by Jane Haddam
“If there are things we legitimately need, we should go and get them.”
Henry cut the last big wedge of pancakes still in front of him into bite-sized pieces. In pieces, the pancakes looked to Evelyn like caramelized corn, waiting to pop up and get her.
“Well,” Henry said. “I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe I could trust you just this once to go to the store by yourself.”
“By myself,” Evelyn repeated.
Henry waved irritably. “I can’t go on policing you forever, Evelyn. Eventually, you’re going to have to take responsibility for all this yourself. I wish you’d join a support group.”
“I don’t want to join a support group.”
“Anyway.” Henry wasn’t really listening. The television news was showing a weather report. He wasn’t really listening to that either. “You have to go out on your own sooner or later. With this work I’m caught up in, it might as well be now.”
“I would need the keys to the car.”
“You can have the keys to the car.”
“I might do anything if I had the keys to the car,” Evelyn said.
Henry turned his face away from the television set.
“For Christ’s sake, Evelyn. Don’t start sounding like The Three Faces of Eve.”
“I might stop at Burger King or Dairy Queen,” Evelyn went on. “I might stop at Taco Bell and buy six ten-packs of hard-shelled tacos and extra sour cream and eat them right there in the parking lot.”
Henry stood up quickly and reached into the pocket of his trousers. He came out with his car keys and tossed them to her. Evelyn almost didn’t catch them. She was that surprised to see them.
“Here,” Henry said. “Take those. Go when you want.”
“I don’t have any money.”
Henry reached into his pocket again and came out with his wallet. He opened it up and took out all the green Evelyn could see.
“Here,” he said, handing it all to her, twenties without number, tens and fives and even one fifty-dollar bill. “Take it. Go to the store. I really do have to work today, Evelyn.”
Evelyn took the money. “All right,” she said.
“I’ve got to go up to the office,” Henry said. “I can’t be disturbed today, Evelyn. Not for anything.”
“I won’t disturb you.”
“I’m going to lock the door. I know you don’t like it, but I have to. I have to concentrate. I can’t have interruptions.”
“I won’t interrupt you.”
“That’s fine, then.” Henry looked around at the family room and the breakfast room and the kitchen. “That’s fine,” he said again. “I’ll just go up to the office now. Have a good time shopping.”
“I will.”
“Be careful driving the car. It’s been a long time since you’ve been behind the wheel.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Try to remember that if you load your cart up with junk food, everybody we know will see it. That ought to help you keep your discipline up. Everybody will see you.”
Everybody sees me every day, Evelyn thought. If I cared, I would already be thin again. But she understood what Henry was trying to tell her. She even understood that he was right, in a way. She did care what the rest of them thought about her. She was just careful never to ask them to explain it.
“So,” Henry said, rocking back on the heels of his shoes. “I’ll be going up.”
“Fine,” Evelyn said.
“I’ll be out of communication most of the day.”
“Fine,” Evelyn said again.
“Right.” Henry put his hands back into his pockets and turned away from her. He hurried out of the room, almost at a run, his shoulders hunched over and his legs moving in an odd, jerky way, as if he had suddenly acquired some kind of nerve disease.
Evelyn looked down at the keys in her hand and shook her head. Keys and money. Keys and money. The car was parked out in the driveway because Henry hadn’t bothered to pull it into the garage when he came back from the club with it last night.
I wonder what all this is about, Evelyn asked herself. I wonder what it is he’s so afraid of.
Then she waddled over to the counter and put the keys and the money in her purse. She thought of the big display of Entenmann’s chocolate cakes down at the Stop ’N Shop and wondered how many she could eat in the car on the way home, eat while driving, eat while stopping for red lights on the road between here and the mall. Maybe I’ll have to pull over someplace, she thought, and give myself time to eat.
2.
Liza Verity never took night duty unless she had to, but last night she had had to, and now, at quarter to nine in the morning, she was exhausted. It had been one of those nights that no nurse likes to have anything to do with. It had started with a bad traffic accident on one of those brutal overpasses that now seemed to define the Philadelphia skyline and then done a domino number on life in the rest of the hospital. The accident was a five-car pileup on one side and a tractor-trailer truck on the other. One of the cars in the five-car pileup had six people crammed into it. One of the other cars had only one person in it, but that person had had a little semiautomatic pistol and been hyped up on something serious. He was at the back of the pileup. As soon as the crashing and the screeching were over, he got out and started firing randomly, hitting cars passing and people standing around to see what had happened. He seemed to take particular offense at the idea of bystanders. There were always dozens of people who stopped to rubberneck at the side of any highway disaster. The man with the semiautomatic pistol shot up ten of them before a teenage boy from Radnor had the courage and the presence of mind to tackle him from behind. The teenage boy got the semiautomatic pistol away from the shooter but suffered a broken arm in the process. By the time all these people got to the emergency room, it was something worse than a mess. They had called six extra doctors and nearly thirty nurses down to duty. There were police everywhere and ambulance men looking green and paramedics looking tired. Liza had been a little surprised to see so few media people. Usually, the local news crews were all over an accident like this one. It was exactly the kind of thing their viewers loved best.
One of the advantages of having been up all night is that it is nearly impossible to summon the energy to be worked up about anything. Coming upstairs from emergency after she was finally let off, Liza had her ass pinched in the elevator by a third-year medical student on apprenticeship roster. She didn’t even turn around and slap his face, which is what she usually did when boys of that sort pulled nonsense on her. In her tiredness, everything about the day-to-day workings of the hospital seemed tacky and absurd. Medical students who had to resort to sexual harassment to have a good day. Doctors who wanted to prove their superiority to God at least once an hour, usually by putting down nurses. Nurses’ aides who were always a little insulted when they were asked to make beds or change bedpans. Liza got off the elevator on the fourth floor and headed down the hall to the pediatrics unit. She could have gotten out of going down to emergency last night. She was a pediatrics specialist and already technically off-duty when they started bringing the bodies in. Maybe she was just getting a little stale, bored with the routine, impatient with the politics—God only knew, she was all of that, there was no maybe about it. Maybe it was time for her to quit and find herself another job.
The pediatrics unit had a wing of its own with twenty-six rooms in it and over sixty beds. The nurses’ station was a curved counter that was always supposed to have somebody standing behind it. There was nobody there. Liza walked around the counter to the door at the back and stuck her head inside. Sharon Birch and Mia Zhiransky were sitting side by side on the office couch, watching something on television.
“Don’t you think you ought to be doing something sensible,” Liza asked them, “like listening for patients?”
“We’ve got the warning system on in here,” Mia said. “We were just discussing politics.”
“Hospital or government?�
� Liza asked.
“Race.” Sharon Birch was tall and thin and black. If she hadn’t had bags under her eyes big enough to pack the Rolling Stones into, she might have been beautiful. “We were talking about the news reports. How did it go with the accident?”
“Awful,” Liza said.
“Anyone dead?” Mia asked.
Liza nodded. “At least three people. There’s probably going to end up being six or more.”
“All black people?” Sharon asked.
Liza had to think. It was honestly not the kind of thing she noticed in the middle of an emergency. “Yes,” she said finally, having gone over all the patients in her head. “I think so.”
“There,” Sharon Birch said.
“I still don’t think it’s race.” Mia Zhiransky was small and blond and perfect, their own hospital china doll. “I think it’s money. It’s always more exciting when something happens to people with money.”
“Why?” Sharon asked.
Liza got a plastic coffee cup from the stack next to the coffee machine and poured herself some coffee. “What are you two talking about? What happened to somebody with money?”
Sharon waved her hand dismissively in the air. “It wasn’t somebody with real money, like a rock star or anything. It was one of those people who lives at Fox Run Hill. You know the place I mean.”
“I’d call ten thousand square feet of house money,” Mia said. “It costs a lot more money than I’m ever going to have.”
“Maybe you’ll win the lottery,” Sharon said.
Liza swallowed half the coffee in the cup at once. “What’s this all about?” she asked again. “What happened to somebody at Fox Run Hill? Mugger get in past those security guards or what?”
“This woman killed her husband,” Sharon said.
“That’s it?” Liza was surprised.
“She had some kind of fancy gun,” Mia said, “and then she drove her car into a parking garage in West Philly and blew it up.”
“She blew up her car?”
“She wasn’t inside it,” Sharon explained. “She left some kind of time bomb in it and disappeared.”
“A time bomb,” Liza repeated. “In a parking garage. Was anybody hurt?”
“There were a few people injured,” Sharon said, “but nobody was killed. That’s why I was saying what I was saying. That it’s race. If it was black people who did all that, nobody would have paid any attention.”
“It’s been all over the news since last night,” Mia explained.
“And what hasn’t been all over the news is that accident,” Sharon said. “I mean, there’ve been some reports on it, you know, here and there, but no real fuss, and all the while they’re going on and on and on about this little murder out in Fox Run Hill. Because the people involved in it are white.”
“Because the people involved in it are rich,” Mia said.
“Maybe it’s both,” Liza told them, finishing the rest of her coffee and pouring some more. “What happened to the wife who committed the murder?”
“No one knows,” Mia said solemnly.
“The problem with these people in the media,” Sharon said, “is they think all black people are animals with nothing on their minds but sex and violence. So a few black people get killed, so who cares? So some black guy takes out a pistol and starts shooting up the landscape, what can you expect? It’s race, pure and simple.”
“I’m not saying it’s not race a lot of the time,” Mia said. “I’m just saying that this time the deciding factor was money. That’s all.”
“Look at O. J. Simpson,” Sharon said. “What was the point of all that fuss except to make it clear to every single American of the white persuasion that it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what a black person accomplishes in his life, he’s still just a hair trigger away from being a thug?”
“All that fuss could have been about violence against women,” Mia said. “I mean, for once the media could have been taking violence against women seriously.”
“When Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend, it was a footnote on the eleven o’clock news,” Sharon said firmly.
Over on the television screen there was a shot of a still photograph of a woman in middle age. There were lines on the sides of her face and bags under her eyes. Her hair was salt-and-pepper gray. Liza drank more coffee and wished she weren’t so tired. The face on the screen looked strangely familiar.
“Here we go again,” Sharon was saying. “The mysterious Mrs. Willis and her awful moneyed murder. Have you ever seen anybody with so little style in your life? If I had money like that, I’d look great.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to look great,” Mia said.
Liza walked closer to the screen and squinted at the picture.
“Oh,” she said.
“What is it?” Sharon said.
“Police today are desperately searching for clues that will explain the bizarre behavior, and present whereabouts, of Patricia MacLaren Willis,” the announcer said.
Liza took a step back. “Who?” she said.
“They called her Patsy,” Mia said. “It was in the Inquirer this morning.”
“But that’s impossible,” Liza said.
“Did you know her?” Sharon said.
“I keep forgetting that Liza went to Vassar,” Mia said. “She must know dozens of people like that.”
The coffee in the cup was all gone. The picture on the screen had changed to one of a talking head with a microphone. The talking head was standing in front of a big Tudor house with what seemed to be hundreds of police cars parked in the driveway. Liza rubbed her eyes.
“Police are now saying that we may never know the complete story of why Patricia MacLaren Willis did what she did yesterday,” the talking head said, “because as the hours go by, there is less and less hope that when she is found, if she is found, she will be found alive.”
“Alive,” Liza Verity repeated. And then she shook her head very hard, as if that would clear it. “For Christ’s sake.”
3.
Out in Fox Run Hill, Sarah Lockwood was also saying “for Christ’s sake,” over and over and over again, under her breath. She was standing at the window at the second floor landing of her French Provincial house, looking out on Patsy Willis’s Tudor. She had been standing there for nearly half an hour, while police cars came and went and police detectives spread out across the lawn and half a dozen women from the neighborhood found excuses to do their jogging right in front of the Willises’ front door. Sarah didn’t think she’d ever been this nervous in her life.
“You can’t stay up there all day,” Kevin called out to her every once in a while. “You’re not going to find anything out mooning over a lot of parked police cars.”
Now a new police car was pulling up, a different police car, from Philadelphia instead of from the local force. Sarah watched as a tall black man in a good black suit got out—an astonishing sight, since there were never any black people in Fox Run Hill, unless they were in uniform—and was followed by an even taller white man, older and thicker and running to fat. It took a minute for Sarah to place him. Then she raced from the window, leaned over the stairrail, and called down the well: “Kevin, come quick. Look who’s here.”
“I’m not going to come quick up those stairs,” Kevin replied, “unless you’re announcing the Second Coming.”
“It’s Gregor Demarkian,” Sarah said. “Come quickly.”
There was a short silence from the lower floor. Then Kevin said “Jesus,” and Sarah heard his heavy footsteps beginning to run up the stairs.
“Look,” she said when Kevin arrived on the landing. “There he is. Do you think the local police have hired him?”
“I don’t think it’s possible to hire him. I don’t think he works for money.”
“Somebody must have brought him in though,” Sarah said. “It stands to reason. He doesn’t just show up on his own.”
“Maybe it’s something we ought to worry about,�
� Kevin said. “Under the circumstances. Considering what we’re up to.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. He isn’t going to be interested in us. It’s Patsy and Stephen he’s going to be worried about.”
“Murder investigations are funny things,” Kevin said carefully. “They can—spread out.”
“I know that.”
“Then maybe we ought to worry about it. Maybe we ought to be a little careful over the next few weeks. Just in case.”
Down in the Willises’ driveway, Gregor Demarkian was huddled in a clutch with a lot of men in suits. Sarah Lockwood bit her lip.
“I think it’s exciting,” she said softly. “I think it makes everything we’re doing much more fun.”
“You’re nuts.”
Sarah turned around and put her hand on the bulge in Stephen’s pants. It pulsed under her fingers and made her smile.
“Of course I’m nuts,” she said. “That’s the point.”
FOUR
1.
THE FIRST GATED COMMUNITY Gregor Demarkian had ever heard of had been in Florida, on the Atlantic coast, exactly one year after Ted Bundy had been arrested for the murder of Kimberly Ann Leach. Logically, Gregor was sure that those two facts did not go together in any meaningful way. The gated community had probably existed long before anyone in Florida had ever heard of Ted Bundy. Still, in his mind the juxtaposition was significant. He had known enough really rich people who lived behind walls and gates and guards and security systems. There was a positive fashion for that sort of thing in the early seventies in Beverly Hills. Gated communities, however, were not for the really rich. They were for the people Gregor had learned in college to call the “upper middle class,” meaning really successful doctors and lawyers and businessmen, the top management of the larger corporations, the ruling elites of America’s better small towns. Of course, Gregor thought as he got out of John Jackman’s commandeered police car, these days the top managements of the larger corporations were counted among the really rich. They had salaries in seven figures and bonus packages that would be the envy of most rock stars. Their job seemed to be to move as much production work as possible out of Pittsburgh and into Southeast Asia. And as for the really successful doctors and lawyers—