by Jane Haddam
Gregor gave one more thought to his trenchcoat, still hanging in the closet in the little guest room out at the Toliver House. He stepped out into the wet, and slammed the door behind himself. Then he turned and made a run for the Country Crafts porch. When he got up onto the porch itself, Kyle was waiting for him.
“I hate this weather,” Kyle said.
Gregor thought, not for the first time, that it was a good thing the store had an OPEN sign to hang in the window, because there would be no way otherwise to tell if the store was open or shut. He wondered why the Blighs hadn’t retrofitted the house with real display windows and a glass front door. Kyle held the front door open and let him through. Gregor went in and was caught, yet again, by the amount of froufrou and knickknacks and sheer clutter everywhere.
Emma Kenyon Bligh was at the back of the store, polishing shelves. She looked up when they came in, then turned away quickly. Kyle and Gregor walked to the back to where she was.
“Don’t bother,” she said when they came close. “I talked it over with George last night. I don’t have to talk to you if I don’t want to. I can have the lawyer here to listen in to anything I have to say.”
“Jesus Christ,” Kyle said. “I’m not asking you for a statement, Emma. I’m just trying to nail down a couple of times for yesterday afternoon. This is Gregor Demarkian.”
“We’ve met,” Emma said. “Well, I mean, we haven’t been formally introduced. He was in here a couple of days ago. How do you do.”
She held out her hand. Gregor took it and kept his mouth shut.
“Mark DeAvecca said that you and Belinda gave him a ride yesterday,” Kyle said. “You and Belinda did give him a ride, right? From the library?”
“Oh, yes,” Emma said. “We did that. And we didn’t even get out of the car, so you don’t need to start thinking I killed Chris while we were at it. Belinda will back me up. We never got out of the car.”
Kyle sighed. “If I were you, I wouldn’t use Belinda frigging Hart as an alibi. She’ll forget what day of the week it was. What time was this, anyway?”
“Three o’clock, maybe quarter after. I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Was the store closed?” Gregor put in.
Emma looked up from the pile of porcelain display plates she was wiping off and said, “My husband was minding the store. Usually he does real estate, but he didn’t have any appointments yesterday afternoon. Why do you let him ask questions? Aren’t you royally upset that some hotshot from Philadelphia is coming down here and telling you how to run your police department?”
“I could use a few more. Mr. Demarkian is usually very expensive, and this time he’s agreed to work cheap. Why’d you have Belinda with you? She has her own car.”
“We weren’t in the car,” Emma said patiently. “At least not originally. George came and took over the store to give me a break, and I ran across the street to see if Belinda had a minute to talk.”
“And?” Kyle said.
Emma got the last of the plates wiped off and put back on the shelf. She leaned forward and put her palms down flat on the floor. Then she put her weight on her hands and slowly began to twist her body until her knees were on the carpet. This, Gregor realized, was what she needed to do to get up.
Emma shrugged. “And nothing. He was there, Mark what’s-his-name. Sitting at one of the big round tables in the front room reading something really weird. And Belinda said he was Betsy’s son.”
“And?”
“You can’t just go on saying ‘and’ all the time, Kyle,” Emma said. “It sounds stupid. And nothing, I suppose. We were curious. Belinda and me both. About what he was like. He looked—expensive, if you know what I mean. I mean, he wasn’t wearing anything in particular, just jeans and one of those, what do you call them, polo shirts. But you could tell he came from money. He had that kind of aura.”
Emma started moving toward the front of the store, and they moved with her. She went behind the counter and arranged a few things there, needlessly. Kyle came up and pushed a box of pipe cleaners out of the way so that he could lean on his elbow.
“So then what?” he said. “Did you just go up to Mark and haul him off to your car? How did you end up driving him home?”
“It was just one of those things,” Emma said. “Belinda really wanted to talk to him, but you know what she’s like. And he kept looking up at the clock. So I sort of drifted over to him and the next time he looked I asked him if there was anything wrong. And we got to talking. And that’s how we ended up offering him a ride out to Betsy’s house. Her mother’s house. You know what I mean.”
“I’m surprised he let you take him,” Gregor said.
“Well, Betsy was late,” Emma said. “She’d forgotten all about him. Which is typical, if you want to know what I think. And anyway, he seemed to have heard all about us.”
“Did he really?” Gregor asked.
“Well, he knew I’d been captain of the varsity cheer-leading squad in high school, and he knew Belinda had been homecoming queen our senior year. Belinda and I thought Betsy must have been talking to him. It seemed odd at first, you know, because if I’d been like Betsy was in high school, I’d never have mentioned it to anybody for the rest of my life. But I think he must have seen her old yearbooks, or something, because he knew an awful lot.”
“He’s a bright kid,” Gregor said.
Emma shrugged. “He’s weird, really. Just like she was, except that he’s less, I don’t know, less prickly. More sure of himself. She was always cringing around, acting like a big crybaby. He’s almost—if it wasn’t for the books and that stuff I’d have thought he was popular, you know, wherever he went to school.”
“So,” Kyle said. “You got to talking to him, and Belinda got to talking to him, and you offered him a ride home. And he accepted.”
“Yes. Well, you know, Laurel, the librarian. She promised to tell his mother where he’d gone if Betsy came in looking for him, and she told him she knew who we were, and that kind of thing. And then he accepted.”
“Good,” Kyle said. “So, you all went around where, to the back of Country Crafts, to get your car?”
“Right.”
“And Belinda just came along for the ride because she was curious?” Kyle said.
“We were both still pretty curious. We thought maybe Betsy had gone home and gotten tied up and not gotten to the library in time, and we would get there and she would be in the house and we would see her. I’d give a lot to actually be able to see her. In the flesh, if you know what I’m saying.”
“But she wasn’t home,” Kyle said.
Emma shook her head. “Nobody was home. It was disappointing. There we were, out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Mark didn’t invite you inside?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, he invited us,” Emma said. “He even offered to make us coffee, although I don’t know how a man is going to make coffee. You see all these chefs in famous restaurants who are men, but they’re all gay, and I could tell right off Mark wasn’t gay. And there didn’t seem to be any point. If Betsy had come home and found us sitting at her kitchen table, she’d have thought we were lying in wait for her.”
“Right,” Kyle said. “Did you pull into the driveway, or did you park out on the street?”
“We parked out in front. I hate that driveway. It’s too long.”
“Could you see down the driveway?” Gregor asked.
Emma shook her head. “If you mean, did we see Chris’s car, the answer is no. But why would it be out there, anyway ? Nobody was home.”
“Chris could have just arrived and not realized nobody was home,” Kyle said. “She could have been parked out there meaning to knock on the kitchen door, and when she did nobody would have been there. So—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Emma said. “If she’d been there and been just getting out of her car, she’d have heard us. Mark stayed on the walk for a good minute talking to us before he went inside, a
nd we sat watching him until he was safely in the house, too. You know how you do that. But he’s got a really loud voice, and there isn’t anything else around there. She’d have heard. She’d have come around to see.”
“Maybe she was already back in her car and on the way out,” Gregor suggested.
“Then we’d have seen her come out,” Emma said. “I told you. We sat there waiting until we were sure he was back in the house. It’s a long drive, but it’s not Manderley, for God’s sake.”
“Right,” Kyle said.
“Face it,” Emma said. “Chris wasn’t there when we were. Why don’t you ask Dan what he was doing that afternoon ? Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? The husband is the one who’s always responsible.”
“He was in Hawaii,” Kyle said. “At some kind of medical convention.”
“Maybe he hired a hit man,” Emma said. “I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s cold as anything. She wasn’t there when we were there. If she was, we would have seen her, one way or the other.”
Of course, Gregor thought, there was always the possibility that Chris Inglerod had been there when they were there, but hadn’t been alive—or alive enough to let them know where she was. It was always so hard, in real life, to establish where anybody was, and when. It was only in murder mysteries that the detective could construct a timetable, and all the times on it would come out right.
3
Belinda Hart Grantling’s apartment turned out to be barely half a block up Grandview Avenue, in one of those brick storefront buildings whose false fronts made it difficult to know just how many stories they really were. In this case, Gregor found, there were two, the one that held the store on the ground floor, and the one reached by a single, narrow staircase to the left of the store’s front door. It was the kind of climb that needed a landing. The ground-floor story must have had fairly high ceilings, because the railing was needed as much to help the ascender pull himself up as to steady him on the way down. It was also absolutely dark. There was a single bare lightbulb in the ceiling of the floor above, but it was inadequate for anything but a horror movie special effect. Gregor was winded before he’d gotten a third of the way to the top.
Gregor thought he might do nothing more than see spots, but they were at the top of the stairs, finally, and he had a chance to stand still and breathe in. When Bennis was first quitting smoking, she used to say that there were times when she thought she would never be able to get enough air. He thought he now knew what she meant.
Kyle Borden knocked hard on the single door on the floor. Gregor heard a bustling and a coughing on the other side of the door.
“If you’ve lost your keys again, I’m going to scream,” a woman said, and then the door swung back, and Gregor was faced with one of the oddest-looking people he had ever seen. In some ways, she was still a child. Her dress was frilly and pastel. Her hair was dyed blond and curled up and back in a way that was thirty years out-of-date, and even when it had been in style it had been a style for a teenager. In other ways, she was peculiarly ancient. Her skin was a mass of wrinkling and deep trenches. Her hair was far too thin on her scalp. Her eyes drooped. She looked them up and down and said, “Kyle, for God’s sake. I thought you were Maris. Come on in. Who’s your friend?”
“Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.
“He’s a consultant,” Kyle said, coming in and signaling Gregor to come after him. “He’s a consultant to the police department. We thought you might be at work.”
“I’m only at work sometimes,” Belinda said. “Honestly. It’s only fifty dollars a week, and no matter how I try, I can’t get anything else. How I’m supposed to live on fifty dollars a week, I don’t know.”
“Did you say that Ms. Coleman lost her keys?” Gregor asked.
Belinda blinked. “Oh. Well, I don’t know. I mean, she did, about a week ago, when she first came. Lost them in the Sycamore one night when we were all there to catch up, you know. Before Betsy Wetsy came back to town. We all went one afternoon right about five, and of course I drove her, because Maris won’t drive, even though the car she’s got is better than mine, it’s new and mine has a hundred thousand miles on it. She didn’t even realize she’d lost them for two days, and then she had to go back over everything and trace her steps and like that, and I had to drive her out to the Sycamore, and there they were. It’s just selfishness, if you ask me. She just likes riding around like she’s got a chauffeur. It drives me crazy.”
By now, Gregor and Kyle were fully into the apartment.
“Listen,” Kyle said. “Maris had her keys last night, didn’t she?”
Belinda blinked again. “I suppose so. I don’t know. I didn’t see her. She went out to Betsy Wetsy’s around five o’clock or so and she didn’t come back. She probably spent the night over there. She’s got to suck up to Betsy because Betsy has money now. It really isn’t fair.”
“Right,” Kyle said.
Belinda sat down in a big overstuffed armchair upholstered in white violets and cherries on twigs and gestured for the two of them to sit down, too. “This is all my own furniture,” she said. “I brought it from the house. It was all I could hold on to. It was terrible the way that worked out. He should have been arrested.”
“What did he do?” Gregor asked, curious.
“He refused to go on paying the mortgage,” Belinda said. “He just stopped paying it, as soon as he moved out. The bank came and padlocked the house. It was humiliating. The only good thing was that Hayley was grown and out on her own, because if she’d still been a child I think I would have killed him. And then the lawyer said there was nothing I could do about it. It was only his name on the deed and only his name on the mortgage. Imagine that. I mean, of course I didn’t work when Hayley was small. I’m not one of those lesbian feminists like Betsy Wetsy. But everybody knows that a husband and a wife own everything together. That’s what marriage is all about.”
Kyle cleared his throat. Gregor sat down on the edge of the couch, which was some kind of pink.
“So,” Kyle said. “We were just over talking to Emma. About how you and she took Mark DeAvecca home from the library yesterday.”
“DeAvecca? Is that his name? I thought his name was Toliver. Betsy Wetsy kept her name after she got married. I read it in the newspapers.”
“Just because she kept her own name doesn’t mean her children wouldn’t have her husband’s name,” Kyle said patiently. “Now, the thing is—”
“I think it’s really terrible, the way she behaves,” Belinda said. “I mean, who is she, anyway? She’s nobody at all. Nobody even said hello to her in high school except to tell her what a jerk she was being. It’s Maris who should be the famous one.”
“Right,” Kyle said.
“And I do know Maris drinks,” Belinda said. “I’m not that stupid. But I know why she drinks, Kyle Borden, and so do you. She drinks because she can’t stand seeing what Betsy Wetsy’s done, that’s why. It isn’t fair.”
Kyle cleared his throat again. Gregor bit his lip.
“Belinda,” Kyle said. “About yesterday afternoon. You and Emma took Mark back to the Toliver house, from the library.”
“Right,” Belinda said. “I was getting off work. We wanted to know what Mark was like. He was terrible. I really hated him. He was such a snot. I told him all about Hayley and you could see he was impressed, but he wouldn’t say so. He just went on about the library and how he couldn’t find this book.”
“What book?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t know,” Belinda said. “I never spend much time with books except, you know, at work, and then I don’t read them. They give me a headache. It was a book about carpentry, I think.”
“Carpentry?” Gregor asked.
“It had carpenter in the title,” Belinda said. “He couldn’t find it. He went looking for it, and he got Laurel to help him, but she had to tell him we didn’t have it. We used to have it, and it was in the card catalogue, but it disappeared and we neve
r got it back, because nobody used to take it out anyway. Honestly, you’d think, with a book on carpentry, at least some people would want to take it out. At least it was about something useful. It wasn’t like Betsy Wetsy’s books. They’re just a lot of bull about what everybody thinks and why they think it and how we’re all too stupid for liking to wear makeup and going on diets.”
“You’ve read one of Betsy’s books?” Kyle said.
Belinda shrugged. “Parts of one. It wasn’t a whole book straight through. It had chapters in it that were separate, you know, and not all about the same thing.”
“Essays,” Gregor suggested.
Belinda shrugged again. “Something. It was stupid. The first chapter was all about high school, and how we all have this sound track to our lives like our lives were a movie, and so instead of really living we have other people’s words and emotions and, I don’t remember. It was really, really stupid. It was like she was saying we shouldn’t ever listen to music except maybe classical music. Or like that.”
“Right,” Kyle said.
“It was stupid,” Belinda repeated.
“Look,” Kyle said. “About driving Mark DeAvecca out to the Toliver house. We’re trying to get a few things straightened out. Emma says it was around three. Is that right?”
“It was a little before,” Belinda said. “Betsy Wetsy had gone and abandoned him, so Emma and I decided to take him home.”
“Okay,” Kyle said. “Now. You take him out to the Toliver house, and then what?”
“He asked us in for some coffee, but Emma wouldn’t go,” Belinda said. “I thought she was being stupid, myself. I would have loved to go in. Betsy Wetsy could have come home anytime and then we’d be able to see for ourselves.”
“But she didn’t come home,” Gregor said.
“No, she didn’t, and we didn’t even get out of the car.” Belinda pouted. “We just stayed parked there at the curb while Emma talked to Mark, which was awful, because he’s just like Betsy Wetsy was. Stuck-up. Snotty. You wouldn’t believe the books he had. I don’t think anybody ever really reads books like that. They just pretend to.”