Murder on Embassy Row Read Online Free

reported it was missing.
    “Thank you,” she said. “That will be all.”
    Marsha James hated Nuri Hafez and the staff was aware of her feelings. No one was quite sure why she felt as she did, although they did speculate. With few exceptions, Mrs. James ran the residence, including the hiring and firing of house staff. But Hafez was out of her reach, above her control. He “belonged” to her husband.
    Marsha knew her husband’s sexual tastes too well to suspect any taint of “the English vice”; it was as though Hafez was a pet dog who not only preferred her husband, but who disliked, no, tolerated her.
    There may have been a time when she envied the close relationship James and Hafez shared; lately she only resented it, and freely let it trigger and fuel the arguments the embassy household overheard too often.
    She went upstairs and stood in the hallway. To her left was the door to his private study. Her own study was next to it, and she often took tea there before retiring, usually with her social secretary, who would brief her on the following day’s activities.
    She went to her study, picked up a phone, and called the kitchen. “I shan’t have anything this evening,” she said. She returned to the hall and paused in front of their bedroom. A maid, on her way to her own bedroom on the floor above, asked, “Can I get you something, ma’am?”
    Mrs. James was startled by the maid’s appearance. “Oh, no, I think not,” she said.
    “Good night, ma’am.”
    “Yes. Good night.”
    She went to her husband’s study, where dim light squeezed through a narrow space at the bottom of the door. There was the smell of burnt cedar. She placed her hand on the doorknob and slowly turned it. The door slid open. She peered into a room rendered chiaroscuro by the light diffused by the green glass shade of a brass study lamp, and the waning orange glow from the embers of the fireplace.
    Silhouetted against this light, she saw her husband, Geoffrey James, the soft folds of his robe draped around him. He was slumped over the card table.
    She entered the room, closing the door behind her, and approached him.
    His right hand held a stemmed glass that was tipped over, its contents having whitened the table’s smooth finish. Toothpaste and cigarette ash; she thought automatically of one of her mother’s home-repair remedies. Geoffrey’s head had fallen sideways onto a silver bowl now half filled with melted ice water, a lemon wedge floating on the top.
    The cut-glass caviar cup was partially submerged, and the caviar still remaining formed a black crust over his nose.
    “Geoffrey,” she said softly, not touching him. Then she reached, hesitated, and felt the exposed side of his face. It was cold, with the flat, gray look of modeling clay. The eye she could see was open and distended and his mouth gaped in a rictus that was half smile, half scream.
    Marsha left the room, involuntarily wiping her hands on her skirt and went downstairs to the kitchen, where Eleanor was having tea with her husband. Marsha sawthe plate of dainty sandwiches between them, the uneaten remains of that evening’s party.
    “Something wrong, ma’am?” Eleanor asked.
    Marsha heard her voice answer. “Yes, I would say there is.”

3
    Salvatore Morizio, a detective captain in Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, sat hunched over a chessboard in the living room of his Arlington, Virginia, condominium. “Why the hell did you make
that
move?” he mumbled as he tried to devise a strategy to counter the unexpected placement of his opponent’s knight.
    The phone rang. He ignored six rings before getting up and answering it. “Yeah?” he said, still thinking about his next move.
    “Sal, Jake. I wake you?”
    “No. What time is it?”
    “One.”
    “Is it? It got late. What’s up?”
    Jacob Feinstein, chief of the State Department’s 1,000-officer police force, whose mission it was to protect the lives of the vast foreign diplomatic