A Fountain Filled With Blood (32 page)

“Hey, Joe. It’s Mal. Look, man, I’m calling because you had suggested I get in touch with you when I was ready to move a little more product than previously.”

He was getting on the phone and calling people who would be willing to spend ten thousand dollars for illegal drugs. She rubbed her lips hard, taking off what was left of her lipstick. Any guesses as to how he might deal with a woman who overheard his sales pitch? Any guesses as to what his customers might do?

Time to bail out of this plane, Clare told herself. And with Malcolm settling in for an evening of telephone conversation and music, there was only one exit still open to her. She picked up her shoes and, holding them tightly against her stomach, slipped between the edge of the shower curtain and the cool tile wall, all the while thinking to herself, flat, flat, flat.

Several hooks slid along the curtain rod with a scrape that sounded to Clare like a Klaxon. Her breath hitched up in her throat and she forced herself to keep on moving, until she was standing next to the toilet in her stocking feet. She couldn’t see out the crack in the door without getting right in front of it, but there was enough light spilling in from the bedroom to pick out all the details in the bath. The detail she was interested in was the window.

It was larger than the usual bathroom window, the same size as the two in the bedroom. Two stories up, looking out onto mountains, one wouldn’t require much privacy, she guessed. Like one of the bedroom windows, its lower pane had been pulled up almost to the level of the middle sash. She pressed her fingers against the screen’s releasing locks and slid it up as far as she could. It clicked into place on its runner with a noise that sounded as loud as a rifle shot.

Behind her, Malcolm was still chatting away and the Dave Matthews CD had looped around to the beginning and was jazzing along with “So Much to Say.” She loved the
Crash
album, but she wondered if she would ever be able to listen to it again after tonight. She eased the latches into place in the uppermost notches and stuck her head out the window to scope out her escape route.

The good news was that Malcolm’s suite overlooked a six-foot-square porch roof, an easy drop from the window if she were hanging from the bottom of the sill. The bad news was, the porch and its roof were attached to the kitchen. Over the jazzy beat of the Dave Matthews Band, she could hear the clang and clatter and chatter of kitchen staff engaged in a full-scale cleanup. Craning her neck to one side, she could see the outlines of several people clustered in conversation on the flagstone terrace surrounding the pool. All it would take would be someone glancing up at the wrong moment and she would look like a character from a Lawrence Block novel. She could see the title now:
The Burglar Who Thought She Was a Priest.

Once she got down to the ground, the view from the pool would be cut off by a wide-planked wind fence that shielded swimmers and sun bathers from the sight of three large trash cans. How long would it take her to climb out of the window, drop, and slide off the porch roof? Thirty seconds? A minute?

She heard the
thump-thump
of footsteps down a pair of steps and then one of the caterers emerged from beneath the roof, striding to the nearest trash can with a white plastic bag swinging from his fist. He tossed it in and vanished back into the kitchen, never once looking up or about.

A quote from
Macbeth
bubbled up from the primordial English-lit ooze: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’t were well it were done quickly…” She glanced at the sandals dangling from her hand. Bogatta Veneta. Italian leather. Bought back when she was flush with a captain’s pay. Praying she would be able to find them again, she leaned out the window and tossed them as hard as she could past the light spilling from the kitchen, toward the gravel drive. She wiggled through the opening until she was sitting on the sill, then stood up, clutching the window’s exterior frame. She awkwardly lowered herself to her knees and then, her hands digging into the sill, let her legs slip off the reassuring solidity of the wood and into space.

The edge of the windowsill dug into her abdomen as she slid farther and farther down. Something interrupted her descent for a moment, tugged at her, and then she felt a release as two silk-covered buttons popped off her jacket and pitter-pattered across the roof and into the darkness below. She dangled for a moment by her hands alone and then let go, dropping as limply as she could. She skidded off the side of the porch roof and tumbled to the ground with a blow that knocked the wind out of her.

Inside the kitchen, someone said, “What the hell was that?” Clare staggered upright and lurched backward, bouncing off a rubberized trash can.

A woman in a large white apron appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Hello?” she said to the night air in general. Then, as she spotted Clare tottering beside the trash cans, she said, “Excuse me? Can I help you?” The woman glanced doubtfully at Clare’s bare feet and her jacket, which was gaping open over her midsection. Clare grabbed the edges and smiled cheerfully. “Great party!” she said, loosening her southern Virginia drawl to sound drunk. More drunk, she amended.

The caterer squinted at her. “Are you okay?” She looked back into the kitchen. “Look, why don’t you come in and let me get you some coffee?”

Clare clutched the jacket more closely and squeezed her bare toes in the dirt she had recently rolled in. “No, thank you, ma’am. ’M just going out front. Waiting for my ride.”

“You do have a ride.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes, ma’am,” Clare said, saluting for full effect. Her jacket swung open, revealing a great deal of skin.

The woman smiled at her uncertainly. “Okay, then. Good night.”

Clare waved, crossed the kitchen yard, and headed toward the drive, walking straight until the woman retreated into the house. Then she cast about the edges of the gravel drive, trying to spot her sandals somewhere amid the grass and dirt and sweep of stones. She failed to turn up anything except a couple more mosquito bites. She let herself curse under her breath. There was no way she could afford to replace those babies on her priest’s salary. She abandoned the search and headed for her car, parked at the other end of the house.

The top of her convertible was up because she had left her purse and her keys in the car when she had arrived. Even she wouldn’t normally be so careless, but in a secluded mountain estate, she had yielded to the impulse not to have to keep track of her things while at the party. She got into the passenger seat and let herself sag against the vinyl, which felt warm and tacky against her skin. She rubbed the soles of her feet together and thought that she had even fewer things to keep track of now. She curled over, buried her face in her hands, and gave in to the shakes, her teeth chattering, throat whimpering, skin shivering. Then she felt better. She scrubbed at her face with her hands, remembering as she did so that she was wearing makeup.

She dug into her purse for the lighted compact her sister Grace had given her years ago and examined the damage. Her lipstick was long gone, her skin was blotchy, and her mascara and eye shadow were smeared. She popped open the glove compartment and retrieved one of the little wet foil-wrapped towels she kept there, a habit of her mother’s that had stuck with Clare throughout the years. After she mopped off her face, she used the compact light to check out the rest of her appearance, which was even more disreputable-looking than she had imagined. Her elegant pantsuit was crumpled, the jacket gaping open where her buttons had come off, one leg stained with something dark and unidentifiable—though from the smell, she thought she must have picked it up when she rolled into the trash can.

She snapped the compact shut and closed her eyes. She didn’t care if it was rude; she was not going back in to join the partygoers. She might not be sober enough to drive, but she sure wasn’t drunk enough to appear looking like she had been out for a roll in the clover. She could hide away here in her car, and when the rest of the alcohol had worked its way out of her system, she would drive home. Then tomorrow, she would call Russ and tell him that—

Her eyes snapped open. Call Russ. Holy cow, he needed to know about Malcolm’s little business venture. And that it sounded like Bill Ingraham’s ex-lover knew a lot more about his death than what he had read about in the papers. She fumbled in her purse for her phone, letting her grandmother’s voice—which was saying
No lady would ever call after ten o’clock at night
—wash away on a tide of exhaustion, relief, and the remnants of several kir royales.

As she pressed the send button, she had a flash of panic. What do I say if his wife answers? The phone rang. Once. Twice. She clicked it off, sagging back into her seat. Coward. Then she remembered. Friday. Dinner at his mother’s. Maybe he was still there. She called information for the number and dialed it, hoping against hope that she wasn’t about to wake Margy Van Alstyne, who might have retired early.

“Hello?”

Margy’s voice sounded crisp. Clare closed her eyes in relief.

“Mrs. Van Alstyne? Margy? It’s Clare Fergusson.”

“Clare Fergusson. Well, I’ll be. What can I do for you this hour of the night?”

You see?
Her grandmother said.
Calling after ten is an imposition.
Clare repressed the urge to apologize and hang up. “I was just wondering…I needed to speak to Russ, and I recalled he said he was going to be at your house for the evening. Is he there?”

“Yes, he’s here.” Margy Van Alstyne’s voice sounded as if only good manners kept her from asking why St. Alban’s rector was calling her son at 10:30 on a Friday night.

“It’s business,” Clare assured her.

“Oh, it’s none of my never mind. Let me give him the phone. Here he is.”

Russ had been lying back in his mom’s ancient La-Z-Boy recliner, watching Roger Clemens getting shelled by the Angels. He had stayed well past the time it took to replace a few boards on the porch and have dinner, enjoying the comforting familiarity of his mom’s house, where no one ever redecorated and the walls had been the same color since she moved in a quarter of a century ago.

Clemens had given up five runs in the last two innings, and the Yankees were going down hard. Now Mel Stottlemyre was marching out toward the mound. “Give him the hook, already,” Russ told the pitching coach. “Any relief pitcher could do better than that. My mother can do better than that.”

Stottlemyre was talking to Clemens, who was evidently arguing. Now the catcher was coming out to the mound. “Oh, for God’s sake, it’s not the UN. Get him offa there.”

His mother walked into the living room, holding the phone and eyeing him speculatively. She clamped her palm over the handset. “It’s Clare Fergusson,” she whispered. “Says it’s a business call.” She handed him the phone.

“Clare?” His mother stood there watching. He frowned and shooed her away. “What’s up?” He glanced at the clock. “It’s late.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you up?”

“No, I’m not spending the night. I was just hanging out, watching the Yankees lose to Los Angeles. What’s going on?”

“I’m at a party at Peggy Landry’s house.”

He listened for the usual background noises you could hear during a phone call in the middle of a party. Nothing.

“It’s a pretty quiet party.”

“I’m calling from my car. I can’t go in.”

“You can’t go in. Clare, you’re not making any sense.” A thought struck him. “Have you been drinking?”

“Yes, but that’s not why I—”

“You’re not planning on driving that car anyplace, are you?”

“No. Well, not yet. I’m going to wait here until I’m fit to drive again.”

He closed his eyes. Christ on a bicycle. “Okay,” he said, enunciating clearly. “Get out of the car and give someone your keys. Then ask Peggy Landry to fix you up with a ride home.”

“I told you, I can’t go inside!” Her whisper sharpened. “Will you please listen to me?”

He clicked off the game. “Go ahead.”

“I was in Malcolm’s room tonight. Here. At Peggy’s house.”

“Who’s Malcolm?”

“Her nephew. He used to be Bill Ingraham’s boyfriend.”

“His
boyfriend
? He got out of his chair. The import of this statement struck him. “And you were in his room? What the hell were you doing in his room?”

“I’m trying to tell you!”

He pushed up his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Go ahead.”

“I got talking with someone at the party about Peggy’s business, and about Malcolm, and I thought it would be a good idea to see if there was anything connecting him to Ingraham’s death—in his room.”

“How much had you had to drink at this point?”

“That doesn’t matter! Listen. Malcolm knows something about Ingraham’s death. I’m sure of it. And he’s selling drugs!”

He walked past his mother, who was methodically folding and stuffing envelopes for a fund-raiser, listening to his every word. He opened the fridge and grabbed a soda. “Uh-huh.”

“Don’t patronize me. I know he’s selling drugs because he was talking to someone in the room with him.”

That brought him up short. “This guy was in the room at the same time you were?” His mom’s head perked right up at that. He frowned at her.

“He and another man. The other guy was talking about Ingraham’s death. At least I’m pretty sure he was. He was scared. And then Malcolm gave him something, some sort of drug.”

He put the soda can down on the counter, unopened. “What did they do? Shoot up? Do you know what they were using?”

“No, not like that. Like a payment. Or a payoff. I didn’t actually see anything. I was hiding in the bathroom.”

He lifted his keys from a row of hooks next to the back door. “You were hiding in the bathroom.”

“Yes. And then the other man left, the one who was worried, and Malcolm started making phone calls to potential buyers. And to a friend named Poppy.”