Sabra sat down on the terrace flagstones.
Mallory looked at the blood on her hands. It was Sabra’s blood, streaming from the holes in her body. The gun in Emma Sue’s frozen grip was a.22. Still, the shots were well placed. What kept this woman going she did not know, unless it was this, the end of the story.
“I believe you, all right? I’m sure Dr. Ramsharan is a very decent person.”
Quinn had always genuinely liked Charles Butler. But early on, he had realized that this charming man didn’t live on the same planet with the rest of them. On Charles’s homeworld, people were all good neighbors and exceedingly kind to strangers. The lions all lay down with the lambs, and discord was restricted to the screams of fresh-cut flowers. He wondered how Charles’s ideal world fared in tandem with this stroll down the hall in the company of a man who was dripping blood on the carpet.
As they waited for the elevator, Quinn was saying, “We should agree on a story for the doctor. We’ll tell her I had an accident while I was showing you my gun collection.”
“Do you have a gun collection?”
“No, but it doesn’t- Oh, I see your point. Best not to clutter it up with unnecessary lies. We’ll say I slipped on a scatter rug while holding a gun. Now that’s reasonable. Most New Yorkers have at least one gun.”
“Do you have one?”
“Yes, everybody has one.”
“I don’t. And you were showing it to me? Henrietta knows I don’t care for the sight of guns. So it’s hardly likely that-”
“All right. I was removing the gun from my desk drawer to get at something beneath the gun.”
They stepped into the elevator, and Quinn slumped against the back wall, leaving a bloodstain there. As Charles pushed the button for the third floor, the large man’s face gave away his deep concern.
Quinn closed his eyes. So tired. His left hand was slick with the blood which leaked from the hole in his arm. His eyes opened again at the prompt of a gentle tug on the sleeve of his good arm.
“Now about the scatter rug behind the desk,” said Charles. “Odd place for a rug, isn’t it? And wouldn’t the desk chair tend to keep the rug from slipping around?”
“All right. I was removing the gun from the drawer of a table-which has a scatter rug in front of it.”
“Bit clumsy slipping on the rug that way. And do you usually keep loaded guns about?”
“So I’ll admit to being slightly drunk and inexperienced with firearms.” So tired. Not thinking straight, not straight at all. “Now you’ll swear you were there and witnessed the whole thing. That might persuade her not to file a report. But if she still insists on it, I can always buy her off. You can buy anyone in New York City. Remember, Mallory’s name shouldn’t enter the conversation.”
He had the idea that Charles was not listening to his instructions. The soft-spoken giant seemed somewhat distracted as they emerged from the elevator and walked toward the door of apartment 3A.
“Charles, perhaps you’d better let me handle it from here on. Somehow, I don’t think guile is your forte.”
Charles smiled gently as he nodded and pressed the doorbell. When the door was opened by a dark-haired woman in a long white robe, he pointed to Quinn’s bloody arm, saying, “Mallory shot him, and we want to hush it up, all right?”
“Yes, of course,” said the woman. “Come in.”
Quinn lurched forward. His last thought before he fainted was that this woman must hail from Charles Butler’s planet, for she opened her arms wide to receive his falling body and to stain her robe with the blood of a stranger.
“No one murdered Peter Ariel,” said Andrew, as he began his story in a monotone. “He was stoned on drugs and very clumsy. I was there when the artwork fell on top of him. He was killed instantly. Koozeman was furious. All that planning and promotion for nothing. He’d done such a brilliant job launching this career, despite the lack of talent. He had Emma Sue and myself as the critics to promote Peter in newspapers. Dean Starr doubled as a critic and a publicist. That’s all his art magazine ever was, you know, a public relations plug for artists who were willing to pay for their reviews. But then it was all for nothing. The artist was killed by his own work, a potential joke of the art world.
“By the time Emma Sue arrived, Dean had come up with the idea to make it look like murder, to sensationalize the death and try to salvage something from sales of the artwork. Well, what was the harm in that? Peter Ariel was already dead. We’d pooled a lot of money to grease a lot of hands-editors of art magazines, and a promised slot in a museum group show. It was a major investment for all of us.”
He fell silent for a moment, losing the threads to this ramble. Mallory touched his shoulder and asked, “Was it Koozeman’s idea to butcher the body and work it into the sculpture?”
“Yes, Koozeman’s idea… Starr loved the concept and so did Emma Sue. All they had to work with was the fire axe from the box with the extinguisher. They underestimated the time it would take to cut up the body parts. All three of them took off their clothes and went to work. I stood by the door to keep watch. It was hard work, cutting up a body with that small axe, but once they got into the rhythm of it, it went much faster. My job was to call out if anything untoward happened-say if Quinn showed early. Had we left him a message then? I can’t remember. If anything happened, if anyone came, I was to call out and give them time to get through the door in the wall. I had no blood on me. I would say I’d just discovered the body. We’d thought of everything, almost everything.
“I could hear what they were doing in the room behind me. There was no door I could close. The noise was as sickening as the stench. Once, I turned around. It was an incredible sight, the three of them, naked and bloody, working over the body.
“It was then, while my back was turned, that Aubry came in. I swear I believed I had locked that door. But I was drunk that night-I’ve been drunk every night since. Aubry shouldn’t have been there. We’d left a message to send her to New Jersey. It was so incredible that she should show up at the gallery. It was the last thing we expected. We’d only meant to use her name to bait Quinn into coming. We needed him, his name linked to Peter Ariel in the press. Koozeman said Quinn would not be able to resist a comment on the artwork of the butchered body. You see, Koozeman had been a promising sculptor once, and now he was determined that this was to be the best piece of work he’d ever done. But now here was Aubry, and the whole thing was coming undone.
“I tried to stop her-to turn her around before she could see. ‘Don’t go in there,’ I said. She misunderstood. We’d left a message to say it was an emergency. She thought something had happened to her uncle. I couldn’t stop her. She ran into the room. And then she stopped, frozen. Koozeman was just turning around, naked and holding the head of Peter Ariel in his hands. Aubry turned to run. Emma Sue screamed, ‘Stop her!’ I did stop her, I was even trying to explain when Dean Starr dragged her back into the room. Emma Sue was already running across the floor. She brought the axe down on Aubry.
“No one had expected that to happen. Emma Sue did it again, and again. The others stood back, and I turned away. Aubry was screaming to me to help her. I’d known her since she was a little girl. We were friends, you see. And now she was bleeding, dying, and she was asking me for help. I turned my back. Then, all I could hear was the gurgling. I closed my eyes. It went on for a long time.”
And now he put his hands over his eyes as if it were all happening again. “She would not die. I listened to the sounds of the axe, the scrabbling on the floor. She was crawling back toward the door. Her hand was within an inch of me when I turned to see Emma Sue strike the final blow to the back of her skull.” His hands fell away from his eyes. “That ended it.”