Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  “Bennis—”

  “Never mind.”

  It turned out not to be impossible after all. The corner wasn’t a corner, but a bend in the park. On the far side of it there was a little indentation in the underbrush at the edge of a wooded area that looked like it had been hollowed out for a police car to sit in. Gregor couldn’t imagine why a police car would want to sit in it. There wouldn’t be anything for a policeman to see. Bennis pulled into this space and put the car in park. Franklin Morrison leaned into the front seat and blew hot thick smoke in Gregor’s face.

  “What are we stopping here for?” he asked.

  “I want to get out and check something one more time.”

  Bennis shut off the ignition. “We might as well go,” she said. “As you should know by now, Mr. Morrison, when the man’s decided he wants to haul ass all over the landscape, there isn’t any stopping him.”

  Gregor almost told her to watch her language. Then he remembered that he was trying not to put her under any kind of stress, just in case it was stress that had caused the reading of all those diet books, and maybe even the diet. Gregor certainly hadn’t seen her eating anything today. He climbed out of the car and across to the park proper, between two sections of bleachers that would have to be the ones almost directly across from where he, Bennis, Tibor, Gemma and Kelley had been sitting the night before. He got to the center of the park and decided he was just about right. He was directly across, but a little to the west. He started across the park to the bushes, confident that Bennis and Franklin would follow him.

  They did follow him, but when they got to the bushes, neither one of them was in a good mood.

  “You’ve been all over this thing a dozen times already,” Bennis complained. “That’s how you found the gun last night, don’t you remember? And that boy from MIT was all over it, too. He took samples. He’s running tests.”

  “I know he’s running tests,” Gregor said.

  “Well, the lady has a point,” Franklin said. “I don’t think you’re going to find anything here. Not anything that we missed. It was real instructive, watching you and Demp working last night. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a scene gone over in quite that way.”

  Gregor almost said “standard Bureau procedure,” but didn’t. That was the kind of remark that made local police departments hate the FBI. He stepped farther into the bushes and picked through the branches, thinking.

  “Bennis,” he said after a while, “I want you to come over here. Come over here and stand in the trees.”

  “In the trees,” Bennis repeated.

  “Put out that cigarette.”

  Bennis dropped her cigarette in the snow, made sure it was out, then picked it up and put it in her pocket. Bennis didn’t litter. She walked up to the trees and stood next to them.

  “Like this?” she asked.

  Gregor shook his head. “Stand in the trees, not next to them.”

  “Gregor, they’re not trees. They’re bushes. And they sting.”

  “That’s just pine needles,” Franklin Morrison said helpfully. “They won’t hurt you.”

  “They are hurting me. And this isn’t a pine tree. These aren’t. I don’t care. Gregor—”

  “Farther in,” Gregor said.

  Bennis moved farther in, but she looked mutinous. When Gregor insisted she go farther in yet, she started to swear. She also disappeared. Franklin Morrison said, “Hey.”

  “You can come out now,” Gregor said.

  Bennis reappeared. “I wasn’t in. I couldn’t get any farther in. I went to the side—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Well, if you know, what did you put me through it for, Gregor? I mean, honestly—”

  “Relax,” Gregor said imperturbably. “Tell me how tall you are.”

  “How tall? Five-four.”

  “What do you weigh?”

  Bennis looked exasperated. “How am I supposed to know what I weigh? I mean, I haven’t been on a scale in years except at the doctor’s, and he’s always telling me I’m healthy as a horse.”

  “Guess.”

  “Okay, I’ll guess. Maybe one hundred. Maybe one-ten.”

  “Maybe one hundred,” Franklin Morrison put in. “She’s too thin. Looks just like my niece in Portland got that anorexia nervosa a few years ago.”

  “No one has ever accused me of not being willing to eat,” Bennis said, “except maybe for Tibor who’s been going crazy lately. Gregor, what is this all about?”

  “Mostly it was just wishful thinking.” Gregor sighed. “You know why I’m not really the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot? Because faced with a situation like this, Hercule Poirot would have done something. He would at least have had an idea of something to do.”

  “About what?”

  “About the fact that I know who did it, and why she did it, and how she did it, and I haven’t got a shred of proof of any of it, or a chance in hell of being able to get any, either.”

  “She?” Bennis Hannaford asked.

  Gregor Demarkian nodded. Franklin Morrison had a look very much like rapture on his face, but Gregor didn’t want to pay attention to that. Apparently, Franklin had just been catapulted into that most exciting of all imaginary detective scenes, the Great Detective’s Perfect Solution.

  Gregor turned back to the evergreen bushes. “It has to have been a woman,” he said, “because any man we’ve heard about in this case so far has been too big, at least as far as I know. I’d guess five-six or so would be the limit in height to fit into this stand of bushes without being noticed. Also, we have measurements from the ground to the branches where the gun was fired, and assuming the gun was fired by being placed in the bushes beforehand—”

  “You said all that last night,” Franklin Morrison said. “You didn’t say anything about it being a woman.”

  “Well,” Gregor said reasonably, “there are always other possibilities. And last night I wasn’t sure of the motive. When you first told me about this case, you spoke of two men I haven’t met yet. Either one of them could be small. There was the lawyer who was going to drive Tisha Verek to the courthouse in Montpelier—”

  “Camber Hartnell,” Franklin Morrison said. “He’s six-two and boozed out.”

  “That takes care of him then.” Gregor nodded. “Then there was another lawyer, Benjamin something.”

  “Benjy Warren,” Franklin said. “Yeah, well, he’s small enough, but he’s not here. He’s in Germany visiting his wife’s brother who’s in the army or something. I mean they all are. The whole family.”

  “Is he local?” Gregor asked. “Someone who has been around all his life?”

  “About as local as it gets,” Franklin said.

  “That takes care of him then. He wouldn’t fit the motive. But forget about the motive for a minute. You must realize that the actual execution was very simple. All she did was pick what was closest to hand and use it.”

  “Semiautomatic rifles?” Bennis protested.

  “We just heard Stuart Ketchum tell us that there are several all over town. Several of them seem to be left lying around where anybody could pick them up. I like that man he was talking about, Reggie George—”

  “I don’t like him,” Franklin said. “First-class son of a bitch and stupid besides.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said, “and for losing a gun and not realizing it’s missing, he’s a good candidate. The other good candidate is the man who’d been in the army, the one who goes hunting in Canada—”

  “Eddie Folier is very careful about his guns,” Franklin Morrison said, “and they wouldn’t be easy to lose. He’s got them right over his fireplace. And—oh.”

  “What is it?” Gregor asked.

  Franklin shrugged. “He’s not home. Hasn’t been home for over six weeks. He’s got some kind of condition left over from the service, something to do with his intestines, every two-three years he ends up at Mary Hitchcock over in Hanover. He’s been there since just after Thanksgiving.”
<
br />   “House locked?” Gregor asked.

  “If it is, it won’t make much difference,” Franklin said. “We don’t lock houses out here the way you lock up city apartments. We don’t go in big time for security.”

  “Well, we’ll have to check it out,” Gregor told him, “but the particulars here are not the point. And that was the second gun. The first gun was easy. The first gun was part of her original plan. She heard about Tisha Verek’s decision to file the lawsuit. She heard the time the lawyer was supposed to pick Tisha up. Why shouldn’t she have? Everybody else in town did. My guess is that she’d been thinking about killing Tisha Verek for a while. So she drove her car out to the Delaford Road, and she parked it in the trees across from the Verek house. But she couldn’t kill Tisha from there. By the time Tisha reached the Delaford Road, she’d be in a moving car. She’d be a difficult target and at least partially protected by the glass in the car’s windows. That was why the plan for the first gun was so perfect. She had to go walking along those stone walls anyway, just to get to Tisha Verek. She walked a little farther and picked up a gun—”

  “That might have been impossible,” Bennis protested. “Stuart Ketchum might have been there.”

  “But he wouldn’t have been and she’d have known it,” Gregor said. “Peter Callisher was on his way out to pick up Stuart Ketchum and the two of them were going over to talk some sense into Tisha Verek’s head. Everybody in town knew that, too. If she got to the Ketchum farm too early, all she had to do was wait in the trees.”

  “So she got Stuart Ketchum’s gun and went back to a place on the wall where she would be in place to kill Tisha Verek and then she did,” Bennis said, “and then what?”

  “Then,” Gregor said, “I think she went back through the trees along the stone wall and stashed the gun. She had to do that just to get away from whatever investigation started happening when the shooting occurred. Then she got to her car—”

  “Wouldn’t it have been seen?” Franklin asked.

  “It depends where she parked it.” Gregor spread out his hands. “I said she was across the road, but I didn’t necessarily mean directly across the road. If she parked another half mile out of town, she could have gotten back into her car and driven off in the other direction—”

  “And circled around when she got to Beaverton and nobody would have been the wiser,” Franklin said. “Whoosh.”

  “Now I’ve got to indulge in a little speculation,” Gregor said. “I think she came back to town not expecting to do anything else for the day, but when she did she was presented with an opportunity. Dinah Ketchum was doing errands that day. She was walking around Main Street. She was an old woman. I haven’t heard anything said about the way she got around—”

  “Stuart drove her,” Franklin said.

  “That’s what I would have guessed. Even if it hadn’t been the case, however, there would have been a way. Let me give you a ride. Come with me to the shopping mall and help me pick up decorations. Anything. It would have been easy. But once she saw her opportunity, she had a problem, because she had already gotten rid of the first gun. She couldn’t go back out to the Ketchum farm for another one, so she stole the first one she could think of to get her hands on.”

  “But how could she have known what to steal?” Bennis asked. “How would she have known who had guns?”

  “Well, if it was this Reggie George person, I think anybody would have known. At least, that’s the impression Stuart Ketchum gave—”

  “Anybody would have known,” Franklin Morrison said. “Reggie’s infamous.”

  “This Eddie Folier would have been another matter,” Gregor said. “I don’t know anything about him, who he sees, who he knows—”

  “He’s Stuart’s friend,” Franklin said, “and that means he’s Peter Callisher’s friend, too, because Stuart and Folier have been together forever, and you don’t get close to one these days without getting close to the other. Oh, and he did a lot of work for those two girls, you know who I mean, Sharon Morrissey and Susan Everman.”

  “What about Kelley Grey?” Gregor asked.

  Franklin shrugged.

  “Whichever,” Gregor said. “My point here is that she got the second gun, drove Dinah Ketchum out to a remote area on the Delaford Road, and essentially performed an execution. Then she stashed the second gun where she stashed the first one.”

  “Oh, I see,” Bennis said. “In those bushes where you found the gun today. And when she decided to kill Gemma Bury she just went out there and picked one up. Did she go out there today?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I don’t believe Jan-Mark Verek very much. I suppose he discovered the changes in his wife’s office today.”

  “But they could have happened any time in the last two weeks,” Franklin Morrison said. “Yeah, I see how that works. It does sound simple when you explain it.”

  “It’s straightforward, rather than simple,” Gregor said. “She’s a very straightforward killer. She always has been. But she’s not very organized and she’s not a master planner. If she had been, she would have varied her style from time to time, just to keep us from getting on to her.”

  “She sounds absolutely cold-blooded,” Bennis said. She looked the stand of evergreen bushes up and down one last time and made a face at it. Then she stepped away and began to beat the palms of her hands against her thighs. “It’s cold as hell out here. Couldn’t we all go inside someplace and talk this out there?”

  “Just one more thing,” Gregor said, “about how you disappeared to Franklin and me but you didn’t really disappear into the bushes. I think that if Gemma Bury hadn’t been given these two particular seats, our murderer would have found another time and place to get her killing done. On the other hand, these were the best two seats for our murderer’s purpose, because not only was that stand of bushes available to conceal the rifle, but that stand backs up on the passageway for the animals. If you stand where our murderer would have had to stand to fire that rifle and hit Gemma Bury, the only people who could see you would be the people in the passage with the animals. But there wouldn’t have been any people in that passage during the second half of the play last night, because aside from two cows that were wandering around the park for atmosphere, there weren’t any animals in the play last night. It was intermission. People were strolling around. All she had to do was step up to the bushes, fire and walk out by going down the passage. It was only by bad luck that she was seen.”

  “Seen?” Bennis said.

  “That’s proof,” Franklin Morrison said.

  “She wasn’t seen shooting,” Gregor said. “She wasn’t even seen in the bushes, as far as I can tell. She was seen leaving. And that isn’t enough to put her in jail with.”

  “I don’t suppose you’re willing to tell us who she is,” Bennis said.

  “Mmm,” Gregor answered.

  Bennis gave Franklin Morrison a long-suffering look. “He’s always like this. He says he doesn’t like to be compared to Hercule Poirot, but he’s just as vain as Poirot ever was. He likes revelation scenes with all the suspects assembled.”

  “I do not,” Gregor said.

  “I’ve got to get back to the Inn,” Bennis told him. “I’m freezing my patooties off and I want a sandwich. Tibor’s been making me so crazy, I haven’t eaten since late last night.”

  She stalked off across the park, leaving them to follow in her wake, and after a while, they did. Franklin Morrison was exhilarated. Gregor Demarkian was anything but. This was not a case he would like to leave lying for lack of usable proof. She was just what he’d said she was—a very straightforward murderer—and that straightforwardness was dangerous in and of itself. It was as if she had tunnel vision. She saw what she had to see and no further. It hadn’t worried her that in shooting at Gemma Bury while Gemma sat in the park on the bleachers she might have shot someone else as well, Gregor thought, because it hadn’t occurred to her that she might have shot someone else as well. She
saw the job at hand and nothing else. What that meant for the future, if she was left to wander around loose, wasn’t very pleasant to contemplate.

  Bennis was sitting behind the wheel when Gregor and Franklin came up, the engine running, the heating on full blast, the doors open so the heater did no good at all. Gregor let Franklin climb into the back seat and then took the seat next to Bennis himself. Bennis had lit another cigarette and was blowing smoke on her hands.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “I want to get my hands on my food before Tibor starts obsessing and spoils it for me.”

  2

  Less than five minutes later, Bennis Hannaford handed the keys to the Ford Taurus to Franklin Morrison and got out on the walk in front of the Green Mountain Inn. Gregor got out after her, holding the seat to help Franklin climb out himself. They all shook hands—why, since they were all going to be at the performance and likely to see each other in under three hours, Gregor didn’t know—and then Franklin got back into the car and Gregor and Bennis started on inside the Inn. The Inn’s windows had been spruced up a little while they were out. The three gold Christmas balls that had been there since their arrival had increased to eight and had been joined by a gold-painted wicker basket. It reminded Gregor more of Easter than of Christmas. Bennis went through the Inn’s front doors, unzipping her parka as she walked. Gregor went in behind her and looked around the lobby. He was glad to see that there didn’t seem to be anyone lying in wait for him. He’d half-expected a visit from Sharon Morrissey. Ever since he’d talked to Susan Everman, he’d been sure a visit from Sharon was on the horizon. Maybe Susan hadn’t told Sharon she’d spoken to Gregor, or even that she’d intended to. That would explain it.

  Bennis had stopped short in the middle of the lobby. Gregor came up next to her and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  Bennis pointed across the room to the fireplace. “Right there,” she said. “Right where he was sitting yesterday.”