Feast of Murder (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “I dated one of your uncle Calvin’s stepdaughters once. Delia Ransom. You know her?”

  “She’s a fish. Back to the subject. You can imagine what Uncle Calvin was like. All he wanted to do was give me a lecture about whether Dad had or hadn’t committed the violations in the indictment, and I didn’t want to talk about that. Dad and I had already talked about that. So when I finally got Uncle Calvin to the subject of Donald McAdam, he was pissed at me. He came off like one of those guys who’s afraid to write a job recommendation because anything they say they can be sued for. If you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah. What McAdam wanted was, like I told you, cocaine with strychnine in it. The fad for that was over, really, but the stuff could be had, except that I didn’t have it. You know how I feel. Do all the drugs you want, just keep the damned stuff out of my life. And especially real nuthouse shit like that strychnine business. There’s a limit even to my tolerance. But there he was, and I wanted to get rid of him, so I gave him a name, an address, and a telephone number.”

  “The name, address, and telephone number of a place where he could get what he wanted,” Mickey said helpfully.

  Tony laughed. “I sent him to Ashaki Madumbra. You’ve heard about good old Ash. He can get you cocaine. He can get you women. He can get you a Stealth Bomber and someone to fly it.”

  “So did McAdam go?”

  “He must have,” Tony said, “because of what happened today. At the time, I had no idea. He left my apartment. I went back to my life. Dad decided to plead guilty. I drank too much for three weeks because it was so totally unnecessary and I was so totally pissed off. And that was that.”

  “Until today,” Mickey said solemnly.

  “Until today,” Tony agreed. “Today, there I am again, asleep on my couch again, except I’m recovering from the performance of a woman who shoots Ping-Pong balls out of her vagina and wouldn’t be considered anything but a burlesque queen except she’s suing the Endowment for not giving her a grant because she says she was denied on political grounds. Which, hell, maybe she was. How should I know? All I know is, there goes the door, and on the other side of it is good old Ash.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “You bet, uh-oh. This is eight o’clock in the morning, remember. The deal hasn’t even been done yet. And Ash has heard about it. And he’s upset.”

  “Upset that he’s got a customer with a cocaine habit who’s going to have twelve and a half million dollars?”

  “Upset that everybody’s going to be so royally pissed off that McAdam got paid that there’s going to be another investigation, maybe a state investigation this time, and state investigations aren’t like federal ones. With Morgenthau’s office, they check everything.”

  “Including possible drug use,” Mickey said.

  “Right,” Tony answered him.

  “Including possible drug connections,” Mickey said.

  Tony pushed his empty beer bottle halfway across the table. “What Ash wants,” he said carefully, “is for me to run a buffer. I should take delivery of McAdam’s stuff. I should deliver it to McAdam. I should pass the money back and forth. I sent McAdam to Ash, now I should protect Ash from McAdam.”

  “Is this a matter of principle?” Mickey asked him. “Is it that you don’t approve of drug use or what?”

  There was a smear of something on the opposite wall, a dark place where the flies clustered and glinted green in the fitful pulsing backshadows of the neon lights. Tony let himself imagine for a moment it was blood—in the Grubb Clubb it was more likely to be vomit—and then checked the wall at the back of his head before he let himself rest against it. There were people who wondered why Tony kept Mickey around, but Tony didn’t wonder at all. Mickey was the only person on earth who knew him well who could understand what he was about to say next.

  “What’s it’s a matter of,” he explained carefully, “is foresight. Next year I don’t want to be here. I want to be at Baird Financial. Dad and I have talked about it. He’s throwing one of his patented Thanksgiving parties this November and we’re supposed to seal the deal there. This is a tough regulatory atmosphere. We can’t seal the deal if I’ve been arrested for dealing dope. Or even having dope.”

  “And you think if Morgenthau’s office does investigate McAdam, they’re going to find dope?”

  “Hell,” Tony said, “I don’t even think you need Morgenthau’s office. McAdam is a jerk. He’s one of those idiots just asking to get caught. At everything. Look at the man.”

  “Oh,” Mickey said.

  “Right,” Tony said, “but you know Ash. Ash is going to insist. I’ve been hanging out all day trying to think of some way out of this mess, and all I can come up with is that I wish Donald McAdam were dead.”

  “Maybe he is dead,” Mickey laughed. “Cocaine and strychnine, cocaine and strychnine. Maybe he’s writhing around on his bathroom floor right this minute.”

  “Maybe he is,” Tony said, but he didn’t believe it. He didn’t have that kind of luck. With the kind of luck he did have, McAdam would go on taking tiny doses of strychnine with his cocaine until he was a hundred and six, and never feel the ill effects at all.

  Unless, of course, something other than luck came along to change the prescription.

  5

  “Let’s start this all over again at the beginning,” Julie Anderwahl said, stopping dead in the middle of her husband Mark’s wall-to-wall carpeted office floor, throwing out her arms in a wide sweep meant to indicate a willingness to capitulate she did not feel. “We’re talking about twelve and a half million dollars. Not serious money in this market, granted, but still. Twelve and a half million dollars. And Baird Financial is giving this twelve and a half million dollars to a man who pleaded guilty to one hundred and forty counts of securities fraud. A man who shopped half his friends to the Feds. A man who told Geraldo Rivera, on the air, in an upper-class accent so phony it could have made a three-dollar bill look like gold bullion, that the rich can’t be expected to follow the same rules as other people. Baird Financial is going to give twelve and a half million dollars to this man, and I’m supposed to make it look good?”

  On the other side of the room, sitting on a black leather swivel chair behind a polished mahogany desk the size of a table tennis table Mark Anderwahl closed his eyes, dredged up an image of the Almighty from his very misty memories of Episcopalian Sunday school, and prayed. What he prayed was that his wife was not about to go on one of her certified rampages, reducing his chair, his desk, and his tie to rubble in the process. He prayed harder than he otherwise might have, because this time he knew she had a point. Julie was an excellent PR woman—probably the best one on the Street—but making the McAdam payoff look good to the Great American Public was an impossibility, and even Jon Baird had to realize that. Even making the McAdam payoff look neutral was probably out of the question. There had been just too much insider sleaze, too many cozy back-room deals, too much fraud. Sometimes it made Mark’s head ache. Passing the racks of magazines in the Pan Am station with their headlines full of Dennis Levine and Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken and Donald McAdam made him physically ill. On the other hand, he had perfect trust in the judgment of his wife. What there was to be done she would do. What could be thought of to be done she would think of to do.

  Actually, Mark had always had perfect trust in Julie, from the very first time he saw her, standing in the middle of Harvard Yard at four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and letting snow fall on her head while she searched through her bookbag for he didn’t know what. He never found out, either. He was too busy accidentally-on-purpose bumping into her, helping her pick up what she had dropped, getting acquainted. He was too busy thinking how absolutely perfect she was. And she was perfect. Mark Anderwahl had been brought up in very thin air. He was the only son of Susannah Baird Anderwahl, only sister of Jon and Calvin Baird, widow of Stephen K. Anderwahl, once president of the largest commercial bank in The Netherlands. Broug
ht back to the States after his father’s death, Mark had been carefully shepherded through all the schools his family considered “right” for him, including Collegiate in Manhattan and the obligatory trip through Groton to Harvard. He had always envied his cousin Tony, who was willing and able to put his foot down and demand a change, even if the change was as minor as accepting a place at Yale. Mark had never been good about putting his foot down about anything. He had never been good at asserting himself in any way. Left to himself, he would quickly have become one of those perpetual boys living on a trust fund, wandering through the expensive restaurants and charity balls of New York City like the Ghost of Achievement Past.

  Julie was one of those girls who was at Harvard less on scholarship than on determination. Her education was being financed by a jury-rigged hodgepodge of student loans, summer jobs, financial aid, and moonlighting. She knew what she wanted to do because she had to. She did what she had to do because she wanted to. She had it all mapped out as early as freshman year. First, Harvard. Then a job with a bank. Then a Harvard MBA. Then—everything. Julie told Mark this in a tone of conviction so strong, she might have been Moses come down from Sinai with the tablets. And Mark believed her. Mark always believed her. And he always let her carry him. If there was one thing Julie understood it was that a woman who wanted “everything” could only get it as part of a partnership, as one half of a “dual-career couple” whose “dual careers” were really one big amalgamated one. She latched on to him as fiercely as he latched on to her, although for different reasons. Whatever the reasons, they were off.

  Now she was standing in the middle of his office, ready to brain him, and he couldn’t blame her. In the years since they had first come together, things had gotten a little complicated. He had made the suggestion, in their senior year, that they both apply to work at Baird Financial. With his connections, their assignments would be more interesting and their chances of getting recommendations for business school would be better. As it turned out, that wasn’t all that had been better. Their promotions and their bonuses had both been unbelievable, Julie’s more so than his own, so that now, when they were both only thirty-two, they were worth at least $5 million apiece and far higher up the ladder than most of the people they had graduated with. They were also just a little bit stuck. Julie had never gone back for her MBA. Without it, the fact that she was the youngest head of PR at any firm on the Street might be more of a liability than an asset. Mark suffered from what he thought of as Family Syndrome. Without the MBA, nobody out there knew if he could really do a job, or if he’d been being carried all these years by the fact that he was a Baird. For better or for worse, both he and Julie were now intricately concerned with the fate of Baird Financial.

  Julie had stopped pacing and stopped posing. She was now standing stock-still in the middle of that great expanse of nothing, looking smaller and blonder than she did when she was throwing a tantrum. Mark cleared his throat.

  “Julie,” he said, “it was necessary. Trust me.”

  “Why?”

  Mark was about to ask “why what?” but he didn’t. It was silly. “We bought the firm,” he said patiently, “don’t you remember that? There was a stock market crash, and then another stock market crash, and on the heels of the second one McAdam was about to go under.”

  “And McAdam Investments was famous,” Julie recited dutifully, “with all these ads on the air with movie stars in them, and the public was very jittery with two big crashes coming so close together like that, and everybody was afraid that if someone as big and well-known as McAdam went bankrupt there’d be a run on the bank, figuratively speaking—”

  “There’d be a run on all the banks,” Mark said, “and maybe not so figuratively. That was the problem.”

  “No,” Julie said. “That was not the problem. We were heroes when we bought McAdam Investments. We had every right to be. How could Jon have been so stupid as to not check on McAdam’s personal employment contract? How could he do that? Jon never makes that kind of mistake.”

  “Maybe he didn’t.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning,” Mark said slowly, “maybe he thought, at the time, that it didn’t matter. This was before McAdam turned state’s evidence on everybody in creation. Maybe he just thought we could go on carrying McAdam indefinitely, until he was sixty-five, and so what?”

  “Why can’t we?”

  “Junk bonds,” Mark said reverently.

  Julie looked confused.

  Mark sat forward a little and put his hands on his desk. “Junk bonds,” he said again. “There’s been all this moaning and groaning in the media about how junk bonds are going bad and losing value and blah, blah, blah, and some of it’s true, of course, but you know what? Milken was right. A diversified junk bond portfolio outperforms the market by twenty-five percent and then some. McAdam Investments is sitting on a gold mine of junk bonds that didn’t go bad and paid off big—or would pay off big, if we could sell them, or even if we could sell the stock we could convert some of them to, except we can’t.”

  “Because of McAdam?” Julie asked.

  Mark nodded. “People are angry,” he said. “They’re worse than angry. They’re out for blood. Any time any of that stuff gets sold, as long as McAdam is still on the payroll he gets a bonus. A big bonus. And everybody knows it. And nobody wants to touch the stuff on those terms.”

  “But it won’t last,” Julie said reasonably. “If we wait it out for a year there’ll be plenty of bidders. We wouldn’t have to pay off McAdam. He was in my office half the morning, Mark. I hated him on sight.”

  “A lot of people love him,” Mark said. “But think. What’s going on in this place in just three months’ time, if we’re lucky?”

  Julie thought. “The takeover thing,” she said. “We’re set to buy the holding company that owns some bank. I have a file on it I’m supposed to get to over Labor Day.”

  “We’re set to buy the holding company that owns a whole string of banks from one end of Asia to the other, and a few other things besides. We could use a little cash under the circumstances, don’t you think?”

  “The terms of that deal are all set up already,” Julie said stiffly. “We don’t need—”

  “I didn’t say need. I said use.”

  “What we can’t use is a lot negative publicity right before Jon gets out of jail,” Julie said. “I made him look like a persecuted innocent going in, but with this McAdam thing he’s going to look like spoiled meat coming out. How am I going to face him? How am I going to spend a week and a half on a boat with him after I’ve failed—”

  “You think too much about failing,” Mark said sharply. Then he caught his breath, and sat back, and made himself calm down. He really hadn’t been himself lately. He’d been under too much pressure. And as for the boat … “Don’t worry about the Thanksgiving thing,” he told Julie. “He’s been doing that since I was a kid, on and off. Not with the replica. That’s new. But with one boat or another. Jon likes boats. Jon likes you. It’ll be fine.”

  “This is the first time we’ve ever been invited to anything like this with your family. It makes me nervous.”

  “Everything makes you nervous,” Mark said, and caught his breath again. It was crazy. Maybe he was sick.

  The one thing he couldn’t be, of course, was out of love with Julie.

  6

  Frieda Derwent Baird kept a notebook in her purse—one of the palm-size ones with the little pencils attached, made especially for Tiffany’s—and at the end of every meal she took it out and wrote down what she had eaten. This was something she had been doing for over thirty years now, and in her mind it was “a strategy that worked.” “A strategy that worked” was the kind of thing she said to magazines like Vogue and Queen and Harper’s Bazaar when they interviewed her, which they did about once or twice a year. She was, after all, the almost-famous “Fritzie” Derwent, only daughter of one of the oldest and most distinguished families on the Phi
ladelphia Main Line, most popular debutante of her year, longtime wife of the spectacularly successful Jonathan Edgewick Baird, chairwoman of committees for everything from benefit galas to club memberships. Even now, after her divorce, she was a force in the city of New York, as long as you defined “the city of New York” as that part of the island of Manhattan below Seventieth Street on the East Side and Eightieth on the West and above Forty-second all the way across. She also looked just the way she was supposed to look when photographed in Calvin Klein flannel skirts and Laura Ashley shawls, because she was very, very thin. She was so thin, in fact, that she looked skeletal, and people passing her on the street sometimes wondered if she was dying of AIDS. If this had been anyplace else but New York, they probably would have asked.

  Cassey Hockner never asked Fritzie anything. In spite of the fact that they had known each other forever—they had been roommates years ago at Madeira and then again at Smith—Fritzie sometimes wondered if that was because Cassey didn’t like her very much. Maybe that should have been: didn’t respect her very much. Fritzie wasn’t sure if there was a difference. She wasn’t sure of very many things, because her head seemed to be fuzzy all the time, and she had the attention span of a gnat. These things were definitely not true of Cassey. Cassey had grown up and come out and gotten married like all the rest of them, but then she had done what Fritzie thought of as a very strange thing. When her fourth and youngest child was safely in the fourth grade, Cassey had applied and been accepted to the graduate program in archaeology at Columbia. Now she had not one doctorate but two—in archaeology and Semitic languages—and a shelf full of books she had published on the dig she was overseeing, off and on, in the Sinai Peninsula. She also had what Fritzie delicately referred to as “a weight problem.” Fritzie began to feel fat as soon as she put on a pound above 110, and she was five feet eight inches tall. Cassey never seemed to feel fat at all. She sat in the middle of Fritzie’s living room, her enormous bulk spread across Fritzie’s white satin couch like an amoeba in a muumuu, picking happily away at a plate of chocolate chip cookies.