The Hellfire Club (13 page)

“Holly Fenn is a slob,” Davey said, surveying the room with his arms crossed over his chest. “Are we surprised? No, we are not.”

Nora sat on a wobbly wooden chair, and Holly Fenn charged through the door, carrying a thick, battered notebook before him like a weapon. “I suppose the press sort of closed in on you out there.”

“They did,” she said, and laughed. “What are they doing here, anyhow?”

Fenn stood up. “Our chief thought we could manage them a little better inside the station.” He held his hand out toward Davey, who shook it. “Thanks for showing up like this, Mr. Chancel.”

“I meant, what are they doing
here
?” Nora said. “I don’t understand how they found out so fast about this woman who says she’s Natalie.”

Fenn paused halfway to his desk and turned to look at her. “You mean you really don’t know?”

“Guess not,” she said.

“Didn’t you see the papers this morning?”

She saw herself tossing the newspaper toward a chair.

“Oh, my God.” Davey put his hands on the top of his head. “You did it? You got him?”

“Looks like it.” For a moment Fenn looked almost pleased with himself.

“Did what?” Nora asked.

“Brought in our murderer,” Fenn said. “Been in custody since about ten last night. I think Popsie Jennings must have called the
Times
herself. You know Popsie, don’t you?”

Both Chancels knew the notorious Popsie Jennings, who owned a women’s clothing store on Main Street called The Unfettered Woman and lived in the guesthouse of her third husband’s estate on the good side of Mount Avenue, about a quarter of a mile from the Poplars. A short, solid, blond woman in her mid-fifties with a Gitane voice and a fondness for profanity, Popsie looked as though she had been born on a sailboat and raised on a golf course, but she had lived unconventionally, even raucously, and was supposed to have named her dress shop after her conception of herself. She was rumored to have in her bedroom two paintings of horses by George Stubbs given her by her first husband, and to declare that all three were well hung—the paintings, the horses, and the first husband.

“He broke into
Popsie’s
house?” Davey said. “He’s lucky he didn’t wind up tied naked to a bed and force-fed vodka.”

“He almost was,” said Fenn. “He came over to her house around nine last night. She got suspicious, nailed him with an andiron, taped his hands and feet together while he was out, and then got a cleaver and said she’d castrate him if he didn’t confess.”

“Wow,” Nora said. “Popsie was pretty sure of herself.”

“Pretty damn mad, too.”

“So who was the guy?” asked Davey.

“I suppose you know him, too. Richard Dart.”

“Dick
Dart
?” Davey sat down clumsily on the chair next to Nora’s and gave her a look of utterly empty astonishment. “I went to school with him. His brother, Petey, was in my class, and Dick was in the sophomore class when I graduated. We were never friends or anything like that, but I see him around town now and then. I introduced him to Nora a couple of months ago— remember, Nora?”

She shook her head, wondering why they were not talking about Natalie Weil and still not quite capable of taking in that she had actually met the man she had called the Wolf of Westerholm. “Where?”

“Gilhoolie’s. Right after it opened.”

And then she remembered the languid, drawling man in the awful bar, the man who had complimented her scent when she had not been wearing one. So she had spoken to, had looked into the eyes of, had been lightly touched by, the man she called the Wolf, who turned out to be a creepy, aging preppy with a drinking problem. The reason he acted as though he hated women turned out to be that he really did hate women. Still, Dick Dart did not at all match the vague mental images she had formed of Wester-holm’s murderer. He was too ordinary in the wrong ways, and not at all ordinary in other wrong ways. But maybe she should have guessed that the Wolf would have an ill-concealed sense of his own superiority.

“I still can’t believe it,” Davey said now. “You remember him, don’t you, Nora?”

“He was awful, but I wouldn’t have imagined he was
that
awful.”

“His father is having a little trouble with that one, too.” Fenn proceeded around to the front of his desk, thumped down the notebook, and sat to face them. “Leland sent over Leo Morris as soon as he heard what happened, and Leo has been in our face since two
A.M. He’s still back in the holding cell with your friend.” Though Leo Morris, the Chancel family lawyer who had hired the
QE2
for his daughter’s sweet-sixteen party, was one of the most powerful attorneys in Connecticut, he was not usually thought of as a criminal lawyer, and Davey expressed his surprise at this choice.

“Leo won’t argue the case in court, they have a sharp young guy for that, but he’ll stage-manage the defense. We’ll have a fight on our hands.”

“You’re sure he’s the guy,” Davey said.

“He is the guy,” said Fenn. “When we booked him, he had a silver cigarette case of Sally Michaelman’s in his jacket pocket. She stopped smoking ten, twelve years ago, but her husband gave her the case a couple of years before they divorced. And when we searched Dart’s apartment, we found lots of goodies. Jewelry, watches, little things that belonged to the victims. Some of this stuff was engraved, and we’re checking the rest, but I’d bet you anything you could name we’ll find that most of it came from the women’s houses. Hell, he even took a book about Ted Bundy from Annabelle Austin’s house—she wrote her name in it. Guess he wanted to pick up some pointers. Besides that, Dart had a scrapbook of articles about the killings, clippings from every newspaper for fifty miles around. And on top of
that
, while Popsie was threatening his manhood, he coughed up a detail we never told the press.”

Davey, who had looked a little alarmed at the mention of the book, asked, “What detail?”

“I can’t tell you that,” said Fenn.

“What made Popsie suspicious in the first place?” asked Nora.

“Dart had no real reason for showing up at her house. He called to say he had to discuss something, but once he got there he just rattled off some gobbledygook about the inventory at the dress shop—stuff he didn’t have anything to do with. Then he says it would be useful to have a look at the paintings in her bedroom, maybe she could will them to a museum for a tax deduction. He wants to look over the paintings before they go any further. Popsie tells him he’s full of it, no tours of the bedroom tonight, junior, go home, but really what she thinks is,
This guy is lonely, he just wants to talk.
Popsie has been around enough men to understand that this guy isn’t on the normal wavelength, it isn’t about sex after all, so she figures she’ll give him one more drink and throw him out. So she gets up, walks around him, and realizes that he’s not just making her nervous, he’s making her
really
nervous. She’s standing next to the fireplace. And then she realized something that made her pick up the andiron and clout him in the head.”

“What was that?” Nora asked.

“All the murdered women were Dart, Morris clients. Popsie referred Brewer, Austin, and Humphrey to Dart herself, and Sally Michaelman had referred
her.
They weren’t on Dick’s luncheon list, but they all knew him. She had what you could call a brainstorm, and because she’s Popsie, instead of falling apart she got mad and brained him.”

“Was Natalie a client of Dart’s?” Nora asked.

Fenn tilted his head back and contemplated the ceiling for a couple of seconds. When he looked back at them he seemed almost embarrassed. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mrs. Chancel. I must be getting too old for this screwball job. Got so caught up in the excitement around here, I forgot the reason you came in.” He slid the thick notebook closer to him and opened it to read the last page. From the other side of the desk, Nora saw that instead of the scrawl she might have expected, Fenn’s notes were written in a small, almost calligraphic hand. He looked up at Nora, then back down at the page. “Let me tell you about this woman. Officer LeDonne was reporting to the station early, at my request. He was coming up the South Post Road when he noticed a woman behaving oddly on the sidewalk in front of the empty building that used to house the Jack and Jill Nursery, in the 1300 block there, just south of the old furniture factory?” He looked up at her.

“Yes.” She felt a faint stirring of alarm.

“Officer LeDonne pulled over and approached the woman. She appeared to be in considerable distress.”

“Did she look like Natalie?” Nora asked.

Fenn ignored the question. “The woman more or less begged to be taken to the police station. She was insistent on getting away from the old nursery. When LeDonne helped her into the patrol car, he saw a resemblance to the photographs he had seen of Mrs. Weil, and asked her if she was Natalie Weil. The woman responded that she was. He brought her here, and she was taken to the station commander’s office, where she almost instantly fell asleep. We called her doctor, but all we got was his service, which said that he’d call us back. We’ll take her to the hospital this morning, but in the meantime she’s still asleep on the station com-mander’s couch.”

“She didn’t explain anything about what happened to her? She just passed out?”

“She was asleep on her feet from the second she came into the station. I should mention this. LeDonne never met Mrs. Weil. I never met Mrs. Weil. Neither did the station commander. None of us knows what she looks like in person. So it seems as if the two of you can help us out again, if you don’t mind.”

“I hope it is Natalie,” Nora said. “Can we see her?”

Holly Fenn came around the side of his desk with a half smile visible beneath his mustache. “Let’s take a little walk.”

“Hey, when Dick Dart was spilling his guts to Popsie and the policemen at her house, what did
he
say about Natalie?” Davey followed Nora and the detective toward the door.

“Said he never went near her.”

“He never went near her?” Nora still had not quite separated Natalie’s bloody disappearance from the fate of the other women.

“You believe him?” Davey stopped moving and let Fenn walk past him to get to the door.

“Sure.” Fenn opened the door and turned toward them. “Dart admitted everything else to Popsie. Why would he lie about one more victim? But the real reason I believe him is that Natalie Weil didn’t use Dart, Morris.”

“He only killed his father’s clients,” said Davey, with a fresh recognition of this fact.

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Fenn motioned them through the door.

Out in the hall he led them past dull green walls, bulletin boards, doors open upon rooms crowded with desks. They were approaching a metal door which stood open behind a uniformed policeman. Through the door a row of barred cells was visible. It struck Nora that the cells looked exactly the way they did in movies, but until you actually saw them you would not guess that they were frightening. “Your friend Dart is back there,” said Fenn. “He’ll stay until we move him to the county lockup. Leo Morris is with him, so it might be a while. We still have to take his picture and print him.”

Nora imagined the languid, smirking man from the bar at Gilhoolie’s penned up in one of these horrors. The image filled her with dread. Then she took another step, and the entire row of cells came into view. In the last of them, one man sat bowed over on the end of the cot and another, his face obscured by a row of bars, stood. They were not speaking. Nora could not look away.

Davey and Holly Fenn moved past the open door. Nora looked at the man hunched at the end of the cot, then took in his curly gray hair and realized that he was Leo Morris. Involuntarily she glanced at the man standing beside the lawyer, and at that second the man moved sideways and became Dick Dart, his face brightening with recognition. She felt an electric shock in the pit of her stomach. Dick Dart
remembered
her.

Dart looked relaxed and utterly unworried. His eyes locked on hers. He derived some unimaginable pleasure from the sight of her. He winked, and she pushed herself forward, telling herself that it was ridiculous to be frightened by a wink.

Farther down the hallway was a door marked station commander. Nora forced herself to stop seeing the mental picture of Dick Dart winking at her and took a long, deep breath.

“Let’s see what’s happening.” Fenn cracked open the door and peered in. A wide young woman in a police uniform immediately slipped out. Fenn said, “Folks, this is Barbara Widdoes. She’s our station commander, and a good one, too. Barbara, these are the Chancels, friends of Mrs. Weil’s.”

“Holly gave me this job.” Barbara Widdoes held out her hand and gave them each a firm shake. “He has to say I’m good at it. How do you do?” She was attractive in a hearty, well-scrubbed way, with friendly brown eyes and short, dark hair as fine as a baby’s. Nora had misjudged her age by at least five years. The woman before her was in her late thirties but looked younger because her face was almost completely unlined. “Actually, all I do is keep everybody else out of this old bear’s way. And rent my couch out to exhausted strays.”

“Can we look in on her?” Fenn asked.

Barbara Widdoes glanced inside. She nodded and allowed Nora, Davey, and Holly Fenn to enter her office.

Covered to her neck by a blanket, a small old woman lay on a short, functional couch against the side wall of the dark office. Her eyes were deep in their sockets, and her cheeks were sunken. Nora turned to Holly Fenn and shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s someone else.”

“Move a little closer,” Fenn whispered.

When Davey and Nora took two steps nearer the woman on the couch, her face came into sharper focus. Now Nora could see why LeDonne had mistaken her for Natalie. There was a slight resemblance in the shape of the forehead, the cut of the nose, even the set of the mouth. Nora shook her head again. “Too bad.”

Davey said, “It’s Natalie.”

Nora shook her head. He was blind.

“Look,”
Davey said, and instantly the woman opened her eyes and sat up, as if she had trained herself to spring out of sleep. She wore a filthy blue suit, and her bare feet were black with grime. Nora saw that this old woman was Natalie Weil after all, staring directly at her, her eyes wide with terror.