by Jane Haddam
“Oh, I’d heard that,” Marian said. “Somebody said—I don’t remember who—that she’d had to apply for heating assistance from the state. And yet Mallory was here, the whole time, trying to be a debutante.”
“Oh,” Jennifer said, “Mallory isn’t going to be a debutante anymore. She’s going to go to nursing school. Which is much more sensible, really, if you think about it. It never does any good to be unrealistic about your circumstances.”
Peter Greer had intended to be alone, but at the moment he found this particular conversation soothing. It was so—Swamp Tree Country Club; so—Litchfield County. It occurred to him that there were dozens of women in this small square part of the state who were perfectly sane, who did not think gossip and status were the bedrocks of life, and some of them were even rich. None of them belonged to the Swamp Tree. And yet this was what he wanted. This was what he had always wanted. He wondered what that said about himself.
“What do you think about it?” Marian asked him. “Are you just shocked beyond words?”
“Not really,” Peter said. “I suppose it was hard to keep up after Frank left.”
“Oh that,” Jennifer said. “Well, of course, nothing on earth could excuse Frank’s behavior. But you have to wonder. You really do. You have to wonder if he had cause.”
“Why?” Peter asked.
“Well, because of this,” Jennifer said. “I mean, she couldn’t have been very stable, could she? And Frank had to live with her. He’d have known something was wrong long before we would. Maybe he saw it happening. This breakdown, or whatever it is she’s having.”
Peter cocked his head. “Her husband left her for another woman and stiffed her on the settlement so that she got practically no cash when she’d been used to living well, and you don’t think that’s enough of a reason for her to have a breakdown?”
“Well,” Marian said, “you’ve got to remember. She used to have a job. She worked for Deloitte. And they fired her.”
“She came up for partnership and didn’t make it,” Peter said. “Most people who come up for partnership don’t make it.”
“Still,” Marian said. “You’ve got to wonder if they saw something, too. Now that we know, you see, it all begins to make sense. The odd things she did. Her peculiar behavior. And her behavior really has been peculiar.”
“She’d come to dinner at your house and then she wouldn’t invite you back,” Jennifer said. “Ever.”
“She didn’t have enough money to entertain,” Peter said.
Jennifer brushed this away. “It wouldn’t have had to be anything elaborate. I never do anything elaborate myself. It’s a waste of time. But anybody can afford a nice little buffet with drinks on the side. Really. She wouldn’t have had to go to any trouble.”
“Champagne cocktails hardly cost anything at all,” Marian said.
Peter stood up. The waiter would be by in a moment, but he didn’t want to sit still just this once. A champagne cocktail at the club cost four dollars. Even if you assumed the price was inflated, that was still not nothing at all.
He got to the bar and asked for another Perrier and lime. It was much too early to be drinking actual alcohol, but some of the women were doing it. They drank tall, fancy drinks with plenty of soda in them and thought of it as not really drinking. He got his Perrier and lime and looked back at them. Marian was wearing tennis shoes and white ankle socks. Jennifer was wearing a print skirt and a cotton sweater. They all got their clothes at the same places. They all looked alike. He loved that about them, that they were so much of a type, that they didn’t bother much with individuality.
“Individuality,” Peter’s first debutante girlfriend had told him, “is very middle-class.”
The doors to the bar were propped open with solid walnut doorstops. Peter looked up as Deborah Candleman came running through them, looking breathless.
“They’re coming out,” she said to nobody in particular and everybody at once. “They’re coming right down the hall.”
Peter didn’t think a single person in the bar sat still. Marian and Jennifer were on their feet so fast, he didn’t even catch them moving. The crowd surged at the doors and then out of them. The hall in question was in the back, and there was a back door there, and they didn’t want to miss anything. Peter followed them very slowly, not sure what he wanted to do.
There was a window in the hall outside the bar. Standing at it, it was possible to see the other door, the one Sally Martindale would be coming out of, and the parking lot beyond it Peter stood at the back of the crowd and looked out on the leaves. The other door opened then and Sally came out with Ruth Grandmere’s arms wrapped around her shoulders. Sally was staring at the ground and hugging herself tight She was taking steps so small, it was as if she were walking on bound feet.
“Oh, look,” somebody said. “Doesn’t she look upset?”
“Well, she ought to look upset,” somebody else said. “Stealing all that money. She ought to look more than upset”
“She won’t go to jail for it though,” the first somebody said. “They never do in cases like this. She’ll just get to pay it back.”
“If she has it.”
“They’ll work out a payment plan.”
“They don’t want embarrassing stories about the club in the newspapers.”
“She didn’t belong here anyway. Anybody could tell that. She was just a nobody from the Midwest somewhere and then she married money.”
Peter took a long pull on his Perrier and lime. Out in the parking lot Sally Martindale was trying to get into her car. All her muscles seemed to be stiff. She was having trouble folding herself into a sitting position. Her face was white. Even at this distance, he could tell that her eyes were red.
“Oh, look at the crocodile tears,” one of the women said. “Isn’t that just like her, the deceitful little cheat.”
Peter went back to the bar, and found his table, and sat down.
He was suddenly feeling violently sick to his stomach.
3
Bennis Hannaford had not meant to turn it into a neighborhood meeting, or an Armenian American convention, or whatever it had become. She had only wanted to have Father Tibor with her if she had to have a biopsy, and that was why she had called him and asked him to come. Now he was here, but so was Donna Moradanyan Donahue and Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian and even Sheila Kashinian, who had been driving the nurses at the nurses’ station totally berserk for nearly half an hour. Sheila Kashinian wanted to redecorate the ward, in primary colors, to make it more cheerful for the patients.
“It really wouldn’t take anything at all to get it done,” she kept saying, in that Philadelphia-accented grating caw of hers, loudly enough so that they could probably hear her down in surgery.
The good thing was, the doctor would only allow two people at a time in Bennis’s room with her. That meant that Tibor and Donna were right here at her bedside, but the rest of them were down the hall. They would all want to come down and talk to her eventually, but Bennis thought she would deal with that when the time came. If she could deal with anything. She was washed out and weak. She was so exhausted, she sometimes dropped off in the middle of conversations she was having herself.
“I still say,” Donna was saying, “that we ought to call Gregor and tell him what’s going on. He’s not going to be at all happy to show up here and find Bennis in a hospital bed when he didn’t even know she was sick.”
“He knows she is sick,” Tibor said, in his very careful, thickly accented English. “I have told him that she has gone to see the doctor. I have told him that she has had an emergency and that he should come home. What else should I have told him?”
“You should have told him the doctors think she might have cancer,” Donna said.
Bennis turned over in bed. She wanted a cigarette. That was the truth. She wanted a cigarette so badly, she was almost ready to cry. More than that, she wanted to be able to breathe.
“Oh, God,” Donna said. �
�We’ve got her upset. Bennis? Bennis, listen, I didn’t mean to upset you, I really didn’t I just meant that Gregor really needs to know what the situation is. It’s not fair to him—”
“Nobody knows what the situation is,” Bennis said, forcing herself to sit up. “They found a spot on my lung. They don’t even know what it is yet.”
“Yes,” Donna said. “Yes, I know.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bennis said. “You don’t have to be so damned optimistic about it.”
“I am optimistic about it,” Tibor said. “I have talked to God. That is my job. But I am not optimistic about you when this is over, because I do not think you will quit smoking.”
Bennis lay back down again. Quit smoking, quit smoking, quit smoking. How long had she been smoking? She couldn’t remember. Since she left high school, she thought She’d started sometime in college. She rolled over on her side and curled into a fetal position. She needed more covers. She needed more blankets. She was so cold. She should have thought to get Tibor to bring something for her from home. If he was going to bring Donna with him anyway, Donna could have gone into Bennis’s apartment and found everything that was needed.
“Look,” Donna said now. “We’ve caused a relapse.”
“We would not cause a relapse if you would not lecture her about cancer,” Tibor said. “It does nobody any good at this point to jump to conclusions.”
Bennis turned over on her back again. Then she sat up again. It made her feel dizzy.
“Listen,” she said. “I want the two of you to get out of here. And then I want to see Lida.”
“Of course,” Donna said quickly. “We’re making you exhausted. We’ll send Lida and Hannah in and—”
“No. Just Lida. I’ll talk to Hannah later. Maybe. If I’m up to it.”
“Hannah is going to be very upset about it,” Donna said dubiously. “Are you sure you want to, well, you know—”
“I need to talk to Lida,” Bennis insisted.
Tibor and Donna looked at each other. Bennis wished they weren’t behaving so much as if they were granting her her last wish. Then they each leaned over the bed in turn and kissed her on the forehead.
“Just a moment,” Tibor promised. “We will send Mrs. Arkmanian down to talk to you.”
Bennis took the time just after they left to rearrange the pillows so that she could sit up better. Then she remembered something she had forgotten about hospital beds and went looking for a button. She found it on a sort of remote-control thing that wasn’t really remote, since it was hooked into a wire. She couldn’t think what to call it. She pushed the button and the top half of the bed began moving upward.
Lida came in just as Bennis found a bed position she liked. Lida Kazanjian Arkmanian had been the prettiest girl in Gregor Demarkian’s grammar school class, and she was still a remarkable-looking woman, with high cheekbones and good hair. She also had a truly remarkable three-quarter-length chinchilla coat.
“I wish I had that,” Bennis said, as soon as Lida came in. “I’d use it as a blanket.”
Lida shrugged off the coat and spread it out over Bennis on the bed. “This should be better than what they give you here. And later this afternoon, maybe I’ll bring you some real blankets and some food. Will they let me bring you food?”
“Absolutely. I can eat anything. I’m supposed to eat anything. It was just last night and this morning you know, when they were leading up to the biopsy.”
“Yes,” Lida said.
Bennis hunkered down under the chinchilla coat. “Look,” she said, “I don’t mean to pry or anything, but are you still in contact with my brother Chris?”
Lida cleared her throat. “Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact, I am. Not quite in the same sort of contact I once was, if you understand—I don’t know, Bennis, but I think I’m getting old—but we still talk at least once a week.”
“Good. Because Chris and I hardly talk at all, and I lost his new address after he moved last spring, and now I want to get in touch with him. Do you think you could get in touch with him for me? Do you think you could tell him I want to talk to him?”
“Of course I can, Bennis. I can do that tonight Do you want him to fly out here? Do you want him to be with you?”
“No, that’s not necessary, really. I just want to talk to him. I can’t tell Gregor everything, after all. Sometimes I try, and he just doesn’t get it.”
“None of them get it, Bennis. At your age, you ought to know that. Some of them are very sweet, of course, but none of them get it.”
“No, I guess they don’t. But I want to talk to Chris anyway. Okay?”
“Of course.”
“Now, do you think you could do me a bigger favor and tell the assembled horde out there that I’m not up to seeing any more visitors? Just tell Hannah I fell asleep or something, will you? I’ll make it up to her later.”
“She’ll be very upset.”
“I know she will. But I just—can’t, if you know what I mean. I just can’t”
“It will be all right, Bennis. We’ll work something out. And maybe you should sleep.”
“I will sleep. They’ll come in here in about half an hour and fill me full of Demerol. I won’t be able to help but sleep.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
“I know.”
“I will be going now,” Lida said. “Do you want to keep the coat?”
“Somebody would steal it.”
“Yes.”
Lida picked up the coat and put it around her shoulders. Then she leaned over and kissed Bennis on the forehead, too. Bennis couldn’t remember a time in her adulthood when so many people had kissed her on the forehead.
As soon as Lida was out of the room, Bennis put the bed back down flat and turned over on her side.
If it really was cancer, she had no idea of what she was going to do.
Seven
1
They impounded the car.
That, and picking up Faye Dallmer’s Jeep, was all they could think of to do. The financial records would be on their way as soon as all the authorizations were in and the bankers felt protected from any possible future lawsuits. Gregor Demarkian did not think there was much chance that what he believed would be there would not be there. After all, nobody takes a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in cash and just leaves it lying around the house. Something has to be done with money of that kind. Someplace has to be found to put it. Even in the event of the nearly unthinkable—that the check had been cashed and the cash put into a safety deposit box, say—there would be some record of the check being cashed. No bank would ever have handed over the money without it.
The question was—was it going to be enough? That was the difficulty with well-heeled, well-educated perpetrators. If they kept their heads, they could get away with almost anything. Evidence was such a tricky thing. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” was even trickier. And then there was the obvious, well known to every law enforcement officer and every district attorney: juries hated to convict personable, successful, well-mannered white people. Gregor had seen it a hundred times, in cases he had been personally involved in and in cases he had only followed in the newspapers. Rapes so egregious they left the victims scarred for life. Assaults so violent the victim required decades of plastic surgery before he would be whole again. Even murders, done carefully, so that the evidence was obvious only to those people who had to deal with evidence all the time. Sometimes, Gregor thought that juries these days were made up of people who had watched entirely too many episodes of The Fugitive.
In the long late afternoon, sitting in the conference room at the Washington Police Department, Gregor watched what evidence they had piling up. There was, he knew, also the status differential. In general, juries tended to find the lives of men more important than the lives of women—where they might convict a woman of murdering a man, the same evidence would be deemed insufficient to convict a man of murdering a woman. This was also the case for blacks and whites, an
d for rich people and poor people. It was as if crime were being judged on a discount scale, or maybe as if the days of aristocracy had never ended. On the other hand, it didn’t really do to be too rich, or too young, or too arrogant. Juries were not made up of members of the Swamp Tree Country Club. The question in this case was how a jury would gauge the life of Kayla Anson. Zara Anne Moss would be too kooky. Margaret Anson would be too old and too easily portrayed as a bitch. It was Kayla Anson whose death a jury might be willing to avenge, and then mostly because they would see her as assailed on every side, a victim of forces that saw her less as a person than as a fountain of money. Poor little rich girl. Cinderella in a golden tower. Gregor didn’t understand why people couldn’t see things clearly, and understand that murder was always wrong, even if the person who had been murdered was better off dead.
It was about quarter to five when he decided that he couldn’t wait any longer. He had already tried to call Cavanaugh Street four times, and on the two occasions when he’d found somebody to talk to, their answers had been vague and unsatisfactory. He was worried as hell, and the more he tried to concentrate on the case, the more worried he got. Bennis had gone to the doctor’s. That was last night sometime. After she’d gone to the doctor’s, though, he had no idea what had happened to her. She hadn’t gone home. He’d called her apartment more times than he could count. He’d called his own apartment half a dozen times, in case she’d decided to use it instead. She liked some of the games she had given him for his computer, that she did not have for her own. He’d called Donna Moradanyan Donahue, too, but that had elicited nothing but the information that she still didn’t know what to do about Tommy’s natural father. He had called Father Tibor Kasparian, but Tibor just kept lapsing into Armenian and Latin. He knew without a doubt that they were all keeping something from him. He didn’t for a moment like the ideas he’d had for what it might be.
“The problem,” Mark Cashman said, when Gregor had made his suggestion, “is that we’re not really clear on location. It’s going into Friday night—”