28 Hearts of Sand (7 page)

Gregor looked on the back of the book and found:
KNIGHT SION BOOKS.
He looked at the copyright page and found Knight Sion Books again, along with an address in Queens.

He put the book back in the bag and got out at his destination, feeling the suddenly unmuffled sounds of city traffic as vaguely hostile. He went into the building and took out his authorization letter. The guard in the lobby looked it over and handed him a visitor’s badge.

The elevator opened at his floor, and a young woman was waiting for him, holding a file folder. She was pleasant and bland and not particularly interested in him. She stepped forward and held out her hand to be shaken. Gregor shook it.

“Mr. Fitzgerald is this way,” she said without bothering to give her name. “He told me to show you right in.”

Gregor was glad not to have to wait. They went down one corridor and passed through a room of cubicles. The office they were going to was down a side hall. The hall was windowless. The office was small.

Darcy Fitzgerald rose up from behind his desk as Gregor and his escort approached, and held out his hand.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “I know we’ve never met, but I’ve heard a lot about you. And not just from Patrick. Why don’t you sit down.”

The young woman waited expectantly.

Fitzgerald said, “Coffee is probably a good idea,” and she took off.

Gregor took one of the two padded visitors’ chairs in front of the desk and put his bag from Partners and Crime on the floor. Fitzgerald raised his eyebrows slightly, and Gregor brought the bag up onto the desk.

“I was wandering around the city earlier,” Gregor said. “I found this and picked it up. The clerk at the bookstore recommended it.”

Gregor took the book out of the bag and put it on the desk. Darcy Fitzgerald’s face lit up.

“Oh, God,” he said. “Well, I suppose it’s not all that surprising. The damned things are all over the city.”

“This book is all over the city?”

“All over the tristate area, probably,” Fitzgerald said. “You’ve got to give the guy credit. He’s got an obsession and he’s made it pay.”

“What guy? And what obsession?”

“Ray Guy Pearce,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s a—I don’t know what to call him. A conspiracy theory nut, that’s for sure. He’s been running Knight Sion Books out of his dining room in Queens for decades—all kinds of conspiracies, the government covering up alien landings, the government being manipulated by the thirteen richest families in the world, who aren’t really humans, but some kind of reptiles, and Clinton was one of them, they only made him look as if he’d grown up poor so that the rest of us would be fooled. That’s the kind of thing.”

“And he does all this out of a dining room in Queens?”

“It’s probably a lot easier now than it used to be,” Fitzgerald said. “Everything’s digital now. He’s got a couple of Web sites. But, yeah, Knight Sion is the largest publisher of conspiracy books in the country. Bigger even than Feral House. This murder must have been a godsend to him.”

“The murder of Chapin Waring?”

“Sure. She’s part of the conspiracy, or the robberies were, or something. I’ll admit I was never able to straighten it out. Knight Sion has been publishing books on the Waring case since maybe two or three years after Chapin Waring went missing. One of my predecessors took it seriously and looked into good old Ray Guy, but I don’t think he ever found anything that would link the man to the case. Except, you know, an obsession to see conspiracies in everything. We’ve got notes about Ray Guy and Knight Sion Books in the file, if you want to look into it yourself.”

Gregor picked up the book and turned it over in his hands. “Maybe I will,” he said.

Fitzgerald laughed. “The one you’ve got came out the first time a few years ago. When the news hit the wires, Ray Guy probably had a ton printed, along with a ton or two of the other titles on the case.”

“And this man has no connection to the case at all?”

“Not that we could tell,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s been sitting out there on his rear end for fifty years, just getting this stuff into print and trying to convince as many people as possible that we’re all being secretly prepared as sacrifices to the Antichrist by a cabal of—I don’t know. I never understood it.”

“He writes all these books himself?” Gregor asked.

“Nope. He’s got a whole stable of writers who do this stuff. Most of them specialize. And there are new ones coming in all the time. You’ve got to ask yourself how many of these people there could possibly be, but the answer is—an infinite number. And I do mean infinite. He writes the stuff about Chapin Waring, though.”

“I’d think it would be difficult to put five bank robberies and a flight from justice into the context of an international conspiracy of—did you say the Antichrist?”

“I did indeed.”

“Somehow, I don’t find Chapin Waring plausible as an agent of the Antichrist.”

“I don’t either,” Fitzgerald said. “But she sure as hell is plausible as a reincarnation of Houdini. It’s been thirty years, and nobody caught so much as a glimpse until she turned up stabbed in the back at Alwych. That’s got to be some kind of record.”

There was a noise at Gregor’s back. He turned to see yet another young woman coming in with coffee, faux cream, and sugar on a tray.

“Here it is,” Fitzgerald said. “And now we can get down to the serious business of finding out what happened to all that money.”

The young woman put the tray down on the desk and left. Fitzgerald handed Gregor a cup of very black coffee. Gregor reached for the faux cream and a spoon.

“The money,” Gregor prompted.

Fitzgerald shook his head vigorously. “Over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Quite a bit of it in bills we had serial numbers for. Gone without a trace for thirty years, just like Chapin Waring herself. Not a single bill has ever turned up anywhere. Not even once.”

“Which means nobody was spending it,” Gregor said.

“That’s what it means,” Fitzgerald said. “It also means that wherever Chapin Waring went, she either didn’t take the money with her, or she didn’t need to use it for anything. The best we can come up with is that it’s got to be sitting somewhere in a pile. It might be a couple of piles. But we want it back.”

“I can imagine,” Gregor said. “It’s a lot of money for only five robberies.”

“Yes, well, what we’re worried about now is that you’re going to go out to Alwych and solve their murder for them, and then that’s all you’re going to do. We’d appreciate it if you would look out for our problem while you’re there. We’ve got reason to think that at least some attempt may be made to keep you from doing anything but dealing with the present.”

“Really?” Gregor said.

“Really,” Fitzgerald said. “Do you remember the name of the person who hired you to go out to Alwych?”

“Jason Battlesea?” Gregor said, thinking about it. “I think he’s the chief of police.”

“Well, this guy may have called you, and he may have made the arrangements, but he couldn’t have hired you without the permission of the mayor. And it’s the mayor who worries us. Her name is Evaline Veer. Martin Veer was her brother.”

3

On the way back to his hotel in the cab, Gregor tried looking first at the picture book he’d bought, and then at the paper file of everything Fitzgerald thought he might need to help the FBI with what they wanted. There was also another file, firmly fixed in Gregor’s laptop, but it might take him a while to get to that.

The book was more interesting every time he looked at it. Gregor had never seen a more eclectic collection of pictures. The photos with credits were all grainy in the way newspaper photographs were thirty years ago. The uncredited ones ran the gamut from posed school photographs to family snapshots to a few that looked as if they might have been taken by a telephoto lens.

That was an interesting point. The Waring case was so famous by now that nobody thought twice about the idea that some investigative journalist manqué had been following Chapin Waring around with a camera and taking pictures of her in secret. But at the time these photographs had to have been taken, there was no Waring case. If Chapin Waring was “famous” at all, it was only among a small group of well-off teenagers on the Connecticut Gold Coast.

In fact, until the case did break, Chapin Waring looked to be on track to be just another one of those women: house in the suburbs and two kids by the time she was thirty; drinking problem (if not worse) by the time she was forty.

There was no reason for anybody to have been stalking and taking pictures of Chapin Waring before she was revealed as one of the two people who were robbing those banks.

And yet, as a slow page-through of this book made clear, somebody had been doing just that. It had been a fairly thorough stalking, too. There were pictures of Chapin Waring in a bedroom, getting ready for bed—although no nudity, and no pictures of her prancing around in her underwear. There were pictures of Chapin Waring in what looked like a breakfast room, having orange juice and coffee. There were pictures of Chapin Waring sitting in the driveway of a big house in the driver’s seat of a little convertible.

He put the book aside and picked up the file. He wondered if the FBI had checked out Ray Guy Pearce as well as Fitzgerald had said they did. Had they noticed the stalking photographs?

Gregor put the file back in his attaché case. More than $250,000 just gone into thin air.

Which left the question of where that was. In that thick file folder, Gregor had the reports of all the search warrants over the years, and there had been plenty of them. Houses had been searched. Cars had been searched. Safe deposit boxes had been searched. Leads had been followed up.

Nothing.

The cab came to a stop under the canopy of Gregor’s hotel. Gregor paid the fare and got out, handing the driver a tip as he went. He went in through the lobby and stopped at the desk. There were no messages for him.

Gregor went to his room and put the book and his attaché case on the little table in the sitting room. He went into the bathroom and washed his face until it didn’t feel full of grit. Then he went back into the sitting room. Sometime while he was out, somebody had sent up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. It was sitting on a tray next to an ice bucket and some glasses.

There was only one person who would send Gregor a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue.

Gregor opened the bottle and poured himself a short glass neat. Then he got out his cell phone and called Bennis.

“I keep telling you I’m not enough of a scotch drinker to know the difference between Black and Blue,” he said when he got her on the line.

“I know the difference between Black and Blue,” Bennis said.

“Yes, and you take a drink every couple of years. Thank you for the bottle, anyway. I’ll carry it around in my suitcase like a private eye in a forties novel. Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right,” Bennis said. “I wasn’t going to leave the cat in the snow. It’s going to be back here tomorrow morning. Then it’s going to stay awhile until Donna and I can find somebody to live with it. Didn’t I already tell you that?”

“I think so.”

“Well, anyway, Donna’s got her sights set on Hannah Krekorian. Old lady. Lives alone.”

“She’s no older than I am,” Gregor said. “She and I went to school together.”

“Oh, I know that,” Bennis said. “I didn’t mean to imply anything. But she’s older than you are in spirit, if you know what I mean. And her landlord allows cats.”

“Howard Kashinian?”

“Let’s just say he’d better allow cats, or Donna will make his life miserable for an eternity. Anyway, that’s where that is now. Are you sure
you’re
all right.”

“I’m fine. The case is a mess, and I haven’t even gotten to the part I’m supposed to be investigating. Let me ask you something. You were a debutante, right?”

“Do we really have to do this again?”

“I’m not trying to dredge up your embarrassing past. I want to know something. Can you think of any reason why somebody would stalk a debutante? Or would have, in Chapin Waring’s day? Followed her around. Taken her picture.”

“On a personal level, or a professional one?”

“There’s a professional one?”

“Well, considerably before my day, debutantes were to the general public what celebrity twits are now. They were celebrity twits. People like Brenda Frazier. They came out in big spectacular parties that were reported in the press. Photographers followed them around the way the paparazzi follow Paris Hilton now.”

“Did Chapin Waring have that kind of coming out?”

“Not that I remember,” Bennis said. “The last real celebrity debutante I remember was Cornelia Guest, and that was 1982. And it never quite reached the level of a Brenda Frazier or a Gloria Vanderbilt. Time has moved on, Gregor. I don’t think anybody cares anymore.”

“What about the personal?” Gregor asked. “Would it make sense for some lone guy, or woman, I suppose—for somebody to follow around a local debutante and take pictures of her with a telephoto lens, for private reasons?”

“You mean ordinary stalking? That can happen to anybody at any time, last I checked.”

“Yes, but would Chapin Waring, as a debutante, have gotten the kind of publicity that would have drawn in somebody from the outside, maybe way from the outside—not even in the same state?”

“I don’t think she would have had national publicity, if that’s what you mean,” Bennis said. “I think I’d have noticed that. But there’s always
Town and Country.
”

“The magazine?”

“Exactly.
Town and Country
always covers all the deb stuff, and a fair amount of the subdeb stuff. If you’re talking about someone who was following the circuit, then he or she would have probably been able to read about her coming out in
Town and Country.
And then there would be the local newspapers. Although, to tell you the truth, Gregor, there’s not a lot of coverage even in those anymore. Time really has moved on.”

“I’m not sure it had moved on thirty years ago.”

“Well,” Bennis said, “maybe it hadn’t. But it really wouldn’t have been the kind of thing it used to be, not even the kind of thing it was in my day. What’s the matter? Did Chapin Waring have a stalker?”