To Darkness and to Death (43 page)

“How brave and clever of you, Reverend Fergusson,” Lena Erlander said in her Scandinavian accent. “Your name—is it Swedish?”

“Scots,” Clare said. “And please, call me Clare.”

Jim Cameron launched into the story of how he and Lena met on a trip to Scotland three years back, which opened the door for Parteger to make the table laugh with a description of learning the Scottish fling for a party, which got Rob Corlew onto dancing lessons he and his wife took on their last cruise, which pretty much got them through the salad. All that time, Russ watched Clare, avoided watching Clare, watched her without seeming to watch her, and felt like a complete shit.

He was the guy in the cartoon with the comic angel on one shoulder and the leering devil on the other. One of them was smacking him upside the head and saying,
Look at this gorgeous woman sitting next to you! Do you want to screw that up
? The other had eyes popping out on cartoon springs and was drooling.
Those eyes, that hair, all that skin…
He’d never seen Clare so undressed before. He wanted to run his hands over her pale white shoulders and down her—He forked a large and bitter piece of endive into his mouth and crunched it.

“You still working on that?” the waiter said. Russ dropped the silverware onto the plate and waved it away.

Linda started describing the frantic hours of work she put in today to get the draperies up all over the hotel. He let his gaze wander to the table next to them, and to the table next to that, automatically checking for signs of intoxication or aggression or distress. Way up at the front of the room, he saw his mom and her cousin Nane, talking and laughing with a rowdy group of women he assumed were the volunteer gardeners of the ACC. A little distance away, he spotted a table with an imbalance of seven men: four elegantly dressed Asians, three white guys in badly fitting rental tuxes, and one slim, older woman in a smoke-gray dress.

“What was the oldest van der Hoeven’s name?” he asked Clare, without thinking.

“Luella? No, Louisa.”

“I think that’s her over there.” He pointed with his chin. His wife gave him an incurious glance before returning to the mayor. She was pitching him on redecorating his office.

Clare turned around in her seat. “It could be,” she said. “I can see a family resemblance.” She turned back. “Do you think she knows?”

“Knows what?” Robert Corlew looked at Clare, then Russ, then back to Clare.

“Eugene van der Hoeven was killed today,” Russ answered.

“No sh——oot!” Corlew said. “Is that going to put a stop to the land sale?”

“Evidently not,” Clare said. “Those Malaysians are the bigwigs from GWP.” She bit her lower lip. “Oh, crud. I have two cases of wine in my car I was supposed to deliver for them.” At Corlew’s baffled look, she went on, “Eugene asked me to do it as a favor. The guy who was supposed to pick them up never showed.”

“Eugene?” Corlew said. “How did you get to be on a first-name basis with the van der Hoevens?”

Clare launched into an account of her time as a search and rescue volunteer. Russ checked out the table next to the GWP brass. And whaddya know, there was his old friend Shaun Reid, with his young and lovely second wife. The tables at the head of the room had already been served their entrees, and he could see Shaun eating methodically. Even from a distance, Russ could see his movements were those of someone stiff and sore.

One of the waiters came up to Shaun. Russ, expecting to see a wine bottle produced, was surprised when the uniformed man handed Shaun what looked like a piece of paper. Shaun unfolded it, read it, and looked around wildly. He sat, head bowed for a moment, then rose and followed the path the waiter had taken out of the ballroom.

That’s interesting.

Russ skidded his chair back. “I think I’ll excuse myself before dinner arrives,” he said. He left through the main entrance, but instead of turning right toward the restrooms, he turned left. He walked past the length of the ballroom until he came to a door bearing a discreet brass plaque: EMPLOYEES ONLY. He pushed against the door and was disappointed to see it led into a shallow room lined with shelf upon shelf of table linens. He stepped back into the lobby. The wall continued unbroken to the corner. Somewhere behind there was the kitchen, but it obviously had an entirely separate entrance, so that unsuspecting guests couldn’t stumble their way into the noisy chaos that made their dinners possible.

He reached into his jacket pocket and removed his cell phone. “Hey, Harlene,” he said when his number connected. “Any news?”

“Hey, Chief. The crime scene boys just finished up at Reid-Gruyn. They said there’s a load of prints off the couch, so it may take ’em a while to eliminate the duds.”

“Do you know if anyone’s tried to get ahold of Shaun Reid? To question him, or maybe to get him to open up a room or something?”

“Not to my knowledge. Lyle’s still on the road checking out places where the Schoof boy might be. Kevin’s still watching the house. He’s called in a few times to complain about how bored he is.”

“Tell him boredom is good. It’s when things get interesting that you have to worry.”

“Ain’t that the truth. Eric’s still up at Haudenosaunee. Mark’s trying to eliminate some of the Mercedes… oh, wait, he wants to talk to you.”

There was a pause, and then he heard Mark’s voice. “Hi, Chief.”

“Hi. You find something?”

“Not yet. But there was something interesting. I’ve been going through the names trying to see if anybody who’s ever had a connection to the van der Hoevens has a black Mercedes, right? And I run across a name that doesn’t have a connection to the family but may be linked to Haudenosaunee.”

“Who?”

“Shaun Reid. He’s a possible suspect in the Castle assault, right? And she was found on Haudenosaunee property.”

Shaun Reid. Who looked for all the world as if he had been brawling today. “Good work. I think it might be time to pay Shaun a more formal visit. Pull together everything we’ve got for a warrant request. If Ryswick comes through, maybe we can hit him early tomorrow morning. In the meanwhile, keep looking for any other connections for the Mercedes. This could easily be someone from the city, you know. Their father, Jan van der Hoeven, headquartered his business there.”

“Yeah, I know.”

From the entryway in the middle of the lobby, Russ could hear the muted clinking of forks hitting china. “Gimme back to Harlene, will you?”

Harlene came onto the line. “Yeah?”

“Tell Lyle I want him to drop by the hospital again as soon as he can. See what the reaction is when he tells Becky Castle her stuff was found in Reid’s office. Have Eric call me from Haudenosaunee as soon as he can. I want to know if he’s turned up anything.”

“Will do, chief. How’s the fancy party? Is it making up for having to work on your birthday?”

He thought about their table. Linda and Clare and Hugh and Russ. Like a bad Italian art movie. “Harlene, I can honestly say I’d rather be eating greasy takeout and waiting for an autopsy report than be here.”

8:20 P.M.

Lisa Schoof tried to control her shaking. She stood in the passageway outside the Algonquin Waters kitchen, listening to pots hammering iron burners and dishes clanging against stainless steel. The door swung open, and she jerked to attention, but it was only an assistant in a grease-spattered white shirt, ducking down the hall for a quick smoke. The door, shutting, pumped a blast of steam and smell and the sound of harsh voices jabbering in a language Lisa couldn’t even recognize.

She had found her way to the kitchen door easily enough: In her sweater and padded motorcycle jacket she looked nothing like the guests she had seen in her brief flight through the lobby, and a sympathetic chambermaid, thinking she was new and late for her shift, pointed her in the right direction.

She stepped into the kitchen, thinking she could snag a waiter to deliver the message she had written out, but was stymied immediately by the chaos around her. She had waitressed before, at the Red Lobster in Glens Falls, but that kitchen could have fit into a corner of the acreage of white tile and chrome racks that surrounded her here. She was perhaps ten steps in when a short man in front of an open blast furnace of an oven started screaming at her, first in a foreign language, then in English. “Get out! Get out, you! Get out!”

Lisa stumbled back, breathless, and was on the verge of bolting when a hand fell on her shoulder and a pleasant voice asked, “What are you doing here, kiddo?”

She was face-to-face with a faultlessly white shirt and an elaborate waistcoat. The man holding her looked like a riverboat gambler in a western. “Are you a waiter?”

“Sure am. Are you new?”

She shook her head. “No.” Her throat threatened to close up, but she got her prepared story out. “I work for Mr. Shaun Reid. I have to get a note to him. It’s important. It’s about the, the mill. His mill.”

“Where’s he at? The banquet? The door’s right over there. I can show you the way.”

“Oh, no. I can’t. I’ll get in trouble. He, he doesn’t want the other businessmen to know. That… there’s a problem.” She reached into her pocket and withdrew the tightly folded note. “Could you?”

The waiter smiled at her indulgently. “Sure, kiddo. Do you know where he’s sitting?”

She had thought about that, driving in. “I think he’s with the people from the big paper company.”

“GWP? Okay, I’ll see that he gets it.” He held out his hand for the paper, but she unfolded it quickly and pulled her ballpoint from her pocket.
Meet me in the hallway outside the kitchen
, she scribbled at the bottom. She refolded the paper and passed it to the nice waiter.

“You better leave now, before Egoberto tries to fillet you.”

She glanced over to where the ferocious cook was ramming rounds of helpless bread into the fiery inferno. “Right,” she said.

So here she stood, chafing her hand over her arms in a futile attempt to rub away the cold seeping from her gut. It already felt as if she had been waiting for an hour. What if the waiter couldn’t find Reid? What if he laughed and tore up the paper? What if he called the cops and they were already on their way to arrest her for blackmail? What if—

The kitchen door swung open again. Shaun Reid strode into the hall, brushing at his tuxedo jacket as if it had been soiled by his time in the kitchen. He saw her. His head went up. His black eyes and bruises startled her. He looked like a boxer. “Who are you?” he asked.

His age, his clothing, the authority in his voice—she almost blurted out the truth by sheer force of habit. The thing that caught her was that he didn’t know already. She had been cleaning his house for a year now, and he didn’t recognize her. Then she noticed the sheen of sweat across his forehead, the dampness on his upper lip.

It was quite cool in the kitchen passageway.

“I’m the person who has Millie van der Hoeven safe.”

He glanced quickly over his shoulder, then back at her. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

“Fine. I’ll go call my friend, and he’ll take her to the cops. She’s been dying to talk to them all day.” She feinted, as if she were going to go around him.

He threw out his arm to stop her. “Open your jacket,” he said.

She did.

“Pick up your sweater.”

“Screw you. You want to see tits, go somewhere else, you perv.”

“I want proof you’re not wearing a wire before I talk with you, you little twit.”

“Oh.” She lifted her sweater and jacket as far as the underside of her breasts and turned around slowly, so he could see there wasn’t anything snaking down her back. It was by far the weirdest thing she had done in a day full of weird things. It didn’t feel real—more like she was acting in a TV show. The unreality emboldened her. “Here’s the deal,” she said, lowering her sweater. “You confess to having beaten up Becky Castle, and we’ll make sure Millie van der Hoeven never has the chance to testify that you killed her brother.”

Reid’s eyes narrowed. He stepped toward her, and for a moment she was afraid. Then a crash from the kitchen reminded her that they were in a relatively public place. If he tried anything, she could bring the house down with her screams.

“It was you who put that dress and the makeup in my office, wasn’t it? You little bitch.” He hissed the last phrase so quietly she wasn’t sure he had said it at all.

She forced her voice to remain strong and confident. “I’m sure you’d rather be arrested for assault than for murder.”

“It was an accident,” he snapped.

“So you want us to take Millie to the cops?”

“No!” He crossed one arm over his chest and propped the other against it. He covered his mouth and chin with one hand. Finally he said, “How do I know you won’t let her testify to the police after I’ve pled guilty to the assault?”

“It’s a balance. Like a seesaw. If you deny you beat up Becky Castle, we’ll be in trouble. If we let Millie tell the cops, you’ll be in trouble.”

“Getting arrested for assault and battery is trouble, you idiot.”

“You’re a rich guy. You can afford a good lawyer. Tell him it was a lovers’ fight, he’ll probably get you off with a few years suspended and some domestic violence classes.”

He looked at her closely. “Your friend is the person who really assaulted the Castle girl, isn’t he?” He stared at her hand. She looked down and saw her wedding ring. “He’s your husband,” Reid said.

She folded her hand and pressed it against her leg. “Do we have a deal?”

“I have to finish the dinner,” he said, tilting his head toward the kitchen. “I’m conducting some important business there. And I need a chance to call my attorney, to arrange to turn myself in.”

“You have until midnight tonight.”

“Just like Cinderella,” he said. “All right.”

She stood for a moment, not knowing what to do now. He had just… given in. She hadn’t been expecting that. Finally she shook herself and walked off. He said nothing, so neither did she.

It wasn’t until she had rounded the corner and was facing the stairs up to the lobby that she let herself smile, a wide, glorious, split-seamed smile. She did it. She was going to save her husband.