Icing Ivy (19 page)

She pushed it open and took a cautious step inside. Graham swept his flashlight slowly around a vast, cavernous room that had clearly been ravaged by fire. The walls and high ceiling were charred black. Cracks ran up and down and from side to side like alligator skin, indicating to Jane that the fire that had raged here had reached an extraordinarily high temperature.

Strewn among black pillars were the charred remains of tables and chairs, merely blackened boards and sticks now. The center of the great room was oddly clear. A dance floor, Jane realized.

“Why have you brought me here?” she asked, though she knew.

He didn't answer, instead continued to sweep his flashlight around the immense room.

At that moment they heard rhythmic footsteps, the sound of a woman's high-heeled shoes. Graham fixed the beam on a doorway exactly opposite the one through which they had come. A woman stepped into the bright yellow circle of light and started toward them, strolling between the bits of burned furniture, her hands plunged deep in the pockets of a full-length fur coat the exact same blond color as her hair.

H
er scent reached Jane first—roses and violets, sickly sweet against the stench of rotting ashes. Then Tamara Henley stopped a few feet from Jane and Graham, looked Jane up and down, and smiled ruefully. “And to think I once wanted to have lunch with you.”

“I can't make it,” Jane said, her voice brimming with contempt.

Tamara threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, you definitely will not be able to make it.” Her coat was of luscious beige chinchilla. Not a strand of her hair was out of place, and she was heavily made up. A small cascade of diamonds hung from each ear.

“All dressed up . . . ” Jane said.

“And so many places to go. I've got another of our buildings to go to this morning, then a luncheon and board-of-directors meeting at the Frick. I certainly don't have time for your nonsense.”

“
Nonsense?
You murdered my best friend.”

Tamara shrugged indifferently. “She should have minded her own business.”

“She was about to discover that you and your husband own this place. The Boriken Social Club, once St. Paul the Apostle Church.”

“Now you see,” Tamara broke in peevishly. “That was exactly the problem with your cheap little friend. She failed to make a very important distinction. Foss and I own this
building.
We
rented
it to the people who ran the Boriken Social Club. There's a world of difference.”

Jane looked at her as if she were mad, which Jane realized she undoubtedly was. “No, there isn't. As the owners, you were responsible for meeting the building code, for installing a sprinkler system, making sure there were enough exits. Because of you and your husband, eighty-seven people died in this room.”

“It wasn't our fault some lunatic decided to start a fire outside the exit to get back at his cheating girlfriend!” Tamara shouted.

“No, but it was your fault there was only one exit—that one. Those poor people had nowhere to go.”

“Actually, there were two exits: the front door and the one you two just came through. Is it our fault that idiot started his fire in front of one of them? Besides, the club owner could have renovated at any time.” Tamara shook her head impatiently. “We're going in circles, and I'm getting extremely bored.” She turned to Graham. “Thank you for bringing her here.”

Graham stood up a little straighter, as if Tamara were his general. “My pleasure, Tammy.”

Tamara approached him and patted him on the back. He smiled and nodded modestly. As Jane watched, something popped out of his Adam's apple—the sharp tip of a thin metal rod. Graham's eyes bugged out, and he put his hands to his throat and turned and stared at Tamara. She raised one leg and with an elegant gold high-heeled pump gave him a firm kick in the side. He crashed to the floor, landing on his back. Blood spurted from his throat, getting on his hands, which now merely fluttered in the vicinity of his neck. As Jane watched in horror, his eyes grew glassy and lifeless.

Jane recoiled in horror.

“I told him not to call me that,” Tamara said. She bent and grabbed the flashlight from where it had fallen beside him. Shining it on Graham's face, she watched him dispassionately for a moment. Then she bent again, roughly turned Graham's head to the side, and yanked out the ice pick she had used to kill him. Its tip shone reddish black, as if it had been dipped in paint.

Straightening, Tamara noticed a large splotch of blood on her coat. “Oh, pooh!” she cried. “Look at my coat. And I've got my luncheon and board meeting.”

Jane, heart banging, short of breath, regarded this monster, then looked down at Graham. “Why did you do that?” she asked, though she knew the answer.

“Oh, he deserved it,” Tamara tossed off. “He tried to blackmail me. Me!”

Of course, Jane thought. And he'd gotten the idea from William Ives, who had blackmailed him. Jane said, “Graham knew you'd heard him and Ivy making plans to meet on the path. He knew you knew she would be there. Then he arrived at the pond and found her dead.”

“Mm,” Tamara said, regarding the ice pick thoughtfully.

Jane continued, “While Larry and Ivy were talking in the lounge, he heard you in the conference room. He hurried out to see who might have overheard them, but you were gone. But he did smell your distinctive perfume.” She thought back. “That's what he meant when he made an odd comment to me about there being some trails you couldn't see.
Scent.”

Tamara's mouth dropped open, and she glared in annoyance at the corpse of Larry Graham. “
That's
how he knew I'd been there? Ooh, that stinking liar. He told me he'd seen me. I
do
have to stop wearing so much scent.”

“The point is, he must later have put two and two together. He knew you had known Ivy would be on that path. He knew
he
hadn't killed Ivy. So he took a flyer, blackmailed you, and hit the jackpot. What did he want?”

Tamara laughed. “Work!”

“Work?”

“Yes, he knew Foss was a developer. Graham wanted the job doing the electrical work in our next building. I told him he could have it, with a few conditions. First, that he go to Ivy's office and get hold of any files she had on her ‘big story.' He found nothing. So I told him to get into Ivy's apartment and look there. Nothing again. I figured she must have had her notes with her, but I couldn't very well search her room at the lodge—the police would have taken anything they'd found anyway—and I couldn't get into the police station to search her luggage. I could only pray that nothing had been found.

“Then,” Tamara went on, glancing at Graham's body, “last Saturday night, he called me. He said you'd been to see him twice asking questions, that you'd found out a lot. I had to find out how much you knew. Why do you think I invited you to my New Year's party—because I
like
you?” She shuddered. “I had to invite all those other dreadful people from the retreat to sort of—camouflage you, if you know what I mean. At my party, you said you'd made progress in finding Ivy's murderer. Well, I couldn't have that, could I? So this was my last condition for Mr. Graham—to bring you here.”

And I walked right into your hands,
Jane thought.

Tamara gazed down again at Graham's lifeless form and shook her head. “He wanted us to have an ongoing ‘relationship,'” she said distastefully. “Can you imagine? He said he was ‘growing' his business, that all he wanted to keep quiet was one big job a year.”

Jane looked around, took in the charred surroundings. “I take it this was the next building.”

“Not precisely. Our next building will be the one we'll build here after we tear this one down. That moron who started the fire outside the club had no idea what a favor he was doing us. Foss and I will collect the insurance and put up a magnificent fifty-story office building on this site—this
historic
site, I should say.”

“An office building?”

“Absolutely,” Tamara replied, regarding Jane as if she were intellectually deficient. “Harlem is hot now; don't you know that? The second Harlem renaissance. We have an ex-president here. Commercial rents are doubling. On 125th Street they're tripling. We'll have this building rented well before it's finished.” She looked around in disgust. “But first we have to tear down this mess. Little will anyone know that you and your friend here will be in the rubble. I'll burn your bodies first, of course. I'll do that before I leave here this morning. I've brought some gasoline.” With her free hand she vaguely indicated the dimness behind her.

She frowned. “I've got one question for you, Jane. Had you yet figured out that it was I who killed Ivy?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask how? Was it my perfume?”

“Scent? No. It was color.”

Tamara frowned. “Color?”

“You made a mistake about Ivy's sweater.”

Tamara eyed Jane shrewdly. “What mistake?”

“The key to solving this case,” Jane said thoughtfully, “was a comment made by my son's nanny, Florence, about cats being color-blind. Suddenly several details I'd ignored became extremely important—and made sense of everything.”

“So,” Tamara said petulantly, “cats are color-blind. Big deal. What does that have to do with anything?”

“So are you.” Tamara made no response, just watched Jane, who went on, “That's why your clothes sometimes clash. That's why you said both of the wreaths in your room at the lodge were the same color. People with color blindness can't tell the difference between red and green.

“In the conference room, when you were talking about the wreaths, I saw Adam frown. But he didn't frown because you'd said they were tacky and offended him. He frowned because you'd said they were both the same color. He knew they weren't and was puzzled by your remark.”

Jane's eyes unfocused as she cast her thoughts back to the night Ivy died. “Red and green . . . Ivy was wearing a red sweater on the night she died. You said the last time you'd seen Ivy was in the lounge, and that she was brushing snow from her green sweater. But when Ivy came into the lounge, she was still wearing the white fisherman's knit sweater Jennifer had lent her.

“In truth, when you last saw Ivy—on the path, by the light of the flashlight you'd stolen from the lodge's storage room—she had already given the sweater back to Jennifer. Ivy's own sweater was red, but you remembered it as green because you can't tell the difference between the two colors. But it didn't matter whether you remembered the sweater as red or green. What mattered was that you didn't remember it as white, and thereby gave yourself away.”

Tamara shook her golden-coiffed head in amazement. “You are a marvel.” Then her face grew pensive. “I wonder if I'll need to take care of Adam. If he ‘puts two and two together,' as you put it . . .”

“Monster,” Jane spat. “Cold-blooded murderer. You stole the ice pick from the kitchen at the lodge, went down the path, and waited for Ivy, who planned to meet Larry, who she must have believed was the bus hijacker.” She shook her head sadly. “She thought she was blackmailing him. He thought she was into some kind of kinky foreplay.

“So what did you do when Ivy got to the end of the path? Talk to her a little? Just jump out and stab her?”

“Does it matter? Yes, we talked a little. I pretended I'd come out for some fresh air. I got her onto the subject of the story she was pursuing about the Boriken Social Club. She told me she'd discovered that the company that owned this building was Coconut Grove Development. The irony was, she hadn't the slightest idea Coconut Grove was Foss and me.”

“But you knew it was only a matter of time before she discovered that . . . before she pierced the many corporate layers you and your husband had placed between you and your tenants to protect yourselves, to keep you anonymous. Ivy's story would have ruined you both, would have put you in jail for a very long time. How did you know she was working on that story?”

“She simply started bragging about it the first night we were at the lodge. That shriveled little old man, William, and I were sitting in the conference room, having some fruit we'd scrounged up in the kitchen. Ivy came in and began chattering about her ‘big story' behind the Boriken Social Club fire, about how the company that owned the building would be in major trouble when she was through. Not to mention the big promotion she'd get at
Skyline
.”

Tamara looked irritated. “I kept trying to press her for more details, to find out how much she knew. But then she changed the subject, and all she wanted to talk about was her daughter who died.” She shrugged. “It didn't matter. I knew enough.”

Jane gave an ironic laugh. “Ivy thought you didn't want to hear about Marlene because you were cold and unfeeling.”

“I
didn't
want to hear about Marlene. Who cares about her foolish daughter?”

Jane ignored this last remark. “I found palm trees and coconuts on Ivy's desk blotter in her office at
Skyline
and elsewhere among her things. The palm and coconuts are, of course, your company's logo. The name
Tamara
means ‘palm.'
Foss
is short for ‘Forrest.' A palm forest . . .”

“Is a coconut grove,” Tamara finished, looking endlessly bored.

“And in the center of the logo, of course, is a six, quite prominent. And at the bottom,
six
coconuts. Six, your lucky number. Very clever, really.”

“No, you're very clever, Jane. You must be a whiz at
The New York Times
crossword puzzle.”

Jane said, “At dinner the night Ivy was killed, when she said she had a story that would put someone in jail for years, we all naturally assumed she was talking about Johnny. But she was actually referring to whoever owned Coconut Grove Development.

“You and your husband are slumlords of the worst kind.” Jane's voice was full of contempt. “You let this magnificent building—St. Paul the Apostle Church—become a firetrap. Yes, Ivy would have had one hell of a story. About your neglect that turned this place into a death box. About its lack of a sprinkler system, its inadequate exits. Your blatant building-code violations led to eighty-seven people getting trampled to death in a panicked stampede or dying from smoke asphyxiation.” She looked around her, almost expecting the ghosts of those poor souls to appear, their screams to resound in the dimness.

“I told you,” Tamara said through clenched teeth, “this club was owned by our
tenants.
Foss and I had nothing to do with it.”