Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Stories Page 19

  And love was rekindled, Henry thought. “Countess . . .”

  “Betsy,” she instructed firmly.

  “All right, Betsy, I have to be blunt. Did you and Tommy begin to pick up where you left off years ago?”

  “Well, yes and no,” Betsy said slowly. “I made it clear to him how very glad I was to see him again, and I think he felt the same way about me. But you see, I also think that Tommy never really gave himself a chance to grieve for Constance. In fact, we talked about it at length. It was obvious to me that his involvement with Arabella Young was his way of trying to escape the grieving process. I advised him to drop Arabella, and then to give himself a period of mourning, something like six months to a year. But then, I told him, he had to call me and take me to a prom.”

  Henry studied Betsy Condazzi’s face, her wistful smile, her eyes filled with memories. “Did he agree?” he asked.

  “Not completely. He said that he was selling his house and was going to move down here permanently.” She smiled. “He said that he’d be ready long before six months were up, to take me to the prom.”

  Henry paused before asking the next question: “If Arabella Young had gone to the tabloids with a story claiming that during my administration and even before his wife’s death, Tommy and I had thrown wild, debauched parties in the White House, what would your reaction be?”

  “Why, I’d know it wasn’t true,” she said simply. “And Tommy knows me well enough to be sure that he could count on my support.”

  • • •

  On the return flight to Teterboro Airport, Henry let his pilot take over the controls. His time was spent deep in thought. It was becoming increasingly clear to him that Tommy was being set up. Obviously he was aware that his future had promised a second chance at happiness and that he didn’t have to kill in order to safeguard that chance. No, it just didn’t make sense that he would have killed Arabella Young. But how were they going to prove it? He wondered if Sunday was having any better luck in finding a likely motive for Arabella’s murder.

  • • •

  Alfred Barker was not a man who inspired instinctive liking, Sunday thought as she sat across from him in the office of his plumbing supply store.

  He appeared to be in his mid-forties, a thick, barrel-chested man with heavily lidded eyes, a sallow complexion, and salt-and-pepper hair, which he combed dramatically across his skull in an obvious effort to hide a growing bald spot. His open shirt, however, revealed a wealth of hair on his chest. The only other distinctive thing she noticed about him was a jagged scar on the back of his right hand.

  Sunday felt a fleeting moment of gratitude as she thought of Henry’s lean, muscular body, his altogether pleasing appearance, including his famous “stubborn” jaw and the sable-brown eyes that could convey or, if necessary, conceal emotion. And while she frequently chaffed at the omnipresent Secret Service men—after all, she had never been a first lady, so why should she need them now?—at this moment, closeted in this squalid room with this hostile man, she was glad to know that they stood just outside the partially open door.

  She had introduced herself as Sandra O’Brien, and it was obvious that Alfred Barker did not have a clue that the rest of her name was Britland.

  “So why do you wanna talk to me about Arabella?” Barker asked as he lit a cigar.

  “I want to start by saying that I’m very sorry about her death,” Sunday said sincerely. “I understand that you and she were very close. But, you see, I know Mr. Shipman.” She paused, then explained, “My husband at one time worked with him. And there seems to be a conflicting version of who broke up his relationship with Miss Young.”

  “What does that matter? Arabella was sick of the old creep,” Barker said. “Arabella always liked me.”

  “But she got engaged to Thomas Shipman,” Sunday protested.

  “Yeah, but I knew that would never last. All he had was a fat wallet. You see, Arabella got married when she was eighteen to some jerk who was so dumb he needed to be introduced to himself every morning. But Arabella was smart. The guy may have been stupid, but he was worth hanging onto ’cause there were big bucks in the family. So she hung around for three or four years, let him pay for her to go to college, get her teeth fixed, whatever, then waited until his very rich uncle died, got him to commingle the money, and then dumped him. She cleaned up in the divorce.”

  Alfred Barker relit the tip of his cigar and exhaled noisily, then leaned back in his chair. “What a shrewd cookie she was. A natural.”

  “And was it then that she started seeing you?” Sunday prodded.

  “Right. But then I had a little misunderstanding with the government and ended up in the can for a spell. She got herself a job with a fancy public relations firm, and when a chance to move to their Washington branch came up a couple of years ago, she grabbed it.”

  Barker inhaled deeply on the cigar, then coughed noisily. “Nope, you couldn’t hold Arabella down, not that I ever wanted to. When I got sprung last year, she used to call me all the time and tell me about that jerk, Shipman, but it was a good setup for her, because he was always giving her jewelry, and she was always meeting fancy people.” Barker leaned across the desk and said meaningfully, “Including the president of the United States, Henry Parker Britland the Fourth.” He paused, once again leaning back in his chair. He looked at Sunday accusingly. “How many people in this country ever sat down at the table and traded jokes with the president of the United States? Have you?” he challenged.

  “No, not with the president,” Sunday said honestly, remembering that first night at the White House when she had declined Henry’s invitation to dinner.

  “See what I mean?” Barker crowed triumphantly.

  “Well, obviously, as secretary of state, Thomas Shipman was able to provide great contacts for Arabella. But according to Mr. Shipman, he was the one who was breaking off the relationship. Not Arabella.”

  “Yeah. Well, so what?”

  “Then why would he kill her?”

  Barker’s face darkened, and he slammed his fist on the desk. “I warned Arabella not to threaten him with that tabloid routine. I told her that this time she was running with a different crowd. But it had worked for her before, so she wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “She got away with it before!” Sunday exclaimed, remembering that this was exactly the scenario she had suggested to Henry. “Who else did she try to blackmail?”

  “Oh, some guy she worked with. I don’t know his name. Some small potatoes. But it’s never a good idea to mess around with a guy who’s got the kind of clout Shipman has. Remember what he did to Castro?”

  “How much did she talk about her efforts to blackmail him?”

  “Not much, and then only to me. I kept telling her not to try it, but she figured it would be worth a couple of bucks.” Unlikely tears welled in Alfred Barker’s eyes. “I really liked her. But she was so stubborn. She just wouldn’t listen.” He paused, apparently lost for a moment in reflection. “I warned her. There was even this quotation that I showed her.”

  Sunday’s head jerked back in involuntary reaction to Barker’s startling statement.

  “I like quotations,” he said. “I read them for laughs and for insight, or whatever, if you know what I mean.”

  Sunday nodded her head. “My husband is very fond of quotations. He says they contain wisdom.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean! What’s your husband do?”

  “He’s unemployed at the moment,” Sunday replied, looking down at her hands.

  “That’s tough. Does he know anything about plumbing?”

  “Not much.”

  “Do you think he could run numbers?”

  Sunday shook her head sadly. “No, mostly he just stays home. And he reads a lot, like the quotations you were mentioning,” she said, trying to get the conversation back on track.

  “Yeah, the one I read Arabella fit her so well it was amazing. She had a big mouth. A real big mouth. I came across thi
s quote and showed it to her. I always told her that her big mouth would get her in trouble, and boy it did.”

  Barker rummaged through the top drawer of his desk, then pulled out a tattered piece of paper. “Here it is. Read this.” He thrust a page at Sunday that obviously had been torn from a book of quotations. One entry on the page was circled in red:

  Beyond this stone, a lump of clay,

  Lies Arabella Young,

  Who on the 24th of May

  Began to hold her tongue.

  “It comes from an old English tombstone. Just like that! Except for the date, is that a coincidence or is that a coincidence?” Barker sighed heavily and then slumped back in his chair. “Yeah, I’m sure gonna miss Arabella. She was fun.”

  “You had dinner with her the night she died, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you drop her off at the Shipman house?”

  “Nah. I told her she should give it a rest, but she wouldn’t listen. So I put her in a cab. She was planning to borrow his car to get home.” Barker shook his head. “Only she wasn’t planning to return it. She was sure he’d give her anything just to keep her from talking to the tabloids.” He fell silent for a moment. “Instead, look what he did to her.”

  Barker stood up, his face twisted with fresh anger. “I hope they fry him!”

  Sunday got to her feet. “The death penalty in New York State is administered by lethal injection, but I get your drift. Tell me, Mr. Barker, what did you do after you put Arabella in a cab?”

  “You know, I’ve been expecting to be asked that, but the cops didn’t even bother talking to me. They knew they got Arabella’s killer from the start. So, after I put her in the cab, I went to my mother’s and took her to the movies. I do that once a month. I was at her house by quarter of nine, and in line to buy tickets at two minutes of nine. The ticket guy knows me. The kid who sells popcorn at the theater knows me. The woman who was sitting next to me is Mama’s friend, and she knows I was there for the whole show. So I didn’t murder Arabella, but I know who did!”

  Barker pounded his fist on the desk, sending an empty soda bottle crashing to the floor. “You wanna help Shipman? Decorate his cell.”

  Sunday’s Secret Service guards were suddenly beside her, staring intently at Barker. “I wouldn’t pound the desk in this lady’s presence,” one of them suggested icily.

  For the first time since she had entered the office, Sunday noticed, Alfred Barker was at a loss for words.

  • • •

  Thomas Acker Shipman had not been pleased to receive the call from Marvin Klein, Henry Britland’s aide, informing him of the president’s request that he delay the plea-bargaining process. What is the use? Shipman wondered, disgruntled by not being able to get on with it. It was inevitable that he would have to go to jail, and he just wanted to get it over with. Besides, this house already had taken on the aspects of a prison. Once the plea bargaining was finished, the media would have a surge of interest in him, but then he would be dropped and they would be on to another poor slob. A sixty-five-year-old man going to prison for ten or fifteen years didn’t remain hot copy for long.

  The only thing that keeps them churning so much, he thought as he once again peered out at the mass of reporters still camped outside his house, is the speculation about whether or not I’ll go to trial. Once that’s been resolved, and it’s clear that I’m taking my medicine without putting up a fight, they’ll lose interest.

  His housekeeper, Lillian West, had arrived promptly at eight o’clock that morning. He had hoped to discourage her coming today by putting on the safety chain, but apparently all he succeeded in doing was making her more determined than ever to get in. When her key did not gain her entrance, she had pushed the doorbell firmly and called his name until he let her in. “You need taking care of, whether you think so or not,” she had said, sharply brushing aside the objection he had voiced yesterday, that he didn’t want her private life invaded by the media, and that, in fact, he really did prefer to be left alone.

  And so she had gone about her usual daily chores, cleaning rooms that he would never again get to live in, and fixing meals for which he had no appetite. Shipman watched her as she moved about the house. Lillian was a handsome woman, an excellent housekeeper, and a cordon bleu cook, but her overly bossy tendencies occasionally made him wistfully remember Dora, the housekeeper who had been with him and Connie for some twenty years. So what if she had sometimes burned the bacon; she had always been a pleasant fixture in their home.

  Also, Dora had been of the old school, while Lillian clearly believed in the equality of the employee to the employer. Nevertheless, Shipman realized that for the short time he would be in the house before going to prison, he could manage to put up with Lillian’s takeover attitude. He would just make the best of it by trying to enjoy the creature comforts of delicious meals and properly served wine.

  Recognizing that he could not cut himself off completely from the outside world, and acknowledging that he actually needed to be available to his lawyer, Shipman had turned on the telephone answering machine and had begun taking calls, although screening out those that weren’t necessary. When he heard Sunday’s voice, however, he gladly picked up the phone.

  “Tommy, I’m in the car and on my way to your house from Yonkers,” Sunday explained. “I want to talk to your housekeeper. Is she in today, and if not, do you know where I can reach her?”

  “Lillian is here.”

  “Wonderful. Don’t let her leave until I have had a chance to visit with her. I should be there in about an hour.”

  “I can’t imagine what she’ll be able to tell you that the police haven’t already heard.”

  “Tommy, I’ve just talked with Arabella’s boyfriend. He knew of her plan to extort money from you, and from what he said, I gather that it was a stunt that she had pulled on at least one other person. We’ve got to find out who that person was. It’s entirely possible that someone followed Arabella to your house that night, and we hope that when Lillian left she might have seen something—a car, maybe—that didn’t seem significant at the time but could prove to be important. The police never really investigated any other possible suspects, and since Henry and I are convinced that you didn’t do it, we’re going to sniff around for them. So buck up! It ain’t over till it’s over.”

  Shipman hung up and turned to see Lillian West standing in the doorway to his study. Obviously she had been listening to his conversation. Even so, he smiled pleasantly. “Mrs. Britland is on her way here to talk to you,” he said. “She and the president seem to feel that I may not be guilty of killing Arabella after all and are doing some sleuthing on their own. They have a theory that might prove to be very helpful to me, and that’s what she wants to speak to you about.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Lillian West said, her voice flat and her tone chilly. “I can’t wait to talk to her.”

  • • •

  Sunday’s next call was to Henry, on his plane. They exchanged reports on what they had learned so far, he from the countess and she from Alfred Barker. After Sunday’s revelation about Arabella’s habit of blackmailing the men she dated, she added a cautionary note: “The only problem with all this is that no matter who else might have wanted to kill Arabella, proving that that person walked into Tommy’s house undetected, loaded the gun that happened to be lying there, and then pulled the trigger is going to be difficult.”

  “Difficult maybe, but not impossible,” Henry said by way of reassurance. “I’ll get Marvin started right away on checking out Arabella’s last places of employment, and maybe he can find out who she might have been involved with there.”

  After saying good-bye to Sunday, Henry sat back to ponder what he had just learned about Arabella’s past. He felt a strong sense of unease, but he couldn’t quite put it together. He had a growing premonition that something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was.

  He leaned back in the swivel chai
r that was his favorite spot on the plane, other than the flight deck. It was something Sunday had said, he decided, but what was it? With almost total recall, he reviewed their conversation. Of course, he said to himself when he reached that point in his recollection, it was Sunday’s observation about the difficulty in trying to prove that some unknown person had walked into Tommy’s house, loaded the pistol and pulled the trigger.

  That was it! It didn’t have to be an outsider. There was one person who could have done that, who knew that Tommy felt both sick and overwhelmingly tired, who knew that Arabella was there, who in fact had let her in. The housekeeper!

  She was relatively new. Chances were that Tommy hadn’t really had her checked out, probably didn’t know much of anything about her.

  Quickly, Henry phoned Countess Condazzi. Let her still be home, he prayed silently. When her now-familiar voice answered, he wasted no time in getting to the point of his call: “Betsy, did Tommy ever say anything to you about his new housekeeper?”

  She hesitated before answering. “Well, yes, but only jokingly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know how it is,” she responded. “There are so many women in their fifties and sixties who are unattached, but there are so few men. When I spoke to Tommy last—it was the morning of the day that poor girl was killed—I said I had a dozen friends who are widowed or divorced who would be jealous because of his interest in me, and that if he showed up down here, he would be the center of attention. I remember that he said that except for me, he intended to steer clear of unattached women, and that, in fact, he had just had a most unpleasant experience in this regard.” She paused before continuing. “It seems that only that morning he had told his new housekeeper that he was putting his house on the market and would be moving to Palm Beach. He confided to her that he was finished with Arabella because someone else had become important to him. Later, when he was thinking back over the conversation and her reaction to it, he realized that the housekeeper may have gotten the crazy idea that he had meant her. So he made a special point of informing her that, of course, he would not need her services once the house was sold and, naturally, would not be taking her with him to Florida. He recounted that she at first had seemed shocked and then had become cool and distant.” Again the countess paused; then she gasped. “Goodness, you don’t think she could have had anything to do with this mess Tommy’s in, do you?”