Deadly Beloved

by Jane Haddam

  Julianne ran her finger down the column of names and found the one she was looking for. She took a pencil out of the caddy on her blotter and underlined both the name and the phone number. Then she pulled the phone closer across the desk and started punching numbers into the phone pad.

  The phone was picked up almost immediately. It was answered less immediately, by a husky voice that seemed to belong to someone who did not intend to be in a good mood. Julianne looked at her little digital clock and winced. It was 6:12 A.M.

  Julianne sat down and took a deep breath. “Bennis?” she said.

  On the other end of the line, Bennis Hannaford made a noise that could have been a death rattle.

  Julianne shook out her overteased hair. “Bennis, listen to me, this is important. I want you to get in touch with that friend of yours for me, Gregor Demarkian—”

  2.

  As soon as the news got around that Stephen Willis had died, Molly Bracken knew she would have to find some way to use the information. It was terrible living day after day in this big Victorian house. It was so boring, Molly could hardly stand it sometimes. Joey went to the office every day, playing out this little charade they were involved in, but Molly had no place to go but to shop. She did go to pro-life rallies every once in a while, but they didn’t want her there without Joey, and she could feel it. Somebody said the Catholics were different. They were used to women doing things on their own because they were used to nuns. To Molly, the Catholic Church was just the old neighborhood in a fancy building. It meant standing there in the middle of all the old ladies from Italy and Poland, with their sachet and garlic smells, with their moaning over rosaries. Molly had joined the Episcopal Church as soon as she had moved out to Fox Run Hill, and made Joey join it with her. Someday, when she was old, she hoped to get to the point when she couldn’t even remember having been ethnic in any way at all.

  The first thing Molly had done when she found out how Stephen Willis had died was to make sure she met the detectives who had come to investigate the case. There was a black man from Philadelphia (how had he ever gotten past the guard at the gate?) named John Jackman, who was incredibly good-looking, like Eddie Murphy only better. There was the policeman from the town, who was not good-looking at all. Molly hadn’t quite been able to hold on to his name, because he had seemed so negligible. Exeter, she thought. Or Exter. Whatever. What was the point of a man who didn’t look good and didn’t have any money? The detective Molly had really wanted to meet, though, was Gregor Demarkian. Ever since the rumor had first started going around that he was going to come out there to look into Stephen Willis’s murder, Molly had lain in wait for him, ready to pounce, ready to tear off a piece of something famous. That was how anybody got anything in this world, she was sure of it. You found somebody who had it and got hold of some for yourself. You—appropriated it. That was the word. It made Molly squirm when she thought of it, as if it were a word with four letters, something she wasn’t supposed to say.

  Molly had not been as lucky with her waiting as she had hoped she would be. She had talked to the two policemen, and given them information she was sure would make them want to come back to question her later, but Gregor Demarkian hadn’t come up her long curving drive and rung her doorbell. Nobody had come, and Molly had spent the afternoon sitting on her window seat, watching the action and wishing she knew how to get back into it. Mostly, she wished she had spent more time with Patsy MacLaren Willis. Dowdy, dour, unimportant—Patsy had always seemed like the least interesting person having dinner at the Fox Run Hill Country Club on any particular night, and half the time Molly hadn’t even gone over to her table to say hello. She could kick herself for that now, she really could. She was going to have to be much more careful in the future. You never knew where people were going to end up.

  Ever since Joey had left that morning, Molly had been sitting at her kitchen table, nursing a coffee with milk into frigidity. Out on her patio, the sun was bouncing a wicked glare off the aluminum arms of the patio furniture. She really ought to get painted wrought iron patio furniture, Molly thought, the kind everybody else had—but she didn’t like the patio much, and it was hard to remember to buy green and white metal chairs when she had sweaters to look at or eighteen-karat-gold chains to consider. She ought to give a party too, Molly thought. She ought to give one now so that they would all have an excuse to get together and talk about the Willises.

  The doorbell rang and Molly stood up. Her kitchen wall clock said it was 9:15. No wonder she was bored. Mornings after Joey left were the worst times of the day. Molly padded out toward the front door and then stopped. The bell had rung again, but it wasn’t the front doorbell. She went out into the mudroom and to the door to the garage.

  Sarah Lockwood was standing in the garage, wearing a blue linen skirt and a white shirt, carrying a pair of blue canvas espadrilles in one hand. It was hot out there. The heat rose up and hit Molly as soon as she stepped beyond the protection of the air-conditioning. Sarah’s hair was damp with sweat and humidity. It looked much darker than it usually did.

  “Oh,” Sarah said when she realized Molly had opened up. “There you are. Did I get you at a bad time?”

  I’m really going to have to get some of those little linen skirts, Molly thought absently. Everybody else has them. Molly was also the only person with a house in Fox Run Hill who owned leggings, but she didn’t think of that. She stepped back and waved Sarah inside.

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” she said. “I was just sitting over a cup of coffee and letting it get cold. Sometimes I think I ought to take up volunteer work.”

  “I did volunteer work for years,” Sarah said. “I hated it. I think it’s very much nicer to be in control of your own time.”

  Sarah was going through the mudroom into the house. Molly made a face at her back. The kind of places Molly wanted to volunteer didn’t take anybody who walked in the door and wanted to sign up. You had to wait to be asked, and Molly could wait forever, in the present arrangement of things. She closed the door to the garage and followed Sarah inside.

  “How pretty you’ve made everything,” Sarah was saying, looking around at the kitchen cabinets and the tiles on the kitchen floor. “I would never have thought of putting terra cotta into a Victorian like this. But of course I’m hopeless at decorating. We had to have somebody come in and do our house so that I didn’t ruin it.”

  Molly had had someone come in and do this house. She couldn’t decide if Sarah was being sincere or not. Sarah never seemed sincere.

  “I could put some coffee on,” Molly said. “And I have Perrier. Could I get you something?”

  “A glass of Perrier would be nice.” Sarah sat down on one of the breakfast room chairs and looked up at the ceiling. Because a Victorian was supposed to be a formal house, there were no exposed beams here. Sarah dropped her espadrilles on the floor and stretched her bare legs into a long, straight line.

  “They’re back again this morning,” she said, tossing her head side-ways to indicate the Willises’ house. “I saw them come in this morning. You’d think they’d have looked through everything in that house by now.”

  Molly put a glass of Perrier water down in front of Sarah. “Was Gregor Demarkian there? Do you know who I mean—”

  “Of course I know who you mean. Everybody in Philadelphia knows Demarkian. He wasn’t there, as far as I could tell.”

  “The paper said he’d been called in to consult on the case.” Molly threw her old coffee away, got a clean cup, and poured herself some hot. “I think that means he’s the one investigating it, but I’m not sure. I talked to him yesterday.”

  “Did you? About what?”

  “About Patsy. Doesn’t it all seem really strange, now that you look back on it?”

  “It seems really strange now,” Sarah said. “I mean, people I know don’t shoot their husbands to death every day. Although I know a few people who ought to.”

  “I mean, they seem really strange,” Molly s
aid, coming back to the table with her new coffee. “Patsy and Steve. I never thought about them before this happened, but they weren’t really normal, were they?”

  “Of course they were.” Sarah was impatient. “They were as normal as anybody. They were dull.”

  “They were dull enough,” Molly agreed, “but they weren’t normal. I mean, he was never around, was he? He was gone for weeks at a time.”

  “There was nothing abnormal about that,” Sarah was positive. “He worked for some company that had oil interests or something. I don’t remember what it was. He had to travel for work.”

  “A lot of people have to travel for work. They don’t just disappear for a month.”

  “I’m sure she heard from him, Molly. Really, you know, you shouldn’t make this kind of—of inference—”

  “I wasn’t making any kind of inference.”

  “—it could be taken the wrong way, especially in circumstances like these. The man is dead, after all. And Patsy…” Sarah Lockwood shrugged.

  “I think he was a bigamist,” Molly said.

  Sarah looked startled. “What are you talking about? How could Stephen Willis have been a bigamist?”

  Molly tried to be careful. She hadn’t thought this up on her own. She had read it in The Star, in an article about another case entirely, but it seemed so obvious to her that all the same elements were there. She didn’t let people in Fox Run Hill know that she read The Star, though, or the National Enquirer either. She bought them in a supermarket in Philadelphia proper, where nobody knew who she was.

  “Listen,” she said eagerly. “If you think about it carefully, it all fits. It really does. He would be gone a month at a time and once or twice he was even gone longer—”

  “Yes, yes, Molly, but it’s like I told you. That was for his work.”

  “It was also a perfect opportunity. I’ll bet he didn’t spend any more time here than he spent away. He’s probably got another family someplace who thinks he’s still on a business trip right now.”

  Sarah sniffed. “They could hardly think he’s still on a business trip. His picture has been all over the newspapers and the television stations for days.”

  “The family might not be here in Philadelphia.”

  “I’m sure the story has been reported nationwide, Molly. His name has probably been mentioned on the TV news.”

  “He might not have been using the same name.”

  “Oh, Molly.”

  “No, no. Really. It all fits. He goes away to this other place and he has another wife and another name and she doesn’t know about it, but then she finds out and she shoots him. That at least makes sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Yes, it does,” Molly insisted. “And even if his other family is right here in Philadelphia, they might not have seen a picture of him. I mean, there have been a couple on the news, yes, but not half so many as the ones there have been of her. It’s like now that he’s dead, he doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “I still say this is an absolutely impossible scenario. Seriously. Wives kill their husbands every day.”

  “There must be some reason they kill their husbands,” Molly insisted. “It can’t be that they just wake up one morning and go boom. I mean, that’s crazy.”

  “Most people were crazy to get married in the first place,” Sarah said. “I think really good marriages are very rare. Most people are simply miserable. Then one day it gets to be too much and—” Sarah shrugged.

  “I’d never do something like that to Joey,” Molly said. “If I got really mad at him, I’d just divorce him.”

  “Divorce can be expensive, and it doesn’t always solve things. Let’s not talk about this anymore. It depresses me. I brought over some pictures of the new house.”

  “The Florida house?”

  Sarah was unpacking Polaroid snapshots from the big patch pockets of her skirt. “Kevin said he talked to Joey about it last night, and Joey said something about wanting to look into buying land in Boca Magra. Really, I don’t see how you’ve gone this long without a winter vacation house. Winters in Philadelphia are so grim.”

  “Mmmm,” Molly said.

  Sarah spread her snapshots across the table. “It’s a gated community, of course,” she said, “because Kevin and I think it’s foolish to buy in any other kind. Otherwise, you can’t be sure of your investment, can you?”

  “Mmmm,” Molly said again, but she wasn’t really listening. Maybe it was really high rent to think about your winter vacation house while a murder investigation was going on, but Molly hadn’t gotten that high rent yet. Her head was still full of speculations about Stephen Willis’s secret life and Patsy MacLaren Willis’s secret hatreds. Molly decided that when she saw Gregor Demarkian again, she’d rush right out, introduce herself, and tell him all about it.

  “This is what we’re doing with the dining room,” Sarah Lockwood said firmly, shoving a picture of a white, high-ceilinged room under Molly’s nose. “We’re very, very, very fond of the Moorish look for Florida.”

  3.

  Miles away, in the Sheraton Society Hill hotel in central Philadelphia, Karla Parrish was lying in the middle of a big double bed, trying to make sense of a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer. This story said that a woman named Patricia MacLaren Willis was assumed to have shot her husband Stephen to death with a semiautomatic pistol, destroyed her car by fire bomb in a Philadelphia parking garage, and then disappeared. It said this more than once, and it repeated the name in every other paragraph.

  Patricia MacLaren Willis.

  Patricia MacLaren Willis.

  Patricia MacLaren Willis.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  Karla rolled over on her stomach and tried again. No matter how many times she read the story, it still said the same thing. But it couldn’t, she was sure of that. It would be far too much of a coincidence.

  “Evan?” she called out.

  Evan was in the living room of the suite, unpacking her photographic equipment. He stuck his head in through the bedroom door and wagged it.

  “Not now,” he told her. “I have some work to do.”

  “Did you ever take drugs?” Karla asked him. “Hallucinogenic drugs?”

  “I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.”

  “Well, I never took any drugs,” Karla said. “I never even tried cigarettes. And right now I feel like I’m on some kind of acid trip.”

  “Nobody says ‘acid trip’ anymore, Karla. It’s passé.”

  “Whatever. What do you do when you see something that can’t possibly be real?”

  “I go back to bed. Preferably with company.”

  “Be serious. Have you ever heard of somebody named Gregor Demarkian?”

  “Sure. The world’s most famous private detective. Except I don’t think he really is a private detective. He’s a consultant or something like that.”

  “Is he good at what he does?”

  “He’s supposed to be.”

  “Do you think you could put me in touch with him?”

  Evan leaned against the doorjamb, curious. “I could, but I don’t really have to. He’s been invited to that reception Julianne Corbett is giving for you. I could call and see if he’s intending to show up.”

  “Do that,” Karla said positively.

  “You want to tell me what this is all about?”

  Karla shook her head. “Not yet. I’m probably just having the vapors. You want to get us some breakfast?”

  “Sure,” Evan said, but he hesitated one more moment in the doorway before he disappeared.

  Karla rolled over on her back. She was exhausted. That was the trouble. She was exhausted and jet-lagged, and if she wasn’t she wouldn’t be having this fantasy.

  And she wouldn’t be so scared.

  SEVEN

  1.

  DONNA MORADANYAN DIDN’T CHANGE the ribbons. All the next day, and the day after that, Gregor watched, getting up from
his kitchen table every hour or so to look out his window at Cavanaugh Street, going out four different times to get a pot of takeout coffee at the Ararat. His table was covered with forensics reports, background checks, financial tracking schemas, lateral witness interviews. John Jackman was good and the organization he had built the homicide department into was better than Gregor had ever imagined it could be, but most of this, Gregor knew, was confetti. It was impossible to know anything about the woman from reports like these. Preferably, Gregor would have been able to meet her, to hear her talk and see her walk. Since that was impossible at the moment—coming in after the fact on cases did that to you—the next best thing would be to find someone who had heard her and seen her. But that was proving surprisingly difficult. Gregor and John Jackman and Chief Exter had gone out to Fox Run Hill to conduct some interviews, but the only interviewing they had done had been of a woman named Molly Bracken, and they had talked to her before.

  “She invents things,” Dan Exter had said when the interview was over—and of course it was true. Molly Bracken wanted to be part of a great adventure. She was clearly overjoyed that John Jackman and Dan Exter, who had interviewed her initially on the evening of the day the murder and the explosion happened, had returned with Gregor Demarkian.

  “She doesn’t know Stephen Willis was involved in bigamy.” John Jackman shook his head and sighed. “She has no real reason to believe Stephen Willis was involved in bigamy. She just wants to think Stephen Willis was involved in bigamy.”

  “She got it out of one of those damn supermarket tabloid newspapers,” Dan Exter said. “Trust me.”

  “Fox Run Hill doesn’t look like the kind of place where people read those supermarket tabloid newspapers,” John Jackman objected.