Feast of Murder (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “I won’t sleep on the floor.”

  Gregor wedged the cabin door open, stuck his head out into the dark hall, and decided that the coast was clear. For the moment, at any rate, the passengers on the Pilgrimage Green seemed to be minding their own business.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” Gregor told Bennis.

  And then he left.

  2

  Where he went was on deck below, where the crew slept in two bunk rooms that were less like cabins than old-fashioned dormitories and Charlie Shay rattled grandly around in a room of his own. He opened that room up, went inside, and locked up again behind himself. Charlie’s corpse was invisible between the slats of its bunk. The other bunk was empty. Gregor stared at it for a moment, trying to decide if he was really capable of doing what he’d come here to do. God only knew it was gruesome, sleeping in the same small room with a corpse and with the door locked besides, but it had its advantages. Gregor had noticed the bunks in this cabin when they’d first brought Charlie in. They were much larger than the ones on the deck above, maybe because on the original ship they’d been meant to sleep more than one. For whatever reason, Gregor was more likely to fit in the empty one here than he was in either of the ones in the cabin he was supposed to share with Bennis, whether Bennis was also in residence or not. Being in here, Gregor would also be able to keep his eye on the corpse. He wasn’t feeling very easy about the corpse. If everything he suspected was true, Charlie Shay’s murderer would have to get rid of Charlie Shay’s body sooner or later—and preferably sooner, because they could only wander around the coastal waters of the northeastern United States so long. Eventually, they would have to either make landfall or head out to sea, and heading out to sea might very well kill them all. Gregor didn’t think the murderer was much interested in a venture that might kill them all. This was a murderer who took risks, but only calculated risks.

  Gregor got a couple of candles lit and went over to look at Charlie Shay’s body. It was completely covered with blankets and barely recognizable beneath them. Gregor lifted them up to make sure. He needn’t have worried. Charlie Shay lay there calmly, looking better than he ever had in life. Gregor covered him up again and retreated to the chair near the door. He put his bag of food on the floor and wished he hadn’t brought it. He wasn’t going to eat it here at the side of a dead man. He picked up the FBI file and rifled through its pages. Less than an hour ago, he was so tired he could have fallen asleep in his tracks. Now he didn’t think he’d ever fall asleep again. Either just talking about the murder, or being presented with its victim, had charged all his batteries again.

  Gregor opened the FBI file and thumbed through it. Since it was a file presented to a confidential source—which is what he’d be considered for the purposes of satisfying the Bureau bureaucracy—it wasn’t inked over the way files released under the Freedom of Information Act were. It was simply straightforward Bureauese, which made it difficult to understand and often unintentionally funny, but at least something he was used to. He stopped for a moment at some agent’s thumbnail description of Charlie Shay—“considered to be more of a gopher than a fully trusted partner of Baird Financial, Shay’s principal function over the past year seems to have been to run errands for Jonathan Baird while Baird was serving time in the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury”—and then went on to what had bothered him back on Cavanaugh Street. Actually, it had bothered him even when it had only been the very young agent telling him about it. Gregor found it impossible to understand why it hadn’t bothered the very young agent’s superior officer, Gregor’s old friend Steve Hartigan. There was only one way it made any sense, but nobody seemed to have noticed. It was at times like these that Gregor wished he could see the real police reports. He thought an everyday working cop would be much better at this sort of thing than most Bureau agents were.

  He found the first of the two pages in question and reread it.

  “… some five minutes after going upstairs,” it read, “the subject was reported by doorman J. Gonzalez to have returned to the lobby to mail a letter. He passed through the lobby proper and greeted J. Gonzalez. Then he turned down a hall that leads to the mail room. In the mail room at that time was a resident of the building, one Mrs. Gail Creasey. Mrs. Creasey was not acquainted with the subject but knew him on sight. According to her statement, the subject entered the mail room and went directly to the slot into which all mail was to be posted in the building. He deposited a letter there, which Mrs. Creasey described as being a thickly packed legal-size envelope. He then turned, bumped into Mrs. Creasey as she was trying to make her way to the door from her own mailbox, and said good evening. It was at that point, according to Mrs. Creasey, that Mrs. Creasey noticed a very strange thing. The subject was a familiar sight to other residents of the building. He was usually very nattily dressed and very careful with his clothes. On this occasion, however, his tie was pulled a little off-center and one of the snaps on his suspenders, the one on the right in the front, had become undone. According to Mrs. Creasey, the subject kept pulling at the suspender snap in an absentedminded and irritated way, but without bothering to refasten it. Mrs. Creasey found this behavior so out of character that she asked the subject if he was feeling well, in spite of the fact that, according to her statement, she had never spoken to him before. He told her he was feeling ‘better than he had in years’ and passed on. Mrs. Creasey was left with the distinct feeling that the subject was behaving oddly and was possibly on the verge of some sort of psychological trouble.”

  Some sort of psychological trouble. Gregor sighed. He had met witnesses like Gail Creasey. They drove him to distraction. They could make a Freudian epic out of a man’s preference for coffee over tea. He had met report writers like the one who had put this together, too. He thought they all ought to be sent back to school. He flipped to the back of the report and found the lists. At least, with the lists, he didn’t have to suffer through anyone’s awful prose.

  As in any FBI report, there were lists of many things, some of them so arbitrary you had to wonder why the list maker had bothered. Gregor always imagined them being put together by a little man with an eyeshade who lived in a vault deep in Bureau headquarters, and who wrote lists for secular sources, like The Book of Lists, in his spare time. The list that Gregor wanted now, though, could have been put together by any decent detective, federal, state, or local. It was the list of things that had been found on Donald McAdam’s foyer table after Donald McAdam had died.

  “Crystal paperweight in the shape of a swan, Steuben glass,” the list began and then:

  copy of book, Collecting Antique Brass, by Devonbarr. Paperback

  sterling silver cocaine spoon, unused

  roll of stamps, 29 cent

  sterling silver letter opener

  manila envelope, used, addressed to Donald McAdam, letterhead Baird Financial Services

  copy of contract, agreement Donald McAdam and Baird Financial Services, dated day of death, signed Donald McAdam and Jonathan Edgewick Baird

  three brass suspender clips

  mason jar, preserves marked “Melon Rind Marmalade”

  one silk rep tie

  one gold tie tack, shape of musical note

  three number 2 pencils

  one gold Mark Cross pen

  one paging device, made by Sony

  Gregor shook his head. A “paging device” would be a beeper, but other than that the list was simple enough. Taken together with the testimony of the doorman and Mrs. Creasey, it could mean only one thing. Gregor thought that had to be significant. In fact, it had to be more than significant. It struck out at him like a snake. He just couldn’t figure out what it meant.

  He tossed the FBI file into the bag with the food Donna Moradanyan had sent and stood up. He could hear people moving above his head, shuffling steps that reminded him of the dead walking in a terrible movie Donna and Bennis had made him take them to because they wanted to see it and it was p
laying in an uncertain part of town. He wondered what it really was, members of the crew or passengers. He had a sudden vision of the passengers getting up to go into each others’ cabins in the dead of night, engaging in hanky-panky of every possible description—and then the hanky-panky he was imagining was between Bennis Hannaford and Tony Baird, and he knew he had to give it up.

  What he did instead was to blow out the candles, climb into the empty bunk, say good night to Charlie Shay in a loud voice, and fall asleep.

  When the door was opened two hours later and a head stuck through, listened to his snoring, and withdrew again, Gregor Demarkian knew nothing about it.

  Five

  1

  FOR GREGOR, THE WORST thing about being a passenger on a boat like the Pilgrimage Green was the utter unending sameness of it all. If he had been crewing on a smaller boat—God forbid—he would at least have had work to do. If he had been a passenger on a large modern liner, he would have been forced into voluntary paralysis by some social director with a whistle around her neck. On this boat, he had nothing to distract him but the weather, and that had calmed significantly while he slept. Gregor Demarkian didn’t count murder as a distraction. That was something he had to think about. He wanted something to do.

  He came awake in the spare bunk in Charlie Shay’s cabin tomb with no idea what time it was, or even if it was morning. There were no portholes in the cabins down here, because these cabins were at the waterline or below it. Gregor unwound himself and climbed out onto the center of the room. It had taken a great deal of winding to fit himself into that small high-sided bunk, so much that the very idea of trying to wind himself into one of the smaller ones on the deck above appalled him. His back ached and his muscles were throbbing. His head felt like a helium balloon. He looked into Charlie Shay’s bunk, found the body lying there undisturbed, and felt around in his clothes for the cabin key. It was a heavy iron old-fashioned thing and hard to lose. He put his hand right on it, because it was sitting in his hip pocket and making a dent in the top of his thigh. His only problem was to get it untangled from the cotton there. He got the FBI file on the death of Donald McAdam and tucked it under his belt. Then he let himself out, locked the door behind him, and headed for the decks above.

  The deck immediately above seemed to be deserted. Gregor went to the cabin he was supposed to be sharing with Bennis and looked in, but she wasn’t in the one useful bunk and she wasn’t sitting in the chair and her pajamas had been neatly folded and left on top of her pillow. Gregor looked through the porthole and saw grey air and what looked like a calm sea. The boat didn’t seem to be rocking much. He poured water into the basin, washed himself off, and found some clean clothes. He also found a mason jar just like the ones that had been on the mess hall table last night, marked “Pumpkin Rind Marmalade” in that same Farmington script. The label was a little different from the ones that had been on the jars last night. It had a line drawing of a grinning turkey on it and a little orange-colored collection of generic vegetables that could have been meant to be decorative gourds and could have been meant to be corn. Gregor decided it didn’t put him any more into the Thanksgiving spirit than anything else on this godforsaken boat and put it aside. He picked up a red cotton sweater with a teddy bear on it that Bennis had given him for his “birthday,” meaning a day she and Donna had decided to call his birthday and give him a party on. In Gregor’s opinion, if letting Bennis know when his birthday was was going to result in ridiculously expensive sweaters with pictures of stuffed animals on them, he would just as soon be assumed to be coexistent with eternity.

  Gregor stowed the FBI report in his suitcase and got the pair of deck shoes Bennis had also bought for him, but that he had refused to wear yesterday because he thought they were silly. They were the kind of thing people wore yachting in Southampton, assuming that the people who went yachting would have called it yachting, which they wouldn’t have. The linguistic convolutions of rich people made him dizzy. He tied the deck shoes tightly onto his feet and headed up again. If there was no one on this deck they had to be above. Just to be sure he stopped at the dining hall and looked in, but it was empty.

  Actually, the main deck was empty, too, which was a surprise. Gregor supposed there was more of the boat beneath where he had been with Charlie Shay’s body—wouldn’t it have been called the hold?—but he couldn’t imagine his fellow passengers trooping down there en masse for any reason whatsoever. They didn’t like to troop en masse into dinner. He looked at the broad flat expanse of the stern and then into the wheelhouse. The stern was deserted and the wheelhouse was full of small dark men talking whatever language the man had talked to Gregor the night before. Gregor smiled and waved and went forward without trying to get a conversation started. The bow was deserted too, but for some reason Gregor found it more restful than he had the rest of the boat, and decided to stay there for a while. It was odd to think that this had been the scene of Charlie Shay’s death only hours before. It was odd to think that this had been the scene of anything violent. The wind, the rain, the body slashing back and forth against the deck—everything was perfectly calm now, the sails flat, the sea like glass. Gregor kept away from the low bow rail and went into the point of the bow itself, which was high. He looked out over the water and wondered how close they were to land. From what he could see, they could have been drifting off the edge of the world.

  He had just about decided that this was an exercise in futility—and spooky, too; he was reminded of those boats found drifting and uninhabited in the Sargasso Sea—when he heard the clatter of someone coming up from the deck below, and the low polite murmur of a woman’s voice thanking someone for helping her up. Gregor turned and looked expectantly at what was still the single narrow passage in and out of the bow. He had noticed that passengers who came on deck almost always came forward. He was not disappointed this time. There was a faint squeaking of rubber soles against wet wood, and Julie Anderwahl made her way slowly into the bow.

  Gregor Demarkian had, of course, seen Julie Anderwahl before. He had even spoken to her. He had never really paid attention to her. Now, while she was busy staring at her feet and trying to contain her unrelenting nausea, he examined her. She was prettier than he had realized at first, in that take-charge, faintly glamorous, New York career woman way, and she was also younger. She was not, however, as pretty as Bennis. Bennis had a sharply defined face, full of lines and angles, uncompromising. Julie Anderwahl had the sort of face that graces America’s Junior Miss year after year and shows up with regularity on prom queens from Lewiston to Tulsa. She was blond. She was blue-eyed. Her features were very regular. It was the steel in her spine and the determination in her gaze that set her apart, not the originality of her body. Bennis had originality of body. Of course, she also had steel and determination. In Gregor Demarkian’s opinion, Bennis Hannaford was altogether a woman and a half.

  Julie Anderwahl was having difficulty making it across the deck to him. She really was very sick, unbelievably sick considering the state of the sea. Either she was a woman who got seasick in the bathtub, or something else was going on. Gregor had no trouble guessing what.

  “Would you like me to help you?” he called out. “You seem to be having some trouble.”

  “I’m fine.” There was an edge of irritation in Julie’s voice, and Gregor didn’t blame her. “I came up because I was feeling sick downstairs and I thought the fresh air would help, but the fresh air smells like salt and now that’s making me sick, and you don’t know how glad I’m going to be when we make land.”

  “I’m going to be glad when we make land, too,” Gregor said. “I don’t like the idea of us floating around on the Atlantic Ocean with a dead body on board. There should have been some way to call the Coast Guard in an emergency.”

  “There probably is.” Julie had made her way to the front now. There was a low, round line spool lying in the bow and she sat down on that, not seeming to care that it was a little wet. Up close she looked
less attractive than she had from afar—but Gregor didn’t think she would have, ordinarily. Her face was much too pale and tinged with green. Her hair hung limply against her head, in spite of the fact that it was stringently clean. Her eyes were dull. She leaned against the ridge of wood in the bow and sighed. “They’re all down there trying out the Green’s idiosyncratic version of a shower. It’s not authentic, but Jon had to do something to keep people on the boat for three days running. I gave it up after a short try and just washed myself down in my cabin. How about you?”

  “I didn’t even know there was a shower. Where is this down there?”

  “Down there,” Julie said vaguely, waving toward nothing in particular. “You go down past where we put Charlie Shay last night. We were all wondering where you were.”

  “I was with Charlie Shay.”

  Julie Anderwahl shuddered. “I wouldn’t have liked that. I don’t like any of this. I keep thinking of the Puritans, coming all the way over from England on a little boat like this, having babies at sea, eating God only knows what, and then instead of landing in Virginia the way they thought they were going to they end up in Massachusetts and all the land they have to farm is full of rocks. No wonder they held a Thanksgiving. As soon as we get to Candle Island, I’m going to hold a Thanksgiving. I’m going to kiss the ground.”

  “My mother said she kissed the ground on the day she arrived in America,” Gregor said. “Of course, she also said she kicked a man who tried to examine her ears, so I don’t know what to believe.”

  “Was your mother born in Armenia?”

  “In Alexandria, in Egypt. It was my grandmother who was born in Armenia, but she left with her family after the Turks came.”

  “My family came over in 1707,” Julie said. “They settled in New York State. Mark’s father never came over at all. He was European and very starchy about it, from everything I’ve heard. I wonder why Americans do that, marry Europeans.”