The Devil Takes Half (31 page)

“
So she's broke.”

“
Not ‘broke' in the usual sense, but they do have a very serious problem. It is my understanding that she and her son still possess a number of valuable assets in England: real estate, an art collection. I don't remember exactly. I've never seen any of this, but my superior in London told me he checked it out and it exists, at least some of it. Her son is trying to salvage Argentis Shipping and make it profitable again, which is probably a good move from a financial point of view. His mother, Titina, doesn't understand the need to guard one's principal, to live off one's profits and leave the rest alone. They've fought about it more than once.”

“
What about Eleni?”

“
I don't know the state of her fortune. She inherited the bulk of her father's estate, so it's probably quite substantial. They might have put it in escrow after she died. You'll have to speak to her lawyer.”

* * *

Patronas sat in his car, reviewing what the accountant had told him. Titina Argentis had married a rich man twice her age and fought with Petros Athanassiou's grandmother over a big box of nothing. If you could test a person's DNA for such things, you'd find greed all over hers. It was one of her defining characteristics.

Patronas had once assumed rich people led idyllic lives and never coveted what others had, that only poor people were greedy. But later, as a policeman, he'd changed his mind. Greed had nothing to do with what people had or didn't have. It was another thing entirely. Those who suffered from it, be they rich or poor, were perpetually uneasy, victims of a kind of cancerous, insatiable yearning that no purchase could long satisfy. Greedy people, they hungered. As simple as that. No matter what they had, it wasn't enough, they wanted more, and Titina Argentis was such a person.

But was she a murderer?

He wished he knew. He longed to arrest her, knock her off her high horse and drag her down the street in handcuffs, squealing like a pig, dirty her up a little with a fingerprinting kit.

Making the same mistake twice does not indicate a wise person.

—
Greek proverb

P
atronas took the tomatoes Petros' grandmother had given him home. He thought he'd eat lunch before heading up to Profitis Ilias to organize the stake-out. “Dimitra,” he yelled as he unlocked the door. As always, the house was orderly and impeccably clean. His clothes washed and put away, the garbage emptied. In the refrigerator, he found a fresh
pasticcio—
a kind of Greek lasagna—a bowl of eggplant spread and half a watermelon. Dimitra must have come and gone. He ate the
pasticcio
cold, standing in front of the open refrigerator, and drank two beers, dribbling some on his uniform. He wiped it off with his hand.

After he finished eating, he took a shower, remembering how he'd looked at the Villa Hotel—as if he were the desperado in an American western, the criminal the posse was after, not the proud sheriff leading them. Then he gathered up some bedding and food and headed out to the car. He tried his wife's cellphone as he drove.

She picked up on the first ring. “Speak,” she said.

“
Dimitra, it's me. I'm heading back to Profitis Ilias. I told all ‘persons of interest' that I'm turning the site over to the authorities on Monday, which gives me five days to catch him. Hopefully that'll be enough.”

“
Did you find Marina's papers?” Her voice was guarded.

“
Yes, but they were too bloodstained to be of any use.” When he dialed her number, he hadn't meant to punish her, but as soon as he heard her voice, there it was. God help them if they stayed together. “Apparently Marina tried to hide them as she was dying. Remember how she told you ‘they were playing the priest with us'?”

“
Yes. She thought three people were involved. McLean and two others.”

“
Did Marina tell you McLean was involved?"

“
No, I just guessed it was him.”

He had to give it to her. It had taken him nearly a week to figure out that ‘playing the priest' meant three people acting in tandem and that Mclean might be one of them. Dimitra had already put it together and hadn't thought to share it with him.

“
I'm not convinced McLean is involved,” he said, more sharply than he intended. “It might have been Titina Argentis. She and her son could have met McLean in England, planned the whole thing there.”

“
Titina Argentis would never kill someone with a knife, Yiannis.” She spoke like a teacher addressing the dumb kid in the class.

“
Why not?”

“
Knives generate blood. She'd ruin her clothes.”

“
So now you're a detective, Dimitra?” Her skepticism made him furious. “When did that happen? When you were doing the dishes?”

“
I'm sure Marina didn't count Titina as one of the three.”

“
We'll never know now, will we, Dimitra? She's dead. Fodder for worms. We can't ask her what she meant. We can't talk it over with her.” He went on for a few more minutes, berating her for her role in Marina's death. After he'd finished, he told her of his preparations for the days ahead—how he had taken the blankets in the closet and the food in the refrigerator.

He waited for her to tell him to be careful, that the night air would be cold up on the mountain. The usual. It took him a minute or two to realize she'd hung up on him.

* * *

Eleni Argentis' lawyer was based in London and, when Patronas finally reached him, the man spoke in the same long-winded English the Oxford don had used, the kind that required a lot of patience and a dictionary. However, he was clear on one point: if Eleni Argentis died, according to the terms of her will, neither her half-brother nor her stepmother stood to inherit ‘a tuppence.' She'd updated the will a year ago and left specific instructions as to how the money was to be used. She had instructed the law firm to establish a scholarship at Harvard University in her father's name for ten Greek students who wished to study abroad there and to endow a chair in the archeology department—also in her father's name.

Patronas sighed as he hung up the phone. He'd thought, before he'd talked to the accountant, that he'd solved the case. It stood to reason: Titina Argentis and her son were broke. They'd killed Eleni for the money and Petros had been in the way. Antonis Argentis, the hooded man in the corral with Evangelos Demos, the one who'd pushed Papa Michalis over the balcony. Patronas had even gone so far as to recheck their alibis and had discovered a discrepancy. Antonis had said he'd been with a woman, but if so, she was not the one he'd told them, whom Patronas had interviewed. Perhaps his lady friend had been married and he'd wanted to spare her grief. Perhaps his company was male and he wanted to spare himself gossip and scandal, shame. It didn't matter now anyway. He had opportunity, maybe, but his motive had just gone up in smoke.

“
I've got nothing.” As his mother used to say, his
treasure was coal.

* * *

Worried about the old man, Patronas called Papa Michalis that night and invited him for dinner. It was no good, him staying on at Marina's house, sleeping in that house of grief. Once he solved the case, he'd find a better place for him to stay. Him and the harelip both.

They drove to a fish taverna by the sea and parked on the sand. A full moon was rising, and he and the priest sat outside and talked while they waited for their dinner, watching the light play across the water.

“
Last time I saw a moon like this I was up at Profitis Ilias,” the priest commented. “I remember looking down at the well and seeing the moon's reflection in the water. The light was dancing everywhere, bright like sequins.” He paused for a moment. “Four weeks ago that was, the night I was attacked.”

“
You tried to grab him, right?”

“
That's right. But I couldn't get a grip. He was as slippery as oil.”

“
Rubbery?”

“
I never thought of it that way. Yes, maybe.”

Patronas nodded. He was almost there. He was sure this time. “I've been looking at this
anapoda
,
backwards. It was Petros, little Petros Athanassiou, who set the whole thing in motion.”

The waiter brought their order and set it on the table. Papa Michalis picked up his fork and transferred three of the fish to his plate. “No wine?” he asked Patronas.

“
No, I have to get back to Profitis Ilias. The coroner, he talked too much about what happened. Got everybody nervous. Now Tembelos and the others, they stay inside the monastery with the doors locked. If this were a movie, this would be the time they'd break out the crucifixes and pitchforks. Just yesterday one of them told me, ‘Something dark and bloodthirsty lives on this hill. It was no man who attacked her. It was a demon.' And this is a policeman talking, mind you.”

The priest began to fillet his barbounia. Although he did his best to hide it, he was amused by what Patronas was telling him. “Your man thinks it was a vampire?”

“
Who knows what he thinks? All I know is, it's hard to stay focused when cops bring up the supernatural, when they start acting like it's goblins they're chasing, not criminals. My men are saying it wasn't human the way he got by them, the night he assaulted Evangelos Demos—how he didn't make a sound. Even Giorgos Tembelos is spooked, and he's the best man I've got. He said we should close the cave back up and leave it. He called it the ‘lair of the devil.' ”

Still chuckling, Papa Michalis ate his fish. Shifting the bones to one side of his plate, he took two more. “Sounds like
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. Terrified a whole community, the murderer did, with nothing more than a tin of phosphorous. It was ridiculously complicated, that case. But Holmes solved it. Went out on the moors alone, he did, and watched for him. As simple as that.”

The priest apparently had committed long portions of the book to memory, and without being asked, recited them to Patronas:

A hound it was, an enormous, coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame.

Patronas fought down the urge to throttle him. “Always dogs. Dogs not barking, dogs with dewlaps, dogs aflame.”

In addition to monopolizing the conversation, the priest was eating more than his share of fish, a great deal more. He'd be lucky if he got two mouthfuls. Still, he was glad he'd invited him. That talk of Holmes and the dog had given him an idea, a plan.

Forking yet another fish onto his plate, Papa Michalis nattered on, oblivious. “You see, Chief Officer, it was just a dog in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, a painted dog, but because people were scared, they attributed supernatural attributes to it. Holmes never lost sight of the criminal hiding there, just as you mustn't. Stay with it, Chief Officer. Don't let your men leave Profitis Ilias. There's no demon stalking that hill. It's a man you're after.”

The eyes of the hare are one thing, those of the owl another.

—
Greek proverb

S
piros Korres' red pick-up truck was gone, but Patronas found his wife hanging up clothes in the backyard. She was a short, dumpy woman, dressed in a mended gray housedress. Her white hair was pulled back in an untidy bun and her deep-set black eyes were wary. She continued to work while he spoke to her, picking up wet clothes from her basket and pinning them to the line.

“
Kyria Korres, would you give Spiros a message? Tell him we're leaving Profitis Ilias and moving our investigation back to police headquarters.”

The old woman eyed him suspiciously. “What does that have to do with us?”

“
The killer is still around. You and your husband need to be careful.”

She tugged another shirt loose from the pile. “Very well, I'll tell him.”

“
Where's the Albanian? I need to talk to him.”

“
The harelip?” She nodded in the direction of the pigs.

Taking a deep breath, Patronas walked quickly past the sty. He stepped over the small stream that trickled through the bottom of the ravine and started back up the other side toward the shed. The end of summer, the river bed was nearly dry, the grass on the banks ratty and clogged with filth. There was a dead rat floating in a fetid pool, its eyes and tufts of skin missing where birds had pecked. The stench of the pigs was omnipresent.

The shepherd was sitting outside. He got up when he saw Patronas and greeted him warmly, kissing him on both cheeks and asking after his health as was the custom. “Come in, come in,” he said.

Unlatching the door of the shed, he cleared a space on the cot and motioned for Patronas to sit down, then went to the dresser and got out a crumpled bag of cookies. He smelled nearly as bad as the pigs.

Patronas pushed the bag away. It made him feel bad, this hospitality. “I'm sorry I took the brooch without your permission,” he told him. “I'll bring it back to you after the investigation is over.” He made a ring with his fingers and held it up as if pinning it to his jacket, worried the man might not understand the Greek. “The bird pin, the little quail.”