With Friends Like These... (26 page)

Now, I sat and silently appreciated him for a few moments before I returned to the topic at hand. “At least,” I finally said, “Lizzie can be eliminated as a suspect. Unless you think she faked the whole thing.”

He shook his head. “Unless she’s one hell of an actress. Or unless somebody who’s that upsettin’ to you, like Lyle was to her—even if you don’ know why—triggers somethin’. Have to check that out.”

We didn’t mention Roy Beecher. It was too easy to envision him taking revenge to further protect his daughter. He’d been quite open with his contempt for Lyle Zacharias, who’d put a loaded gun within reach of a baby. Again and again he’d condemned the legal system for lacking the laws to put such a man behind bars.

I picked over the remnants of my pasta and breadsticks and Caesar salad. It felt wrong—heartless, even—to be hungry after such a dreadful, wrenching scene, but the fact was, we had been.

“Take your plate?” a waiter said, whisking away Mackenzie’s service before anyone answered.

“Rude,” I told his retreating back. “Makes the person who’s still eating feel terrible. Makes eating feel like a race. Whatever happened to gracious dining?” But of course the waiter could not hear my oration. On my left, a man barked dictation to someone on the other end of a cellular phone. On my right, a baby cried. Behind me, a beeper cheeped.

“So let’s see who we have.” Mackenzie pulled a ratty notebook out of his pocket. I had never seen him with a new or unfrayed one. I wondered where he bought predistressed tablets, the stationery equivalent of stone-washed jeans, and why. “Been through the whole guest list. Interestin’. You could split it into thirds: the Pro-Lyles, the Anti-Lyles, and the Lyle Who?’s. I’ve pretty much eliminated the Pros and the Lyle Who?’s and the husbands and wives who were only there for the ride. Eliminated a few Antis, too. Good-lookin’ brunette woman. Remember her?”

I didn’t. Nor did I particularly like the relish with which he did.

“Little tipped-up nose. Dark blue eyes?”

I shook my head more vigorously.

“She works on another soap now. Used to work for Lyle. Says he harassed her, came to her apartment, touched her—you know. Then he tried to keep other people from hirin’ her after she threatened a lawsuit. But that was a while ago and he was about to hire her again and more important, she is one of the few people who never went near the kitchen. Power’s interestin’, isn’t it? You and me, we aren’t playin’ in that arena.”

“Some say that being a cop is all about power.”

“Not that way. You and me, would we go to somebody’s birthday party if we hated him? Nothin’s at stake for us. For some of them, reputation, or good old boy status, or something in the big game was on the line, so they came. They work for him, or owe him, or fear him.”

“I’m not feeling like much of a judge of character,” I said. “When I met Lyle, I thought he was pretty wonderful, a hyperalive, magnetic, considerate, talented man. But since then it’s been a constant piece-by-piece unmasking. The Picture of Lyle Zacharias. All the corruption and duplicity and deception under the skin. At first I wondered who on earth could have killed a man like that. And then what a man like that meant got really fuzzy, and now, God help me, I wonder who didn’t want him dead. It’s very depressing.”

“Some people should only be viewed from afar,” Mackenzie said. And then he said something else.

“What’s that?” I leaned forward. The ambient din had mysteriously escalated. Once upon a time, restaurants believed in conversation and encouraged romantic tête-à-têtes with candles and soft carpets and soft music. Now, we were surrounded by bare floors, uncovered windows, acoustical torture chambers. I’d read that people wanted to be where things were happening, and noise, per se, gave the sense of happening. I am not one of the people they polled.

Mackenzie also leaned forward. “What?”

“You first!” I projected my voice.

“It comes back to the suspects, then,” Mackenzie said, rather briskly. He stood up and relocated himself to the seat at my right, so that we had the possibility of conversation. “I favor Roy Beecher,” he said. “He has it all. Motive, opportunity, method. Always intrigues me when the worst of acts—murder—comes out of the best of intentions like protectin’ your child.”

“Who else?” I didn’t want it to be Roy, as logical as he seemed. I didn’t want a decent man with too many troubles, but good impulses, to be the one. “Certainly lots more have motives.” Even though he was now next to me rather than across from me, I still had to talk loudly. I wondered where spies met to swap secrets these days. Maybe the real reason the cold war ended was that there were no restaurants left in which to secretly inform.

“More? Like who?”

“Whom, I think. Like Tiffany, for starters.” Why weren’t we paying more attention to her?

“Ah, the dame, like in a Raymond Chandler movie. But she isn’t necessarily the villain just because she looks like that.”

“Like what?”

He raised one eyebrow. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m sure all she ever wanted of Lyle was his money—so how would it be when suddenly he decides to change his life, drop his income, maybe even give away assets? Doesn’t it make sense?”

Mackenzie shrugged.

“Speaking of Tiffany,” I said. “Your name—could the C possibly stand for Cartier?”

“No, it could not possibly.”

“And surely the K has nothing to do with a mart of the same letter?”

“Correct again.”

“What a relief. Anyway, there is also, of course, Tiffany’s lover, Shepard McCoy. There are contracts and money and a love triangle between them, and, I bet, trouble. Maybe Shepard’s locked into that doctor role. Maybe he wanted something else, or out. And how about Richard Quinn? His whole life was screwed up by Zacharias, or he thinks so, and that’s the same thing. Plus, Tiffany’s his stepdaughter, for whatever that’s worth. If he knew about Lyle and the cute brunette with the tipped-up nose, for example…maybe that’d be the final straw.”

“Maybe,” Mackenzie said. “Maybe not.”

From time to time his line of vision dropped to my plate, then quickly rose again. The evil waiter had done his work. Mackenzie was eager for his espresso, and I was standing—or rather, sitting and masticating—in the way of his happiness. I put down my fork, resenting the hell out of that waiter, but more reluctant to look like a pig than to actually finish eating what I’d ordered. “And there’s his wife,” I said.

“Shepard’s?”

“Oh. No. Does he have one? That makes things even worse. I meant Lyle’s.”

“You already mentioned her.”

“Not Tiffany; Sybil.”

“The man had a wife glut, didn’t he, though?” Mackenzie murmured. “What about her? ’Course she’s on my list, too—they all are, but I like hearin’ your take on the lineup.”

“Sybil? Hell definitely hath no fury. And not only on her own behalf. She thinks her ex and Tiffany ignore and mistreat Reed, and she’s like a mother lion about her son. And worst of all, Lyle was about to undergo a lifestyle change, which translates into moving to a farm or a ranch or whatever those people think is the simple life.”

“Which translates into less support,” he said.

I nodded, first to the question and then to the waiter who must have been lurking like a vulture in search of dead plates. “From now on, his father was going to ignore and mistreat Reed and be cheap about it. Sybil was panicked. But if Lyle died before he sold off everything, before the show was canceled and so forth, Reed would be better off.”

Mackenzie nodded. “She’s a real out-front woman, I give her credit for that. She’s the only one of ’em told me straight on she was glad the man was dead and better off for it.”

“Do you think that means she’s innocent?”

“Or real clever,” he said.

I am a fairly good reader of upside-down print. It’s not a talent that counts for much, but sometimes it gives me an edge. At the moment, I was having trouble deciphering Mackenzie’s upside-down scrawl in the frayed notebook. He had divided the pages into three columns. The first had names, relationships to the deceased, and whatever he knew of their whereabouts the night of the poisoning. The second listed possible motives, but I couldn’t make out the third, so I asked about it.

“That’s how a person might get hold of the poison,” he said. “It isn’t a household item, somethin’ you pick up at the market.”

“And Sybil’s access?”

“Just what it says. Landscape architect.”

It didn’t say that at all. It said, I could now see, Lndscparch.

“She’d know about poisonous ornamentals, ’specially a popular one like that. Could easily get specimens, too.”

I spotted the Wileys, Terry and Janine, together in one grouping. “You don’t have a whole lot written next to them,” I said. They were up top on my list. He, for a motive I could understand, and she, simply because it would be a civic service to have her locked away for a few decades. I ordered an espresso, decaffeinated. Mackenzie took his straight, which had to mean he was working tonight. Through such exquisitely subtle hints did I determine the shape and pace of my love life.

“That business about stealing his idea for Ace of Hearts,” Mackenzie murmured.

“Lots of people confirmed it.”

“Only problem is, those very people are also currently suspects, isn’t that so? How do you decide what part of what they say to believe? How do you decide how much they’re tryin’ to move the spotlight off their own precious face and motives?”

I had no answer. Instead, I pondered something easier, the question of why I’d ordered espresso, aside from its being culinarily correct. The thimbleful of nuclear-powered coffee didn’t allow for much sipping or even hand-warming, which is, by and large, the whole point of after-dinner coffee. “Anyway,” I said, “we’ve named seven people, if I counted correctly. That’s a long list.”

Mackenzie looked at me, his head slightly tilted. “The count should be a little longer than that, don’t you think?”

“You mean Reed? He does seem to know a whole lot about science, and he was nothing if not angry and resentful.”

“Didn’ mean the boy just at the moment.”

“You’re the one who had a chance to talk to everybody who was there. I didn’t. How would I know who else is on your list?”

“Because.”

His expression combined regret and determination. The face of somebody who reluctantly had to inflict pain. By the time his slow southern rhythms moved him on to the next part of his sentence, I understood why he looked that way. All the same, I flinched and felt each word’s impact, even though he said them very, very softly and gently.

“You’d know who else is on the list, Mandy, because it’s hard to forget your own parents, isn’t it?” he said.

“I DON’ KNOW…” MACKENZIE SAID. He held his keys, I held mine as we walked to our cars, which sat side by side in separate but equal slots on a trash-filled parking lot on Callowhill Street. Symbolically perfect and just as unsatisfactory as other so-called separate but equal arrangements had proven.

Frankly, I didn’t know, either. Not even to what he referred.

But I did know that as of this moment, I couldn’t stand all the uncertainties in my life. The week’s tension had been steadily building, and I felt as if my central wiring system was about to detonate. I wanted a resolution—of what Mackenzie didn’t know about, of who had done what, of what I didn’t know about. Of anything.

If the man didn’t have to rush off into the night to fight for goodness and right, then there were more amicable ways to reduce the tension. A glass of wine, soft music, and thou.

But he was rushing off, he was always rushing off, so I opted for second choice. A fight. About anything.

The problem was, I didn’t even know what topic to choose. I was tired of trying to figure out who’d killed Lyle Zacharias—aside from my parents—and tired of worrying about the kid who wanted me dead, and tired of not knowing what being Mackenzie’s you-know meant.

Too tired to fight, frankly. Too cold out on this parking lot for any extended debate.

“Wish I didn’ have to go…” he said, touching my cheek.

His hand was icy. His hair blew in bouncing ringlets.

This March had an attitude. Newspaper fragments puffed and stuck against the brick building next to the lot. The wind threatened to cleave my head in two, straight down between the eyebrows. Thick clouds glowed dull gray and hid the moon. “Might snow again,” I said morosely.

“Don’ worry.”

“About snow?”

“About this.” He waved the threatening envelope with the letter and clippings. “We’ll find the creep.” He kissed the rapidly freezing tip of my nose and then my rapidly freezing mouth.

When spring arrived, we’d talk, I promised myself. We honked farewell as we pulled off the lot in opposite directions. Modern romance.

In the distance, to my right, the Museum of Art loomed, its columns undefined in the starless gloom. On a night like this, even Rocky would pass on running up those wide front steps.

I turned onto the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. America’s Champs Elysees, it has been called. I hoped the Paris version was a little livelier. Tonight ours was almost deserted, with only uncollected refuse fluttering in the cruel wind.

I felt as if I’d had hundreds of those thimblefuls of espresso, not one. My blood cells did pirouettes.

The trees lining the wide boulevard creaked and shook in increasingly high winds. I jumped and clutched the wheel when an unseen trash can toppled with a clang. The night felt oppressive, low-ceilinged, too dark.

The perfect setting for a horror movie, but too urban. We needed a deserted road, an owl’s hoot. I laughed at my stupid, hyperactive imagination.

Although, truth be told, the road was deserted. One or two cars coming in the opposite direction and only one other car traveling in mine. Creepy.

Nine-twenty p.m. It was streets like this that accounted for the bad joke about going to Philadelphia when it was closed. Wide streets and pretty plantings do not a Champs Elysees make, although in defense of the Champs Benjamin Franklin, it did feel like snow and the wind-chill factor had to be in the single digits. Also, once the museums that lined it closed for the night, the Parkway was not a very logical hangout. As soon as I was around Logan Circle, I headed south on a side street, toward more traffic company.