Seven Kinds of Death (5 page)

“Constance,” Ba Ba said at her elbow, wheezing slightly, “have you heard yet? No one can find Victoria Leeds. She isn’t in the house and she never changed her clothes or anything.”

Constance and Toni looked through the upstairs bedrooms and closets, the three bathrooms. When they returned to the first floor, Paul was entering from the back of the house. Toni’s fingers dug into Constance’s arm. The young woman was staring at Paul, her expression a mixture of anguish and fear; she was ashen. She turned and ran.

“Would she have walked to town, to take a taxi back to Washington, perhaps?” Constance asked Paul.

He shook his head. “I called the two taxi companies and asked. I called the train station and the bus depot. No sign of her.” He glanced beyond Constance; a few guests were still partying, no more than five or six. “We need to organize a real search,” he said. “Why don’t they clear out?”

Spence joined them. “She’s not on this side of the property, I’d swear to it. Did she even know there was the rest of it across the road?” His voice was gravelly; a frown etched deeply into his forehead.

“She never came out here before, but someone could have told her. Let’s start over there.” Paul Volte was nearly as pale as Toni.

Constance saw again the look of terror that had come to Toni’s face, and although she had no idea of why these people were all assuming the worst, their fear became her fear. She said slowly, “Paul, perhaps we should call the sheriff’s office. Two or three people can’t really search the woods thoroughly.” It was fifteen minutes before eight.

Later, when Charlie asked Constance exactly how she got rid of the lingering guests, she said simply, “I told them to go away.” It wasn’t quite that abrupt, but very nearly. Max called the sheriff, and Spence and Paul left to search the woods across the road.

Ba Ba came up to Constance to complain about the summary dismissal of guests and Constance didn’t really tell her to shut up, just something like that, and then Tootles appeared again, coming from across the road. She had found time to change into her black pants and shirt.

“What’s happening?” she demanded. “I met Paul and Spence and they practically ordered me to get my butt over here.”

“And she’s ordering everyone in sight,” Ba Ba said aggrievedly, glowering at Constance. “All I said was that I was still having a conversation with Susan Walters, and here she comes and—”

“Ba Ba, shut up,” Tootles said and asked Max, “What’s wrong?”

“It seems that Victoria Leeds is missing,” he said with a shrug. “Personally, I think she must have decided to take a powder and just forgot to mention it to anyone. I called the sheriff.”

Tootles’s eyes widened, then narrowed to slits. “Good Christ! Not Paul!”

The sheriff’s deputy arrived a minute or two after that, and he called back to his office for help for a real search of the woods before it got too dark. It was nearly eight thirty.

Dinner was a buffet; since the cook had no clear idea of how many people she would be feeding that night, it had seemed the simplest way to go, Ba Ba explained, and then started to explain again. This time Max told her to shut up. They picked at food that was very good. Paul and Spence had returned, and Paul didn’t even attempt to eat. He sat in the living room with his eyes closed and started at every sound from outside the house.

The deputy returned at nine thirty. It was still day-bright outside; he was sweating heavily. He was a florid-faced man in his twenties, blond, blue-eyed; his shape was somehow not right, too narrow in the shoulders and chest, too wide in the hips. “What’s in the big boxes in the barn, Mr. Buell?” the deputy asked, standing in the doorway to the living room.

“Artwork, pieces going on tour,” Max said.

Everyone had stood up, and as if managed by a choreographer, they all began to move toward the door. The deputy looked surprised, but did not object, and the group went outside, across the porch, through the front yard that was several hundred feet deep, across the dirt road, and finally into the barn. The big double doors had been opened, and interior lights had been turned on. The crates were in the center of the building; leading to one of them were red spots.

Janet screamed shrilly and Toni grabbed her; they stood with their arms around each other.

“Hey, take it easy,” the deputy said. “It’s just paint. But it looks to me like someone’s opened a couple of the boxes, and didn’t take the time to close them again, not like the others, anyway.”

Constance moved closer and saw what he meant. Some of the screws had been removed evidently and replaced, but were no longer in all the way.

“Open it,” Tootles said in a croaking voice. “For God’s sake, just open it!” She flew at the crate and tried to rip the front off. Max drew her back and nodded to the deputy, who began to take out the screws. Max held Tootles against him until the box was opened.

Constance was aware that Janet screamed again, and Tootles made deep, hurt-animal sounds against Max’s chest. There were other sounds of incredulity, of fury, anguish… Inside the crate was a wooden sculpture about three feet high, two feet in diameter, securely fastened to the crate with straps, and covered with red paint. The paint had splashed against the wood of the box, turning the interior into a grotesque red stage.

Wordlessly Spence went to a worktable and came back with another screwdriver. He opened another crate. More paint. A piece of wood had been broken off the sculpture and was lying on the bottom of the box.

Janet was keening, her voice rising and falling. Constance moved to Toni, who was holding the younger woman. “Take her back to the house, will you? And stay with her. And Max, you should take Tootles back.” Ba Ba, stunned into silence, left with Max and Tootles. Toni pulled Janet out the door. The deputy and Spence opened more crates. Paul had found another screwdriver and was opening crates also.

Out of fourteen sculptures that were already crated up, eleven were paint-daubed, or broken. There were five pieces yet to be boxed; none of them had been damaged.

When they finished, the three men gazed at the spoiled pieces, and finally Spence said, “Why in God’s name did she do it?”

“Who?” the deputy asked.

“The missing woman, Victoria Leeds, obviously. She must have come over here, and destroyed a lifetime of work. For God’s sake, why? Is she crazy?”

For a second or two Constance thought Paul was going to hit Spence Dwyers. Paul’s muscles tensed; his face became set in a grimace of hatred, but then he relaxed. And she could think of the expression that replaced the hatred only as one of hope. She thought then that nothing she had seen or heard since all this started made a bit of sense, including Tootles’s original note to her and the mysterious words she had uttered over the phone.

FIVE

When Constance returned
to the house, Ba Ba was talking shrilly: “Well, he shouldn’t have brought her out just to fight with her! They could fight back in New York.”

Tootles and Max were on one of the sofas, his arm around her shoulders; she looked dazed. Ba Ba was sitting near them, leaning forward speaking into Tootles’s face. Janet was huddled on another sofa looking terrified, and Toni, only slightly less frightened, was sitting close to her. Ignoring Ba Ba, who had glanced up without interrupting her stream of words, Constance went over to the young women.

“Why don’t you rearrange things one more time,” Constance said to them. “Both of you take my room, and I’ll move into Toni’s room for the night.”

“Would you?” Janet asked. Her voice was tremulous.

“No problem,” Constance said, but she wished she knew the girl better, knew how close to the edge she really was. Too close, she thought. “Let’s go up and do it.” They had to walk around
Seven Kinds of Death
in order to leave the room. At least, Constance thought, the best of the lot had been safe, under the eyes of sixty or more guests all evening.

“Why she had to carry the fight beyond Paul is more than I can see…” Ba Ba’s voice floated out with them. In the room Constance had used, Toni said they’d do it themselves, if that was all right, and Constance left them moving bedding and clothes.

The search was called off when it became dark enough to justify abandoning the effort to find a woman who apparently was missing only because she chose to absent herself. The deputy clearly was no longer interested in searching for Victoria. Paul looked murderous, and he paced the entire downstairs jerkily. He would be exhausted, Constance knew; his muscles were so tight, and all that walking with so much anger or worry would exact a high cost physically. Spence slouched in a deep chair and scowled at the floor.

Two women from the village who had cooked and served and cleaned up were gone, and the house felt eerily quiet after so much commotion. Ba Ba was talking steadily; she seemed quite unaware that no one listened, no one responded. She was talking about her premonition about the weekend.

“No show,” Tootles said to Spence during that evening.

“We’ll assess the damage tomorrow,” he said. “I think everything can be put together again, cleaned up. We’ll see tomorrow.”

She shook her head; she appeared to have aged ten years or more since the party. “No show,” she said again, and put her head on Max’s chest. He stroked her hair.

“I knew something evil would happen, you see, just not what it was. That’s how it works for me so much of the time…” Ba Ba talked on and the others drifted away to go to bed.

The next morning Constance talked to Janet and to Toni, and she talked to Paul, and to Spence, and began to think she was learning much more about all these people than she needed to know, or even wanted to know. But she did not talk with Tootles, who had a headache and was staying in her room. And she talked as little as possible with Ba Ba. Actually she talked not at all to Ba Ba, and she tried to avoid listening.

Victoria had not returned to her New York address; she had not shown up anywhere.

“Well, I don’t think it’s fair for her to spoil the weekend for all of us,” Ba Ba said at lunch. It was not at all clear to whom she was addressing her complaints. “I mean we have only until Monday, and today we’re supposed to get a peek at the condo that will be home for Max and Marion any day now.” So she wasn’t talking to Tootles, Constance thought. The air? Was that her audience, just that simple: the air? “… and tomorrow we’re having brunch in that nice old inn, aren’t we? They used to have Bay clams, remember? They did them in a champagne sauce. I wonder if they still do that. That means out until late in the afternoon…”

Wearily Tootles said, “Ba Ba, for God’s sake, stop. We’ll go look at the condo. Let’s walk over. I feel as if I’m going stir crazy!”

“I’ll meet you,” Ba Ba said hastily. “I’ll drive.”

“Good, you drive. I’ll walk. Paul, Spence, Constance, who else wants a walk through the woods?”

So even this walk would be semipublic, Constance realized, and she also heard herself making plans to start for home as soon as they got back from inspecting the condo. Say she left at two, she was calculating, she could make it home before midnight without pushing too hard. And before she left, she had already decided, she would give Tootles what-ho for alarming her with talk of desperation and suicide.

Max drove over with Ba Ba; Toni and Janet, who had already seen the condos, chose to stay behind, still huddling together, still wary around Paul. Whatever had been bothering Toni seemed to have infected Janet, who now regarded Paul with fear also. He ignored them both. Constance doubted that he had even noticed their fear. He was very pale, and his hands trembled; a tic jerked in his cheek over and over. He seemed unaware of it. Constance walked next to Spence, with Tootles and Paul leading the way, talking in low voices. Tootles strode along briskly; he walked with a hunched shuffle like that of an old man. The day was heating up; it would be very hot before evening; already the woods felt close and too still, with no air in motion.

“Have you had a chance to assess the damage yet?” Constance asked Spence.

“Yeah. Son of a bitch, what a mess. It can be cleaned up, most of it, but it’s going to take patience, and she doesn’t have the heart for it right now.”

The stretch of woods covered uneven ground that rose and fell, rose again. The path was the only sign of any usage here; on both sides the undergrowth was dense and wild. There were many brambles with blackberries starting to turn color, the brilliant red giving way to black.

Then they reached the tiny stone structure, a one-room house built of gray fieldstones; Tootles led the way around it, to the right and downhill twenty or thirty feet. Across a train track, and the state road that ran parallel to it, they could see the high construction fence and the tops of several condos. Only one of them was finished, Constance understood, but there were six in all being built more or less at the same time. It looked like an alien city rising from behind the wide-board fence.

Max had already arrived with Ba Ba; they had driven over in Tootles’s ancient station wagon and were standing by it; Johnny had borrowed Max’s Continental, Constance remembered, and Ba Ba was not a likely candidate to ride in a Corvette. In the compound, enough landscaping had been done to be impressively pretty, if artificial looking—too institutional.

Ba Ba appeared to be the only one in the group who had any interest in the condo. Spence and Paul were both impatient, and Constance, thinking now of driving home, was eager to be on her way. The building they entered had a wall of handsome, dark, carved doors, each with a smoked glass oval insert, most of them numbered: 6, 5, 4… . The numbers were eight or ten inches high, in brass, very rococo. Max inserted a computer card at 6. The oval window lighted up, and the door opened. It was more like a small foyer than an elevator; there was a mirror on one wall, and a shelf nearly overwhelmed with a large arrangement of roses. Their perfume was cloying in the small space. A small helium balloon floated over them with
Congratulations
printed on it.

“Hey!” Max exclaimed. He peered at the card and then turned to Tootles. “You did this?” His voice was husky.

Tootles looked embarrassed; she shrugged, but when Max took her hand and held it, she did not try to pull away.

There was no sense of motion whatever after the door closed, and then a moment later a door opposite the entrance swung open. Dedicated elevators, Constance realized, and this really was a foyer, of a piece with the bigger foyer that they now entered. A blast of frigid air hit them; the air conditioner apparently was super efficient, and set far too low.

Straight ahead was a wide hall, bright with sunlight. A door to the left was partly open to the kitchen area. Max was smiling broadly, and Ba Ba was praising everything, even the sunlight. They paused while she exclaimed over a curved hallway, broad enough to permit bookcases on one whole wall. Then they took the few remaining steps toward the living room. Spence and Max were in front now, Ba Ba close behind them, Constance, Paul and Tootles trailing. And Ba Ba screamed.

Constance darted away from Paul and Tootles, passed Ba Ba, and caught Spence’s arm just as he reached out toward Victoria Leeds, who was on the floor. She was lying on her stomach, with half her face visible; both arms were outstretched, one hand clutching a tarpaulin partially dragged off a table. Around her throat was a piece of rope buried in the swollen flesh; only the ends could be seen. Her face was grotesquely swollen and discolored, her eye wide open and blind.

“Don’t touch that,” Constance said in a low voice to Spence, who was reaching for a slip of paper. He was as white as the newly painted walls, his eyes seemed not to be focusing properly. Constance looked back at the group still in the doorway, and realized that Ba Ba was still screaming, over and over. She said sharply to Max, “Get them out of here and call the police.” He nodded and just then Paul Volte started to move toward Constance and toward Victoria. He walked like a man in a trance. Constance caught Spence’s arm, pulled him back a step from the body, and said in a very brusque voice, “Get Paul out of here. Take care of him.”

Spence looked at the body, at Constance, and ran his hands down his face; then he seemed to focus his eyes again, and he moved toward Paul and took him by the arms. Max had already herded the others out the doorway. “Come on, old buddy,” Spence said. “Can’t do anything for her now. Come on. Let’s go.” Slowly he got Paul turned around, moving in the opposite direction. Constance doubted that Paul would remember any of this. Without touching the body on the floor or anything else, she also moved to the door, where she stood studying the room.

A conference table and chairs were in the center, covered with tarpaulins. Opposite the door was floor-to-ceiling glass, with a balcony beyond it. No drapes or curtains were at the windows. She could see into another room with another long table with blueprints and a typewriter on it. A temporary office apparently. It looked as though more tarps were on the floor in that room, and now she could smell the paint, and she could smell death. She turned and followed the others into the foyer, back into the elevator, and down to the lobby to wait for the police.

This time the sheriff came with the deputies. Bill Gruenwald, he said, examining them all very carefully and quickly. He looked like a man who took good care of himself; he was muscular and trim, in his early forties, with a brush mustache and short brown hair neatly cut.

Ba Ba had stopped screaming to take up moaning. Gruenwald turned his gaze to her, and she said, “I knew it would happen. I knew it would. I had a premonition of evil. I usually listen, but my own sister called me to come, and I did. But—”

“Ba Ba, shut up,” Tootles snapped. “Sheriff, can we please go back to the house?”

He sent a deputy to follow them, and they all rode in the station wagon.

“I have to tell Toni,” Tootles said when they entered the house. “My God, just my God!” She started to walk toward the studio; the deputy made a motion as if to stop her, and she looked at him in a way that made him flinch and move aside. She went on, and in less than a minute Janet screamed, and she and Toni ran from the studio, up the stairs, and banged a door closed.

Johnny Buell arrived only seconds after that; he shook his head in disbelief when Max told him Victoria was dead.

“Murdered? Why? How did anyone get in the building? That unit? I was over there at seven, I took Debra and Phil and Sunny, and got my briefcase. A little after seven. And I locked up, but anyway Pierce was working by then. We saw him. How did she get in?”

He stopped abruptly. He had looked stunned, disbelieving, but now a different expression crossed his face. He suddenly looked sick. “I have to call people,” he said dully. “How long will it be before we can get into Six, clean it up, make it accessible again?”

Max glared at him, and Paul left the living room abruptly. After a moment, Johnny walked out.

When the sheriff finally came to the house, he was met by his deputy, who talked to him in a low voice on the porch.

Sheriff Gruenwald looked particularly grim when he entered the living room, grim and angry.

“John Buell?” He looked at Johnny who had come from the studio area when the car drove up. Johnny nodded. “You went to the condo last night with some other people?”

“That’s right. We left here right after seven and drove over there. We went up to Six and I got my briefcase, and we went down again. The watchman came over and we talked a minute or two. I remember that it was ten after seven when I went up to check out the other units, to make sure the painters hadn’t left anything. That couldn’t have taken more than a minute or two, and then we drove into Washington.”

“We who?”

Johnny gave him Debra Saltzman’s name and address, and the names of her friends whose addresses he did not know. Gruenwald looked very unhappy. “Our report from yesterday says no one saw Ms. Leeds after about four forty.” He looked them all over again, as carefully as he had done before; Toni and Janet had come down, and his gaze rested on them.

“Ms. Cuprillo?”

Janet nodded.

“Right. You were still talking to Ms. Leeds, I understand, after the others left to change their clothes. Is that right?”

She nodded again. Her eyes were very large.

“Fine. Did she say anything about meeting anyone? Did she mention an appointment or anything of that sort?”

“No,” Janet whispered.

Toni looked from her to Paul. “She got a letter, remember?” she asked Paul. She said to the sheriff, “I showed them their rooms and there was a letter for her, in Paul’s room.”

Patiently Sheriff Gruenwald asked Toni to elaborate. When she led them into Paul’s room, there had been a letter propped up on one of the pillows, addressed to V. Leeds, typed. She and Victoria had not gone into the room with Paul. He found the note and brought it to the door and handed it over. Toni didn’t remember what he had done then, only that Victoria had opened it, glanced at it, crumpled it, and put it in her pocket as they walked towards the room she was to have used.