by Jane Haddam
“You took them out?” Jon Baird said.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Tony Baird said.
“I didn’t understand what was going on,” Julie Anderwahl said, sounding frightened. “I thought Charlie was—that he was sick or having a breakdown or something—and I took what I’d found to Mark and we talked about it and then I put them away in my safe, just in case. Just in case anybody ever needed them again, if you see what I mean. And if it turned out that it was just that nobody wanted to remember that we’d actually done a deal with McAdam now that he was dead, well, they’d be gone. I mean, after all, McAdam’s estate would have had to have a copy. It wasn’t as if shredding ours would be obliterating the deal.”
“Damn,” Jon Baird said.
“Damn nothing,” Tony Baird exploded. “It’s just a question of who gets to a radio first.”
With that, he launched himself toward the narrow passageway out of the bow, where Bennis Hannaford had been busily piling up lines and spools and stray boxes all through Gregor’s talk. That slowed him down, but it didn’t stop him. What did stop him was Mark Anderwahl’s flare.
“Don’t you dare move another millimeter,” Mark Anderwahl shouted, in his best swashbuckler-wanna-be fashion. “I’ll blow you right off this boat.”
He did not, of course, blow Tony Baird off this boat. He simply lit the very short fuse on his homemade flare, tossed it in Tony’s direction, and stood back.
It turned out he had used a great deal more baking soda than he should have.
Epilogue
The Life of Gregor Demarkian
1
ON THANKSGIVING MORNING, THERE was a little old Armenian grandmother sleeping on the floor in Gregor Demarkian’s living room on Cavanaugh Street, and a plump Armenian mother of three sleeping in his bathtub. The three children were in Gregor’s bed, where he had not slept since coming back from the Pilgrimage Green four nights before, after one of the clumsiest rescues at sea he’d ever had the bad luck to witness. Maybe it was clumsy because the Coast Guard didn’t really believe they needed to be rescued, merely torn away from each other’s throats. The Coast Guard might even have been right. Gregor didn’t know. What he did know was that Julie and Mark Anderwahl had sailed triumphantly off in a police cruiser, on their way to what a colleague of Gregor’s from the Federal Bureau of Investigation called a “voluntary discovery.” Gregor didn’t know if that was the jargon these days or not. He just knew that the FBI man had been able to commandeer a police cruiser, and since they had come to rest in Connecticut instead of Massachusetts, had been perfectly willing to drive straight west to New York. In the old days, Gregor would have made himself sit down and figure it all out: who had jurisdiction over what, who was allowed to investigate whom. Now it seemed like a lot of peripheral nonsense. He was tired and he wanted to get home. He had forgotten all about Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian and the Society for the Support of an Independent Armenia. He had also forgotten about the refugees. If he lived to be a hundred and one, he’d never understand where the good ladies of Cavanaugh Street had found so many of them.
Getting up on Thanksgiving morning, he washed his face and brushed his teeth very quietly, so as not to wake the woman sleeping in his bathtub. Then he tiptoed through the living room, also very quietly, so as not to wake the grandmother sleeping on the floor. Then he went out to the kitchen and looked around. In at least two ways, living with all these refugees was definitely better than living alone. For one thing, his apartment was always clean. Gregor never saw the women cleaning, but they must have been at it constantly whenever he was out of sight. The world’s pickiest medical doctor could have performed neurosurgery on his kitchen floor. For another thing, he was never out of food. Lida and Hannah had introduced his refugees to the American supermarket, and they had taken it to their hearts. Or their stomachs. Or somewhere. His refrigerator was crammed full of casserole dishes. His tiny pantry looked as if he’d just got the news that nuclear Armageddon was on the way. Even his kitchen table was loaded down with pastries and breads and odd fruit concoctions deemed hearty enough not to need refrigeration. It was enough to make him lose his appetite, except that he couldn’t seem to stop eating.
He went into his kitchen, took a piece of halvah from a platter on the stove, and looked around. His uncomplicated jars of instant coffee had been replaced with coffee beans and a grinder—God only knew where this group got that—and they intimidated him. He’d tried for years to learn how to make decent coffee and never been able to make much more than mud. He opened the refrigerator and took out a grape leaf stuffed with rice. Then, because it was morning and breakfast is the most important part of a balanced diet, he took two large bulgar-encrusted meatballs, a chicken breast cooked in lemon and oregano, a lamb chop stuffed with dill and mint, a small sandwich with a filling made of ground chick-peas and garlic, and a bacon meat pastry made with phyllo dough. Then he sat down at the table and ate it all, thinking as he did that Elizabeth would brain him if she saw him. Elizabeth had always been very careful about what he ate. She’d known a lot about cholesterol, too, while the refugees seemed never to have heard of it.
Finishing off the food, he stood up, cleaned off in the kitchen sink, and looked around again. He needed a shower, but he couldn’t have one with the lady sleeping in his bathtub. He needed a good night’s sleep, too, but he wasn’t going to get one as long as he had children in his bed. What was he supposed to do? He thought about staying around long enough for everybody to wake up, but decided against it. The refugees awake weren’t much less disconcerting than the refugees asleep. The women flirted with him, which was all right, but the men wanted to talk politics—and Gregor didn’t know anything about politics.
Gregor got hold of another piece of halvah, tiptoed back through his living room again, went a little more quickly and more noisily through his foyer, and let himself out into the hall. From far below him he could hear a clattering and a humming that could belong to only one person. He leaned over the banister and tried to catch her coming home. A second later, he did. Bennis Hannaford was bouncing jauntily up the steps, a load of newspapers in her arms. She seemed well-rested, energetic, and unruffled, just as if her apartment weren’t just as full of refugees as Gregor’s was. Gregor wondered if she had more nerve than he did and insisted on sleeping in her own bed while the refugees slept on the floor. Actually, knowing Bennis, that was unlikely. She had probably just gone out and bought a few extra beds.
She reached the second-floor landing and stopped in front of her own door. Then she put the newspapers down at her feet and began fumbling in her pockets for the keys. She got the key out, tried it in the door, realized the door wasn’t locked in the first place—was it ever?—and blew a cheerful little raspberry. Gregor leaned over the banister a little farther and whistled.
“Bennis,” he said. “Can I use your shower?”
Bennis backed up and threw back her head. “You’ve got to use Donna Moradanyan’s shower except you can’t now because Tommy is still sleeping. Mine has a teenager from Yekevan in it who insists on wearing his cowboy boots when he sleeps. Come down and visit me anyway. I’ve got the papers.”
“I can see you have the papers.”
“No, Gregor,” Bennis said patiently. “I’ve got the papers. We’re finally news. They’ve got the most god-awful picture of you coming off the Pilgrimage Green in Essex, looking sick and about two hundred and forty years old, but they’re all calling you a genius from what I can see. Are you going to come down?”
“I guess I’d better.”
“You’re right you’d better,” Bennis said. “Hannah and Lida and Tibor and all the rest of them will have read every word by the time we get across the street for dinner, and you’re going to have to perform for a spot quiz. I’ll put some coffee on.”
She picked up the papers again and disappeared through her door, leaving it just a little bit open. Gregor sighed and started down the stairs.
He didn’t mind b
eing mixed up in extracurricular murders. He even liked it, in a way. He didn’t mind having a decent reputation for solving the things, either. That was part of the reward for work well done. What he did mind was the papers, and everything they represented. The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.
He went down the stairs as quickly as he could, devising arguments against calling him an Armenian-American anything as he went.
2
From the day that she moved in, Bennis Hannaford had had more decoration in her apartment than Gregor had had in his. She had paintings from her book covers and posters from the publicity campaigns for her books and papier mâché models of all kinds of unidentifiable things that had something to do with the nonexistent world in which she spent most of her working life. Gregor found a life-size model of Devonerra, Queen of Zedalia—in full royal Zedalia ceremonial regalia, complete with blue and gold robes and a crown that seemed to be made of gold-leaf chipmunks flattened into stamps—standing in her foyer, and a small-scale model of a castle with a dragon in the moat next to her kitchen door. He also, of course, found refugees, but they were more decorously placed than the ones in his own apartment. Bennis had not gone out and bought extra beds. She had bought cots.
Bennis’s refugees were sleeping just as soundly as Gregor’s were. Gregor shut Bennis’s door very carefully and tiptoed through the back of the living room until he could let himself into the kitchen. He found Bennis at the kitchen table with the newspapers spread out before her. For a moment, he thought she had been shortchanged on food. Her refugees didn’t seem to have cooked at all. Then he looked at the floor and saw the plates of pastries stacked up there, and realized that Bennis had just cleared the decks to read.
Bennis looked up as he came in and raised a newspaper for his inspection. It was the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the headline on its front page just below the fold said:
“PHILADELPHIA’S MASTER DETECTIVE DOES IT AGAIN.”
Below the headline was the worst picture of himself Gregor had ever seen. His eyes were drowned in bags. His cheeks looked collapsed into his gums. His shoulders were stooped. The only one in the picture who looked worse was Jon Baird, and that was because he was fighting mad. Bennis, standing on the other side of Gregor from Jon Baird, looked wonderful. Gregor took the newspaper out of her hands, folded it back up again, and put it on the table.
“I take it it’s a slow news day,” he said.
Bennis shrugged. “It is Thanksgiving, after all. The vice president is in the Middle East talking to the Israelis and the Arabs, but someone’s always in the Middle East talking to the Israelis and the Arabs. So there you are. And you can’t really complain, Gregor. You only look that tired because it took you so long to convince the police to do what you wanted them to do, and you won and you were right.”
“I was right,” Gregor said grudgingly. “I got a call from Steve Hartigan last night. They did find the contracts. They did find the envelope. And they did find strychnine in the glue.”
“So are they going to arrest Jon Baird now, for real?”
“I don’t know.”
“Couldn’t they at least get him for killing Charlie Shay? I mean, that was so obvious. And Tony ought to be an accessory after the fact for tossing the body into the sea.”
“But Tony did toss the body into the sea,” Gregor pointed out. “So what would the police have? My statement that what I saw was strychnine poisoning? Anyone could talk a jury out of that one. There’s no other available evidence. I should have thought of preserving the salad plates, because the strychnine had to have been delivered to Charlie Shay in the salad, but in all the excitement I didn’t think of it—”
“You’d have had to have been fast,” Bennis said drily. “By the time we got downstairs again, it had all been cleaned up.”
“Had it? Well, that could be suspicious or it could not. There’s no real way to tell.” Gregor looked meaningfully at Bennis’s coffeepot, perking away merrily on the counter, and Bennis got up to pour him a cup.
“What I can’t figure out,” she said, “is how you knew so soon. Right after Charlie Shay died you said you knew who killed him. Did you know?”
“You mean, did I change my mind later? No, I didn’t. I thought it was Jon Baird in the beginning. I thought it was Jon Baird in the end.”
“Why?”
“For a couple of reasons. In the first place, there was the problem of just what I was doing on that boat. The investigate-the-leaks explanation disintegrated in a hurry, because no one was asking me to investigate anything. It did occur to me, however, that I was observing a lot. Do you remember when we were pulling out of port and Tony Baird fell into the sea and I told you that Jon Baird had pushed him?”
“I remember,” Bennis said, “I’d forgotten about that.”
“I hadn’t. That was when I decided that Tony Baird was willing to do anything his father wanted without waiting for an explanation, and when I began wondering what was going on, too. What was this little scene supposed to establish, after all? It was supposed to show us how easy it was for someone to fall overboard from the bow. I was Jon Baird’s insurance, you see?”
“No,” Bennis said.
Gregor smiled. “Think of that FBI report and the things that were outlined in it. That I was good at poisons. That I was good at unraveling situations where the times were tight or the circumstances weren’t right. I was Jon Baird’s best possible witness. If I said Charlie Shay fell overboard and that was it, nobody would ever bother Jon Baird about that death again. But, of course, there were other reasons.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that, once I saw Charlie Shay die from strychnine, it wasn’t very plausible to believe I was looking at a coincidence. McAdam died of strychnine. Charlie Shay died of strychnine. One person was most likely responsible for both. But if that were the case, then the one person had to be sitting on that boat with us. And that meant that that same person had not only killed Donald McAdam, but killed him after the contracts were signed. Didn’t that bother you?”
“No. Why should it?”
“Because there was no point to it,” Gregor insisted. “Why go to all the trouble of getting the contracts signed before you kill Donald McAdam if you are, for instance, Calvin Baird? If you’re Calvin Baird, you can kill Donald McAdam any time.”
“Oh, I see. But Jon Baird needed an excuse to see Donald McAdam, because he and McAdam weren’t friends, and McAdam wouldn’t have visited him in prison.”
“Exactly. As it turned out, of course, Jon Baird had better reasons than that for setting it up the way he did, but that didn’t matter. I was onto it anyway. I did have a wild idea that the bridge Jon Baird broke on the Pilgrimage Green might contain strychnine, too, but I should have known better. Why go to all that trouble? I got Steve Hartigan to get the police to run a check on it anyway, but there was nothing. It was clean.”
“And Tony?”
Gregor shrugged. “I don’t like that young man,” he said. “I don’t trust him, and if you ask me he’s the next best thing to a psychopath. But the fact is, he didn’t really do enough of anything to get caught out this time. They can’t charge him with being an accessory after the fact in the murder of Charlie Shay unless they can prove there was a murder of Charlie Shay, which they can’t. They could prosecute him for getting rid of the corpse, but in the long run that would turn out to be a misdemeanor. They won’t bother him.”
“That’s too bad,” Bennis said. “I didn’t like him either.”
Gregor raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t?”
“He gave me the creeps, if you want to know the truth,” Bennis said. “He was one of those men—you and Father Tibor think I’m doing dangerous stuff going out with the people I do, but at least I always pick ones who are—beneficent. Or something.”
“For a while, I thought you had something of a crush on Tony Baird.”
“On Tony Baird? Tony Baird was sleeping with his own stepmother, for God
’s sake, what do you take me for?”
“I take you as someone who accepts the idea that Jon Baird murdered Charlie Shay without asking why Jon Baird would want to,” Gregor said, hastily changing the subject.
“Jon Baird murdered Charlie Shay because Charlie Shay did all that stuff for him around the killing of Donald McAdam and especially trying to shred the envelope and the contracts and Tony didn’t do any of it because he wasn’t that close to his father before this trip and he wouldn’t have looked right wandering around the offices of Baird Financial. Anyone with half a brain can figure that out for himself. I want to get back to the subject. What do you mean you thought I had a crush on Tony Baird?”
“Bennis—”
“Sometimes, Gregor, I swear, you’re so exasperating I want to kill you myself and why I shouldn’t—”
“That’s the doorbell,” Gregor said desperately. Then he bolted out of his chair and headed for the foyer at a run.
3
In the end, Gregor Demarkian never made it to Bennis Hannaford’s foyer at all, at least not then. After all, this was Cavanaugh Street. Nobody locked their doors. Nobody thought the least thing of coming right in before they’d ever been asked. Gregor was just coming through the kitchen door when Bennis’s front door opened and Father Tibor Kasparian stepped in. Behind him, a seemingly endless crowd of bright refugee faces beamed beatifically. The refugees on the cots in Bennis’s living room woke up and peered about. The teenage boy who had taken up residence in Bennis’s bathroom came stumbling out, his cowboy boots polished to a high black and red shine. Tibor looked around at them all and threw out his arms.