Act of Darkness

by Jane Haddam

  The second thing Gregor noticed about Patchen Rawls—and it was the most important thing—was that, in spite of her many declarations in favor of feminism, she saw herself entirely in sexual terms. In fact, she saw everyone entirely in sexual terms. Gregor decided that that was why she was so confounded by the ordinary reactions of the people around her to what she had done in the case of her mother. In Patchen’s mind, the point of life was sex. Before you were capable of it, you were not fully alive. After you were no longer capable of it, you were alive only through a misuse of language.

  “Of course, a lot of people stay fully alive long past the age of forty,” she told Gregor, “but to do that you have to work at it. Janet doesn’t work at it. I don’t think she even wants to. She’s just—well, committing suicide, if you see what I mean.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said.

  They were still in Bennis’s room, and Gregor was standing next to the window, looking down on the beach. The weather had now thoroughly cleared. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. On the other hand, it was getting late. The light was fading, and the solar-activated lamps that lined the beach just above the high-water mark were beginning to glow amber. Some time between the time the rain had stopped and now, the service hired to carry out Great Expectations’s part in the Fourth-of-July celebrations had decked those lamps out with flags. The beach looked as if it had been marked out as the route of a parade, with flag concessions set up and waiting for an army of vendors to man them. In the distance, he heard music again, this time “The Star-Spangled Banner” played in brass. He wondered what was going to happen when the sun went all the way down, and the police were no longer able to see clearly. The last time he’d looked, there were more than a hundred people out on the drive, still trying to find a way onto the grounds.

  Behind him, Patchen was off again on another of her fugues. “What I can’t understand,” she was saying, “is why what bothers everybody so much is that she wasn’t in a coma or anything at the time. I mean, a coma isn’t everything. You’d think just because someone was more or less awake that meant they weren’t dead. But what I say is—”

  “Miss Rawls,” Gregor said.

  “I don’t see what was so terrible about taking away the feeding tube, either,” Patchen said. “I mean, she wasn’t on a respirator or a kidney machine or anything. Nothing else would have worked.”

  “Miss Rawls.”

  Patchen blinked at him, and pouted. “I don’t think you understand, either. I think you’re just as narrow-minded as all those other people. People have a right to die in dignity, you know.”

  Gregor didn’t want to get into the issue of the right to die, in dignity or otherwise. He left the window and walked to the chair she was sitting in, then decided nothing would be gained by standing over her. If she began to feel threatened, she would just veer off on one more round of Cosmic Reality. He left the side of her chair and sat down on Bennis’s bed.

  “Miss Rawls,” he said for the third time, as patiently as he could. “Do you think we could go back over what happened today? What you did and what you saw? What we started talking about?”

  “We don’t have to go back to it,” Patchen said. “I never got off it.”

  “Yes. Well. I mean the details. Let me try to get them straight. You say you entered Stephen Fox’s room for the first time this morning around seven o’clock—”

  “It was almost exactly, actually. I meant to go in earlier, at five thirty, but I couldn’t. There were too many people around.”

  “You said that, yes,” Gregor said. “It seems to me a strange time of the morning for too many people to be around.”

  “Well, I’m with you. I got up early on purpose because I thought there wouldn’t be any trouble. But then, when I opened my door, there they all were.”

  “What do you mean, there they all were? Milling around in the hall?”

  “No, no. Stephen was in his room with the door open. At five thirty, I mean. He was cleaning up. He always did that when he got up too early for the maids. Even in hotels. He hated sitting around in a dirty room.”

  Gregor had seen Patchen Rawls’s room. If Stephen had been as fastidious as she said he was, she must have made him crazy.

  “Tell me,” he said, “what happened next. As closely as you can in the order in which it happened.”

  “Well,” Patchen said, “Clare Markey got a phone call. It woke her up. That was at just about six. She had her door closed, so I couldn’t hear many of the words—”

  “Were you listening at the door?”

  “No, no. I was in my room, but my door was open. I was watching for the coast to be clear, if you understand what I mean. But she shouted once, and I could hear that. These rooms aren’t all that soundproof, you know.”

  Gregor knew. “What did she shout?”

  “The word I heard best was a name. Harvey. Then she went on with something that was probably ‘for God’s sake.’”

  “Good. Now, the next thing that happened was—”

  “Dan Chester went to see Stephen. Stephen let him in and then they locked up. Then Janet came out of her room and went downstairs. Then Dan came out of Stephen’s room and went downstairs, too. Then Stephen came out—”

  “—and went downstairs, too,” Gregor finished up. “What about the other people on the hall? Bennis? Me?”

  “You were pacing around in your room,” Patchen said seriously. “I know that because I stopped at your door and listened. I don’t think you can blame me for that. I didn’t want you to see me.”

  “I guessed that.”

  “I listened at Bennis Hannaford’s room, too, but she must have been asleep. Either that, or she went downstairs long before I woke up. I never heard her moving around and I never saw her, either.”

  “All right,” Gregor said, “at this point, you went into Stephen Fox’s room. You were carrying a laundry bag full of underwear—”

  “Bras and panties only,” Patchen said.

  “No pantyhose.”

  “No.”

  “But you do wear pantyhose? You own them and you brought pairs with you?”

  “I own lots. And I always pack lots, too. They run really easily.”

  Gregor nodded. Something had just occurred to him that should have occurred to him before. “How tall are you?” he asked.

  “Five ten,” Patchen answered promptly.

  “Do you know how tall Janet Harte Fox is?”

  “Oh, she’s five ten, too. Stephen liked tall women. Usually, anyway.”

  Gregor thought the senator’s taste in women had been catholic. To say the least. “What about Victoria Harte,” he asked Patchen. “She’s taller than both you and Janet Harte Fox, isn’t she?”

  “No, she’s not.” Patchen grinned. “She wears those terrible spike heels. Four inches at least and they’re probably giving her weak ankles. And all those shoulder pads, too, even on those caftan things. But she’s always been known for that, you know. For being tall. That was part of her trademark when she was really a movie star and not just a used-to-be. So she plays it up.”

  “Shoulder pads.”

  “But why do you care?” Patchen asked. “I should think the really important thing is—”

  Gregor didn’t want to know what the really important thing was. He could just guess.

  “Miss Rawls,” he said finally, interrupting while she took a breath. “Let’s get back to this morning and this afternoon. Now, you put this underwear all around Stephen Fox’s room—”

  “It was all clean underwear.” I made sure of that. And I was careful about where I put it and how. I didn’t just throw it around. It was supposed to be an artistic statement,”

  “Of your love for Senator Fox.”

  “Of the bond between us. A bond between two people is always sexual. Even the bond between parent and child is sexual. I’m not so sure we’re smart in calling that sort of thing abuse. If a child is brought up naturally, to really understand and appreciate his
own sexuality—”

  “Miss Rawls,” Gregor said desperately.

  “You really ought to do something about your mental rigidity,” Patchen told him. “It’s going to play havoc with your karma.”

  “Right,” Gregor said, and heard the echo of Bennis’s voice in his head.

  “Now,” he said. “You put these things around the senator’s room, and then you went back to your own.”

  “And meditated,” Patchen told him. “I had to calm down.”

  “But you went back to the senator’s room,” Gregor said.

  “I stayed in my own room the whole morning until I went out to see what Clare was doing, and that was—well, quarter or ten to one.”

  “All right. Let’s go to afternoon. You meditated in the morning, and then what did you do?”

  “I read for a while. I have a wonderful book, by Whitley Strieber, about contact with aliens. I love Whitley Strieber, don’t you?”

  Gregor didn’t know who Whitley Strieber was. “You must have read for several hours. What made you stop?”

  “Nothing, really. I just got tired. And I was restless and a little hungry. I’m always hungry around noon because I fast in the mornings to clean out the poisons. Especially when I’m staying someplace away from home. You can never tell what they’ve put in the food.”

  “You didn’t hear sounds in the hall? Nothing like that?”

  “No. There were sounds off and on, of course, all day, but I didn’t pay any attention to them. Why should I have?”

  “No reason.” Of course, Gregor thought, from her descriptions of her two days at Great Expectations, it seemed to him that Patchen Rawls made a habit of spying, but he wasn’t going to say so. “So you went to your door, intending to go out and instead—”

  “I saw Clare in the hall, yes.”

  “And she was coming from Stephen Fox’s room.”

  “She was standing in the hallway with the door open,” Patchen corrected, “looking into it. Well, not exactly standing. She was sort of backing up, taking these little steps and moving all the time. You could tell she’d been inside it. It was all over her, like an aura.”

  “But you didn’t see her go inside it?”

  “No,” Patchen said. And sighed. “I just sat on the floor next to my door and watched her go away. She went down to her own room—it’s between here and there—and went in. She said downstairs she left her door open.”

  “You didn’t notice that?”

  “No. I was a little nervous, you see. I mean, I’d gone to all that trouble to make the room look right, and Stephen hadn’t even seen it yet.”

  “Can you be sure of that?”

  “Of course I can. If he had, he’d have come to talk to me. And even if he didn’t do that directly, he’d talk to Dan and show him, and Dan would have come to talk to me. And nobody came.”

  Gregor nodded. “So,” he said, “you went down to Senator Fox’s room yourself. And you definitely went inside.”

  “Definitely.”

  “And you found?”

  Patchen grinned, triumphant. “Pantyhose,” she said. “Pantyhose. Not one pair but three. And all my things had been moved around, messed up. The room didn’t look right at all. It took me fifteen minutes just to get it put back together again. I let them think downstairs that I saw Stephen in there, but I didn’t. I don’t think he was even upstairs, no matter what they say. The room was empty and Stephen had never been in it. But Clare Markey had, and she ruined my effect and then she left pantyhose there that didn’t belong there. I know what she was trying to do. She was afraid if Stephen left Janet he wouldn’t be a senator anymore either, and she didn’t want that to happen. She wanted him around where he could help her. So she went in there and deliberately ruined my spell.”

  Gregor was about to tell her, for what would have been the fifth or sixth time, that it was the silliest motive for doing anything he had ever heard. A schizophrenic would have done better. Surely, no matter how stupid this woman was, it had to be possible to make her understand—

  Perhaps fortunately, he never got the chance to try. There was a knock on the door, and both he and Patchen Rawls turned expectantly toward it. A moment later, Henry Berman came in, looking annoyed.

  He looked even more annoyed when he saw that Patchen was still there. He had sat in on the first fifteen minutes of Gregor’s interview with her, and then taken himself off, muttering under his breath. To Henry Berman, Patchen Rawls was not simply a stupid woman. She was a flaming insult to the species Homo sapiens.

  Berman looked her over, decided she had not been changed by her time with Gregor Demarkian, and then turned to Gregor himself.

  “I think you’d better get downstairs,” the police chief said. “That Bettinger fool is in the foyer, and all he’ll say to anybody is that he has to talk to you.”

  [2]

  Gregor Demarkian had never been ambivalent in the ordinary way about his service in the FBI. He was not one of those people who wondered if any society ever had any right to allow its police forces to work undercover, or to investigate groups of people whose motives were obscure and might not be wholesome. He was a child of World War II. His older brother had been killed at Anjou, and he could remember, with more clarity than he could remember what he’d had for breakfast the morning before, the day when “spy rings” had meant Nazi sympathizers and been all too real. To his thinking, some very few people were morally good, most people were morally neutral, and a tiny percentage of people were actively evil. Because evil almost always operated by deceit—Gregor was also a child of the Armenian Church; the story of Adam and Eve had not been lost on him—it was not always possible to defeat it by transparency. There were times when you just had to knuckle down and play the game their way, just a little. If you didn’t, you ended up, as a colleague of his had once put it, with “your rear end hanging naked in the wind.”

  The problem, as Gregor saw it, was not with playing the game their way, just a little. The problem was with agents and administrators who got so caught up in the process that they forgot about the “just a little.” Gregor had never been entirely comfortable in the Bureau as long as old J. Edgar was alive. It had become much too obvious to him much too early that the Boss wasn’t playing with a full deck, and that what he was playing with was marked. Or worse. There had been rumors from one end of the Bureau to the other about the kind of nonsense the Boss was pulling. Gregor had found those rumors all too believable. It had been a terrible relief to him when the old man had died.

  Unfortunately, it hadn’t been a relief for long. While he’d been concentrating first on kidnappings and then on the serial killer liaisons that would eventually give birth to the Department of Behavioral Sciences, a new breed of men had been coming into the Bureau. Brought up and educated in ways Gregor couldn’t begin to fathom, a small minority of them seemed to have no points of moral reference at all. They were not evil in the way Gregor was accustomed to think about evil, but they weren’t good, either. They didn’t think in those terms. If there was anything they were unquestionably committed to, it was Career. If they had any fixed idea of a natural and inalienable value, it was Results. None of them were plotters. All of them were potential loose cannons. And loose cannons, to Gregor’s mind, were very dangerous indeed.

  It was in this way—as a potential loose cannon, but not necessarily an actual one—that Gregor had always thought of Carl Bettinger. Bettinger was a fine agent. Gregor had worked with him often enough to know he had a great capacity for work, a first-class talent for analysis, and the mind of a true policeman. Whether he also had the soul of a true policeman was another question. There was something about Carl Bettinger that Gregor had always found a little—slippery.

  Standing in the foyer at Great Expectations, Bettinger looked less slippery than worried, and with that Gregor could sympathize. Dan Chester was standing in the foyer, too, and he looked angry. Bettinger had obviously been getting the benefit of Dan Chester’s tongue.
Gregor thought it must have been like a public scolding, in school, in the days before child-centered education. The living room space was still full of people, lacking only Patchen Rawls (Gregor wondered where she had gotten to) and Dan himself, who could hardly be said to be absent. There were also two uniformed policemen—the one who had been here with Pulaski at the beginning, and a new one—and the arriving hordes from the medical examiner’s office. Bettinger had to be feeling like a ten year old caught putting his frog in the teacher’s desk.

  He was, Gregor saw, destined to go on feeling like that. Dan Chester was for the moment silent, but there were rustlings from the living room space. Coming down the last of the stairs, Gregor looked across at the group there and saw that Victoria Harte had risen and begun walking toward the foyer. Her hair flowed. Her caftan flowed. Her face had an expression on it that reminded Gregor of Judith Anderson playing Medea.

  Gregor looked reflexively at Victoria’s feet and saw that Patchen Rawls had been telling the truth about at least one thing. Victoria did wear very high heels, the skinny kind that came almost to a point at the end. On the hardwood floor of the living room space they sounded like pegs being pounded into the holes of a carpenter’s board. On the marble tiles of the foyer, they sounded like bullets.

  Gregor stepped off the last of the stairs into the foyer itself just as Victoria reached Carl Bettinger’s side. He caught Bettinger’s eye over Victoria’s head and shrugged a little.

  “You,” Victoria said, pushing a finger into Bettinger’s chest, “should have been here an hour ago.”

  Carl Bettinger stiffened, and Gregor remembered he had never been good at dealing with women. He was younger than Gregor, but not really young. He was still from the generation before the generation who took mixed sex activity as natural in all things. He looked down at Victoria’s finger, and blanched, and began to straighten his tie.