by Jane Haddam
“What the hell—” Tony began.
The creaking changed to a sound more like wood splintering. Then there was an enormous creak, the creak to end all creaks, a screaming whine like a vampire whose heart had just been staked. Then there was a crash, and a woman started screaming.
“Traci Cardinale,” Tony said, just before he started moving.
Gregor started moving, too. He went out the door of Simon Roveter’s office and into the hall. He went down the hall to the doors that led to the balcony. The doors were standing open. So were the doors that led to the viewing section of the exercise studio where Traci had shown them the beginners’ class. Women were spilling out of that door and milling around in confusion.
“Somebody’s screaming,” one of the women kept saying—not Dessa Carter or the woman who had been leading the class. “Somebody’s screaming. Why should somebody be screaming?”
Gregor pushed past her and then past Dessa Carter. He went through the doors to the balcony without looking where he was going. He nearly plowed into Tony Bandero’s back. Tony was standing stock-still in the very middle of the balcony, his hands on his hips and his head thrown back.
“What the hell is going on around here?” he was demanding.
Gregor got around the side of him and saw what it was that was happening, as far as it was possible to see. A long low stretch of balcony railing was missing, gone from the center of the curved stretch that overlooked the foyer. When Gregor went forward a few steps, he could see what was left of it lying on the foyer floor below. A lot of the wood seemed to have been reduced to shards and splinters. There were raw nails sticking up out of the debris. Traci Cardinale stood with her back to the balcony wall. Her face was leached of color and the knuckles on both her hands were white. If she had been standing next to that balcony rail when it collapsed, Gregor thought, she would have been dead. At the very least, she would have been seriously hurt.
Traci Cardinale’s skirt was torn. She was screaming.
“I’m going to call into the office and get a car out here,” Tony Bandero announced to the assembled company.
Gregor thought that was a very good idea, although maybe not for the reasons Tony Bandero thought it was. Gregor walked to the raw open edge of the balcony rail and back to the doors that led into the second floor and back to the balcony rail again. It was a mess down there in the foyer. There were pieces of wood scattered across Traci Cardinale’s receptionist’s desk. There were more nails than Gregor had realized would be necessary for a balcony of this kind.
In the background, Traci Cardinale was still screaming. Tony had ceased hearing her because he was busy. Gregor had ceased hearing her because he was thinking. She was going on and on and on, letting out a thin high wail that was as even and unsubstantial as water from a lawn sprinkler.
Gregor went back to the gap on the balcony and looked down. No one was hurt. No one was killed. No one was even messed up, as far as Gregor could see.
It just didn’t make any sense.
3
GREGOR WAS STILL STANDING at the open place in the balcony rail, thinking that nothing at all was making sense, when the police finally showed up—but by that time Gregor wasn’t alone, and Tony Bandero had lost the fight to keep order in the foyer. The police arrived with sirens wailing, as if there were an armed robbery in progress. Their noise mingled with all the other noise and became unintelligible.
“Get away from the wood,” Tony Bandero was bellowing. “Get away from the wood.”
There were now dozens of women in leotards in the foyer and on the balcony. They had come streaming out of doors and stairways all over the house, curious and tense, still worked up from whatever exercise they had been doing when the fuss started. The women who had come from the third and fourth floors had their hair plastered to their heads with sweat. Some of them were wearing clothing with Fountain of Youth advertising on it. Gregor saw one woman in a pale green leotard with the words “A NEW YOU FOR THE NEW YEAR” plastered across her chest in black. The letters made it impossible to tell with any accuracy whether she was thick or thin, in good shape or bad.
“Traci nearly got killed,” women kept saying.
Traci was standing where she had been standing all along, with her back to the wall. She wasn’t screaming anymore.
“Get away from the wood,” Tony Bandero kept saying. “Get away from the wood and stay away from it.”
Down in the foyer, the front door opened and two uniformed policemen stepped in. They were both young and jumpy. When they saw the crowds of women who awaited them, they both blanched. Gregor shook his head in exasperation and started down the stairs. That was all they were going to need now, two rookies put out of commission by sexual confusion. There were too many people around here who had been put out of commission by other kinds of confusion already.
Gregor gave Traci Cardinale one last look—she seemed on the verge of tears, but she wasn’t crying—and then went all the way down into the foyer. He pushed his way through a crowd of older women in dark tights and brightly colored headbands and went up to Tony Bandero.
“Is everybody here you expect to be here? Simon Roveter? Magda Hale?”
“I don’t know,” Tony told Gregor, Beginning to redden, “I haven’t had a chance to look. This is nuts.”
“We need you ladies to step away from the wood,” one of the young uniformed patrolmen was saying to five very young women in stretch bicycle shorts. “We need you to keep away from the wood.” The women weren’t listening to the patrolman any more than they had been listening to Tony Bandero.
Gregor stepped up to the wood himself and looked it over. There wasn’t much more of to see close up than there had been from the balcony. The nails looked longer and newer. The splinters of wood looked bigger and more treacherous. Gregor rubbed his face.
“The important thing here,” Tony Bandero said, coming up behind him, “is to find out whether this was deliberate or an accident.”
“No,” Gregor told him, still rubbing his face.
“No?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “it couldn’t have been an accident. That’s obvious. So the real question is not whether this was deliberate, but what kind of deliberate it was.”
“I don’t think I get your point here,” Tony Bandero said.
Gregor walked away from Tony. There was wood everywhere in the foyer, so he couldn’t walk all the way around it all. The nails gleamed. The shards flashed wickedly sharp points. The splinters looked like loose needles ready to prick and stab. Gregor wanted to kick something. It didn’t make any sense.
“The important thing here,” Gregor told Tony Bandero with an edge of anger in his voice, “is that nobody got killed, nobody got hurt, nobody got even scratched. And it just doesn’t begin to add up.”
THREE
1
WHEN GRETA BELLAMY FIRST heard that Gregor Demarkian was in the building, she was standing on the second-floor balcony just a few steps from the doors to the second floor proper in a cluster of other women, wondering what was going on. Ten minutes later, she was still wondering what was going on, but she had seen Gregor Demarkian in the flesh. He was less impressive than he had been in People magazine. That might have been because he was looking confused instead of wise. In People, he always looked a little like one of those ancient seers, a man with all the answers. It might also have been because he didn’t have Bennis Hannaford with him, or didn’t seem to. Greta was confused. She had thought, from what she had read, that Gregor Demarkian and Bennis Hannaford were always together, like Siamese twins. She looked around and around the foyer and through all the clusters of strange women that littered the stairway and the halls, but she didn’t see anyone who looked like the dark-haired woman in People magazine. It made Greta feel a little let down. She had been tense and miserable all day, thinking about Chick and Marsha in Atlantic City, thinking about how ugly she must look in her leotard and how stupid she must seem trying to do aerobic dance ste
ps when she had no sense of rhythm. She felt thick and awkward, the way she had when she first started going out with Chick. When Chick had asked her out for the first time, it had felt like a miracle.
Gregor Demarkian was a tall, broad shaggy man in an expensive winter coat. He had an air of authority, but he was much too old—much older than Greta had imagined a woman like Bennis Hannaford would be willing to put up with. Maybe they weren’t lovers after all. Maybe they were just friends, and Bennis Hannaford had other lovers who weren’t famous or didn’t like publicity. Whatever was going on, she didn’t seem to be with him, and Greta wasn’t interested enough in Gregor Demarkian on his own to go on standing in a drafty hallway in a leotard and tights. There wasn’t as much going on as there had seemed to be at first anyway. There had been some kind of accident, and part of the balcony railing had fallen over. The police had been called in, but no one was being arrested. The real reason the police were there had to do with a mugging that had taken place in the backyard almost a month ago. Greta found it very hard to straighten out.
The part of the railing that had fallen was a mass of splinters and nails. A tall black man with a dancer’s way of moving came out onto the balcony and called for all the beginners’ smorgasbord group to get back to their classroom. If he had come out ten minutes earlier, nobody would have listened to him, but by then everybody was bored. The women from the experts’ class had already disappeared in the direction of their studio. Greta allowed herself to be herded back to work in the company of the very fat woman who stood next to her in the dance line and a smaller, older woman who was so well dressed and fierce she made Greta nervous. A lot of the women in the class made Greta nervous. Most of them looked like they had more money than she did. All of them looked like they’d had better educations.
Back in the studio, the pace suddenly seemed to be much faster and more demanding than it had been before. The black man introduced himself as Nick Bannerman, but unlike the woman who had run the first three dances the group had done, Nick Bannerman didn’t talk on about his life and his feelings. He just got to work, and they got to work with him. Greta didn’t think she had ever moved so much in her life, or come down so hard on her knees and ankles. By the end of the first dance Nick Bannerman led, her feet ached. By the end of the second one, her legs and hips felt stiff and frozen. By the end of the third, Greta wanted only to stop—and was surprised, when she looked up at the clock, to see that it was quarter to twelve. It didn’t feel like quarter to twelve. There were windows at the back of the studio, overlooking the downward sweep of Prospect Street, showing hedges and houses and cars and spires. The sky was gray and thick with clouds. It looked darker now than it had when Greta had gotten up in the morning.
“We must have spent more time looking at the accident than I thought we did,” Greta said to the very fat woman when Nick Bannerman had finished the third dance and gone off to drink some water from his plastic tube bottle.
The fat woman was panting and shaky. She had sweat so much, the top half of her leotard was soaked through. “Two and a half hours,” she said, when she was finally able to catch her breath. “I kept checking the time.”
Greta shook her head. “And we didn’t even do anything. I mean we didn’t accomplish anything. We just wandered around.”
“I don’t see that there was anything else we could do,” the fat woman said.
The older, thinner woman turned around now and gave Greta and the fat woman a tight little smile.
“I’m Virginia Hanley,” she said, in a mock-formal voice, like someone interviewing for a job she didn’t really want. “You two are—?”
“Greta Bellamy,” Greta said.
“Dessa Carter.”
Virginia Hanley fussed with the top of her bright red Danskin leotard and the rhinestone stretch belt she was wearing at her waist. “That receptionist was a total little fool,” she said, “screaming and screaming like that when nothing had even happened. If she’d kept her head, we wouldn’t have lost any classroom time at all.”
“I don’t think we lost any dances,” Dessa Carter said drily. Sweat was making rivers down the sides of her face. “I think we just got them crammed into a very small space.”
Virginia Hanley sniffed. “I couldn’t believe the production they were making about it down there. I mean, for God’s sake. Things like that happen in old houses like this all the time. Things get worn out.”
“It didn’t look like those nails were worn out,” Dessa Carter said impassively. “It looked like they were brand new.”
“They did look brand new, didn’t they?” Greta said, startled. “You know, all the time I was looking at them, I kept feeling that something was wrong, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Virginia Hanley said.
The young girl standing next to Virginia Hanley turned around. “Excuse me. It’s because of the murder. The fuss they made, I mean. I think they were worried that it might not be an accident, because somebody had already been murdered.”
“He wasn’t murdered,” Virginia Hanley said. “He was mugged.”
Dessa Carter was looking drier and more amused by the minute. “He died,” she pointed out. “Someone killed him. That usually adds up to murder.”
“It adds up to murder legally,” Virginia Hanley said. “This girl was making it sound like Perry Mason or something.”
“This girl” was very thin, thinner than Greta had ever seen anybody except in television documentaries about AIDS, and she looked extremely tired. There were dark circles under her eyes and deep hollows under her cheekbones. Her skin was far too white. Impulsively, Greta stuck out her hand again and said,
“Greta Bellamy.”
“Christie Mulligan,” the thin girl said. She pulled on the arm of the plump girl next to her and went on, “This is my friend, Michelle Dean. We came together.”
“We came as a trio,” Michelle said pleasantly. “The third one is Tara Corcoran. She went to the bathroom.”
“Right before the last dance,” Christie said. “I think she was fed up.”
“I’m fed up,” Michelle said. “I just don’t have the guts to play hooky.”
Christie Mulligan rubbed the top of her left breast reflexively. “It was because of the murder,” she said. “It had to have been. I mean, we live not very far from here—”
“At Jonathan Edwards College. At Yale,” Michelle put in.
“—and the story’s been all over the place for weeks. I don’t think the police are treating it like a normal mugging. For one thing, there are all these rumors. About how he died, I mean. What we heard was that he wasn’t shot or strangled or anything, he was poisoned.”
“That’s why there was never anything about cause of death in the papers,” Michelle said.
“And muggers don’t poison people,” Christie said. “But the other thing is, they’re really going back and checking up on him, on the guy who died, I mean. He worked at Yale one summer at one of the cafeterias and they had police over there asking questions about him. He worked during one of the school years at one of the parking lots and they had police over there, too. I don’t think they’d go back that far if they thought his death was nothing but your usual thing. I don’t think they’d expend the energy.”
“I’d heard they were checking up on him, too,” Dessa said. “One of the women I work with has a brother who’s a cop. She said he said they were really covering this guy’s life, going back over everything he did and everybody who ever knew him.”
“It will turn out to be about drugs, then,” Virginia Hanley said dismissively. “It won’t have anything to do with people like us.”
Greta bent her knees a little, straightened up again, bent again. Her knees were stiff.
“I wish I knew what was going on,” she said. “We’re just standing around again. I wish I knew what was supposed to come next.”
“We’re supposed to go to lunch,” Dessa Carter said. “At twe
lve-oh-five.”
“Can you just imagine what lunch is going to be like in a place like this?” Michelle said. “Carrot sticks. Bean sprouts. Tofu. Gruesome.”
Up at the front of the room, Nick Bannerman reappeared and surveyed the class.
“We’re going downstairs to the first floor to the dining room now,” he announced in a very loud voice, a kindergarten teacher roping in a class of tantrum-prone toddlers. “After we have lunch, you will all be given a free half hour to shower if you want to or just to rest. On your way downstairs, please be careful on the balcony. We’ve installed some safety board in the place where the railing collapsed, but I wouldn’t want to count on it to keep me from falling. All right. Let’s go.”
“If I were Magda Hale,” Virginia Hanley said, “I’d install a guard out there. I wouldn’t put it past somebody to fall deliberately just to be able to file a lawsuit.”
Virginia Hanley was walking out ahead, toward the door Nick Bannerman had already gone out of. Christie Mulligan caught Greta Bellamy’s eye and winked elaborately. Greta bit her lip, hard, to keep herself from giggling.
“Oh, dear,” she said, as Christie and Michelle came up beside her.
“Just wait till Tara gets a look at that one,” Christie said, almost in a whisper. “Tara Corcoran is not the sort of person who sits still for phonies.”
“Is that what she is?” Greta asked. “I thought she was just a bitch. You know. With money.”
“Rhymes with rich,” Michelle said, laughing out loud.
They were all walking toward the door together now, at the very back of the crowd.
“No matter what that silly old woman thinks,” Christie Mulligan said, “I’m sure this murder isn’t your ordinary kind of thing. I mean, your ordinary drug pusher doesn’t kill his enemies with cyanide or whatever it was.”
“Arsenic is what I heard,” Michelle said.