Skeleton Key

by Jane Haddam

“I told you so,” Grace Feinmann said.

  “I take it you want to go out to Capernaum Road.”

  “As soon as you can get me there,” Gregor said. “And I want Miss Feinmann here to take Mrs. Wachinsky back to her apartment and put her to bed. Immediately. She’s, in no shape to be out. Are the rest of you gentlemen going to come with us?”

  “I’m just so glad I didn’t do anything stupid,” Eve Wachinsky said. “I don’t know why it is, but I seem to spend all my time doing things that are stupid.”

  Gregor Demarkian knew how that felt but at the moment he didn’t have time to think about it.

  3

  Out on the Capernaum Road, it was as if nothing had ever happened. No telephone pole had ever come down. No live wires had ever lay stretched across the road. As soon as Stacey Spratz’s car pulled over to the shoulder—if you could call the start of wild-growing grass a shoulder—Gregor got out and looked around. There wasn’t much to it. The road was only a few hundred feet long. On one end was Route 109. On the other was Route 63. The dirt was well-tamped and packed solid, probably because a lot of people used this road as a shortcut between the two routes. It would be faster than going all the way out to the intersection.

  There were five telephone poles along the road, all on the side away from the hill that led to the Fairchild Family Cemetery. Gregor walked from one to the other of them, carefully inspecting each of them at their bases. They all looked as if they had been smashed into and knocked over, that was the problem. He came back to the police car and looked up the hill.

  “That hill is rocky like that, all the way up?” he asked Stacey Spratz.

  “All the way up,” Stacey agreed.

  “Meaning the Jeep could have been driven straight up and into the Fairchild Family Cemetery without leaving a trace.”

  “After it had been smashed into a telephone pole hard enough to knock the pole over?”

  “Why not? It still runs. It was returned to Faye Dallmer banged up but still going. That’s what the report said.”

  Another car pulled into the road and up onto the grass. Mark Cashman got out and walked over to them.

  “I talked to SNET. It was the second one in from Sixty-three. And it fell toward Sixty-three, too.”

  “That way.” Gregor pointed away from the part of the hill that led up to the cemetery.

  “Right,” Mark Cashman said.

  “I had it backward, you see, that was the problem,” Gregor said. “I thought that the murderer must have hit Kayla Anson’s BMW with the Jeep. The murderer was following Kayla close enough to bump her, according to Zara Anne Moss. I thought that what must have happened was that something from the BMW got onto the Jeep, and then it needed to be disguised. But if you think about it, that doesn’t make much sense. The Jeep was being driven very oddly some of the time. People would have seen it. People might have remembered it and commented on it. In fact, people did see it and comment on it. And so what? The Jeep didn’t belong to the murderer anyway. The murderer could leave any evidence on it at all, and it just wouldn’t have mattered.”

  “Then why smash up the Jeep?” Stacey asked. “Why knock over a telephone pole.”

  “Because the Jeep smashed into something else,” Gregor said. “It smashed into the murderer’s own car.”

  “The Ferrari,” Mark said.

  “The problem,” Gregor said, “was that the Jeep, which lots of people could have seen and remembered, and would know was following Kayla Anson’s BMW, the Jeep now had trace evidence of the murderer’s own car. There’s an efficient area of police work for you—we can get all kinds of things off a car that’s hit something. So the idea was, I think, to have it hit something else and far more violently. To layer evidence on top of evidence. To give the impression diat we had found the source of the crash, on the assumption that we wouldn’t go looking for another one.”

  “There’s still a chance that something is left on that Jeep,” Mark Cashman said. “We can get it from Faye for a couple of days and check it out.”

  “You do that,” Gregor said. “What about the Ferrari? Can we get to that?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Stacey said. “It can’t have disappeared.”

  “It’s likely to be someplace not immediately available,” Gregor said. “At somebody else’s house. Or in the garage. If the Jeep smashed into it, there may have been some damage.”

  “Well, there’s only one place in this part of the hills that fixes Ferarris,” Stacey said. “That ought to be easy enough.”

  “Did the telephone company people take pictures?” Gregor asked.

  Mark Cashman turned on his heel and went back to his car. Gregor looked around the Capernaum Road one more time. There really wasn’t anything much to it and yet there had to be more than he could see. The need to walk, and the need for secrecy, required it.

  “Stacey?” he said. “Is there any road branching off this road? Not the routes on either end. A road.”

  “Go on up to about the fourth pole,” Stacey said. “You’ll see it going into the woods on the left. On the pole side, I mean. It isn’t really a road anymore. The town doesn’t maintain it. There used to be a house up there back about fifty years ago, but there’s nothing now. Why?”

  Gregor walked up to the fourth pole. He had been there before, and he hadn’t noticed it, but it was there—a road in the process of self-destruction. The weeds were high in the center of it. There were rocks everywhere. Still, the edges of what had once been a traveled pathway were clearly visible, if you took the time to look.

  “What’s wrong?” Stacey asked, coming up behind him.

  “You need to get some people up there,” Gregor said. “That’s where Kayla Anson died. Up that thing. That’s where the BMW and the Jeep and the Ferrari were parked. Nobody would ever have known they were there.”

  “Taking a four-hundred-thousand-dollar Ferrari up that thing is asking for trouble.”

  “Under the circumstances, I think that was a minor consideration. But you can see what happened. The murder venue had to be out of the way. So did the places where the switches were made. Capernaum Road itself wouldn’t do. It was too well-traveled. People probably use it for a shortcut—”

  “All the time.”

  “—and that means the chance of getting caught at any moment. So you come up here instead, and it’s quiet and out of the way, and nobody will see you. But you have to keep your lights low or off. If you don’t, somebody might see them. So you come barreling back up here after you dump the body, you need to move the Jeep for some reason, and instead you smash into your own car. If that hadn’t happened, I think the Jeep would still be on this road.”

  “This whole thing sounds nuts,” Stacey Spratz said.

  “Not nuts. Just careful. And very elaborate. Some people like to be elaborate.”

  “Some people should be locked up for more reasons than one.”

  “Get some people out and at work,” Gregor said. “Find out about people passing on One-oh-nine that night. Not this part of it, the other side of Four Corners, on the way to Margaret Anson’s house. That has to be—what? Ten or fifteen miles. It was a long walk.”

  “Walk?”

  “Didn’t it bother you at all, about the times? The Jeep is following Kayla Anson’s car at six o’clock at night or so. All the rest of these things don’t start happening until nearly midnight.”

  “This is worse than nuts,” Stacey Spratz said.

  But, Gregor thought, it wasn’t nuts at all. He wished it were nuts. Nuts was easier to deal with than premeditated.

  4

  Half an hour later, sitting in the parking lot of the Adams Super Food Store in Watertown while Stacey ran in to buy a six-pack of Coke, Gregor Demarkian finally gave in to exhaustion. He could feel it start almost as soon as Stacey left the car. He turned up the radio and found that Big D 103 FM out of Hartford was once again playing “Fun, Fun, Fun.” He thought of Bennis Hannaford and her little tangerine orange
two-seater Mercedes convertible. Then the music changed to the Beach Boys doing “Sloop John B” and he thought about Cavanaugh Street, where everything was empty and sad because Donna Moradanyan hadn’t been able to concentrate on decorating for Halloween. In fact, it was Halloween. The days had been going by with such formless insanity, Gregor hadn’t realized it.

  Like most people who have spent a significant part of their lives in law enforcement of one kind or another, Gregor Demarkian didn’t like Halloween. That was the holiday when people felt justified in causing pain, and fear, and death. The streets were full of people who thought they had made pacts with the devil.

  Gregor put his head back on the seat, and closed his eyes, and dropped into unconsciousness.

  Six

  1

  It was one of those days that felt like rain even though it wasn’t raining. The air was wet as well as cold. So many leaves had fallen from the trees that there was a rustling along the ground in even the slightest wind. Martin Chandling kept putting his hands up to touch the top of his head, to see if raindrops had fallen there. Then, when his hair seemed dry but all too thin, when the slick curve of baldness underneath was all too evident, he put his hand down again and tried to get some work done. He had a lot of work to do. It was going to be Halloween tonight. Maybe it was Halloween even now. Out there somewhere there were teenaged boys, hot-rodding up and down the back roads. They had six-packs of Coors in the back of their trucks and their radios turned up loud. They had girls who had convinced themselves to love them, and later, when it got dark enough and they got tired of scaring lonely women driving home by themselves in the dark, they would take the girls out onto the dirt lanes where there were no lights. Martin had taken girls out onto the dirt lanes himself when he was seventeen. He could still feel the cold on his back as they squirmed underneath him. He could still remember not caring if he froze to death.

  Right now, he had to clean out the gutters. They were clogged full of leaves, and if it did rain in the next couple of days, the clog would bring the gutters down. He tried to remember what it had been like, to make love to a woman, even when he was married, but all that stuff was pretty hazy now. He remembered high school better than that, when he and Henry had walked through the halls with their books and their high-topped sneakers, and the girls they both secretly wanted—the blonde ones with the Villager skirt-and-sweater sets, the ones who looked like magazine models and who were going away to Connecticut College or Smith—wouldn’t even talk to them. Cecily Harkness, that was the name of the one Martin had liked best She had gone to Vassar and then married a man from Goshen who had gone to Yale. He sometimes saw her in the Dan-bury Fair Mall, going in and out of Lord & Taylor looking like an advertisement for a country club. Except that country clubs didn’t have advertisements. Had he realized, even then, that life didn’t usually work out for people like him?

  He got out the stepladder and popped it open next to the big casement window block that looked into the kitchen. He climbed up a few steps and saw that the leaves were all bunched down at one end, the other end, and he would have to move his whole operation to the far side of the house. He got down off the stepladder and wiped the palms of his hands against his jeans.

  “Damn,” he said. But even he thought he sounded as if he didn’t mean it.

  Henry came around the side of the house. Henry had been looking fidgety all morning, but Martin had put that down to the fact that Demarkian and those people had been out here again. Although they’d left the two of them mostly alone this time, Martin had to admit. They’d been out there pacing around on the roads. Martin had thought that Demarkian was going to break his ankle.

  “So,” Henry said, looking up as Martin climbed the step-ladder again. “I thought maybe we should talk.”

  “Talk about what?” Martin asked. The clog was too tight to be shook loose by a hard stream of water. That was too bad, because blasting the sucker with the hose was definitely the easiest way to take care of a problem like this. Martin was going to need a stick, or the handle of the rake.

  “This is a mess up here,” he told Henry. “We’ve got to do something about it.”

  “I said maybe we should talk,” Henry said again. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “About what?” There was a stick right there on the ground that looked like it might do. Martin got off the ladder and picked it up. It was bent, but thickly round. He broke a little piece off the end of it to make it a more manageable size and started up the ladder again.

  “I don’t see why what we have to talk about can’t wait till supper,” he said.

  “Martin, for God’s sake.”

  Henry put his arm out and on Martin’s arm. Martin looked down on it like it was a large dragonfly that had come out of nowhere and chosen him to roost.

  “What the hell,” he said.

  “Listen,” Henry said. “It’s about this place. The cemetery. It’s about us being here in the cemetery. Or about me being here in the cemetery.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well,” Henry said, “the thing is, I don’t want to do it anymore. Do you see that? I mean, we’ve been doing it for years. And I’m sick of it.”

  The ladder seemed suddenly very high, much too high to climb. Martin put the stick on the ground and tried to think.

  “But you can’t just stop doing it,” he said finally. “They’d kick us out of the house. It isn’t our house. It belongs to the Fairfield Foundation.”

  “I meant I was sick of the house, too.”

  Martin rubbed his palms against his jeans again. There seemed to be nothing else to do. “I don’t get it,” he said finally. “Where would we go? What would we do?”

  “We don’t necessarily have to do anything,” Henry said. “You could stay here if you wanted to. I could go on my own.”

  “I couldn’t handle this place by myself.”

  “You could hire a helper. Get one of those boys who’s always driving us so crazy. One of them would probably be more than happy to have a part-time job.”

  “You don’t want me along with you,” Martin said. “Wherever you’re going, you don’t want me to be there, too.”

  Henry sighed. “It’s not that I don’t want you to be there, too. I just want you to do what you want to do. That’s all. I just want to stop going along to go along. I’m an old man. I want to do something fun before it’s too late.”

  “Fun,” Martin said.

  Then he turned around and lifted the ladder off the ground. He snapped it closed and put it under his arm. These were familiar things he was doing, the things he did every day. This was the life he knew. Henry was crazy to be talking about fun.

  “I’m going to go put this away in the barn,” he said, keeping his back to his brother. “You go do what you want.”

  “Listen,” Henry said. “We can get Social Security in a few years. Do you realize that?”

  “So what?”

  “So it’s enough to live on, some places. And we wouldn’t have to stop working. We could flip burgers or something. There would be jobs.”

  “Where?” Martin demanded. “In Waterbury? Why would I want to flip burgers in Waterbury?”

  “Not in Waterbury. In Florida. We could go to Florida. I’ve got some money put by. We could buy a trailer, one of those things, or a little ranch house. They don’t cost much in Florida. Maybe sixty or seventy thousand dollars in some places.”

  “Nobody can buy a house for sixty or seventy thousand dollars,” Martin said. “You can’t buy a garage for that.”

  “Up here you can’t. Down in Florida you can. I’ve been checking. Down in Palm Harbor, that’s a place. And it’s getting cold, can’t you feel it? It’s going to be cold as hell all winter.”

  “It’s always cold as hell all winter.”

  “So you like that?” Henry asked. “Why? Why should we both be miserable for months at a time? Why shouldn’t we go to Florida?”

  Martin put the ladder down on the gro
und, on its side. The leaves were thick around his ankles. Somebody would have to come out here and rake. The raking would take all day, and when it was done it would have to be done again. Then the snow would begin to fall, and somebody would have to shovel out the driveway and the walk. Him. He would have to shovel out the driveway and the walk, unless Henry did it, and Henry couldn’t do it if he was in Florida.

  “We’ve never been to Florida,” Martin said finally, as if that ought to answer everything.

  Instead, Henry was hopping around from one foot to another, grinning like he’d just finished a bottle of whiskey.

  “That’s the point,” he said. “We’ve never been there, and it’s warm, and we can go to Disney World.”

  Disney World.

  For the first time in his life, Martin Chandling thought he was getting a migraine.

  2

  By late on the afternoon of Halloween, everybody at the Swamp Tree Country Club knew what had happened with Sally Martindale. Everybody knew what the deal was going to be, too, because members had been eavesdropping outside old Mortimer’s door all afternoon. Mortimer was not being particularly quiet in there—in fact, most of the time he was shouting. It was Ruth Grandmere who was keeping her head and being practical about things. If it hadn’t been for Ruth, Mortimer would probably have had the police come right to the club and cart Sally Martindale off to jail.

  “It was gambling,” Marian Ridenour confided to Peter Greer as she pulled out a chair to sit down at his table. “Can you believe that? She was taking all this money and going out to Ledyard to play the slots. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of it.”

  “It wasn’t hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Jennifer Crawford said, pulling another chair over to the little table. “It was only about ten thousand, and mostly she wasn’t gambling with it. Apparently, she’s been living out there in that huge house for months without enough money to pay the bills. She’d had her heat shut off last winter.”