Act of Darkness (10 page)

“But what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s the problem. I don’t know.”

“Are you feeling ill?”

“No. Yes. Listen. I’ve got to ask you a question.”

“Ask ahead,” Clare said, and thought, Maybe Harvey’s been working the phones again, threatening the doctor with purgative revolutionary violence. That would be just like Harvey.

But Kevin Debrett’s question, when it came, had nothing to do with Harvey Gort. It had nothing to do with anything Clare could have imagined, no matter how hard she’d worked at it. It was born in left field and stayed there, like a rock that had suddenly acquired too much weight to move through air.

“What do you know,” Kevin Debrett asked her, “about a man named Gregor Demarkian?”

It was eleven in the morning, and the hall outside Patchen Rawls’s door was quiet. For a while, there had been a lot of coming and going. Dan had gone to Stephen’s room. Kevin Debrett had gone to Clare Markey’s room. Mr. Demarkian—who was supposed to be a great detective, but who looked to Patchen like a bookstore clerk who had inherited money—had arrived with a woman who was pretty, but thankfully too old to be Stephen’s type. Then Janet Harte Fox had come out of her bedroom, carrying a beach bag and a heavy hardcover book, and the coast was finally clear.

Patchen stood up, slipped into the hall, and headed for the other end. Her bedroom sat behind the set of double doors at the east end of the hall. Janet’s room sat behind the double doors at the west end. Patchen went very quietly, moving with bare feet along thick carpet and stopping at every door she knew had someone behind it, just in case.

At the west end of the hall she stood in front of Janet’s door, knocked tentatively just for form, and then tried the knob. It moved easily and she opened the door a crack, slipped inside, and looked around her. The room was dark, the shades pulled over the wall of windows that looked out on the sound, and unashamedly a mess. The bed was unmade and the vanity table was covered with powder and dribs of cream and scent. Patchen went back to the door and threw the bolt.

A second later, she headed across the room to Janet’s bathroom, hidden behind a gray steel door in the corner, just like her own at the other end of the hall. She stepped onto the small white tiles and looked around, at the towels thrown everywhere, at the smear of toothpaste in the bottom of the sink, at the open shower door still beaded with water.

There was a large whirlpool tub tucked at an angle into a corner of the room, with a triangular shelf built into the corner wall, and that was where she found it: a gray burlap laundry sack. She reached over and snatched it up and looked inside.

What she wanted was right there on top, in plain sight, like a sacrificial virgin on an Aztec altar.

It was the pair of underwear Janet had been wearing before she took her shower this morning, and it was beautifully, gloriously, perfectly stained.

T
HE NOTE FROM DAN
Chester was lying on the night table next to the bed when Gregor was shown into his room, sealed into a thick linen-rag square of envelope with his name written across the front in calligraphic script. The script caught his attention. Any hint of tradition would have caught it, because, as it turned out, the interior of the house was just as bizarre as the exterior. Downstairs, the first thing he had noticed was the almost total absence of walls. The foyer was separated from the living room by two square columns. The living room was separated from the dining room by a change in the pattern in the parquet floor. Standing under the angular stairs that led to the second-floor guest wing, he could see all the way across the house to its west end, where the library was a collection of steel and glass bookcases punctuated, he had thought at first, by oversize mirrors. A second later, he realized they weren’t mirrors at all. They were photographs, and not even photographs of the same person. Blown up to the nearly life-size dimensions of rock group posters and framed in polished chrome, Victoria Harte and Janet Harte Fox stared at each other across the loop-pile expanse of the library carpet, looking like twins. It smacked of expense and it smacked of obsession.

When he was able to concentrate on details instead of on the nearly hallucinatory use of space, he saw that everything smacked of expense, and much of obsession. Victoria’s three Oscars stood upside down in three hard-edged clear glass flower pots in the middle of the living room’s heart-shaped, cut glass coffee table. Around that table, narrow lengths of sectional sofa had been custom-made to allow them to be arranged in the shape of a heart as well, and upholstered in a thick red silk that looked wet. There were heart-shaped pillows made of heavy Turkish damask and a heart-shaped ottoman covered in striped, piece-dyed satin. On closer inspection, the stripes turned out to be thousands of linked tiny hearts. If it hadn’t been for the photographs of Janet that littered every available surface—photographs placed, of course, in heart-shaped silver frames—Gregor would have thought of Victoria as the ultimate egoist: a woman incapable of imagining the universe without herself in it.

Fortunately, the heart motif didn’t extend to the second-floor guest wing. Unfortunately, the wing bore an uncomfortable resemblance to certain mass-produced, overpriced hotels, and Gregor’s room was positively schizophrenic. As he put his suitcases on the floor—the maid had wanted to carry them, but he hadn’t let her; she was a small Spanish girl weighing no more than ninety pounds—he thought about the architect, a famous man, who, until his death at the age of forty-one from cirrhosis of the liver, had widely been hailed as the “greatest original sensibility in architecture since the death of Sir Christopher Wren.” Gregor didn’t know anything about sensibility in architecture, but he did know awfulness when he saw it, and this room was truly awful. There was a skylight directly over the head of the bed, ensuring sleeplessness early every bright morning and all night during any good rainstorm. There was a wall of windows looking out on Long Island Sound, but not rectangular windows. The panes were cut into everything from hexagons to wickedly razor-pointed stars. Then there was the mirrored wall that faced the bed, a single expanse of polished glass, an invitation to neurotic narcissism. He could just see himself standing in front of it every morning, trying to get his trousers on and contemplating his paunch.

On the other wall, where the head of the bed was, there were two doors. He tried the closest and found a bathroom, small but adequate. He tried the other and found it locked. He closed his eyes and mentally recreated their progress along the balcony, the maid bringing Bennis to her room, him to his. Then he knocked.

“Bennis?” he said.

There were sounds of movement on the other side of the door, then the click of the bolt being thrown. The door opened and Bennis stuck her head through, but nothing else.

“I’m getting changed,” she said, “into something more appropriate. There’s a beach out there, Gregor. I can’t go in a Chanel suit.”

“I’d just as soon you never wore a Chanel suit. What’s your room like?”

“Alice in Wonderland on lysergic acid. Did you look at your folder yet?”

“What folder?”

“It’s on your night table. The green thing with gold lettering on it.”

“Gregor looked at his night table, but all that was there was the square envelope that he hadn’t opened yet, even though he knew he should. He turned his back on it with determination and said, “I don’t have a folder. What’s in yours?”

“Just a minute,” Bennis said. She closed the door and padded away behind it, humming “You’re So Vain,” off-key.

Left on his own, he went to the bed, sat down, and took the envelope from its place at the base of a lamp that looked a little like a souvenir statue of the Empire State Building and a little like Jabba the Hut. He listened for Bennis, coming back to him, but got nothing. No reprieve. He slid his fingers under the corner of the flap and ripped the envelope open across the top.

Inside, there was only a single sheet of paper, thick and stiff and smooth as cloth, that had been folded once. Written across the top half of it, in the same calligraphic hand, was this:

Mr. Demarkian:

Could you meet me in the study at 11:00? We have some important things to discuss.

Dan Chester

Gregor folded it up again, stuck it back into its envelope, and put the whole thing in the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

Now
he was hearing Bennis, and the last thing he wanted was for Bennis to see this note.

The connecting door opened and Bennis came in, dressed in a long terry cloth robe and carrying what looked like a room-service menu from a Manhattan hotel, complete with a tasseled cord woven into its spine.

“Look at this,” she said, “You won’t believe it even when you see it.”

Later, Gregor Demarkian admitted to himself that Bennis had been right. He hadn’t believed it, even when he saw it, and he was going to have a hard time believing it for years to come. What Bennis had found on her night table was almost as odd as a room-service menu would have been—odder, really, because some large country houses, he knew, did provide menus to their guests for breakfast in bed. This, however, was no menu. Its cover was made of thick, supple green cardboard textured to look like alligator skin and embossed in gold with the words
Great Expectations
across the front. Its tassel was made of good-quality string, dyed green to match the cover and flecked with what looked like child’s gold glitter. Inside was a collection of the kind of information usually provided to the visitors of museums, with one little kicker. The kicker had been attached to the back cover by a gold-plated paper clip. It was heart-shaped.

Bennis threw the folder down on the bed and herself down after it, and propped her chin up in her hands. Then she flipped the cover open and said, “What does this make you think of?”

They were looking at what Gregor supposed would have to be called the title page, although it contained less than the usual run of information. The words
Great Expectations
had been printed in green script at the center, and there was a copyright notice in very small type at the bottom, but there was no byline.

He drew the folder closer. “It reminds me of a room-service menu,” he said. “What does it remind you of?”

The prospectuses they give out for brand-new condominium apartments. You know, the kind of thing where a builder puts up a high-rise on spec, and then tries to sell off the units at really ridiculous prices—”

“What are you talking about?”

Bennis sighed. “I know it’s not your kind of thing, Gregor, but you ought to at least read the newspapers. About ten years ago there was this enormous building boom, especially in places like New York, and a lot of builders put up these apartments with one or two bedrooms for single working people. Except, while the building was getting done, the single working people got married and had children. So then—”

“Then the builders couldn’t sell the apartments,” Gregor said. “Yes, I see what you mean. But what does that have to do with this?”

Bennis sighed again. “Think,” she said, ignoring the look Gregor shot at her, which was lethal. Gregor had to smile. He was always telling people to “think.” He supposed he deserved a little return play every once in a while, even from Bennis.

“Nobody,” Bennis said, “puts out one of these things on an apartment building that’s selling well. They only put them out on buildings that aren’t selling at all. Which reminds me of the other thing this reminds me of. Conference centers.”

“Conference centers?”

“You know, those places out in the country that aren’t regular hotels but just big spaces you can rent to hold your convention in. They put out things like this to send to prospects, to help them book their space. Now do you see?”

“No.”

“Well,” Bennis said, “in a way, neither do I. I mean, this is Victoria Harte’s house. She doesn’t rent it out that I’ve ever heard. I don’t even think she’s big on visitors. So what’s she doing with something like this?”

“What’s in ‘this’?”

Bennis flipped the page. On the back of the title page there was nothing. On the facing page there was a column of type, about half as wide as it should have been, running down the right-hand side, and a big white margin running down the other. The margin was studded with tiny color pictures of spaces Gregor recognized from his quick look at the first floor. Across the top, in sedately sized but boldly inked letters, were the words
Welcome To Great Expectations.

Gregor tapped his finger against the page and shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense, does it? I wonder why she had this made.”

“It was probably lots of them. It costs a lot of money to get things printed, especially on heavy slick stock like this. The smaller the printing, the higher the price per piece. Wait’ll you read the copy. It’s like one of those stockholders’ reports where the management doesn’t want to let anyone know what it’s doing.”

“Why don’t you just give me the gist.”

“All right. There’s a section on the architect, Philip Track, and how wonderful and significant he was. There’s a section on Victoria Harte, and how she had tremendous aesthetic vision back in the days when modern architecture wasn’t an accepted thing. Then there’s a section on the construction, and all the industrial techniques they applied when they were building. And a section on the materials—”

“Wait,” Gregor said. He flipped through a couple of pages himself, and found more wide margins and more small color pictures and more boldface section heads, but he didn’t find what he wanted. There was no neatly overwritten paragraph on what a wonderful house this would be to live in. There was no sly line about how this house would not be for everyone. There was nothing at all to indicate that this folder had been produced for anything but to inform Victoria Harte’s guests about the building they were being allowed to inhabit for a very limited length of time.

He pushed the folder away from him again and said, “I thought you had it there for a minute. I thought Victoria Harte was trying to sell this house. But if she were, there’d be a come-on at the end, and there isn’t.”