The Body in the Moonlight (12 page)

Faith stood up. “I ought to go and see whether he has time to talk to me.” She smiled down at the woman. “It was very nice meeting you.”

“Very nice meeting you, too, sweetie. My name is Muriel and I'm usually here. Come again.” She was still waving when Faith went into the building.

Brown's voice crackled over the security system after a short interval. “Yes?”

“I hope I'm not disturbing you, but my name is Faith Fairchild and I wondered if I might talk to you about last Saturday night, the event at Ballou House? I was—”

“The caterer. Come on up, Faith. Don't know what I can do for you, but I'm pretty curious to know what you think I can.” There was that voice again. Which southern state produced it? Faith wondered. Virginia? It made everything he said sound like good news.

He buzzed her in and was waiting when the elevator doors opened on the third floor.

Aside from exchanging a tuxedo for worn corduroys and a blue oxford-cloth button-down shirt with fraying cuffs—both neatly pressed—Bill Brown looked the same. Very neat, very clean. The apartment reflected his appearance. After her experience with Veronica, Faith had wondered whether Brown would be wallowing in psychedelic clutter—he appeared to be the right age for long hair in the sixties—but the room she'd stepped into from the hall was Spartan. A linen-covered couch, a pole lamp, a coffee table—bare—and one beige easy chair. There was nothing hanging on the walls. The windows were uncovered and the spines
of the books in the shelves that ran from floor to ceiling on one wall provided the only color in the place.

If Bill Brown was annoyed with the interruption, he didn't show it. He was looking at her with warm humor. “I never met the woman, so you can cross me off your list. You are trying to solve the crime, right? Otherwise, your business is toast.”

Got it in one. She
definitely
had to read his books. She recalled Spenser's Mystery Books was not far from the gallery on Newbury Street. If the day produced nothing else, at least she'd be going home with a lot of new books.

“Apparently, most of my customers have begun to have doubts about my ingredients—against all logic.” She smiled to herself, remembering her encounter in the courtyard, and added, “But then, there are those who don't care much for logic.”

“You've met Muriel,” Bill said. “My favorite little old lady. Complete unto herself. Doesn't even need a pet.”

Faith looked again at the furniture. It was so drab, she knew she'd be completely unable to describe a single piece once she'd left the stark space. There wasn't even a rug on the hardwood floor.

“May I sit down? And to satisfy your curiosity, what I want is your take, as a mystery writer, on the whole thing. Isn't fiction just reality written down?”

“If you made that up yourself, it's not too bad. Very quotable. Yeah, let's sit. But I've got to warn you, it takes me months to work out a plot.”

“I've talked to Anson Scott and Veronica Brookside. So far, I've learned murderers like to fool the whole world, are filled with overweening pride, think they're too clever to be caught, have twisted senses of humor, are fearful cowards, and are consummate actors. Would you agree?”

With a bow tie, he'd look a little like Gary Moore, she thought as he took his time answering.

“Again not bad, and eminently quotable. Profiling is a big deal nowadays and every killer is unique, but yes, I'd agree with that list, especially the part about thinking they'll get away with it. But I'd add something—something pretty obvious and only implied by Anson and Veronica. Murderers are crazy. Insane. Not cuckoo. Not quirky. But very, very, terrifyingly nuts.”

He leaned back in the chair.

Faith was startled. It was a given, yet she hadn't thought about the killer this way. It had been a premeditated crime. The product of intelligence, not sudden rage. Not madness in that sense.

“Not everyone would agree with me, but the older I get, the more I believe it. Murder is an act of total insanity. Including crimes of passion, maybe especially crimes of passion. You leave the world of reason, even if only for a short time. The beast leaps, strikes, and you come to with your wife and her lover dead in front of you. What made sense in the universe of insanity becomes inexplicable back at home base. You've taken a life, maybe more.”

Faith nodded. She wanted him to continue.

“When I was a kid, I didn't read mysteries. I read about real cases. Like Leopold and Loeb. They wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody. Smart boys. Very smart boys. Clarence Darrow got them life imprisonment on the basis of ‘mental instability.' Legally, they were sane, according to the experts, so he had to argue that their instability was abnormal. Great lines—‘Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way.' Mental instability, hell. They were crazy. Maybe they should have been following what was going on in Germany—a war would have done it for them. They would have had plenty of chances to experience the thrill. They were tried in twenty-four and we didn't enter the war until forty-two. Even if they had known, they couldn't have waited that long. Something else for your list. Most murderers are not into deferred gratification.” Bill Brown liked to talk. His face was animated as he described the case.

It was an interesting train of thought—all of it. Faith thought about the two young men and killing for the thrill of it. War might have been different. She gave words to her thoughts. “War. That would have been random. And most of the time you're not face-to-face with your enemy, your victim. Maybe they had to kill someone they knew. They did know him, right?”

“Yeah, they knew him. He was a cousin of Loeb's. It's true, though. Much harder to kill someone face-to-face. After the war, when army officers talked to GIs
about how they felt in combat, it was found that three out of four couldn't pull the trigger when they could see the person they were about to shoot, which is pretty amazing. And it brings us back to Ballou House. The killer was there, because I'm assuming—unlike your asshole customers, pardon me—that you didn't put cyanide in the young lady's dessert. Unless, of course, your husband was fooling around with her, which again strikes me as unlikely, not because he wears his collar backward, but because you live in a very small town and by the time one of them had kicked a shoe off, people would have been talking about it at the grocery store.”

Faith had felt a hot flash of anxiety at his first words regarding a possible motive for herself, then immediate reassurance. It would have been all over town. And no one had been giving her any of those pitying, knowing looks Aleford inhabitants perfected at an early age. Millicent had dropped her land-mine hints, but again, the look hadn't been there. If anything, Millicent had seemed sorry for Tom, but that was normal.

Brown continued. “So the killer was there and able to watch. Kind of like a snuff movie come to life.”

Faith shuddered.

“I keep wondering, Why Gwen? And I can't imagine that her fiancé, Jared, had anything to do with it. He was the only one who stood to gain by her death, and he has enough money himself.”

“There's no such thing as enough money for some people, probably most people.”

Faith looked around the room. Whatever he was making, Bill Brown seemed to have enough for his needs, a notch above the needs of a Carthusian monk.

He followed her glance. “I don't like to accumulate anything except books. My bedroom looks like this, too, except for a table with my computer, a chair, and the bed. I don't like extra stuff in my life. And no, I'm not married.” He laughed. “Never was. But you should see my girlfriend's house. And her storage containers. I come back here to breathe. And work. But enough about me.”

Faith was getting tired of trying to think like Hercule Poirot. She wanted to stop in at the gallery and the time on her Mom-o-meter was running out.

She posed one more question, a catchall. “Anything else that occurs to you about all this?”

He half-closed his eyes. It didn't seem affected. She felt comfortable with him—more so than with the other two writers. Maybe it was knowing how he helped Muriel with her jar. It seemed he didn't want to add any more. She started to get up.

“Well,” Bill Brown said in his slow, deep voice, stretching the word out around a bend, “you've probably thought of this yourself and I'm sure the cops have, but are you positive Gwendolyn Lord was the intended victim?”

 

Veronica Brookside had made Faith feel inadequate, while providing very little insight herself. In contrast, Bill Brown had pointed out a crucial piece of the
puzzle lying on the floor, but instead of berating herself for the oversight, Faith felt invigorated and ready to move to the middle from the outside edges. Reaching Newbury Street, she found a parking space right in front of the Armani Emporio. The sun was shining. She hadn't felt this good in weeks.

The Undique Gallery was close enough to the Public Garden end of Newbury to be desirable, yet far enough away for a merely outrageous, not catastrophic, rent. The current show was titled “Millennial Moods.” Faith went in, nodded to a young man sitting behind a desk, whose bright red hair seemed only slightly unnatural, and slowly walked past the drawings and prints. It really should have been called “Millennial Nudes,” she thought, and several were quite striking. She took the price list from a pedestal next to the door. It was striking, too. The Chagalls and the Dalís were probably good investments even now, but buyers today would never make the killings earlier ones had. Of course, you had to have had the money back then to buy art, instead of, say, food. It was always the way. Think of all those wealthy Americans snapping up Impressionists for a song, lyrics that went on to reap royalties for the next and the next generation. You had to have money to make money in the normal course of things. Why was she thinking about all this? It was the street, certainly. Looking past the artwork and out through the large plate-glass window to the sidewalk beyond, she could see a parade of ladies who lunch—at the Ritz—in Chanel suits, mink
coats, platinum from the rings on their fingers to the streaks in their Sassoon coifs; men in well-cut cashmere topcoats, cell phones to the ear, slim Bottega Veneta briefcases clutched in one hand. And the street youth, impossibly slender and European, even when born and bred in Ohio, they came to Boston for an education—what to order at L'Espalier, where to max out a credit card, and how to say “I'm sorry, this isn't working for me” in six different languages. Gwen had been part of this scene. She'd protested to Faith that she didn't have the time or money to patronize the local shops, but the moment she stepped out the door, it was all around her. Faith remembered how much fun it had been living as a single woman in New York, out of college and starting her catering business. Boston was very decidedly the Little Apple, but she imagined the sensation that the world held limitless possibilities must have been the same for Gwen. Gwen had loved her work, was excited about uncovering new talent, and, being bright, beautiful, had fit right in. Fit right in until someone killed her. Faith turned from the window and went over to the desk. The young man looked up and smiled. “Anything catch your eye?”

It was disarming. Not hard sell, not soft, and the implication was that she had an eye. In some New York galleries, she'd been made to feel that she had to sell herself as a legitimate buyer with taste before they would even let her look—let alone sell anything to her.

“Quite a few things. It's a lovely show, but I'm actually here to talk about Gwen Lord. I was there last
Saturday night when she died. I was catering the event.”

He stood up and pulled another chair up to the desk.

“Omigod! You must have felt terrible! To put it mildly. I mean, it was your food! Jesus!”

I get it. I get it, Faith said to herself, then murmured aloud, “Yes, it
was
horrible. And now, I'm sure you can understand, my business stands to be affected.”

“Stands to be? I would have thought it already was. I know this sounds insensitive, but when you're looking for a caterer, you don't want the Grim Reaper.”

It was insensitive, but Faith had to laugh.

“I'm Faith Fairchild, by the way.”

“I'm Alexander Hoffmann. Sandy for short.”

“Did you know Gwen well?”

“Yes and no. I started working here last June and we saw each other most workdays. I liked her, liked her a lot, yet I can't say that I ever felt I really knew her. She was engaged, so there was no question of getting involved that way. I mean I'd tell her she looked sensational—she usually did—and she'd flirt a little, but she was crazy about Jared.”

“How about friends? Did they ever come by the gallery?”

“She'd have lunch with someone she'd known in college every once in a while, female. I think they'd been roommates. But any extra time she had—and it wasn't much—she'd spend with her honey. I can't imagine what the guy is going through. I mean, if she'd
been hit by a car that would have been awful, but to have your girlfriend murdered!”

“So, there were no other men in her life as far as you know.”

He shook his head. “None. She wasn't having any last flings, and there were no exs creeping around.”

So much for that theory, Faith thought.

“How did she get along with Nick? Her boss?”

“Oh, Nick's great.” Sandy's voice became slightly guarded. Faith realized Nick Gabriel might be in the back, where he probably had his office.

“Is he around? I'd like to talk to him, too.”

“No, he's not, but he's due back any minute, if you can wait.” So that explained the tone in his voice. Nick could walk through the door at any moment.