by Jane Haddam
“We just got here,” Bennis said.
“Karla’s inside, standing at the punch table,” Julianne said. “I think she feels a little awkward. This isn’t her usual milieu.”
“Is it anybody’s?” Bennis said.
“Well,” Julianne Corbett said. “You two go inside and look. I’ve got to do my duty around here for a while. But don’t leave without talking to me again. I have something very important I want to ask Mr. Demarkian.”
Gregor knew better than to say there was something very important he wanted to ask her. There was no need to alert her to what could be a potential embarrassment. He took Bennis’s arm and propelled her toward the inner doors. Through them, he could see a tall woman with flat brown hair, looking uncomfortable in a dress that didn’t seem to fit right. Bennis would know why it didn’t. Gregor decided that he liked this woman’s face.
“Is that Karla Parrish?” he asked Bennis.
Bennis looked in the direction he was pointing and nodded. “Oh, yes, it is. But she needs some advice on wardrobe if she intends to show up at things like this. Although it’s very sweet, isn’t it? She’s like a lamb among the wolves.”
“Culture vultures,” Gregor agreed solemnly.
He felt a tug on his sleeve and turned around to find the young man in the high starched collar and the dinner jacket at his elbow. The young man was even younger than he had seemed to be at a distance. His face looked as smooth and round as the face of a boy who is just starting to shave.
“Mr. Demarkian?” he said. “You don’t know me, but my name is Evan Walsh. I’m Karla Parrish’s assistant.”
Evan Walsh was wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Gregor thought idly of the sixties, when wire-rims had been the mark of hippies. Now they seemed to be the distinguishing element in the wardrobes of young men in dinner jackets.
“Mr. Demarkian?” Evan Walsh repeated uncertainly.
“I’m sorry,” Gregor said. “These parties tend to make me drift off. How do you do?”
“I’m going to go over and introduce myself to Karla Parrish,” Bennis said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
Gregor watched Bennis begin to wend her way through the sparser knots of people inside to get to the table where Karla Parrish stood. He saw Karla Parrish straighten when she realized that somebody was actually going to talk to her. He smiled to himself and said, “She’s not used to this kind of thing, is she? It’s very attractive, in a way. Very affecting.”
“Yeah,” Evan said. “Well, I’ll feel a lot better when she is used to this kind of thing. She’s too easy to get to, the way things are now. It worries me.”
“What do you mean, that she’s too easy to get to? Do you think somebody has designs on her money? Were you just talking in general?”
“Well,” Evan said. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s about this news story that’s in all the papers, this case you’re involved in, the one about Patsy MacLaren. Karla wants to talk to you about it. You see—”
Gregor never found out what Evan saw. What happened next happened in slow motion, but it happened in an instant just the same, and there was no time for anything. Gregor had been watching Karla Parrish and Bennis Hannaford all the time he was talking to Evan. He had seen Karla get herself a glass of punch from the bowl and Bennis eat at least three stuffed celery spears. Bennis ate like a horse and kept it off with nervous energy. Then Karla and Bennis walked away from the table and up to one of the walls, where Karla started pointing things out. Gregor wondered what it was they were looking at a photograph of. They seemed very intent.
The next thing Gregor noticed was that the table with the punch bowl on it seemed to rock, which was impossible. An older woman who had been leaning against it jumped and turned around. A young man who had been reaching for the ladle in the punch bowl stepped back in confusion. There was a nervous little titter of laughter, and then it happened.
The explosion was so loud, it made Gregor’s ears ring. The flash was so bright, it blinded him. The next thing he saw was fire and smoke. The next thing he heard was screaming.
“Oh, God,” somebody was shouting. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.”
Gregor should have headed for the nearest phone. He knew he should have. He shouldn’t have headed through the double doors into the living room. He had no way of knowing if something else in there was getting ready to explode. He had to go. Bennis was in there. That was all he could think of. Bennis was in there.
And now that the smoke was clearing, he could see the table that had once held the punch bowl.
It had been ripped in half and hacked into splinters by the blast.
PART TWO
Bondage in Holy Matrimony and Otherwise
ONE
1.
IT HADN’T BEEN A very big bomb. Gregor knew that as soon as he got through the double doors. The shattered table had looked horrible from a distance. It looked horrible close up. There were one or two people who looked more horrible still. Gregor saw a woman in a bright purple dress he was sure had to be dead. She had pieces of white fluff stuck to her and a pin that read I WEAR FAKE FUR. Gregor saw cuts and bruises everywhere, but not all that much blood. He scanned the faces he could see and came up blank. There was nobody there that he knew. Men and women began to get themselves up from the floor and shake themselves out. Someone was crying.
“Where is she?” someone demanded, grabbing on to his elbow and spinning him around. “Where—is—she?”
For a moment Gregor was certain the “she” referred to was Bennis Hannaford. That was the “she” he was looking for, and that he was beginning to feel increasingly uneasy that he hadn’t found. The man clutching his elbow was young Evan Walsh. Walsh looked almost as bad as he might have if he had been in the room at the time of the blast. There were tears running down his sooty face. He must have been the one who was crying, Gregor realized. His hair was a mess. One of the lenses in his glasses was cracked.
“She was right there,” he screamed, pointing at the devastation at the center of the room. “She was standing right next to the punch bowl when… when the whole thing blew up. She must be under all that wreckage—She—”
“No, she’s not,” Gregor said firmly. “She’d moved. I saw her. She was with my friend Bennis Hannaford, looking at one of the pictures on the wall right before the blast.”
“Then where is she?” Evan demanded shrilly. He looked ready to cry again.
Gregor felt another tug on his elbow and turned this time to find Julianne Corbett, looking terrified.
“What should we do?” she gasped. “Nobody knows what we should do. Was it an assassination attempt?”
Gregor didn’t know what it had been, except that it had probably been a pipe bomb—and that gave him ideas he didn’t want to bring up at the moment. He took Julianne by the shoulders.
“Call 911,” he demanded. “Get ambulances here. And the police. And the bomb squad.”
“The bomb squad?” Julianne paled.
“Do you mean to say you think there’s another one of those things in here?” Evan shrilled. “We have to get out of here. We have to find Karla. We have to get her out of here—”
“We’ll find Karla momentarily,” Gregor said. He hoped that they’d find Bennis Hannaford too. It was Bennis he was looking for. It was Bennis his mind was on even as he talked to Julianne and Evan, even as he gave instructions and advice. He pushed Julianne toward the doors again. “Go. Call 911. Do it now. There’s a woman over there I think is dead.”
“Dead,” Julianne said.
Gregor pushed her hard, and she finally went. Evan stayed. Gregor didn’t think the young man was going to move until he had his hand in Karla Parrish’s.
There were dozens of people who needed help, hundreds of things to do. Enough time had gone by now so that the people on the floor were stirring. The people who had been in the foyer were crowding around the open doors, straining their necks to look in on the chaos. Gregor saw that t
he tablecloth that had covered the now-shattered table was being eaten up by fire without ever having burst into flame. It was being consumed by a traveling glowing ember. Gregor went over to it, pulled the tablecloth off the wreckage, and began stepping on the glowing ember. It wouldn’t make any sense to find Bennis and then be unable to rescue her because they were both trapped in a fire.
The time to have rescued Bennis Hannaford was at least ten minutes gone. Gregor couldn’t stop himself from feeling guilty about it, in spite of the fact that he knew he couldn’t have done things any differently than he had.
“Mr. Demarkian.” Evan Walsh was tugging on his arm again.
Gregor pointed to an enormous blowup of two young girls in ragged, dirty dresses standing next to a bloody body on a dirt road.
“They were looking at that photograph, I think,” Gregor said. “At least, from where they were standing the last time I saw them, that seemed to be what they were doing. What’s underneath there?”
“Nothing,” Evan said a little wildly. “Nothing. A chair.”
Gregor had stamped out all of the ember that he could see. The floor was littered with people and debris. There was enough odd stuff under the photograph of the young girls to fill a garbage truck. There was even a person there, although it wasn’t Karla Parrish or Bennis. It was a man in a tweed sport coat, and he was crawling on his hands and knees toward the double doors.
“I’m getting out of here,” he kept muttering. “I’m getting out of here right now.”
Gregor let him go.
One of the things that was on the floor under the photograph was the remains of another photograph, its cardboard frame twisted and broken, the long sheet of photographic paper ripped at the edges but still basically in one piece.
“Help me move this,” Gregor ordered Evan. “Pick it up at the edges and lift it straight up. There may be people under there with broken bones or concussions. You don’t want to move them unnecessarily.”
“I just want to find Karla,” Evan said stubbornly. “I’ll bet you think I’m a jerk, Mr. Demarkian, but I don’t care. I don’t care if I’m being responsible or compassionate or any of those things. I just want to find Karla.”
“I don’t think you’re a jerk,” Gregor said. “I just want to find Bennis Hannaford.”
Gregor grabbed one end of the photographic paper and a piece of broken cardboard from the frame. Evan went around the other side of the pile and grabbed another.
“It was aimed at Karla, I know it,” Evan said. “People don’t like what she does. The way she exposes the injustice in the world. They’ll do anything to stop her.”
Underneath the photographic paper there were pieces of cloth and wood and paper, but underneath those there was at least one person, and that person was breathing.
“I don’t think the Rwandan revolutionary forces are going to go around setting off bombs at cocktail parties in Philadelphia,” Gregor said firmly. “I think it’s much more likely here that this was somebody after Julianne Corbett. She is a political figure.” The person he could see beneath the wood and cloth and paper did not seem to be wearing Bennis’s beautiful beaded dress.
“She’s a political figure who doesn’t do anything,” Evan said. “And what about this thing Karla wanted to talk to you about? This thing about the murder.”
“What murder?” Whoever it was was definitely breathing. Gregor kept taking handfuls of garbage and tossing them aside. Evan was standing straight up and looking at the ceiling, doing no work at all.
“The murder,” Evan insisted. “That was why she was so anxious to meet you. I told you she was anxious to meet you.”
“I think so.” Gregor honestly couldn’t remember much of anything about what he had been doing five minutes before the blast.
“It was because of this murder,” Evan insisted. “This woman named Willis. Or MacLaren. Or there were two women, Willis and MacLaren—”
“There’s one woman. Patricia MacLaren Willis.”
“Whatever. She saw it in the papers. She was all worked up about it. She wanted me to get in touch with you so she could talk to you about it, but I said you were supposed to be here, you were on the list, and she said she’d wait.”
“Do you know what it was she wanted to say?”
“No,” Evan admitted. “She just kept laughing and saying that it was impossible. Patsy MacLaren couldn’t have murdered anybody. And then I said that anybody could murder somebody. They’re always saying that in, like, Psychology Today and Agatha Christie novels and all that kind of thing, and then Karla said, but yes, all right, except there are some limits, and Patsy certainly couldn’t murder anybody now. And then there were other things we had to do, you know, and we went and did them and do you think that was it? Whoever murdered Patsy MacLaren decided to get rid of Karla because of what she knew?”
“Nobody murdered Patsy MacLaren as far as we can tell. Patsy MacLaren murdered her husband. Stephen Willis.”
“Oh. And Karla knows her. Maybe that’s it. Karla thinks she’s innocent, but she isn’t, and Karla knows something about her that could be damaging, so to head her off at the pass—”
It was Evan whom Gregor had to head off at the pass. The breathing person beneath him was now clearly Karla Parrish.
The hollows of her ears were crusted with blood. Her eyes were half open and blank. Evan turned at just that moment and saw her. He jumped three inches into the air and dived toward the rubble, intending to drag her out.
“Don’t move her,” Gregor commanded. “She’s probably got a concussion, for God’s sake. You’ll make it worse.”
“I have to find out if she’s alive,” Evan insisted. “I have to know. I can’t just leave her there.”
“You have to leave her there,” Gregor insisted. “You can see that she’s alive just by looking at her. You can see that she’s breathing.”
“Look at her eyes,” Evan said. “People are dead and still breathing all the time. That’s what those right-to-life cases are all about.”
“Gregor?” Bennis Hannaford’s voice said. “Gregor, can you move her at all? Can you get me out of here?”
Gregor and Evan both looked down at the figure of Karla Parrish. The light was not wonderful in this room, and there was so much confusion. It took Gregor several seconds before he saw the glittering black beads of Bennis’s dress.
“I’m under everything,” her voice continued desperately. “Gregor, please. I feel like I’m suffocating in here. And I think I’ve broken my arm.”
“You can’t move Karla,” Evan said. “You told me yourself that could make her worse.”
“We can’t leave Bennis lying underneath her either,” Gregor said. “Would you get control of yourself?”
“I’m in as much control as anybody could be. Don’t you think for a minute that you’re in any more control than I am. If you touch her, I’m going to beat you up, Mr. Demarkian. I swear to God, I’ll beat you up.”
Evan Walsh was the kind of person men like Gregor Demarkian never paid very much attention to. Slight of body. Seemingly slight of mind. Frivolous and foppish and dandyish and just a little too feminine in an old-fashioned definition of that word, catlike in the worst sense. The eyes, though, were not the eyes of a frivolous person. Suddenly, Gregor Demarkian didn’t like Evan Walsh at all. He didn’t even like having to look at him.
“Gregor?” Bennis Hannaford said from under the body of Karla Parrish. “What is that idiot talking about? Can’t you get me out of here?”
“Just a minute,” Gregor told her.
“I’ll break your arm,” Evan Walsh told him pleasantly, smiling through his teeth. “Just you try it and see if I don’t.”
“Gregor,” Bennis said again.
They were saved by the paramedics. Julianne Corbett had followed orders. She had dialed 911, and now the emergency services came barreling through the doors like a SWAT team in white coats, and one of them even yelled, “Nobody move!”
2.
Karla Parrish had a concussion and had to be rushed to the hospital. Bennis Hannaford had a broken arm and had to be taken to the hospital too. The woman with the fake fur button was dead. A dozen people were hurt. The two uniformed police officers kept wandering around the wreckage of the living room, muttering to themselves. Gregor hung around long enough to let one of them take his name and address, and then left. The one who took his address muttered something about “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” but they both had too much on their minds to pursue it, including the possibility that the bomb that had gone off was not the only one that had been planted. After looking Gregor up and down like a prize bull, they both went off to take the names and addresses of other people, and Gregor found himself outside the town house, free to do what he thought best.
Outside on the sidewalk there were more police, and cordons holding back the crowd. The crowd was large and good-natured and unlikely to want to leave anytime soon. They were spiced with camera crews from all the local news shows and reporters with press cards in plastic envelopes on cords around their necks. The reporter from the Inquirer recognized Gregor immediately and began to gesture frantically. Gregor walked off in the other direction and had one of the cops let him through the cord and into the crowd. A camera crew from the local NBC affiliate was there, and the reporter leaned a microphone toward him as soon as he came out.
“Mr. Demarkian!” the woman said. “What can you tell us about how it felt to be at the very site of the blast?”
Why did television reporters always want to know how people felt about things? Gregor had grown up in a generation that thought of emotions as private matters, like what went on in the bathroom, and didn’t talk about them in public if they could help it. Now even the most respected news shows paraded sobbing widows and orphans in front of their cameras and asked serial killers if they felt any remorse. For Christ’s sake. If serial killers felt remorse, they wouldn’t be serial killers.