by Jane Haddam
Gregor left her standing where she was, gaping after him and not moving at all, never mind with the speed he wanted of her, and headed into the bow with a determined step. The boat was tiny. He didn’t have far to go. It was just that with the way things were situated on the deck, it was hard to see into the bow until you were practically there. It might have been easier to see on the port side, but nobody ever went that way. Maybe that was why it had been blocked up. Gregor made himself go a little faster. There was no urgency at the moment, but he was ready to be finished with all of this.
He got through the passage just as Bennis got into gear, running toward the stern in search of God only knew what. Gregor trusted her. Bennis would come up with something. Gregor came up behind Julie Anderwahl, tapped her politely on the shoulder, and nodded to ask her permission to pass. She said “Oh!” and got out of his way.
Julie Anderwahl’s “Oh!” attracted attention. The rest of them were strung out across the bow in a rough semicircle, facing away from him. Only Tony Baird was facing in Gregor’s direction, and he wasn’t looking at Gregor. He was looking at his father, a smug, self-satisfied smirk spread across his face that made Gregor feel faintly nauseated. Jon Baird was smirking back, leaning against an empty spool with his arms crossed in front of his chest. The rest of them seemed paralyzed. Even Fritzie Baird didn’t look as distracted as she usually did. She was staring from her former husband to her son and back again, appalled.
It was Sheila Baird who decided to recognize Gregor’s presence for real, instead of just spying on him out of the corner of her eye. She was standing very close to Tony Baird. She spun around on her heel and marched up to Gregor in a huff, not so much as glancing at her husband on the way.
“He put him up to it,” Sheila said spitefully. “Don’t you dare believe anything else. He put him up to it.”
“He didn’t put me up to anything,” Tony Baird said.
Sheila ignored him. “He would never have killed Charlie otherwise. I know. I know them both. He would never—”
“But Tony didn’t kill Charlie,” Fritzie said, confused. “He couldn’t have. He was—”
“He was sitting much too far away at dinner and you had his attention most of the time before Charlie got ill anyway,” Gregor said pleasantly. “That’s right, Mrs. Baird. It was Jon Baird who killed Charlie Shay. Jon Baird was the only person who could have killed Charlie Shay. Julie Anderwahl was much too sick to put both strychnine and ipecac into Charlie’s salad without being noticed. That took skill. And I’d have had no reason to.”
“Someone might have hired you to,” Tony Baird said.
Gregor pivoted, so that he was facing Jon Baird. Jon Baird was still leaning against the spool, keeping his arms crossed on his chest. Now he looked amused.
“I could sue you for this,” he said happily. “You’ve got no proof. You couldn’t have any proof. You don’t even have a body. The body just went—”
“I heard the body go,” Gregor said. “It doesn’t matter. You’re right. I can’t prove you killed Charlie Shay.”
“Well, then,” Jon Baird said.
“What I can do,” Gregor Demarkian told him, “is prove you killed Donald McAdam, and how, and tell any police official who might be concerned where to lay hands on the physical evidence. How about that?”
Jon Baird didn’t look in the least bit worried. “When Donald McAdam died, I was in jail,” he said. “Nobody knows that that was a murder anyway. And there is no physical evidence.”
“Would you like to hear what I have to say?”
2
Whether Jon Baird or anyone else wanted to hear what Gregor Demarkian had to say was moot. They were going to hear it no matter how they felt about it. They were incapable of moving out of its way. Gregor had seen reactions like this before. That was why he’d never been as harsh on the people who stopped to look at accidents as some of his colleagues inevitably were. He knew the paralysis of fascination. He thought it was normal.
He moved into the middle of the group, taking over Jon Baird’s place at the center of the bow’s small triangle and Tony Baird’s place as the center of attention. The two men yielded without protest.
“It all starts,” Gregor told them, “a few years ago, at least two, when Jon Baird decided that the time had come to rival the Rothschilds. He wanted to buy a European banking conglomerate called Europabanc. He still wants that. On purely objective grounds, he could even afford it. Baird Financial had stepped in during the last serious market slump and bought a controlling interest in Donald McAdam’s McAdam Investments. Part of what came along with that acquisition was a large portfolio of junk bonds that weren’t really junk. Maybe I should say they were the right kind of junk. The problem was, Jon Baird could only sell those junk bonds and use the proceeds for the Europabanc deal if he either had Donald McAdam’s permission—which wasn’t going to happen—or if he bought McAdam out of his employment contract. Between the time Baird Financial had bought its interest in McAdam Investments and the time Jon Baird wanted to use McAdam assets for his pursuit of Europabanc, McAdam himself had become a pariah in the American financial community. He had turned state’s evidence in a number of highly publicized insider trading investigations. He had tattled on his friends and caused a great many people to go to jail who would have been safe from the law otherwise. He had stirred up a great deal of enmity. According to the terms under which Baird Financial bought McAdam Investments, with Donald McAdam installed as head and virtually unfirable, McAdam Investments was no use to Jon Baird in the Europabanc deal at all. Junk bonds aren’t cash. He couldn’t use them in figuring his cash on hand for the initial round of mutual guarantees that started the merger. McAdam junk bonds were truly junk. Jon Baird couldn’t sell them at their true value as long as Donald McAdam was still in the picture. Even if McAdam himself was willing to sell, almost nobody would be willing to buy as long as the sale benefited McAdam himself. That meant either selling the bonds at a discount—and I don’t think Mr. Baird could have done that; I think he needed all the money he could get—or getting rid of McAdam. Since I’ve started paying attention to the facts in the McAdam case, I’ve heard one thing over and over again. Nobody at Baird Financial, people said, had any reason to kill Donald McAdam except pure spite or good old-fashioned hatred, because the contracts terminating McAdam’s employment had been signed. McAdam was no longer a thorn in the side of the new owners of the company he himself had founded. I came to realize that that wasn’t exactly true. In order to get rid of McAdam, Baird Financial had to fork over twelve and a half million dollars, and nobody was happy about it. On several occasions people have told me that various members of the financial community were almost as upset at that twelve and a half million dollar payoff as they were about McAdam. In order to get a full field for an auction of those junk bonds, with no residual anger damping down the prices, it was much better for Donald McAdam to be dead. Not necessary, mind you, but better. And Jon Baird has always been a man who insists on perfection.
“Now we come to a difficulty. We are back a couple of years ago still, and we have a situation where Jon Baird wants Donald McAdam dead, but where of course he wants him safely dead. Safely for Jon Baird himself, that is. The problem here is the obvious one. The first thing any police department asks in a case of suspicious death is, who benefits? The facts in this case were going to be somewhat arcane, but the police would have picked up on them eventually. Who benefits most is most definitely Baird Financial. The auction from the sale of those junk bonds went off a little while ago, and I’ve heard it was the biggest in history. It was, therefore, a very good idea, in the first place, to make it look as if Baird Financial didn’t benefit, and then that the man most likely to have the nerve and imagination to commit such a murder was definitely out of the possible run of murderers. That, I think, was vanity on the part of Jon Baird. He liked to think of himself as the only true genius of Baird Financial, and in a financial sense that might be true. In the
business of day-to-day life, however, I think he has a few employees who can rival him, even ones on this boat. Never mind. The important point here is that he wanted to make sure he could not be suspected of this murder.”
Jon Baird was no longer leaning against the spool. He was sitting down, with his arms still crossed on his chest and his legs stretched out in front of him. He looked awkwardly like someone not used to relaxing, but trying to.
“All this is very interesting,” he said, “but I still don’t see how you’re going to prove it. And if you can’t prove it, I still don’t see why anybody ought to listen to it.”
“I can’t prove this part of it,” Gregor admitted, “but it wouldn’t be necessary to in a court of law. It’s just good to get the background in, don’t you think? The important point here is that you set out to commit a murder you could not be charged with—or that you thought you could not be charged with—and how you went about it was this. You got yourself arrested.”
“What?” Sheila Baird said.
“He got himself arrested,” Gregor repeated. “The more I heard about the case that sent Jon Baird to Danbury for fourteen months, the phonier it seemed. In the first place, it was the wrong kind of charge. The kind of insider trading Jon Baird was accused of participating in is unnecessary for anyone like Jon Baird. He can go to Paris and trade that way perfectly legally if he wants to. In the second place, it’s very hard to detect and almost impossible to prove. Well, the authorities didn’t detect it. They were tipped off to it, anonymously. And they didn’t have to prove it, either. Jon Baird pleaded guilty with no fuss at all. The more I looked at it, the more I had to conclude that the only reason Jon Baird went to jail was because Jon Baird wanted to go to jail.
“I also noted something else. Men who go into jail do a hundred things in preparation—or at least, they do if they’re middle-class, white-collar criminals with responsibilities they can’t ignore even if they have just got their hands caught in the cookie jar. Jon Baird had a business to run, a wife, a son, an ex-wife, partners—and yet, in the middle of all that, what did he do? He made advance preparations in case his dental bridge should break, going so far as to have a spare made and put aside should he need to call for it. And in spite of everything else he had on his mind, when he got to jail he went to work on a very elaborate ship model in a bottle, one that took him most of his term to complete.”
“But Dad’s bridge does break,” Tony Baird said, “and he’s always made ship models. They cool him out.”
“I know,” Gregor agreed. “But now look at this. Jon Baird is sitting in jail with only two months to go before his release. He suddenly—and a dozen people have told me it was suddenly—decides to buy off Donald McAdam’s employment contract, right now, right this minute, won’t wait. Of course, he did have the Europabanc deal in the offing. He needed the cash for that. He faked his records for the preliminaries, but when the sale came he was going to have to have the cash. But look what happened with that. The auction didn’t go off until well after Jon Baird had been released from prison. There was no reason on earth why the McAdam signing shouldn’t have waited until Jon was back in his office. Except, of course, that he didn’t want it to wait. He didn’t want to be in a position to be suspected of hastening McAdam’s death. After all, we were going to have to have death by strychnine here. McAdam was notorious for putting strychnine in cocaine to give himself an extra kick—courting suicide in the process—and although that was likely to be what the police believe in this case, there was no way to be sure. And as it turned out, the police didn’t believe, although when they were talking for public consumption they said they did. As a matter of fact, there was no strychnine in the cocaine McAdam used the night after he saw Jon Baird in Danbury, and there wasn’t any in the apartment, either.”
“Ah,” Jon Baird said, “I didn’t know that.”
This was a piece of information Gregor had gotten from the FBI report on Donald McAdam’s death. He nodded at Jon Baird and said, “It’s not something very many people know. I want to back up a minute now. On top of the strange timing of the McAdam signing, there was something else that was strange. That was the way the signing was set up to take place. On the night before McAdam was to come to Danbury to pick up the contracts, Charlie Shay brought Jon Baird—at Jon Baird’s request—three things. One of those things was that spare bridge. Jon Baird had broken the one he’d been using. The next thing was the McAdam contracts, all three copies. That was understandable enough. Jon Baird wanted to read the contracts—and to check them against some research which had also been provided—and it might be considered safer to have all the contracts together in one place. The third thing, though, made no sense at all. The third thing Jon Baird wanted was the stamped, preaddressed envelope Donald McAdam was supposed to use to send back those contracts after he’d signed them.”
Gregor shifted on his feet, wishing he could sit down. “If you look at it carefully,” he told the assembled company, “everything in any way connected to that envelope comes out nonsense. Why have Donald McAdam take those contracts home and mail them in to Baird Financial? Why not have him sign them right there in the conference room at the prison or later in the day in the Baird Financial offices? When I asked Jon Baird about that, he said he was protecting himself from later being sued by McAdam on grounds of undue influence or coersion, but that’s nonsense on the face of it. This wasn’t a back-room meeting where fifteen men from one side and a single representative from the other are holding secret negotiations. This is a very public, highly structured process where McAdam would have been allowed to bring his own lawyers and assistants in at any time, and probably did, if we check. Why send him home with those three copies of the contract and that envelope?
“It took me a while, but it finally came to me, and then I checked the reports I had heard and the things people had said to me. Jon Baird went over a year at Danbury without breaking his bridge. He broke it the day before he was to meet with McAdam. Charlie Shay brought him the spare he had had made up before he went to prison, and the next day that one was broken as well. It’s true that that particular bridge breaks easily. It broke on this boat. It’s not usual, however, for a spare to break the day after an original has. In fact, if we check that out, I’ll bet we’ll find it’s damn near unheard of.”
Jon Baird chuckled. “So now what?” he said. “I was supposed to have strychnine concealed in my teeth.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “that’s exactly what you had. The teeth are hollow. I saw that this morning when you showed me a broken set. What you did was to tap a small hole into one of those teeth very near the gum line, fill the cavity with strychnine, and repair the hole the way you’d build a ship model, but working with wires from the inside out. It wouldn’t be noticeable. It wouldn’t be dangerous, either. You could wear the bridge at least for a short period of time, and a short period of time was all you needed, without having to worry about being poisoned. That inside-out method is the same one they use to repair water mains. Its the best possible way of sealing a cavity against leaks. You broke the new bridge Charlie Shay had brought for you, which was, of course, already full of strychnine. You then applied ship modeling glue to the flap of the envelope, right over the glue provided, and into this new glue you sprinkled the strychnine. You were perfectly safe. Nobody looks at the flaps of envelopes, not even when they’re licking them. All you had to do was sit back and wait for Donald McAdam to lick this one. Which he did.”
“How can you know he did?” Tony Baird demanded. “You’re making all kinds of crazy assumptions.”
“I know Donald McAdam sent that envelope and two of the three contracts back to Baird Financial on the night he died because it’s the only possible explanation for the series of events immediately preceding his death,” Gregor said. “He went down to mail something. He was seen by two people. And when the police searched his apartment the next day, they found one copy of the executed contract, but not the other two, an
d not the envelope.” Gregor swung to Jon Baird, looking him full in the face now. “That’s how I can prove it, you see. Like a lot of other companies, Baird Financial keeps the envelopes with letters that deal with matters that might have a bearing on a future IRS audit. Any high-level financial payout would qualify under that definition. I think if we go into the files at Baird, we’ll find Donald McAdam’s contracts and that envelope, and if we analyze the glue on the envelope, we’ll find traces of strychnine.”
“Maybe,” Jon Baird said easily. “If you find the envelope. Of course, Baird Financial is a very large company for the kind of company it is, and we have the usual high rate of turnover in support staff. Things get lost.”
“This didn’t get lost,” Julie Anderwahl said suddenly.
The rest of them swung toward her in a body, making her blush. Mark stood just behind her, holding her by the shoulder. For the first time since all this had started, Jon Baird looked wary.
Julie grabbed Mark’s hand and squeezed it tightly. “It didn’t even occur to me to think about the envelope,” she said, half-apologetically, half-mechanically. “Mark and I were going to tell you all about it because it was so strange. Especially after Charlie—after Charlie. It doesn’t matter. When you asked about envelopes this morning, I didn’t even think.”
“If this isn’t about the envelope, what is it about?” Jon Baird demanded. “I thought the question on the table here was whether Gregor Demarkian could send me to jail on the strength of an envelope.”
“If there really is strychnine on it, he can,” Mark Anderwahl said. “Except we thought it was the contracts he was trying to get rid of. We never even considered the envelope.”
“Who was trying to get rid of them?” Sheila Baird said.
“Why, Charlie Shay, of course,” Julie told them. It was right after McAdam died. You know what Charlie’s like—what he was like. He never stayed late at the office. Never. But maybe three or four days after McAdam died, there he was, when there wasn’t anybody there but me, and he was putting something in the pile for the shredder for the next morning. But he wasn’t putting something on the pile, on top of it, the way you normally would. He was lifting up a whole raft of papers and putting whatever he had under it. It was so strange. So I waited for him to leave and then I went down there myself and looked. And there were our two copies of the McAdam contracts and the envelope, and if I hadn’t taken them out myself they would have been confetti in the morning.”