Somebody Else's Music

by Jane Haddam

  “I really hate that part of the detective novel where the detective tells his sidekick a third of everything he knows and then shuts up like a clam and acts like Buddha for fifty pages while the sidekick tears his hair trying to decipher all the Zen koans. You know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean. I’m waiting for one more piece of information, and then we’ll do all the usual things that cops like to do and you can hold a press conference to announce the arrest. How’s that?”

  “Okay unless somebody else ends up dead in the meantime,” Kyle said.

  “I absolutely promise you not to hold a party to accuse each of the suspects in turn. Some of them would probably refuse to come. And I absolutely promise you that there won’t be another death, unless it’s the death of Emma Kenyon Bligh, and the last time we heard from the hospital, that was very unlikely.”

  “Right,” Kyle said. He had pulled into a parking space against the building. It was a handicapped parking space, but he didn’t seem to care. “Dozens of people have linoleum cutters. You can buy them in any hardware store.”

  “Of course, but why would she do that? Why not use something close to hand, like a kitchen knife?”

  “Not sharp enough,” Kyle said.

  “You’re giving her too much credit. She didn’t think that far ahead. And I meant it. The forensics are hard. They take meticulous collection, and meticulous lab work. Even big-city, fully professionalized police departments screw them up. Investigation is easy. It’s just a matter of thinking clearly, and remembering that somebody can be very logical without being in the least bit rational.”

  “We’re back to Zen Buddhism again,” Kyle said.

  Gregor laughed. He popped his door open and got out. He waited for Kyle to get out and then went up the curving concrete walk to the front door.

  “With any luck,” he said, “there will be a fax waiting for me at the desk, and there will be Bennis waiting for me in the room. If we can get those two things, we can get this thing over with pretty quickly. And besides.”

  “Besides what?” Kyle said.

  “Besides. You keep forgetting that Emma Kenyon Bligh is going to wake up.”

  2

  Gregor was not sure what he was expecting when he checked in at the desk—the worst-case scenario was that Bennis had forgotten to tell anybody he might be coming, and he wouldn’t be able to get up to the room, or even in touch with her—but as it turned out he was already on record as being one of the occupants of the suite, and there was already a sheaf of messages waiting for him in the mailbox. One of them was a fax from Russ Donahue. Gregor tried to remember if he’d told Bennis to have that faxed to the hotel or to the police department, and he was fairly sure he’d asked her to have it faxed to the police department. She might have asked for it to be faxed both places just to be safe. He folded that one in squares and put it in his right hip pocket. The other message was from Jimmy Card. It included a floor number and the words “password: goldfish.”

  “Whatever,” Gregor said, frowning at the note. He put that away in his right hip pocket, too. “I think I’ll go up to the suite and see if Bennis is around to talk to,” he told Kyle Borden.

  “Ms. Hannaford has gone out,” the helpful young woman at the desk said cheerfully. “She left about two hours ago with—ah—with a friend.”

  The young woman arched her eyebrows. Gregor frowned. “A friend? How could she have left with a friend? She doesn’t know anybody in this part of Pennsylvania that I’ve heard about.”

  “She left with a woman friend,” the young woman said. Now it was her tone that was arched. Gregor was completely bewildered. “She said you’d know who it would be. Of course, under the circumstances, I couldn’t mention the name in a place where we might be overheard.”

  Light dawned. It was an idiot light, but it dawned. “Ah,” Gregor said. “All right then. Maybe I’ll go upstairs and answer my mail.”

  “I hope you have a pleasant stay,” the young woman said, cheerfully again.

  Gregor got Kyle Borden in hand and headed for the elevators, but once inside the car he didn’t press the button for the second floor, where his own suite was, but for the fourth. Kyle frowned.

  “Didn’t she say you were on the second floor?”

  “Right.”

  “Why are we going to the fourth?”

  “Because that’s where Jimmy Card and Elizabeth Toliver are. They have the entire west wing of the fourth floor.”

  “And we can just walk on there anytime we want? They don’t have any better security than that?”

  The elevator car stopped on the fourth floor. Gregor and Kyle got out onto an open foyer-type arrangement. One set of signs pointed to the east wing. One set of signs pointed to the west. Gregor went toward the west wing doors and pulled them back. They were immediately blocked by a large man in a black suit. He looked like he should be doing a bit part on The Sopranos.

  “I think you’re lost, sir,” he said, very politely, with no Brooklyn accent at all.

  “Goldfish,” Gregor said solemnly.

  “Yes, sir,” the man in black said, politely again, stepping back to let them through.

  “What was that all about?” Kyle asked as they came out onto the fourth-floor west wing itself. “I feel like I’m in a James Bond movie.”

  “Security,” Gregor said.

  It wasn’t much in the way of security. As soon as they were past the man in black, they could see Geoff DeAvecca running back and fourth between the rooms. Geoff saw them coming down the hall and veered in their direction. He came to a stop just in front of them and said, “Cool! Is that a real gun? Does it have bullets in it? Can I shoot it?”

  Kyle put his hand protectively on his gun. “I always knew there was a reason why I felt stupid wearing a holster,” he said.

  “It’s a real gun,” Gregor said, “but you can’t hold it and you can’t shoot it. It would be far too dangerous. I can’t believe your mother would approve of it.”

  “My mother doesn’t approve of Donkey Kong,” Geoff said majestically. “But she’s a girl. Jimmy likes Donkey Kong.”

  Up toward the other end of the hall, a head poked out of a door. A moment later, Mark DeAvecca’s entire body followed it, and Jimmy Card followed him. Jimmy was supposed to be the grown-up, but Mark was half a foot taller. Gregor always got the feeling that Mark was growing even taller as he watched.

  “Mr. Demarkian! What’s up? Have you seen Mom? She went out with your friend Bennis. What’re you doing? Mom says you said she isn’t a suspect anymore. Is that a real policeman?”

  “Mark, for Christ’s sake,” Jimmy said.

  “I’m just a little jumpy,” Mark said. “I don’t like the idea of her being out there on her own. She doesn’t have a lot of sense.”

  Gregor cleared his throat. It was that or laugh. “We got your note at reception. We just didn’t know what it meant. So we decided to come up here to see. Where did Liz and Bennis go, do you know?”

  “No,” Jimmy said. “We don’t. Liz wouldn’t tell me what was on her mind. She went downstairs to borrow Bennis’s car, and then she called back up here to say that Bennis was going to go with her.”

  “I figure if she wanted somebody with her, she wasn’t going to do anything stupid like commit suicide,” Mark said. “And don’t look at me like that. People do do that. They do it all the time. And she’s been depressed.”

  “She hasn’t been that kind of depressed,” Jimmy said. Then he sighed. “I don’t know what it was about. She’s been acting peculiar practically since we got here. She keeps saying she thought she knew what she heard, but now she knows she’s wrong. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No,” Gregor said, although it did. He wondered why Jimmy hadn’t thought of it, or Mark. Elizabeth Toliver had heard a voice in the woods on the night she was nailed into the outhouse and Michael Houseman died, a voice screaming “slit his throat.” She’d always said she had no idea whose voice it was, but s
he might not have been telling the truth. Gregor had always suspected she wasn’t. She hadn’t been behaving like somebody who couldn’t figure out who it was she had heard.

  “I just hope she didn’t get caught by reporters,” Jimmy said. “That’s just about all we’d need right now.”

  “She talks,” Mark said. “You wouldn’t believe it. She’s on cable news all the time and she still doesn’t get it. She just blurts it all out. But that’s not what I’m worried about. I’m worried about the murderer. That’s been the point of this exercise, hasn’t it? Somebody’s been trying to murder her? I’ve been trying to tell Jimmy that, but he won’t listen.”

  “Nobody murders somebody just because they left town after high school and got famous,” Jimmy said.

  “Those two women who drove me home would be happy to see her dead,” Mark said. “You didn’t talk to them for an hour. I did.”

  “It took an hour to drive you home from the middle of Hollman?” Jimmy said.

  “No,” Mark said. “We talked some before we went. But you ask Mr. Demarkian. I’m right, aren’t I? Somebody has been trying to kill her.”

  “No,” Gregor said.

  “This is new,” Kyle said. “Why would you think somebody wanted to kill your mother?”

  “What else could be going on?” Mark said.

  “Nobody has been trying to kill Ms. Toliver,” Gregor said firmly. “And nobody is going to be trying to kill Ms. Toliver in the foreseeable future, as far as I know. She may have enemies in New York or Connecticut that I’m unaware of, of course—”

  “Senior citizens,” Mark said solemnly. “These guys who are like sixty-five and seventy. They hate it that they’ve been sending their stories in for years and couldn’t get published and there she is. They hate losing to a girl.”

  “I don’t think that means they’d kill her,” Jimmy said.

  “Even if the killer didn’t mean to murder her in the first place,” Mark said, “couldn’t he be meaning to do that now? There has to be some reason he killed Grandma’s dog and left the body on her lawn. It’s not like Grandma’s house is convenient to anything.”

  “Maybe it is,” Jimmy said. “There could be any number of things in the area.”

  “You have to drive to all of them,” Mark said. “Ask Mr. Demarkian.”

  “Nobody is going to kill anybody for the rest of the day,” Gregor said firmly, “at least, nobody involved in this case is. You don’t have any idea at all where Ms. Toliver has gone? And Bennis?”

  “I thought she might have gone to the hospital to visit Grandma,” Mark said. “I mean, she’s been agitating over Grandma all day. I don’t know why. The woman’s a complete bitch—”

  “Jesus,” Jimmy Card said. “She’s going to blame me for your language. She always does.”

  “I’m being accurate,” Mark said. “Grandma is a bitch. Especially to Mom. It’s like she hates her or something. Except you wouldn’t think a mother would hate her own daughter, but she does. I don’t understand women. I mean, guys just do what they do, you know? Women get psychotic.”

  “Women are born psychotic,” Jimmy Card said.

  “Listen,” Gregor said. “We just came up to make sure that everything was all right. We need to get back to the hospital and see if Emma Bligh is ready to be interviewed. If you give me the number, we’ll call in when we get to the hospital. I really would like to know when you know that Bennis and Liz are all right.”

  3

  Goldfish, Gregor thought as he and Kyle went down the elevator again, this time to the second floor.

  “It’s incredible, don’t you think?” Kyle said. “A whole floor. What do you think that costs? What do you think Jimmy Card makes in a year?”

  “I think this is our floor,” Gregor said, although he had wondered the same thing.

  The elevator let them off, and they headed for the east wing. 217E was the number on Gregor’s room key, which was not a room key at all, but a little plastic square like a thick credit card. Gregor hated those.

  At 217E, Gregor got the card out and pushed it horizontally into a slot opening in the middle of the door. He pulled the card out and tried the knob. It was still locked. He put the card into the slot again and pulled it out again. He tried the knob again. It was still locked. He put the card into the slot again.

  “Here,” Kyle Borden said. “If I let you do that, we’ll be here all day.”

  Kyle pushed the card into the slot, pulled it out quickly, grabbed for the doorknob with his other hand, and turned. The knob did, indeed, turn. The door swung open.

  “How did you do that?” Gregor said.

  “You have to be fast.”

  “Obviously,” Gregor said. He pushed through the door and looked around inside. The front room was pleasantly furnished with a good carpet and decent furniture and a very impressive television set, but it was also empty. He went through it to the inner room and found that much more like what he expected. The bed was covered with clothes, all Bennis’s. There was a blue bathrobe hanging over the bathroom door that belonged to him, but it wasn’t the one he had brought with him from Cavanaugh Street. It was the one he’d left home. Bennis must have brought it.

  “I’m going to have to do something about getting hold of my clothes,” Gregor said. “They’re out at the Toliver place. I wish we knew where they’d gone.”

  “I thought you said there was nothing to worry about,” Kyle said. “You told Jimmy Card and that kid—”

  “Mark. I told them she was in no danger of getting murdered. She isn’t. There are other things to worry about. The first is the reporters. I do think they’re still around.”

  “I haven’t noticed them. Maybe they’ve gone home.”

  “What do you think the chances of that are?”

  “Nil,” Kyle said. “This morning before you got to the station, they were asking me when I was going to hold a press conference. I’ve never held a press conference in my life. I wouldn’t know how to start.”

  “When the time comes, I’ll tell you how to set up a press conference. There’s the possibility that Elizabeth Toliver has decided to act on what she knows, which is not a very good idea at all. It won’t get her killed, but it might get her tangled up in something more than she needs to be. I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman, especially not a famous woman, who is this—vulnerable—to the claims of other people. Most of them learn to put a wall up around themselves fairly early in the game. You should see Bennis when she’s attacked by what she calls a psychofan.”

  “What’s a psychofan?”

  “Somebody who dresses up like Queen Amalia and tries to talk to Bennis in Zedalian.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a long story. Let’s go back in the living room.”

  Kyle still looked bewildered, but he did as he was told. Gregor went out to the suite’s living room and pulled out one of the chairs around its oval dining table. Then he reached into his pocket to get his folded-up version of Russ Donahue’s fax. He spread it out against the table. The first page was one of those fax administrative pages and he pushed it away. The second page was full of Russ’s lawyer’s scrawl.

  Gregor, it said. I have no idea what you wanted this for, but here it is. There’s not much of it. I checked a couple of sources and they all say the same thing. We weren’t really collecting comprehensive crime records in this state back in 1969. What I was able to get were the big things that the municipal police forces thought were worthwhile to talk to Harrisburg about, but that doesn’t give you much. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. Get in touch if you need anything else. Donna and Tommy say hi. Tibor says there’s some Bible fanatic on rec.arts.mystery who claims that the King James Bible is a perfectly accurate translation of the Masoretic text, but he doesn’t even know there are two Masoretic texts. I have no idea what that means, but he said you would. Take care. Russ.

  Gregor had no idea what the Masoretic text was, never mind that there were two of them. He pu
t Russ’s note away, thinking he would get back to it, and Tibor and rec.arts.mystery and the Masoretic text, when he had a little time. There were only two more pages left, and there wasn’t much on them but bureaucratic verbiage about “felony crime reporting patterns” and “inadequacies in local law enforcement paradigms.” He got out his notebook, flipped it to a fresh page, and got out his pen.

  “So what’s that,” Kyle asked, “a list of all the crimes committed in Hollman in the last six days? What?”

  “It’s the only list available of the crimes committed in this county in July and August of 1969. It’s nowhere near comprehensive, unfortunately.”

  Kyle came and stood behind Gregor’s shoulder. “There doesn’t look like there’s much there but a lot of talk. Were there really practically no crimes here back then? I mean, even just in the last month, I could probably do you better than that in Hollman alone.”

  “In felony arrests?”

  “Oh,” Kyle said. “Well, no. We don’t really get a lot of felony arrests.”

  Gregor looked through the first page and wrote a list that said:

  July 5 Kennanburg arrest attempted murder weapon shotgun

  July 7 Kennanburg arrest murder weapon blunt instrument

  July 8 Kennanburg arrest attempted murder weapon pistol

  July 16 Kennanburg murder weapon razor

  July 17 Kennanburg arrest narcotics possession with intent to sell

  July 18 Kennanburg attempted murder weapon shotgun

  July 19 Kennanburg murder weapon razor

  July 22 Kennanburg attempted murder weapon shotgun

  He pushed that page out of the way and went through the next one. There was far less on this page. Russ was right to say they hadn’t done much about collecting crime reports in 1969. Gregor wrote down:

  August 2 Kennanburg arrest attempted murder shotgun

  August 3 Kennanburg narcotics possession with intent to sell

  August 12 Kennanburg arrest murder weapon pistol