Well Bred and Dead Read online

  “Yah?”

  “Hello, I’d like to speak to someone about getting into an apartment.”

  “About getting an apartment?”

  “No. About getting into an apartment.”

  “What?”

  “I said I would like to get into one of your apartments. I have a friend who resides here, and I’m fearful something has happened to him. I would greatly appreciate it if you would come to the door and speak with me in person so I can explain. It is quite difficult talking into this box.”

  The box clicked which I took to mean the manager was on his way. After several minutes the lobby elevator opened and discharged an enormous man with oily brown hair plastered to his head. He wore a torn T-shirt stretched tight by a rotund belly one might describe as hanging over his belt, had he seen fit to wear one. He scrutinized me from his side of the door as if I posed him some threat, the clogged pores on his nose visible through the glass.

  “I would be ever so grateful if you would let me in,” I said.

  His eyes rolled up toward his forehead as he visibly deliberated. After some consideration he must have deemed me harmless, and he opened the door, deigning me entry to the inner lobby. With its worn red industrial carpeting, token sofa, and another freestanding ashtray, it was no cleaner than the outside lobby. It also had the additional drawback of smelling like the Paris Metro at the height of summer. Or perhaps it was the slovenly giant who smelled. Regardless, I had come for a reason and precious time was ticking away. I quickly introduced myself and learned he was Mr. Desmond Keifer, the building’s manager and superintendent. I explained the reason for my visit to this outpost of civilization, how Ethan stood me up for our regular luncheon engagement and how he had complained about his ankles swelling the night before. I pointed out that it was critical I be let into Ethan’s apartment immediately in the event that he had taken ill and was unable to come to the door himself. I noted with satisfaction that Mr. Desmond Keifer nodded his head in agreement the entire time I spoke.

  “So may I go up then and have a look?” I asked, growing almost as eager to distance myself from the odoriferous lobby and him as I was to check Ethan’s status.

  He stopped nodding. “No,” he said simply.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I can’t do it, lady. I just can’t go around opening apartment doors whenever some renter don’t answer his phone. How do I know you’re not a thief or a jilted lover who wants revenge or something?”

  “I can assure you I am none of the aforementioned. It is imperative that I get into Mr. Campbell’s apartment at once.”

  “You’ll have to get the police to do it.”

  Though perturbed, I had no intention of being put off. I had not come this far, risking life, limb, and loss of property to hear “no.” I crossed my arms and stood my ground, contemplating what tack might be best with this unreasonable man while stealing an occasional glance outside to assure myself my car still had four tires. Mr. Keifer must have noticed this, because there was a sudden change in his demeanor. “Is that your car?” he solicited.

  “Yes, it is, and I’d like to get to the bottom of this while it’s still there. Now would you please let me into Mr. Campbell’s apartment?”

  He looked from the car to me. “Car like that costs a lot of money, don’t it?”

  “It certainly does,” I replied, not quite catching his insinuation. After all, this was uncharted territory to me. When he looked down at my Chanel bag in a none-too-subtle manner, I entered a state of enlightenment. “Oh, I see,” I said. I took out my billfold and opened it. It contained two dozen credit cards and seven dollars. I removed the five-dollar bill and held it out to him.

  “Five bucks? You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.

  “That’s five good dollars, take it or leave it. You certainly don’t think I’m going to give you my last two dollars as well. If you don’t want the money, then I suppose I will have go to the police as you suggested, and you will have passed up five perfectly good dollars.”

  His eyes lolled back into the sagging creases of his fat eyelids and he snapped the five-dollar bill from my hand. “Drives a Jaguar and only has seven dollars in her wallet. Now I’ve seen everything.”

  The elevator was insufferably slow, especially when considering I was sharing the small unventilated space with a large man whose hygienic practices were reminiscent of the Middle Ages. We finally creaked to a halt at the seventh floor. Mr. Keifer lumbered out and led the way down the dimly lit hallway like a giant fish struggling to swim upstream. I followed at a distance, the worn carpet beneath my feet even more dreary than that in the lobby.

  He came to a stop in front of 7F and pounded ferociously on the door with a hairy balled-up fist. “Anyone in there?” he shouted. When a minute passed with no response to his barrage, he reached deeply into the pocket of his baggy pants and unearthed a huge keyring with dozens of keys. Considering the number of keys he had to sort through, he found the appropriate one in an amazingly short time. A second later, the door opened and Mr. Keifer was standing aside for me to enter.

  I walked into the apartment and found myself in the small living room. My first thought was that it had been ransacked. There was paper everywhere, blanketing the floor as well as the couch and coffee table. The walls were barren, causing me to think that whoever had made this mess had also taken Ethan’s art, since he professed to be an aficionado. But after taking a moment to focus in closer, I realized that the papers were stacked in piles. The chaos I was viewing was actually a room being used as a gigantic filing cabinet. Though Ethan professed to being somewhat disorganized, I never suspected he was this bad. I bent over and picked up a note card from the top of the stack nearest me. There, in Ethan’s trademark loops and curlicues, was written: Daisy, early years.

  I put the card back and moved into the adjacent kitchen, a narrow galley with metal cabinets painted yellow and a gray tile floor. In stark contrast to the living room, it was remarkably orderly, with a solitary coffee mug turned upside down on a towel next to the sink. A hall off the kitchen led to two doors, one open and one closed. The clear view of a sink through the open door told me it was the bathroom. The closed one had to be Ethan’s bedroom. My heart pounded with apprehension as I gave it a light tap, a ridiculous gesture in light of the brutal pounding Mr. Keifer had administered to the front door minutes before. My resolve began to waver. I have never been good with sick people and matters of health. Perhaps Mr. Keifer had been right when he said we should call the authorities. Being a very private person myself, the prospect of violating another’s inner sanctum went against my grain. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the notion I might be intruding. Or was it more the sense that there was something in that room I didn’t want to see?

  “Ethan, are you in there? It’s Pauline. I was worried about you.” I cracked the door open the tiniest bit. Through the crack I could see a small desk with a typewriter. Above it a piece of yellow legal paper was taped to the wall. It read: FINISH CHAPTER ONE. While my eyes locked on the note, an iron-like scent drifted to my nostrils.

  “No!” I cried aloud, throwing the door open without giving it further thought.

  The sight that greeted me will remain forever etched in my memory like the prehistoric images are in the cave at Lascaux. Ethan was slumped over on a narrow twin bed, clad only in a pair of boxer shorts, his concave chest sporting an embarrassing half-dozen wiry gray hairs. His head was situated so that he stared at me with empty black eyes. His right hand rested alongside him on the covers; the left dangled in space. It dawned on me he was dead at the same time it dawned on me that the mural on the wall behind him was pieces of his head.

  I must have screamed because the next thing I knew, Mr. Keifer was squeezing his bulk past me into the room. When he saw the body on the bed, his jaw fell open. “Oh, shit,” he uttered, and then with growing emphasis each time, “shit, shIT, SHIT.”

  “I imagine we should call the police,” said my
pragmatic side while my emotional one was trying to sort out the scene before me.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, the two of us on the same side for the time being. We backed out of the room and Mr. Keifer closed the door behind us. He muttered something about this being the last thing he needed as he headed into the kitchen, repeating his pet phrase the entire way. “Oh, shit.”

  I leaned into the doorframe. My hands were trembling and my insides felt as if they had just been vacuumed out. It was an emptiness I had not experienced since my husband’s death twelve years before. But with Henry’s death there had been one big difference. His illness had given me plenty of time to prepare for his loss. Nothing had prepared me for this.

  I felt confused and immensely sad, my head spinning as though I were being sucked down into a vortex. Then the questions began to form, the most pressing one being what had happened on the other side of that door and why.

  One thing was crystal clear. Ethan had not died from swollen ankles.

  2

  It’s Not Who You Know

  I refused to think the unthinkable—suicide. Having lost several friends and acquaintances over the years to this most unnatural cause of death, it inevitably leads one to ask oneself, How could I have missed the signs? Certainly Ethan had given me no signs. Or had he? I recalled cutting him short on the phone last night, and did not want to think I had missed a cry for help. But Armand Peckles’s car had been waiting out front, and there was no time for dallying if we were going to make the opening curtain of Tosca at the Lyric. If there is one occasion that demands punctuality it is the opera. A scant minute of tardiness can mean watching the entire first act on video monitors in the lobby.

  Coming from the kitchen, Mr. Keifer’s gravelly voice gave out Ethan’s address over the phone. In no time at all, the small apartment would be overrun with police and coroners and what have you. Once they arrived, they would take over and things would be beyond my control. I wanted some answers now, but in order to get them, I would have to go back into that room with Ethan. I had to know if the violence that occurred therein was of his own doing or if something of a more sinister nature had taken place.

  I put my hand to the knob and it froze there as if it were paralyzed. The picture of the gore just the other side of the wooden barrier was still fresh in my mind. I’d never witnessed such vulgarity before, and my psyche balked at facing it again. But if I wanted my answer I had to go back in.

  Once, when Henry and I were trekking in the Himalayas, we had gotten lost and ended up in front of a deep chasm. It was not too terribly wide, two feet at the most, but it was bottomless. An electrical storm was moving in quickly, jagged bolts of lightning crackling from the sky to the earth, and we had no choice but to jump across the gap in order to get back to safety before it struck in all its fury. But, in spite of the greater danger the storm posed, my gut terror stopped me like a steer at a cattle guard. Henry tried everything to get me to jump to no avail. It wasn’t until he quoted Goethe that he was finally able to get me across. Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.

  I boldly threw the door open and stepped back into the room. The calm was eerie, Ethan’s face staring at me in mute slumber with glassy blank eyes. The iron smell of blood was sharper now, and layered over more offensive odors, the foulness of human waste. Barely able to draw breath, my eyes glossed over the pointy-nosed face to the wall behind it where vestiges of gray matter stuck in ragged bits and pieces. My stomach lurched momentarily, and the thought occurred to me it was a good thing I hadn’t finished lunch.

  Turning my head away from the body, I rummaged the bedclothes searching for a gun. To my great relief I didn’t find one. The absence of a weapon would prove that someone else had performed this horrific act and not Ethan himself. I preferred it be that way, so that I could absolve myself from any blame. But my relief was to prove shorter lived than a fourth marriage as I looked downward and caught the cold glimmer of a metal cylinder peeking out from under the bed, just beyond the reach of Ethan’s dangling left hand. I had known that Ethan was left-handed. I had not known he owned a gun.

  “Oh, Ethan, what possessed you?” I cried aloud, angry and devastated at the same time. Nothing made sense. For all appearances, Ethan had been enjoying his life to the fullest and seemed far too self-centered to take it. Not to mention squeamish. It simply wasn’t logical. But then what is logical about suicide? I forced myself to look back at the pale pathetic body and found myself burning with shame for him—not only for what he had done but that he had done it in such an undignified manner.

  There had to be some kind of explanation. Certainly a writer would have left a note. I went to his desk where a sheet of paper stuck from the carriage of his typewriter. I rolled it forward and read the two lines of type centered on the page.

  DAISY FELLOWES—A WOMAN REINVENTED

  by Ethan Campbell

  Evidently he had written even less than I thought.

  Still hoping to find a note, I decided to search his desk. I opened the top drawer and saw his appointment book laying atop a jumble of papers. His self-declared “lifeline,” he never went anywhere without it. I picked up the slender leather book and thumbed through it. The ink-filled pages testified to a full social agenda: lunch dates and dinner parties, library board meetings, a fundraiser at the Historical Society, a speaking engagement at the Women’s Athletic Club. No wonder he never got anything written; he was never at home. I suspected he would have been better served putting more time into writing at his typewriter and less in his appointment book.

  I flipped to the current date: Wednesday, March 30. Our lunch engagement was carefully inked-in at twelve-thirty, Pauline, Lunch, Drake. On Tuesday, I noticed he’d had lunch with Sunny Livermore at the Four Seasons. Funny, he hadn’t mentioned it to me. That made Sunny the last of his friends to see him alive, I thought jealously. Though the emotion was probably misplaced, it stung just the same to think that someone other than I spent his last afternoon with him.

  I was startled by the sound of someone coming into the room and turned to see a tall Latino man standing in the doorway, an inexpensive navy suit hanging loosely on his lanky frame. His features were those one might see on the cover of a grocery store romance novel: deep black eyes, a cropped mustache, a helmet of thick dark hair, a tremendously macho scar that traced a line from his right cheek to his jawbone. His gaze flicked from me to the corpse, and then back to me again. Assuming him to be some sort of authority figure, I also assumed he was not terribly pleased to see me rifling through Ethan’s personal effects. I was correct on both counts.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “And who is asking?” I countered.

  Though his eyes telegraphed impatience, he accommodated me by reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out a worn-looking wallet. He flipped it open with one hand to reveal a silver star. “Detective Velez from the Chicago Police Department. Homicide. And you are…?”

  “My name is Pauline Cook,” I said, scrutinizing the badge as if I had the foggiest notion what I should look for. It could have been a child’s plaything for all I knew. After finishing my examination, I pointed at the body on the bed. “We were friends,” I said softly.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Cook—”

  “Missus,” I corrected him.

  “Mrs. Cook, but I’m going to ask you to step into the other room. And leave that.” He was staring at the appointment book in my hand. I laid it obediently on the desk.

  “Now, Mrs. Cook. If you’d please…” He indicated the door with a gesture that could only be taken one way.

  Mr. Keifer and I were led from the apartment and asked to wait in the hall until someone could interview us. Not long afterward, a second detective arrived on the scene, Detective Jerry Malloy. Younger than his counterpart, he was dressed entirely in black: black leather blazer, black T-shirt, black polyester pants. With a broad freckled face, sandy hair in serious need of a cut, and eyes an insignificant murky shade o
f green, Detective Malloy had the sort of bland looks that made him easily forgettable. However, there was one thing about the young detective that was quite indelible: his unique butchery of the English language. An assault upon the ears akin to fingernails on a chalkboard, it would have driven Henry Higgins to take up serious drinking. Not only was his grammar atrocious, but it was punctuated by the occasional replacement of the you pronoun with youse and the consonants th with the letter d.

  Take, for example, his first question. “Mrs. Cook, Mr. Keifer, I got a couple of t’ings to ask youse here.” His pen poised in the air over a small note pad. “For one, could youse please explain for me what prompted the two of youse to gain entry to the deceased’s apartment?”

  Aside from the fact that I found him somewhat insolent, I didn’t take kindly to the implication that somehow Mr. Keifer and I were associated. For a moment, I considered being difficult and telling him to contact my attorney for his answers. But being uncooperative wouldn’t have served the best interest of Ethan’s memory, and besides, my attorney was ridiculously expensive.

  “We went in to see if he was all right,” I said, reigning in my indignation. “Which clearly he wasn’t.” I explained my relationship to the deceased and his failure to appear at lunch. “And after getting no answer on the telephone, I recalled Ethan complaining about his ankles swelling just last night. Naturally, I got worried and drove up here right away. I insisted Mr. Keifer let me in.”

  “I told her she should call the police,” Mr. Keifer piped up in his own defense.

  “Uh-huh. And what did youse do after entering to the apartment?”