by Jane Haddam
“Bennis—”
“Bye.”
She marched over to the connecting door, and disappeared behind it, a flutter of faint perfume and terry cloth that seemed to make its own wind. Gregor stared after her for a while, thinking, and then picked up the folder she had left him.
[3]
Half an hour later, having ingested a monumental amount of information he couldn’t imagine ever finding a use for—the pillows were made of a special material, as were the bedspreads, but not of the same special material; the window shades were abstractions of Incan and Aztec symbols for all kinds of things and meant to bring good luck to a house; the kitchen was fully electronic and could produce food processors and pasta makers from special openings in its seemingly seamless tile counters with the press of a button—he decided it was time to go downstairs. He wanted to be a little early, the person waiting and not the person waited for. It was the kind of thing he knew would put the man he imagined Dan Chester to be off balance. He got off the bed and stood in front of the mirrored wall, straightening his suit, straightening his tie, and making ineffectual swipes at his still-thick hair.
When he had himself in what he could think of as reasonable order, he let himself out of his room onto the balcony and headed for the stairs. It was odd, he thought, how quiet this place was.
Getting to the stairs, he felt his shoelace come loose, and stopped to fix it. He was standing there like that, bent over, when he realized the atmosphere around him had changed. It was a small thing, but it was there: one of the double doors to the room at the east end of the hall had opened slightly, and stayed open, as if there was someone behind it who wanted to come out but didn’t dare as long as he was there. He finished with his shoelace, straightened up, and started down the stairs.
All the way to the foyer, he thought about the floor plan at the back of the folder, and the names printed into the little squares of rooms.
That particular room, at that particular end of the hall, belonged to Patchen Rawls.
FIVE
[1]
GREGOR HAD NOT EXPECTED to have any trouble finding the study, because he hadn’t really believed there was any such thing as a “study,” just a small square of floor someplace whose demarcation from the rest of the house was more psychological than actual. As it turned out, he was grievously wrong. Getting to the bottom of the stairs, he stopped in the foyer and looked right, left, and down the center toward the back. He saw pictures of Janet, pictures of Victoria, and even more pictures of Janet. There was no sign of anyone who could be Dan Chester, or of anyone at all.
He might have stood there forever, lost in bemused contemplation of heart-shaped objects of every size and material and that same picture of Janet Harte Fox crammed into every conceivable type of frame, if he hadn’t been rescued by a blast of Chanel No. 5 and the sound of soft leather slapping against carpet. He looked up and saw a woman coming toward him, wearing a tight little smile that distorted her features and closed her eyes to slits. He barely recognized her. She was so much older, and so much less animated, than the girl whose picture surrounded him.
Janet Harte Fox.
She saw him register her and gave him a very different smile, one that pulled across the entire lower third of her face. It was, Gregor thought, no less nervous a smile than the other. She had to be a woman under a great deal of stain. She put her hand up to her hair and pulled at the ornamental pins stuck in it. One came out, and Gregor could see it had a wicked point.
She put out her hand to him and said, “It’s Mr. Gregor Demarkian, isn’t it? I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I’m Janet Harte Fox.”
Gregor restrained himself from saying “I know.”
“I’m glad to meet you, too,” he said. “If you want to know the truth, I’m glad to meet anyone. I’m supposed to be on my way to the study, and I thought it was going to be easy to find, but—”
“But nothing is easy to find? Oh, yes, I know. This is a very deceptive house.”
It was, of course, the perfect description. He just wished he’d thought of it himself.
“There’s a lot more to it than I realized,” he said. “And less, if you know what I mean.”
“You mean there are so few walls. Of course. There aren’t nearly enough. It makes almost everyone crazy except my mother, and my mother is a very unusual woman.” Janet Fox thought about it. “In her wing of the house, though, there are walls. Were you looking for the Mondrian study or the Pollock one?”
“I don’t know.”
“The Mondrian has walls, and the Pollock doesn’t. I’d look for the Mondrian if I were you. I saw Dan Chester going into it a few minutes ago. That’s probably who you’re looking for.”
Gregor wanted to get a look at his watch, to see if he’d spent an unconscionable amount of time daydreaming or if Dan Chester had been more determined to be first at their meeting than he had. He was too fascinated by Janet’s obsessive pulling at those ornamental hair pins to manage it.
“Does the Mondrian study have Mondrian paintings in it? Your mother doesn’t seem to go in for paintings much.”
“She has some. The Pollock study has frescoes. In fact, it is a fresco: walls, ceiling, and floor. And she has portraits, too, in her own room.”
“Portraits of you?”
“And of herself, yes. And of my daughter—my daughter who died. That one was done from a photograph taken in the hospital. Stephen didn’t want it taken, but I did, and I’m glad I did. She never left the hospital alive.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I’d heard you had a child that died. I’m very sorry.”
“It was a long time ago. Much too long ago for you to be sorry. I’m sorry. I’m prattling along like a Beverly Hills twit, aren’t I?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, I would. That’s what Beverly Hills is like, you know. Lots of parties full of people you’ve never seen before and are never going to see again, coming up to you and telling you all about how they have problems with premature ejaculation or why they left psychoanalysis for EST. If I was going to run true to type, I’d start telling you how sorry I am that I decided not to have any more children—which is true—and how enthusiastic I am about Stephen’s act, which I’m not.
“You’re not in favor of federal aid to retarded children?”
“Oh, I’m in favor of that, all right. Stephen’s act is federal aid for campaign contributors. You must know that. Are you going to find out what’s been going on with Stephen?”
“Well,” Gregor said cautiously, “it depends on what you mean—”
“Oh, stop it,” Janet said. “The first time he keeled over, he did it practically in my lap, at a cocktail party in Washington. The second time he keeled over, I was only two or three feet away. Everybody knows what’s going on with Stephen.”
“Everyone knows he’s keeling over, as you put it.”
“Dan Chester thinks there’s something sinister about it,” Janet said, “but Dan thinks there’s something sinister about everything. I still think it’s something neurological—”
“If it is something neurological, Mrs. Fox, I’d think that would be serious enough. Anything organic that could cause the symptoms Mr. Chester described to me would be—let’s just say ‘sinister’ would be an understatement.”
“I know. I know. But don’t you think that makes more sense, as an explanation, than some kind of weird political plot? Dan Chester did the oddest thing after Stephen got out of the hospital after those tests. Do you know what?”
“No.”
“Stephen was challenged in his last election by a real right-wing nut, the kind of person who wants to ban all abortions and castrate all rapists and murder all murderers and then nuke Moscow for good measure. Nobody took him seriously at the time, not even Dan, not even after we realized the man had five million dollars to spend. But after those tests came back, Dan had him followed.”
“By a private detective, do you mean?”
J
anet’s smile turned cynical. “I mean by one of your former colleagues in the FBI. Dan must have been frantic. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard of. Stephen can crash around all he wants to. That’s no long-term problem for Dan. People will just say Stephen self-destructed. But if anybody ever found out about Dan putting the arm on the FBI—”
“‘Putting the arm?’”
“My mother’s been in a lot of Mafia movies. But you see what I mean. Putting the arm on the FBI and having one of Stephen’s opponents investigated. Political suicide.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I do see.” He did, too. It was the stuff of which serious political scandals were made, the perfect fodder for righteous news stories and the perfect rock on which to wreck a career. It was also an unlikely project for the Bureau to agree to, especially these days. Gregor wondered if Carl Bettinger was the “former colleague” Janet was talking about, and felt immediately uneasy. “It doesn’t sound like the Dan Chester I’ve had described to me,” he told Janet. “It doesn’t sound anything like him at all.”
“It doesn’t sound anything like him to me, and I’ve known him for twenty years. At least. And I’m worried about Stephen, Mr. Demarkian. While Dan’s chasing right-wing terrorist fantasies, Stephen is very probably ill. Maybe terminally ill.”
“You said he’d had tests. They didn’t turn up anything?”
“He had four days of tests and they came back clean. That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything physically wrong.”
“No,” Gregor agreed. “But it’s a good start.”
“Stephen needs to go back into the hospital and I need to get him there. Will you try to talk some sense into Dan Chester?”
“I think he intends to try to talk some sense into me.”
Janet turned around, in the direction of the room that wrapped toward the back of the house. “The Mondrian study is down there,” she said. “You go all the way to the end, turn the corner, and keep going until you’re in a big room with glass doors. That’s the beach room. Off to the left of it there’s a hall with doors on both sides. Dan is behind the third door on the left. Just like the five hundred cans of cat food in the showcase round on Let’s Make a Deal.”
[2]
Dan Chester was not actually “behind” the third door on the left in the small hall that led off the wraparound room. He was in the middle of it, leaning against the doorjamb with a cup of coffee in his hands and an abstracted look on his face, like a small dark muscular Cerberus dreaming about heaven. It took a while for Gregor to realize what Chester was looking at. There was a television placed between the two windows that looked out on the beach. On it was a videotape machine with its red power light glowing. Chester was watching a tape of Stephen and Janet crossing a wide room. Janet was wearing a neat little politician’s-wife black knit dress, disfigured by a large red heart-shaped brooch placed high on the left shoulder. The brooch looked like Victoria’s own—expensive and real—but too heavy, so that it pulled against the dress and made it sag.
“Damned brooch,” Dan Chester muttered to himself. “Damn thing looks like a whorehouse light.” He saw Gregor, but didn’t seem to register who Gregor was. “It was because of the idiot surgery,” he said. “I couldn’t talk her out of it. Mama gave it to her for her twenty-first birthday. Mama was having surgery. Girlie had to wear the brooch. For luck.”
“Surgery?” Gregor said.
“Gallbladder,” Chester told him. “Six months ago. Mostly; Janet won’t be caught dead with that thing. Jesus Christ.”
“Do you like being called Dan or Mr. Chester?”
Dan Chester snapped to attention. He cast a look back over his shoulder, seeming to check out the flags and bunting that had been tacked across the beach, fastened to poles and decking like after-thought decorations on a not-quite birthday cake. Then he shoved his coffee cup out of sight behind the wall he’d been leaning against and held out his hand. He also went into what Gregor automatically labeled “defense mode.” His face went blank. His eyes went blanker. Then he turned around quickly and shut the videotape off with a remote.
“Mr. Demarkian?” he said. “You’re early. I didn’t expect you for another ten minutes.”
Gregor reminded himself not to analyze. Most often, when people made senseless remarks, they were doing nothing more than filling the air with sound. Chester had moved away from the door, so Gregor passed through it, into a room that was a cube made of concrete, with only that one set of windows looking out on the beach. One wall was taken up with the Mondrian of the room’s title. It was as large as a tapestry, and very square, and very angular, and very bright. It reminded Gregor of the kind of quilt that made the cover of Bloomingdale’s catalogs.
Dan Chester shut the door. Then, giving it a little thought, he threw the bolt and glanced guiltily at Gregor. “It’s not that I’m paranoid,” he said. “It’s just that the house is full of—people.”
Gregor supposed he meant the house was full of the wrong people, but he let it go. There was a steel and swung-leather sofa in the center of the room, with its back to the painting. He sat down in that.
“I hope you don’t mind my saying so,” he told Chester, “but it’s interesting to see what you look like. It’s hard to picture someone you’ve met over the phone.”
“You hadn’t seen pictures of me?”
“Yes, I’d seen pictures.”
Chester smiled faintly. “It’s just that in pictures I don’t look like I’m supposed to look. I know. It’s a good thing I never wanted to run for office. I remind people of the kind of kid who gets a football scholarship to a college with a tenth-rate team. Do you want some coffee?”
What had been behind the wall next to the door that had allowed Chester to put down his coffee cup when he shook hands was a built-in desk with a mirror and tall column of built-in shelves above it. It had an array of modernistic coffee things: urn, creamer, sugar bowl, cups, saucers, spoons. Dan’s used cup was on the edge closest to the door. On the far edge was a plain manila file folder, stuffed until it was gaping with computer printout sheets.
Chester picked up his cup, gestured at the rest of the things, and shrugged when Gregor shook his head no. Then he picked up the file folder in his free hand and came to sit down in the chair that flanked the sofa.
“Here,” he said, handing the folder to Gregor. “You were looking at this, I know. I brought it for you. It’s the results of the medical tests we had done on Stephen at UConn Farmington.”
“And?” Gregor said.
Chester shrugged again. “And nothing. It’s the way I told you over the phone. If there is something physically wrong with him, it’s nothing any doctor ever heard of. I had them run every test in the universe—”
“You couldn’t have, Mr. Chester. The tests conflict. It would have taken more than four days.”
“Every test that could possibly be relevant.” Chester sounded impatient. “I’m not worried that Stephen’s got bowel cancer. It wouldn’t fit. I want to know what’s making him—fall over like that.”
Gregor looked down at the folder in his hand. It was heavy enough to make his wrist ache, and he put it down next to him on the sofa. “Mr. Chester, I talked to you on the phone, and I talked to Carl Bettinger—”
“Bettinger’s been very helpful,” Dan Chester said quickly.
“I’m sure he has. He always was a conscientious agent.” He was also behaving in a damned peculiar manner, but Gregor didn’t say that. “What I’m trying to say here is that the impression I got was that Senator Fox hasn’t simply been ‘falling over,’ as you put it. He’s been going into paralytic states—”
“Let me tell you what he tells me. He says he starts out feeling fine, except that he’s nervous. He has to speak to a lot of people, get up in front of a crowd, he gets nervous—”
“Bad habit in a politician.”
“Bad habit in an actor, too, but it didn’t hurt Laurence Olivier any. So. Stephen gets nervous, but he feels fine, until s
uddenly he doesn’t feel fine.”
“Are you sure it’s suddenly?”
“He says it’s like being hit with a brick.”
“There’s no warning at all?”
Chester hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said uneasily. “I don’t think so. Stephen definitely doesn’t think so.”
Gregor was puzzled. “Is he that—distracted by his stage fright? How could you not be sure, how could he not be sure—”
“It’s not that he’s distracted.” Chester sounded desperate. “It’s the way the stage fright takes him. He says it makes his body prickle.”
“Prickle?”
“He’s been telling me that for years and I never paid any attention to it. After all this started, I made him explain it to me at length. As far as I can figure out, he gets the kind of feeling you’d have if your entire body went to sleep.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
Chester drank the rest of his coffee and put his cup on the floor. “I told all this to the doctors. They tested him out for circulatory problems. Nothing.”
“He always has this prickling feeling before he has one of his attacks?”
“Yes.”
“Does he always have an attack when he gets the prickling feeling?”
Chester started. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. I didn’t even think to ask him.”
“Maybe, after we talk, we should pay a visit to Senator Fox. In the meantime, can you make a guess? He’s had these attacks—”
“Three times,” Chester said. “The first time was at a cocktail party in Washington, the day we moved him into his new office. It was also the day we announced the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children. That was a month ago.”
“And the other two?”
“The second time was about a week later. We were at a dinner for contributors. A fund-raising dinner, I mean. The third time was about four days after that. Stephen had a speaking engagement at some citizens’ group in Virginia.”
Gregor thought about it. “From what I understand, the cocktail party where the senator had his first attack was a fund-raiser?”