Shadows Everywhere (14 page)

Mungweather shook his head at both suggestions. "It's about these," he said, lifting the lid from the florist's box. He parted folds of white tissue to reveal a bouquet of different types of flowers–withered and dead flowers.

"I guess you'd better explain," Mr. Staples said.

Detective Mungweather flashed his gentle little smile. "Mr. Staples," he said, "inadvertently you are involved in one of the most bizarre cases of murder in the history of crime."

"Murder?"

"The facts haven't been made public yet," Mungweather said, "so I'll have to start at the beginning. Are you familiar with those old houses on Maden Street, the big ones that have become a little run down?"

Mr. Staples nodded. He had seen those blocks of houses from an earlier, more prosperous era, brownstone and brick, with high gables atop three stories of hideous pseudo-Gothic architecture. Half of them were rooming houses now, with dirty windows and sloping terraces and gardens given back to nature.

"There was a man who lived alone in one of those houses," Detective Mungweather went on, "a man who inherited the house from his mother over a dozen years ago. This man–we're not at liberty yet to give you his name–had a small greenhouse built onto the back of his house, a hothouse about ten feet square and constructed entirely of glass. It was situated in such a way that it was hardly visible from the street, and most of the glass panes were soaped on the inside, partly to control the sun's rays, partly for privacy. Our man took great pains with his hothouse, even going to the expense of having a special gas heating unit installed in it to insure perfectly controllable warmth all year round."

"Nothing bizarre so far," Mr. Staples said, lighting up another filter-tipped cigarette. "Just a slightly eccentric horticulturist."

"More than slightly eccentric," Detective Mungweather said. "You see, besides being interested in the beauties of flowers, our man was also interested in the beauties of womanhood. He'd had two wives, both of whom supposedly ran off. The last one disappeared four years ago. Now it turns out that there were many women in his life, a dozen in all. He murdered all twelve of them and buried them in his indoor year-round garden."

"Murdered a dozen women?" Mr. Staples half stood and sat back down again.

"Murdered," Detective Mungweather said clearly and calmly.

"But just a moment," Mr. Staples said, his cigarette poised before his lips. "You said they'd all been buried inside his hothouse, and you did mention that it was small, only ten by ten."

"That's true," Detective Mungweather said with his little smile. "He buried them all upright, with their heads a few inches below the ground. The tops of their skulls had been removed and a flower had been planted in each head. Marvelous fertilizer, I would think."

Mr. Staples almost doubled up in his chair. Images of those grotesque flowerpot heads beneath cool dark soil made his stomach wrench. "Good heavens, you can't he serious! You can't be!"

"I am, though," Detective Mungweather said. "They were women with pasts mostly their own, prostitutes, transients... women no one would really miss. Our man would strike up their acquaintance and go from there. Some of them lived with him for a while before their murders. I suppose he must have had a certain charm."

"But the flowers...why?"

Detective Mungweather leaned back in his chair. "Well, you must understand that this man identified the beauty of certain types of women with the beauty of certain types of flowers. We got this from his diary. One woman was named Laureen, and she was to him like an orchid, soft and delicate, with a perfect roundness and fragility about her. Then there was Rose Anne, his pink rose, blushing and pure, and looking younger than her years." Mungweather had reached into the florist's box and removed a withered rose on a long stem, a crushed and shriveled yellow tulip, a dried, once-delicate chrysanthemum. "Marlene, Doris, Barbara, Eunice... He had a flower for each of them."

"Insane!" Mr. Staples said.

Detective Mungweather nodded agreement. "But you must understand that this was how he possessed these women; to him, these soft petals whose stems and roots were nourished by the bodies of his loved ones
were
his women. These once-beautiful plants were the flesh of his beloved."

"Revolting," Mr. Staples said. "But I still don't see how all this concerns my company anyway."

"This man was out of town yesterday," Detective Mungweather said, "when the gas failed. These," he nodded at the white box of withered flowers, "were all that was left in his hothouse when he returned. They are dead, and he holds Consolidated Natural Gas and Power, and you as Regional Director, directly responsible for the death of his loved ones."

"What!" Mr. Staples' voice was incredulous. "Responsible? How did you find out about this maniac and arrest him?"

"That's just our problem," Detective Mungweather said with his little wisp of a smile. "He hasn't been apprehended, and, as I said, he holds you directly responsible for what happened."

Mr. Staples brought his open palm down on the desktop. He'd had a hard last couple of days, and now this ridiculous business was just too much. "That's preposterous!"

"A lot of things are preposterous," Mungweather said. "For instance, when I came in here, you didn't even ask to see my identification."

Mr. Staples' eyes fixed on the dark and withered flowers in the white box for a full ten seconds. His Adam's apple jerked and disappeared below his starched white collar. "Now see here..."

"See where?" Mr. Mungweather asked, drawing from beneath his suit coat a pair of long-bladed pruning shears with red handles. He inserted his fingers within the handles expertly.

"I don't believe a word of this! I don't!" Mr. Staples said in a desperate, choking voice. He placed his hands on the edge of the desk and stood.

But Mr. Mungweather had stood also, his arm drawing back the glinting shears in what seemed, through Mr. Staples' horrified eyes, to be slow motion. Only Mr. Staples, still not believing, couldn't move–
he couldn't move!

"Directly responsible!" Mr. Mungweather repeated through clenched teeth each time he lifted and plunged downward the red-handled glistening shears.

R
oger Tabber sat quietly behind the wide desk in his private office, listening to the muted sounds of the traffic streaming below him on Seventh Avenue. He was visible really from three angles, for the plush office was furnished with several huge mirrors stretching from floor to ceiling, to give the impression of space. It was the nature of Tabber's business that he spent much time confined to his office, and he wanted to spend that time in an unstifled atmosphere conducive to decision-making. The three Roger Tabbers were men of about fifty, beginning to gray, with handsome, aggressive faces becoming slightly padded with the excess flesh of middle age. They lifted their right arms simultaneously and picked up the telephone receiver.

"Louis?" Tabber said into the telephone. "Give me a quote on Laytun Oil."

"I see," Tabber said after a pause. He drummed his fingers on the smooth desktop, letting the man on the other end of the line wait. "Buy me five hundred shares," he said then. "I'll talk to you later, Louis."

Tabber hung up the phone and gazed around him at the many handsomely framed charts hanging on the walls, at the wide table in the office corner covered with more charts and graphs, financial reports, figure sheets on great corporations and small alike. With his pencil, with his ascending and descending lines and sheet after sheet of figures, Roger Tabber was able to keep his finger on the pulse of the stock market. As an independent speculator and investor he had to in order to stay in business.

Tabber was intimately familiar with the countless graphs around him, and he believed in them. If all the pertinent facts were known, almost anything could be reduced to a graph, could be analyzed, plotted, and, more importantly, predicted, at least to the degree that Roger Tabber had made a profitable business out of it.

When he'd returned from Haiti last year he had started the business, working out of his apartment, but soon the reams of graphs and assorted information, the tools of his trade, became too numerous. He was making plenty of money, so he rented this office on Seventh Avenue, had it lavishly decorated and had two telephones installed. Here, alone in his office with his charts and telephones, he was building his fortune.

Tabber gave a little start behind his desk at the knock on his door. It was most unusual for anyone to be calling on him at the office. He straightened his tie and called for the visitor to enter.

A tall, dark-complected man stepped into the office and closed the door behind him. He was broad-shouldered and muscular, though the trim cut of his dark-blue business suit made him appear almost slender. With a wide smile on his pleasant face, he glanced around him at the imposing graphs hanging upon the walls before advancing on the desk.

"Mr. Tabber," he said, extending his right hand, "I am Siano... of the Leasia family."

Tabber's heart leaped as he shook hands. Well, there was nothing this man could do about it now, even if he were fully aware of what had really happened.

"Yes," Tabber said, "I know of the family from my stay in Haiti. And I have heard of you."

"I'm honored, sir," Siano said in his velvet, high-pitched voice. It was a cultured voice, grammatically precise, and Tabber could almost see the verbal punctuation in the air. "I have been a long time away from the island. It surprises me that you have heard of me."

"I heard you mentioned in a conversation about your father," Tabber said. "Your father, you know, is rumored to be a… What is it?"

"A
houngan
," Siano said pleasantly, "and it is good, sir, that you know I am of his family."

Again Tabber felt an irregularity in his heartbeat. He remembered now–native superstition. A
houngan
, or shaman as he'd heard them called, was a voodoo witch doctor. There was always talk of such nonsense when he was on the island; it had developed into quite a gimmick for the tourist trade. And this was Siano, one of the Sons of the Leasia clan, well-traveled and educated in Europe–on some kind of foundation grant, no doubt.

"Well," Tabber said, "what is it that brings you to New York?"

"I will be here for some time," Siano said, "staying at the Hilshire, and I thought I would talk with you about the Sweet Kane Sugar Company."

"But...Tabber shrugged,
"
it no longer exists."

"I am aware," Siano said in a sad voice behind his smile. "Bankruptcy, liquidation–it was cruel."

"Cruel?" Tabber shook his head. "It was unavoidable."

Siano's smiling dark eyes met Tabber's directly. "You, sir, as the manager, should know better. After an entire tribe of people had migrated from their homes, after they had been promised wages to live on, you got them to help you strip the land and then liquidated the company, paying them no wages, leaving them to poverty and hunger."

Tabber pressed the flat of his hand on the desk. "But there simply
was
no money! Don't you understand?"

"I understand, sir, the mechanics of business," Siano said. "I know that the profits of Sweet Kane Sugar went to the parent company that owned most of the stock, that all assets went in various ways to the parent company so that when liquidation occurred there was nothing for the people. I am not inexperienced in the world of finance, sir."

Tabber drew a gold fountain pen from his pocket and began toying with it. "Well," he said, staring at the pen, "it does no good to talk about it now."

"That's true," Siano said, "but I must tell you that my people will not tolerate what happened. I, too, have called the Loa, I am also a
houngan
, and I have been sent to New York to see that death visits you."

Tabber's body stiffened in sudden shock. "And how to you propose to do that?" he asked in a tight voice.

"You needn't fear death by the hand of man," Siano said in his pleasant, smooth voice, "but death will come to you; death is on the way to you."

Tabber felt himself getting angry. "What the hell do you intend to do, stick pins in a doll or something? I don't believe in your
malarkey any more than I believe in leprechauns, and I'm surprised an educated man like yourself does. You must know that voodoo works by the power of suggestion; the intended victim must believe in it or it's worthless. And I assure you I don't believe in it!"

"I am aware," Siano said calmly.

"I am aware, too," Tabber said angrily. "Now get the hell out."

He watched Siano smile and get up slowly. Tabber felt the hardness of his walnut desktop for reassurance. Around him were the wall charts, the square-cornered filing cabinets, the accouterments of commerce, of civilization, while below him he could hear the Seventh Avenue traffic passing below his window in an endless stream of reassuring noise and gleaming metal. This was New York, not Haiti. Was this savage in an expensive business suit out of his mind?

Siano turned and walked gracefully to the door. Tabber expected him to turn back and say something before leaving but he didn't.