by Jane Haddam
This morning, he had risen and packed up his briefcase and driven to the train station. He usually drove into the city, but he was running late. Just for once he didn’t want the bother of traffic and rush hour and Manhattan parking.
If anybody had opened his briefcase, they would have found it a model of rectitude. It had his phone, court documents from a bankruptcy filing that was being entered against his advice, a copy of Forbes and a copy of The Economist.
He found himself a seat alone near a window. The train car was almost empty. There was a buzz in his briefcase. He opened it and took out the phone.
“Yes,” he said, leaving the briefcase on the empty seat beside him.
“Where the hell are you?” Walter said. “I’ve been looking for you for the past hour.”
“I’m running a little late.” This was not an explanation. Kyle knew it. “The train is just leaving the station. I’ll be in in about an hour and a half.”
“You’re taking the train? You never take the train.”
“I couldn’t handle the traffic. Is this actually about something? Has there been some kind of crisis in the office?”
“Listen.” Walter was whispering. His voice was so low, Kyle almost couldn’t hear it. “I’m a little worried about this phone. Your phone. We need a secure connection. We could get picked up.”
“For God’s sake,” Kyle said again. “Those people would need a wiretap warrant. And to get a wiretap warrant, they’d need probable cause that a crime had been committed, or was being committed, or was about to be committed. What kind of crime do you think is being committed here?”
“Everything is a crime these days,” Walter said.
“For God’s—never mind. Walter, just tell me who it is so I’ll know what to expect when I get there.”
More hemming and hawing. Another cough.
“Walter,” Kyle said.
Walter gave one great, last cough and said, “It’s the guy from Washington. He flew in this morning. He’s at the Hilton.”
The train started to move. Kyle watched as he rolled slowly by cars and people and buildings.
“Kyle?” Walter said.
“I’m here,” Kyle said.
“He’s blowing steam out his head. I’m supposed to call him as soon as you get in.”
“You should both calm down.”
Kyle looked out the window again. The train was picking up speed. There was a billboard that said: VIRGINIA WESTERVAN FOR U.S. SENATE. Kyle wondered for the hundredth time why she hadn’t gone back to her maiden name after their divorce.
“Kyle,” Walter said.
“I’ll be there when the train gets in,” Kyle said, and then slid the phone shut.
With the phone shut, the world was silent.
3
Tim Brand had been born into a lot of money. He had as much in a trust fund on the day after he was delivered than most people would see in a lifetime. He had money he was not allowed to touch except for the income. He had money he could do anything he wanted with.
Even so, he didn’t have enough money to run a full-service free clinic 24/7/365 unless he was very, very careful.
The letters from the Office of Health Care Access and the Office of the Healthcare Advocate had come Saturday. Tim hadn’t been able to get a full night’s sleep since. He’d pushed himself at the clinic until he thought he was going to fall over. It didn’t matter. He got home and lay down and found himself staring at the ceiling.
Part of being careful in the founding and running of the free clinic was his choice of where to live. He hadn’t been silly enough to think he could afford a house in Alwych at the same time he was telling single mothers they didn’t have to worry about getting a bill for Susie’s flu vaccination and Tommy’s set leg. Tim Brand lived in a “condominium townhome,” which had been ridiculously expensive, but at least within the realm of basic sanity.
This morning, he had gotten up and showered as soon as he accepted the fact that sleep was over for the night. Then he had gone to Mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
After Mass was over, he went out to stand on the steps and look down the hill at the town. The priest stopped and asked him if he felt all right. He brushed it off.
He took his run the long way. He went down by Beach Drive and the Atlantic Club. He watched the waves coming up on the shore.
He ran down the Drive and up again. Then he headed off through the houses and the stores toward the hospital and the clinic. The hospital was not a Catholic hospital. It hadn’t had to do anything ridiculous when the law was passed that required all emergency rooms to provide the morning-after pill to rape victims. The hospital emergency room was so close to the clinic, he could walk there in under three minutes. Ambulances arrived at the doors of the emergency room all the time. No ambulances arrived at the clinic. There were good reasons why, if he went toe to toe with the Office of the Health Care Advocate and the Office of Health Care Access, he would very certainly win.
The problem, of course, was that winning—that way—was not the issue here.
Tim got to the clinic parking lot. The clinic was open, because it always was, but there was almost nobody waiting.
Tim let himself in through the front door. He nodded at the volunteer on reception and went on through to the back. He passed the door to the room where Maartje was sorting mail. She looked up and waved to him. He waved back and kept on going.
He went past empty examining rooms and empty offices. He got all the way to his own office and stopped. Marcie was in there, going through the paper records of their books. They always kept paper records as well as computer records, just in case.
Marcie looked up when he stopped at the door and gave him a faint smile. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
“I couldn’t either,” Tim said. “We’d better start finding ways to sleep, or we’re going to start making mistakes when we really can’t afford to. Did you really buy one of those silly books about the Waring case?”
Marcie picked it up and looked it over. “It was at the checkout this morning when I went into the pharmacy to buy aspirin. I bought the aspirin, I bought the book, and I bought a little Fourth of July teddy bear to give to the little Desini boy the next time his mother brings him in.”
“Did we talk to Yale about that?” Tim asked. “I thought we were going—”
“I got a call from the financial department about his insurance.”
“Ah,” Tim said. “Maybe we should try Saint Raphael’s.”
“They’re merging with Yale.”
“Mary Desini is absolutely never going to let us do a public appeal.”
“I know.”
Tim came all the way into the room. Marcie was sitting in his chair behind his desk. He took one of the other chairs and sat down.
“We’re going to need lawyers,” he said finally.
“Well,” Marcie said. “That was the idea, wasn’t it?”
“I think the idea was for Virginia to be able to tell her hard-core base that she was moving against ‘theocracy.’ Not that she’s ever going to admit in public that she’s behind this thing. If she did, she’d kill any chance she had of being elected, even in Connecticut. But there are ways to get the word out without admitting anything, and Virginia knows all of them.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Marcie said.
“It’s ridiculous, but it’s just plausible enough so that we can’t count on its being thrown out the first time we appear before a judge. And that, Marcie, means we’re going to need lawyers.”
“Does she really think the world would be a better place if this clinic shut down?”
“I think she thinks the world would be a better place if nobody in it thought like us,” Tim said. “I’ve never really understood Virginia.”
“She’s a rich girl who wants to go on being rich.”
“If that was all it was, she could have stayed married to Kyle Westervan and devoted her life to giving parties. There’s something else
driving that woman. There always has been, even when we were both children. And I’ve never known what is it.”
“Are they going to walk in someday next week and shut us down?”
“No,” Tim said. “They’re not going to shut us down at all. They’re going to give us a time frame, and when we don’t comply, they’re going to start levying fines. Once the fines get high enough, they’ll put a lien on the clinic. This could take years.”
“Oh,” Marcie said. “Years. But a lot could happen in years.”
“One of the things that could happen is that they could bleed us dry.”
“I hate lawyers,” Marcie said. She looked down at the papers and ledgers spread out over the desk. Then she picked up the paperback about the Waring case—The Secret Files of Chapin Waring!—and turned it over in her hands.
“I suppose it is going to be a silly book,” she said, “but I get curious. Did it upset you very much, when Chapin Waring died?”
“I think it mostly disoriented me,” Tim said. “I think I unconsciously assumed she’d been dead for years. If there are things you really want to know, I could probably tell you more about that case than anything you can get out of a book. Especially a book like that.”
“I didn’t like to ask. I didn’t know if it was—something, you know. A painful something,” Marcie said.
Tim got up out of the chair. “I don’t know if ‘painful’ is the word I’d use,” he said. “That case made me a Catholic, although it took about a decade.”
“Maybe this Gregor Demarkian will find all the answers,” Marcie said. “Maybe having him here and having all this fuss will take everybody’s minds off of us, and this whole Health Care Access thing will fall into the sea without a trace.”
Tim thought that was as likely to happen as fig trees sprouting green cheese.
SIX
1
Gregor Demarkian got his first glimpse of Alwych, Connecticut, from the windows of the Metro-North train. Alwych was much as Gregor had expected it to be: high-end suburban, complete with dozens of little shops with highly erudite names, all their facades framed with very real wood. Going out from the center of town there would be houses, most of them on streets with sidewalks and set well back from the road, but there would be no subdivisions. Towns like Alwych had serious zoning.
Gregor had spent the trip out from Manhattan going through Patrick’s diary and Fitzgerald’s presentation and even the picture book he’d bought in Greenwich Village. He had no more insight into the robberies than he’d had before he started.
The robbery case looked, on the surface, like nothing particularly complicated. Except for the difficulty the police and the FBI had had in pinpointing the perpetrators, and possibly the intelligence with which the perpetrators had demanded and taken their money, it was like a thousand other bank robberies over the years.
Even the two things that seemed like anomalies weren’t really. In the ordinary course of events, police didn’t go looking for upmarket teenagers to solve their bank crimes. All Chapin Waring and Martin Veer needed to do was to get around a corner somewhere and ditch the black clothes, and they would have looked like hundreds of other innocent citizens of those suburbs. Nobody would have looked at them twice.
As for the intelligence—it was a fantasy to think of robbers as really smart guys with lots of skill who were doing this instead of attending Harvard because they’d had bad breaks in their lives. Most criminals were bone stupid, and most were outright thugs. Gregor had met intelligent criminals in his life, but they were nearly all sociopaths.
The train did a little jerking bounce and stopped moving. Gregor put his papers and the big book away. At the last minute he looked at the big picture in the middle of the book cover. It was a security camera shot of the robbery in Fairfield. He could recognize the slim figure as belonging to Chapin Waring right away. The other figure still looked odd. Gregor wished he had a better picture of Martin Veer in civilian clothes. There was something wrong about that second figure in black.
Other passengers were up and moving down the aisle. Gregor got his suitcase from the rack above his head, and went down the aisle and to the claustrophobic little vestibule where he could get out onto the platform. He looked around. The station had a little waiting room, heavily done in dark wood.
Gregor was about to go into the waiting room when a man approached him, wearing the livery of a limousine company. He had his hat in his hand and a note folded up in one fist. He was small and square and thick around the neck.
“Señor,” he said, thrusting the note at Gregor.
Gregor took it and had a moment of panic that the police department of Alwych, having been asked to get him a car and a driver, had misinterpreted that to mean a limousine and a chauffeur. There was no possibility in the world that he could work on a case while being driven around like Jackie O on a night out.
He opened the note. It had been typed out, very neatly, on Alwych Police Department letterhead.
This is Juan Valdez, the note said. He’ll be your driver while you’re in town. I’ve told him to take you directly to the Switch and Shingle as soon as you get in. He can bring you out to us when you’ve gotten settled. Thank you again for coming. Jason Battlesea.
Gregor read the note through twice. What in the name of God was the Switch and Shingle? He looked up at Juan Valdez.
“Is the Switch and Shingle close to here?” Gregor asked.
Juan Valdez stared at him. Then he bent over and picked up the suitcase. He did not touch the attaché case. He said something in Spanish that Gregor didn’t understand. Then he headed through the doors to the waiting room.
Gregor grabbed his attaché case and followed as quickly as he could. Juan Valdez was moving through the doors on the other side as Gregor got to the waiting room benches. Gregor tried moving faster still.
He got out of the waiting room’s front doors and found himself on a little sidewalk with cabs parked along it. The only car that wasn’t a cab was a brown Volvo sedan. Juan Valdez was standing next to the sedan, closing the trunk. Then he came around and opened the back passenger door closest to the curb.
“Por favor,” he said.
Gregor hesitated a moment, then got in. At least it wasn’t a limousine. Juan Valdez closed the door next to him and went around the car to get behind the wheel. Then he pulled out as if there were no other cars in the area, and pulled out onto Main Street.
Main Street looked, from the ground, pretty much as it had from the train. There were dress shops and restaurants, a little local bookstore with a cat in the window, a drugstore with a big cardboard sign in front in the shape of a gigantic puppy. They passed a hospital and, right next to it, a building announcing itself as a FREE CLINIC. They passed a small park that sat deep in a well in the ground, so that you had to go down a steep grassy hill or an equally steep ramp to get to it. It had slides and swings and places where the grass had been removed to make way for sand.
A couple of minutes later, Gregor began to feel the sea. The car was running the air-conditioning at full blast, but he put his window down anyway. As soon as he did so, he could most definitely hear it. He could smell it, too. There was ocean here.
They took another turn, and they were on a wide, nearly straight boulevard flanked by the sea on one side and huge, secretive houses on the other. The houses were all behind hedges. Gregor turned around and looked out the rear window. All the way at the end down there, getting smaller and smaller, was an even bigger building, houselike but without the quasi-protection of hedges, and with terraces making a wide sweep over the beach. That, he thought, must be the Atlantic Club.
The houses never got smaller, but they did get farther apart. The beach was empty, even though the day was beautiful and it was almost July. They glided past it all as if none of it had any significance to Gregor’s being here, even though he knew this had to be Beach Drive, and that meant that this had to be where Chapin Waring had died. He tried to concentrate on the
houses, to see if he could pick out the one. There was nothing out in the open that indicated that any house was any different from any other. There weren’t even any people. For some reason, Gregor found that very disturbing.
The road made another little sweeping turn, and Gregor suddenly found himself being driven through the gates of a big Victorian with wide terraces facing the ocean. He just caught the sign that said THE SWITCH AND SHINGLE BED AND BREAKFAST as they passed it.
Juan Valdez pulled the car up in front of the front door. Gregor opened his door and got out. The driveway under his feet was gravel. The house in front of his face was big enough to be a girls’ school.
Suddenly, the front doors opened and a woman came out. She was tall and heavyset and out of breath, and she was wearing the muumuu to end all muumuus. It was mostly purple, but it had some flamingo pink in it, and some neon orange. She was, however, wearing neither makeup nor jewelry, and she had never dyed her hair.
She came down the steps from the front door and walked right up to him.
“Are you Gregor Demarkian?” she asked.
“I most definitely am,” Gregor said.
“Well, we got something right, at any rate,” she said. “I’m Darlee Corn. I was born and brought up right here on Beach Drive, in this very house, and if you think I spend my time wishing I hadn’t been, you’d be right. Jason Battlesea is having the vapors about putting you up here, and Evaline don’t-say-my-last-name-too-loud Veer is doing worse, but there aren’t any hotels in Alwych. I gave you the best room in the house and I think you’re going to like it. You’d better come right in now. If you take too much time, we’re going to have Jason over here foaming at the mouth.”
2
The room Gregor was shown to was spectacular. It had a curved wall of windows and glass doors. Through the glass doors was a curved balcony that looked right out over Beach Drive and, beyond it, the sea. It was Long Island Sound, not Maui, but impressive all the same. The suite was even more so. The broad, high-celinged bedroom let in more light than Gregor thought he could stand. The sitting room had a stained glass window that made everything look like it had been dipped in rose food coloring.