Not a Creature Was Stirring (21 page)

“I like him well enough,” Donna said. “He’s a nice person, really. A little young, you know, and maybe a little weak, but nice. I don’t want to marry him, if that’s what you mean.”

“If you don’t want to marry him, what are you going to do with him when I find him?”

“Talk to him. Just to get a few things straight in my mind. And tell him about the baby, of course, because he’s the father and I’m going to have it and he ought to know. And. Well. Ask him to do something for me. Something important.”

“What?”

“Oh,” Donna said. “You know. It’s a brave new world.”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t—”

“The AIDS test,” Donna said. “I want him to have the AIDS test. I mean, I thought he was all right, when I first met him, but now, with all of this, how can I know? He’s so irresponsible. He could have been doing anything before I met him.”

“I suppose he could have,” Gregor said.

“I think it’s a lot of crap,” Donna said. “All that stuff about how everybody wants sex all the time and just pretends they don’t or stuffs it down in their unconscious or something. I think some people do and some people don’t. And I don’t see why it has to be bad if you’re one of the people who don’t.”

“Of course it’s not bad,” Gregor said.

“Everybody always tells you it is,” Donna said. “Especially boys. Men. Whoever. Do you want to see a picture of him? I’ve got a good one.”

Gregor held out his hand. “First the picture, then everything he ever told you about his family, his life, his schooling—everything.”

“He told me a lot about his life.” Donna sat down at the table again. She looked very earnest and very young and very, very angry. “The problem is, Mr. Demarkian, I think most of it might have been lies.”

“Lies?”

“Lying was something he did, wasn’t it? He’s the one who was talking about marriage for eight months. I never brought up the subject. And it’s not like you have to say those things just to get yourself laid these days.”

She reached into her jacket, came up with a wallet and threw the wallet on the table.

“There,” she said. “Everything there is to know about Peter Desarian and Donna Moradanyan, Couple.”

Out on Cavanaugh Street, the snow was coming down again, thick and hard—the start of another blizzard. After Donna Moradanyan had left his apartment, he’d spent some time making calls—checking information for Boston and five of its suburbs; talking to a friend of his in the Boston city government; talking to another friend of his who was still at the Bureau—and then he’d stretched out on the couch, feeling vaguely disturbed. Donna Moradanyan was such a nice, ordinary girl. He couldn’t believe she was also a crazy, although she’d sounded like one. He wished he watched more television, or read more popular fiction. Maybe the things she had described to him were perfectly normal now, as mundane as war movies and John Wayne westerns had been when he was younger. He had no way of knowing.

After a while, he got up and started to wander around the apartment. It was a useless exercise. The only popular fiction he owned was a copy of one of Bennis Hannaford’s books, and that wasn’t going to be much help to him. For one thing, the damned novel took place in fairy land, or wherever it was unicorns were commonplace. For another, he’d got the impression, from reading the first few chapters, that Bennis Hannaford had an unusual sensibility. She would never have been taken in by “psychology.” Assuming she knew it existed.

He sat back down on the couch, stretched out again, and folded his hands over his stomach. The last two calls he had made would bear fruit in a very few hours. People would get back to him, and the things they had to tell him would point him in the right direction. If the boy was an habitual liar—and so many people were; it never ceased to surprise him—he’d have to start again from the beginning, but he didn’t think he’d mind that. What he minded was Donna Moradanyan, so confused she didn’t know what she thought or felt any more—so much in love and not even knowing it.

Love, he decided, had been a lot easier in the old days, when he and Elizabeth had met. Then courting had been a dance, engraved in stone, and everyone had known the steps. He could remember sitting alone in the tiny one-room apartment he had rented when he was a graduate student at Harvard, counting out quarters and dimes and trying to come up with enough for half a dozen red roses. Roses were the universal language, practically a proposal of marriage—especially if you were poor and the girl you were seeing knew you couldn’t afford them. People might not have had so much sex in those days, but they’d had assurances.

He closed his eyes, dreaming of hole-in-the-wall restaurants and tightly packed cafes and little dance places with postage-stamp floors where you had to dance cheek-to-cheek or not at all. Elizabeth’s perfume: Chanel No. 5, bought once a year in minuscule bottles after much frantic saving, applied sparingly and only on very special occasions. Elizabeth’s clothes: silk and wool hiding an infinity of mysterious rustles. Elizabeth’s shoes: high-heeled but sturdy, making her seem taller and thinner than he wanted her to be. Gregor had to remind himself that those days hadn’t actually taken place in black and white.

He started drifting into sleep, and the dreams changed, in color and intensity. Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, he thought, and saw her growing older, into the woman he was married to. But not growing sick. In dreams like this, Elizabeth never got sick. She just got lovelier and lovelier, more and more perfect. Her hair got white and the skin on her face got impossibly soft. The polish she wore on her fingernails got paler.

He was just slipping into the best dream of all, when the phone rang. The phone was in the bedroom, but he had turned the ringer on high, to make sure he heard it no matter where he was in the apartment. When ringing, it sounded as shrill and crazy as a police whistle under his ear.

He sat up, brushed the hair out of his face, and waited. It rang on and on and on. He got off the couch and went into the bedroom.

“Stupid,” he said.

Then he picked up the receiver and listened to the sound of police sirens, whirring and screaming and choking in somebody else’s endless night.

“Gregor,” Jackman said, as soon as the noise had fallen off enough for him to say anything. “Listen. I’m at Engine House. I’ve sent a police car for you.” Gregor sat down on the bed and ran his hands through his hair again and made another stab at counting to ten. “What do you mean, you sent a police car? You can’t send a police car for me here. Everybody on the street will think I’m being arrested.”

“I’m not arresting you, Gregor.”

“I know that,” Gregor said.

“I’m just in a goddamned hurry. I told them to put the siren on. When they get there, just climb in back and let them bring your ass out to me.”

There was the sound of someone talking in the background, an urgent, excited voice just a little too indistinct for Gregor to hear. Jackman said, “Just a sec,” and stopped breathing into the phone. A moment later, he was back, swearing.

“Goddamned idiots,” he said. “Christ, Gregor, you can’t get anything done right any more. Not anything. They say it’s black people they’ve lowered the standards for, but let me tell you. They’re hiring white idiots, Gregor. They’re taking white people on this police force with IQs of twenty-nine.”

“Mr. Jackman,” Gregor said.

“Oh, stop with the Mr. Jackman. Come on out. The car’ll be there any minute.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?” Jackman said. “You were right. I’ve got another body. She wasn’t a body when we came through the door, but she sure as hell is a body now.”

“Cordelia Hannaford?”

“Emma Hannaford,” Jackman said. “And you were right about something else. I’m being set up to believe she committed suicide out of remorse. And I do mean set up.”

“How?”

“For one thing, I’ve got a suicide note that’s not a suicide note.”

“John—”

“Gotta go,” Jackman said.

The connection was broken with a slam, making Gregor wince. He looked down at the slippers on his feet and sighed.

He wasn’t dressed. He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t even awake.

And there was a police siren out there someplace, getting closer.

F
OR SOME REASON—MAYBE
because this was the second death—Gregor had expected the scene at Engine House to be more garish, more lurid, more melodramatic than the one he had walked into Christmas Eve. Instead, it was less. The day was dark, its sky carpeted in black storm clouds, its air full of snow and grit—but there was still enough light to see by. None of the vehicles parked on the circular turnaround at the bottom of the terrace steps had its lights on. Stacked together there, wearing none of their ordinary badges of emergency, they made Gregor think of the commuter lots that had sprung up all along the Main Line.

The car Jackman had sent for him had turned out not to be a regular police car, but a “transportation vehicle” meant to bring accused but possibly dangerous prisoners from jail to courthouse during a trial. There was a cage in the back, but only a single man in front. Gregor was able to ride in the passenger seat, like a normal person. After a while, he’d even managed to convince the driver to turn off the siren. Like most of Jackman’s lowest level footmen, this one was very young and scared to death of his boss. To make him see reason, Gregor had had to make the boy just as scared of
him
.

The car slowed. Gregor opened his door and jumped out, hitting the ground just as the boy hit the brakes.
Hit
was the operative word. Gregor slipped a little on the ice that had formed between the fieldstone edge of the terrace and the heated gravel of the drive. In fact, he almost fell on his ass.

Above him, the great double front doors of Engine House opened and Bennis Hannaford came out. She had put a pair of clogs on her feet, but aside from that she was dressed as Gregor remembered her. Jeans, turtleneck, oversize flannel shirt with the shirttails hanging down to her knees. In her author photographs, Bennis Hannaford always looked city-sophisticated, rich, and successful. In person, she looked like a college student with a paper three days late.

She found him, nodded to him, and came across the terrace and down the steps. She had been crying, hard enough and recently enough so that the skin around her eyes was puffy and red. Her manner commanded him to ignore that.

“Mr. Demarkian?” she said as she came up to him, holding out her hand. “I’m Bennis Hannaford.”

“I know. You introduced yourself the other night.” Gregor took her hand and gave it a little shake. “I’m surprised to see you. From the phone call I got, I expected John Jackman to be waiting for me with a fishnet.”

“A fishnet?”

“To make sure I didn’t get away.”

Bennis sighed and turned to look at the house. “Mr. Jackman is up in Emma’s room, pacing around and swearing a lot. He’s driving my sister Anne Marie crazy. She doesn’t like to hear people say
hell
in the house.”

Gregor turned to look at the berry-strewn wreath on Engine House’s front door.

“If all Jackman is saying is
hell
, your sister is getting off lightly.”

“All Mr. Jackman is saying is not
hell
,” Bennis said. “I’m supposed to bring you up there. Do you want to come?”

“Of course.”

Bennis shrugged at the “of course,” and then started back up the steps to the terrace and the doors. Gregor followed her. It was remarkable what a difference a heated surface made. The terrace was wet but not slippery, and its warmth radiated up his legs and under his coat. By the time they got to the doors, he was feeling almost comfortable.

Bennis let him in, to be met by a small man in a black day suit and a heavily starched shirt. Gregor searched his memory and came up with a name and a designation: Marshall, the butler. He shook off his coat and handed it over.

Bennis shut the doors. “We have to go up the stairs and to the right,” she said. “I’d give you directions and let you go by yourself, but it’s a long hall, and it’s full of people now.”

“Police,” Gregor said.

Bennis nodded. “Police and people connected to the police. Before all this started, I’d had no idea how many people showed up when you had a murder in the family.”

“Do you agree with Jackman, then? That your sister didn’t kill herself? That she was murdered?”

Bennis was halfway up the stairs. She stopped and turned back to him. “Can you tell me something? Were you working for the police the night you came here, Christmas Eve?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“But you’re working for them now,” Bennis said.

“I’ve been asked to, yes. I don’t know what the legalities are in a situation like this, Miss Hannaford. If you don’t want me here, you can probably get John Jackman to send me home. He isn’t going to want to compromise his evidence.”

“Would you compromise his evidence?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t want him to send you home,” Bennis said. “I can talk to you better than I can talk to him. I knew that the other night. I kept hoping you’d be the one to handle things, but then you went home.”

“I got thrown out,” Gregor said drily.

“You left the room and it was Mr. Jackman who came back, at any rate,” Bennis said. “Were you working for Daddy then?”

“Not exactly. Your father approached a friend of mine, who approached me, about my having dinner here that night. If he had approached me directly, I probably wouldn’t have come.”

“Daddy didn’t hire you?”

“No. He didn’t even offer to pay me.”

Bennis smiled faintly. “That’s typical. Daddy didn’t offer to pay anybody, most of the time. He didn’t pay the dentist until the fourth dunning letter came in. That’s rich people’s behavior. Other people have to worry about their credit ratings.”

“I take care of that by never having a credit card.”

“Daddy never had credit cards, either. He had accounts.” She started up the stairs again, dragging her hand along the banister. “It’s been terrible here the last few days. Really terrible. I always used to think things would be better when he died, but they weren’t. We all sat around wondering who did it and thinking we knew.”