Act of Darkness (12 page)

“Surgery?” Gregor said.

“Gallbladder,” Chester told him. “Six months ago. Mostly; Janet won’t be caught dead with that thing. Jesus Christ.”

“Do you like being called Dan or Mr. Chester?”

Dan Chester snapped to attention. He cast a look back over his shoulder, seeming to check out the flags and bunting that had been tacked across the beach, fastened to poles and decking like after-thought decorations on a not-quite birthday cake. Then he shoved his coffee cup out of sight behind the wall he’d been leaning against and held out his hand. He also went into what Gregor automatically labeled “defense mode.” His face went blank. His eyes went blanker. Then he turned around quickly and shut the videotape off with a remote.

“Mr. Demarkian?” he said. “You’re early. I didn’t expect you for another ten minutes.”

Gregor reminded himself not to analyze. Most often, when people made senseless remarks, they were doing nothing more than filling the air with sound. Chester had moved away from the door, so Gregor passed through it, into a room that was a cube made of concrete, with only that one set of windows looking out on the beach. One wall was taken up with the Mondrian of the room’s title. It was as large as a tapestry, and very square, and very angular, and very bright. It reminded Gregor of the kind of quilt that made the cover of Bloomingdale’s catalogs.

Dan Chester shut the door. Then, giving it a little thought, he threw the bolt and glanced guiltily at Gregor. “It’s not that I’m paranoid,” he said. “It’s just that the house is full of—people.”

Gregor supposed he meant the house was full of the wrong people, but he let it go. There was a steel and swung-leather sofa in the center of the room, with its back to the painting. He sat down in that.

“I hope you don’t mind my saying so,” he told Chester, “but it’s interesting to see what you look like. It’s hard to picture someone you’ve met over the phone.”

“You hadn’t seen pictures of me?”

“Yes, I’d seen pictures.”

Chester smiled faintly. “It’s just that in pictures I don’t look like I’m supposed to look. I know. It’s a good thing I never wanted to run for office. I remind people of the kind of kid who gets a football scholarship to a college with a tenth-rate team. Do you want some coffee?”

What had been behind the wall next to the door that had allowed Chester to put down his coffee cup when he shook hands was a built-in desk with a mirror and tall column of built-in shelves above it. It had an array of modernistic coffee things: urn, creamer, sugar bowl, cups, saucers, spoons. Dan’s used cup was on the edge closest to the door. On the far edge was a plain manila file folder, stuffed until it was gaping with computer printout sheets.

Chester picked up his cup, gestured at the rest of the things, and shrugged when Gregor shook his head no. Then he picked up the file folder in his free hand and came to sit down in the chair that flanked the sofa.

“Here,” he said, handing the folder to Gregor. “You were looking at this, I know. I brought it for you. It’s the results of the medical tests we had done on Stephen at UConn Farmington.”

“And?” Gregor said.

Chester shrugged again. “And nothing. It’s the way I told you over the phone. If there is something physically wrong with him, it’s nothing any doctor ever heard of. I had them run every test in the universe—”

“You couldn’t have, Mr. Chester. The tests conflict. It would have taken more than four days.”

“Every test that could possibly be relevant.” Chester sounded impatient. “I’m not worried that Stephen’s got bowel cancer. It wouldn’t fit. I want to know what’s making him—fall over like that.”

Gregor looked down at the folder in his hand. It was heavy enough to make his wrist ache, and he put it down next to him on the sofa. “Mr. Chester, I talked to you on the phone, and I talked to Carl Bettinger—”

“Bettinger’s been very helpful,” Dan Chester said quickly.

“I’m sure he has. He always was a conscientious agent.” He was also behaving in a damned peculiar manner, but Gregor didn’t say that. “What I’m trying to say here is that the impression I got was that Senator Fox hasn’t simply been ‘falling over,’ as you put it. He’s been going into paralytic states—”

“Let me tell you what he tells me. He says he starts out feeling fine, except that he’s nervous. He has to speak to a lot of people, get up in front of a crowd, he gets nervous—”

“Bad habit in a politician.”

“Bad habit in an actor, too, but it didn’t hurt Laurence Olivier any. So. Stephen gets nervous, but he feels fine, until suddenly he doesn’t feel fine.”

“Are you sure it’s suddenly?”

“He says it’s like being hit with a brick.”

“There’s no warning at all?”

Chester hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said uneasily. “I don’t think so. Stephen definitely doesn’t think so.”

Gregor was puzzled. “Is he that—distracted by his stage fright? How could you not be sure, how could he not be sure—”

“It’s not that he’s distracted.” Chester sounded desperate. “It’s the way the stage fright takes him. He says it makes his body prickle.”

“Prickle?”

“He’s been telling me that for years and I never paid any attention to it. After all this started, I made him explain it to me at length. As far as I can figure out, he gets the kind of feeling you’d have if your entire body went to sleep.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

Chester drank the rest of his coffee and put his cup on the floor. “I told all this to the doctors. They tested him out for circulatory problems. Nothing.”

“He always has this prickling feeling before he has one of his attacks?”

“Yes.”

“Does he always have an attack when he gets the prickling feeling?”

Chester started. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. I didn’t even think to ask him.”

“Maybe, after we talk, we should pay a visit to Senator Fox. In the meantime, can you make a guess? He’s had these attacks—”

“Three times,” Chester said. “The first time was at a cocktail party in Washington, the day we moved him into his new office. It was also the day we announced the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children. That was a month ago.”

“And the other two?”

“The second time was about a week later. We were at a dinner for contributors. A fund-raising dinner, I mean. The third time was about four days after that. Stephen had a speaking engagement at some citizens’ group in Virginia.”

Gregor thought about it. “From what I understand, the cocktail party where the senator had his first attack was a fund-raiser?”

“That’s right,” Chester said.

“And this speaking engagement—”

“He got paid for it. You don’t have to beat around the bush. Everybody on Capitol Hill with a title to sell supplements his income that way.”

“So that was a fund-raiser, too, in a way.”

“It raised funds,” Chester said, “but it raised them for Stephen personally. Not for the campaign.”

“The press was out in force at all three events?”

“No,” Chester said. “At the first two, yes, but not at the third. No self-respecting Washington reporter is going to trek all the way out to the Blue Ridge Mountains just to hear Stephen talk about how we have to develop the compassion to cherish and support our mentally retarded children.”

“All right.” Gregor thought he wouldn’t have trekked all the way out to Virginia for that either. He wouldn’t have taken a taxi across town. “What about between those times? Did Senator Fox do anything that would normally give him a case of stage fright? Anything at all?”

“Oh, yes,” Chester said. “He got an award from the American Osteopathic Association. For his support, you know it was a straight payback, if you want to know the truth. There was a bill—”

“You don’t have to tell me, Mr. Chester.”

“Yeah. I don’t suppose I do. You were with the Bureau in Washington forever. Anyway, there was that. Two thousand people. Some reporters but not a lot.”

“Was that a fund-raiser?”

“Not directly. The AOA has a PAC. They give a lot of money away. Some of it they give to Stephen.”

“Anything else?”

Chester considered it. “Yes,” he said finally. “A couple of things. Small ones, really. He had a meeting with the Boy Scouts—the Connecticut council, or whatever it’s called. Big picnic with all the parents there. He gave a speech.”

“Stage fright but no attack?”

“Stephen always has stage fright when he has to talk to a crowd that big. That wasn’t a fund-raiser, but there was press. We do it every year. Like I said, it’s no big deal, There was a small dinner for the American Association of University Women, too, maybe three days ago. About two hundred people and one reporter for a local paper.”

“He’s get stage fright at that?”

“Stephen gets stage fright if he has to give a toast at Thanksgiving dinner. He really isn’t very comfortable in public, Mr. Demarkian. He’s just comfortable in front of television cameras. That’s what you need these days. Is this getting us anywhere?”

Gregor sighed. “It’s getting us at least a tentative answer to my question. Senator Fox gets these attacks only when he has stage fright, but not every time he gets stage fright.”

“So?”

“So, whatever’s going on, it isn’t a psychological response to the stage fright. Or it isn’t likely that it is.”

Dan Chester stared at him—so hard and so long, Gregor began to wonder what he could possibly have said to make the man so bug-eyed. Surely the thought must have occurred to him that Senator Fox might simply be breaking down. It was the first thing Gregor had thought of, and the first thing Carl Bettinger had suggested when he called Gregor to ask for his help. “Fox is one of the real world-class bozos on Capitol Hill,” Bettinger had said, “and my reading is the man’s not glued together too tight.” But even if Stephen Whistler Fox was a rock, the question would have to be asked. In the face of the clean bill of health delivered by the UConn medical center, it would have to be asked first.

“Mr. Chester,” Gregor said. “You must have considered—”

“Considered?” Dan Chester exploded. “Of course I considered. Stephen’s not having a nervous breakdown. Or at least he wasn’t having one when these attacks started.”

“Meaning he is having one now?”

“You’d be a little upset, too, under the circumstances. But you don’t understand. Stephen couldn’t be having—psychological—psycho—oh, hell.”

“Excuse me?”

Dan Chester got out of his chair. He had lost his blankness and his control. He dumped his empty coffee cup on the rectangular table near the door, passing from anger to the edge of hysterical laughter. He seemed to be holding himself in only with difficulty.

“Look,” he said, “maybe you’re right. Maybe you ought to talk to Stephen.”

“Mr. Chester, I have to talk to the senator. At least, if I’m going to do you any good I have to.”

“You think that’s going to help you out, Mr. Demarkian? Well, that’s fine. You talk to him. I’ll set it up myself. But try to remember one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“People like Stephen Whistler Fox don’t run the country. People like me run the country. And it’s a good thing, too. If we had to depend for government on people whose only qualification for office was that their jawlines don’t blur on videotape, we’d be in even worse shape than we are. Do you get my drift?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“Look at the folder,” Dan Chester said. “It’s got everything and nothing in it. I’ll go find the honorable senator.”

Chester threw the bolt, flung open the door, and began to disappear into the hall outside. Just before he was out of earshot, Gregor said, “Mr. Chester, speaking of folders, there are some very fancy ones upstairs.”

Chester stopped. “What about them? I wrote them myself. They’re supposed to be souvenirs.”

“Was it your idea to include a heart-shaped paper clip?”

Chester gave him a twisted little smile. “That,” he said, “was Janet’s idea. In fact, the folders were Janet’s idea. She says they were Vicky’s, but she always says that when she thinks I’m going to hate an idea.”

W
HEN DAN CHESTER FINISHED
with Gregor Demarkian, he didn’t go in search of Stephen Whistler Fox. Instead, he went out the great sliding glass doors in the beach room to the deck, and from there onto the beach itself. Janet saw him moving clumsily across the sand in his perfectly clean, perfectly stiff Top-Siders, shaking his head and talking to himself in a tone too low to be heard over the Chinese water-torture rhythm of the waves. He went up onto the flagstone patio around the saltwater pool, where long tables had been laid out in preparation for lunch. He fiddled with the decorations there—red, white, and blue flowers in red, white, and blue vases tied with red, white, and blue satin ribbons; a red, white, and blue donkey that was a piñata stuffed with red, white, and blue candy; a red, white, and blue elephant that was also a piñata, but stuffed with coal. Victoria had a sense of humor.

Janet was standing on the beach, halfway between the house and the water, and when she saw Dan she hesitated. Patchen was down there, sitting cross-legged with her knees in the tide, and Janet wanted to talk to her, alone. What she didn’t want to do was get that close to the water, where she would be able to see the beach at the de Broden place without obstruction. For Janet, the de Broden place epitomized everything she didn’t like about Oyster Bay: the carefully understated good taste, the carefully understated fashionless clothes, the carefully understated tones of voice. At the de Brodens’, even the sand was carefully understated. Watching them, Janet sometimes thought they lived at the bottom of an invisible sea.

She checked out Patchen Rawls one more time, then made her choice for Dan, who was at least someone she understood. As she came up on the patio, he turned in her direction, thinking of something else. When he saw her, he blinked. Then he looked down the beach at Patchen Rawls and blinked again.

“Oh, dear Jesus Christ,” he said.

Janet sat down on a deck chair, sideways, without stretching out her legs. “Never mind about Jesus Christ,” she told him. “What about Gregor Demarkian? What did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything. He asked a lot of questions.”