Helen Hath No Fury (13 page)

I’m sorry, I silently said as I made my way between the tables. I’m sorry, Gretchen. I’m even sorry, Ivan. I really meant to back off, but things just changed.

I felt like the paving contractor on the road to hell, toting all my good intentions, but now, there was no doubt in my mind that Helen’s death warranted—required—questioning.

It hadn’t been Susan’s overactive imagination that had walloped her across the head last night.

“I’
M SURE IT WAS
H
ELEN’S NOTES
. T
HAT’S WHAT THE
mugging was about. Why would anyone snatch lists of partygoers and invoices?”

Mackenzie worked on what was left of his chicken, carefully slicing a last delicious piece off the bone, chewing, and listening. He didn’t look supercilious, he didn’t interrupt, he didn’t patiently explain why my thinking was all wrong. At least not yet.

This was so unexpected and thrilling, I got carried away and pushed at the theory. “Somebody obviously saw what she was carrying. You can see right through those envelopes, especially the clear one, the one Helen’s notes were in.”

“Who? When?”

I shrugged. “How would I know that? I don’t even know when Clary gave it to her. Yesterday, sometime. Someone she met during the day.”

“You haven’t exactly narrowed it down,” Mackenzie said. “Susan visits clients, works on the event itself—she must have gone a dozen places, seen who knows whom?”

I considered all this while finishing my grilled tuna. Also while our plates were whisked away. Also while we ordered coffee. “We could track where she’d been,” I
finally said. “It surely couldn’t be that hard, then, to think of who had connections to Helen.”

“Or how about to Susan? How about if somebody just plain wanted to hurt Susan for her own self?”

“Hate me for my own self and not because of anything else? A new credo?”

Our coffees arrived. Service was quick, but then we’d dawdled for so long, waiting for Susan and Joe to arrive. I couldn’t really blame the restaurant.

“Isn’t it possible that a mugger, out on his nightly prowls, randomly picked Susan, then got frustrated and grabbed whatever he could?” Mackenzie asked quietly. “When she fell, getting the bag with the strap across her would take more time than was available. Couldn’t taking the folders be a desperate fluke with no meaning?”

He might have continued, but at that point, Mackenzie had gotten the unsubtle hint that we were preventing a second seating with our sluggishness, and so he asked for the check and we were out of there.

Back in the loft, I reopened the discussion, convinced that there had to be an internal logic to what had happened, whether we could see evidence of it or not. It was unbearable to think of these terrible things happening at random. Not that I normally believe in tidy cause and effect. I envision us like billiard balls—one gets poked and the rest of us are pushed into new and unexpected positions. My version of chaos theory. But now, I renounced happenstance. I became a devout cause-and-effect believer. I needed to.

“Let’s operate on an as-if basis,” I said after we’d checked the messages—none—and opened a bottle of wine. I put the duplicated pages on the sofa between us. Most had next to nothing on them. One had a recipe for moussaka, another, a funny drawing of a stick character apparently having a fit, with the comic-book signals for
curse words—stars and asterisks and ampersands—in a balloon coming out of the figure’s head. A few had dates scribbled without reference to what they were about, and almost every page had those intricate doodles. I tossed the packet down.

Mackenzie picked it up and went through it deliberately. “How compulsive a woman was she?” he asked.

“Not particularly. Not so I noticed. She paid attention to details, but I wouldn’t call that compulsive. Why?”

“Was she forgetful?”

“Not that I ever heard or saw.” I considered this. “No. Just the opposite as far as I could tell. She kept at least three tracks going in her brain at all times.”

“I’m only half joking—but really, why leave yourself a reminder of where to be to kill yourself? Does this make sense to you?”

He pointed at one of her spirals. I hadn’t noticed, but in its center, “Noon. Roof.” The double os in both words had been gone over and over until they looked part of the design, not parts of words, which is why I hadn’t noticed them before.

Noon. Roof. And the date she died.

An appointment with death.

He sighed and nodded. “This is what you’ve been sayin’ all along, isn’t it?”

It’s terrific when the other person says “you told me so,” but my elation was short-lived. So now he agreed with me—with what? We still didn’t have much that made sense. I felt in the shadow of something I should have been able to decipher, that would explain Helen’s death—and now, Susan’s mugging. But shadows were all I could see. We sat in our own private clouds until finally Mackenzie stood and stretched. “Beats me,” he said. “I’ll think on this more. Makes no sense to make an appointment with yourself.”

I looked up. “Maybe an appointment with somebody else. Maybe a real appointment.”

“Wish we could tell. Police checked. Nobody there except the housekeeper, who was eating her lunch in the kitchen and watching a soap on TV, and who became so hysterical when she found out what had happened, she’s never been considered a suspect. And who said she didn’t think any workmen were there, but since they were always there, she thought maybe they were there. Maybe one. Maybe not. Which is to say, she went back and forth and was totally useless.”

I remembered her. She was child-sized and would have had a hard time overpowering a tall woman like Helen or, in fact, anyone, and she was capable of being agitated beyond reason about a request to retrieve a raincoat. Roxanne had suggested that she was one of Helen’s kindnesses rather than an efficient, competent housekeeper. “So somebody could have been there, somebody pretending to be a worker.”

“But they were elsewhere, didn’t you tell me that?”

I nodded. “Somebody pretending to be a special kind of worker, not one of the regular crew.”

“Such as?”

“A landscape designer, a watering-systems man … I don’t know. But not one of the contractor’s regular crew. In fact, Roxanne thought she saw somebody in white overalls and a hard hat. It wasn’t hard to know that construction was going on there—that Dumpster’s been there for months. Maybe he—she—set up a phony appointment and was waiting up on the roof. Or met Helen outside. Housekeeper wouldn’t even know with the TV blaring.”

“If Roxanne’s telling the truth. Bears further questions. When people talk about suicide notes, they don’t
mean notes to themselves, tellin’ them not to forget when and where they’re jumpin’.”

“Notes!”
I said. “That’s what bothered me about the Polly Baker things. And the so-called suicide note. Those jumpy bits. They’re notes.
Reminders.”

Mackenzie sat back down. He looked as if he were willing to understand, if someone would translate me into his language.

“Why the Polly Baker stuff? That was the first question. Then why in that way? Why in there? Too much, too specific if you just wanted to tell your family about this story you heard.”

Mackenzie gave a half nod. Mild encouragement.

“Those notes were to herself. Not to survivors or readers. The audience for those things was Helen herself.”

“Why? What did she want them for?”

If I knew that, Sherlock …

“Speaking of notes—have you written down who’s said what to you so far?”

“I—I started.” A lie. I was behaving like one of my students. I hadn’t written down a word yet, but I would tonight, I vowed. All of it.

“Good. So you were sayin’? About Helen?”

“She made notes on something the rest of us were groaning about. A two-hundred-year-old hoax. Why do you think?”

“I don’t think much of anything. I’m still ponderin’ that
RvW.”

“Arvey W.? Who is that?”

“When last I mentioned it, you were speculating about my given name,” he said. “Wonderin’ if perhaps my Cajun mama had named me Chaim or the like. Perhaps that accounts for your not rememberin’. Let’s go through it again. There’s this wavy line from Polly’s story to those letters, a fancy, decorated line.”

It looked like an extension of one of her mazes, and I’d skimmed right over it. Thought it was another of her doodles. “Arvey?”

“Initials. You know, like C. K.? These are
R.V.W.
You’re good with initials, so what do you think?”

“Somebody’s Volkswagen? Rachel? Robert? Russell?” My brain felt made of soft, nonabsorbent material. “Who knows? Bad enough I have to do this with your name, but really, Mackenzie—”

“Hold on. Didn’t give you all the info. Big
R
, little
v
, big W.”

I thought of branding irons. Of Big D, as in Dallas.

“Versus,” he said.

“Poems?”

“Versus as means ‘against.’ As in the
RvW
, Roe
v.
Wade, I think. Helen was connectin’ Polly’s persecution by the judges and—”

“Of course! That quote about laws creating crimes. Clever you!”

He nodded agreement. He doesn’t bother with false modesty.

“Roe
v.
Wade! That’s great! That’s …” And that quickly, the moment of elation passed because—once again—so what? I didn’t even have to say it. It was there in the air, a gigantic, inflated
So what?
Something had to connect to something else. This entire exercise hadn’t brought us one inch closer to explaining what really happened to Helen—or to Susan, for that matter.

“Why would anybody want this?” I asked. “I kind of forgot the basic question. What’s this about?”

“Notes,” Mackenzie said. “So what sort of event could they be meant for? Something where she’s making a logical argument for something. Was she giving a speech or writing an article?”

An article about Polly Baker? I couldn’t remember her
ever doing something like that or even talking about doing something like that. An article? The small hairs at the back of my neck went on alert—not
an
article. “The
article
, Mackenzie. The
article.”

“I admire your enthusiasm, Amanda,” he said. “I’m intrigued by your air of discovery and revelation, an’ you’re cute when you go crazy this way. All the same, I’d be happier still if you made yourself clear. What article?”

“The one she set up with Roxanne. A feature, she hoped, for the paper or the magazine. Helen said she had a big announcement. Roxanne assumed it was about the new internship program. But maybe it wasn’t. Of
course
it wasn’t. Helen told Roxanne it would be a
scoop.
That has the sense of an exclusive, of breaking news. Maybe it was about …” My mind sputtered again. Polly Baker? Roe versus Wade? A manufacturer of high-end children’s clothing on historical hoaxes or legal precedent? What sense would that make?

“What if … what if the so-called suicide note was more of the same thing?” Mackenzie said. “It reads the same way. More prepping herself, reminders of talking points. Reread it. Listen to it. Think of it now as notes for an apologia—an explanation. So that she made sure she told the reporter—and the world, and her family—that she’s thought this through.”

I read it again, out loud: “Hate to do this; upset family; disrupt lives; everything in me says no, don’t; battled with this long time; hypocrisy is a true sin; can’t see other
honorable
course; if could, would; hope and trust family—anybody else who cares—understand, forgive.”

He looked as apprehensive as I felt. “So either we have just another typically stupid mugger,” he said slowly, “or we have somebody who didn’t want anybody seein’ those notes. Maybe the somebody thought there was more,
and more specifics—things worth killin’ over. Things that weren’t to be said or known.”

“The Dumpster, remember? ‘Liar.’ We’re right. It was about something she said, or was going to.”

He looked at me with those eyes that were so intensely blue they should be cold, but weren’t. They were thoughtful. Concerned.

I wondered if he was thinking what I was. That whoever wanted the notes enough to attack Susan still didn’t have them.

I did.

“W
HO KNEW SUSAN HAD THAT FOLDER?” I ASKED RHETORICALLY
. Mackenzie was engrossed in his book again, as was Macavity, who considered any volume a potential bed. The cat kept reengineering himself onto it, and the man kept gentling him off it. Neither seemed bored by the predictability of it all.

“Clary knew,” Mackenzie said without looking up. “Yet another example of my amazing powers of deduction.”

“You think she gave it to Susan just to look as if she didn’t care about it? Talk about convoluted motives. Okay. She’s on the list, but who else? Susan had meetings all day. In fact, she had lunch with somebody from the group—”

“And dinner with another, right? That Republican thing.”

“I didn’t think of that as her ‘having dinner with,’ but yes.”

“Tight group you have there. If they were all male, you women would be outside picketing about exclusion.”

“Untrue. And not true of the group, actually. But everybody in it is close with one or two other women, and I guess anybody who was thinking of a PR firm might think of Susan. At least consider her. That’s what I
think the lunch was about. But I’m blanking out on who it was.”

“Save needless mental strain an’ ask Susan when you see her.” Mackenzie sounded finished with the topic, at least temporarily, and two seconds later was back into his book about recent Philadelphia history. I wanted to point out that I was in fact a part of recent Philadelphia history and so was this discussion. But it would be futile. Mackenzie doesn’t consider wheel spinning valuable exercise the way I seem to. When he had more data, he’d regear. Until then, what we did know was filed in a compartment of his brain, and he was operating as a happy camper, complete with cat and book.

Still and all … “Are you going to …?”

He slowly looked up, as if a hand were dragging his head into a position of attention.

“I don’t know how these things work.”

His brow slightly crinkled. My vagueness puzzled him, but not pleasantly. I wished I could be more blunt, but I was frankly nervous as I tiptoed onto his turf.

“In a case like this, I mean where it isn’t actually a criminal case but you have suspicions … nothing definite, but … do you …”

“Would I suggest we look at it some more?” he asked mildly. “Is that what you’re gaspin’ over?”

“I mean, it’s none of my—”

“We should have a sofa pillow embroidered with that,” he said. “But the short answer’s yes. And the longer one is, let’s give it the weekend, see how it sorts itself out, and then, yes, if it seems to warrant it, yes. What bothers me is that Ivan Coulter hasn’t said somethin’ along those lines. That in fact bothers me a lot.”

“He bothers me, too. And if I made matters worse, so did he. I still have no idea where he was when Helen
died—and why wouldn’t he just say it? Why keep it mysterious?”

“Could be immoral, not illegal,” Mackenzie said. “Wouldn’t want his daughter to know if he was with another woman at the time.”

I had a horrible thought. “What if Helen really
did
jump? And it was
because
of another woman, a break in the marriage?”

“Was she that type?”

Much as I wanted to believe in this last scenario because it explained Ivan’s cryptic silence, I couldn’t. Besides, it’s my observation that in real life, men are the ones who have romantic histrionics—often involving the death of the “beloved.” Women, after a teary spell, mostly pull themselves together with a minimum of dramatics. Women are pragmatists, even though men don’t like knowing that.

“It also bothers me,” Mackenzie continued, “that her business partner and supposed best friend has also not said word one about the possibility that it isn’t a suicide. That’s the route it most often would come to us. That’s what happens when there isn’t any initial suspicion.”

“You’re saying Clary? …”

He’d kept his finger in his place in the book, almost promising it that he’d be back quickly, and now he looked at me, then toward the heavens, then back. “I’m not sayin’ that at all. Not either of them. Necessarily. Because an equally good hypothesis is that Ivan and Clary believe it was a suicide. That they know Helen way better than you do.” And having effectively shut the door on further open-ended speculation, he returned to the chronicled problems and triumphs of the city.

I felt a reflex twinge of annoyance, but then I reconsidered. He might have temporarily lost interest, but on the other hand, Mackenzie wasn’t squelching or disputing
me. He wasn’t telling me to stop thinking, acting, doing anything. In fact, in his own fashion, he was behaving like a partner. But he was also suggesting that we’d reached a good stopping point, until we had more information.

He was undoubtedly right, and had experience on his side to boot. But I felt agitated, wanted to do something. I’d anticipated a pleasantly long evening with Susan and Joe—perhaps a movie after our early dinner, or a walk through the city with a stop for drinks, or coffee and talk back at one or the other of our homes. Now, the evening stretched ahead. It was early. Lots of stretching ahead.

I rolled my head to uncrick my neck. I looked at my stack of unread books, all titles for which I’d yearned. I looked at my pile of
New Yorkers.
I drummed my fingernails, such as they are, on the table. I paced.

And finally, I did what I’d known I was going to do all along—I phoned Clary Oliver. But I did it from our bedroom.

“Oh!” I said when her voice and no prerecorded message responded. “You’re there! I expected … it’s Amanda, and I—”

“Because it’s Saturday night? I have no life,” she answered. “But then, you’re the one calling me, so you can’t be kicking up your heels, either.”

“Not exactly.”

“But I bet you aren’t watching an infomercial for hair weaving.”

I had to laugh. “You are bored, aren’t you?”

“Actually, I’m not doing that either. Wanted you to feel sorry for me. I’m catching up on bills and mail, listening to music. It’s soothing to do busywork after a bad week.”

“Listen, Clary, this bad week just got—”

“Mandy, did Susan give you the stuff I copied for her?”

“That’s more or less why I called.”

“I take it that’s a yes?”

“Yes. But—”

“I’d like them back. I’m sorry I gave her the material. I thought it’d set everybody’s minds to rest—there’s no secret message in there—but still, they weren’t mine to duplicate, and it certainly didn’t set Ivan’s mind to rest. He’s furious with me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I mentioned it in passing, and he blew a gasket. Everything’s getting to him—as well it might. Just give them back—or burn them, and I’ll say you gave it back, okay?”

In the age of the copy machine, what did it mean if I either burned or returned? I could make a dozen more copies. So this was all an idiotic formality. There seemed no point discussing it.

Or raising the question of whether Ivan wanted it back so much he clubbed Susan in order to get it. “I’ll put it in the trash tonight,” I said. “Shredded, if you like.”

“I know it doesn’t make sense, but I think Ivan feels so out of control—the rug pulled out from under him. All that. So whatever I can do …”

“You can do something for me. You can tell me precisely when you gave the pages to Susan.”

There was an overlong silence.

“Clary?”

“Yesterday,” she finally said.

“What time of day? And where were you when you handed them over?”

“Mandy? Are you and Susan still playing spies? What is this?”

“Please.”

She exhaled directly into the mouthpiece, making sure I registered her irritation. “Probably ten-thirty in the morning. At my office. Give or take a half hour.”

“Thanks. And were all the pages in the notebook copied?”

“Yes, but why does it matter?”

“And finally, when did you tell Ivan that you’d done it?”

“Oh, Jesus, Mandy, enough’s enough!”

“Please.”

“Hell. He called about … actually shortly after Susan picked up the pages. That’s why they were on my mind and I mentioned them. I cannot believe such a fuss is being made about doodles and notes relating to nothing in particular. I think the group should lay off, leave this alone. There’s no conspiracy to unravel, but if you keep probing and searching and pushing, things may come out that will be of no use to anybody, except to make things worse. Gretchen is already beside herself.”

“Things about Gretchen?”

“No, no. Things about … business. I’m not going into detail. We aren’t a megacompany, and I’m sure Helen needed a short-term loan and would have put the money back shortly, but maybe she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to, and in any case, she couldn’t. She died. So what good would it do if you poked around until somebody here in accounting tells you that? Just as an example.”

“You’re saying that’s what the note was about?”

“That’s all I can figure. Isn’t it enough? If we didn’t own the damn business, if we were a public company—then it would have to be revealed. But it doesn’t have to be, so let it … let it all stop here and now with you. Unless you and Susan and whoever else think this sleuthing around is fun and gnaw at it until Gretchen finds it out. It
isn’t the nicest thing about Helen, but it isn’t as bad as it would sound to Gretchen, so why do it? It would just be another punch in the gut to her.”

I was stunned. Clary might speak of it lightly, but in plain English, Helen had siphoned funds off from her own company. Without telling her partner and best friend. It opened new and unsavory prospects.

And questions. Hadn’t Roxanne said something about a deal Helen had prevented—Ivan and Wendy Loeb? Were those events related? Had not having capital had anything to do with it—and was this her attempt to make amends by digging herself a deeper hole? Hadn’t there been something about Gretchen wanting computer equipment and Helen saying things were too tough for that? I remembered, because Gretchen had felt responsible for her mother’s plunge, thought it had stemmed from that.

Maybe that house had swallowed every cent they had, but even if so … “Wow,” I said softly. That was all I could manage.

“What’s the verdict?” Clary asked.

“I … my impulse is to say sure. No problem. Except—”

“Oh, please! No excepts!”

“Clary, listen. Susan was attacked last night. Ribs broken. Her face messed up.”

“Dear God,” Clary said. “Where? When?”

I explained the locale, I told her the time, Susan’s injuries and prognosis.

“I was right there!” she said.

“I know.” I left her politics and motives for another discussion. “The thing is, she’d been carrying envelopes. Four or five of them, in different colors.”

“She had them when she came to the office,” Clary said. “Keeps her organized, she said.”

Maybe that eliminated Clary. She’d have known the
color of the envelope. She wouldn’t have taken the others.

“The ones she was carrying last night had receipts and seating charts and things like that in them,” I said. “And the one with Helen’s notes, which I came by and took. Then I left.”

I’ve noticed that half the time when speaking to my single friends, I edit Mackenzie out of nonessential descriptions, as if on some level, I’m ashamed of being luckier in life and love than they. I guess I shouldn’t have felt the need to do it for Clary. She’d been married twice. She’d had her own guys to edit out with a vengeance.

“She was hit with a club or a stick, from behind, right up from the restaurant on Columbus,” I said. “When she fell down, the envelopes went flying. A driver shouted that he’d called the cops, and the mugger fled—after he took all the envelopes.” I waited for a response, but got none. “Clary? You still there?”

“Here,” she said.

“I’m convinced there is something about those notes,” I said. “Or at least, somebody thinks so.”

“I understand.”

“So about your request? That nobody pay any more attention to who Helen was or what was going on?”

This time I expected an angry blast and had the receiver out from my ear by the time I finished my sentence.

“Be careful,” Clary said, not at all angrily. “Be very careful.”

I wasn’t sure if she was wishing me well or giving me a warning.