Something Wicked (30 page)

What a muddle of crossed purposes and broken dreams.

But how had Carla known that her lover was the murderer? What had Carla seen? And who had been her lover?

There were only four other women at the theater the night Shane was shot: Cindy, Janet, Henny, and Annie herself. Obviously, it wasn’t Henny.

Cindy. Nothing in Cindy’s demeanor ever indicated the least bit of interest in her own sex. She was so vigorously lustful about Shane that it seemed unlikely.

Janet. Janet still seemed to Annie the acme of middleclass respectability, a woman who had slipped into an affair with Shane and was bitterly regretting it and hating even more his involvement with her daughter.

Annie shook her head in bewilderment.

As she considered Janet’s and Cindy’s involvement with Shane, Annie remembered anew just how loathsome Shane had been. Carla had
despised
him. That was clear, right from the first day of rehearsal, from her occasional glance of distaste, her incredulous disgust when he didn’t even recognize the most common quote from
Macbeth.

Annie paced into the kitchen and poured another mug of coffee. She felt supercharged, a mixture of energy, determination, and intense concentration. But she also felt a quiver of worry. Something didn’t jell here. She was right, wasn’t she, about Carla? Carla was depressed to the point of suicide by the actions of her lover. And her lover had to be a woman. That was clear as clear. And her lover was the murderer.

Cindy. Or Janet.

Was it conceivable that Carla was involved with one of
them?
But it had to be, unless Annie was absolutely off target.

Carla. It all came back to her—her likes, her dislikes, her loves and hates. Carla had seemed much as usual when they gathered at the school to hear Posey. Subdued, of course, as were they all. But she’d left there to go home and drink—

Annie put down her coffee mug untasted.

Carla seemed fine when she arrived at the high school auditorium Thursday morning. But after the session there, she’d returned to her condo and started to drink heavily. And it had upset her dreadfully when Annie told her the gun had been hidden in Max’s condo. Annie thought about that morning’s interrogation and Posey’s loud, obnoxious behavior. She thought about the gun being placed in Max’s apartment.

And, quickly, like the meshing of gears, it all came together in her mind.

There were so many pointers.

The maliciousness of the sabotage, especially the shooting of Freddy.

Shane’s last-minute mastery of his lines.

The timing of the murder.

Carla’s distress after the session with Posey at the high school.

And it all came down to a single fact. It wasn’t what Carla
saw
that caused her suicide attempt—or her murder.

“Hello.” His voice was thick with sleep.

Annie glanced at the clock and realized with surprise that it was almost midnight, but what she had to say couldn’t wait. There was no time to lose.

“Chief, I know who the murderer is.”

“The hell you say.” Now he was wide awake. And eager.

Obviously, the chief
cared
about Max. Annie felt a warm rush of affection.

“What’s happened? Where are you, girl?”

“Oh, I’m here. At home. And I haven’t done anything yet. I called you first. I need your help. Now look, Chief, this is how I see it.”

She laid it out for him, and, after a first shocked exclamation, he said slowly, “By God, it all fits … Jesus, what a bitch.”

“Yes. I agree.”

“To set somebody up like that! She’s a monster, isn’t she?”

Yes. A cool, calculating, manipulative monster, feigning love, instigating murder, then brilliantly covering her tracks. Annie felt her throat tighten. And all they had against her was a reasoned judgment. Nothing concrete. Nothing to take to Posey and say, “Hey, look at this! She’s the one!”

Chief Saulter, too, saw the problem. “Damn, I think you’re right, only I don’t see how we can ever prove it.”

But Annie had an idea there, too.

“It isn’t going to be easy. But, with your help, I’m going to raise a ghost.”

She rode her bicycle through the night. Saulter had offered to pick her up, but there must be no public connection between them from this point on. As she pumped past the marsh ponds with their night sounds, the hoot of owls, the gurgle of water, the splash of scavenging raccoons and cotton rats, she realized anew how easy it was to get around Broward’s Rock. It was just a few minutes’ bike ride to any point. She would bet that was how the murderer came to Carla’s condo last night, waiting until the fall of darkness and depending upon the anonymity of a bike rider, dressed perhaps in a navy-blue warmup, a scarf, unremarkable, unremarked. When Annie reached the condos, she dropped her bike behind a sweet myrtle. Her shoes crushed fallen leaves and a spicy bay rum scent rose in the humid night air. She slipped from shadow to shadow and ran lightly up the outside steps to Carla’s door. She knocked twice, softly and quickly, and the door swung open. For just an instant, she had a hideous memory of that morning, then she reached out and gripped the chiefs strong brown hands.

“Her tape recorder’s on the shelf above the TV.” He turned his hooded flash briefly to his left.

That was the first requisite.

Then she explained the second. “Can you get the postmaster to cooperate?”

“Sure. You want to mail a tape and have it stamped with Thursday’s date and delivered tomorrow morning. Right?”

“Yes. Otherwise the murderer will know Carla couldn’t have mailed it. Everything hinges on that.”

“No problem,” he said softly. “The timing works fine. Carla could’ve mailed it late Thursday and that would account for delivery on Saturday instead of Friday morning.”

Now, all Annie had to do was put on the best performance of her life.

Annie drew the curtains and turned on a single floor lamp. In the dim light, she paced back and forth in Carla’s living room, glancing occasionally at the couch. She was remembering her visit with Carla, every word Carla had said, every intonation, that careful, particular, enunciated speech of the very intoxicated.

Because Carla must have called her murderer at some point, must have telephoned and said she knew that Max was
being questioned and the gun had been found in his condo. Carla must have warned that she wouldn’t be a party to a frame-up.

Carla meant that she had reached the end of her complicity, that she intended to die, but the murderer took it as a threat and so the murderer came.

By then Carla was sunk in her final sleep. Death was coming, but it came sooner than called. At least she hadn’t suffered.

Carla’s voice, its sound and substance and resonance.

Annie closed her eyes and pressed her hands to her face. In her mind, she could hear Carla: “L’il Orphan Annie. But that’s all right, folks. ’Cause she has Prince Charming.”

She dropped her hands, opened her eyes, and crossed to the tape recorder. When she turned it on, she began to speak and it was Carla’s voice, husky and low, with its undercurrent of sadness and alienation, that hung in the quiet air:

“I will be dead when you hear this. But you won’t care, will you? You never really cared for me at all. It was a sham, wasn’t it, when we made love?”

Annie paused. She stared unseeingly across the night-shadowed room so dimly illuminated by the brass, onyx-based floor lamp. She let the tape roll for several seconds, because she was Carla and she was very, very drunk.

“Cinderella came. I told you that. You hid the gun at Max’s. That was wrong. Dead wrong.” A soft, hiccoughing laugh. “Dead wrong. Just like I’m going to be. But I won’t help you do it. I was such a fool, listening to your lies, and all the while I think I knew. It’s always been the same. I love, but nobody loves me. But that’s not”—a pause and the very careful articulation of two syllables—“germane.”

Silence again. Two seconds. Three.

“I hated Shane.” The ghostly rendition of Carla’s voice became harsh. “I hated him. To know he had touched you—And you convinced me he’d been so dreadful to you. But that wasn’t true, was it? No, you had such a long-range plan and you and I would enjoy the fruits together. What a laugh. God, what a laugh,” and the word ended in a sob.

Carla, vulnerable, betrayed, exploited.

“Maybe it all went wrong because we called up the weird sisters. That’s what they thought, you know, in Shakespeare’s
time. If you called up the forces of darkness, they would overwhelm you—and they did. They did. Remember what the first murderer said: ‘I am one, my liege, Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world Hath so incens’d that I am reckless what I do to spite the world.’ That’s how I felt, but the agony of the act won’t go away, so I’m going to sleep forever. I don’t want to keep remembering.”

Another pause. The longest pause.

“I don’t know why I’m sending this to you.” A brittle laugh. “But that’s a lie. I know. I’m so angry. But I still want to give you some time. Perhaps you’ll join me. That might be the easiest answer. You see, the world is going to know
everything
that happened. I’ve sent a tape to Annie, too. I told it all. Every ugly word of it.”

A final pause. Annie clicked off the recorder and wiped away the tears streaming down her face.

Annie slept restlessly. Frightful images kept creeping out from the dark recesses of her mind. Finally, she lay quietly, watching the sun edge into her room, turning the shadows to gold. Saturday morning. The tape would be delivered to the murderer about nine-thirty. As on all Saturdays, Annie would be at Death on Demand.

Everything was in readiness, Ingrid sent to Beaufort on an errand to keep her out of harm’s way, Annie equipped with a hidden microphone, and the back door unlocked so that Chief Saulter could slip inside to hide behind the coffee bar.

At nine-thirty, the telephone rang.

It had to be answered, of course, though, of all days and all hours, this was the very worst time for Laurel to call. But she was, after all, Max’s mother.

“Death on Demand.”

The tone was upbeat, feisty, and bright. “Leave it to me, Annie. Rebecca Schwartz knows where to hang out and when. The suspect won’t give me the slip.”

So Julie Smith’s Jewish-feminist lawyer-heroine, or at least Henny’s version of her, was hot on someone’s trail.
Annie would have grinned, but right now she was having a hard time breathing.

Shortly before ten, the postman and two sunburned, middle-aged tourists entered Death on Demand.

Annie nodded good morning at Sam Mickle, who didn’t look big enough to hoist the large leather mail pouch slung over his shoulder. He plopped down a thick batch of circulars, magazines, bills, and—yes, there it was, the small padded envelope with the Death on Demand address penned in handwriting copied so meticulously from Carla’s address book.

Sam paused, cleared his throat, and bent close to her, speaking softly so he wouldn’t be overheard. “Miss Laurance, just want you to know, I think this arrest of Mr. Darling is a bad thing. A damn bad thing.”

Annie felt as jittery as a second-story man perched on the sharply tilted tile roof of a French chateau. Lord, if there was ever a moment when she didn’t want to be spotted in confidential conversation with her postman, this was it. She was aware of a shadow at the used-book window. If the murderer saw this … “Thanks, Sam. It will be all right.” She stepped back. “Sorry, I’ve got customers.”

He nodded and turned away.

Annie forced herself to look pleasant as she turned toward her unwanted customers. “Yes, can I help you?”

But if she felt thwarted, how must the murderer feel, peering through the window, and seeing the telltale envelope lying on the cash desk?

The husband, a skinny six-footer with thick-rimmed wire glasses, a nose smeared with sun block, and a querulous look, confided, “I’m always on the lookout for books about codes.”

“Codes?”

“Cryptanalysis. You know, pigpen ciphers, chronograms, one-time pads, vigenère ciphers.” His peeling brow wrinkled in irritation. “You do realize there is a subgenre of mysteries based on codes?”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course. Right over here.”

“And I don’t have all the Elizabeth Peters. Can you help me?” his wife chirped.

Annie had never helped anybody quite so quickly. In less than eight minutes, she was ringing up her sales and
shepherding them out the door, the man clutching
Spy in the Room, The Cipher, The Spy and the Thief,
and
Code Name Sebastian.
His equally sunburned wife carried
Crocodile on the Sandbank, The Curse of the Pharoahs, The Mummy Case, The Jackal’s Head, Borrower of the Night, The Copenhagen Connection,
and
Die for Love.

And they were out the door and on their way wondering perhaps why they hadn’t browsed a little longer.

No more customers,
Annie prayed.

The doorbell sang.

Annie looked up and panic flooded her.

Oh, dear Lord, she should have known. She should have
known.
There hadn’t been a phone call since last night.