by Jane Haddam
“You’re always so sure of what it is people must have known.”
It was Bennis’s guess that Victoria Harte was always too sure of everything. She wouldn’t even cafe much if she found out she was wrong—which, in this case, she was. Bennis’s relationship with Stephen Whistler Fox had been more complicated than Victoria was giving it credit for, and Bennis’s relationship with Gregor Demarkian had been (for the moment) much less open. Even so, Bennis had not wanted to face either of those women then, any more than she wanted to face Stephen and Janet now. If there had been any way to get back upstairs unnoticed, she would have gone.
There was never any way to do anything unnoticed at Great Expectations. Bennis heard a door slam somewhere down at the other end of the house,’ and then Dan Chester’s voice saying, “Victoria, for God’s sake. What do you expect me to do about these things? I’m not Stephen’s keeper.”
“Janet is very upset,” Victoria said.
“I’m not Janet’s keeper, either.”
“You ought to be.”
“Victoria—”
There was the sound of a door opening and closing, and the voices disappeared. Bennis heaved a sigh of relief, then poked her head past the edge of the dining room’s half-wall. She had expected to find no sign of Janet or Stephen at all. It was so quiet over there. Instead, she found them both, looking paralyzed. They were staring in the direction of the foyer, so Bennis decided to stare in that direction, too. God only knew why.
Unfortunately, the blind spot she was standing in was not so blind when looked at from the foyer, or the stairs. Bennis saw Patchen Rawls right away, just as Patchen saw her. What passed between them was a look of mutual dislike so intense, it startled them both.
From the other side of the half-wall, Janet Harte Fox whispered; “Well, there she is. The most extraordinary screen presence since the young Judy Holliday.”
Stephen gave out with something that sounded like choking.
Because there was no longer any way to avoid detection—Bennis didn’t believe Patchen Rawls would ever let her do that—she decided to give it up. As Patchen padded her way into the dining room space, Bennis emerged from her semi-hiding place. She had steeled herself against attack from any and every direction. She was ready to fight off Patchen, Janet, and Stephen, separately and together. She might as well not have bothered.
Patchen had noticed Bennis joining the circle. Janet and Stephen had noticed only Patchen.
Against Victoria’s custom-designed, hardwood, hard-shellacked floor, Patchen’s sandals sounded like a wrecker’s ball. Her head swiveled back and forth between the photographs hung on every available wall, from Victoria to Janet and back again. Then she came to a stop five inches from Janet Harte Fox’s nose and said, “I think you should leave here now, you know. I think you should pack your things and get out.”
Janet Harte Fox took a deep breath. Bennis bit her lip. Stephen did nothing at all. The senator might as well have been a piece of prize jewelry trussed up against a velveteen wall. Bennis was suddenly ready to strangle him.
“For God’s sake,” she said. “It’s Janet’s mother’s house.”
The two women swung around sharply to stare at her, mirror-image she-devils of light and dark.
“Nobody owns this house,” Patchen Rawls said righteously. “People don’t own things. Things own people. We’re all the communal property of the Great Cosmic Consciousness. “The only thing that’s communal property around here,” Janet said, “is my husband’s dick.”
“Oh, Lord,” Bennis said.
Patchen walked over and stroked the arm of Stephen’s jacket, as if she were checking the material for flaws.
“Do you know what they do to get cashmere?” she said. They torture goats.”
Then she turned on her heel and walked off, through the dining room, toward the back of the house. Janet swung back to the dining room table, picked up the red, white, and blue centerpiece, and put it down again. Then she swung back to Stephen and Bennis and said, “Politics. That’s what you get when you get mixed up with politics.”
A second later, she was gone, too. Bennis’ was not sure where. She was only conscious that she had been left alone with Stephen Whistler Fox, and that the situation should have been embarrassing.
In a way, it was. It just wasn’t in the way Bennis had expected it to be.
Stephen Whistler Fox was smiling at her benignly, blankly, avuncularly, with not a hint of uneasiness in his face.
“Hello,” he said, after a while, when she hadn’t said anything and didn’t seem about to. The truth was, she couldn’t think of anything to say. “You’re here with Mr. Demarkian, aren’t you? You were in the living room last night after—after Kevin died. I don’t think we were ever introduced.”
Everything in Bennis Hannaford froze. She had imagined a thousand scenes, crazy and awkward, if she and Stephen Whistler Fox were ever left alone. It had never occurred to her that he would simply fail to recognize her.
She hesitated, wondering if it was an act. His face was so open and bland, it didn’t seem possible that it could be.
“My name,” she said carefully, “is Bennis Hannaford.”
Stephen gave her a wide politician’s smile. “Hannaford,” he repeated. “Are you from Philadelphia? Are you one of those Hannafords?”
“Yes, I am.”
“What a fine family,” he said. “What a fine, fine family. You must be very proud of your history.”
It wasn’t an act, Bennis realized with shock. Her name meant nothing to him. Worse than that, her family’s name meant nothing to him beyond the commonplace vague impressions of nineteenth-century railroad money and Main Line prominence. Six months ago, her family had gone through a catharsis that had landed them on the front pages of every newspaper and the covers of half a dozen magazines. Stephen Whistler Fox, a U.S. senator, a man who was supposed to be competent and informed, knew nothing about it.
Bennis began to back away in a semicircle, out of the dining room, away from Stephen Whistler Fox and everything he represented. It scared her, this obliviousness. It did more than scare her.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I’ve got—I’ve got something—”
“Busy, busy, busy,” Stephen said cheerfully. “I’ve got to find my wife myself.”
“Right,” Bennis said.
Then she bolted, toward the beach room, toward nowhere in particular.
She had never been so humiliated in all her life. He hadn’t even remembered her name.
SEVEN
[1]
IT WAS TIME GREGOR Demarkian had decided, to ask some questions—and better yet, to ask some questions that made sense. Speculating on the possible uses of curare—or synthetic curare, as Tibor had pointed out to him toward the end of their conversation on the phone—wasn’t getting him anywhere. He’d learned long ago that it didn’t matter what a detective had figured out. It only mattered what he’d been able to prove.
The problem was, it was never easy to find anyone in this house when you wanted to find them. Only when you wanted to be left alone did you have them cluttering up the landscape like dust bunnies. Like murder suspects everywhere, this bunch was distinctly uncooperative.
Because he had already scoured the first floor for signs of life and been disappointed, he wandered toward the beach room, the Mondrian study, and the great wall of windows at the back. Out there, the rain was still coming down and the red-white-and-blue decorations looked limp. If they had been made of crepe paper like everybody else’s, they would have been ruined.
He was just beginning to wonder if he should get hold of a bullhorn and get Bennis’s attention that way, when Clare Markey came out of one of the other doors on the short hall. She was dressed in a white silk shirt and a pair of the kind of “casual” pants that never look right unless they have just been dry-cleaned. Her hair, on the other hand, was loose to her shoulders and more than a little uncombed.
She swung into the hall and
then between the pair of couches that marked out the western boundary of the space that led to the deck, turning automatically south, not watching where she was going, or even seeming to care. A second later she slammed into Gregor’s chest, nose to sternum. Gregor thought with surprise that it had been a long time since he had been made so aware of how tall he was. Clare Markey was a tall woman, at least five foot ten. Right up against him like this, she looked minuscule.
She bounced away from him and blushed and said, “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.” Then she looked at him, realized how absurd that must have sounded, and blushed again. “Excuse me. I sound like an absolute idiot today.”
“Not at all,” Gregor told her. “You were thinking about something else. I do it all the time.”
“I’m not supposed to do it at all. That’s part of being a lobbyist. You’re supposed to know what’s going on at all times.”
“And do you? Usually?”
“I used to.”
“Do most lobbyists?”
Clare Markey shrugged. “Believe it or not, I never thought about ‘most lobbyists,’ not before this weekend, anyway. I never thought about me as a lobbyist, either, if that makes any sense.”
“It does if you’re becoming dissatisfied with your work.”
Clare shot him a swift, startled look, then burst out laughing. “Oh, dear. Dissatisfied with my work. Do you know how old I am, Mr. Demarkian?”
“Twenty-eight or twenty-nine?”
“Twenty-nine. Do you know how much money I made last year?”
“I have no idea. I know lobbyists are supposed to be well paid.”
“Well paid isn’t the word for it. Last year, I made over half a million dollars—you look shocked. I don’t blame you. I’m a little shocked myself. What do I do, after all? I talk a lot of horse manure to a lot of corrupt politicians, and we all pretend what I’m saying isn’t horse manure and what the politicians are isn’t corrupt.”
“It’s not exactly that,” Gregor said mildly. “Its that I’m surprised the organization you work for can pay you that.”
“You mean the Empowerment Project? They can’t. They’re not the only people I work for. Although I’ve got to admit, they can pay a lot more than you would think. You’d be amazed at what a PAC can collect from a lot of people who are living barely above the poverty line, if the organization puts its mind to it.”
“The members don’t complain?”
“Why should they? They get what they want, almost always. I’m very good. Of course, whether what they want is good for the country, that’s another story. And the Empowerment Project is small potatoes next to any of the really big operations, like the teachers’ unions.”
“Teachers’ unions?”
“That’s what I was thinking about, before all this started. That I was getting a good enough reputation to pick up one of the teachers’ unions. Get one of those on your client list and you can make a million dollars a year. Half of it called expenses and untouched by the men from the income tax.” She looked back in the direction of the Mondrian study and sighed. “I was just talking to Dan Chester. It’s amazing how talking to Dan Chester can change my mind about practically everything.”
Gregor looked into the hallway, too, but there was nothing to see. The hallway was empty. All the doors along it were open. “Is Mr. Chester down there now? In one of those rooms?”
“No,” Clare said. “He left about fifteen minutes ago. I was just so—so depressed, I couldn’t move. I just sat in a chair and stared at the window and wondered what I was doing in this place.”
“What did Mr. Chester want that made you so depressed?”
“It’s not what he wanted, it’s how he was. I think there’s some nasty pop psych word for the way that man operates.”
“Maybe you ought to give up your line of work. I don’t think Dan Chester is the worst of the tenth-rate Machiavellis who infest Washington politics.”
Clare laughed again, in a more subdued way. “I don’t know about that. He’s more intelligent than most, and he’s slicker, but in a way that makes him worse. Of course, he never suggests a romp in bed in exchange for an amendment to a bill, so I suppose that makes him better. I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I told you. I’m not thinking straight today. Maybe I’ll go upstairs and get cleaned up for lunch.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said.
“What is it? Is there something you want to know? That just shows you how mixed up I am today. It never occurred to me you might be looking for me.”
Of course, Gregor had not been looking for her. He had been looking for Bennis, and he still was. It had, however, just occurred to him that Clare Markey might have some of the information he wanted—and although she wouldn’t be the only one, or even the. most likely one, she was one of the few people in this house he trusted.
He looked back at her and found that she had sat down on the arm of a sofa and crossed her arms over her chest.
“Well,” she asked him, “was there something you wanted to know?”
Gregor nodded slowly. “In a way, yes. It might seem irrelevant.”
“Good. After you ask me, I can go back to my room and worry about it. You know, as if it were the kind of cryptic question Hercule Poirot would ask in a murder mystery.”
“I’m not sure it would suit even for a murder mystery. It’s about those attacks Senator Fox was having before you all came up here.”
“Senator Fox? You mean Stephen?”
“Of course, I mean Stephen.”
Clare blushed again. Gregor was beginning to think it was habitual. “Excuse me,” she said. “It’s just that—”
“What?”
“Well, I was thinking about it the day I made arrangements for this weekend. That nobody really thinks of Stephen by himself, I mean. If he does something or something happens concerning him or whatever, your mind just automatically says, ‘that’s Dan Chester.’”
“Do you think Dan Chester was responsible for the senator’s attacks?”
“I think the senator is cracking up. He was always just a hair away from it anyway. Stephen is not loo stable, Mr. Demarkian.”
“I’ve noticed. Let’s talk about the attacks, though, if you don’t mind. You were there when the first one happened?”
“I was there when the first one they’re admitting to happened. It might even have really been the first one. You can never tell with Dan.”
“This was at a cocktail party,” Gregor prompted.
Clare nodded. “Oh, yes. Not exactly a purely social occasion. Stephen was supposed to be announcing his plans for the Act in Aid for Exceptional Children. It cost me twenty-five hundred dollars to get in.”
“The senator charges a lot for his time.”
“Dan Chester does. And why not? With Stephen in the Senate, he’s got the nuts of the American taxpayer in a paper bag.”
This, Gregor thought, was no simple case of burnout. This was a case of internal revolution.
“Can you remember,” he asked her, “who was at this cocktail party? Of the people who are here?”
“Of course I can. We all were.”
“You’re sure?”
“Very sure. I talked to Kevin Debrett and Stephen myself. And Dan was there, you couldn’t miss him. Janet went up with Stephen when Stephen was supposed to make his little speech, just before he keeled over. As for Victoria and Patchen Rawls—well. All I can say is that it was like a cat fight in the abstract. Victoria held court in the middle of the room, and Patchen held court on the terrace.”
“Were you there the second time? Dan Chester told me it was at a dinner for contributors.”
Clare’s smile was thin. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I was there. That one cost fifteen thousand dollars, what with buying a whole table and feeding people I didn’t even know, just to make a decent showing. Stephen was supposed to get up and make a speech at that one, too, because it was a fund-raising dinner specifically for expenses involved in getting the act passed.
Funny how that works out. Nobody ever tells you what those expenses are.”
“What about the rest of the people here this weekend? Were any of them at that dinner too?”
“They all were, but I don’t think Patchen Rawls was supposed to be. Even Stephen looked upset when she showed up, Dan tried to stick her at a table in the back, but she made a scene, so she ended up on one end of the dais. Dan tried everything he could think of to hide her except put a paper bag over her head.”
“What about the third time?”
“That was the Citizens’ Coalition for Education,” Clare said promptly. “Now, that was odd.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t have to pay for that at all. Nobody invites lobbyists to public functions unless they’re looking for a contribution, but they invited me. I couldn’t understand it. It was a speaking engagement, for God’s sake. Stephen went and talked silliness for fifty minutes, and the Citizens’ Coalition paid him a lot of money he didn’t need.”
Gregor thought about this. “If it was so odd,” he asked her, “why did you go?”
“Because I assumed it was a command performance. It always is when Dan asks a lobbyist to show up at something.”
“It was Dan Chester who invited you?”
“I assume so, yes. Victoria’s name was on the invitation, of course, because it was an invitation to a private table. But Victoria wouldn’t have asked me without Dan’s having asked her first. She doesn’t even know me.”
“How does that work? The Citizens’ Coalition is giving the dinner, but Victoria has a table—does she pay for it?”
“It would have been assigned to her complimentarily. Stephen had a place on the dais with Janet, and Victoria had a table she could fill with friends at the Coalition’s expense. It’s part of the payout. I mean, everybody knows how Victoria and Janet feel about each other.”
“What did Senator Fox talk about?”
“I told you. He talked silliness. And he put in a plug for the act. I assumed that was why I was there. People were supposed to look at me and think of the Empowerment Project and forget that all I am is a lobbyist.”