Murder in a Good Cause (16 page)

“It's safer than your idea,” said Manu doggedly. “Any day they could investigate that house, maybe even Monday. And then what happens to us?”

“Screw the fucking war for fucking independence,” said Don. “But I sure as hell could use my share of the money. I say we think about Manu's plan, whatever it is.” Manu froze as Don's words sank in. His hand moved almost imperceptibly toward his ankle and then appeared at table level with a hunting knife not quite concealed under his downward-pointing fingers. He slowly rose to his feet and flipped the knife so that he was grasping it lightly, palm and fingers up, pointing it upward and moving it in the direction of Don's belly. Sweat appeared on Don's upper lip, and Carlos leaned forward, his eyes bright with interest. Suddenly, Manu changed grip on the knife again, brought his hand down with one rapid motion, and slashed a two-inch piece off the summer sausage.

The buru looked up from his paper. “Nothing will happen before Wednesday at the earliest.” Authority rang in his voice. “And besides that, New York can't handle any more goods right now. It takes a long time to get a good price for those things, and he doesn't want any more identifiable stuff around than is necessary, you understand?”

Manu turned to him with a jerk. “So . . . it doesn't matter that we're not safe, eh? Or that we lose everything we've worked for here, does it? All that matters is that he is safe and rich. Bastard!” he hissed, and muttered something in his native tongue, something that sounded unpleasant in the extreme. “Now what do we do, eh, Buru?”

The boss, for it was he who was being addressed, looked at the other three men's impassive faces. “We wait,” he said at last.

Sanders walked out to the deck and leaned on the railing, looking down into the garden. It was a cool and melancholy night, neither summer nor fall, smelling neither of dying leaves nor of heat-ripened decay. A bastard of a night, caught unacknowledged between seasons, reminding him of how little he belonged, leaning here, between the pots of basil and the flowering plants that Harriet nursed intermittently when she wasn't too busy. In fact, she probably regarded him in much the same light, something to be taken up when she wasn't too busy, looked after for a while, and put back where it belonged. He turned to go.

He hadn't heard Harriet's footsteps behind him. She had kicked off her high-heeled sandals and was standing in her stocking feet, looking at him with her head tilted slightly, her face expressionless in the dark. “Look, Harriet—” he started, but she had begun to speak at the same time.

“It's a strange night, isn't it?” she said, gliding silently up beside him and leaning over the rail. “Not like September at all. I can't decide if I'm cold or not.”

He was startled that her thoughts should have echoed his own so clearly and yet that she seemed completely unaware of his unhappiness. It was in some obscure way unfair. “I'd better go, Harriet,” he said. “You're home, safe. You don't need a cop around anymore.” He had tried to sound lightly ironic and managed only a bitter whine.

“Go?” she said, leaning farther over the rail. “I thought you had allowed yourself at least three more minutes.”

“For chrissake,” he exploded, clutching the rail as if it were her throat, “do you have to?”

“Have to what?” she said. “Oh, this. Maybe I do. I prefer you irritable, I think. Instead of looking as if you were considering pitching yourself over the railing. It's not very far, by the way. And you'd land in the bushes. They're a bit prickly, but too soft for you to do any real damage.”

“Harriet,” he said in a warning voice, and turned toward her. Angry, he grabbed her by the shoulders, digging his hands into her taut muscles. She flinched automatically and then, controlling herself, looked up at him, her eyes steady; he shuddered at his own rage and pulled her toward him until she was tightly enfolded in his grasp. To his horror he could feel his eyes beginning to sting with the hint of tears, and he buried his face in her hair. Time trickled by until his arms began to ache and relaxed their hold; she slipped from his embrace and led him into the living room.

“Sit down,” she said. He sat and watched her walk across the room, passing over the invisible line into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and take out two bottles of beer. She took clean glasses out of the dishwasher, picked up a bottle opener, and carried the lot over to the table in front of him. “Now, what in hell is wrong with you?” she asked. Her tone was inquisitive rather than sympathetic, and he bridled at it.

“There's nothing wrong with me,” he snapped. “I'm fine. What's wrong with you?”

She sat down, one foot under her, relaxed and casual, neither close to him nor far away. The distance a sister might choose. “You first. The way you were looking at Derek's garden out there, I thought it must be filled with green slimy things out of a horror movie. Assuming that it isn't, what's wrong? It's not like you to go around looking haunted. I don't think it is, anyway,” she added dubiously, acknowledging that there was much that she did not know about him.

“You can't take anything seriously, can you, Harriet?” he said bitterly. “Except your goddamn work and your own goddamn little problems. Everyone else is some kind of joke. No one else deserves consideration or understanding or even sympathy.”

“You don't need sympathy,” she said. “You need sleep, and someone to chase besides my friend Nikki. And you probably need a couple of weeks' vacation as well. And maybe a few other things, but you'd hate me if I were sympathetic. Social workers are sympathetic.”

“And what does that make you?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she replied slowly. “I don't know. A woman . . .”

“Oh, God, yes,” he said painfully. “You are a woman. Agonizingly a woman.”

Color flooded her pale cheeks. Abruptly, as if she had only just then become aware of his presence. Her arm, which had been lying carelessly over the back of the couch, suddenly seemed to be stretching itself toward him. “Harriet,” he said tentatively, and then sat still. She put down her glass slowly and turned toward him; then, with a slither of pale green silk, she was right against him, her face looking upward. He bent and kissed her, lightly at first, then with a ferocity that was out of his control. Her body seemed as fluid as the silk of her dress, blending into his in spite of the awkwardness of the position. The scent rising from her skin, her hair, her clothes, obliterated awareness of anything but his intense need.

He applied himself with all the skill at his disposal to getting rid of her panty hose; she twisted under his fingers so that the awkward things slipped down to her ankles, and she kicked them off. At the same time, she had undone his belt and his trousers and was now working at having them join her underwear on the floor. “Just a minute, Harriet,” he murmured. “Your dress—”

“Screw my dress,” she whispered huskily.

“No,” he said, pushing her back onto the couch. “Not the dress, lady.” He buried his face in the skin bared as the silk slipped from her shoulder and half-exposed her breast. “You.”

He knew and yet had forgotten in the intervening months how her body responded to the slightest touch. The crumpled silk tormented every nerve as he pushed it out of the way, and with a cry Harriet flung her legs around him and pulled him close.

“A gentleman—” said Sanders, leaning on one disheveled elbow and looking down at her.

“Always makes love on his elbows,” said Harriet, reaching up and kissing him on the chin. “You damn near smothered me,” she added, and giggled huskily.

“That wasn't what I was going to say. Smothering you was intentional, even though it wasn't successful. I'll do better next time. What I was going to say is that a gentleman never makes love in his socks. Everyone knows that. Or his watch. Much less his shirt and tie, I suppose,” he added ruefully. “I am going to look rather rumpled tomorrow.” He sat up, picking up her legs and moving them behind him. “And speaking of tomorrow . . .” He reached over, picked up the telephone, and punched in some numbers. “Sanders,” he said into the receiver as he picked up his untasted beer and took a swallow. “Anything new? . . . Good . . . My number here is—” He reeled off the number with the assurance of one who has been dialing it every day for weeks. “That's what I said. Yes, until tomorrow morning,” he added after a pause, and hung up, pulling off his tie as he did.

“Planning on spending the night, are we?” said Harriet. “Aren't you rather taking me for granted?”

“Of course I'm spending the night,” he said lightly. “Anything else would be an insult to someone as . . .” Suddenly his voice hoarsened, and he pushed the hair out of his eyes. “My God, Harriet,” he said with a fierceness that startled her, “I almost forgot what it was like with you.” He lowered himself down gently until he was almost on top of her and leaned forward to kiss her. “Now take that damned dress off before I ruin it completely.”

Sanders paused in front of the recently completed office tower. The low morning sun was burning through a slight haze and pouring golden light onto the great commercial tombs erected in the last ten years over every square inch of the financial district. There was silence—stunning and bizarre silence—except for the chirping of a sparrow perched in a small tree that grew wanly in its concrete prison. He looked back at Harriet, her face pale and clean of makeup, dressed in scruffy jeans and a long jacket filled with bulging pockets, and was awestruck by her beauty in that rich morning light. She was looking in every direction except at the building or toward him, unaware of the cloying sentimentality of his thoughts. “Here?” he called at last.

“Sure. That's fine,” she said. “Put them down there. Carefully,” she added with a touch of sharpness in her voice. He raised an ironic eyebrow at her, but it was wasted effort. She was deep in calculations. He set down the large aluminum camera case, the almost-as-large lens case, the tripod that had been squashing his fingers as it balanced on the camera case, and finally shrugged carefully out of the green knapsack whose exclusive purpose was to hold objects with very sharp edges.

“Is all this necessary?” he asked suspiciously when she finally walked up to him and set down the orange cooler filled with sheet-film holders.

“I would have carried half of it,” she said. “Only you had to go all gallant on me and insist.”

“You've got more stuff than you were carrying around in Ottawa,” he complained. “I wouldn't have believed it possible.”

“Sinar,” she said laconically. “Four by five. Bigger camera.”

“Does a bigger camera take as much time as a little one?”

“As the Olympus? Oh, no, that's a speedy little thing. This
is
more cumbersome, but the customer expects four-by-five transparencies.” Despair struck as he absorbed her meaning. This was going to take a hell of a long time. As she talked, she was setting a bar on top of the tripod. Onto the bar she slipped a lens mount and a film back and then carefully joined them with a bellows. “There. Instant camera. Make your own. I hope you're impressed.” She looked around, picked up the tripod, walked with calm deliberation into the middle of the road—not busy at this hour, but not blocked off, either—and set it down. From around her neck she took a large square of double cloth, dark blue corduroy on one side, white cotton on the other, and used it to cover both her head and the film back. “This'll do,” she said finally. “Do you think you could keep the cars from killing me? You must remember how to do that, don't you?”

“When I got a call to investigate a suspicious death on Friday, the last thing I expected to end up doing was this,” he said, walking over to the lane she was occupying. “Standing in the middle of King Street directing traffic.” But Harriet, of course, was paying no attention.

An hour and a half later, Harriet, who was now set up on the top of the stairs of the building opposite—much to the distress of that building's security guard, who felt she was doing something obscurely wrong but was not quite sure what—turned to Sanders, gave him a dazzling smile, and pushed the cable release. “That's it,” she said. “Last exposure. I've got four terrific shots: three color, three black and white in each one, twenty-four in all. And unless something goes horribly wrong, we eat next week.” Suddenly, she hurled the focusing cloth at him. As he reached to pluck it expertly out of the air, he was hit, twice, by the weights concealed in the corners. He gave her a reproachful look and folded it up. “Now let's get some breakfast,” she said. “I'm absolutely starved.”

Twenty minutes later, they were sitting in a Swiss restaurant, with coffee and fresh orange juice in front of them, having ordered, without a qualm, muesli and a farmer's breakfast each.

“Why did you say I needed someone to chase besides Veronika von Hohenkammer?” asked Sanders suddenly.

Harriet set down her orange-juice glass and looked directly at him. “Because you know how unlikely it is that she killed her mother,” she said calmly. “Your conscience is bothering you.”

“My conscience? What do you know about my conscience?”

“A lot,” said Harriet. “Not only do you have a very complicated conscience, but you appear to be completely unaware of its existence.”

“You mean I make love like a man with a tormented conscience?” he asked grimly.

She shook her head and waited until the bowls of fresh raspberry and cream-filled muesli were placed in front of them. “No,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact. “You don't. You have lots of hang-ups, but they don't seem to be about sex. Or at least not sex with me.” She picked up a spoon and looked at him sharply. “I'd like to know what would happen if a whore tried to pick you up, though.”

“If?” he said. “You're kidding. When you're on Vice, you fight them off nightly. That's how they pay off. It's cheaper than cash.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Fight them off.”

“Oh, yes. I have more hang-ups about sex than you realize. I can't make love to a woman who doesn't want me. And whores by definition don't want you.” His face went blank, and he turned his attention to the muesli until he was almost finished. When he spoke again, the topic was dead. “Why are you trying to con me into believing that Nikki couldn't have done in her mother? She has as good a motive as any of the others. Why are you so sure? You don't know her that well, do you?”

Harriet shook her head. “Hardly at all. I just met her Thursday. But it's so unlikely. When you consider how many people were wandering in and out of that basement all evening . . . Anyone of them could have helped himself to the cyanide. The murderer didn't have to live in the house.”

Sanders set down his coffee cup very carefully and stared at Harriet. “How in hell do you know who was down in the basement?” he asked. “Or did someone tell you? Because that doesn't count, you know.”

“I was down there . . . for quite a long time, really. Looking at Klaus's darkroom, telling him what was missing, where to store various chemicals, in general being very officious and overbearing. He was terribly polite about it. I'm sure he only wanted me to say how wonderful it all was, but when you ask my opinion about something technical, you have to be prepared to get it.” She noticed his expression and paused irritably. “Why are you staring at me like that?” she asked. “He's just a kid. I don't go in for cradle snatching, if that's what's bothering you. Anyway, lots of people came down: the housekeeper and the ghastly brother-in-law and the business manager; just about everyone. I remember wondering how he could possibly work down there. It was like Union Station on a Friday afternoon. In fact, Nikki was one of the few people who didn't come down.”

Sanders waited until the muesli bowls disappeared and the heaping frying pans filled with scrambled eggs, rosti potatoes, bacon, ham, and sausages were put in their place. “Did it ever occur to you, Harriet, that what you saw just might fall into the category of what we like to call, for lack of a better word, evidence?”

“You're annoyed,” she said flatly. “Well, I guess you have some justification. But actually, I had completely forgotten about Klaus's darkroom. It must have been getting down to routine again that brought it back to me. But anyway, I did go down there, and I forgot, and I'm sorry.”

“Sorry,” Sanders muttered with heavy sarcasm. He reached into his pocket, extracted his notebook and a pen, and looked up at her. “Now,” he said, “let's go over this again. When were you down there? Who did you see? Who came up before you or down after you left? Have some more coffee.”

Once more he stood in Clara von Hohenkammer's sitting room and felt a powerful reluctance to start in on it. He had dropped Harriet off after breakfast, written up his notes on what she had seen, routed out Dubinsky, and the two men were back. A team was coming in on Monday to look at her files—a team who could understand both financial statements and the German language. Now they were looking for anything that Collins and his team might have missed. But drawn by the warm September sunshine, he wandered over to the French doors, opened them, and stepped onto the balcony. The prospect was utterly wild. Behind the garden was a tangle of trees and shrubs, falling away into a ravine; on the east side was a utilitarian fence half-hidden by lush plantings. The only building visible was the garage, with its upstairs apartment that belonged to the gardener and his dogs. That was what money bought you around here. Privacy.

He ran an impatient hand through his hair and walked into the bedroom. The room was light and uncluttered, with a large, comfortable-looking bed, a love seat and chair, a couple of small tables, and in one corner, a triangular-shaped dressing table with mirrors. He drifted around, looking without anything much in mind, and finally sat on the edge of the bed. He hoped she hadn't been the sort of person who objected too strongly to people sitting on beds. The table beside him was almost bare. A clock, a lamp, and a copy of a paperback novel. He picked it up. The title meant nothing, but Günter Grass, the author's name, acted like a bell, immersing him in nostalgia. And the illustration on the battered cover told him what the German title,
Die Blechtrommel,
did not. What mood had she been in that made her want to reread
The Tin Drum
?

He began to turn the pages, mildly regretful that he'd never bothered to learn German. Here and there, in the sea of meaningless black symbols, only a few names leaped out at him. He was jeering silently at his own sentimentality, watching himself sit there, staring at a book he couldn't read because it reminded him of university days, when a folded sheet of airmail-weight paper fluttered out and fell on his lap.

It was neatly and closely written over in black ink, and, of course, in German. “Meine liebe Clara,” it started, and it ended, “Peter.” The rest was mystery. The chances were excellent that it was a chatty letter from a friend that she had picked up and used as a bookmark and that after he had gone to great efforts to have it translated, he would discover that the weather had been good and little Hans had had a bad cold. Nevertheless, something had to be done with it. He stood up again, regretfully. He liked this room. What he would really like to do would be to slip off his shoes and stretch out on the big bed and stare up at the wide, cool ceiling. “Dubinsky,” he roared.

“Yeah?” Dubinsky's voice floated through from the sitting room.

“Find Bauer.”

Constable Bauer was, in fact, at home, enjoying a rare Sunday off duty, standing in the driveway of his neat brick house, supervising two small children who were washing the family car. The air was filled with shrieks, giggles, soapsuds, and water. Bauer was not pleased at the sight of Sanders and Dubinsky drawing up to the curb in front of his house. “Hi, Martin,” said Dubinsky, getting out and leaning his elbows on the roof of the car as though there were no reason Bauer would not be delighted to see them. “Sorry to bother you, but—”

Sanders unfolded himself from the front seat. “I need you to read this letter and tell me what's in it,” he interrupted. “Now.”

Bauer dried his wet hands on his jeans, took the letter, and started in on it, squinting from time to time at peculiarities in the handwriting. He shook his head slowly and started to reread it. “It's weird. It came in another envelope because he didn't want someone to read it.”

“What?”

“He doesn't want her to sell some . . . uh . . .” He looked up. “It'll be faster if I just type up a translation, instead of trying to explain it to you. Just a minute. Jan!” he yelled.

A dark-haired young woman came to the door. “What do you want?”

“Could you keep an eye on the kids for five minutes while I do this?”

She sighed and nodded. “I knew it was too good to be true,” she said, frowning. “Remember . . .” On that note she came down the steps, grasped one slippery child in each hand, and headed for the backyard.

Dubinsky remained draped across the car in an attitude of total relaxation; Sanders paced irritably back and forth on the sidewalk.

“I translated it as literally as I could,” said Bauer when he finally emerged a few minutes later. “Here it is, for what it's worth.”

Sanders took the two pages out of his hand, thanked him perfunctorily, and started reading as he walked back to the car. Dubinsky winked at one of the Bauer children, shrugged his shoulders at their father, and followed after. The letter was not terribly long.

Munich, Sept. 7

My dear Clara,

Such an old friend will excuse the childish trick I have played with the envelopes. I know when you open this you will be expecting a letter from your sister, but Friedl assures me that she will send you a real letter of her own next week. She is well.

Because of what I wish to say, I did not want this to be opened by another, perhaps by a secretary, believing it to be just another dull business communication, and so I have dressed it for a masked ball, as it were, for your eyes only.

Your latest request to sell, among other things, AMZ Gmbh. alarms me greatly, especially after what you sold in the spring. It is unwise to let your holdings in assets that are easily liquidated drop to such a low level. If I sell this now—and I have risked your anger by ignoring your request—not only would most of your European holdings be in real estate and other assets difficult to realize, but because of the current value of the mark vis-à-vis the US dollar and a certain amount of reorganization in the company itself, its shares are temporarily at an artificially low level. This is a disastrous time to sell.

If you are in difficulties of some sort, Marthe and I would much rather advance the cash ourselves than have you placed in such a position.