“No.”
She watched in silence as I put his gloves back on. “The tape’s clean.”
“Back in the machine?”
“Yes.”
I finished and stood. “Get the Walkman, the balloons and champagne, and wait by the door.” She straightened. Her march down the hall was wooden but not wobbly. She’d make it.
I turned the light off and stood at the top of the steps. When she was by the door, balloons bobbing, I went back into the spare room and reconnected the battery to the alarm, checked my watch, then closed the breakers and ran downstairs. Six seconds. I stripped the wires from the alarm box, clipped the cover back on, accepted the Walkman from Julia and put everything back in the satchel. Nineteen seconds. “Out,” I said. She stood there, balloons bobbing, as I closed the door behind us and relocked it. Twenty-seven seconds. Free and clear, with no sign of our passage but the two unconscious men in the third-floor study.
She was shaking by the time we got to the car. I opened her door, gave her the balloons. “Hold on to those.” I pulled my jacket from the backseat and settled it over her shoulders.
I drove for about five miles. She was still shaking, though not as badly. One eye on the road, I handed her the satchel. “Use something in here to burst the balloons.” She looked at me as though I were crazy. “It will be easier to dispose of them.” And it would give her something to do. “There’s a brown paper grocery bag in there, too. When you’re done with the balloons, put them in it.”
It took her a while.
“Now your gloves. Carefully.”
She complied, peeling the left right down to the fingertips, then using the left to peel down the right, and dumping the whole lot into the bag. She flexed her bare hands, studied them. Graceful, clean hands. Made for holding, not hitting. After a while, she said, “How about you?”
“One more thing to do first.”
I pulled up at a phone box. Dialed 911. When they asked whether I wanted fire, police, or ambulance, I just said, “4731 Fallgood Road, Marietta,” and hung up.
Back in the car, I stripped off my gloves and dropped them in the paper sack. We drove in silence for a while. The wet patch on my shirt was spreading and with it a cold ache.
“Who were they?”
“I don’t know.”
“It might be important.”
“I’m sure it is, to them. Not to you. You have the information you wanted. You know who ordered Lusk killed. You know you didn’t make a mistake brokering the painting. Now that we’ve fixed the phone tape, no one knows you know.”
Her face was pale and set. “Can you find out who they were?”
“It’s over, Julia. Done.”
“Can you?”
She looked small and fragile and alone. I wanted to take her hand, tell her everything would be all right, that no one would ever hurt her again because I would track them all down, tie up the loose ends, make the world safe. But there is no perfect safety. “Jim Lusk is dead. He’ll stay dead whatever you do. You are not to blame. The police will take it from here. Let it go.”
She looked at me as though from a great distance, then turned away.
She stared out of the window all the way back. When I pulled up outside her house, she thanked me nicely, smiled at me gently and without depth, and said she would be by to pick her car up in the morning. Just as though we had been carpooling from the PTA meeting. Partially shock, partially a need to distance herself from blood, and burglary, and attacks by strange men dressed in dark clothes. I would have gone in with her, made her something hot and sweet to drink, but I belonged to that world she didn’t want to think about right now, not in her nice little house in Virginia Highlands with roses climbing up the trellis.
I drove myself and the bottle of Mumm’s champagne back to Lake Claire. I put it in the pantry, not the fridge. I had a feeling it would be a long time before I drank it.
The knife wound was not too bad, a shallow four-inch gash across a lower rib. I cleaned it, pulled the edges together with butterfly Band-Aids, covered it with gauze, then started wrapping a crepe bandage round my torso. If it hadn’t crusted over by the morning, I’d get it seen to. The emergency room staff would believe the fake name and a story about a mad, jealous husband with a steak knife, and a terrified wife who didn’t want to face the truth and call the police. Happened all the time. As usual, the bandage finished in the small of my back, where I couldn’t reach to pin it. I had to fold it back and pin it at my right side.
I swallowed some ibuprofen and broad-spectrum antibiotics, then took the papers from Honeycutt’s house into my office. They were stained with my blood but in clear halogen light their nature was plain: blackmail notes. They were photocopies of messages made by cutting out words and phrases from magazines, with careful annotations—in the same blue ink, the same handwriting, I’d seen on Honeycutt’s files—in the top right hand corner: date, time, and method of arrival. All but one had come by U. S. mail.
The first was from March last year. It was straightforward:
I know who you work for. I know how much you wash: I want some. I’ll call.
Interesting. No problem saying “I.” No problem with grammar: the colon had actually been written in using a black marker. Obviously not stupid: a photocopy meant no saliva, no magazine subscriptions to trace.
I assumed whoever it was had called. The next one was dated May last year:
Same place, same method, same amount.
The next dated just a week later:
Don’t ever try that again. The rate just doubled. Every time you try something, it will double again. I know how much you can afford.
What had Honeycutt tried? Whatever it was, the blackmailer didn’t seem too perturbed. They obviously thought of themself as rational, reasonable, and aimed to keep Honeycutt controlled by simultaneously reassuring him and laying down simple rules. The next note was two words:
Thank you.
I had a sudden flash of a networking cynic. Grip and grin. Be nice. Say the right thing….
After that, the notes came regularly, every month; identical copies of the Same place, same method, same amount note, followed a week later by the Thank you. Until January.
A new year, a new rate. Fifty percent more, with penalties for late payment.
January, just when Honeycutt had shown interest in the Friedrich. Say two weeks to track down someone to commission the fake, another few to paint it…. But obviously no outward complaint from Honeycutt; the usual Thank you note followed on schedule. More Same place notes followed by more Thank yous. Until an April date two days after Lusk’s death.
You are a fool. What would you have done if I hadn’t cleaned up for you? No more independent action. I’ll call.
I would love to have listened in on that one. The blackmailer obviously didn’t care for Honeycutt’s creative solution to the rate hike, and seemed to understand that if the drug cartel found out about Honeycutt’s playing both ends against the middle, the source of extorted cash would dry up. You can’t blackmail a corpse.
That was the last note. I put them all back in order and read through them again. A smart, cynical blackmailer, apparently in it for the long haul and willing to play by clear rules. Someone who liked rules and order, liked to plan ahead but could act swiftly. What would you have done if I hadn’t cleaned up for you? But it had been Honeycutt who had ordered the burn, so what had been taken care of?
The ibuprofen wasn’t working. My ribs flared every time I moved. I put the notes in the folder labelled LYONS-BENNET, found some codeine in the bathroom, and took myself off to the bedroom of raspberry and Viking gold.