Claire and Present Danger (7 page)

She flashed a bitter look at me. Okay, it had been a stupid question. People who are all right don’t huddle, crying, in a butler’s pantry. “Is it—is everything okay about the baby?”

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She looked down at her pregnant belly, as if surprised by it.

“Yes, why . . .” She shook her head and retreated into herself again.

We were in a social situation that might be described as awkward. Having intruded, discretion—backing off and making an exit—seemed polite. It also seemed inhumane. Was I to behave as if I’d noticed nothing? “Can I do something for you?” I asked.

She shook her head back and forth, vigorously. “No,” she whispered. “No. Please. I handle this.”

I heard fear, but also a real plea for me to leave her alone. “Okay, I’ll—”

She put up a hand. “Wait—please, miss—don’t say to Mrs.

Fairchild.”

“Say that I—” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. Somehow mentioning out loud that she was crying in the butler’s pantry made it worse. “—saw you?”

“Yes. You did not see me, yes? Please, is important.”

“Sure,” I said after a pause. “But are you positive there isn’t something I could do?”

“Nobody can help me. Nobody on the earth.”

“I could try.” I knew I should back out of that pantry and remove this scene from my mind. This really was none of my business. Or was it—in the way it was everybody’s business. There are no parables of the Half-Assed Samaritan who asked politely, then backed off.

“If you say to her I tell you anything, it makes worse. That you saw me cry? That makes worse.” She drilled her words into my skull with her eyes and intensity. “She makes worse.”

She. My client. She who gets upset about women’s names and intimidates the investigator she hired.

“Two years I work for her,” Batya said softly. “Two years, day and night. I live here. She says, ‘Batya you are best. Stay with me.’

My aunt, she watches my baby.”

My surprise must have shown, because Batya’s baby was in-escapably, hugely here.

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“Other baby,” she said. “He is two years, but he needs medicine.” She shook her head, as if forbidding that child’s sickness to be true. “I see him Sunday only. She feeds me, gives me room, I buy his medicine, but . . .” She grimaced and shook her head.

“Money?” I whispered. “She pays you, doesn’t she?”

She didn’t look at me now. She shrugged, and looked away, and I had to lean close to hear her say, “Not so I can live somewhere else. Not so I can live with him. She say that is all she can pay. She is widow on—how you say—always the same money.”

“A fixed income?”

“Fixed. Yes. She says someday, when she dies, she is leaving me money. Is all big lie. Mr. Leo, he’s rich. He gives her everything.

She gives me nothing.”

I looked at her, an eggplant-shaped woman, face wet with tears.

“And now this,” I said softly. “Are you crying because of this baby?”

She looked up at me and sniffled. “For both babies. I ask Mrs.

Fairchild for more money. Only what other people get. Is fair, what I ask. I work hard for her. I cook, shop, clean, help with the sickness. I take good care.” She put her hands protectively around her belly.

I thought of how many positions there were like this one, how many ill and elderly people could have used Batya’s services. It would be easy enough for her to quit, to find a new job or accept public assistance. Unless . . . “Are you a legal alien, Batya? Do you have a green card?”

She looked up at me, her mouth open and her eyes wide and wild. Her worst fears had been realized.

“I’m not going to tell anybody. I wanted to know what she . . .

Is that it?” The threat of deportation is a powerful form of blackmail and, apparently, of keeping virtual slaves from fleeing.

“My husband left. Disappeared. Mrs. Fairchild, she says it doesn’t matter. Is my fault.” She clutched her belly and rocked.

“Don’t panic,” I said. “Let me find out what can be done. Just 48

CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER

take care of yourself and your baby and don’t panic—and I won’t say a word to Mrs. Fairchild.”

“Or to—”

“To anybody. I promise.”

“But she—she—” She shook her head and was silent.

I tiptoed out, the echo of that she hissing through my brain.

49

Five

WHENI returned to the living room, Claire Fairchild looked as if she’d fallen asleep. I stood near the entry and cleared my throat by way of announcement. Her eyes opened and she adjusted her torso to a more up-right position. I suspected that once, before parts of her went bad, she’d had ramrod posture.

“Don’t sit down,” she said.

Fired? Like that? I formulated a protest, feeling as humiliated as the frightened housekeeper had been, except my emotions immediately steamed and mutated into anger. Enough of this woman’s imperial attitude!

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“The desk.” She pointed. “Bottom drawer.”

As almost always, I was glad I’d held my temper. I didn’t hear arrogance in her voice. I heard exhaustion. It had probably been a busier than normal day already, with her son’s visit and, as added psychic strain, his announcement of a wedding date to a woman she wanted investigated. Me. And, from the appearance of it, earlier on, a confrontation with her housekeeper.

I went to the small desk—what was called a lady’s desk because it’s easier to say lady’s than useless, undersized, and intended for trivial, inconsequential tasks. It was narrow and delicately formed of pale wood inlay. I opened the lower of its two shallow drawers.

“On top,” she said. I extracted a plain manila envelope and held it up. She lowered her head in a nod of acknowledgment, then, wiggling her index finger again, indicated that I should bring it over.

I handed it to her and sat down on my assigned love seat.

“I thought I was being too . . . careful . . . putting it there. He drops over. Lucky today.”

So there was more to this than a snit about inadequate storytelling skills, and we were finally getting to the point.

She slowly unclipped the envelope and extracted sheets of paper and photographs, all of which she let sit on her lap. “I worried,”

she said. “Not right, how she says nothing. How determined she is. Moving here. But I called because of this.” She checked one of the papers on her lap, then passed it to me.

The top of the page was dominated by a drawing of a skinny-necked insect with huge eyes and saw-edged front legs, an unreal creature from an inept science-fiction film. Below was a message written in a collage of different-sized print from what looked like newspapers and magazines. I had the sense of being back in an old movie. Given computers and clip art, nobody had to cut up newspapers to remain anonymous. This was the Antiques Roadshow of crime. I read the message:

the PRAYING man TIS! lookS devout but LOOKS lie! sHE eats its mate when sex is done.

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“Did this come in the mail?”

She nodded.

“Do you have the envelope?”

She shook her head and frowned. At herself this time, I trusted.

“I remember. From New Jersey, somewhere.”

“You couldn’t have known,” I said, wondering why I was trying to spare her feelings. “In any case, this could mean anything, about anybody or nobody. Most likely, it’s a prank. I don’t think it should worry you. Somebody plucked your name from the phone book—”

“Not listed.”

“You know what I mean. Somebody found your name and address. For starters, it’s on the wall downstairs, next to the buzzers.

This isn’t necessarily anything, and its meaning—it doesn’t make sense.”

“Then this came.” She passed a second sheet that was again crudely fashioned out of snippets of print, some words pasted on letter by letter. Letters were clipped from shiny magazine stock, others from newspaper headlines or advertisements.

Would not YOU Feel More InFORMed IF! you Could read THE

Independent Journal?

I looked up at Mrs. Fairchild. “Sent from Altoona,” she said. “I remember.”

“What’s it mean? What’s this Journal? The sender doesn’t sound bright, to put it mildly.”

She shook her head and passed me a third page that had only a date, about fifteen months ago. “From Chicago.” The envelope was clipped to a page dominated by an illustration of a praying mantis.

It made me sad that the detailed drawing had been hacked out of a library or textbook, just for the sake of this ill-intended mailing.

I knew that defacing books was not the problem I was supposed to be considering, but all the same . . .

The message read:

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CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER

PRAY NOW! Don’t wait UNTIL It’s TOO late & YOU are tHE prey!

I was ashamed of myself for noticing—and worse, being pleased by—the fact that we were dealing with a literate crank, because it’s and too were properly spelled. I guess you can take the English teacher out of the classroom, but et cetera. “Is this the end of it?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Six so far. Every three–four days.”

“Since . . . ?”

“Last two weeks.” She passed me the fourth:

Nothing is free xcept some murderers.

Dollar signs of various sizes dotted the page, and the name Independent Journal was repeated, accompanied by a date.

“Mailed from Baltimore,” Mrs. Fairchild said.

“Did you check out that newspaper? Find out where it is?”

“Went to library.” She made a small gesture toward the window.

I understood. She meant the library snuggled at the edge of the Square. She could walk there, though judging her strength, it would occupy the major part of the day. “Batya helped me.”

“Does she know about the threats, then?”

“Batya knows everything. I can’t do . . .” She sighed. “Batya knows.”

Then pay her a living wage, I wanted to shout. Stop blackmailing her, threatening to have her deported.

“Librarian found the paper. Outside San Francisco.”

Where Emmie Cade last lived.

“Librarian said it has no . . .” Her brow wrinkled as she tried to remember something. “Archives!” She nodded. “No online archives.” Her voice was weak, and she paused more often, but seemed determined to get everything out and onto the table. “But—”

I thought I knew what she wanted to say. “They have them on file, and we can request articles.”

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She nodded. “You’ll find them.”

That seemed an easy-enough task. “Did you report these notes to the police?”

“What would I say?” I had put the pages on the small table beside the love seat, and she glanced at them. “Looks like kid stuff.”

She stopped and breathed quietly, silently, for a minute, her eyes lowered. Then she looked up at me. “Wouldn’t have called you, except . . .” For the first time, she seemed unsure of herself.

“There’s more, isn’t there?”

Her face contorted, and she looked near tears as she handed me another page with a copy of the newspaper article the earlier mailing had referred to.

To my surprise, the article had nothing to do with Emma Cade.

“Who is Stacy?” I asked, because that was the name below a blurred picture—a copy-machine copy of a mediocre newspaper photo.

“Emmie. Stacy. King. Cade. Who knows what else?”

I looked at the shot of a woman, a mourner obviously taken by surprise. Her face was misted behind a veil, and one arm blurred as it rose to shield part of her face. She wore black. Only a brooch—a twisted, abstract outline of a heart—broke its severity. The woman was identified as Stacy King, widow of noted sailor Jake King.

The text was unsettling. It managed to make clear, in oblique and nonlitigious ways, the confusion and suspicion surrounding Jake King’s death. Apparently, he’d been everybody’s favorite regular rich guy. He’d been a dot-com entrepreneur when the going was good, smart enough to pull out reams of money in time.

But being a land-animal was only his day job. His soul lived on the water. Many fellow members of his yacht club were quoted as being incredulous that he’d had any accident, let alone a fatal one.

According to them, Jake was practically drown-proof. He’d been exceptional, an avid sailboat racer and all-around expert seafarer, and nobody could understand why, on a calm spring day, he’d pitched over the side of his boat, half naked, not wearing the life vest he always wore, and drowned.

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“It was the heat,” the widow was quoted as saying. “The wine. I warned him, but he loved fine wines, and it was his party.” Her take on the accident sounded weak and unconvincing.

“Jake was lots of things, but not a reckless sailor,” his ex-wife, Geraldine Fiori King, also an expert sailor, was quoted. The article semi-obliquely referred to a long and nasty divorce that followed Jake King’s meeting the lovely young Stacy. “He respected the ocean and bay,” the first Mrs. King said, “and the only time he took his vest off—well . . . you know . . . let’s say to go to sleep, okay?”

An investigation was underway. I thought of the lithe young poet-woman I’d seen within the hour. “Are you positive this story and this Stacy has anything to do with your son’s fiancée?”

She passed over the two photos she’d earlier pulled out of the manila envelope. One showed two young women, smiling into the sun. One, in a broad-brimmed hat trimmed with daisies, wore a halter top and a softly patterned long skirt that showed the outline of her legs through its translucent material. Her feet were bare.

The hat was good for her skin, but bad for recognition purposes, as it shadowed her features. Her companion held her hand up as a visor, almost as if she were saluting the photographer. She wore a man-tailored shirt, sleeves rolled up, and tails tucked into a pair of belted, tailored slacks and deck shoes. She reminded me of my sister and all my sister’s friends.

“That’s her, too. This past summer. The halter girl. The other is a proof.”

“The other woman? Proof of what?“

She shook her head.

I understood. Not the other girl, but the other photo, and not evidence of anything, but a photographer’s proof.