One Dangerous Lady

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  I shook my head in vague amusement. “You don’t know Larry very well if you think he’s easily intimidated. But if you don’t want him to publish that article, why don’t you call him up and tell him yourself. Why tell me?”

  “Because I feel it would have so much more weight coming from you, Jo.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because you know him. And you know me . . . and you know the friend that you and I have in common,” she said in a sly voice.

  “What friend is that?” I said, understanding full well who she meant.

  “You know . . . our friend from Las Vegas?”

  I took a deep breath, gearing myself up. “Okay, Carla, since we’re being very frank here . . . I saw the picture of you and Oliva on your boat.”

  She lurched back and furrowed her brow. “Oliva? Who is Oliva?”

  “Our mutual friend from Las Vegas.”

  “I do not know anyone by that name.”

  “I suspect she goes by a variety of names. And although I think you know that I pay support to her,” I said, carefully choosing a word other than blackmail, “I doubt you know the reason why.”

  Carla cocked her head to one side. “No? How can you be so sure?”

  “Because you definitely would have used it against me by now.”

  Carla feigned hurt. “You do not think well of me, do you, Jo?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Carla, we are so far beyond whether or not I think well of you. . . . I suspect our mutual friend told you some things about me, told you she had some hold over me. But I seriously doubt she was dumb enough to tell you what that hold is because that would take away her power. And she’s a smart cookie.”

  Carla gave me a crooked little smile. I knew I was right.

  I went on: “However, the very fact that you know this woman tells me a lot about you, Carla, dear. She’s not the most savory character in the world, as you know. And I’m sure that many people would be very interested to know exactly where you two met and how you came to be friends. I think Max would be particularly interested in that information.”

  Carla leaned over and stubbed out her cigarette in the pretty, flower-pattern Sevres porcelain dish on the coffee table. She then stood up abruptly. I stood up, too. We were just about the same height and our eyes locked.

  “Jo, my darling, do you not know me by now?” she said with icy sweetness. “Do you imagine that I will let you or Larry Locket or our mutual friend in Las Vegas stand in my way? As you have seen, it is much better to be my friend than my enemy. I can do so much for you as a friend . . . and so much to you as an enemy. Why take the chance? It’s just one silly little article, Jo. Larry will find another subject for his great talent—one who is far more worthy than myself. Please tell him to leave me and my darling husband alone. We would be most grateful . . . and so will he, I promise.”

  I called Larry the minute I got home and started to tell him about my meeting with Carla. Sounding rushed, he cut me off.

  “Jo, listen, I’m really sorry, but I can’t talk to you now. I’m catching a plane for Florida and I’m late.”

  “Why are you going back to Florida?”

  “It’s a long story. I’m seeing someone there,” he said.

  “Larry, Carla means business. She really doesn’t want you to publish this article.”

  “Well, that’s too damn bad.”

  “I know. I told her, fat chance.”

  “Besides, I may have found the smoking gun,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, I’ll call you when I get back, okay? I’ll have much more news then.”

  “Larry . . . please be careful.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve been threatened by the best of them. And I’m still here.”

  He hung up.

  For the next few days, I thought a lot about my meeting with Carla. True, she had me a little worried. However, it pleased me to think that I had her a little worried, as well. Carla was obviously very concerned about her reputation and particularly about what Max Vermilion thought of her. Once again, I toyed seriously with the idea of getting in touch with Oliva to find out exactly how she and Carla knew each other. But each time I sat down to compose the note I would send to her, I came to my senses when I thought it through.

  If Larry had noticed the striking resemblance between Oliva and the late Countess de Passy, then others would surely notice it, too. While it wouldn’t mean much to most people except as something of passing interest, it would mean a great deal to one person, if he ever saw her, that dogged and doglike Detective Shreve. I still feared Shreve for he’d figured out exactly what I’d done, and told me so at the time. But he also admitted he couldn’t prove it. However, I knew that if he ever laid eyes on Oliva and then discovered she and I had known each other around the time of the countess’s death, well . . . that wouldn’t be good for me—to say the least. But that’s another story.

  For the moment, at least, I naïvely imagined myself to have somewhat of the upper hand with Carla. That was shortly to change.

  Chapter 32

  When I didn’t hear from Larry for a few days, I got worried. I left lots of messages on his answering machine and cell phone. He finally called to apologize for his silence and say that he was “doing fine, up to my ears, hot on a great lead.” I told him a little more about my conversation with Carla Cole, but he didn’t seem too concerned.

  “Jo, if I have what I think I have, all I can say is she better run for cover.”

  He told me he’d be home in a few days with some “fascinating stuff.” We set a date for lunch at his house.

  The evening before I was to meet Larry, I was sitting in the library, just finishing up some correspondence when Cyril came in.

  “This just arrived for you, madam,” he said, handing me a manila envelope.

  “At this hour?” I said. It was nearly ten o’clock.

  I thanked Cyril and told him he could go home. Then I turned my attention to the package. Taped to the outside was a small ecru envelope with my name, Jo Slater, written in a scrawly hand on the back. The initials, EV, were written on the bottom righthand corner. EV stood for “en ville”—“in town,” which was the European equivalent of “by hand.” It was a bit pretentious, given that we were not in Europe, and I suspected that the package was from Carla.

  I detached the small white envelope and opened it. Inside was one of Carla’s note cards with her gold initials monogrammed at the top. Now the intertwined letters looked to me like Max’s coronet. Written in the same scrawly script was the following message,

  Cara Jo,

  I promised you that one day I would give you a present you would not be able to refuse. Here it is.

  Carla

  I stared at the manila envelope for a few seconds, wary of its contents. I felt curiously vulnerable sitting there alone in my library at this hour when it was dark outside and the city was relatively quiet. I got up from my chair, went over to the desk, and removed the carved ebony-handled letter opener from its cradle. Inserting the sharp, shiny blade into the corner seam of the manila envelope, I ripped it open in one stroke. Inside was a two-page clipping from a Las Vegas newspaper dated two days earlier. At the top was the headline, “Mystery Life, Violent Death,” and a subheading, which read, “Woman’s Secrets May Stay Hidden.” The article began,

  The woman known to her neighbors as Ginger Brown remains as much a mystery in death as she did in life. Brown was stabbed to death in her apartment, where she lay undiscovered for at least two days. Her body remains in the Las Vegas morgue unclaimed, and officially unidentified. Police described the killing as “particularly gruesome.”

  Brown’s murder has sent the chill of fear through the quiet residential community where she lived. According to an officer at the scene, there was evidence of a struggle,
but robbery did not appear to be the motive. The perpetrator has not been apprehended and there are few leads.

  Neighbors admit to knowing very little about the woman who lived in apartment 7B. They described her as “very secretive and not very friendly.” Police discovered that Brown had several credit cards and other forms of identification in different names among her belongings, and they believe she may have been a bunko artist, although she apparently had no police record. Police also found a C. V. among her possessions, but Ms. Brown wasn’t what she claimed to be. On the résumé, Brown claimed to have two language degrees from Ohio State University, but the school has never heard of her. She claimed to have worked as an actress in movies, but the Screen Actors Guild did not list her as a member. She also claimed to have worked as a dealer in one of the major casinos, but no casino in Las Vegas had a record of her and her fingerprints are not on file. . . .

  The article went on to say how much of the dead woman’s life was simply fabricated or unknown. Her neighbors said she traveled a lot and was away for long periods of time, but never let on where she went. The police found a bank account in which she had over a quarter of a million dollars.

  “We’d sure as heck like to know where she got all this money,” the detective in charge of the case told reporters, “but her deposits were all made in cash.”

  I don’t know whether it was denseness, fear, or fatigue that made me unable to see why Carla had sent this clipping to me as a “present.” It was only when I turned to the second page of the story that all suddenly became clear. There were two pictures: one was of the apartment complex where the dead woman lived and the other, a snapshot of the victim herself, which had apparently been stapled to her phoney résumé. The photograph was of a prim woman wearing a corporate smile and pearls. The instant I saw it, I felt a pluck of terror. Ginger Brown was Oliva—my blackmailer.

  I was off the hook. Carla had indeed given me the one present I couldn’t refuse: a death.

  I arrived at Larry’s at noon the next day. Mrs. Barnes, his old housekeeper, answered the door in a blue uniform with white collar and cuffs. Like the Association itself, Mrs. Barnes was a throwback to another era. A stout woman with tightly curled white hair, a constant frown, and a determined manner, she spoke with a brogue and bristled with an air of disapproval. She was also somewhat deaf, or at least “deaf when it suits her,” as Larry said.

  “Hello, Mrs. Barnes,” I said as the older woman stepped aside to let me in.

  “Mr. Locket’s expecting you. He’s upstairs.” Upstairs meant the office. “You know the way. I’m just making lunch,” she said, retreating to the kitchen.

  I walked upstairs to the office, where Larry, pipe in hand, dressed in corduroy pants and a tweed jacket, was standing hunched over his desk. The day was overcast. I glanced out at the garden where the thin vines of a climbing plant looked like a crazy spiderweb outside the multi-paned window.

  “Hi, there,” I said, trying not to show my apprehension.

  I had the manila envelope with the newspaper clipping inside tucked into my purse. I was still debating whether or not to tell Larry about it. He was concentrating hard on something on his desk.

  “Come take a look at this, Jo,” he said without turning around.

  I peered over his shoulder. There were two fairly large sheets of paper spread out on his desk, one above the other. They each had fold marks on them. They looked like blueprints.

  “What are they?” I asked him.

  “Naval architectural plans,” he said reflectively.

  “Where did you get them?”

  “That’s why I went to Florida. Jeffrey Martin’s sister called me. Have a look at this,” he said, handing me a black ring-binder notebook.

  I opened the notebook, which was filled with plastic sheets encasing more folded schematics of the boat like the two spread out in front of Larry.

  “That notebook contains all the specs of The Lady C from Feadship,” he said. I knew from my various travels that Feadship was the greatest yacht builder in the world.

  “So The Lady C was a Feadship. Figures.”

  “Nothing but the best for the Coles. All Feadship yachts keep a notebook like that on board, filled with the specs of the boat. Feadship headquarters keep a duplicate so the captain can confer with them if there’s something the engineer can’t fix. That notebook was in Jeff Martin’s safety deposit box in a package addressed to me.”

  “To you?”

  “Yup. He obviously intended to give it to me before he died. His sister just got the box open and found it. And she called me immediately.”

  “Those look identical,” I said, examining the two sheets of paper he was studying.

  “They do, don’t they? Well, they’re not. The top one here is from that notebook. This bottom one, though,” he said, tapping the paper with the mouthpiece of his unlit pipe, “was in an envelope taped to the inside cover. I’ve literally spent hours trying to figure out what this one spec was doing in that envelope, particularly when there’s this duplicate here from the book . . . and I think I’ve just discovered the reason. Look here, Jo . . .”

  Larry traced an area on the top blueprint with the mouthpiece of his pipe. Then he traced the corresponding area on the bottom blueprint. “These are obviously the same section. But you see how they differ ever so slightly? The bottom one seems to have an extra passage right there,” he said, gliding the stem of his pipe back and forth over the spot. “It’s very difficult to see at first.”

  “I see it. There’s like a little tiny alcove there.”

  “Or a hidden room, perhaps?” Larry said, casting a sly glance.

  “So what do you make of it?”

  Larry straightened up and stretched his arms in the air. He looked exhausted.

  “Let’s sit down a minute, shall we?”

  We sat around the coffee table. Larry took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He lit his pipe and sat back in the chair, puffing on it in spurts as he spoke.

  “When I was down in Barbados, I interviewed the captain of the Coast Guard. He told me that he and his officers searched that yacht from top to bottom the minute they got on board. They found nothing, of course. Being my usual suspicious and macabre self, I asked him if there was a way to dispose of a body so close to land. He said the best way would be to hide it, then smuggle it out with the trash. Like all megayachts, The Lady C has an enormous amount of storage space. The captain assured me they went through all the garbage and all the storerooms with a fine-tooth comb. They didn’t find anything. Obviously. See now, that argues for Carla’s case—that Russell is having one of his episodes.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Larry.”

  He nodded slightly. “You’re thinking the same thing: If Carla had a place to hide the body so that when the Coast Guard searched the ship, they wouldn’t find it, then . . .”

  “Then she could get away with murder.”

  “Precisely,” Larry said, flicking his eyes onto mine. “All she’d have to do would be to hide the body until they could sail out to sea where she could dump it. It’s a brilliant plan. She kills him. Hides him. Dumps him. Then she uses his past history to invent this fiction about how he’s suffering from an episode of Dissociative Fugue Disorder, but that he’s bound to turn up again. This gives her time to rearrange all the money, knowing damn well, of course, that Russell is never coming back. But she also knows that no one can prove that and that he’ll never be found.”

  “But why go to the trouble of hiding the body? Why not just take the boat out to sea, conk him over the head, and throw him overboard in the first place?”

  “Because she’s got to be near land for her story to hold up. There’s got to be a really plausible explanation for why he’s gone. Anyway, it’s risky dumping him at sea. The body might be found too quickly for her to get her hands on the mon
ey. You can’t always depend on the sharks, you know.”

  “Except in Manhattan, where they never let you down,” I said.

  Larry chuckled. “Indeed . . . no, Carla and whoever helped her—and she certainly had to have help—they needed a way to dispose of Russell’s body so it wouldn’t be found and it would look like he’d just gone off on one of his episodes. I think Jeff Martin figured out exactly what she’d done. That’s probably why he was killed.”

  “So his death definitely wasn’t an accident.”

  “Now that I see this? No. I definitely think he was murdered. It’s a brilliant plan, Jo. My hat’s off to her.”

  “So let me get this straight: Carla has Russell’s powers of attorney, but she knows she needs time to use them.”

  “Right. She can’t afford to have him turn up dead because according to the will, she inherits next to nothing. So she has to convince the world that Russell’s just having one of his episodes. And now it doesn’t matter if he’s dead or alive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s got control of the money,” Larry said.

  We sat in silence for a time, contemplating this diabolical plan.

  “How did Martin get a hold of this other plan?” I asked, after a time.

  “I have no idea. Maybe it was on the boat. But it obviously wasn’t among the official Feadship specs. . . . The only thing I can think of is that’s it’s a plan from the interior designer.”

  “Do we know who the interior designer is?”

  “Her name was Melody Hayes.”

  “Was?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Jesus, Larry! Not killed?”

  “No, cancer. Six months ago. The Lady C was designed by Peter de Hoch, a very famous naval architect. She was his last commission, in fact. He died about four years ago, well into his eighties. Melody Hayes designed the interior for three of his yachts—The Lady C being one.”

  “Well, that’s just great. So we can’t talk to either of the designers, right?”

  “Right. It’s amazing, isn’t it? In my view, you can chalk all this up to one of three things: a coincidence, a curse, or Carla. Take your pick,” he said.