Invitation to a killer, p.9
Invitation to a Killer, page 9
‘Complacent.’
‘Yes.’ She looked as if she might add, ‘stupid,’ but did not.
‘So, you have been happy here?’ I asked. ‘Happier?’
She shrugged. Her expression said, ‘No,’ but she said, ‘I can only tell you that my husband and I have been planning to leave this house for some time. But it’s not so easy to leave.’
‘Why is it not easy?’ But I guessed the answer before it came.
‘I am not sure if we got another position Mrs Moore would give us a good recommendation. And then we would be well and truly stuck here. Having raised a fuss, you understand? And then we have to live with the fuss.’
‘I understand completely,’ I said. ‘And I can guess why you want to leave – Callie might be … difficult – but was there one particular thing that was driving you out?’
‘It is not a happy house.’ Zelda looked over her shoulder before continuing, gesturing with one hand to draw me to one side. We stood nearer the refrigerator now, listening to it hum. When it suddenly disgorged a load of ice cubes into its bin I jumped about a foot.
‘There are arguments,’ she whispered. ‘Madame is threatening to leave. However, this is not having the desired effect.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘She thinks he will beg her to stay.’
‘Oh, I see. She is overplaying her hand.’
‘I think that is the expression, yes. She overplays the hand. It is a poker expression is it not?’
‘Precisely that. When you play a game, sometimes the risk you take is not well thought out in advance. Nor the next move.’
‘And now this.’ Zelda swept a hand around the room. ‘Now this murder.’ The word ‘murder’ was said in an even lower note, almost a hiss. ‘Now Antoine and I are well and truly stuck here. Because if we leave now, how will that look to the police?’
‘That will look very bad to the police, I must admit. But why do you think it was murder?’ At least they had the common sense to stay put and available for questioning. But at what point might she and her husband decide the Immigration and Naturalization Services were a bigger threat than the local police? Truly they were between a rock and a hard place, especially if you add their markedly unstable employer into the mix. If Callie were overbearing to begin with, now she had an added threat to hold over their heads. If she wanted to cast blame somewhere, Antoine and Zelda might be the first place she’d start.
‘We’re not sure yet it was murder,’ I said. We being me and my pal Narduzzi, of course. ‘But, what did you hear exactly?’ I asked this in the gentlest, calmest voice I could muster, fearing the wrong tone would frighten her into everlasting silence. ‘If this helps the police, I will make sure they know you helped. I happen to be, well, rather well acquainted with Detective Narduzzi. I’ve helped him before, you see. I promise you he is a reasonable type and if you are cooperative, I will make sure he knows this. You will have no trouble if you tell the truth.’
‘How many times I have heard that in my country!’ she said, causing me to wonder just what she had been accused of doing in her country, rightly or wrongly. ‘Look, it is no good. What I know – even if I thought it would help the case – what I know, it’s not much.’
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Let me decide if I think it’s worth passing along. Maybe I can keep your name out of it.’
‘And maybe you can’t.’ Seeming to regret the snippy tone she sighed, adding softly, ‘My husband – this concerns him too. I can promise no more than that we will discuss it. Perhaps you have a card you can leave with us.’
‘Actually, I—’
‘Just tell me the phone number. I will memorize,’ she said, saving me from having to explain why I didn’t have anything identifying me as being in any way attached to the police unless you counted several old paid-up parking tickets.
During all this the butler stood slightly to one side and behind his wife. Very much melting into the background. I was reminded of Fred Overstone, with his ability to vanish at will into the wallpaper. I realized my focus had remained on Zelda rather than Antoine but that was no doubt because he was such a good man at his job, seen but not heard.
Today he was in casual clothing like his wife, in jeans and shirt instead of his formal butler’s gear. The relief showed in his body language. He was, however, on alert. In his shoes, so would I be. ‘The butler did it’ may be a cliché but those with total access to a household are bound to be suspect. They’re also bound to be terrific sources of insider information, rather depending on how indiscreet they’re willing to be. A ticked-off butler is probably a fountain of information during an investigation.
I decided to try a slightly different approach. ‘I’m glad you’re here together,’ I said. ‘Because it can help me clear up a few questions I had. Antoine, you were serving the drinks throughout dinner, as I recall. But your wife served the cocktails before dinner.’
‘That is correct,’ she said.
‘Were there any special requests?’
‘They were all special requests, Madame. I mean we didn’t offer, for example, a bottle of wine to share. Everyone was drinking different things before the meal. Cocktails, you know.’
‘So in addition to your many talents, you are bartenders,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I worked many years in the restaurant trade.’
‘And that was here?’
‘No, in Europe. Anyway, during the meal we had the various wines, as you know. After the meal we had port to go with the Baked Alaska.’
‘That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Madame. The mistress of the house liked to serve a tawny port with every kind of dessert. It was, she liked to say, her signature.’
‘There’s no need to call me Madame,’ I said. ‘Do you recall any of the cocktails that were out of the ordinary? Any really strange requests?’ I wasn’t sure why I was asking but I thought poisoning an individual drink would be easier than poisoning the food: Everyone had a portion of the avocado shrimp and the prime rib and vegetables. Except for me, the vegetarian – I had whispered to Antoine when he tried to serve me the prime rib that I’d have only the vegetables.
Thinking this through, I realized how much the butler had control over who got what portion of what. No wonder the butler was often the prime suspect, so to speak.
One other option was the bread rolls. Antoine had portioned those out, as well. But directing one particular poisoned bread roll to the doctor, while not impossible, seemed most unlikely. Poison baked into the roll? That certainly put the onus directly back on Zelda, the chef, if so.
The Baked Alaska had been portioned out by the butler and shared by all. It would be impossible – or nearly – to poison just one segment of it. And only the butler would know which portion was tainted.
Which wasn’t exactly true, I realized even as I thought it. Zelda could have made a mark on the meringue, for example, to show him the portion where, say, the ice cream inside had been poisoned.
As all of this went through my mind, Antoine was continuing to answer my cocktail question. I dragged my mind back to attention.
‘The mistress was having a vodka martini, Madame. She always has a vodka martini with just the slightest soupçon of vermouth in the evenings before dinner. She is very particular about that tiny amount of vermouth. “Just set the bottle of vermouth next to the vodka bottle and that will be enough,” she will say. It is her little joke, always.’ He pulled back his lips in a rictus of a smile. I answered with a grim little smile of my own at the old joke.
‘And the others? The guests?’
‘Someone had a Manhattan. Two Manhattans, I should say. That was the Stoneovens. I am not sure about the agent.’
‘The Overstones. Yes.’
‘And then the congressman and his wife had sherry. I remember particularly because I had to go into the cellar to retrieve some. Very few people drink sherry anymore. It is out of fashion.’
This fit with my memory, as well as my impressions of the couple as being rigidly conservative. At least for occasions of public display they would drink not what they liked, but the most refined, Old World, Oxford-donnish drink they could think of.
‘And Montana?’
‘He drank a flavored sparkling water. As did the doctor.’
‘Had you met the doctor before this evening?’
He shook his head as she said, ‘People Magazine.’ I knew what she was referring to; I happened to catch the issue where a reporter followed the doctor around somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.
‘And was there anything about the evening that struck you as unusual?’
‘I’m sure I couldn’t say, Madame.’
Again, he and his wife exchanged glances. This time I was sure their glances relayed that they had talked with me long enough. I had to step up my game or I’d lose them.
‘There was a lot of wine and alcohol flowing,’ I said quickly. ‘Was that normal in your experience?’
‘Sometime,’ he said. ‘Sometime normal.’
It seemed as if we had entered an area these two really did not want to go.
‘Did you pick up on any particular tensions in the room? People who seemed to be avoiding other people? People who were oddly friendly?’
‘The only one who was oddly friendly was the congressman,’ said Zelda, surprising me. ‘He is a pig’s ear that one. We have them in our country.’
I knew what she meant. Of course the old saying is that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. I wanted to follow up on this outburst of honesty but Antoine gave his wife a small shake of the head: We don’t talk about this here.
That topic having become radioactive, I decided to try another tack.
‘It was quite chilly on the patio. Was it normal for Madame Moore to want dessert to be served out there?’
‘It was because of the Baked Alaska,’ said Zelda. ‘For safety’s sake she didn’t want the flames in the dining room. There had been an accident one time. The memory of the wallpaper, it made her very nervous.’
I thought the person who was very nervous was Zelda. She was lying about something; I was sure of it.
‘It was a beautiful dessert,’ I said, feeling my way through this possible minefield. ‘I haven’t seen it made in an age. My mother used to make it.’
This happened to be true. It was also true she caught the dining room drapes on fire one time when she’d been drinking.
Zelda softened enough to say, ‘It is very tricky pudding to make.’
‘But it was what Madame wanted.’
She nodded. ‘It was what Madame insisted on. She said one of the guests was from Alaska and this was to honor them.’
‘You have been in England it would seem?’ I observed. ‘No one calls it “pudding” over here.’
‘At one time,’ said Zelda. ‘If there’s nothing else, we must get back to work.’
‘Keep in mind what I said. I can help.’
‘Thank you. We will be fine.’
And the interview was at an end. The butler showed me to the door, closing it behind me with perhaps a bit more firmness than was necessary.
EIGHT
My interview with Antoine and Zelda left me unsatisfied. Clearly, they thought there was something more to the doctor’s death. And we had barely scraped the surface of their thinking.
Why had their minds leapt to thoughts of murder, when I had been careful not to introduce the word?
I might have written it off as the natural paranoia and twitchiness of two people in the country illegally who were clearly the products of tyrannical regimes, but it seemed other people were uneasy with the situation as well. The next day I got a call from, of all people, Rem Larsson. Could I come to his office to talk about some project, unspecified?
Sure, I said. I could carve out time for Rem Larsson, the most famous agent in DC if not New York. We settled on a late morning appointment for the next day at his offices on 12th Street.
I tried very hard not to fool myself into thinking this man was showing a sudden interest in my work and wanted to dangle a Netflix deal in front of my eyes. There’s nothing wrong with my work, mind, but it was not the sort of thing he would care about representing. He was probably not all that thrilled about representing thrillers written by former politicians but that was a well-paying gig and maybe it went to support pro bono work. For all I knew he was another version of the good doctor, doing things that made him metaphorically hold his nose while the income from those projects went to help the unjustly unpublished.
I paid a visit to his firm’s website, where I was reminded he is first and foremost an attorney, literary agents having evolved over time, expanding their expertise as the publishing industry morphed from gentleman’s pastime into something more resembling the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Age. Agents had had to adapt, swimming as they did in the increasingly murky worlds of finance, politics, justice for all, and the Internet. I learned from the website that his pro bono work as an attorney focused on cases where there was question about the evidence and tactics used by the prosecution. His work was not confined, then, to copyright disputes and so on but on occasion wandered into the shadier streets of the criminal law. He furthermore had served an apprenticeship with a justice of the Supreme Court.
He was sounding more and more like quite a guy. There was no grass growing under the feet of Rem Larsson.
His office was on 12th Street, one of those corridors of power that evolved seemingly overnight. No one quite knew how but like immigrants, lawyers had been drawn to the same area by ties of acquaintance and familiarity, not to mention the ability to speak the same language of torts and testimonies. Uber-agent Bob Barnett’s law firm offices were nearby, along with the offices of a dozen other members of the same or similar professions, housed in massive buildings of polished steel and marble.
I parked at the nearby public short-term garage and entered the building by the 12th Street entrance between G & H Streets.
Security cleared my visit with someone on the phone and I was directed to a bank of elevators that would transport me to Book Nirvana on the 14th floor. There I was grabbed and handed off by various lackeys (the first a rather severe-looking woman I pegged as a graduate of Bryn Mawr or Wellesley, Women’s Studies) before I was discreetly shuffled into Larsson’s office, announced by a fourth lackey (Vassar, English Literature, possibly nineteenth-century Romantics) as Ms Augusta Hawke. He rose from behind his mahogany desk to greet me. The desk belonged in a museum along with other artefacts of the Vanderbilt family.
He looked smaller than I remembered in his grand surroundings. Even though at Callie’s house he had stood beneath tall ceilings laced with crown moldings that had to be a nuisance for Zelda or Antoine to dust, here the massiveness of the glass picture windows overlooking 12th Street distorted his proportions further. He was still, in any setting, impressive. Sharp of eye and a sharp dresser, aging but gracefully. Graying hair grown just to meet the top of his starched shirt collar, the tortoiseshell eyeglasses giving him a scholarly look.
No bright yellow Porsches in his garage to ease him through his mid-life crisis, was my guess. He seemed too confident by far to need all that. Not surprisingly he was surrounded by books, which lined every wall. I glimpsed the titles of nearly every political biography or autobiography of the past decade, the ones not snatched up by Bob Barnett, all with glossy covers – mostly black, for some reason – and that ever desirable embossing.
In gold.
Callie’s house, now I came to think of it, had been devoid of books, at least in the living room. Perhaps there was a library somewhere down one of the long hallways, but the place seemed more pleasure palace then literary salon.
Perhaps I was just attaching my not-impressed views of Callie to her surroundings and props. For an investigator that was an easy trap to fall into. For this I needed to keep an open mind and that included assuming that despite appearances Callie might be far brighter than she let on.
Larsson let my eyes rest for a while upon the majesty of his empire but after offering me coffee, which I declined, he quickly came to the point of our meeting. Folding his hands atop his desk blotter, he said, ‘Callie has sent me some of those documents of which she spoke.’
No Netflix deal for me, then. But this sounded interesting, nonetheless.
More interesting was the question of, why tell me? From my perspective it was as if he had struck up a conversation with some random person on the Metro.
‘The interesting thing about Callie,’ he began, ‘is that just when you feel she is full of total nonsense and it’s safe to ignore her, she actually comes through.’
‘Aunt Davinia’s memoirs,’ I said.
‘She’s hinting at something a bit more, well, alarming than the whole business with the then-Prince. Although there are publishers who would sell their grandmothers for the chance to publish those bits.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I mean, like you I had my doubts but …’
‘She’s only hinting, mind, at some fantastic further disclosures. Some fly-on-the-wall stuff. I’m not sure whether to believe her.’
I felt doubt was a good policy in this case and I said so.
‘Let me ask you this,’ I said. ‘How well do you know Callie? I didn’t get the impression your relationship went back a long time.’
‘No, no, it does not. I had my assistant do a general Google search on her. She’s from Louisiana originally, did you know?’
‘I did not know that. Interesting. She’s managed to sand off that accent pretty well, assuming she had the drawl.’
‘Her family owned what we would have to call even these days a plantation. Acres of cotton or coffee beans or whatever it was. When the market for what they were selling dropped they got by selling off acreage, generation after generation, acre after acre, until they were left with basically the mansion and some surrounding fields that had been exhausted of any nutrients. At which point, her parents decided it was time to get their only daughter educated and married off to a wealthy man and for some reason they felt a good hunting ground would be Washington DC. Probably by that point Callie was too notorious to be married off to any of the local swains. But I’m extrapolating there; I don’t really know. She went to Hollins College in Virginia, scraping out a diploma in agronomy or whatever, and managed to get herself a job on Capitol Hill as an intern. It all made a sort of sense. She is nothing if not cunning and manipulative and the Hill is the best place in the world for such talents to take root and flourish. She met Tommy while she was busy selling access to her congressman.’
