Not a Creature Was Stirring

by Jane Haddam

  If he had been a different kind of man, he would have worried about his insensitivity. That poor girl was dead. From what he’d seen, she’d been as innocent and undeserving of execution as Donna Moradanyan. Somebody should grieve for her. Gregor knew too much about the world to think that someone ought to be him. It was a damn good thing there were people who could think without becoming sentimental, who could divorce themselves from the emotional to concentrate on the objective truth. Without them, the human race would still be living in caves.

  Jackman turned onto a side street, taking some shortcut through the rush hour traffic Gregor didn’t want to understand.

  “I don’t understand why you don’t like the financial angle,” he said. “I don’t believe Bobby Hannaford is straight. You don’t either. If he’s fooling around, he’s got a real motive. Now that the old man is dead—”

  “Hundred-dollar bills are showing up in wastebaskets,” Gregor said. “And you should have found the briefcase.”

  “I did, Gregor. It was right where you said it would be.”

  “That briefcase started out in Robert Hannaford’s study. He told me it would be there.”

  “There’s too damn much manipulation in this case,” Jackman said. “And it’s weird manipulation, too. It’s like something out of an Agatha Christie novel. It’s not real.”

  “What’s real—a couple of idiot nineteen year olds blowing each other away with Uzis over a quarter of a pound of crack?”

  “That does tend to be more usual.”

  “That also has all the reality of a Kafka nightmare.”

  Jackman laughed. Gregor went back to looking out the window. They were in a part of Philadelphia he knew, but he didn’t know why he knew. They weren’t near Cavanaugh Street, and they weren’t near the library, either. He stared at the solid, undistinguished office buildings and wondered what they meant to him.

  “You okay?” Jackman asked him.

  “I’m fine. Where are we?”

  “Out behind the Dick Building.”

  Gregor sat up a little straighter. Of course. It had been years, but he should have remembered. He checked the numbers on the buildings they were passing and saw they were going in the right direction. Slowly, but in the right direction.

  “John,” he said, “not this block coming up, but the one after that. Pull up to the curb in the middle and let me get out for a second.”

  “Get out?”

  “There’s something I want to see.”

  Jackman looked at him like he’d just announced he was going to take LSD, but he slowed the car even further, and in the middle of the block in question pulled up to the pavement. Gregor got out, scanned the building numbers until he found 1227, and went up to its front door.

  The front door was two mammoth pieces of plate glass, locked. Through it, Gregor could see the call board, rows of little steel buttons next to white-on-black company names arranged in alphabetical order. The first of those names, at the top of the list, was Aardvark Construction, Inc. The fifth was Federal Bureau of Investigation, Philadelphia Office.

  Gregor stepped back. There was a call button on the outside of the building, so that people with late meetings could get far enough into the lobby to buzz up to whoever was waiting for them. Somewhere in the basement there was probably a janitor with access to a television security system. Gregor scanned the door frame and found the camera.

  “Fine,” he said, to the snow falling on his head.

  He went back to the car, stuck his head in Jackman’s window, and announced, “You can leave me here. I’ve got something I want to do.”

  This time, Jackman looked sure Gregor needed a psychiatrist—but he went.

  2

  The man at the front desk was a stranger. Gregor had expected that. For one thing, he had been retired long enough for a new crop of recruits to go professional. Those recruits almost always ended up at front desks or on information lines for the first six months or so. For another thing, once he’d made it to the call board and announced himself, it had taken at least three minutes before he was buzzed through the inner doors. That meant the deskman hadn’t known his name. It also meant somebody else had.

  That somebody else must have been impressed with him. The deskman nearly leapt to his feet when Gregor came into the office. Then he sat down again, reached for his intercom, and said,

  “Mr. Demarkian? Mr. Flanagan will be out right away. Please. Why don’t you just sit down?”

  Flanagan. Gregor smiled. He’d been sure there’d be someone he knew up here, even this late at night, but Jim Flanagan was a piece of very good luck. Flanagan had been at Behavioral Sciences for three years, and they’d gotten along. Gregor took off his coat, laid it across one chair, and sat down in another. He felt a little guilty about being so amused. The deskman meant well. He was just too wet behind the ears to realize there was no need to be this formal after normal business hours.

  Seconds later, the inner door opened and Jim Flanagan stuck his head out. His face was mottled and mournful. His hair was still bright, electric red. His eyes were a deep, clear blue. He looked so much like the stereotypical Irishman, he could have been invented by a turn-of-the-century anti-Papist.

  “Gregor,” he said. “It is you. I thought I was hearing things.”

  “I still think I’m seeing things,” Gregor said. “Can’t you afford to get someone in here to paint?”

  “No,” Flanagan said. “Dope.”

  “Dope?” Gregor said. “Not Miller?”

  “I don’t even want to think about Miller,” Flanagan said. “Go in the back there and say Miller, four men will probably try to kill you.”

  “Just four?”

  “Four is all we’ve got, besides me and Steve here.” Flanagan stepped back. “Come into my office and have some coffee. I’m supposed to be working out the details of a coordinated drug bust. I’m bored stiff.”

  Gregor knew all about being bored stiff. He also knew Flanagan’s work wouldn’t suffer for it. He gathered up his coat and followed Flanagan through the inner door.

  3

  Flanagan’s office was a cubbyhole oversupplied with paper, file cabinets, and manila folders. It had been painted even less recently than the outer office and in a shade of particularly unattractive green. The only indication that Flanagan was head man here was on the door. There was a placard screwed into that, with Flanagan’s name on it in letters the size of a National Enquirer headline.

  Flanagan cleared off a chair, reminding Gregor of Tibor that first day in the church. Then he dropped into the chair behind the desk and shoved a Pyrex pot of primal ooze onto the hot plate on the shelf behind him.

  “So,” he said, “what brings you here? If you’ve just dropped in for a talk, I won’t mind. I’d do just about anything not to have to think about timetables any more.”

  “It’s late,” Gregor said gently. “And you’re not exactly in a prime shopping area.”

  “True. But you could have been in the area. I tried to call you, you know, after they did that piece about you in The Inquirer. Your number’s unlisted.”

  “I unlisted it because of The Inquirer piece.”

  “Nuts,” Flanagan said wisely. The primal ooze began to bubble, and he took it off the plate. In the harsh light of the fluorescent lamps that lined the ceiling, his face looked even more mottled and more mournful than it had in the outer room. It also looked infinitely tired, with that bone-crushing weariness that comes of digging through slime for centuries without getting any nearer to cleaning up the mess. Gregor felt suddenly very sorry for the man.

  “I don’t suppose it’s been much of a picnic around here since I left. I’m sorry I didn’t think about how beat you’d be at this time of day. I saw where I was and I just came in.”

  “You were in the neighborhood,” Flanagan said.

  “I was driving through. Or rather, a friend was driving me through.”

  “That’s good. You were never much of a driver.�
� Flanagan had found his coffee mugs. He put them on the desk and filled them. “But I meant what I said. I’m glad to see you, as long as you’re not involved in some drug thing. I can’t take the drug thing any more. It’s one of those days. Sometimes it doesn’t faze me. Sometimes I get very attracted to the Gordian knot solution. I just want to get hold of an AK-47 of my own and blow these jerks to kingdom come.”

  “I’m not involved in any drug thing,” Gregor said. “I never was.”

  Flanagan shrugged. “So? You had ax murderers and people who ate their mothers for breakfast. Literally. Also other people’s mothers. It doesn’t sound much better.”

  “It wasn’t. But the past tense is important, Jim. I’m retired.”

  “Funny,” Flanagan said. “You don’t look retired.”

  Gregor took the mug of coffee Flanagan had pushed in his direction and gave it a try. It was worse than his own. Much worse.

  “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “I’m glad I came in. I’ve been sitting around the last couple of months, wondering if I’d have felt better if I hadn’t retired. Not that I could have done anything about that. I’m fifty-five. I’ve hit the age limit—”

  “I was sorry to hear about Elizabeth, Gregor.”

  “I know. You sent a card. I appreciated it, even if I didn’t answer it. But Jim, I’m glad I’m not still in it.”

  “I’m fifty-two,” Flanagan said. “Some mornings, I count the time. It’s not the same. Drugs changed everything, Gregor, drugs and this weird attitude they’ve all got now.”

  “I know what you mean. They don’t know the difference between fact and opinion. To them, the law of gravitation isn’t even a theory. It’s a biosociologically determined concept.”

  “It’s the laws of morality I’m worried about. I don’t care about the sex so much. People have been sleeping with people they shouldn’t be sleeping with forever. But the other things. Catch this, Gregor. We’ve got petty theft problems in the office.”

  “Here?”

  “Here. Pencils. Pens. Paper clips. Junk. Theft for the sake of theft.”

  “I think I liked it better when guilt was in fashion,” Gregor said. “I also think we’re getting old. Listen to us. We’re talking about the young as ‘them.’”

  “The young are ‘them.’” Flanagan said it firmly.

  Gregor took another sip of his coffee, decided he was not feeling suicidal enough to try to finish it, and pushed the mug away across the desk. “The thing is,” he told Flanagan, “I didn’t just come to talk. I need some information I don’t even know if you have.”

  “Really? What did you do? Decide to go private?”

  “Not exactly.” Gregor explained his arrangement with Jackman and his involvement in the Hannaford case. He was gratified to see that Flanagan was impressed. “The problem with it all,” he said, “is that I’m sure Jackman is right. Bobby Hannaford is not straight: Bobby Hannaford is in trouble up to his eyeballs. It’s the easiest thing in the world to see.”

  “Is it?”

  “Of course it is. And from the look on your face, Flanagan, I’d say you think so, too.”

  “I know so,” Flanagan admitted. “I want to know why you know so.”

  “Because he spends more money than he has, but he doesn’t have that—that look people get when they’re in serious debt. I was thinking about it today when I was out at Engine House. One of the other brothers, Christopher, he has that look. Kind of an adrenaline worry and a paralysis at the same time. Bobby Hannaford looks like a man who thinks he can do something about his problems. Do you see what I mean?”

  “No,” Flanagan said.

  “It figures,” Gregor said.

  “I never could see what you meant,” Flanagan pointed out. “I don’t know how many times you gave me that lecture of yours about internal constituency—”

  “Internal consistency.”

  “Whatever. I could never figure out how to do it. Nobody could but you. The younger guys used to finish working on a case with you and walk around for weeks, talking like they’d been present at a miracle. I don’t think you do miracles, but I don’t usually think you’re wrong.”

  “Am I right this time?”

  “Spell it out for me,” Flanagan said. “Give me a laugh.”

  Against his better judgment, Gregor tried the coffee again. His throat was dry, and he needed something. Unfortunately, Flanagan’s coffee was not it. He put the mug down again.

  “If you ask me, there’s two things going on. One of them definitely involves the oldest sister, Myra—”

  “Myra?”

  “Myra Hannaford Van Damm. If you haven’t turned her up, I’d check on her. There’s something going on between those two. You can feel it when you see them together. And I think Mrs. Van Damm may need money. Her father didn’t give her any. She’s married to a rich man, but that’s not the same as having her own.”

  “Ah,” Flanagan said.

  “But I think there’s something else. Bobby Hannaford is a neurotic. He’s addicted to possessions, yes, you can see that, but he doesn’t really care about them. He cares about his father. I think he hated the man. But I don’t think he killed him.”

  “Internal consistency again?”

  “It wouldn’t be internally consistent to leave a lot of hundred-dollar bills in a wastebasket with what’s supposed to be a suicide note. It wouldn’t be internally consistent to stage a murder that looks like a murder when what you wanted was to avoid discovery of financial manipulation. Tell me that for a start: Do you know anything about Robert Hannaford doing anything whatsoever in the last six months to indicate he might suspect his son of embezzling? Stock fraud? Insider trading? Anything?”

  Flanagan had a pipe. He got it out, lit it up, and watched it die. He didn’t try to get it going again. “On the first of November of this year,” he said, “Robert Hannaford used his voting stock to force the board of Hannaford Financial into scheduling a directors’ audit. It’s supposed to commence right after the first of the year.”

  “All right.”

  “Will you tell me something? If you’re so sure Bobby has nothing to do with the death of his father, why are you also so sure he really had a motive?”

  “Think.”

  “I’ve done too damn much thinking in my life.”

  “First we have a supposed suicide,” Gregor said. “Then Jackman shows up and refuses to buy it. Then we find a suicide note—not genuine, almost certainly—in a wastebasket with a lot of money in it. If the crime is going to be internally consistent, Flanagan, we know two things. One, there must be some reason somewhere, as yet undiscovered, why we could be led to believe that Emma Hannaford would make a credible murderer. There must also be some reason why Bobby Hannaford would make one. No motive, no sense.”

  “Maybe there’s something else going on altogether. Maybe you’re right about your Mrs. Van Damm. Maybe neither of them had anything to do with it, and she wants to do her brother in for some reason of her own.”

  “Maybe. Am I right about Bobby Hannaford? Did he have good reasons for wanting the old man dead?”

  Flanagan stood up. “He had the best reasons in the world and none at all.”

  “Meaning,” Gregor said, “you’re already onto him, but he doesn’t know it yet.”

  Flanagan went to his file cabinet, opened the top drawer, and drew out a thick manila file. He tossed it on the desk in front of Gregor. “Here. It’s insider trading, by the way. It’s not mine and it’s sensitive, but you might as well know. Hell, you already do know, practically. I wish to hell I knew how to do that.”

  “Internal consistency,” Gregor said.

  “Right.” Flanagan dropped down into his chair again, looking old and tired and grim. “Let me tell you all about a man named Donald George McAdam,” he said.

  4

  An hour later, Gregor was on the street again. He knew more than he really wanted to about Donald McAdam. He knew all he could about insider tradi
ng, considering the fact that he knew nothing about stocks and even less about the operations of the market. He had what he had gone to get, confirmation of just how Bobby Hannaford’s neuroses had played themselves out in real life.

  Unfortunately, he also had a problem. He could see a way to make the killings of Robert and Emma Hannaford make sense. He could devise an internally consistent scenario for what had been going on at Engine House with no trouble at all. But if that scenario was right, then the framing of Bobby Hannaford could not be happening.

  “So maybe it isn’t,” he said to the wind and the rain.

  Then the cab Flanagan had called for him drew up at the curb, and he got in. He leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and started to worry. He worried all the way home, through a Philadelphia still locked in an orgy of Christmas celebration and a wariness about the weather.

  He only stopped worrying after he’d gotten out of the cab on Cavanaugh Street, tipped and paid the driver, and started walking up the steep stone steps to his vestibule. That was when he saw Bennis Hannaford, leaning out old George Tekamanian’s front window.

  She looked very Christmasy, in a bright red sweater with a large shiny tin bell brooch spread across the shoulder.

  SIX

  1

  BENNIS OPENED THE FRONT DOOR for him. George was enthroned in his very best easy chair, wedged between a drinks cart and a pile of hardcover books, wearing an emerald green sweater someone must have given him for Christmas and a pair of reindeer socks. The socks were noticeable because George wasn’t wearing shoes. A pair of tasseled Gucci loafers had been abandoned unceremoniously in the middle of his carpet. Gregor could hardly believe his eyes. George looked deliriously happy. Bennis looked bemused.