Act of Darkness

by Jane Haddam

  “You should be proud to be on the business of the American government, Krekor. It makes its mistakes but it’s nothing like what I am used to. I know you don’t have very much time—”

  “Tibor.”

  “—but there is a problem.”

  There, Gregor thought. There it was. A problem. His shirt felt as foul as his jacket had. His tie felt like a noose. He began to pace, holding the phone in his right hand while he undressed with his left. He hated problems on Cavanaugh Street. They frightened him. The idea that something irrevocably awful might happen to one of the people he knew there did more than that.

  “All right,” he said. “Start from the beginning. Remember I don’t know anything.”

  “I do not now that is true, Krekor. You may know more than I. Do you know that Bennis called Donna Moradanyan?”

  “I didn’t know, but I suspected it. We have connecting rooms. I heard her talking to somebody through the wall, but I couldn’t make out the words.”

  “Connecting rooms?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Tibor.”

  “I am never ridiculous,” Tibor said. “Lida Arkmanian, now, she is often ridiculous. I think it would be a good thing—”

  “Don’t worry. I have no intention of announcing my present sleeping arrangements to Lida, no matter how innocent. I think you can count on Bennis for that, too.”

  “Yes. Bennis is a very intelligent woman, Krekor, but she has enthusiasms. Donna is not such an intelligent woman but she also has enthusiasms. Do you know what they talked about last night?”

  “No.”

  “Unfortunately, Krekor, neither do I. I think it might be the best thing if we found out. I think they are possibly up to something.”

  “They’re always up to something.”

  “I mean something in particular,” Tibor said. “Do you want to hear what has been happening here this morning?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  “Good. First, it is seven o’clock. I am asleep on my couch, because I have fallen asleep there in the middle of the night, because I was reading a book. Also, I have had a lot of work lately and I don’t think I’ve been sleeping as much as I should.”

  “You never do.”

  “It does not matter, Krekor. It is seven o’clock, and I am asleep on the couch, and the bell rings at my door. I get up and answer it, and there is Donna Moradanyan, with the baby.”

  “Fine,” Gregor said.

  “Donna comes in and asks me if she can leave the baby with me, she has to go out. I say it is too early to go out. She says she knows, but she is too excited to rest, she thinks she will walk. This is a very bad idea, I tell her because beyond this neighborhood there are some very bad places. What will happen to the baby if something happens to her? I used guilt, Krekor.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Yes. Anyway, she decides to wait, and while she is waiting she stays with me. For a while she talks about nothing, shows me how to change a diaper—I listened, Krekor, but I could not remember—but then after a while she starts to say some very strange things. Do I think people can have sex in their sleep? Do I believe in temporary insanity? Do I think sex can take place—it was like this, Krekor. You see what I mean?”

  “They always talk like that.”

  “This was different. Donna, she started to ask me a lot of questions about you.”

  “About me? About me and sex?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What does that mean, ‘not exactly’?”

  “It was about you and friendship, Krekor. But she asked about lying, too. If you would think not being told something you should know was the same as being lied to.”

  Gregor had his tie and shirt both off and was working at his belt. He had the door to his closet open so that he could see his clean clothes. He stopped everything. “Sex,” he said meditatively.

  “I can’t talk about sex any more today, Krekor. Do you know somebody named Darissa Stapleton?”

  Gregor winced. Given the turn the conversation had taken, he should have expected Darissa Stapleton. “She was a woman who killed her husband in 1974. In Yellowstone National Park. Except nobody knew he was her husband.”

  There was a pause on Tibor’s end and then, “Donna asked me to find a clipping for her. In my file.”

  Gregor knew all about Tibor’s “file.”

  Tibor coughed. “It didn’t say you had investigated the case, Krekor.”

  “I didn’t,” Gregor said. “Darissa Stapleton was a friend of Elizabeth’s. She didn’t tell Elizabeth the man was her husband, either.”

  There was another pause on Tibor’s end of the line, another cough, then a sound Gregor thought was probably Tibor’s version of “tsk, tsk, tsk.”

  “Krekor,” he said, “I think you know what is going on here.”

  “I think I do, yes.”

  “I think you are not going to tell me what it is.”

  “It’s not mine to tell. Don’t worry about it, Tibor. Donna and Bennis have the wind up over nothing.”

  “Over nothing, Donna doesn’t go walking around Philadelphia on no sleep and leave the baby with me. If you’re not going to behave like a Christian, Krekor, I think I am going to hang up the phone.”

  “I don’t know that I am a Christian. And don’t hang up the phone.”

  “Why not?”

  “I need you to look something up for me. Do you have a PDR? A Physician’s Desk Reference?”

  “I have one three years old. What—”

  “Never mind what, Tibor. Just do me a favor. Go look up curare for me.”

  This time the silence, as someone had once said, was deafening. Gregor had a vision of Tibor in his book-crammed living room, mentally confining his best friend Gregor Demarkian to an asylum for the hopelessly insane.

  “Fah,” Tibor said. “You are all crazy. You and Bennis and Donna and that Carl Bettinger person, who calls me up twice in one day to find out where you are, when he already knows.”

  “Carl Bettinger?” Gregor said.

  “Never mind, Krekor. I go now to find out all about curare. After that, you and I will make some blow darts and go to the Amazon.”

  The phone clanked down on something hard, the baby began to cry, and Gregor sat down on his bed and closed his eyes.

  Curare, Bennis, and Carl Bettinger.

  It was a triumvirate out of Fellini by way of Hieronymus Bosch.

  SIX

  [1]

  THERE WERE TIMES WHEN Janet Harte Fox thought she was compulsive. She knew there were times when she took too much responsibility for too many things that were none of her business. Now she was standing at the head of the table in her mother’s dining room, counting forks and spoons, and wondering why she was doing it. Maybe it was a holdover from her political life. She had given so many dinner parties for the sake of Stephen’s career, so many cocktail parties for the sake of Stephen’s career, so many afternoon tea parties for the sake of Stephen’s career, she had become convinced that she was responsible for silverware. It didn’t matter that her mother had maids, or that her mother had insisted that this party was going to be all her own doing, the whole weekend. It didn’t matter that Janet didn’t know what was being served for lunch, meaning that she had no idea what silverware ought to be here. It didn’t even matter that she was tired enough to drop.

  It did matter that Stephen was here, standing at the other end of the table, watching her.

  Janet straightened a dessert fork at the head place, sucked in her breath, and mentally counted to ten. It had been so long since Stephen paid attention to her, she’d forgotten how uncomfortable it made her. She felt as if she were being stared at by a doll, and she had as much to say to him as she would have had to say to her Barbie—meaning nothing. Janet had never been a doll person.

  She straightened a coffee cup on a saucer, which didn’t need it. Stephen was still staring at her, and she was thinking there was poetic justice in that, in what he had become. He had
spent so much of his life being unable to make himself believe in the reality of other people. Now he had ceased being a person himself.

  “I wish you wouldn’t stand there and watch,” she told him. “It makes me nervous.”

  “I was just wondering what you were doing.”

  “I’m checking the settings.”

  “Doesn’t your mother have maids to do that?”

  “We have maids to do that at home, Stephen, and I check them there, too. You can never really count on maids knowing what they’re supposed to do.”

  “Oh.”

  Janet moved around the side of the table and started to fuss with the first place on the right, where the lady of honor would have sat if this had been a normal household.

  She looked up at Stephen. “You’re still staring at me,” she said. “Why are you still staring at me?”

  “I want to talk to you. I was waiting until you weren’t busy.”

  “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  Stephen took out the chair closest to him and sat down in it. He looked sweaty and ill and feverish and excited all at the same time. It made Janet distinctly nervous. He wasn’t like himself. He wasn’t like anyone she could ever remember knowing, and what he was like was—”

  She straightened another knife, straightened another saucer, took a napkin out from under a fork and folded it again.

  “Stephen,” she said.

  Stephen dragged himself out of whatever well he had sunk himself in. “I’ve been thinking,” he told her. “About Kevin.”

  “What about Kevin?”

  “You didn’t like him,” Stephen said. “You never did.”

  “That’s true.” It was also an understatement. Janet bit her lip. “I thought he was an opportunist. I thought he had the morals of an alley cat. I think those same things about Dan Chester. I think those same things about you.”

  “I know. I didn’t mean—”

  “What did you mean?”

  Stephen shrugged and looked away. “That’s the trouble with you,” he said. “You’re very hard to talk to. Every time I start I feel like I’m being tripped. Trapped. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. You make me stupid. And all I was trying to do was—”

  “What?”

  “Make you feel better.”

  The cups in their saucers. There was silverware fanned out on each side of every plate. There was a centerpiece of yellow roses in the middle of the table, their stems twined around the smoked glass tendrils of an abstracted ivy plant. Janet tried to see them clearly, but her dizziness wouldn’t let her. Everything was blurred.

  “I can’t believe you said that,” she said. “I can’t believe you said it. It’s impossible.”

  “Why? It’s true. You always said Kevin put a lot of pressure on you and now that he’s dead—”

  “You think it would make me feel better just to have him dead?”

  “Janet—”

  “There’s only one thing on earth that would make me feel better, and you know it.”

  “Stephanie’s dead, Janet. That was a long time ago. Ten years ago. How can you care about that now?”

  “Since you can’t care about anything from one second to the next, I don’t suppose you’d understand. But if we’re looking for suitable but inadequate substitutes, Kevin’s death is not one of them.”

  “Janet—”

  “Get that woman out of my mother’s house. Get her out of my life, Stephen.”

  “I’m trying—”

  “You’re trying not to let yourself in for any kind of scene, that’s what you’re trying to do. That’s what you’re always trying to do. Well, fine. Don’t get her out of my life then. Get a few other people into my life.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Let me call the Emiliani School and have Sister Mary James bring the children out here for the fireworks tomorrow night.”

  Stephen sucked air, shocked. “But Janet,” he said, “you can’t do that. Dan told you—”

  “I’m not talking about Dan. I’m talking about you. Don’t hide behind Dan. Dan would love to have those children out here. He’d call the New York Times and set up a photo op.”

  Stephen looked down at his hands. Janet looked with him. The hands were working, working, and working, rubbing against each other as if they wanted to rub the skin off.

  “It wouldn’t work out,” Stephen said. “You know it wouldn’t. They wouldn’t understand what they were seeing. They’d—they’d be out of control, and they’d make a mess of everything, and then where would we be? They’d—”

  “Never mind, Stephen.”

  He looked up at her, earnest and pleading. “You shouldn’t have said that about my hiding behind Dan. That isn’t how it is, you know. It really isn’t. Dan—sometimes I think my relationship with Dan isn’t—isn’t natural.”

  “Really?” Janet shook her head. This was new. But not entirely unexpected. She was sure he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, that he and Dan were involved in homosexual union. She would have felt better about them both if he had.

  “It’s funny,” Stephen said, his voice distant and slightly high, like a singer warming into a different piece. “I know you don’t like Patchen, Janet, but she was the one who pointed it out to me. How strange it was, I mean, the way we were together, me and Kevin and Dan.”

  “I’ve been pointing it out to you for years,” Janet said.

  “You didn’t mean the same thing. You just didn’t like them, that’s all. You just thought they made me do things I shouldn’t do. It was Patchen who told me how they sucked the soul out of me.”

  “What?”

  “How they sucked the soul out of me,” Stephen repeated, and then turned his head to face her. There was, she saw, something wrong with his eyes. They had gotten bigger and very, very bright, as if someone had put glycerin in them. “Patchen says we were born in splinters, Kevin and Dan and I. There was supposed to be one soul in one body, but something went wrong. We ended up as one soul in three bodies, splintered. Do you see?”

  “No,” Janet said lamely. “No.”

  “It’s so odd now that Kevin’s dead. I feel much stronger. I know my own mind much better. I used to feel so much as if something inside me was missing.”

  “Dan’s still alive, Stephen.”

  “I know. But I don’t think he’ll be alive for long.”

  “What?”

  Stephen smiled, slowly and broadly, letting it take up his whole face. Any minute, Janet thought wildly, he would turn into a cartoon.

  “It’s my soul,” he said seriously. “Mine. Not theirs.” I don’t think anybody killed Kevin. I think the splinter of my soul in him came back to me. That’s why he was so still. That’s why they couldn’t find a cause of death. There wasn’t any cause of death. He was never alive in the first place. He was just a body living on a piece of borrowed soul.”

  “They’re doing tests,” Janet said tightly. “They may find a cause of death yet.”

  “They won’t.”

  He got out of his chair and stretched, making his shirt strain against the belt that held it to his waist. Then he pushed his chair back into place, neatly, perfectly. He had tidied up the place setting where the weight of his elbows, resting on it as he talked, had pushed it askew.

  “It’s all right,” he said gently. “I have everything under control.”

  “I don’t think you do,” she said. “I think you ought to go upstairs and lie down.”

  “I don’t want to lie down. I have things to do.”

  “The most important thing you have to do is be here at lunch in an hour. That’s it.”

  “I have some things to do before then.”

  “Stephen—”

  He was backing away from her, toward what would probably have been the dining room door if there had been a dining room door. It hit her suddenly that they had said everything they had had to say right out in the open. If there was anyone around, the
y must have been overheard. Every muscle in her body went rigid and her eyes darted from one direction to the other. She saw only strange angular furniture and high-ceilinged emptiness, and she relaxed.

  Stephen had backed up all the way to the end of the dining room space, marked off only by a change in pattern of the hardwood floor.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I wouldn’t leave you for Patchen Rawls. She’s insane.”

  [2]

  Bennis Hannaford was standing in the one blind spot in the entire expanse of the center section of Great Expectations’s first floor when Stephen Whistler Fox called Patchen Rawls insane—and for a moment she was stopped there, breathless, because she wasn’t in the mood to face either the senator or his wife. It had been bad enough facing them in groups, and when she still thought Janet had no idea what had gone on all those years ago. Then she’d merely been embarrassed by her own secret knowledge and by the fear that Stephen might let something slip. He had never been discreet.

  The problem, as she saw it, was that she felt guilty about everything she could think of. What was worse, she was right to feel guilty. She had not told Gregor about her once-upon-a-time relationship with Stephen Whistler Fox. She had come to Great Expectations without giving a thought to how Janet would feel if she knew. She had blithely assumed Stephen’s wife would not know. Even after it was obvious that Victoria did, she had stayed on—and, of course, stayed on too long. Last night, she had heard Janet and Victoria talking. It had taken Bennis no time at all to understand they were talking about, her.

  “Gregor Demarkian is supposed to know everything,” Victoria had said. “You can’t tell me he doesn’t know his own assistant once had an affair with the man he’s supposed to be working for.”

  “He isn’t working for Stephen, Mother. And besides, you don’t know—”

  “Oh, yes. I do know. It was while you were in the hospital having Stephanie, too. She’s no better than Patchen Rawls.”

  “She might not have known Stephen was married, Mother. He doesn’t go around advertising the fact.”

  “She was living in Washington. With this woman who was trying to be a hostess. She must have known—”