You belong to me (8 page)

Enter Dee. Big sister. Darling of fashion photographers. Sophisticated. Amusing. Charming. Three men in line, wanting to marry her, but she had wanted Jack.

Susan went into the bathroom and reached for the toothpaste. She brushed her teeth briskly, as if by that action she could obliterate the bitter aftertaste she always experienced when she remembered Dee's tearful explanation: "Susan, forgive me. But what is between Jack and me is inevitable-maybe even necessary."

Jack's agonized non-excuse: "Susan, I'm sorry."

And the crazy part, Susan thought, is that they were right for each other. They did love each other. Maybe even too much. Dee hated the cold. If she hadn't been so in love, and such a good sport, she would have insisted Jack quit dragging her to ski slopes. If she had succeeded in keeping him at home, he wouldn't have been caught in the avalanche. And maybe he would be alive today.

On the other hand, Susan thought as she turned on the hot water in the shower, if Jack and I had ended up together, I might be dead too, because I surely would have been on that slope with him.

Her mother had understood. "I realize that if it had been the other way 'round, Susan, if you'd been attracted to someone Dee cared about, you would have removed yourself from the picture. But something you have to accept, even if you find it hard to understand, is that Dee always has been somewhat jealous of you."

Yes, I would have removed myself from the picture, Susan thought as she slipped off her robe and stepped under the steaming water.

By seven-thirty she was dressed and was having her usual breakfast of juice, coffee, and half an English muffin. She turned on Good Day, New York to catch the news. Before she could see more than the opening montage, however, the phone rang.

It was her mother. "Just wanted to catch you before you got too busy, dear."

Pleased to hear that her mother sounded upbeat, Susan pressed the mute button of the TV remote control. "Hi, Mom." And thank God she still expects to be called Mom, she thought, and not Emily.

"Your program yesterday was fascinating. Did that woman who phoned show up at your office?"

"No, she didn't."

"Not surprising. She sounded pretty worried. But I thought you'd be interested to know that I once met Regina Clausen. I was with your father at a stockholders' meeting; that was in the B.B. days, so it would be about four years ago."

B.B. Before Binky.

"Needless to say Charley-Charles was trying to impress Regina Clausen with the terrific investments he'd made, a fact I reminded him of during our financial settlement, but which, of course, he then tried to deny."

Susan laughed. "Mom, be charitable."

"Sorry, Susan, I didn't mean to make a crack about the divorce," her mother said.

"Sure you did. You do it all the time."

"That's true," her mother agreed cheerfully. "But I really did call to tell you about Regina Clausen. She got quite chatty with us-you know what a schmoozer your father can be-and she told us that on her next long vacation, she was planning to go on a cruise. She clearly was excited about it. I told her I hoped the people on board wouldn't keep bothering her for investment advice. I remember she laughed and said something about looking forward to having some fun and excitement, and that did not include discussing the Dow Jones average. She said her father had had a heart attack in his forties, and that before he died he talked with regret about the vacations he'd never made time for."

"What you're telling me just serves to reinforce the theory that she did have some kind of shipboard romance," Susan said. "Certainly it sounds like she was open to the idea and probably would have been receptive." She thought of the turquoise ring Jane Clausen had given her. "Yes, I think that's what happened to her, a well-concealed shipboard romance."

"Well, what she said clearly helped put a bug in your father's ear. We separated shortly after that. He had his plastic surgery, got rid of his gray hair, and started running around with Binky. Incidentally he's encouraging Dee to take a cruise now. Did she tell you about that?"

Susan looked at the clock. She didn't want to cut her mother off, but she needed to be on her way. "No, I didn't know Dee was thinking about a cruise herself. But then I missed her call yesterday," she said.

Her mother's voice became troubled. "I'm worried about Dee, Susan. She's down. She's lonely. She's not springing back. She's not strong like you."

"You're pretty strong yourself, Mom."

Her mother laughed. "Not consistently, but I'm getting there. Susan, don't work too hard."

"Meaning find a nice guy, get married, be happy."

"Something like that. Anybody interesting you haven't told me about? When Dee phoned she mentioned someone she met at the Binky-Charley party who seemed very smitten with you. She said he was terribly attractive."

Susan thought of Alex Wright. "He's not bad."

"According to Dee he's much more than 'not bad.'"

"Bye, Mom," Susan said firmly. After she hung up, she put her coffee cup in the microwave and turned up the TV sound again. A reporter was talking about an elderly woman who had been stabbed to death in her Upper East Side apartment. Susan was just about to turn off the TV when the anchorman replayed the segment from the previous evening's news that included the report that Hilda Johnson, the murder victim, had called the police, claiming that the woman who had been run over on Park Avenue had been deliberately pushed during a mugging.

Susan stared at the television, realizing that the prosecutor in her was refusing to believe that these two events were coincidental, while the psychologist in her was wondering what kind of out-of-control mind could commit two such brutal crimes.

21

Even though he had found her terribly irritating, Captain Tom Shea of the 19th Precinct had been fond of Hilda Johnson. As he pointed out to his men, the bottom line was that usually there was some validity to Hilda's complaints. For example, a derelict she accused of hanging around the playground in the park turned out to have a record of minor sex offenses against young children. And the kid she complained about who kept riding his bike around her neighborhood got caught red-handed mugging an elderly pedestrian.

Standing now in Hilda Johnson's apartment, Captain Shea felt both anger and tenderness at the sight of the limp, chenille-covered remains of the old woman. The crime photographers had taken their pictures. The coroner had done his job. It was okay to touch her.

Shea knelt beside Hilda. Her eyes were staring, her face frozen into an expression of panic. Gently he turned her palm toward him, observing the cuts where she had tried to shield herself from the fatal thrust that had entered her heart.

Then he looked closely. There were smudges on several fingers of her right hand. Ink stains.

Shea stood and turned his attention to the desk, observing that it was open. His grandmother had a desk like this, and she always kept the lid in that position, proud to reveal the little pigeonholes and drawers and the matching blotter and desk set that no one ever used.

He thought back to the previous year, when Hilda had sprained her ankle on some broken pavement, and he had stopped by to see her. The desk was closed then. I bet she always left it closed, he thought.

In the desk there was a box of stationery that obviously had just been opened-the cellophane that had sealed it was still there. He half smiled when he read the lettering: "A ban mot for you from Hilda Johnson."

An old-fashioned pen was tying next to the inkwell, the sort of pen people used for sketching. He touched it and then studied the smudge the pen left on his fingers. Next he counted the sheets of paper remaining in the box. There were eleven. Then he counted the envelopes-twelve.

Had Hilda Johnson been writing or sketching on the missing sheet shortly before her death? he wondered. Why would she do that? According to Tony Hubbard, who had been on the desk when Hilda called yesterday, she told him she was going right to bed and would come by the station in the morning.

Ignoring the cameramen, who were packing up their gear, and the fingerprint experts, who were reducing Hilda's painfully neat apartment to a sooty mess, Tom went into the bedroom.

Hilda had gone to bed-that was obvious. The pillow still bore the imprint of her head. It was now eight o'clock. The medical examiner estimated she had been dead between eight and ten hours. So sometime between 10 P.M. and midnight, Hilda got out of bed, put on her robe, went to her desk and wrote or sketched something, then put the kettle on.

When Hilda, notoriously prompt, failed to show up, Captain Shea had tried to call her. Getting no answer, and alarmed, he asked the superintendent to check on her. If he hadn't, it might have been days before her body was discovered. They had found no evidence of a break-in, so that meant that in all likelihood she had opened the door voluntarily. Had she been expecting someone? Or was a suspicious and sharp old bird like Hilda tricked into believing that her visitor was someone she could trust?

The captain went back into the living room. How did she happen to be standing at the desk when she was murdered? he wondered. If she suspected that she was in danger, wouldn't she at least have tried to run?

Had she been showing something to her visitor when she died?-something her visitor took after he killed her?

The two detectives who had accompanied him straightened up as he approached them. "I want everyone in this building interrogated," Captain Shea snapped. "I want to know where each person was last night and what time they got home. I'm particularly interested in anyone who came or went between ten o'clock and midnight. I want to know if anyone is aware of Hilda Johnson writing notes to people. I'm on my way to the station."

There, the unfortunate Sergeant Hubbard, who had joked about Hilda's phone call swearing that Carolyn Wells was pushed and a manila envelope stolen from her, endured the worst dressing-down of his life.

"You ignored a call that could have been significant. If you had treated Hilda Johnson with the respect she deserved and sent someone to talk to her, it's very possible that she'd be alive today, or at least that we'd be on a direct line to a mugger who may now be a murderer. Jerk."

He pointed an angry finger at Hubbard. "I want you to interview every person whose name was taken at the accident scene and find out if anyone noticed whether Carolyn Wells had a manila envelope under her arm before she fell into the street. Got it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Now I hope I don't have to tell you not to specifically mention a manila envelope. Just ask if she had anything under her arm and what it was. Got that?"

22

He slept only fitfully, awaking several times during the night. Each time, he turned on the TV which remained tuned to the local news station- New York 1 - and each time he heard the same thing: Carolyn Wells, the woman who had been run over at Park Avenue and Eighty-first Street, was in a coma; her condition was critical.

He knew that if by some unlucky circumstance she recovered, she would tell people that she had been pushed by Owen Adams, a man she had met while on a cruise.

They couldn't trace Owen Adams of that he was certain. The British passport, like all the ones he had used on his special journeys, was a fake. No, the real danger lay in the fact that even without glasses, a mustache, and a wig, at close range he had been recognized by Carolyn Wells yesterday. Which meant that if she recovered, it wasn't impossible that they might run into each other in New York again someday. In a face-to-face situation, she would recognize him again.

That must never happen. So, clearly she could not be allowed to recover.

There was no news about Hilda Johnson on any of the newscasts during the early hours, so her body hadn't yet been discovered. On the news at nine, it was announced that an elderly woman had been found stabbed to death in her Upper East Side apartment. He braced himself for the anchorman's next words.

"As was reported yesterday, the murder victim, Hilda Johnson, had called the police claiming she had seen someone deliberately push the woman who was hit by a van at Park and Eighty-first yesterday afternoon."

Frowning, he pointed the remote control and turned off the television. Unless the police were extremely stupid, they would investigate the possibility that Hilda Johnson was not the victim of a random crime.

If they tied Hilda Johnson's death to Carolyn Wells's supposed accident, there would be a media stampede. It might even come out that Carolyn Wells had been the one who phoned Susan Chandler's program and talked about a souvenir ring with the inscription "You belong to me."

People would read about it, would discuss it, he mused. It was even possible that the little gnome who ran that rattrap of a cut-rate souvenir store in Greenwich Village might remember that on several occasions a particular gentleman whose name he knew had come in to purchase one of the turquoise rings with that inscription.

When he was young he had heard the story of the woman who confessed to spreading scandal and was told that as her penance she was to cut open a feather pillow on a wind-swept day, then retrieve all of the feathers that were scattered. When she said that it was impossible, she was told that it was just as impossible to find and correct all the people who had heard her lies.

It was a story that had amused him at the time. He had had a mental image of a particular woman he detested, bobbing and running hither and yon to recapture the elusive feathers.

But now he thought of the feather pillow story in a different context. Pieces were escaping from the scenario he had planned so carefully.

Carolyn Wells. Hilda Johnson. Susan Chandler. The gnome.

He was safe from Hilda Johnson. But the other three were still like feathers in the wind.

23

It was one of those golden October mornings that sometimes follow a particularly chilly day. The air felt fresh, and everything seemed to glow. Donald Richards decided to enjoy the morning by walking the distance between Central Park West and Eighty-eighth Street, and the WOR studio at Forty-first and Broadway.