The Dirty Book Murder (22 page)

“Nicely done,” I said.

“Piece of cake,” the hunchback said. “Uh, I don’t suppose you could lift me up there. I got to raise it to a vertical position. Can’t have Miss de Milo lying down.”

By the time he had the ice standing up, the door connecting the shed to the kitchen opened and in skittered a slender man, mid-thirties, waving his hands like a fluttering French waiter. He wore a cravat with navy blue polka dots on a white background. Pinned to his white silk shirt was a round button that said “fopdoodle.”

“My God! Where’s the rest of it?” he shrieked.

In the fifteen minutes it had taken us to get the block from the refrigerated truck to the table, it had melted from three hundred pounds to the size of a rather large chimpanzee.

“I’ll never complete the full torso now,” Alphonse the Ice Artist wailed. “Oh, dear Jesus. Martin’s not going to like this! We’ll need another block.”

“Like hell,” Harvey growled, jumping off the table. He brandished his tongs toward the man’s crotch. “You’d best get to work before all you got left to sculpt is an ear.”

Even Alphonse saw the point to that. After he skipped back to the kitchen to get his tools, I sauntered over to one of the windows and unhooked the latch. Then Harvey and I walked out the way we came in before anyone else could impugn our good names. We had the empty cart halfway down the hill when we heard Alphonse’s electric ice saw sputter into life.

Back at the refrigeration truck, I pocketed the three dollars Harvey offered for helping him. It would have hurt his pride to decline. One never knows when one can use a friend in the ice business.

*  *  *

I drove home, washed down another baloney sandwich with a Diet Coke, took a shower and, after listening to part of a Royals game broadcast, climbed into a tuxedo I hadn’t worn for ten years. It was a little tight in the shoulders, but the trousers fit fine.

Higgins picked me up at eight-thirty. A full moon hunkered as big and orange as a basketball over the trees to the east. We crossed State Line back into the “old money”
neighborhood and cruised past Quist’s front gate. Where there had been only catering trucks three hours before, the right side of the street in front was now glutted with shining Mercedeses, Lexuses, Jaguars, and the occasional Porsche Carrera. Dozens of well-dressed guests were getting out of cars and handing their keys to sweating parking valets. Colored lanterns dangling from the oak trees lining the long circular drive lit their way to the arched entrance of the house.

We drove on for a half mile, dodging sprinting valets and parallel-parked cars until coming to a street that showed no signs of either.

Higgins pulled onto Sixty-third, shut off the headlights, and drove another block west before turning north onto a quiet lane that paralleled Indian Creek on one side and the Kansas City Country Club golf course on the other. He stopped the car opposite the ninth green so that Casa de Quist loomed directly above us. Eerily lit by the rising moon, it looked like the closing credits scene of
Citizen Kane
. Although we were a good distance from the house, we could hear music and high-pitched voices seeping into the night through its open doors and windows.

“Best to go up from here,” Higgins said quietly when I got out of the car. “Our men cut off the alarm system this morning, but you’re on your own now, Bevan. And whatever happens, don’t screw up our bust or I’ll break whatever bones are left after Quist’s boys have a go.”

Higgins gave me a thumbs-up, then drove slowly away, lights still off. I crawled through the slats of a country post fence and slid on the slick grass to the edge of the creek. There had been little rain the past month and the water wasn’t as high as usual, but it still looked like it would come up to my chest in mid-stream. I undressed—shorts, shoes, and all—to wade across holding the clothes over my head.

A stone wall eight feet high surrounded the property. After shaking off what water and mud I could, I put my clothes back on and looked for something to help get me over the wall. All I could find was a piece of driftwood a foot thick. I stood on it, got my elbows over the ledge, and arm-crabbed my way up, then took a minute to rest on the top of the rough surface to scout the grounds.

A dog barked a short distance away. I turned my head in the direction of the sound and saw a German shepherd straining on a leash held by a guard. They were moving downhill in my direction. I lay prone on the wall, not sure that I’d been spotted. Balloonlike biceps stretched the sleeves of the dark T-shirt of the man. It was the Gold’s Gym boy from the shed.

My first inclination was to drop off the wall and crawl back to the creek—fast. But retreating, even for a few minutes, meant the end of my helping Anne escape. I felt
sure Gold Body wasn’t the only guard prowling the grounds. I decided to play it out.

He stopped thirty feet from where I lay on the wall, jerked the leash to quiet the dog, and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. He talked on it for nine minutes, long enough that I figured it had to be to a girlfriend, not his boss or another guard. After ringing off, he dropped the phone into his pocket, pulled out a joint, and lit up. He took a couple of hits on the weed and walked in my direction until he and Rin Tin Tin were directly below me.

Strapped to his thigh was a Blackhawk tactical drop holster. Sticking out of it was what seemed to be the butt of a Glock 17 similar to those I’d been issued in the Marine Corps.

I considered leaping on top of him. The dog would do what it had to do. Fortunately for all of us, the sweet smell of marijuana must have covered my scent. I let my heroic leaping idea pass and, after a few more leisurely drags, he and Rinty walked away.

When I was certain he had disappeared around a corner of the wall, I dropped onto Quist’s property. The shed was on the right rear side of the mansion, partially shaded from the floodlight on the roof. I sprinted forty yards uphill to reach the window that I’d unlocked earlier. After catching my breath, I stood on my toes to peer inside.

The room was dark except for a horizontal line of light under the door leading into the kitchen. I pushed open the window, crawled over the sill, and fell in a painful heap on the concrete floor. I crept up to the kitchen door, but not before slamming my upper thigh into the pointed edge of the steel table that had once held Harvey’s block of ice.

I tried the handle to the door and, to my relief, found it unlocked. Clinging to the hope that no one in the kitchen would care about someone entering through the darkened shed, I opened the door a crack. Sweat momentarily clouded my vision, but I could see that the kitchen was full of people in starched white outfits hurrying about their duties. They cut meat, adjusted oven temperatures, spread sauce, and diced vegetables in a noisy, chaotic atmosphere filled with delightful aromas.

At the far end of the large room, I noticed what looked to be an elevator cage. A squat, muscular man stood in front of it with arms crossed. Figuring he wasn’t there just to cut carrots, I waited for him to leave the kitchen before making my entrance.

It took ten minutes for him to find something else to do. As soon as I stepped in, however, an obese chef stopped shouting at his minions long enough to demand in a Marseilles accent why a tuxedoed guest had been allowed to enter his terrain.

I answered in the typical French manner—by ignoring him. While he waited for
an answer, I casually plucked a canapé of smoked salmon off a nearby tray table and whistled a Beatles tune before passing through a swinging door into party central.

Immediately outside the kitchen was a narrow set of stairs built for the servants of an earlier age. I went up, passed through an empty changing room, and exited into a lushly carpeted hallway. Four masked figures holding candles like extras in a Vincent Price horror flick glided silently past me in the opposite direction. The last in line, a woman, stopped and pointed out the trail of dirty footprints in my wake. She shook her head; I shrugged my shoulders apologetically.

I walked farther down the hall toward the main staircase where the hum of voices and music rose from below. Another masked couple ascended the stairs. I ducked into a dark room before they could notice me. While I waited for them to pass, something on the far wall caught my eye. A faint beam illuminated the photograph of a young woman whose milk white face was partially covered by a dark hood. Her visible features appeared devoid of personality. She might have been a mannequin except for the arch in her lip indicating the slightest sense of surprise.

As my eyes became used to the dimness, I noticed other photos. All but two were similar in that black hoods partially covered their pale faces. In each, one breast was similarly exposed as if the models had been posed for no other purpose than to be the objects of a voyeur’s derision. I studied the eyes of the models. All were heavily dilated. The girls must have been drugged when photographed. Except for the last one, who I think was dead.

I returned to the hallway.

The couple I had seen coming up the stairs were now humping away in a guest bedroom next door, oblivious to my or anyone else’s presence. I stepped inside, grabbing one of their masks and a long scarf that lay among other hastily discarded clothes on a chair.

Back in the hallway, I put on the mask, wrapped the black silk scarf around my shoulders, and crept to the top of a circular carved oak staircase that overlooked the main entrance. The gallery below teemed with attractive men and women in their middle-to-late twenties. They laughed and chattered with the familiarity derived from sharing the same private schools and country clubs since childhood.

I knew the type, if only from my encounters with their fathers and uncles on high school football fields. They were wimps when it came to us Jesuit-educated punks,
always whining how we hit too hard and too late. Circumstances, of course, changed when the playing fields became the social register and financial and professional institutions.

Catholics who graduated Notre Dame, Boston College, or even Marquette or Saint Louis U. had their own kind of economic and political mafia in town, but nothing like these lads and lassies whose golden pedigrees from eastern colleges opened every social and economic door. They were the new elite, scions of the WASP hierarchy who were just beginning to make their mark in the downtown law firms, banks, and brokerage houses.

For the most part, they were also very young emotionally. And here was Martin Quist, the pied piper their parents had probably warned them about, offering a liberating lifestyle; one more sophisticated and daring than they ever thought to find in their stodgy hometown.

An enormous inglenook and Italian marble fireplace filled the north wall of the main hall. A pre-Raphaelite sculpture portraying Undine hung atop its mantel. It seemed appropriate, given the nature of the gathering, that to the ancient Greeks Undine was a water nymph who drowned her promiscuous husband with an embrace.

On a marble table in the center of the room stood the ice sculpture of the Venus de Milo, minus the legs. Her truncated waist was surrounded by crepes and turnips cut to look like flower petals. I noticed the ice artist in a nearby corner, gazing forlornly at his half-melted masterpiece.

The men wore tuxedos, the women shimmering dresses—more like slips really—that clung to their lithe bodies like lizard skins. A few couples lounged on old-fashioned silk davenports drinking champagne, smoking hashish, and dipping tiny spoons in dishes covered with white powder.

An overly made-up young woman dressed in a skimpy black lace outfit cowered in the center of a pack of men who showered her with abusive language, comparing her breasts to cantaloupes and the like. Based on the tentative bond that she might be the giggling maid I’d spoken to on the telephone, I debated whether to intervene. Before I risked blowing my cover, however, a silver-haired gentleman appeared by her side. With arms defiantly crossed, he addressed the tormentors until, one by one, they sulked away.

The maid pasted on a frozen smile and resumed wandering among the guests. Her rescuer returned to his post by the front door to continue his job checking the invitation cards of new arrivals.

I seemed to have been the only one to notice the mini-crisis. Sounds of laughter and humming conversations continued to mix with the strains of Mozart played by a
string quartet. Pretty young heiresses fluttered about like black-and-white moths, showing off their décolletage, their bare arms, their long legs, inviting the men who shimmered among them to spread their pollen. Virile Adonises and scantily clad Dianas, no doubt rented for the occasion from local health clubs, glided through the animated crowd proffering alcohol and pills with the assorted canapés laid out on round silver platters. Hands flew everywhere, patting shoulders, playfully adjusting one another’s masks, brushing against thighs, cupping breasts and crotches.

The swanlike girls and their randy counterparts, stimulated by alcohol, drugs, sumptuous food, and the Gatsby surroundings, looked primed for whatever revels Martin Quist had planned as the time edged past eleven.

The invitation had intimated that something sexual was in store for them, and, because the guest of honor was Hollywood’s infamous Long Bob Langston, they must have thought anything short of a Fellini-esque bacchanal would be disappointing.

Two men and a young woman, each glowing with lustful expectation, stopped in front of me on the stairs. The latter, barely dressed in a flowing see-through tunic, nodded pleasantly as I bowed before her like a courtier. They invited me to watch their coupling, but I politely expressed my regrets. I descended the staircase looking for an inconspicuous place from which to look for my daughter.

I wallowed into the throng that filled the main room to overflowing. Not everyone wore the black masks provided at the door, but most did. The sense of anonymity fueled by alcohol, beautiful bodies, and the languid air of unchallenged privilege led to a palpable lack of inhibitions by these ambitious and reasonably intelligent young professionals.