Kiss of Death Read online

  “That’s the crazy thing,” Bobby said. “Maybe this guy is nuts, or he just thinks that after all these years he’s safe, but he’s living in a town called Belle Valley, Ohio. It’s only two hundred miles from Downsville, West Virginia—where he’s still on the wanted list—and he’s calling himself Ray Wilson again.”

  “Does he … does he have a child with him?”

  “I was afraid of that, too. No. He lives alone. I found him because he’s collecting SSI disability. In other words, our tax dollars are supporting this crud.”

  The word disability sent a new jolt of fear through me. I didn’t want Ray Wilson to die before I confronted him. “What kind of disability?” I asked.

  “It’s nothing visible. I got a look at him from a distance. He’s got both his legs and both his arms. I’m guessing it’s alcoholism or drugs or a mental disorder. It’ll take a little more digging to find out the specifics.”

  “No!”

  “No? What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry, Bobby. I didn’t mean to snap at you. Where are you right now?”

  “In Belle Valley, Ohio, room twelve at the Dew Drop In Motel. It’s down the block from the house where the subject is living, at four-oh-four Webster Street.”

  “Forget about him for now. I need you to come back to New York right away and help Nancy. We’ve uncovered five suspects—people who might have murdered Veronica Rose.” Quickly, I told him about the two couples from Boston who had reason to hate her, and about my conversations today with Link Ramsey and Jay Garwood.

  “We’ve got to find out who the real killer is before Nancy has to go on trial,” I said. “Or at least we have to come up with someone else who looks so guilty that the prosecutor will have to drop the charges against Nancy. Right now, she’s the only person they’re even considering.”

  “Okay. I’ll be back at my place tonight.”

  “Tomorrow’s Friday. Let’s get together in the evening for a meeting with Walter and Nancy, and Nancy’s lawyer, if he’s available. We’ll make plans for the investigation over dinner. How’s seven o’clock at my apartment? And Chinese food?”

  “That’s all good,” Bobby said. “Be sure to get chopsticks. Chinese food doesn’t taste as good with a fork.”

  “Agreed. Oh, Bobby, about what you’ve been doing? Don’t bother to write a report. We need to concentrate on saving Nancy. Just give me your bill for time and expenses tomorrow night, when we have a moment alone. I’ll send you a check the next morning.”

  “Great.”

  After we said goodbye, I replaced the receiver and thought about what Bobby had told me: Ray Wilson was in Belle Valley, Ohio. Now that I knew he was alive, and where he could be found, it was time to make some plans.

  Taking a clean white legal pad from my desk, I began a list of the things I had to do in the next couple of weeks. First, I’d go to a library tomorrow and use a computer there to look up information about Belle Valley, Ohio, and get driving directions. I had to do it at a library so as not leave any trace of my interest on either my office or home computers.

  Next, I’d start taking money out of my savings account, three or four thousand dollars at a time, well below an amount that would attract attention. I’d make the first withdrawal this evening, just before six, when the bank closed. Already, at home, I had ten thousand dollars of emergency cash in the bedroom closet safe. Keeping hidden emergency money was a habit my late husband, Ian, had taught me when we were traveling in dangerous parts of the world.

  “You never know when cash for a bribe could mean the difference between life and death,” he had said. Twice, before Ian was killed in the crash of our Land Rover, we were captured by separate sets of poachers who discovered us photographing evidence that they’d slaughtered elephants for the ivory and a rhino for its horn. Rhino horns, ground to powder, were thought to be aphrodisiacs—primitive Viagra. The money we had hidden in boxes of film had saved our lives.

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK, I insisted that Betty go home. “Tommy’s getting back from the Affiliates meeting tonight,” I said, “and I’m meeting with the breakdown writers tomorrow morning, so we might have a long day.”

  “I haven’t copied the script revisions you made yet,” she said.

  “Do that tomorrow. We’re not taping those scenes for another week.”

  She reached into the bottom drawer of her desk for her handbag and said with a smile, “Then I’m taking off.” She came out from behind her desk, but paused. “Oh—do you want me to order lunch in for the breakdown meeting?”

  “Good idea. Find out what each of them want when they arrive, then have the order delivered at one o’clock. Thanks for reminding me. Now go home.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said, giving me a comic salute.

  I waited until the elevator doors had closed behind Betty, and then went back into my office and took a key from the collection hanging from a hook beneath my desk. Quickly finding the key marked “Small Props,” I crossed the floor to a door behind Stage 35. The stage was dark; the last scene of the day using that set had wrapped an hour ago.

  The room where small props such as hospital I.D. tags, police and fire department badges, passports, and such were kept in filing cabinets was not much bigger than a storage closet.

  My first act was to open the drawer marked “Misc. Devices” and remove a lock pick. I knew we had one because a few months ago I’d written a scene in which Link Ramsey’s character used it to get into a bad guy’s office. I slipped it into my pocket.

  Next, I went to the drawer marked “Driver’s Licenses” and rummaged through them until I came to a Chicago license with a picture on it of a woman about my age. The name on the license was “Charlotte Brown.” She’d been a minor character in the story three years ago. The actress who’d played Charlotte had short dark hair, bangs that brushed the top of her eyebrows, and she wore glasses.

  For my purpose, the only thing that was wrong with the license was the expiration date, but I could have that changed by one of our studio prop artists. Tommy called them “our forgers” because they were so skillful at making fake documents that looked real. He joked that we paid them well so they wouldn’t use their talents for crime. All I had to do was tell one of them that I needed the expiration date changed on the license to use as a prop in a future storyline.

  I stared at the picture on the laminated rectangle in my hands. Unlike Charlotte’s short dark hair, mine is shoulder length, and a kind of blondish reddish shade Matt says is the color of marmalade.

  With a pair of clear, nonprescription glasses, and a short black wig that I could buy at any one of a thousand shops in the city and customize, I would look enough like Charlotte Brown to pass for her.

  Chapter 27

  FRIDAY NIGHT, BOBBY arrived first, shortly followed by Kent Wayne and Nancy. Wayne, who lives on East Eighty-first Street, directly across the park from Nancy, had picked her up on his way to the Dakota.

  From the brightness of her voice, to her quick smile, it would seem to a stranger that Nancy was holding up well under the stress of being accused of murder, but I saw the stiffness of her shoulders, and the hollows in her cheeks. Movements that used to be smooth were now abrupt, and when she wasn’t holding something, her fingers tended to twist around each other when they used to lie gracefully at rest. Nancy had been the best and kindest friend in the world to me when I first came to New York City on scholarship to Columbia, and again, after Ian’s death. Whatever it took, I had vowed to help her now.

  By the time Bobby, Walter, Wayne, Nancy, and I were seated at my dining room table eating Chinese takeout, it had been forty-four hours since my argument with Matt at Penny’s dinner party, and he still hadn’t contacted me. I was fuming. I might not have been so angry if we hadn’t spent Monday night and Tuesday morning making love with such enthusiasm. Apparently, those hours hadn’t meant enough to Matt for him to get over his snit about my tricking his partner. G. G. got over it. Why couldn’t Matt?

>   Well, to hell with him. Who needs a man with—as Walter put it—a stiff neck that goes all the way down to the soles of his feet? Not this woman!

  “Who’d like some more cashew chicken?” I asked.

  Bobby and Wayne signaled with raised chopsticks. I got up to put more of that dish onto their plates as Nancy refilled glasses: bottled water for Bobby and me, beer for Walter, red wine for herself and her lawyer.

  “I’ve never been in this building,” Kent Wayne said. “Always been curious about it, but I never knew anybody who lived here.”

  “First time I took Morgan home,” Bobby said, “we were on my motorcycle. I thought the Dakota looked like the set of a mad scientist movie.”

  “You’re close,” I said. “The first actor who lived in this building was Boris Karloff.”

  Glancing around, Wayne said, “I find your decor interesting.”

  Nancy defended me. “The place was furnished when Morgan bought it. She didn’t pick out that wallpaper with the tiny rosebuds, or this table with the gilt trim.”

  “I wasn’t making a critical judgment,” Wayne said. Using his chopsticks, he gestured toward the most unusual object in the room—or in the entire apartment, for that matter. “Do you mean to say that authentic-looking ancient Egyptian mummy case in the corner came with this apartment?”

  “I wondered about that thing. She’s not a bad-looking woman,” Bobby said, referring to the painted female figure on the front of the case. She had large dark eyes and even features, and wore a headdress fashioned in the form of a hawk’s head, with its feathers fanning out on either side. Her straight black hair reached to the middle of her breasts. Narrow arms, crossed at the level of her rib cage, displayed long, slim fingers.

  Nancy, who had been staying here with me when the mummy case was delivered, and knew from whom it had come, glanced at me, but didn’t say anything. Instead, she turned her attention to the last few bits of Mongolian beef and snow peas on her plate.

  Noting the sudden silence, Wayne said, “I’ll bet there’s a story about that thing.”

  There was, but I wasn’t about to tell him that the mummy case had arrived containing the missing piece of a murder mystery that I’d been involved in several months ago.

  “Not a very interesting story,” I lied. “It was just a gift from someone.”

  “When I was a young fella, we gave a bunch of flowers to a pretty girl. Guess the world has changed more than I knew,” Walter said.

  “Anyway, I’ve been promising Nancy and Penny for months that I’ll get around to redecorating this apartment with things that I’m going to choose.”

  Nancy asked, “When? I need something fun to look forward to, so I want a firm commitment.”

  “As soon as we get you out of this mess, I promise to start redecorating. You and Penny can go shopping with me.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that,” Nancy said.

  Wayne’s attention had remained fixed on the mummy case. Gesturing toward it, he asked, “Mind if I take a closer look?”

  “Go ahead. Are you interested in that sort of thing?”

  “I wasn’t, until a former client paid my fee with an Egyptian sarcophagus.” He got up from the table and moved over to the mummy case. “I didn’t know anything about antiquities, but I live a couple of blocks east of the Metropolitan Museum, so I did some studying and found out the sarcophagus was from the early years of the Ptolemic dynasty, around three hundred B.C. This case might be several hundred years older, Morgan. You probably know this held a female mummy—the painting on a case was usually a representation of the person they put in it.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said, and felt a little embarrassed that I hadn’t tried to find out. As soon as I have time, I’ll do some studying on the subject.

  “An expert could tell you the exact age of the piece and where it came from by the panel of hieroglyphics that run down the center of her gown, and from the colors of the paint and the style of the artist.”

  “Antiquity detectives—everybody wants to get into my act,” Bobby joked.

  Wayne leaned over and pointed out a design on the side. “See this drawing of a doorway? Something like it was on my sarcophagus. The man at the Met told me that’s supposed to be the portal for the spirit to exit, allowing it to roam between the world of the living and the world of the dead.”

  “Was it worth as much as you were charging the client?” Bobby asked.

  “More. My fee was eighty thousand, and according to an appraiser at a big auction house the sarcophagus was worth over a hundred. From the catalogue prices I saw, this case of yours would probably go for a bigger number.”

  Walter was peering closely at the mummy case. “From all the work that went into decorating this, the woman must have been somebody important.”

  With a faint note of wistfulness in her voice, Nancy added, “Or somebody who was loved.”

  Wayne reached for the latch. Before I could say, “Don’t open it” he opened the mummy case—and exposed one of my housekeeping secrets.

  Surveying the contents inside, he asked, “What’s this?”

  Embarrassed, I admitted, “I’m using it for storage. Those are old Love of My Life scripts.”

  Wayne closed the case carefully. “You’ve got a treasure here.”

  “What did you do with your sarcophagus?” Bobby asked him.

  “Ah, thereby lies a sad tale. In a wild burst of affection, I presented it to the woman I was seeing at the time.” He added ruefully, “It turned out she’d wanted a diamond. She stamped her feet and cried—not a pretty picture. The irony is she didn’t realize that what she angrily referred to as ‘an old coffin’ was worth more than any diamond even she would have picked out. We broke up, and I kept it. If I ever again think I’ve found ‘the one,’ I’ll give it to her as a test of our compatibility.” He expelled an exaggerated sigh. “For now I’m just a lonely bachelor, overworked and underloved.”

  LATER, DINNER FINISHED and dishes cleared away, the five of us began to brainstorm Nancy’s case.

  “The girl, Didi, found her mother dead,” Wayne said. “I’ll want to talk to her, to find out if she saw someone in the hall before she went into the apartment.”

  “Arnold won’t let you anywhere near her,” Nancy said. “And I can’t blame him. Didi’s traumatized.”

  “Didi likes me,” I said. “Or at least she used to. If I can find a way to get to her, maybe I can persuade her to talk to me.”

  “I appreciate what you want to do, and I wish you luck,” Nancy said, “but I don’t think anybody’s going to get through the barricades Arnold’s stacked up around her.”

  “Unless she’s in a coma, I’ll think of some way to see her,” I said. An idea had already occurred to me. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Didi is obsessed with horseback riding—she’s won ribbons in competitions. To keep up her skills, I’ll bet she’s going to insist on practicing.”

  “Yes, she would!” Nancy’s voice was full of excitement, and hope. “She’s registered in three big shows before the end of the year. Arnold doesn’t ride—he’s afraid of horses. He won’t go near one unless it’s to see Didi compete, and then he’ll stay outside the ring. I’ll bet he will let her go to the stable alone, but with his chauffeur to drive her and to make sure nobody tries to talk to her as she leaves or enters the building. The driver’s name is Max.” She turned to Wayne. “I know Max pretty well, but I don’t think he’s ever seen Morgan.”

  “Would he go inside with Didi?”

  “I doubt it. When Max took us places, he’d always stay out in the car and read a book.”

  “A few months ago Didi invited me to see her perform,” I said, “so I know where she goes through her ring exercises. The Woodburn Academy on Amsterdam Avenue.”

  Nancy nodded in agreement. “Because she spends so much time practicing, Didi doesn’t go to school—Arnold has private tutors come to the apartment. I think the riding ring is probably the only place you could g
et to her.”

  “Then that’s my first move,” I said.

  Talk turned to the list of suspects Walter and I had compiled: Ralph and Gloria Hartley, Laura and George Reynolds, Cathy Chatsworth—a.k.a. Olive Flitt—and Jay Garwood, who lied about being romantically involved with Veronica Rose.

  “One of the things I’ll ask Didi is what she knew about her mother’s relationship with Garwood. When she saw him last, and how he acted.”

  “Also, if she came down via the stairs, or used the elevator, and if she saw anyone at all between leaving Arnold’s apartment and getting to her mother’s,” Wayne said and turned to Nancy. “Is there a back way out of the apartment?”

  “Arnold has a back service entrance for deliveries and trash pickup—an elevator and stairs. It’s likely that all of the apartments there do.”

  Wayne frowned. “Back entrances mean easy escape, if the killer knew anything about the building. Let’s hope the girl saw something that she doesn’t realize is significant.” Proceeding to the next subject, he said, “There’s a detective firm in Europe that I’ve done business with. I’ll have them track Gloria Hartley’s movements in Paris the last few weeks. Find out who she’s seen, what she’s done, if she left the city.”

  “If she knows any hit men,” Nancy added.

  Walter volunteered to locate Jay Garwood’s ex-wife. “I’ll go have a talk with her, find out what she has to say about him—like for instance if he was violent, an’ why they got a divorce.”

  “Excellent,” Wayne said.

  Bobby said, “I’ll hire some reliable Boston operatives to help. We’ll do a full-court press on Ralph Hartley, George and Laura Reynolds, and Cathy Chatsworth.”

  “Be careful of the Chatsworth woman,” Wayne cautioned. “She’s a journalist.”

  Bobby snorted. “She’s a journalist like I’ll be playing center for the Boston Celtics.”

  “Nevertheless, she’s employed by a major newspaper,” Wayne said. “Stay below her radar.”