stephen said. Jack stared at him. I wanted reactions. I got them. The Staff looked distressed, the way any subway newspaper reader would look distressed by news of random violence. Jack and Stephen were beyond that. I wondered what I’d wanted from them, an expression of guilt? I didn’t get it. They were staring at each other with a kind of fascinated honor. Jack looked on the verge of breaking down. Stephen was a step away from hysterical laughter.

  I had a crazy desire to ask Jack about the paperweight on his desk the way I’d asked him about the Writing covers—anything to change the conversation, to get myself back into control of the situation. Then the situation got back into control of itself. Stephen relaxed in his chair. Jack straightened a few things on his desk, cleared his throat, turned his face to me, and started smiling again.

  “Our romance newsletter,” he said, “is doing a special edition. It’ll have three times the usual pages for romance month. The romance newsletter is published in sixteen languages and sold in twenty-two countries.”

  “I find I have a need to excuse myself,” Stephen said. He gave Jack a really nasty little smile. He wasn’t Richard Burton this time. He was Vincent Price in The Conqueror Worm. “Nature calls.”

  I watched, fascinated, while they engaged in another staring match. There was nothing confusing about this one. Stephen wanted to leave. Jack didn’t approve of his going, or what he was going for.

  Stephen got out of his seat, shook out his pants creases, and bowed to me. Then he bowed to Jack and walked out the door.

  “This is going to take teamwork,” Jack called after him. “This is a very big project. We’re all going to have to work together.”

  Stephen didn’t answer. Maybe he hadn’t heard. Jack turned his attention to me and worked up a big, hearty smile.

  “A coordinated effort,” he said, as if nothing had happened to change the subject since I first walked into his office.

  I got out my cigarettes and settled in for a long haul.

  THIRTY-ONE

  IT WAS A LONG HAUL—over an hour. Jack had projections, statistics, business philosophies, aesthetics, illustrations, and tangents. I had a head full of questions and resentments. Something had happened between Stephen and Jack. Something about the beating of Irene Haskell—or my knowledge of it—had frightened them both. I was in no position to know which of those possibilities scared them, or why.

  If the Staff hadn’t been in attendance, I might have tried to strong-arm Jack. It had worked once before. It might work again. The presence of peons-as-audience made that tactic unworkable. I knew Jack as an appeaser. I had no idea what he’d do to appease the six nondescript figures sitting in a semicircle behind me. Lie, probably, or ignore my questions. Unlike Hercule Poirot, I am not adept at spotting lies and using them against the liar.

  I allowed myself
to be subjected to a lecture on The Psychology of the Unpublished Writer. Jack seemed to have researched this subject at length.

  “Their attitude to the business,” he told me, “is that it’s an unscalable wall, an unclimbable mountain, an impossibility. If you could get past what they say they think to what they really think, you’d find they think no one ever gets published at all.”

  This was too much, even for me.

  “Where do they think books come from?” I asked him.

  “Books are written by people who have always been writers and will always be writers,” Jack said. “They—the unpublished writers—are people who have never been writers and will never be writers. World without beginning or end.” I was curious. “You try to talk them out of this?” I said.

  Jack was appalled. “Oh, no. It’s the state of mind we’re looking for. The optimum Writing Enterprises client is someone who expects failure—who even wants failure.”

  There was a snicker from one of the Staff, telling him he’d gone too far. He blushed furiously.

  “Not that we want them to fail,” he said. “We’re here to show them how wrong they are.”

  He scanned the group behind me. Their expressions must have been particularly disapproving. Jack started straightening his desk again. Since he had already straightened it four times, he was reduced to moving everything on it into a new position.

  “Once they’ve succeeded,” he said, “they’re no longer our clients.” He brightened. “Our job is to make ourselves obsolete.”

  Someone behind me whispered, “As long as there’s one born every minute, we’ll never be obsolete.” Someone else giggled.

  I grabbed the strap of my shoulder bag and started to get up. “Mr. Brookfield,” I said.

  “Jack,” Jack said.

  “This has all been very interesting, but I’ve been here more than an hour. If I intend to get any work done—”

  “Work?” He said the word like a Maori tribesman would say “television.”

  “There isn’t going to be a romance month without a special romance section, and there isn’t going to be a special romance section unless I get down to my office and work on it.”

  Jack said, “Oh.” He thought I was giving him an excuse. He thought I was politely telling him I didn’t like him. He was half-right.

  I scooted for the door, unwilling to give him time to think of a new essential matter for discussion.

  “You ought to write your philosophy down,” I said as I disappeared into the corridor. “They could use it as an article in Writing magazine.”

  I don’t know what made me feel worse—that I’d said it, or that Jack Brookfield looked pleased.

  I did not head for my office. I did not plunge immediately into solving the problems of the wardrobe and Janet’s last name. I started looking for Stephen Brookfield instead.

  He wasn’t in his office. He wasn’t in the reception area, Felicity Aldershot’s office, or the Art Department, either. I asked the art assistants still occupying the floor of the reception area if he’d gone out. They said no.

  I returned to the central core of offices, wishing they’d said yes. If Stephen had not left and could not be found, there was only one place he could be. I stood in front of the door marked MEN and argued with myself. There might be five or six stalls beyond that door and a man in every one of them. There might be half a dozen open urinals, all in use. There might be a condom dispenser. I wasn’t sure condom dispensers were legal in the state of New York.

  I looked up and down the corridor. It was empty. I stood very still and listened for approaching footsteps. There were none. I opened the door and went inside.

  If Alida Brookfield hadn’t been cheap—or a female supremacist, as Martin Lahler called her—there might have been half a dozen urinals, five or six stalls, and a condom dispenser. Instead, there were two stalls, no urinals, and a sink. One of the stalls was empty. I could hear Stephen Brookfield’s muffled laughter coming from the other.

  There was a latch-lock on the door to the corridor, and I used it. Then I walked across the dirty white-tiled floor and knocked on the door of the stall Stephen had hidden himself in.

  “Come out of there,” I said. “I don’t want to stay in here any longer than I have to.”

  The laughter stopped. Stephen said, “Jesus Christ.”

  “I have something of yours,” I said. “I locked the outside door.”

  There was the sound of metal sliding against metal. Stephen slid the stall door open and peered out at me. His eyes were very dark and bright. His hands were limp.

  “You’re out of your mind,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  I unzipped the safety compartment in my bag and took out the glassine envelope.

  “It was in one of the books you gave me yesterday,” I said. “I found it.”

  “You found it.” He took it from me. He turned it over and over in his hand. Then he slipped it into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He smiled as if he’d caught me out in a trick I was trying to play on him. “Why don’t I think you’re just being a good Samaritan?”

  I backed up until I was leaning against the sink. Everything was slow motion for Stephen. His speech was slow, his movements were slow, even his thinking was slow. It was all very correct, but whatever he did or said took forever. It gave me time to think. What I thought about was how out of place I was in that room.

  Stephen came all the way out of the stall. “If you’re not being a good Samaritan,” he said. “You must want something.”

  That was true enough. I tried to remember what it was I wanted. I had wanted to confront Stephen and was now confronting him. I had never actually defined what I wanted to confront him about.

  I started with the obvious. “That costs a lot of money,” I said. “You have to get the money from somewhere. I want to know where you get the money.”

  “You want to know where I get the money for dope?”

  “Jack’s stealing from petty cash,” I said. “You told me so yourself. Michael was embezzling. What are you doing?”

  “If I was doing something, why would I tell you?”

  I thought that one over. “I don’t know,” I said.

  Stephen sighed. I was no longer an object of suspicion. I was pitiful. He walked across to the radiator and leaned against it, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “You said you played a half-assed role in the Agenworth case,” he said. “Now I believe it. Do you really think, if I was selling the family silver, I’d tell you about it? Just because you asked?”

  “I brought back the envelope,” I said.

  “There are plenty more envelopes,” Stephen Brookfield said. “There are envelopes stretching from here to the end of created history.” He shook his head sadly. “You don’t even know the right questions,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you what I do know,” I said. “I know they ran a check on you, on all of you, after Michael was murdered. They went into all your finances. They didn’t find anything on you. I know something else, too. I know that stuff costs a lot of money. As I said before. Where are you getting the money for it?”

  “Maybe I’m not using that much of it.”

  “Look in the mirror. Make a videotape of one of your days in the office.”

  “Maybe it’s not costing me any money.”

  He laughed at the look of shock on my face. He had shifted the atmosphere. He was no longer the potential friend of late in our talk in my office. He had returned to the Graham Greene novel. I could easily hate him when he was like that. He did ooze. He was sweaty and dirty and insinuating. “McKenna, McKenna, McKenna,” he said. “Didn’t they teach you Aristotle in that fancy college you undoubtedly went to? Didn’t you ever read Ayn Rand? Contradictions cannot and do not exist. Paradoxes, yes. Contradictions, no.”

  “Which is supposed to mean what?” I said.

  “Which is supposed to mean that, when you have rid yourself of everything that is
not an elephant—”

  “Don’t quote clichés to me,” I said. “You’re not making any sense.”

  “I have not been stealing any money, at least not in quantities big enough for anyone to find. That’s true. I’ll tell you something else that’s true. I do use a lot of it. And something else. I get paid exactly fifteen thousand dollars a year, and I have never earned a bonus. All those things are true. Of course, I’ve had the clothing allowance and my rent, but you’ll find Alida paid for those as bills were presented to her. I never saw any of that money.”

  “Which is supposed to mean you haven’t been paying for the drugs,” I said.

  He shrugged again. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “You’re the one who came running in here, bent on interrogating me.”

  “I wasn’t interrogating you, goddamn it.” I grabbed a cigarette from the pack in my pocket, lit it, and threw the match on the floor. There were a lot of matches on the floor. There were a lot of cigarette butts, too. I wondered if the cleaning lady had ever ventured in here.

  “You don’t pay for it and if I can figure out why you don’t pay for it, then I can explain everything,” I said. “That’s what you’re saying.”

  “I’m not saying anything.”

  “You want me to figure it out,” I said. “That’s why you asked me if it were true I solved the Agenworth mess. You want somebody to figure it out. Why bother to wait till I figure it out? Why not just tell me?”

  A smile, a shake, a shrug: sequence in slow motion. Graham Greene was gone. I wondered what was coming next, The Sound of Music?

  What came next was a request for a cigarette. I lit one and gave it to him.

  “All I want,” Stephen Brookfield said, “is to be allowed to commit suicide in peace.”

  “What?”

  “I could give you a lot of crap about my childhood,” he said, “but I’m thirty-four, not thirteen, and no matter how crappy it was, I know it’s no excuse. Let me try to make this perfectly clear. I take a lot of dope. I am perfectly aware that by taking a lot of dope I am killing myself. I don’t give a shit.”