The Sugar House

chapter 23

HILDE WAS DEAD. THE PHILADELPHIA COPS, OVER Tess’s objections, made Devon come inside the apartment and identify her keeper’s sturdy body. Tess, who knew more about murder scenes than she wanted to, could see that Hilde had been shot as she came through the door, then dragged to the kitchen. The homicide detectives seemed to find this curious, and spent a long time pacing the path of dried blood she had left, looking for pieces of evidence to bag. Why had the body been moved, they kept asking one another, when the answer seemed obvious to Tess. Hilde’s killer wanted Devon to be inside the apartment before she knew anything was amiss. A corpse by the front door would have ruined the element of surprise.

She kept her thoughts to herself. Baltimore cops had never been particularly enamored of her ideas, and there she was a taxpayer. Here, she was an out-of-state PI. An out-of-state PI who hadn’t bothered to check if her license to carry transferred across the Mason-Dixon line. Oops.

Devon handled herself well. She was tougher than Tess had thought. Oh, she cried, and looked as if she might become sick, yet she seemed remarkably composed. Did she understand she was the intended victim, that Hilde had been nothing but an unexpected obstacle? Probably not, and Tess didn’t see any reason to tell her. The realization would come soon enough and, along with it, the electric guilt of surviving when someone close to you is dead. That was the hard part. The secret euphoria you felt at still being alive.

The cops kept Tess and Devon apart as much as possible, taking them to the police station in separate vehicles and sequestering them in different interview rooms. It did not strike Tess that they feared the two women were collaborators, who would conspire to tell one version of events. No, they were from different caste systems. The cops were deferential to Devon-the hometown girl, the Main Line deb, with a Philadelphia lawyer waiting for her at the station, along with her parents. Tess was the scruffy outsider and although they knew she was not to blame for what had happened, they couldn’t seem to shake the idea she was a troublemaker. She didn’t help matters by refusing to divulge details about the case that had brought her to the City of Brotherly Love.

“Privileged,” she said, keeping her voice as polite and cool as possible.

“Privilege is for lawyers, priests, and doctors,” one of the homicide cops said.

“I work for one.”

“Which one?”

“A lawyer, for Christ’s sake. Do you think I had my gun drawn because I was attempting to convert Devon Whittaker to Catholicism?”

The Philadelphia cops enjoyed her sense of humor about as much as the Baltimore cops did. But given that they had one, maybe two less homicides to solve because of Tess, they grudgingly relaxed their hard-ass routine. So she unbent, too, telling them enough to seem almost co-operative.

“I came to see Devon Whittaker because phone logs indicated she had been one of the last people to speak to a woman connected to a case.” All true, and straightforward. Trying to explain Gwen Schiller, the Jane Doe murder, Henry Dembrow’s sudden demise, and her whole family history wouldn’t have shed any more light on the matter.

They seemed somewhat mollified, but they didn’t let her go. Left alone with her own thoughts-always a dangerous combination-Tess puzzled over the day’s events. Had she been followed? No, she would have noticed a two-hour tail, she was sure of that. From eavesdropping on the cops, she knew Hilde had been dead for a while by the time they entered the apartment. At least, she thought that was what was meant by lividity. Maybe she just couldn’t bear to believe that Hilde had been shot even as she sat outside, waiting for Devon to come home from her classes.

Tess had been sitting with her left leg curled beneath her, and it had gone to sleep, all pins and needles. She stood up and stomped Frankenstein-style around the room, not caring if this made for a comic show for the cops on the other side of the one-way glass. She wondered if she was going to have to tell them more before they let her go. She had called Tyner, and he was sending a friend, a local attorney. They had agreed this would be quicker than waiting for him to head up I- 95 in his van. Besides, Tyner and Kitty had tickets to the opera that night. Tosca.

“I find Puccini the most sensual of all the composers,” he had told Tess. “As I told Kitty in bed last night-”

Tess had told Tyner she really didn’t need to know where he and Kitty had their conversations, or if they were vertical or horizontial at the time. Really, Tyner was such an adolescent. He wanted the whole world to know that he was in love and, better yet, having sex. To Tess, this fell into the same category as the President’s sex life, Bob Dole’s Viagara habit, and Larry King’s insistence on procreating well into Methuselah-hood. It was beyond too much information, it was instant Ipecac.

But she couldn’t help noticing that Tyner’s friend, when she finally arrived, was a striking woman in her fifties, with dark hair slicked back in what Tess thought of as a Mexican movie star bun. Very Delores del Rio, even if her name was decidedly unexotic: Ellen Cade.

“I work for one of the big boy firms here,” she told Tess, offering a soft, cool hand.

“Criminal law?” Tess asked her.

“Constitutional. But I know enough to get by. Besides, it was my impression that you’re not going to be charged with a crime. You just want to know how much you have to tell these guys, if you can claim privilege as a contractual employee of an attorney.”

“Something like that.”

“Let me play devil’s advocate: Why not tell them everything?”

Tess thought about this. She was, by nature, a wary person, stingy with what she knew and suspicious of anyone in authority. It didn’t help that she wasn’t sure what she knew, and if it had any bearing on what had happened today. But a woman had been killed, and Tess was not inclined to solve the crime herself, so perhaps she should cooperate a little.

“I’m investigating…I’m not sure what I’m investigating. A girl was murdered in Baltimore a year ago. Her killer died in prison. There are some loose ends around the case, and I’m looking into those for the killer’s sister. The dead girl called Devon Whittaker the day before she died-a fact that Devon hid from me when I talked to her earlier this month. I came back today to find out why.”

Ellen Cade ran her hands across her head, smoothing her already smooth hair. “The police think Devon was being targeted for a kidnapping. Her family’s rich, and quite prominent. She made an attractive target, living off campus, with so few people around her.”

“Then why fire at her from the apartment? The gunshots are on the 911 tape and they know from looking at my gun that it wasn’t fired today. Why kill Hilde?”

Ellen Cade’s shrug was as throwaway elegant as the rest of her. These were not flesh-and-blood people to her, just names in a theoretical case one might study in law school. “If you want to go argue with the police, feel free. But in my opinion, our strategy should be all or nothing. You can’t tell them just what you feel like telling them. You want to say what you know is privileged, I’ll back you up on that. If you want to talk to them, I’ll stay with you, make sure you don’t incriminate yourself in any way.”

“What I really need is to speak to Devon.”

“When you’re a Whittaker, and the potential victim in a crime, the Philadelphia police don’t keep you all night. She was on her way out when I came in-her parents on one side, the family lawyer on the other.”

“Do you know how I can find them?”

Ellen Cade’s eyes were a dark, rich brown, the color of good milk chocolate, yet devoid of warmth. “I’m not here to broker your dealings with the Whittakers. I’m the go-between for you and the Philadelphia Police Department. The way I see it, you could be out of here in an hour, or you could stay considerably longer. Which do you choose?”

“Where do the Whittakers live? The Main Line, right?”

“Short or long?”

Tess sighed. “Short. I have nothing to say to them. Everything I know is privileged.”

“Good girl. I hope you understand I am billing you for my services. Tyner and I ended on friendly terms-but not such friendly terms that I give it away. The way I see it, I gave quite enough while we were dating.”

Great, another factoid about Tyner’s sex life. This day kept getting better and better.

Ellen Cade overrated her abilities. Two hours passed before the Philadelphia cops sent Tess off into what was now night. Tess would have liked to crawl into the back of her Toyota and sleep, but that wasn’t an option. Instead, she dialed Whitney’s house. Not the guest cottage, but the main house.

“Tesser!” Mrs. Talbot’s voice was mellow with tiny cracks in it, like good whisky being poured over ice. “We’re just sitting down to dinner. But Whitney’s at a holiday party held by one of her classmates from Roland Park Country Day.”

“That’s okay, Mrs. Talbot. I really wanted to talk to you.”

“To me?” She sounded at once surprised and flattered.

Tess paused, trying to think of a polite way to ask Mrs. Talbot if she knew the Whittakers of Philadelphia. It would sound as if she assumed all rich, blueblood types knew one another. Which was exactly what she assumed.

“Mrs. Talbot, is your family in the Social Register?”

“Tess, you know I’ve never cared about such things.”

That would be a yes. “Does the Social Register include addresses?”

“Yes, winter and summer. And the yachts, sometimes, if the family uses one.” If there was any irony in Mrs. Talbot’s voice, Tess missed it. “Why do you ask? Certainly, you know where we live.”

“I’m trying to find a home address for the Whittakers of Philadelphia. They’re not in the phone book.”

“Which Philadelphia Whittakers? There are several.”

“The parents of Devon Whittaker.”

“I may have the Philadelphia book around. It’s an excellent resource for fund-raising, and you know how many committees I serve on.”

Mrs. Talbot put the phone down. Not a minute later, she picked up an extension in another room. “I do have it,” she said, a little breathlessly. “Is this part of your work? Am I helping you out? It’s rather fun, isn’t it?”

Tess had a vision of both Talbot women following her around, in fetching mother-and-daughter outfits. Starsky and Hutch and the Duchess of Windsor on stakeouts together.

“Rather,” she said, trying not to mimic Mrs. Talbot’s accent. “If you have the stomach for it.” She thought again of Hilde, how her lifeless body had been dragged and bumped across the room, as if she were nothing more than an unwieldy bag of garbage. She remembered the jumbo bag of barbecued Fritos the cops had plucked from the dining room table, hoping to find fingerprints on the plastic. Devon Whittaker would not have a bag of Fritos in her pantry, Tess knew, and Hilde probably wouldn’t bring such a loaded food into the house. Which meant the killer had sat a few feet from Hilde’s body, having a picnic while waiting for Devon to arrive.

She took down the phone number and address Mrs. Talbot provided, then stopped at a 7-Eleven to buy a map.

It was dark in the suburbs and house numbers were difficult to see. Tess had to get out of her car several times to check the mailboxes at the street’s edge. Finally, she found the Whittakers, and headed up the long driveway. She wasn’t sure why she felt so cowed-the Whittakers, after all, were just the Philadelphia version of the Talbots, or any number of moneyed, familied Baltimoreans she had known. But this wasn’t her territory, she didn’t know the connections and history here. If the Whittakers called the cops when she showed up on their doorstep, she could end up back downtown, waiting for Ellen Cade to bail her out a second time.

A man opened a door. Not a butler, judging by his clothes-a tweed jacket over an Oxford cloth shirt, khaki pants-but far from the patrician man of the manor Tess had expected.

“Yes?” Behind tortoiseshell glasses, his eyes were at once vague and nervous. His other features were soft and mushy, more like lumps in gravy than an actual face.

“I’m Tess Monaghan.”

“The girl who saved Devon’s life?”

“Yes.” Left unasked was the question of whether Tess had put Devon’s life in jeopardy to begin with.

“Please come in.”

She was led into a book-lined study that could have been drawn from the plans for her own dream home-antique Persian rugs, a fireplace, a sofa covered in moss green velvet, the walls lined with books, old books, with worn spines that had known many hands and many readings.

But Devon, sitting in an armchair close to the fire and wrapped in a chenille throw, registered no delight in her surroundings. Despite the throw, and the fire, her body was shaking convulsively. Her face, reflected in the firelight, had a decidedly bluish cast.

“I just feel so bad,” she said when she saw Tess.

“About Hilde?”

She nodded. “And Gwen.”

Her father stood in the doorway, as if waiting for Devon’s permission to enter. Tess wondered if this young woman had always held so much power in her family, or if she had earned her father’s deference when she began destroying her body. Maybe that was the reason she had stopped eating in the first place, to gain power.

“You can listen, Daddy. That way I won’t have to tell it twice.”

The father took a seat at a rolltop desk, out of Devon’s sight line. Tess sat on the sofa, facing her. That is, she would have been facing her, if Devon hadn’t continued to stare into the flames.

“The first time I came to see you-why didn’t you tell me you had heard from Gwen, that she had called you?”

“Are you good at keeping secrets?” Devon asked.

“I like to think I am.”

“I’m great at it. Most girls with eating disorders are. I was. So was Gwen. The disease turns you into a sneak, you see. You have to be crafty, to keep people from making you eat, in my case, or making you stop throwing up, in Gwen’s case. Even when you told me Gwen was dead, I felt I had to keep her secrets.”

“About the rape?”

“And other things.”

“What other secrets could Gwen possibly have?”

“The usual. She hated her father”-Devon turned her head toward Mr. Whittaker, but he didn’t seem to notice-“for putting her in that place, then going off on his year-long honeymoon with the secretary-slut. That’s what she called his new wife. She thought if she ran away, he would have to pay attention to her. It was just a castle in the air at first, a fantasy to talk about at night. But when the teacher raped her, she decided to run away for real.”

“How could you know that? You left Persephone’s more than a month before Gwen escaped, to enroll at Penn.”

Devon pulled the throw more tightly around her. “We stayed in touch. It wasn’t allowed, but we did it.”

“Not allowed?” Tess asked.

“It was the doctor at the clinic who thought it would be better for you, Devon,” Mr. Whittaker said in a soft, shy voice. Tess had almost forgotten he was there. “He said it might retard your progress.”

“Dr. Blount.” Devon grimaced. “Yes, he was a real prize. You’d pay two thousand dollars a day never to see him again, or smell his rotten breath while he blabbed on and on about all the stupid reasons girls did what they did. As if he knew. As if he knew anything.”

“But you’re better,” Mr. Whittaker said, his voice a plea.

“Sure,” Devon said. “I’m better. I’m alive. I’ve been alive for a whole year longer than Gwen. That doesn’t seem fair somehow. I helped her run away, and she ended up dead. Does that mean I killed her?”

“How did you help her?”

“I sent her money, through one of the Mexican women they hired to clean there. She didn’t know what she was smuggling in, she just knew she got twenty dollars for every letter she took in. I managed to send Gwen five hundred dollars that way, before she left. You know, she never even thanked me for the money. She was a bit spoiled that way. Gwen was so beautiful that people liked to do things for her, and she grew accustomed to it. When she wanted something from you, she expected to get it right away. She thought you could drop everything and do her bidding.”

Tess thought she knew where Devon was heading. “She called you, and asked you to come to Baltimore, didn’t she?”

“She left a message on my voice mail, telling me she was waiting for me at a park near Fort McHenry. I didn’t find it until evening, when I came home from class. I figured it was too late, by then. The call had come in hours before. Besides, I couldn’t figure out a way to shake Hilde. I thought Gwen would call me again the next day. But she didn’t.”

She tried, Tess thought, thinking of Henry Dembrow’s confession. She died trying. You have a phone, she asked. Of course we have a phone. It was then that Gwen’s interest had been piqued, that she had agreed to go to Henry’s house with him.

“I still don’t understand why you couldn’t tell me she called you. It’s not your fault she’s dead, Devon.”

Devon was crying now, tears streaming down her face. “But it is. If I hadn’t helped her leave Persephone’s Place, she never would have been there, don’t you see? All this time, I told myself she couldn’t be dead, because Dick Schiller’s daughter couldn’t die without it being a big deal, right? I told myself that every day for a year, but I never picked up the phone, never tried to call the Schillers’ house down in Potomac. Because I knew somehow. I knew something terrible had happened to her.”

Sobbing, Devon was a figure of pity, yet her father did not move from his chair, did not try to comfort her. It was as if he was waiting for an invitation. Finally, Tess went over to her and pulled the throw around her shoulders. Devon stiffened at the contact, but she didn’t push Tess away.

“You didn’t hurt me, by hiding what you knew,” Tess told her. “But you almost hurt yourself. Someone else knows Gwen called you. I don’t know how, but they do. Someone who wanted to keep you from speaking to me. I’m not sure what Gwen knew, but someone is willing to kill anyone who talked to her in the final days of her life.”

“I can’t help hiding things,” Devon said. Her nose was running, and her voice was still choked from her tears. “It’s what I do. I used to cut my food into tiny little pieces, and push it down into my sock when no one was looking, then throw the socks away after supper. My mother could never understand why I was always running out of tube socks. I told her the dog was stealing them from the hamper.”

Mr. Whittaker cleared his throat, but said nothing.

“Whoever tried to kill you thinks Gwen told you something.”

“Well, she didn’t. The only thing she kept saying on the answering machine was, ‘I can’t go back, I can’t go back.’”

“She meant to Persephone’s?”

“I thought so at the time. Although she also said…” Devon paused, searching her memory. “She said, ‘I can’t go back. I can’t go with him.’”

“I can’t go with him?”

“Yes. I thought she meant her father, but it could have been someone else.”

Tess shook her head. It was too small a scrap of information to be useful. Besides, it might not mean anything.

“Devon, Mr. Whittaker-” the father hitched his chair slightly forward, but otherwise was silent. “I don’t think you should assume Devon is safe, not in the short run. She should be sent some place far away, and I think you should hire a bodyguard for her. If you can afford it.”

The last part sounded silly to her ears. There was clearly very little the Whittakers couldn’t afford, or wouldn’t buy, especially when it came to Devon.

“How long will she have to go away?”

“I wish I could tell you. If Hilde’s killer thinks it through, he’ll realize Devon has spoken to the Philadelphia police, to me, to her family, and that keeping her silent is no longer a realistic possibility. But I’d go away for Christmas, if it’s not too much of an imposition.”

“We could,” her father said. “We have a house in Guadeloupe.”

Of course you do, Tess wanted to say.

“What about school?” Devon asked. “I have finals.”

“I’ll take care of it,” her father assured her. Tess wondered how many times he had made that same promise to his daughter. “You can do them by mail, perhaps. We’ll work something out.”

“Guadeloupe will be warm at least,” Devon said. “I’m cold all the time now. I feel like I’ll never get warm again.”

“I thought the doctor said your blood pressure would start going up,” her father said.

“Doctors,” Devon said, cramming more scorn into that one word than Tess would have thought possible.

She stood, ready to leave. “Guadeloupe sounds like a good plan. Don’t forget the bodyguard, though. Besides, maybe the Philadelphia cops will surprise us. Maybe it will turn out that this has nothing to do with Gwen at all. Maybe it was a botched kidnapping.”

Devon’s father seemed to find some comfort in this, but Devon was a harder sell.

“Aren’t you in danger, too? They followed you to my apartment today. They’re one step behind you.”

“Actually,” Tess said, “I’m afraid they’re one step ahead of me.”