Chapter Twenty-six
Her 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.”
“You and your husband still feel no responsibility for what you’ve done—or not done,” Jane marveled. “Slumlords rarely do. The way you look at it, you and Foss are the victims, am I correct?”
“Yes, for once you are.”
Jane nodded. “You made this attitude quite clear when you said the owner of the house across the street from yours would be blamed for the negligence of his tenants. And when you scoffed when Red Pearson read from his novel based on the club fire: It wasn’t to get back at him for criticizing your story; it was because his telling of the club fire tragedy was, to your way of thinking, inaccurate.
“Everyone had it wrong, you thought. Everyone was making you and your husband the culprits. So—in order to protect yourselves—you killed the woman who would make it all public.”
“You bet I did,” Tamara said resentfully. “I wasn’t going to let some tacky little slut playing Lois Lane ruin everything Foss and I have built. Cause some huge scandal, turn Foss and me into another Harry and Leona Helmsley. No, thank you.”
Tamara turned down the corners of her mouth disdainfully. “Ivy was an idiot. She started telling me this slob”—she gestured toward Graham’s corpse—“was once a figure skater. She said Larry was going to skate for her, and turned around to look at the pond. That’s when I stabbed her. She made the funniest little squeaking sound.” She giggled.
Jane winced.
“It was quite easy, really,” Tamara said. “Killing her, I mean.” She held up the ice pick, admiring it. “I liked it so much that as soon as I’d decided I was going to get rid of you, I drove over to Fortunoff in Wayne and picked this up.” She smiled. “Fortunoff. The Source.”
She checked her slimly elegant watch. “Oh, dear, getting late. You’ve wasted enough of my time.” Suddenly she lunged forward, like a fencer, thrusting the pick at Jane, jabbing her right hand. Hot pain seared the center of Jane’s palm. She looked quickly and saw blood seeping from the wound.
She had no sooner looked up again than Tamara rushed forward with a cry, throwing her whole weight at Jane. Jane managed to grab the arm holding the pick and put all her strength into forcing it away. Tamara was surprisingly strong. For a moment, as they pushed at each other, their faces were only inches apart, and Jane saw unadulterated hatred—and madness—in the other woman’s eyes.
Jane drew back her right foot and kicked Tamara as hard as she could in the shin. Tamara let out a grunt of pain, the flashlight went flying from her hand, yet the pressure of her arm against Jane’s barely lessened, and her hand still clutched the ice pick, its bloody tip now only inches from Jane’s face.
With a great mustering of strength, Jane surged forward, and the two women toppled to the floor, Jane on top. The ice pick’s handle hit the floor and was knocked out of Tamara’s hand, landing a few inches from Larry Graham’s inert body. Jane scrambled for it, grabbed it, and swiftly stood. Tamara had also gotten up and stood a few yards away, watching.
Jane clutched the handle of the ice pick with both hands, pointing its tip straight out before her. She waited. Tamara took a step closer.
“Stay back,” Jane warned, but Tamara took another step. Jane broke out in a sweat, wondering if she could stab someone—even Tamara—even if it was to save her own life. Then a great rage overtook her and she realized that of course she could—could and would.
Tamara’s foot came flying toward Jane, knocking the ice pick out of her hands. Tamara quickly retrieved it. Jane turned and ran.
She went back out the door through which she and Larry had come, and to the left down the long corridor. She ducked into one of the rooms toward the end on the left, unsure if Tamara had seen her.
Silently she slid behind the door, then stood as still as a statue, waiting, peering into the gloom through the crack of the door, between its hinges.
There was absolute quiet . . . then a crunch, followed by the faint creak of a floorboard not far away. Jane held her breath. She realized her hands were shaking.
And in the next instant Tamara was there, looking straight at her through the crack of the door. With all her might, Jane slammed the door into Tamara’s face.
Tamara made an odd choking-gurgling sound, then collapsed.
Slowly Jane walked around the door. Tamara lay in a chinchilla sprawl, on her back, the ice pick having pierced her throat and emerged from the back of her neck. Her eyes were open, still full of gleaming hatred.
Jane gasped, turning quickly away.
Then Tamara moved and Jane returned her gaze to her in horror. Tamara’s lips were moving. Cautiously Jane leaned over her, straining to make out what she was trying to say.
“Not . . . our fault,” Tamara whispered. In a flash her hand flew up and grabbed Jane’s face. Jane drew back, pulling at Tamara’s arm, but couldn’t loosen the clawlike grip, the fingernails digging into her cheeks.
And then, in the next moment, the grip was released as Tamara’s hand went limp and her arm fell to her side.
Jane began to cry. Stepping over Tamara’s body, she walked slowly down the corridor and found the door to the courtyard. There was Graham’s pickup at the curb. She made her way toward it. As she reached it, her legs suddenly weakened and she faltered, grabbing at the truck for support.
“Lady, you okay?”
She looked up. A petite young woman came toward her wheeling a wire shopping basket full of groceries.
“I’m fine, thank you,” Jane said, but her legs betrayed her again and she fell to the sidewalk.
The young woman rushed to her and helped her gently lie down.
“Help! Somebody help me!” Jane heard the woman cry.
“What’s the problem?” came a young man’s voice.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with her. Maybe drunk.”
Through partially closed eyes Jane saw the young man’s dark face—shrewd, serious—come near hers. “Lady,” he said softly, “you okay?” Then she felt him touch her coat.
“Look at this,” she heard him say.
“Oh, Lord. What is that?”
“What do you think it is? It’s blood.”
“Blood? Whose? Hers?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Get a cop.”