Harlem Redux (48 page)

Why had it taken him so long to see the obvious? He knew—undeniably and completely—that Lilian had indeed been murdered. He knew who had killed her. He understood why Gem had given up her attempts to seduce Sweet; why she had offered to help Lilian; and why she had staged that raucous breakup.

He thought about Sadie Mansfield, a former client. She had cut her wrists after her husband left her. He would never forget her body. Her wrists were covered with the small incisions she had made as she worked up her courage to die.

With rapid fluidity, his thoughts flew to a book he had once read in his father’s library. French sociologist Emile Durkheim had written that suicide victims always give their act a personal stamp, one that reflects their temperament and the special characteristics of their circumstances.

David found a sheet of paper and a pen. He wrote first the name “Pierre Lorraine” and underlined it heavily. After a moment or two, he wrote the word “conceit.” Then after a space, the question: “Why not take the easy way?”

He sat quite still for about three minutes. In his mind, he could hear Rachel asking him, “But why would Sweet kill her?” and his answer, “Because he not only didn’t love her—he loved someone else.”

He thought of Nella and vanilla. And his heart gave a hard little thump. Something heavy and cold landed in the pit of his stomach. He had been close to the truth before, very close—but two false assumptions had kept him from it. He saw it all now. He had the solution, he had it—but how he wished he hadn’t.

There was a knock on his door. Annie stepped in. “Mr. Jameson’s back. I just thought you might like to know.”

“Thank you.”

She turned to go, then hesitated.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Mr. Jameson—he don’t know about you and Miss Rachel. Maybe you better tell him—b’fore she comes home from work.”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I’ll be sure to talk to him—about that and many other things.”

Going downstairs, he found Sweet relaxing with a newspaper in Augustus’s throne. Sweet was humming the popular song “I’m Sitting on Top of the World.”

David stood in the doorway, watching him. Sweet shifted uneasily. Perhaps he felt a cold wind at his back. He looked up, saw David, and rose to his feet. The two men stared at one another.

“You don’t miss my sister at all, do you?” David said.

Sweet looked at David as though he were mad. He opened his mouth to reply, but David raised a hand. “Please. The last thing I need is to hear more lies.”

David entered the room. Sweet watched him warily. David remembered how impressed he’d been with Durkheim’s insights. He’d never foreseen that he would have to recall Durkheim’s words twenty years later to solve his sister’s murder. He spoke thoughtfully, explaining in a methodical tone.

“I returned because I was told that Lilian had committed suicide. That she’d become mentally unstable and taken her life. I was told that Gem had suddenly reappeared after five years’ absence and just as suddenly left again. So I was told, and so I was supposed to believe. But none of it made sense. None of it reflected the people I knew my sisters to be. So, I asked questions. Annie, Rachel, Nella Harding, you. On the surface, you each told the same tale, but when I looked closer, listened harder, I found too many contradictions to ignore. The Lilian I knew was not the Lilian people described.”

Sweets expression was faintly contemptuous. “I told you—her illness changed her.”

“No illness could explain these changes.”

“Which changes?”

“Lilian’s pregnancy, for one.”

“It was imagined—”

“Her doctor, at least initially, confirmed it.”

Sweet looked genuinely stunned. “He couldn’t have. She would’ve told me—

“She wouldn’t have told you and she didn’t tell you—for reasons we’re both aware of.”

Sweet’s lizard-like eyes narrowed. “I refuse to believe there was a pregnancy. But go on. You spoke of several—what was the word?” He paused. “Oh, yes. Contradictions.”

“Suffice it to say there were enough to make me wonder. When I first started asking questions, Annie warned me that things aren’t always the way they seem. The more people I talked to, the more applicable that warning seemed to be.”

Sweet smirked. “You think I killed her, don’t you? You feel guilty about her suicide, so now you want to say
I
did it.”

“No. Not at all.”

Sweet’s surprise was obvious.

David inclined his head. “Naturally, there was someone else who could’ve killed her—someone who like you would’ve benefited, or hoped to benefit, from her death.”

Sweet tensed.

David kept his voice calm and restrained. “I know that Gem was interested in you and that you rejected her when she approached you openly. Gem found herself another lover, Adrian Snyder. She showed how much she disliked you when Lilian was around and offered Lilian the benefit of her sisterly advice. Finally, she ran weeping to the Hamptons after her breakup with Snyder. But nothing was as it seemed: Gem neither despised you nor loved Snyder. He didn’t break up with her—she broke up with him. And she wasn’t ashamed of the breakup. She wanted people to know about it. They had to believe she had good reason to suddenly leave town.

“While the gossips were still atwitter, Gem packed her bags. She fled the cold grayness of New York for the stillness of Harding House. Nella’s described it to me; it sounds like a lovely place. Relatively isolated, set on an outcropping of private beach, with a small private dock and a boat for short excursions. It fitted Gem’s needs perfectly. The water was too cold to swim in, so Gem probably sat on the beach the first couple of days, letting the hours slip by peacefully, watching the sun sink lower over the horizon. I can see her hugging herself, as the air grew chill with the setting sun. She prepared simple suppers and ate them alone. She probably read for a while, before going to bed. She spent several days like this, in self-imposed isolation. Then one night, lying in the dark, let’s say she watched a cloud pass over the moon. And she knew it was time to do what she planned next.

“She telephoned Lilian, invited her to visit. When Lilian arrived, Gem went on to the next step of her plan—a plan that was exquisitely simple and brutally direct. She killed her own sister—shot her, stabbed her, I don’t know—and hid her body on Nella’s property. Then she dressed herself in Lilian’s clothes, drove back to Manhattan, and took Lilian’s place.”

Sweet said nothing, but he looked dismayed.

David went on. “This would explain why the last entry in Lilian’s diary was dated just after the breakup. It would explain why no one had a chance to see Gem before she left. Why Lilian was suddenly no longer pregnant. Why she lost interest in her friends and sought out Nella. It would explain a great deal. And it would explain it with sense.”

“But that couldn’t be! It couldn’t! Don’t you think I’d know if Gem had been pretending to be my wife?”

“A good question,” David said. “Very good.”

Stillness.

Sweet cleared his throat. “This is ridiculous. I know it was Lilian. If it had been Gem, she would’ve been healthy. But the woman who came back from Harding House was as sick as ever.”

“You said she was well for some time after Gem supposedly left.”

“Just for a short time—”

“Enough time for Gem to develop Lilian’s symptoms.”

“Preposterous! Impossible!”

“Think about it—about the mental strain Gem was under. She’d gotten Lilian to confide in her, so she felt sure of her familiarity with Lilian’s life, but there must’ve been many perks to Lilian’s personality, areas about Lilian’s life, that Gem didn’t know about, and they must’ve tripped her up. What was worse was conforming herself to the ways and habits she did know about. It was an ironic twist: Gem the free spirit had trapped herself in a situation where she had to adopt the ways of the sister she’d scorned, the woman she’d killed. As time went by, Gem must’ve felt imprisoned by glass walls. And she felt guilt. Intense, unbearable guilt. Yes, she’d been cold enough to kill her own sister. But she wasn’t cold enough to live with it.

“Gem was haunted by Lilian’s dying gaze. That would explain a letter Nella Harding found, a letter that reads like a poem. ‘It’s her fault. It’s her fault. My sister, that sister of mine. She’s trying to kill me, to slay me, with her dead blind eyes …’ Gem was the family poet. She’s the only one who would’ve written those words. I think she dreamed constantly about what she’d done. She was tortured by nightmares. That’s why, on a visit to Nella’s house, it seemed as though she was screaming out her own name.

“When you urged Gem to see a psychiatrist, she panicked. She couldn’t afford to let a stranger probe her mind, but she couldn’t hold out. She probably told the good doctor what she thought he wanted to hear. She knew exactly what to say to make him cluck or sigh or tsk or simply nod his head in empathy, sympathy, or feigned understanding. What a dear old fool, she probably thought. And that was fine, because she found it entertaining to manipulate him, but then he became a ‘tiring old fool’ when she began to suspect that he was seeing through her, was indeed learning more about her through her lies than any of the few truths she volunteered. So she broke off her therapy. She turned to liquor.”

“Gem would’ve never committed suicide. She’s the most self-loving woman I’ve ever met.”

“And one of the most self-destructive. Liquor and guilt can bring anyone down.”

David paused. “Still, I agree with you. Gem did not kill herself. She didn’t die by her own hand any more than Lilian did.”

Sweet’s dark eyes were bleak and grim. Several uneasy minutes passed by.

“You might’ve gotten away with it, Sweet. But you’re a sloppy killer.”

Sweet started, and then caught himself. “Lilian wasn’t the only one with mental problems, I see.”

“Yes, well ... All of us McKays are cursed with a rather creative intelligence,” David said mildly. “Unfortunately for you, you aren’t. You didn’t do your homework. You didn’t study your victim enough.”

Sweet said nothing, but he swallowed once.

“Is your throat dry?” David asked. “Nervousness—fear—will do that to people. Make yourself a drink.”

Sweet licked his lips, but he didn’t move.

“I once read that every suicide chooses his death, marks his death,” David said, “in a way that reflects his special temperament. Seen in that light, it was a bad idea for you to have shown that suicide note to me. Neither one of my sisters would’ve written something like that.

“You quoted Lorraine. I’m sure you thought you were being brilliant. But Lilian hated Lorraine. Why would she quote a writer she so disliked? I mentioned that, but you didn’t react. You didn’t understand. You didn’t realize what your ignorance told me.

“Then I realized that it wasn’t Lilian, but Gem who was found upstairs, and that made the note seemed even odder. Gem would’ve never written such a thing. At most, she might’ve grabbed a page of stationery and in her pretty script, scribbled, ‘See you in Hell.’ She would’ve never typed it. Neither Gem nor Lilian would’ve thought to write anything so personal on a machine.”

Sweet’s eyes were riveted to David’s face. He listened, unwillingly captivated, as David continued.

“Gem’s thinking patterns never interested me before. I never found her scintillatingly unpredictable. She was one of the most boringly predictable people I’ve ever known. Why? Because she was unerringly selfish and vain. She always chose the easiest way out. And she always wanted to look her best. So why would she choose such an ugly, not to mention painful, way to die? Why didn’t she use the drugs that were right there? Why would she instead take a knife and butcher her own flesh? It didn’t make sense.”

There was a momentary pause, then David added, almost as an afterthought: “There was also the matter of the slashes.”