Slugfest Read online

  For Mary M. Simari

  1921–2010

  Whose favorite saying was “Watch your back!”

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to NYPD Det. Marco Conelli; bestselling author and NYC medical examiner Jonathan Hayes; Ed MacFarlane; Margaret Norton; and my fellow volunteers at the Philadelphia International Flower Show, Cheryl Carter, Laura DiPreta; and to all the beekeepers I know. I’ve learned so much from all of you. Thanks for letting me pick your brains.

  Many thanks to David Baldeosingh Rotstein for another inventive cover for a book with an unusual title, to my editor, Allison Strobel, for her support and insightful comments, and to my amazing copy editor, Martha Schwartz.

  And as always, thanks to Bruce.

  Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the soul.

  —Luther Burbank

  A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

  —H. L. Mencken

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraphs

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Epilogue

  Also by Rosemary Harris

  Copyright

  One

  When I was eight, I was convinced I could disappear. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. It wasn’t as if I saw dead people or thought I could beam myself to another planet. I did it all the time. Grown-ups and teachers would smile and glide past me to torture another poor kid who hadn’t cultivated this valuable skill.

  It had been years since I’d thought about this long-neglected talent, but I prayed it was like riding a bicycle as I crouched in a shed, hoping the person who’d already killed two people would not see me or the women I was hiding.

  “You in there, little girl…?”

  Four days earlier …

  Rolanda Knox was formidable. I could attest to that. I pictured her laying out her uniform with all the pomp and ceremony of a warrior going into battle. Freshly pressed dark blue material. Shoes, belt buckle, and badge so shiny she could start fires with them if she needed to. This would be a grueling assignment and she’d need all her patience, experience, and powers of observation to ensure things went smoothly. Not that they ever did. No matter how prepared you were, something or someone always came along to gum up the works.

  My name’s Paula Holliday. Rolanda Knox, who in my mind had earned the nickname “Fort,” had stared me down with a surprising ferocity two days before. Her actual words were “talk to the hand,” an expression I’ve never really understood but which commands a certain respect when the hand in question is almost as big as your own head.

  I wasn’t listed in the official show directory, only in the addendum, and from her post at the entrance to Hall E, Rolanda had interrogated me as if I’d been trying to gate-crash the Pentagon. She’d even subjected the printed insert in my badge holder to the low-tech spit-and-rub test to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit. All weekend long I’d bear the traces of her smeared thumbprint. Knox was a security guard; and in this day and age, no one was getting into her convention center without proper documentation no matter how long it took and who was tapping her toes and glaring from the back of the line.

  The young man Rolanda was talking to must not have had his papers in order, but he was persistent. He’d be no match for her if it came to a physical confrontation—but that was unlikely. He didn’t look stupid, just young and cocky in a T-shirt and baggy pants—too certain the quick smile and boyish charm, which had probably earned him a 90 percent return rate elsewhere, would work on this woman, too. He was mistaken.

  The wall of polyester dared him to pass. It wasn’t just the wide expanse of fabric covering a well-muscled figure. And it wasn’t the badge. Who was impressed by authority anymore? It was a steely look in the woman’s eyes that conveyed her dead serious attitude. Stopping this boy would be no big deal. She’d be like a water buffalo swatting at a cattle egret: barely breaking a sweat. Then, something the kid said caused a slight chink in the woman’s armor, but she held her ground.

  “Absolutely nothing,” she said. “Now, get that chicken chest out of my sight.” But this time she dismissed him the way you’d shoo away a pesky child.

  He looked vaguely familiar—pale, with straw-colored hair and a mischievous Tom Sawyer expression on his face that could get you to paint the fence for him and thank him for it. The faded T-shirt read Happy Valley, and tied around his waist was a denim jacket covered with dozens of souvenir patches. He could have been any of the young workers hustling around the Wagner Center on Manhattan’s West Side on this early spring morning, but he wasn’t.

  The boy scoped out the crowd, looking for an entrance with a less imposing gatekeeper or a sucker. He found me, just as my eyes lingered on him a second too long, struggling to remember where I’d seen him.

  “Yo, Adrian.”

  That was it. The art museum. The morning before I’d been jogging near the museum and couldn’t resist the urge to run up the steps and wave my hands over my head Rocky Balboa–style. To my utter humiliation the spectacle of a thirtysomething-year-old woman pretending to be Sylvester Stallone had been witnessed by someone who peered out of the shadows and applauded. He was huddled in the doorway, surrounded by bags. Something told me he wasn’t waiting for the Matisse exhibit to open.

  I assumed he was a runaway. His belongings had been clustered around his ankles and his backpack had been punched down, probably used as a pillow. Like the jacket he’d been wearing, one of the bags bore patches from colorful destinations not generally frequented by runaways and homeless kids.

  “She’s tough,” he said, walking over to me and motioning toward Rolanda.

  “She lightened up
toward the end. I thought you had her. What did you say?”

  “I asked if last night had meant nothing to her.” He shrugged. “It was worth a try. Humor sometimes works wonders with authority figures.” He said it like a kid who had experience getting around people with equal parts of charm and flattery applied liberally with a shovel.

  It would hardly have affected national security to let him slip into the convention center; but, in fairness, Fort Knox was just doing her job. Who wanted to be the one to let in the psycho-killer because he seemed harmless and had playfully suggested they’d had a tryst the night before? The show would open to the public in two days. I advised him to wait until then and buy a ticket.

  “Can’t. I need to see one of the exhibitors before the show starts,” he said. “It’s super important.”

  What constituted “super important” for someone halfway between skateboard age and first-real-job age was anyone’s guess. How urgent could it be? Knox shot us a look that warned don’t try any funny business, and I aborted the sales pitch before it came.

  “I don’t have any extra badges. I’m a one-woman show. Just manning a booth for a friend. And I don’t know anyone else at the show well enough to ask.”

  “I know a couple,” he said, looking around, “but they don’t know I’m here.” He eyeballed the rest of the exhibitors in line, preoccupied, furiously fingering BlackBerrys or sucking on coffees to help them wake up. He quickly calculated the odds and stuck with me.

  “If you can’t get me in, will you deliver a note for me?” He took my silent intake of breath as assent. “Perfect.” He dropped his things on the floor and rummaged through his backpack until he found a scratch pad, pilfered from a budget hotel chain a half step up from the museum’s doorway. He pointed to my thick show directory. “Can I borrow that to write on?” He scribbled his note, then folded it over four times. “It’s private. You can’t tell anyone.”

  Two

  Why was I such a softie? Where was the ruthless media exec who had trampled corn-fed kids like this on her way to the board room or edit suite in a previous lifetime? “Okay, who gets it?” I asked, holding out my hand for the note and the directory.

  “The company’s new. I’m not sure which name they’ve settled on, so I need to look it up.” He stood up and clumsily juggled the note, the directory, and his bags. The throng of exhibitors waiting to set up condensed, and we slid a few feet closer to the door, the way you do at Disneyland or airport security when you need to feel like you’re getting somewhere but in fact aren’t. I picked up one of his bags to keep his belongings together. While he searched the bricklike book for his friend’s name, I inspected the patches on the bag. I’d been to a lot of the same places—Hong Kong, Rome, Utah. As he flipped through the pages, the crowd clustered around Rolanda until the doors were opened and a gold-rush-like sweep of people attempted to enter the halls all at once. Credentials were checked carefully at every door and we inched up to the door of Hall E until it was our turn.

  “I know he doesn’t work for you, missy.” Rolanda Knox peered at my badge to let me know she’d remember me. “Miss Holliday, Primo’s Outdoor Art. And you, Mr. Happy Valley, how many times do I have to tell you, you ain’t going nowhere? How do I know you don’t have an incendiary device in those bags? Or an envelope of anthrax?”

  I was still holding the guy’s bag and reflexively held it out toward him. Great. I’d be collateral damage and an unwitting accomplice to a terrorist act or some obscure ecological protest like Free the Albino Tree Frogs. Passionate and ready to take a stand, a handful of antichemical demonstrators with placards were stationed outside the convention center. For all we knew, this kid was one of them. He made a move to open the bag with his free hand.

  “Don’t do that, fool. I don’t want to see your dirty laundry. You never heard of a rhetorical question? I was simply illustrating a point. No badge, no entry.”

  We’d stepped aside to let in a slight man in a black cotton outfit, who’d obligingly raised his badge up to Rolanda’s eye level, when a bloodcurdling scream ripped through the cavernous convention center.

  “What the…”

  Three

  All heads turned to see what the commotion was. Other security guards and exhibitors rushed in, only some running toward the screams that had now escalated into wails. Rolanda held her arms out wide, but it was like trying to hold back the ocean or a surging crowd of European soccer fans.

  “Oh, hell.” She dropped her arms and sprinted, as much as a large woman can sprint, in the direction of the cries. Rolanda was the largest and most intimidating of the Wagner Center staff, and the crowd parted for her. The shrieks were coming from the direction of my booth, so I rode in her slipstream.

  Near a grass shack, under a banner that read Connie’s Brooklyn Beach Garden, was a blond woman dressed in an outfit that suggested she’d raided the closet of the Little Mermaid’s promiscuous older sister. The top was a shrunken Sergeant Pepper–style vest with two small fabric lobsters instead of epaulets on the shoulders and scallop shell appliques cupping her breasts. Across the back was an octopus whose tentacles reached to the front, grabbing the wearer around the waist. Someone spent hours of his or her life creating this garment. It was impossible not to stare.

  “My veronica. My veronica’s dead.”

  Two women from nearby booths brought a conch-shaped chair from the back of her display. Without thinking, the woman I assumed was Connie sat down heavily on the papier-mâché chair, and it collapsed, eliciting a ripple of laughter from some teenagers on the fringes of the group. A woman in overalls, who wasn’t much older than they, gave them a stern look; but it wasn’t easy to maintain since she was chuckling herself.

  A trade show volunteer in a bright yellow pinny fanned the woman with a straw hat, and a weather-beaten exhibitor in a smock produced a pack of cigarettes that the woman smacked away. The smoker stood with her arms folded as if to say, In that case, I’ll just enjoy the meltdown. She scanned the crowd and fixed an accusatory gaze on the teenagers that shut them up more effectively than their companion had.

  Rolanda explored the partial ruins of a cloyingly sweet flower bed filled with a staggering number of cardboard fish and plaster crustaceans. In the rear, a painted sign paid homage to Nathan’s Famous hot dogs and thick-cut fries, two Coney Island staples.

  The woman’s eye makeup spread out like a Rorschach test. The creator of a nearby Zen garden drifted over to console her. “Sometimes plants die,” he said. “It’s a circle.”

  “Listen, grasshopper, circle this. My garden looks like it’s been kissed by a blowtorch. Don’t talk to me about impermanence. I’m not shopping for enlightenment right now, so why don’t you just scurry back to your little hut and rake the sand again?” Ouch. The pajama-clad man backed away.

  Any sympathy the shrieking blonde might have garnered evaporated. She’d been rude to the hat fanner, the smoker, and now a Zen gardener. It was as if she’d trashed the Dalai Lama. The Little Mermaid’s less nice sibling fiddled with her cell phone and jutted her chin in the direction of an exuberant display garden, prejudged and already festooned with ribbons. It belonged to a Mrs. Jean Moffitt.

  “That old dame practically has armed sentries stationed at her displays. Where are my sentries? I’ve ruined five nail wraps on this exhibit, and someone has sabotaged it. And don’t think I don’t know why.” She held the phone to her ear and waited for it to come to life.

  “There’s no one here,” the security guard said, after a thorough check around the display and inside and behind the fake grass beach house.

  “Veronica, veronica,” the woman persisted. She raised a freshly manicured hand and pointed to a mound of desiccated plants. Formerly blue, formerly tall and willowy.

  Under her breath, Rolanda Knox muttered, “Welcome to the Big Apple Flower Show.”

  Four

  Connie Anzalone stared down the few remaining bystanders with a slightly less friendly look than she’d given
the Zen gardener and they wisely scattered, leaving just Rolanda and me. Rolanda was paid to stick around, but what was my excuse? In addition to being mesmerized by the outfit, I was drawn to the spectacle of a grown woman throwing a tantrum over a few dead plants. Her veronicas had gone to that great compost heap in the sky. It happened: the little suckers don’t always do as they’re told. You feed them, you water them, and do they thank you? No. Sometimes they gave it up to pests, bacteria, fungus, or a good stiff wind and they didn’t even say good-bye. I kept silent while Rolanda tried to do what the Zen gardener couldn’t.

  “Calm down, ma’am. I’ll alert someone from show management, and I’m sure they’ll mount a complete investigation.”

  I couldn’t tell if the guard was joking, but within minutes a frosty woman of about thirty arrived to defuse the situation. She introduced herself as Kristi Reynolds, director of the Big Apple Flower Show.

  She had a Bluetooth implant in her head and I would have bet there were two larger implants farther south. I could visualize her standing in front of a weather map, making sweeping motions with her arms and maintaining the same manic smile whether she was forecasting sunshine or tsunami.

  Much like the kid who’d tried to sneak in, Kristi was a smooth talker. She assured the woman that should anyone be found responsible, they would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  “For what,” I muttered. “Herbicide?” Kristi glared in my direction. Her eyes traveled to the name on my badge but all the while she kept the same smile, the smile facial expression.

  Either another emergency call had come in or Kristi had perfected the artful exit. She tilted her head and nodded to an unseen speaker, fluttering her eyelids—the only sign that the caller was delivering bad news.

  “Oh, dear. I’ll be right there,” she said. “Seems someone has borrowed a baseball bat from the Bambi-no booth and decapitated a gnome. I must fly. And you, Rolanda, need to get back to your post. Those fanatical protesters could be pouring in right now, ready to do more damage. Let’s get Otis to clean this up.” The two women exchanged forced smiles before Kristi turned on her heels and clacked away.