Death's Savage Passion (14 page)

I abandoned my attempt to get next to the police line. I headed out of the crowd, trying to look bulky as well as tall, to give myself the advantage of being intimidating. Unfortunately, I am only intimidating to small women and men with ego problems. By the time I got to the edge of the crowd, Caroline Dooley and her friend were already wedging themselves into the mass.

I caught Caroline by the elbow and pulled her back.

“I was just coming to see you,” I said.

She stared at me, stupid. “My
building’s
on fire,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s that bad,” I said.

“Why don’t we go up and ask,” the man said.

“Pay McKenna,” I said. I held out my hand.

He took my hand, smiled, and said, “John Robert Train.”

“Oh,
God,”
Caroline said.

“John Robert
Train?”
I said. “Verna’s John Robert Train?”

“They’ve been divorced for
years,”
Caroline said.

“There she is,” the doorman yelled. “Miss Dooley from 1426. I don’t know who you think died up there, but it ain’t her, because she’s
here.”

T
HE FIRE CHIEF WAS
a weathered, cadaverous man with buckteeth and the light of passionate bigotry in his eyes. He had no more use for his crew (two women, two blacks, two Hispanics, and a white man with an Appalachian accent) than he had for Ms. Caroline Dooley, Woman Posing Around as Big Executive. He stood in the glass and marble foyer, staring at the rococo ceiling and shouting.

“Smoke inhalation,” he said.
“Smoke
inhalation.”

I had attached myself to Caroline like a Siamese twin. The fire chief didn’t notice. Neither did the super, the doorman, or the two underage patrolmen who had been hauled in to provide a Police Presence. John Robert Train eyed me dubiously, but he wasn’t about to say anything. He had troubles of his own.

The fire chief led us to the elevators. The super, the doorman, and the two policemen got into the east elevator. The fire chief, Caroline, John Robert Train, and I got into the west. We punched “14.” It followed “12.”

“Smoke inhalation,” the fire chief said again. “She’s pretty singed, but it wasn’t that. They die by fire, you can tell. They get this look on their faces.”

“Oh, God,” Caroline said.

“This one looks peaceful,” the fire chief said.

“Who?” Caroline said.
“Who
looks peaceful?”

“What we can’t figure is why she didn’t move,” the fire chief said. “Found her just sitting in a chair. Whole thing about to fall into ash and sticks the minute you touch it, but there she is. Now why didn’t she get out of the chair?”

“Smoke inhalation,” Caroline said, sarcastic.

“Nah,” the fire chief said. “With smoke inhalation, they’re overcome while running for the door. You find ’em passed out on the carpet.”

The elevator stopped on fourteen, opened, deposited us in the hall. Blank beige walls bordered thin maroon carpet and surrounded maroon metal doors. It looked like the Locked Ward in a not particularly expensive institution for the treatment of senile dementia.

The east elevator disgorged the Nominal Officials. As if on cue, the fire chief turned his back on us and tramped around the corner in the direction of 1426.

“We didn’t find any cigarettes,” he said to the ceiling. “The oven wasn’t on.”

“In his last life he must have been an
art
director,” Caroline said. “What is he
talking
about?”

John Robert Train coughed. It was a very discreet cough, meant to be heard only by Caroline, but it made the doorman and the two policemen jump.

“I think he’s saying the fire started in your apartment,” John Robert Train said.

“The fire started in my apartment and there’s a woman in my apartment?” Caroline said. “For God’s
sake.”

We turned the corner and came to a stop in the middle of the hall. The door to Caroline’s apartment was open, looking black and scorched and loose on its hinges. All the other doors were as maroon and pristine as the ones near the elevator. The fire had not only started in her apartment, it had been
contained
in her apartment.

We crept closer, reluctant to move too quickly, reluctant to arrive. Behind us, the elevators opened again. We heard the first of the ambulance men.

“That’s a foldable stretcher,” one of them said.
“Fold
it.”

We advanced. “Dear Jesus,” Caroline said. “What is this? What’s going on in my life?”

She went to the doorway and stood peering into the smoke.

“Paper,” she said. “More
paper.”

“What?” I asked her.

“Paper,” she said again. She gestured into the smoke. “Somebody took all my bills and
burned
them.”

The bills had indeed burned. There was a charred, sodden pile of them in the middle of what had been a white carpet. There was what might have been more of them on a chair, burned into a hollow in the paisley damask.

“The
Starrunner
manuscript,” she said. “Oh,
Christ.”

The fire chief came out of the smoke, stamping his cleats into the carpet.

“You see what I mean?” he said.

“I don’t see anything,” Caroline said. “I see my apartment burned up. That’s all I see.”

“Just a minute,” the fire chief said. He turned away and stomped back into the smoke.

Caroline turned to me, eyebrows arching. She wanted to leave. I didn’t want to go. It had been a long time since I allowed manners to interfere with getting something I really wanted. I stared back.

“What are you doing here?” Caroline said.

“I came to see you.”

“Well, yes,” Caroline said. “I know that. But—”

The fire chief came back. This time I knew the stomp was commentary, not habit. He wanted to destroy that carpet. He wanted to destroy all the white carpets in Manhattan and all the pinko liberals who bought them.

“No cigarettes,” the fire chief said. “No oven on. Fire started in the middle of the room someplace.”

“In the middle of the room someplace?” Caroline said.

“We did some pretty heavy hosing,” the fire chief said. “Things got moved around.”

The ambulance men came up behind us, stretcher finally folded. We let them by.

“We’ll be able to tell when the lab gets through,” the fire chief said, “if you see what I mean, but right now all we know is the fire started in the middle of the living room. Maybe this friend of yours—”

“Whoever it is, is not a friend of mine,” Caroline said.

“She’s here,” the fire chief said. “She’s the only one here. Who’s got keys to your apartment?”

“I have keys to my apartment,” Caroline said. “The super has keys to my apartment. That’s it.”

“You don’t smoke cigarettes,” the fire chief said.

“Filthy habit.”

“With cigarettes, that’s something we know about. People go to sleep. I smoked for thirty years, never fell asleep with a cigarette in my hand, never could, but these people—”

“Why don’t you
identify
her?” Caroline said. “Why don’t you find out who and what was in my apartment?”

The fire chief set his face.

I moved around them, cautious and fey. I knew this conversation. It could go on forever, and probably would. The fire chief couldn’t say he thought the fire had been set. If he did and it hadn’t been, or wasn’t proved, Caroline could sue. Either Caroline had set the fire herself and was being smarter than she’d ever before shown any evidence of being, or she didn’t know what was going on. I left them to their impasse. I thought they would enjoy it.

Caroline had a lot of high-tech furniture with metal frames and white cushions. The cushions were wet and gray-looking. The metal was burned black. I pushed aside a chair that had been toppled in the confusion of men and hoses and moved closer to the ambulance men. They were bending over a body in a chair near the chrome and glass coffee table, swearing.

“You folded the damn thing,” one of them said. “Now unfold it.”

“I’ll unfold it if you’ll deal with
that.”

“I’m going to get the police to deal with
that,”
the first one said. “I’ll give them the gloves and they can pick it up.”

“Damn thing’s broken,” the other one said.

There was what looked like a paper paste sculpture at my feet, the kind they teach you to make in kindergarten because all the materials can be found around the house and are nontoxic. I leaned over to look at it. It was more paper, but what kind was impossible to determine. It had been shredded into confetti. And burned.

Caroline’s voice sailed through the smoke. “Last Friday,” she said. “Somebody came into my office last
Friday
and tore the place up with a razor blade, for God’s sake, and now you’re trying to tell me—Oh, dear. Last Friday. The keys—”

Last Friday was the day someone had filled me full of arsenic. I turned toward the sound of Caroline’s voice. It seemed important, terribly important, to get to Caroline and find out what had happened in her office.

Behind me, the ambulance men grunted, heaved, and staggered backward. I moved out of the way. I had to move backward, away from Caroline and the door, because the ambulance men were carrying the stretcher at a tilt and in a hurry.

They should have been carrying a body bag. The woman on the stretcher was not so much burned as disintegrating. Her face was slack and shriveled. The skin under her fingernails was black.

For the first time, the smell of her penetrated the smell of smoke and chemical extinguisher, filling my nostrils with an odor so sickly sweet it was almost a taste.

That woman had been dead for days. The policemen, young as they were, would know as soon as she passed them. The ambulance men knew already, but weren’t making waves. The coroner wouldn’t have to think twice.

I looked down into Sarah English’s blank, unyielding eyes and wondered if I should call Tony before I called Nick, or make it the other way around.

W
HAT NICK SAID WAS:

“It’s the arrogance I can’t believe. The blind, stupid, all-powerful arrogance.”

I closed my eyes and put the back of my head against the disguised cement block of the wall. We were in the lobby of Caroline Dooley’s apartment building. That was what the two young patrolmen thought of as “neutral territory.” They couldn’t leave us in Caroline’s apartment—not only had the fire made it uninhabitable, the body had made it a possible crime scene. They didn’t want to take us to the nearest precinct. I might be some kind of nut, no matter what Tony Marsh said. They might be liable for a charge of false arrest, assuming they could figure out who to arrest.

The cigarette between the fingers of my right hand felt like it weighed five pounds. My wrist felt close to cracking. It was all happening too fast. My emotions were having a hard time catching up. Sarah English in Dana’s reception room. Sarah English in Caroline Dooley’s apartment. Sarah English in Holbrook. Sarah English.

Once upon a time, I wanted to play the big, sophisticated New York writer. Once upon a time, I, as Nora Ephron said about Helen Gurley Brown, only wanted to
help.
Dear Jesus.

“We’ve got to
talk
about this,” Nick said.

I opened my eyes and looked at the cigarette in my hand. The ash was an inch and a half long. I tapped it into a potted plant.

Caroline Dooley and John Robert Train were on the other side of the lobby. John Robert Train looked resigned but in control. Caroline looked furious and incredulous. Neither of them was speaking to me.

“What I want to know,” Nick said, “is what you intend to
do
with her.”

I sat up, bent forward until my head was between my knees, bounced. It didn’t help to clear my head, but it made me think I was doing something.

“What I intend to do with her,” I told Nick, “is keep her.”

“You’re out of your
mind,”
Nick said.

I came up for air. “I don’t see why,” I told him. “Sarah’s dead. Adrienne’s alone. What do you want me to do with her? Let the juvenile authorities have her? You’re the one who told me those places were snake pits. Give her back to Cassie Arbeth? You haven’t seen Cassie Arbeth. Loan her the money for a bus ticket? To where?”

“Stop making the argument ridiculous. You can’t just take a child. You have to go through channels. The law makes you go through channels.”

“Possession is nine tenths of the law.” I was quoting.

“I don’t think you can possess a person,” Nick said. “And there may be relatives.”

“We’ll check relatives. I’ll be good about relatives.”

“You can’t tell me you’ve fallen for this kid in less than a day.”

“It’s not her,” I said. “It’s Sarah. Something I owe to Sarah. Don’t make me explain it now, for God’s sake. It’s too complicated.”

“Phoebe says it’s liberal guilt.”

I ignored him. He turned to look out the great plate-glass windows at the street. A thin rain was beginning to fall. The ruts and mounds—results of eighteen months of attempting to construct an office building next door—were turning to mud.

“You’re a public personality,” Nick said. “You’ve got a reputation for getting involved in crime.” I started to look indignant, but he frowned me down. “You get involved in the right end of crime, but that’s not the point. The juvenile authorities are very conservative. They still think of the perfect family as a clone of ‘Father Knows Best.’ If you really want to play foster mother to this kid, assuming we can untangle the legal ramifications of your taking her across state lines in the first place, which I doubt—”

I got up and walked away from him. There was activity in the street: two blue-and-whites and an unmarked car I knew was a police car only because Tony Marsh got out of it. A beefy, hangdog-looking man got out of it with him. I had never seen Tony’s partner before.

I didn’t really know I wanted to keep Adrienne with me. I just knew I had to get her out of Cassie Arbeth’s house. And I did.

On the other hand, keeping her with me did not sound like a bad idea, now that I’d thought of it.

I pointed into the street. “They’re here,” I told Nick, although he was perfectly capable of seeing them himself. “God, I wish I knew what was going on. This whole thing is so crazy.”