Seven Kinds of Death (12 page)

One of Phil Stern’s little jokes was that he and Charlie had gone to school together, and then he had gone into insurance and Charlie had gone to blazes. Charlie assumed a patient expression; Constance smiled politely; his wife Alicia ignored him, but on the whole the evening was pleasant. Everyone went to bed early.

Charlie had found out even less than she had, and he had a long list of names of Victoria’s friends and acquaintances. They both regarded the list with resignation the next morning at breakfast. They had dawdled in their room until Phil and Alicia were gone; now they had the lovely old apartment to themselves. Phil had kept this rent-controlled apartment for nearly thirty years, and it was as fine as ever, even if the windows were dirty and the woodwork needed a new coat of paint. The rooms were large and bright with oversized windows, the ceilings were high, the walls were thick, and it was very quiet.

“Beckman told jokes,” Charlie said. Constance groaned in commiseration. Beckman told the world’s filthiest jokes, it was generally conceded. No one laughed but Beckman.

“There won’t be an investigation here?” she had asked in surprise last night, but she understood why not. As far as the city was concerned, Victoria Leeds was Maryland’s problem. New York would gather up her belongings and ship them off to her family; case closed. They would hang on to stuff for a time, just in case Maryland sent someone up to look through things; no one had objected to Charlie’s going through the stuff they had collected from her office. For all he had gained, he might just as well have stayed in bed, he had added, recounting his day.

“Bergdorf’s thinking about retirement. Says they’ll raise goats.”

“Goats? Does he know anything about goats? Why goats?”

“He likes their eyes. You know, the pupils. He thinks they’re really aliens, and they can only see in straight lines, bands, or something like that.”

She studied him narrowly. “You’re kidding me,” she said.

He shook his head. “That’s what I said to Bergdorf, but he swore he intends to retire and keep goats. Alien goats!”

She laughed, and after a moment he joined her.

They both went to see Sam Stover, who turned out to be nearly seventy, nearly bald, and dressed in a seersucker suit. Charlie stared at it in awe. He had not seen a seersucker suit for twenty-five years, thirty years. Actually, he couldn’t remember if he had ever seen a blue-and-white seersucker suit. It was something you just knew about, learned at your grandfather’s knee.

“I’ll do anything I can to help you,” Sam Stover said. “Victoria was a very special person, very dear to me.” He motioned to two chairs that looked as if they belonged in a high school from the turn of the century, heavy, ugly oak, much scarred, and polished from use. He sat behind a desk that was piled high with papers.

Sam Stover was precise in everything he said. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with care, and it appeared that he had never forgotten a thing in his life. He talked at great length about Victoria, how she had been his protégée, his assistant, then his junior colleague, and finally his peer. There had been no enemies, he said firmly; she had not been the type to make enemies. She had been a true professional; any number of careers had been advanced through her efforts with the writers. “It was a good thing for her to move on,” he said. “She would have had an illustrious career in book publishing. The magazine, you understand, has been bought out by a Japanese filmmaker, or something of the sort.”

He knew exactly what he meant by “of the sort,” and it came through as contempt, scorn, derision, beneath civilized consideration. The unspoken words were eloquently expressed in his gesture, the haughty look he assumed.

Charlie finally got around to the last weeks Victoria had been with the magazine, and then the period after she had left. He asked about the manuscript Stover had forwarded to her. “What do you generally do with manuscripts addressed to editors who have left? Is it customary to forward them?”

“Not customary. Not at all. Generally we treat them exactly the same as any other submissions. The publishing world of the magazine is quite different from that of books, naturally. What might be suitable for one would be unsuitable for the other without a great deal of work. But this manuscript, addressed so precisely to the editor of Paul Volte’s series, was obviously not meant for anyone else. If there had been even a chance of our taking it, I might have opened it to have a look, but of course, there wasn’t.”

“Why do you say, ‘of course’?”

“Several reasons. One is that we so seldom accept anything that comes in over the transom. That is, freelance, unsolicited, unagented. Life is too short,” he added in a brusque tone. “Second, since this person referred to Paul’s work, it was to be presumed that the enclosed proposal somehow resembled that, or why draw attention to it, why suggest the same editor should see the new material? We would never have run a second article that in any way resembled such a fine piece as Paul’s. Not for many years, anyway, but few on the outside would have known that. And finally, Victoria developed the material with Paul, you understand, and it was possible that the proposal might have been worth her time to develop with this unknown author. That’s always a possibility, however remote. It was her option to read it, to send it back unopened, or to pass it on to her first reader, or whatever.”

“Lewis Goldstein suggested you might just have wanted to get rid of it, and that was a convenient way, to forward it to Victoria Leeds,” Constance murmured.

“Lewis Goldstein is an ass. It would have been easier to put it in the stamped return envelope and send it back to the writer the day it arrived.”

“When did the writer call you?” Charlie asked.

“I can’t be certain. I think we received the manuscript soon after Victoria left, or she would have handled it herself. Her last day here was the thirtieth of April. I’m certain I had already sent it on to her when this man called me to have me change his address back in May.” His voice had gone very dry. Obviously he had never been asked to do anything like that before. “He called and said that he had to have the manuscript back because he had discovered grave errors of fact.”

He cleared his throat. “I’m afraid his name meant nothing to me; I had paid no attention to the name on the envelope. I mentioned that the United States Post Office department makes it a rule to forward mail for quite a long time, and he became agitated. I assumed at the time that domestic problems had arisen for him, necessitating the post office box number, and the likelihood was that he would never see the manuscript again if it was delivered to his home address. Therefore, I told him that if it turned up, we would send it to the new address, and that he should write me a letter with that address. He insisted on giving it over the phone, and I jotted it down. It didn’t even occur to me to tell him Victoria had moved over to Magnum Publishers. I knew she was out of town, for one thing, but that really was not the reason. I simply didn’t think of it. Later, after her return, while we were on the phone I told her about the telephone call and the manuscript. It had already been sent on over to her. I keep a phone log of my outgoing calls; I talked to her on June ninth. I gave her the new address at that time.”

It was a miracle that it had ever surfaced again, Charlie thought, regarding the desk. “Had she read it yet?”

“She had. She said it was interesting, might have had something for her, and it was too bad if it had factual errors, but of course that would kill it. She said she would return it. She did not mention the contents, or the subject matter, no more than what I have just said.”

“Who sent her the manuscript, Mr. Stover? What was the new address?” Charlie asked. There was no particular reason to pursue this business matter, but there was the remote chance that one of the crew at Tootles’s house had lied about having had a contact with Victoria. There was even a chance that it could have had something to do with Paul Volte. Short of plagiarism, Charlie could not think of what that might be, however.

“I thought you might want to know,” Sam Stover said and opened a desk drawer. “Naturally I found it for you.” He handed a slip of paper to Charlie. The handwriting was elegant and very legible. The name written there was David Musselman.

At two that afternoon they met Sergeant Michael Pressger at the Eighty-ninth Street apartment that Victoria Leeds had leased for the past twelve years. The sergeant was young and very eager. He wanted to rise through the ranks fast, Charlie decided, fending him off as he moved in too close, watching every motion through narrowed eyes, memorizing everything Charlie did, everything he said. No doubt he would re-create it all carefully later. Deliberately Charlie went to a window, studied the view, turned to study the room, even paced it off, and then grunted. The sergeant made a note. Constance glared at Charlie wordlessly; he looked innocent.

The apartment was clean, four rooms, cluttered with too much stuff, but all stowed away as well as the space had permitted. Books, manuscripts, correspondence made up most of the clutter. Two walls had book shelves from ceiling to floor. Her living room appeared to be an extension of her office. The bedroom was almost barren in contrast: a three-quarter-sized bed, chest of drawers, comfortable reading chair and lamp, and a small table laden with books of poetry and plays. In both the living room and the bedroom the tables had marks made by wet glasses, and there was a burn mark on the coffee table in the living room. Constance nodded; just as she had suspected. Victoria had been a wet-glass type. There was an incomplete needlepoint pillow top on the sofa, and a box of colored yarn strands and needles. The kitchen with eating space, and a utility room/second bedroom finished the apartment. It was all comfortable; Victoria had accumulated things she liked over the years, nice prints on the walls, Monet, Chagall, a Turner; there was a good compact disk player—classical music, jazz; thriving geraniums in bloom lined a windowsill. Two needlepoint pillows on a chair in the second bedroom… . Charlie came to a complete stop in the living room before a bas-relief of a face, her face he assumed. He looked at Constance, who nodded.

“Good likeness?” he asked.

“Very. Idealized and romanticized, but she caught her. Toni’s work, I’m sure. She said she had done a study of Victoria’s face.” She remembered that Toni had said Paul had bought a second bas-relief identical to this one; she examined it more closely and gradually became aware that the sergeant had moved in as Charlie moved away. The officer was breathing on her neck.

“You know anything about computers?” Charlie asked from across the room, where he was standing at a desk with a computer system.

“A little,” the sergeant said.

“I’d like to make a list of the files, not copy them all, just find out what she was… oh, oh.”

“What?” the sergeant asked, coming to the desk.

“Not sure. Maybe a gold mine. Look, she used a calendar program.” He was in a menu program, and keyed in the letter for Calendar. It appeared quickly.

Charlie was able to read through the entries enough to see that she had recorded:
call from M. Check Marion Olsen. Call P.
The date of that entry was June 14. June 15 was the date of her call to Paul Volte to invite herself to Tootles’s party.

“I’d like a copy of everything on her calendar from mid-March on,” Charlie said to the sergeant then. He scanned the entries following the one that had caught his attention. Everything would need cross-referencing with the addresses in her files, in her little black book.

“Guess I could make a printout right now,” the sergeant said, studying the layout of the computer and printer.

Charlie moved out of his way and in a minute the printer blinked awake, cleared its throat, and rattled off several pages. Charlie noticed without comment that the sergeant made two copies.

After they left the apartment, Charlie said he wanted to talk to an old buddy. Curt Mercer, who could very well do most of the legwork involved in finding and talking to the many people listed in Victoria’s books. Constance nodded. “And I’m off to the library,” she said. “Meet you back at Phil’s?”

“Library? What for?”

“They probably have some biographical stuff about Paul Volte,” she said vaguely. “Just curious, I guess.”

Actually she wanted to find out when his various successes had come about, and how many people close to him had died, or left him, and if the two events seemed linked in time. And this was the kind of thing, she well knew, that would be very hard to explain to Charlie. Not that she believed a word of it, either, she hastened to add to herself. Just curious. Very curious.

THIRTEEN

Charlie watched her climb
the stairs to the library with a feeling of disquiet. Yesterday when they had gone their separate ways a surge of unease had caught him off guard, but now that had changed; unease had become a real fear. The library steps were crowded with people lounging, reading, eating lunch, watching others, doing nothing, hanging out, and he saw menace everywhere. The fact that they had lived in the city for most of their married life made no difference; the populace had not been armed with assault rifles then, he told himself, and ignored the mocking voice that said
then
was only a few years ago, remember; and, he went on in his silent monologue, murder
then
had been newsworthy, not just a filler on page fifty. As soon as she was out of sight, he started to walk.

He was still preoccupied with the danger of the city, not for him because he had grown up here; it held no more real surprises for him, and he knew it was irrational to be this fearful for Constance. He knew very well that if anyone ever tried to roughhouse Constance, she could easily flatten the guy without mussing a hair or breathing hard. She had studied aikido for many years, at his insistence, he added grimly to himself, and she kept in good shape, and worked out with other aikido partners when she had the chance. Their daughter was almost as good as Constance; he had nearly disgraced them and himself by bawling with pride the first time they had put on a public demonstration. He still remembered the hole he had chewed in his cheek to keep the tears back. But that was different. There was no self-defense against a bullet, or a thrown knife. He wondered if Victoria Leeds would have had a chance with years of self-defense training. A rope over the head, a quick upward yank against the carotids to bring almost instant unconsciousness. He doubted that anyone would have been able to fight back, even Constance with all her skills. He wanted them out of the city as fast as they could manage; he wanted her safe in their own house upstate.

He quickened his pace on his way to hire the help that would allow them to leave. Curt Mercer was a good man, reliable, plodding; he believed investigative work was supposed to be boring, and he accepted without question chores of the sort that Charlie intended to load on him: go see all these people and find out if any of them had known Victoria was going to the party, or why. Or if any of them had a suggestion about why she had been killed, or anything else that might be of help.

He was not happy about the vagueness of the assignment; he had learned that it was best to lay it out precisely: go find out if so and so was home Monday from ten to three. Anyone could ask the right questions and find out something like that, while what he was looking for was open, vague, subjective. But he was willing to give it to Curt because he didn’t really believe there was anything to learn from her friends. Everyone so far had told the same story: she had not mentioned the party, had not mentioned meeting anyone in particular, had not mentioned anything out of ordinary. He suspected that would continue to be the case. Victoria Leeds had not been a gossip, had not talked much about herself apparently. He was starting to feel that he would have liked her quite a lot; he knew Constance felt that.

When he got back to Phil’s apartment, he called Bill Gruenwald, whom he thought of as the tame, friendly sheriff. He gave him the name David Musselman, and the post office number, and they agreed cautiously that maybe they would now learn why Victoria had gone to the party just outside Washington. There was nothing else new, Gruenwald said glumly.

The medical examiner put death at no later than seven-thirty—he had not been able to narrow it more than that. She hadn’t eaten anything all day, Gruenwald had said almost apologetically. And the air conditioner had been set to subarctic. Charlie knew enough about autopsies to know that sometimes if you got the year right you were ahead of the game.

He gave the sheriff Phil’s number and hung up soon afterward. Then he started to pace.

Constance had been gone for longer than three hours, plenty long to look up Paul Volte. It was nearly five. She would be caught in the gridlock; and it was too far to walk. She wouldn’t come by subway, he told himself. She wouldn’t do anything that dumb. That’s where the guys with the knives and guns were; she knew that. She probably wouldn’t get there until after seven, eight… . Gruenwald called back.

“Charlie, this Musselman, you know anything about him?”

“Just give it to me,” Charlie said in a tight voice. “What?”

“He’s dead, Charlie. You know they had two accidents at the condo site? One involved some kids, but the other was a fatal accident. David Musselman fell off a sixth floor structure and was killed instantly. I thought that name sounded familiar. Right there in the file.”

Charlie asked very softly, “When was that, Bill?”

“May tenth.” There was a brief silence, and then Gruenwald said, “Someone else has that box number now. Your turn, Charlie. Give.”

Charlie told him about the manuscript. “And,” he finished, “apparently Musselman called the magazine on about May tenth or eleventh to get the manuscript back. Exactly when did he rent that post office box?”

Gruenwald cursed. “I’ll get back to you. When are you coming back down here?”

“Tomorrow,” Charlie said. “Nine o’clock shuttle.”

They made plans for Gruenwald to meet the plane, and then for the three of them to go see Musselman’s widow; she lived in Chevy Chase. Charlie hung up, walked to the window, and stared out at the city, seeing little of it.

It was nearly six when Constance arrived; she was carrying a bag of groceries. Charlie met her at the door, took the bag from her arm and set it aside, and then drew her in close in a hard embrace.

“Hey,” she said after a moment. “Wow!” She pulled back smiling, but her smile faded at the look on his face. “Charlie? What is it? What’s wrong?”

He shook his head. “Nothing now. I kept seeing you getting mugged, getting thrown under the wheels of a bus, thrown down on the tracks in the subway station. Idle hands, idle minds, Satan’s playground, or something like that.”

“Oh, Charlie,” she whispered. “Oh, Charlie.”

“What’s in the bag?” he asked then in a hearty voice. “And I learned something from Gruenwald that could blow our case sky high again, whole new ball game maybe.”

“Ingredients,” she said, indicating the bag. “I decided to cook some dinner for Phil and Alicia. Least we can do. You know how much hotels cost here in New York these days, if you can get one on short notice?” She picked up the bag and started for the kitchen. “What did the sheriff say?”

There was a counter with stools in the kitchen; he seated himself out of the way and watched her unload the ingredients: a lovely salmon, lingonberries, sour cream, horseradish… . Lingonberries, he realized, meant blintzes. His look was reverential when he turned again to her.

“Well?” she asked.

“Well, it seems that Mr. Musselman died on May tenth, for openers. And he worked at the Buell condo complex. He was the fatality we heard about, the reason for tight security now.”

She was frowning at him, her hands motionless over the salmon that she had been anointing with lime juice. “May tenth? But isn’t that about when he sent the manuscript to the magazine, and when he called? Are those dates all right?”

“I don’t know yet. But it makes for an interesting twist. I think we’ve found the reason for Victoria’s party crashing. And she must not have thought he was dead. She returned the manuscript in June, remember, to the post office box.”

“Presumably someone collected it,” Constance said in a low voice. “Or else it’s still there.”

He shook his head. “Box is closed out, new tenants.”

Phil and Alicia arrived then, and they joined Charlie at the counter where they had drinks and offered advice to Constance about knives, spices, the location of proper pans and skillets, and she was spared either dodging Charlie’s inevitable questions about what she had learned, or else out-and-out lying about it. She knew she was a pretty good dodger, and an incompetent liar.

It had shaken her terribly to see fear on Charlie’s face when he caught her up in his arms earlier. He said fear of the dangers of the city, and although that might be what he believed, she did not believe it. They had spent too many years living here for such terror to surface now. But he had been afraid; she had felt his heart thumping, had felt the tremor in his hands when he pulled her to him. At the moment he was laughing at something Phil had just said, the fear pushed out of mind again, so far back that now it would be possible to believe that earlier there had been a simple aberration, a twinge of indigestion, or something equally fleeting and benign. Now it would be impossible to bring it up and talk about it. What fear? he would drawl lazily. Hungry, that’s what I was.

It had something to do with Tootles and Ba Ba and that ancient silly Ouija incident, she felt certain. He had buried that, had never breathed a word of it before, but it had soured him for all these years on Tootles and Ba Ba, and had created in him a dread, even a terror that was surfacing now. The fear was inappropriate, out of time, out of place, but that was what made phobias so powerful, their very inappropriateness. Not that this was a phobia, she told herself quickly, well aware that it could turn into one, a phobia that could make an otherwise rational person behave in ways so irrational that treatment could be required. This was an irrational fear that had to be denied, and denial was achieved by transferring the fear away from the self to the other; he feared for her because he could not accept or even examine what had frightened him so badly many years ago.

She thought through this while she prepared the dinner, and chatted with their hosts, and then served and ate the dinner, which everyone agreed was delicious.

As she was drifting off to sleep that night, Constance was jarred wide awake when Charlie grunted and cursed.

“What?” she demanded. “Too many blintzes, too much horseradish in the sauce?”

“What Victoria Leeds said, interpreted by Janet Cuprillo, something about a proposal from a jock. I just got it.”

After a second she shivered and groaned. He put his arm around her and drew her close and eventually they fell asleep entwined.

When Bill Gruenwald met them at the terminal in Washington the next morning, he looked so thoroughly scrubbed, he seemed to shine. Before the handshaking was completed, he said dourly, “He rented the box May eleventh.”

“Oh,” Charlie said with great interest. “Busy day for Mr. Musselman, what with the funeral and all.”

“You got it,” Gruenwald said. “I’m parked over this way.”

Someone calling himself David Musselman had rented a post office box at the main post office on May eleventh and had kept it until June twelfth. According to Victoria Leeds’s assistant, the manuscript had been put in the mail to be returned on June eighth, a Friday. And on June twelfth, someone collected the mail, and turned in the key, Gruenwald said. No one remembered a thing about him. He had put the key in an envelope and left it in the box with a typed note saying he no longer needed it. They hadn’t bothered to keep the note, why should anyone? Gruenwald scowled.

“Once he knew who he was dealing with, he didn’t need to write letters,” Charlie said. “And he did call, apparently, on June fourteenth. Told her to invite herself to the bash, I bet, so they could meet and talk over the proposal that weekend. And that would explain Ms. Leeds’s presence, and her ducking out for a date with someone.” A date with a ghost, he added silently, and then instantly denied it. Someone who either claimed to be Musselman, or else claimed to represent him, probably.

Gruenwald drove with unconscious ease, and soon they were nearing the Chevy Chase developments. “Mrs. Musselman,” he said in a rather flat tone, “has come into a neat little fortune, couple hundred thousand, plus a settlement from the company. Three kids, away with grandparents right now. She was having trouble coping with meals and such.” At the next intersection he turned left, and pulled into a driveway. These houses were all expensive, with acres of velvet grass, landscaping done by expensive landscape designers, houses designed by fine architects. Very impressive, and somehow depressing, Charlie was thinking as they followed the curve in the driveway to the front entrance of the house. It looked like a set for a stylish Hollywood movie and real people didn’t live in Hollywood sets.

Diane Musselman would have been at home in a movie filmed here. She was blond and pretty, dressed in a silk pantsuit. Her waist was tiny, her breasts and hips generous, a real hourglass figure, Charlie thought, shaking her hand. She carried a wisp of lacy handkerchief that she touched to her eyes now and then although her eyes were as dry as his. An image of the Barbie doll in Tootles’s office swam up in his mind, and he struggled to erase it again.

“I know this is a terrible imposition,” the sheriff was saying as she led them into the house, through a spacious foyer with many flowers in oversized vases, and on to a comfortable sitting room. It looked as if no one had entered it since the decorators left.

“I must help in any way possible,” she said in a tremulous voice. “Please, if there’s anything at all I can do, you must let me. I’ll try.” She was very brave.

“Yes,” Gruenwald said. “Something has turned up that puzzles us. Did your husband ever do any writing? I mean articles for publication, books, things of that sort.”

She shook her head, her eyes wide and bewildered.

“Did he have an office here in the house, a study, something like that?”

“Oh, yes. He did a lot of work at home.”

She took them to the study, a large room with tan leather-covered chairs, a sofa, two desks, a drawing table… many books were on shelves here. One of the desks held an elaborate computer system, printer, a complicated-looking drawing machine. In here, as in the other rooms they had seen so far, everything was very neat.

Charlie and Bill Gruenwald exchanged glances, the gloom they had shared seemed to lift.

“Has anyone touched this equipment since your husband’s accident?” Gruenwald asked.