by Jane Haddam
“I come from Armonk, New York.”
“Well,” Nancy said.
“Armonk is not what I’d call cosmopolitan,” David Asch said. “Although it certainly is a good deal more sophisticated than this area around here. We moved here so that I could teach at UP-Johnstown. I have another year to go on my contract and then I’ll be gone. That will be Diane’s senior year.”
“What do you teach?”
“Psychology,” David Asch said. “But I’m not a clinical psychologist. I’m a behavioral one. I deal in statistics and probabilities. I don’t have much use for touchy-feely. Do you know what this is?” He took a thick wad of paper out of the attache’ case and dropped it down on the middle of her desk.
“No,” Nancy said.
“It’s a copy of the summary of the police report on the murder of one Michael Houseman, until last night the most famous crime to have been committed in this town. It’s not hard to get hold of, by the way. It’s a public record. I actually obtained it nearly six months ago, after that incident when two girls pushed Diane into the trash Dumpster out by the athletic field and then piled the door of it with heavy objects so that she couldn’t get out. Do you remember that incident?”
“Yes,” Nancy said. “We did—”
“You did nothing,” David Asch said. “My wife came in to see you at the time. You gave her a lecture on how we should send Diane to therapy to ‘help her with her problem.’”
“She does have a problem,” Nancy said. “She has several of them. And we did try to do something about the incident with the Dumpster, we just couldn’t—”
“Prove who had done it? Yes, of course. Except that Diane told you who had done it.”
“We can’t initiate disciplinary proceedings that might end in expulsion on one student’s say-so,” Nancy said. “And that’s especially so in this case, because Diane has an almost paranoid obsession with the girls she accused—”
“Diane has an obsession?”
“Yes, she does. She—”
“They follow her around while she tries to avoid them. That doesn’t sound to me like she has an obsession. It sounds to me like they have an obsession. Just as it sounds to me like they have a problem. Not Diane.”
“I realize that as her father—”
David Asch leaned forward and flipped open the report. “I bookmarked the page for you,” he said. “And I highlighted the relevant passages. Don’t worry about making a mess of it. I made copies. One to leave with you. One to keep for myself. One to give to other people.”
“What other people?”
“This morning, I gave it to a reporter for the National Enquirer that I met in JayMar’s. He wasn’t keeping it to himself. We had a very nice talk, he and I. About you. And Elizabeth Toliver. And Diane. Do you know what a parallel case is?”
“Nobody listens to the supermarket tabloids,” Nancy said stiffly.
“Oh, everybody listens to them,” David Asch said. “But I’m not leaving it at that. My old college roommate now works on the national desk of the New York Times. I’ve talked to him, too. I talked to him a good long time ago, if you want to know the truth, but now the—problem—with Diane is newsworthy. You’re newsworthy. And that makes all the difference.”
“I don’t see what you think you’re going to accomplish,” Nancy said, and now she was not just stiff. She was frantic. “I really can’t make the other girls like her. I can’t do anything. What do you think it’s going to get you to blackmail me?”
“I’m not blackmailing you,” David Asch said. Then he laughed. That wasn’t very nice, either. “I wouldn’t bother to blackmail you. There’s no point. I’m not telling you what I’ll do if you don’t help Diane. I’m telling you what I’ve already done. Oh, I’ll do a little more of it. There’s no reason not to. But by and large, it’s already done.”
“I don’t get it,” Nancy said. “I really don’t understand what you want. What’s the point here? What are you trying to accomplish?”
“Let’s just say payback’s a bitch,” David Asch said. He was still smiling when he stood up. “The year after next, we’ll be gone, Diane will be at a good college and I’ll never have to speak to you again. But it would be interesting to see if I can get you fired long before that. Don’t you think?”
He closed the attache’ case and picked it up. The report was still lying in the middle of Nancy’s desk. He made no move to take it. Nancy thought the air was waving, but she couldn’t be sure. It was hard to tell what was going on in the real world, and what was just her mind, reeling. She’d heard about minds reeling, but she’d never believed they actually did, until now.
A second later she looked up and was surprised to see that she was alone. David Asch had left without saying good-bye, or taking her hand, or doing any of those other things that are required by politeness. The rain outside was coming down harder than ever, and the thunder was harsh and close. The only light in the world came from the lightning that broke out in sheets to backlight the sky. This cannot be happening to me, she thought.
Then she put her head down on her desk and closed her eyes.
FIVE
1
The rain got worse. Gregor had never seen so much rain. He kept worrying about floods, but nobody else seemed to. Even Bennis ignored the weather, except to say once or twice how awful it had been to drive in it. Kyle Borden ran in and out of the station house as if nothing were going on. When the thunder got bad enough to rattle windows, Sharon Morobito complained that the storm might take out the power.
Bennis got on the phone and found them a hotel room. “I knew you wouldn’t think of it,” she said, heading off to a spare desk in the big outside room with a list of hotels made out by Kyle Borden. He’d put little stars next to the ones he thought were “expensive,” which included the Ramada Inn. “You’d have gotten to tonight and then realized you didn’t have anyplace to stay, and by the time you went looking everything would be booked up, and then you’d be stuck in some fleabag on a back road somewhere, wondering why you couldn’t sleep.”
“We could just go back to the Toliver house,” Gregor said. “Somebody ought to. If they leave that place empty overnight, somebody is going to break into it.”
“Somebody probably already has,” Bennis said. “And I don’t want to go back to the Toliver house. I’ve never been there in the first place. I’ve never met the woman. And what would I say? Hello, Ms. Toliver, I’m Bennis Hannaford. I used to be your lover’s lover.”
“She isn’t worried about you,” Gregor said calmly. “She’s worried about somebody named Julie.”
“Julie Handley, yes. She’s a supermodel. I’d worry about her, too. Jimmy was married to her. She was in Sports Illustrated.”
“Why was a supermodel in Sports Illustrated? Was she in the Olympics before she started modeling?”
Bennis and Kyle Borden both gave him very odd looks, and then Bennis disappeared, mumbling to herself as she went. Kyle pulled out a piece of paper and started to make a list.
“The real problem is not knowing where Betsy Toliver went,” he said. “There are things here from last night that I’d like to nail down. Are they going to skip town, do you think?”
“They weren’t meaning to,” Gregor told him. “At the house this morning, they were talking about finding a hotel in the vicinity so that they’d be available for the investigation. From what I’ve seen of Elizabeth Toliver, she probably meant it. I’ve never seen enough of Jimmy Card to even guess what he’d do.”
“There aren’t a lot of places in the vicinity,” Kyle Borden said. “Especially not ones that a big pop star would want to go to. We could call around.”
“They’d be crazy not to use an assumed name,” Gregor said.
“Right,” Kyle Borden said. He looked down at the piece of paper he had placed on his desk. “Okay, first person I want to talk to is Mark DeAvecca, and I can’t. Next people I want to talk to are Emma Kenyon and Belinda Hart. That’s right,
isn’t it? That’s who he said gave him a ride home from the library?”
“That’s what he said. And they were stupid.”
“At his age, all adults are stupid,” Kyle said. “Except Belinda really is stupid. I don’t mean mentally retarded or like that. She’s just stupid. It’s incredible to try to talk to her.”
“She can’t be too stupid, can she? She was one of the girls that night in the park?”
“You think she couldn’t be stupid and be one of the girls that night in the park?”
“No, I mean they’d all graduated from high school, from what I remember,” Gregor said. “So she couldn’t be too stupid. She graduated from high school.”
Kyle Borden snorted. “Listen,” he said, “it isn’t the Main Line out here. You could graduate high school with a brick for a brain if you were just willing to slog it out. And she did slog it out. I think she did a couple of years at a community college or a secretarial school or something afterward, too. Not that it mattered. She got married as soon as she could. He divorced her as soon as she got a little saggy and he got a little itchy turning forty. When you marry a woman because she’s got perfect skin, the relationship has a short trajectory.”
“She had perfect skin, I take it,” Gregor said.
“She had perfect everything. You should have seen her. I can still remember the first time I saw her. Perfect skin. Big china-blue eyes. These days, she’d probably go off to New York to see if she could be a model, except maybe she’s not tall enough. But there wasn’t anything else there. None of them are too bright, except for Maris, but Belinda is—whatever.”
Gregor looked down at Kyle’s piece of paper. He’d written the three names in a line: Mark DeAvecca, Belinda Hart, Emma Kenyon. He knew that Emma Kenyon’s married name was Bligh. He wondered if Belinda Hart used her married name, too.
“So,” he said. “This Emma Kenyon we’re talking to. That’s the one at the Country Crafts store I went into in town?”
“That’s the one. She’s easy to find. The store used to be their house—the Kenyons’ house, I mean. Emma grew up there. When she got older and her father died, her mother turned it into that little store, and then when her mother wanted to retire Emma and George took over the store and moved into the rooms above it. George works a little real estate at an agency on Grandview. We can go right over.”
“What about Belinda Hart?”
“She lives in an apartment in a building near English Drugs,” Kyle said.
“Does she work?”
“At the library. I don’t know if today is one of her days. The thing is, though, Maris Coleman is staying with her. It’s kind of weird, really. Maris doesn’t usually stay there because, you know, it’s hard to stay there and not go nuts.”
“So why is she staying there?”
Kyle shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe because Nancy Quayde bought a house out in Stony Hill last year. Nancy used to live in town, you know, so Maris could walk—”
“She doesn’t drive?”
“Well,” Kyle said cautiously, “she used to. And she does have a car, nice rental Volkswagen, one of those new bugs. She’s got it parked back of English Drugs. So I suppose she’s still got a driver’s license. All you have to do to keep that up is show up to have your picture taken once a year. But she doesn’t drive when she comes here.”
“Why not?”
“You ever seen her one hundred percent sober?”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“Like I said, Maris isn’t stupid. A bitch of legendary proportions, maybe, but not stupid.”
“Well, at least they’re together in one place,” Gregor said. “Maybe we can get to both of them at once.”
“We ought to talk to Nancy Quayde, too,” Kyle said. “She was Chris’s best friend, all the way back to when we were all in kindergarten. Dan will be back from Hawaii today. We can talk to him. Then I guess we should think about talking to Peggy Smith. Do you really think this is going to turn out to be about what happened back in 1969?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t either. Peggy was there. Peggy was a part of that popular crowd, but she’s sort of out of it these days.”
“Why?”
“Married a guy from our class. He drinks himself blind, stokes himself up on cocaine, and beats the crap out of her. If we could ever catch him with dope on him, we’d send him away, and maybe she could get free. But don’t count on it. I’ve been out there myself half a dozen times when she’s had to go to the emergency room and she will not rat on him. Will not.”
“That’s a syndrome, you know,” Gregor said. “There are therapists—”
“Yeah, well,” Kyle said, “that’s all well and good, but when you’re standing in the emergency room at three o’clock in the morning it doesn’t help you much. He blames her for us coming out to begin with, even though she never calls. The neighbors hear it and they call, but Stu won’t listen. If we arrest him, he’ll blame her for that, too, and if we can’t get him successfully prosecuted or she insists on taking him back home he’s only going to beat her up worse because of it. You tell me how to handle that, Mr. Demarkian, I’d love to know.”
“Gregor,” Gregor said.
“Here’s the thing,” Kyle said. “Peggy Smith doesn’t have a car. Stu won’t let her have one. I think he thinks that if she did have one she’d get in it one day and take off, and he can’t have that. She supports him.”
“Does he have one?”
“Yeah,” Kyle said, “but don’t go jumping to conclusions. He keeps the keys on a chain around his neck. I suppose she could get hold of them if he passed out cold, but you’d be amazed with these guys. They don’t pass out cold all that often. You’d think they’d spend their whole lives passed out cold.”
“They learn to accommodate the alcohol,” Gregor said.
“Nancy Quayde picks her up every morning and takes her to school, because now that the school is out in Plumtrees, she can’t just walk there.”
“What about, who is this, Belinda Hart? Does she have a car?”
“Little Escort, bright blue. Keeps it parked behind English Drugs, and they let her. Because they’ve known her forever. They knew her parents.”
“So,” Gregor said, pulling a chair out of the corner of the room and sitting down himself. “Let’s see what we’ve got. Belinda Hart, Emma Kenyon, Nancy Quayde, Elizabeth Toliver, all have cars and can drive them. Peggy Smith and Maris Coleman can drive, but Peggy Smith doesn’t have access to a car, and Maris Coleman tries never to drive hers.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “Elizabeth Toliver’s mother’s house isn’t within walking distance of town. It isn’t within walking distance of anything. That means that to get there, to kill the dog, to kill Chris Inglerod Barr, somebody had to drive. And we know already that some of them did drive. Emma Kenyon and Belinda Hart gave Mark DeAvecca a ride back out there from the library. They went out of their way to do it, because they both live in town. They could just have been being helpful, or they could have been driving out to Stony Hill to see somebody else, or they could just have been curious about what Mark was like. Maybe they were even hoping to see his mother.”
“You’d think they’d want to stay the hell away from her,” Kyle said, “but I know what you mean.”
“It’s too bad about the way the dog was found. Anyone could have put it there at any time. It’s all well and good to say that the dog was still alive when it was found, but we’ve got no way of proving that. I wonder if there’s some kind of significance about late afternoons.”
“It’s a time when most people are able to take off work if they really want to?” Kyle suggested.
Bennis came in from the other room. “There’s a Radisson,” she said. “I got us a suite. If Elizabeth Toliver and Jimmy have any sense, they’ll be there, too. I couldn’t find another place within a hundred miles that had suites at all. Mostly, what you’ve got here is
Holiday Inn.”
“I like Holiday Inn,” Gregor said.
“I know you do. I like suites. I’m going to drive out there and register. We’ll be under the name Mr. and Mrs. Tibor Kasparian.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Gregor said.
“I was just picking something everybody could remember. It would be nice if you could come on out for dinner and like that this evening, just so I could see you. It was your idea to have me come out there. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Borden.”
“It was nice to meet you, too,” Kyle Borden said.
Bennis gave Gregor a peck on the cheek. “Talk to you later,” she said. She turned around and went quickly out of the door. The reporters were gone.
Gregor sat back and wished that he’d remembered to grab his raincoat before bolting out of Elizabeth Toliver’s house.
2
They went to Emma Kenyon Bligh’s place first, because it was one of the closest, and because she was the most likely to be where she was supposed to be.
“We could try Belinda,” Kyle said as he eased one of Hollman’s two police cars out onto Grandview Avenue. “She’s just up the block. Thing is, though, she might be at work, or out at the mall, or anyplace. I think she’d live at the mall if she could afford it. And Peggy’ll be teaching until three.”
Gregor thought that Grandview Avenue in the rain was much like Grandview Avenue in the sunlight, except that it had a faintly biblical air about it. God was mightily displeased , Gregor thought, and then got an image of Hollman in a deluge, rowboats drifting through the water between the tops of nineteenth-century false-front commercial buildings.
Kyle found a parking space as close to Country Crafts as he could. “It’s a good thing for the rain,” he said. “Grandview is usually parked solid this time of day. I hate parking in the lot at English Drugs.”