Hearts of Sand: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian Novels)

by Jane Haddam

  “All right,” Gregor said. “So you brought it in here. I didn’t think you liked cats.”

  “I don’t mind them,” Bennis said. “And we couldn’t just leave it out there to die. We called the vet, and we’ve given it something to eat, but Donna went to get a cat carrier so that we can get it some medical attention. The vet says it sounds like it might be feral.”

  “Which means?”

  “Cats that have gone back to the wild, who have never lived with people. But if the mother cat had the litter under our front porch, the kittens might not have seen people but the mother cat might have, so—”

  “All right, I can see that.”

  “It is all right, Gregor, I promise you. I don’t intend to stick you with a cat. We’re just going to take it to the vet’s and then when it’s all right medically, we’ll feed it for a while and find somebody to adopt it. Maybe Tibor can adopt it. He likes cats. And the apartment is big enough.”

  “You’ll have to ask Tibor about that,” Gregor said. “And the cat seems to be reemerging.”

  Bennis got up to look. The cat was coming out on very wobbly legs. She picked it up and held it close to her chest, stroking its head. It curled up against her, and its shaking seemed to get less violent.

  “Well,” Gregor said.

  “Oh, I know,” Bennis said. “You think I’ve gone completely out of my mind. But it’s really not anything like that. And I promise you, the house will not take forever.”

  The kitchen door rattled and Donna Moradanyan Donahue burst in, carrying three cat carriers and another pile of blankets, and being trailed by a small boy who looked as if his day had suddenly become not boring.

  TWO

  1

  Gregor Demarkian always thought of Patrick Hallihan as living “in Philadelphia.” Technically, however, Patrick lived in a township just past the proper city limits, in a big apartment complex that stretched out across blocks like an upscale housing project. The name of the apartment complex was Drexelbrook, and Gregor tended to think of the entire town by that same name. He had no idea if this was right or not. The cabdrivers knew how to get him to Drexelbrook, and that was all that mattered.

  Of course, a cab all the way out here was enormously expensive, but for some reason Gregor didn’t care this morning. This morning the sky was black and everything looked apocalyptically dismal. Gregor was sure that somewhere, somehow, Cassandra had returned in the flesh to warn the populace about the coming doom.

  The cab left him at the curb. The building was a bit of a walk down a narrow concrete pathway. Gregor wished he’d brought his Windbreaker as well as his umbrella.

  He went down the path and into the foyer. The fresh flowers were really there. The air-conditioning was on much too high. He went to the call board and buzzed Patrick’s apartment, only to get a lilting female voice saying, “If that’s you, prove it.”

  Gregor said, “Good morning, Lillian. I don’t know how to prove it.”

  “Honestly, Gregor,” Lillian said. “You wouldn’t know you’d been in the FBI for twenty years. You wouldn’t know it about Patrick, either. Don’t either of you ever watch television?”

  Gregor made his way across the lobby to the elevators. When the elevator doors opened, he punched the button for the third floor. The lobby itself was absolutely empty, and it had been absolutely empty every single time Gregor was ever in it. In fact, now that he thought of it, every apartment building lobby he had ever been in was empty, except the ones with doormen, and those didn’t count. It made him wonder why there were apartment building lobbies.

  When he came off the elevator, Patrick was standing in the hall waiting for him, holding open the door of his apartment. Gregor shook the water off his shoulders and hurried up a little.

  “I think I’m losing my mind,” he said. “I’m thinking about apartment building lobbies.”

  “What?” Patrick said.

  “And Bennis has a cat,” Gregor said.

  Patrick stepped back to let Gregor through the door. “I wouldn’t have thought Bennis was a cat person,” he said.

  “She isn’t,” Gregor said. “She found it under our porch. It looked half dead, so she brought it inside. It was pitiful.”

  Lillian was putting out a coffeepot and cups on the living room coffee table. She was all dressed up like a housewife in a ’50s sitcom.

  “You two should watch television,” she said. “You’d find out how you’re supposed to behave. I’ve never known a law enforcement officer in my life who knew how to behave.”

  “She watches CSI,” Patrick said. “I try to talk her out of it.”

  “I left all that stuff on the wingback chair,” Lillian said. “I’m going to run out to the grocery store. You’d think once you people retired, you’d stay retired.”

  Gregor and Patrick waited while Lillian went through the door to another room and then reemerged in a good London Fog raincoat. She waggled her fingers at them and headed out the front door.

  Then Patrick looked at Gregor and shrugged.

  “You might as well sit down and have some coffee,” he said. “I don’t know how much use I’m going to be able to be to you. It’s been a long time.”

  Gregor sat down on the love seat. Patrick sat down on the couch. They both looked at the stack of papers and notebooks and journals on the wingback chair. Then Patrick picked up the coffeepot and started pouring.

  “So,” he said, “I take it this is official. You’ve been hired to look into this.”

  “I’ve been hired as a consultant by the Alwych Police Department, yes,” Gregor said, “to help them look into what really does seem to be the deliberate and planned murder of Chapin Waring. The deliberate and planned murder of a ghost, was what the police chief told me when he called. Then I got a call from the Bureau’s New York office, asking me to be their liaison, or something. I insisted that Alwych had to know up front. Nobody was happy, but everybody’s going forward at the moment.”

  “Well, you can’t really blame the New York office,” Patrick said, handing Gregor his full cup. “It was one of the most famous cases they’ve had since the sixties, and the best anybody will say about it is that they botched it. That I botched it. You do know that was the reason I retired?”

  “I’d heard something about it.”

  “Elizabeth may have been sick then,” Patrick said. “I always forget that you spent the last year on the job more than a little distracted. Even though part of me says that there wasn’t anything we could have done that we didn’t do. You don’t come into a bank robbery case thinking that the bank robbers are a couple of rich kids who happen to be bored.”

  “Is that what you think happened? Chapin Waring and this other person—”

  “Martin Veer.”

  “Martin Veer. They were bored?”

  “Well, Gregor, what else would it have been? We looked into them at the time it all blew up in our faces, but there wasn’t any indication that either of them needed money. And then, you know, the whole thing was just bizarre.”

  “The whole thing?”

  Patrick nodded vigorously. “The Bureau got called in on the bank robberies on the third one. Not that we weren’t investigating the first two, because we were, but the third one was what started the special investigation. Before that, it looked to us like normal bank robberies. Except it didn’t.”

  “This isn’t making sense,” Gregor said.

  “There were two bank robberies in two different towns in Connecticut, Fairfield and Greenwich. Two perpetrators, both dressed head to toe in black like they were in some commando ops movie. They went in. They waved guns around. They got the money and put it into their own bags. That was interesting right there, because we were just starting to use those paint things that blow up and turn all the money blue, and they knew enough to protect themselves from it. Anyway, they got their money and then they shot up the place. They put a bunch of bullet holes in the ceiling and the walls. Then they got out. The whole thin
g, both times, took less than three full minutes. And when they were gone, they were gone.”

  “Nobody saw two people dressed all in black like commandos wandering around in the streets?”

  “Nope. Greenwich is pretty built up for a suburban town, and it was even then. But nobody saw a thing.”

  “What about surveillance cameras?”

  “This was thirty years ago,” Patrick said. “They had them, but they didn’t have nearly as many as they do now. We did get some surveillance footage. I’ve included whatever is in the public domain in that stack of stuff over there. I’m sure New York will give you the rest. There isn’t much of it. But that’s weird, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because”—Patrick shook his head—“it’s hard to put your finger on. The cameras weren’t as good then. So maybe I’m just fussing around about nothing. Try to get New York to give you the actual feed. Look at the film so that you can see them in motion. That’s all I’m going to say. I never knew if I was actually seeing something or if I was imagining things. You tell me.”

  “What happened with the third one?” Gregor asked.

  “They crossed state lines,” Patrick said. “The third and the fourth ones were in New York State, in Westchester. Not that that’s much of a drive. Greenwich is right on the border with Port Chester. The third robbery was a bank in Rye, the fourth was a bank in Armonk. Armonk was a bit of a drive.”

  “Same routine?”

  “Yep. Same routine, and same problems for us. You’d think somebody would have seen something somewhere. It was the middle of the summer, for God’s sake. Who walks around in black turtlenecks in summer? You’d figure we would have gotten something. But there was nothing. Then there was number five.”

  Gregor nodded. “The one where somebody got killed.”

  “Two people,” Patrick said. “Same routine, same complete lack of anybody seeing anything, but when they got to the part where they shot the place up, they ended up hitting two people, a bank guard and a high school kid waiting in line to make a deposit from his first job. Their names are in all that, too. It was in Westport, Connecticut. The Fairfield County Savings Bank.”

  Gregor considered this. “You’re sure it was accidental, that somebody died?”

  “It was either accidental, or it was done just for kicks. We’ve never been able to find out. We didn’t have a single lead as to who killed them, or who had been robbing those banks. It would have been the biggest news story in town, if the accident hadn’t happened the same damned night.”

  Gregor tried to process this. “Accident,” he said. “I did hear something about an accident.”

  “Of course you did,” Patrick said. “When a bunch of rich Fairfield County teenagers smash up a car and one of them is killed, it’s going to be bigger news in the New York ADI than the bank robberies were, even with two people dead. There were six people in the car. Martin Veer was driving. Chapin Waring was in the backseat. Then there were four more, don’t remember the names off the top of my head. Martin Veer was killed. Two of the others were treated for injuries. There was a big, enormous explosion, and four days later there was a funeral. It was a big funeral. It made all the local news stations and it made CBS in New York. There was this one clip they kept running over and over again, of Chapin Waring putting a rose into the ground where the casket was. And that’s what did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “We had a special agent then—she died a few years ago, unfortunately, breast cancer—her name was Sarah Havermack. She was watching one of those clips when she realized that the Waring girl looked familiar. She checked it out, and sure enough, there was no mistaking it. Chapin Waring was one of the two people in the bank surveillance footage. It wasn’t even hard to tell.”

  “You say one of them,” Gregor said. “The other was Martin Veer?”

  Patrick hesitated. “Martin Veer is very definitely the other one in the fifth robbery film.”

  “You think he wasn’t the one in the other robberies? It was her every single time, but not the same second person every single time?”

  Patrick shrugged. “I don’t know. I wish I did. Look at the video yourself and see what you think. But we never found any evidence that any of the other kids in that car, or any of the kids Waring and Veer hung around with, had anything to do with any of it, so the official explanation has always been that it was just those two.”

  “Did you go after Waring right away?”

  “As soon as Sarah figured it out,” Patrick said. “We just weren’t fast enough. We got there two days after the funeral, and by then Chapin Waring had disappeared into thin air. She was gone. Completely gone. And so was all the money.”

  Gregor considered this. “It’s not that easy to drop out of sight carrying—what? A couple of hundred thousand in cash?”

  “Two and a half,” Patrick said.

  “Okay, two and a half,” Gregor said. “People are suspicious when you show up with wads of bills, and they were just as suspicious thirty years ago. She couldn’t have just waltzed off and thrown the money around. She had to have help.”

  “I know.”

  “But?”

  “We never found any trace of it,” Patrick said. “And we’ve been looking. We’ve been looking for years. We’ve never caught any communication between her and her family. We’ve never caught any communication between her and the other kids who were in the car that night. And that’s not all.”

  “Could this actually get worse?”

  “Indeed it could,” Patrick said. “We’ve had her featured a total of five times on America’s Most Wanted. We came up absolutely blank. We didn’t even get any false reports.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Absolutely. And you’ve seen pictures of her, Gregor. She’s a striking-looking woman. It’s not like she looks like everybody else on the planet, or has the kind of face you wouldn’t notice. She was just gone, vanished, transported to another dimension. That’s the joke we used to make about it. I always thought she was dead.”

  “But here she is,” Gregor said.

  “Right,” Patrick said. “With a knife in her back.”

  “Do you think the Bureau knows where she’s been?”

  “If they did, they would have announced it,” Patrick said. “I’ve still got contacts where it matters. I’ll guarantee you there’s been nothing to find. She disappeared. She stayed disappeared. She showed up one day in June and ended up dead in her own family’s living room. And nobody has any idea where she’s been or what she’s been doing, and when she finally did show up, she was armed.”

  “We’re sure it was her gun she had on her when she died?”

  “Well,” Patrick said. “It wasn’t registered to anybody, if that’s what you mean. I’ve heard it had her fingerprints on it. Like I said, I’ve still got contacts where it matters.”

  “What’s that over on the chair?” Gregor asked.

  “Those are my notes,” Patrick said. “Including the diary I kept at the time. I’ve got copies of all of them, don’t worry, and I’ve scanned them into the computer. I was thinking I might write a book on the case. It would be a good case to write a book on, don’t you think?”

  “It would be better if we could figure out what happened.”

  2

  Gregor hailed a cab and the driver was adamant about how much it would cost to get him to Cavanaugh Street. But Gregor could afford it and a bus ride would be bumpy and uncomfortable. Once the cab took off, he opened his briefcase and looked at the material in it briefly. There was a little manila envelope full of pictures, and he took that out to look through them. Most of the pictures were close to useless, grainy old-time surveillance photographs that had been taken from above the crowd and were therefore only minimally useful. Gregor thought the actual moving surveillance tapes had to be better, or he couldn’t see how anybody could have recognized Chapin Waring, or anybody else. As it was, some of the pictures looked odd—in a way he couldn
’t put his finger on. He wondered if that was what Patrick had meant about there being something wrong with the photographs of the second robber.

  There were also other pictures in the envelope, pictures of Chapin Waring and Martin Veer from their senior year high school yearbook, pictures of them at what notes on the backs indicated was Chapin Waring’s coming-out party, pictures of them with a group of other kids their own age at some beach somewhere. What wasn’t from their high school yearbook seemed to have come from newspapers. The Alwych Town Times had produced a lot of them.

  Gregor gave some of his attention to the other kids in the photographs. They were almost always the same other kids. Hope Matlock. Kyle Westervan. Tim Brand. Virginia Brand. On one of the photographs, Patrick had circled the picture of Virginia Brand and written: VB Westervan, USHR.

  Gregor was about to go looking for what that meant when the neighborhood around him began to look more familiar. He pushed the papers back into his briefcase and locked it up. They passed his old building, which looked as if nobody lived there anymore. With three of the five floors now unoccupied, Gregor wasn’t surprised.

  They passed the church, which also looked unoccupied, but that wasn’t unusual for a midweek afternoon. They passed the Ararat, which looked very occupied indeed. All the lights were on. Linda Melajian and one of her sisters were rushing back and forth between the tables. The tables were packed. Everybody on Cavanaugh Street seemed to have decided that a stormy day was a good day to get out of the house and have a little lunch.

  Gregor had the cab take him to his own front door. The place looked almost as deserted as everything else did, except that there was a dim light shining in the front window. Either Bennis was home, or she had left a light shining for him, as if he were in danger of being lost at sea.

  Gregor got out of the cab and paid the driver. The rain fell down on the back of his neck in drips and drops that made his skin crawl more than just a little. He ran up the front steps, tried the doorknob, and found that it was open.