by Jane Haddam
Farther along the passage, another door opened and a head stuck out into the hall.
“Tony?” Sheila said. “Is that you?”
“It’s me.”
“I came down looking for you before, but you were out.”
There was a doorstop made out of a polished rock on the table where he had put his food. Tony dropped it to the floor and kicked it across to hold the door open, letting the dim light of the single candle glow into the passage. Sheila came out into the passage with no light of her own and closed the door to her cabin behind her.
“For a while there I thought you were with that Hannaford woman,” she said. “You’ve been with her all day.”
“She’s an interesting woman. She’s led an interesting life.”
“I stopped worrying when I remembered she had a cabin together with Mr. Demarkian.”
Sheila came up to Tony’s door, looked at the plate of food on the table and made a face.
“I couldn’t face food if you paid me,” she said. “Not after all that terrible stuff about Charlie Shay. I think you’re very callous to be able to eat.”
“I think you’re a dyed-in-the-wool bitch to be pulling this now. I am hungry, you know, Sheila.”
“Mmm.”
“What about my father?”
“Your father took a sleeping pill.”
“Dad never takes sleeping pills.”
“He does when I want him to.”
“Are you trying to tell me you drugged him?”
Sheila walked around the table, poking at the food as she went. Tony watched her move with fascination. He’d always thought of Sheila as something not exactly human, almost as something feline. The more he saw of her the more convinced he was that that description was true.
Tony bent over, picked up the doorstop, and stood while the door swung shut on its own. It had an old-fashioned hasp and wouldn’t close by itself. He leaned over and closed it and then threw the bolt.
“Good,” Sheila told him. “No sensible person would want to eat anything right now.”
Actually, Tony wanted to eat everything right now, what he had on the plate and what he had left back in the kitchen. He was ravenous and obsessed. He was also very conscious of the rules of the game here. He knew what he had to do as long as he wanted to go on having an affair with his father’s wife.
Sheila came around to the front of him and wrapped her arms around his neck. He put his hand on her back and pulled her toward him. He still felt more hunger than he did anything else, but he knew the moves of this dance as well as he knew how to chew.
He could have done it in his sleep.
Four
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD BROUGHT along the FBI report on the death of Donald McAdam because the very young man from the Bureau had asked him to read it. He had even intended to read it, in spite of the fact that he thought the exercise was silly. It didn’t matter if the death of Donald McAdam was murder or suicide or accident or the will of an angry God. Nobody was going to prove it one way or the other now. If it was murder, nobody was going to jail the murderer. Gregor had never been the sort of investigator who gave up on his cases forty-eight hours after they had started. He’d known agents and cops like that and never had much use for them. Still, there was a point at which you had to accept the inevitable. To bring a case to court you needed either one or two pieces of hard physical evidence, or the very best kind of story. Gregor had seen story-cases brought and won. The Woodchipper Murderer had been jailed on a story. So had Frances Schreuder, who had manipulated her teenage sons into killing her father. To make it stick, you had to have a veritable epic, a large-scale morality tale with background music. There was nothing like that in Donald McAdam’s fall. Gregor had listened to the very young man from the Bureau and then thought the problem through himself. The lack of strychnine in the apartment was suggestive—it might even be definitive—but it couldn’t quite dispel the dispirited limpness of it all. Donald McAdam had been a fool. Donald McAdam had behaved foolishly. Donald McAdam was dead. A marginally intelligent public defender just two days out of the South Podunk Community College Law School could establish reasonable doubt with the likes of that.
Once Charlie Shay was dead—once Gregor had seen him die, and gone through the motions necessary to secure the body and bring some kind of order to the resulting situation—Gregor had thought he would go back to the file for other reasons. Gregor had lived too long a life not to believe in coincidence. He knew that if a man intent on cheating on his wife runs into that wife in the lobby of the very hotel where he has established his rendezvous, the chances are that the wife has a meeting of her Sunday school teachers’ support group in that very place at that very time and isn’t following her husband at all. There was, however, a limit. Two men connected to the same enterprise, both poisoned with strychnine, both falling off things—or almost falling off them, in Charlie Shay’s case. That had to be too much for anybody. Gregor wanted to get down to the file and see if he could clear up a few of the points that had been bothering him when he’d talked to the very young man from the Bureau. He wanted to read through the whole thing with a felt-tipped highlighter in his hand. He wanted to really concentrate. He did not, however, want to do any of those things now. Now was very late on their first night on board, only hours after Charlie Shay had died. Gregor was tired and cold and wet. His body ached from the battering it had taken making sure Charlie’s body didn’t disappear into the sea. His head ached from the stuffy closeness of the cabins and the unending need to compensate for the rocking of the boat. His stomach was empty. Dinner had disappeared in the confusion. They had been just about to sit down to it when Charlie had gotten sick and gone up to the main deck. They had never sat down to it again after Charlie’s body was stowed below. Excitement had carried Gregor through all of that without allowing him to feel hungry, but excitement had come to an end. He was now hungry enough to eat wood.
He used the forked throne that hung over the sea that was all that was provided for a toilet and then made his way back to the cabin he shared with Bennis. He came in to find her sitting in the one chair, dressed for bed, her legs folded under her Turkish-fashion. Gregor had never seen Bennis dressed for bed before, although he’d been with her on one or two occasions when he should have. For some reason, at those times she’d gone to sleep in her jeans or drifted away from him to rest in private. Gregor didn’t know what he’d expected of her in the way of nightwear. He didn’t know if he’d ever thought about what to expect of her in the way of nightwear. He was still a little surprised by what he found. Bennis was dressed in what looked like a pair of men’s pajamas, except that they were made of silk and vertically striped in white and candy cane pink. Over them she had a wrap robe that was also vertically striped in white and candy cane pink. Gregor didn’t know why, but he got the idea that both these articles were very expensive. Bennis looked about fourteen in them, even with the grey in her hair.
Bennis looked up when Gregor came through the door. Gregor shut the door and latched it and went over to sit on the side of the bunk. It was not a comfortable position. The bunk’s side was really just a polished slat of wood, less than an inch thick. Sitting on it was like sitting on the pickets of a fence.
“So,” he said, “what have you got there? I take it it’s mine.”
“It’s the FBI report on Donald McAdam,” Bennis said. “You can’t chew me out about this, Gregor. You showed it to me yourself.”
“I’m not chewing you out. I was just thinking about it myself. Thinking I ought to read it, I mean. But not now. I’m tired.”
“I’ll bet you’re hungry.” Bennis waved her hand toward the narrow, stern-side end of the cabin, where an odd arrangement of slats served as a luggage holder, holding their suitcases against the motion of the sea. “Look in the zipper compartment under the top flap of my bag. You know, open it up and look right under what you’re holding. Donna packed us some food.”
�
��Donna?”
“On orders from Lida and Hannah Krekorian. They were busy doing something or other with the Society for the Support of an Independent Armenia.”
Gregor got up and went to the suitcase, opened it up, and found the “zipper compartment” just where Bennis said it would be. He unzipped it and looked inside. With that blissful disregard for practicality that characterized every resident of Cavanaugh Street on the subject of food, Donna had packed not only honey cakes and breads, which made sense, but stuffed grape leaves and eggplant salad, which needed refrigeration to stay fresh. Gregor took these out and added a whole small loaf of what looked like Lida’s best four grain and went back to the side of the bunk. It still hurt to sit down, but he accepted it better because it was in such a good cause. It was the only place he could go to eat.
Over in the chair, Bennis was sucking on her fingers, a sure sign that she had just finished a honey cake. He waited until she looked up and said, “Has all that reading gotten you anywhere? Have you come to any conclusions about the death of Donald McAdam?”
“I hope I’ve come to the same conclusions you have,” Bennis said. “You have to think it’s murder, now.”
“I always did think it was murder,” Gregor said. “That wasn’t my point. My point was that it was a murder that was never going to be proved, and for which no one was ever going to go to jail.”
“Fine. Let me ask you this. Do you think Charlie Shay and Donald McAdam were killed by the same person?”
“I think it would be a very strange world if they were not.” Gregor scooped up eggplant salad with a chunk of bread and ate it. “Let’s look at it this way,” he said. “There are a great many people on this boat who would dearly have liked to see Donald McAdam dead. Donald McAdam is dead, and so is another man, who has died in a way very similar to the one in which we suppose McAdam died. It would be a one in a billion chance if these two things were not connected; therefore we must assume they were connected.”
“All right.”
“All right,” Gregor repeated. “What does that tell you?”
Bennis looked puzzled. “It doesn’t tell me anything,” she said, “except that there’s a murderer on this boat, and I already know that. It doesn’t tell me who the murderer is. Oh. It means whoever it is has to be the same person who murdered McAdam, so that lets out Jon Baird.”
“Excuse me?”
“Jon Baird was in jail at the time, so he couldn’t have murdered Donald McAdam. Or if he had, McAdam would have died before he did because strychnine works fast. Actually, if you believe this report, it lets out everybody. I’ve been paying careful attention to where everybody said they were ten minutes or so before McAdam died, and they were all halfway across town.”
Gregor looked down at his lap and saw that he was out of food. He got up, went back to the suitcase, and got some more.
“Let’s change the subject for a minute.” He gave up on taking pieces of food and simply acquired the entire brown paper bag. There were some things in there he hadn’t seen before, including a little pile of meatballs in crust. What had Donna been thinking of? He sat down on the slat again and put the bag on the bunk’s mattress. Then he began to unpack it. “Did you talk to Calvin Baird today?” he asked Bennis.
Bennis made a face. “Of course I did. Everybody’s talked to Calvin Baird today. He’s been wandering up and down the boat, behaving like the ancient mariner of certified accounting.”
“He was talking to you about a discrepancy in some numbers?”
“He certainly was.”
“Did you understand what it was about?”
“Of course I did.”
“Explain it to me.”
Bennis looked nonplussed, the way she always did when Gregor asked for financial information. After all, didn’t Gregor have a degree in accounting—a master’s degree, from the Harvard Business School? Gregor never seemed to be able to explain to her that he had taken that degree a long time ago, and only because in those days a man had to have a degree in accounting or law to get taken on at the Bureau. Once he had been taken on at the Bureau, he had volunteered for kidnapping detail and forgotten all about numbers. Bennis rearranged herself on her chair and said, “The discrepancy is in the list of figures that are supposed to be reporting the cash Baird Financial had on hand about eight months or a year ago when they made their formal offer for Europabanc. You understand what I mean by a formal offer? Baird and Europabanc had been talking to each other for years, I think. The first article I ever read about Jon Baird, I think it was in Forbes, went on at length about how he’d always wanted to found a great international banking house like Rothschild and how he’d had his eye on Europabanc and a possible method of doing that. You can have your eye on anything, though, if you know what I mean. They only made the formal offer this past year, or maybe it was last.”
“While Jon Baird was in jail.”
“I don’t know,” Bennis said slowly. “It might have been before that—I’m sorry to be so fuzzy, Gregor, you ought to ask Calvin or Jon Baird about the exact timing—but you know, if it wasn’t after Jon Baird had gone to jail, then it was probably after they knew he was going to. If you see what I mean.”
“I see what you mean. This cash on hand. How important was it?”
“At the time? Very important. Now? Not important at all.” Bennis shrugged. “When they made the offer, they would have had to have come up with proof that they could make the deal. If they hadn’t, Europabanc wouldn’t have bit, and neither would the governments they had to deal with, one of which I’m pretty sure was Switzerland. The Swiss like guarantees. Then they would have signed a set of preliminary agreements, and after that their cash could have all turned out to be counterfeit and it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Bennis said patiently, “if there was a problem like that, Jon Baird is smart enough to make sure it was covered in the prelims. He’d put himself in a position where all that mattered was that he had the cash when he showed up to close. And he’ll certainly have the cash.”
Gregor turned this over in his mind. “That would be because of Donald McAdam’s junk bonds,” he said. “I seem to remember something about a sale.”
Bennis grinned. “I’m glad Mark Anderwahl wasn’t around to hear you say it like that. It wasn’t just a ‘sale,’ Gregor. It was hundreds of millions of dollars. Which just goes to show. There are junk bonds and junk bonds.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s supposed to mean that there are some bonds that are junk because the companies behind them are insolvent, and there are some bonds that are junk because the companies behind them are new and unknown. It’s like junk stock in the old days. My father bought some of that once, in a small company nobody had ever heard of. American Halographic. Paid sixteen dollars a share, spent a hundred and sixty thousand dollars, his banker tried to have him committed. A couple of years later, the company came out with a new product and changed its name to Xerox.”
“Good God.”
“You just have to know what you’re doing,” Bennis said complacently. “Are you going to eat all of that? I could use some bread and butter.”
“Here.” Gregor passed the bread and butter across. “Can I see the file for a moment? There’s something I want to look up.”
“You can keep the file as far as I’m concerned.” Bennis passed it over and concentrated on buttering her bread. “I’m going to go to sleep as soon as I stuff enough into myself to feel tired. Don’t you think we ought to do something about this? About where we sleep, I mean.”
“Do what?”
“Well,” Bennis said slowly, “I’ve been thinking about it. You really can’t take the other bunk, Gregor, and neither can I. No adult human being would fit. So I thought, you know, that maybe what we ought to do is bundle.”
“What do you mean, bundle?”
“It was a form of courting in Colonial New England,”
Bennis said, “which seems entirely appropriate to me. Not the courting part, Gregor, the part about Colonial New England. Anyway, what you do is, the woman—it would have been a girl then, seventeen or younger probably—anyway, she gets in bed and gets wrapped up in the sheets like a mummy so she can’t move, and then the man does the same thing, and then they sleep together. No hanky panky. Lots of conversation. It was supposed to be a great way for two people to get to know each other.”
“Get to know each other,” Gregor repeated stupefied. “Bennis, are you out of your mind?”
“According to you, yes.”
“Bennis, listen to me. Do you realize what would happen, if we do what you’re suggesting and it got out on Cavanaugh Street?”
“How would it get out on Cavanaugh Street?”
“You’d tell Donna Moradanyan. Donna Moradanyan would tell her mother. Marie would tell Lida Arkmanian—how do you think it would get out on Cavanaugh Street?”
“Now, Gregor—”
“And you think you’ve got problems now with them trying to match make us together,” Gregor said. “I’d come home from the library one day and find the church decked out with flowers and old George all ready to give you away. They’d probably have you chained to the church door so you couldn’t bolt. What’s the matter with you?”
“Gregor—”
“Never mind,” Gregor said.
He hopped down off the slat, clutching the bag of food to his chest in one arm and the FBI file on Donald McAdam to his side with the other. Then he headed for the cabin door with the sort of determination he usually brought only to making complaints to the heads of government departments.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I know where I can sleep.”
“You can’t sleep on the floor,” Bennis warned him. “You’ll roll.”