by Jane Haddam
He felt his stomach start to cramp and leaned over, counting until it went away. He was losing his nerve. He was coming apart. And that second phone call hadn’t helped.
They were going to kill him.
The Dead record was winding to an end. He got another from the stack and flipped it on without introduction. The masses never minded getting their music straight. Mostly he wouldn’t oblige them, of course. Just because the idiots wanted to pretend that literature began with Paul McCartney and ended with Bruce Springsteen didn’t mean he had to agree with them. He’d won four dozen awards for his poetry, been published in everything from The Atlantic to The New Kionossa Review, and was (if he had to say it himself) the driving force in the survival of poetry in post-Reagan America. Actually, someone else had said it for him, in The Yale Review. A friend who still lived in New Haven had sent him the article. He’d been embarrassed as hell at first, but after he’d thought about it he’d realized it was nothing but the truth. Who else was there?
His stomach cramped up again, and he forgot all about it.
They were going to kill him. They had practically said so when they called. How in the name of God had he got himself involved with these people? What was he—aside from the driving force, etc.—but an ex-preppie Yale boy with a little family money and even fewer brains? He must have been tripping.
Except that he didn’t trip. He didn’t do much of anything but smoke marijuana, write poetry, show up for work—and gamble. When he put it like that, it made him want to laugh. Gambling was what got people in trouble in thirties detective novels. Getting in hock to mob-connected bookies was a hard-boiled private-eye cliché. That kind of thing didn’t happen to people in real life. It didn’t exist in real life.
(We don’t hear from you in four days, we’re gonna take your thumb.)
He nipped the second record for a third, still not able to talk. The spasms were so bad, he had to put his head between his knees to keep from vomiting. That comic-opera voice on the phone, for God’s sake. The thought of his thumb (right or left?) lying on the pavement in Santa Clara in a mess of blood and pulp. Four days.
He felt the sweat break out on his forehead and knew he was going to be better. The sweat always hit him just before and after these attacks. He sat up, waited for the record to finish, and said,
“That was the Dead times three, ladies and gentlemen. ‘Truckin,’ ‘Sugar Magnolia,’ and ‘Uncle John’s Band.’ Give me a minute here, we’re going to have a Chris Hannaford special. An uninterrupted album. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
He chose it because it was sitting right there on top of his stack. He spun it onto the turntable, nipped off his mike, and sat back, a tall, cadaverous, long-limbed man with the trademark Hannaford hair and a face that had seen too many bars, too many late nights and too much trouble. Now that the attack was over, he could think.
Myra was out there somewhere, getting a bug in her ass about dear old Daddy. Myra always had a bug in her ass about something. That was her thing. Just like being a first-class son-of-a-whore was Daddy’s thing.
Just like gambling was his thing.
He thought about calling Bennis and decided against it. She’d got him out of the hole that first time without asking questions. She’d get him out of this one the same way. He wasn’t going to ask her. In direct contradiction to the way he lived and the things he said when he had anyone but Bennis for an audience, Chris had a streak of moralism in him. Bennis would let him bleed her forever. For precisely that reason, he couldn’t go to her. After all, he was the one with the nice little chunk of family money. Bennis had what she made and nothing more.
(We’re gonna take your thumb.)
They were going to take his thumb. Yes, they were. And after they took his thumb they were going to take the rest of him, piece by piece, because this time he was in for $75,000 and there was no way he could pay it. Not now, not tomorrow, not two days from tomorrow. What the hell had he bet in on, anyway?
Did they know about Engine House? Probably. But he knew his father. Engine House was a fortress. Daddy was the ultimate paranoid.
He rubbed his hands against his face and went back to trying to think.
4
“You must understand,” the chairman of the English department was saying, “no matter how liberal the times have become, we cannot, in cases like this, ignore the traditional consequences.” The chairman of the English department looked like a fish wearing a toupee. At least, he looked that way to Teddy Hannaford, and Teddy had always prided himself on his powers of observation and his ear for a good metaphor. Simile. Whatever. The chairman of the English department was a turd, and all Teddy wanted on earth was not to have to listen to him.
Unfortunately, at the moment he had no choice. He sat awkwardly in the chairman’s visitor’s chair, his right leg in its brace as stiff as a length of hardwood, thinking they could have saved half an hour if the chairman had just fired him outright. Instead, the fish was making a speech. And a banal one at that.
Teddy started to put a hand to his head and stopped himself. Unlike everybody else in the family, he had not been born with hair that flourished under any and all conditions. He was going bald at the top and thinning in every other place. It was not something he could think about with charity. They, after all, were just fine—Bennis and Emma and Bobby and Chris and even Anne Marie. He never counted Myra, because Myra was a housewife. Nobody took housewives seriously. But the rest of them—. Emma was young and pretty. Chris was screwing every blonde in Southern California. Anne Marie was always in the society magazines. Bobby had been given the biggest chunk of money. And then there was Bennis.
Sometimes, when he went into the Waldenbooks in Kennebunk and saw all those ridiculous books taking up more shelf space than Dreiser, he wanted to scream. Bennis had been the pain of his life for as long as he could remember. Here she was again, making idiots of them all with stories about unicorns and knights in shining armor. They even carried her trash in the college bookstore. And The New York Times Magazine had done a silly article called “The New Face of Fantasy Fiction” and put Bennis right on the cover.
No matter what the chairman of the English department said this interview was about, it was really about Bennis. Teddy knew. He also knew it was Bennis’s fault his leg was in a brace and his knee wouldn’t bend. He hadn’t figured out how that worked—Bennis had been in Paris the day Daddy had taken him for a ride and tried to kill him—but he was sure he would be able to unravel it if he put his mind to it.
The fish squirmed in his chair, cleared his throat, and tried a smile. “There is also,” he said, “the question of your alleged motive in this, uh, action.”
“Motive?” Teddy could practically feel the antennae rise up out of his head, like the retractable ears on a Martian in a fifties alien invasion movie.
“Miss Carpenter,” the chairman said, “claims you made this suggestion to her as the means by which she could receive credit on a paper you were writing for NEJLA with research you had used from her final project in Victorian Authors.”
NEJLA was the New England Journal of Literary Arts. What the fool was trying to say was that Susan Carpenter claimed Teddy had told her she’d have to sleep with him if she wanted her name on the article he was submitting to NEJLA on women in the Victorian novel. Where the fish had it wrong was in that bit about “using some of Miss Carpenter’s research.” He had not used some of Miss Carpenter’s research. He had stolen her paper outright.
He hadn’t told Susan she’d have to sleep with him if she wanted her credit, either. He might have implied it, but he hadn’t said it. He never made promises he had no intention of keeping.
“Miss Carpenter,” the fish was saying, “has submitted to us a photocopy of this—”
Teddy closed his eyes. A photocopy. Yes, he’d been waiting for a photocopy. After all, Susan Carpenter wasn’t the first. She wasn’t even the twentieth.
“Professor Hannaford,” the
chairman said solemnly.
Teddy looked up quickly. He had broken out in a cold sweat.
“You understand,” he said, “that every professor has this problem from time to time with students, especially female students, who think they haven’t received the grade they, uh, deserved.”
“It comes up,” the chairman agreed, and then spoiled it by saying, “rarely.”
“Yes,” Teddy said. “Well. Rarely or not, it comes up. If you’ve read Miss Carpenter’s paper—”
“I have not.”
“Well, read it. You’ll see it’s nothing NEJLA would be interested in. Miss Carpenter’s, ah, communications skills are not of the highest. As for research—”
“Yes?”
“There isn’t any,” Teddy said. “It was an exposition. Textual analysis.”
“And Miss Carpenter’s analytical skills are not of the highest?”
“They’re nonexistent.”
“Ah.” The chairman sat back and folded his hands over his stomach. He no longer looked like a fish. He looked like a pregnant frog.
“I see,” he was saying. “This should be relatively easy to clear up. We have Miss Carpenter’s paper. We have your article—has it been published yet?”
“No,” Teddy said, knowing this was the worst luck of all. “It’s due in their spring issue.”
“I see. Do you have a copy?”
“Of course.”
“Fine, then. We’ll have both the paper and the article. We’ll have copies made before the hearing. Then, at the hearing—”
“What hearing?”
“The departmental hearing,” the chairman said. “There’ll have to be one. If the charges had any merit, there’d have to be a hearing in the Faculty Senate as well, but as you’ve assured me—” The chairman didn’t look assured. He looked, in fact, rather smug. Teddy was suddenly sure the chairman had known about his papers for years.
Just then, the buzzer went off on the chairman’s phone. The chairman picked up, grunted a few times, and then hung up again.
“That was Miss Holcomb in the office,” he said. “It’s a Mrs. Richard Van Damm. She says she’s your sister. She says it’s urgent.”
The chairman looked as if he thought Teddy had fixed this up just to escape from the interview, but Teddy didn’t care. Myra, of all people. Bless her malicious little heart. Myra could make an emergency out of a lost earring, but Teddy wasn’t going to tell the chairman that.
After all, for the moment, she was his salvation.
5
When the phone rang, Bobby Hannaford was sitting on the king-size bed in the second-floor master suite of his $1.5-million house in Chestnut Hill, trying to extract forty-two $100 bills from the waistband of his boxer shorts. It would have been easier if he hadn’t been so edgy, but he was always edgy on the days he saw McAdam. When the bell went off, he jumped half a foot in the air, scattering bills everywhere. He had to get down on his hands and knees to rescue the two that blew under the night table. When he got up, he was breathing heavily, and he still had money in his underwear. He snatched at the receiver with all the good humor he could muster, which was none at all.
“Bobby? Bobby, I know it’s probably a bad time, but I’ve got to talk to you.”
Bobby paused in his struggles with elasticized 100 percent cotton. He’d know that voice anywhere. When he died and went to Hell, it would be waiting for him in the fiery pit, right along with Donald McAdam.
“Shit,” he said, extracting another $600 from his shorts. He didn’t need Myra. He needed to think about McAdam. McAdam was getting crazy. If he got crazy enough, they were both going to get caught.
Bobby knew exactly what getting caught would mean. He’d gone about white-collar crime the way he went about everything else. He’d done a cost-benefit analysis. The benefit: three-quarters of a million dollars so far, in cash, most of it still in the tempered steel wall safe in his room at Engine House. The cost: either nothing, or public exposure, an IRS judgment, a criminal trial, and Leavenworth.
Leavenworth, in the name of Christ Jesus.
“Bobby,” Myra said.
“I’m here,” Bobby said. “Just a minute. I was changing when you called.”
“Stop changing for a minute. This is serious.”
“Myra, with you everything is serious.”
Myra snorted. “Stop acting like my algebra teacher. You’re as worried about this as I am. And you know it’s important. You said yourself—”
“I remember what I said, Myra.”
“When you want to,” Myra said. “I’ve called them. They’re coming. Whether that’s going to do the trick, I don’t know.”
“It can’t hurt. At least it will take his mind off us. If he runs that audit—”
“I don’t know,” Myra said. “The company has to be audited sometime.”
“This would be a directors’ audit,” Bobby said, “not the usual annual pain in the ass. You know he just wants to cause trouble—”
“Maybe he does,” Myra said, “but—”
“And don’t forget. You’re the one on the books with thirty thousand nobody knows where it came from. Except you, of course.”
There was a pause on the line. “That was low, Bobby. That was very low.”
“I’m not your husband,” Bobby said. “You can’t fool me. If you hadn’t had a stake in this yourself, you’d have left me to paddle my own canoe.”
“Maybe I should have.”
“I could answer that, Myra, but I don’t want to be indiscreet over the phone.”
There was another pause, a longer one this time. Bobby felt a little spurt of fear climb up his spine. Myra was a smart woman, and a vindictive one. And right at this moment, he needed her. He needed her more than she could know.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long day. And we don’t have anything to worry about now. They’re coming. It’ll take care of everything.”
“I hope so, Bobby.”
“I know so. He’ll be so worked up over Bennis, he won’t have time for us.”
“Are you sure there isn’t something you’re not telling me?” Myra said. “You haven’t, oh, fiddled with the books or anything? Because if you have—”
“What would I have to fiddle with the books for, Myra? Remember me? I’m the one who got the most money.”
“I remember. You’d think the old goat could just have made a will like everybody else. I wish he had. Maybe somebody would have killed him for it.”
“That’s a very indiscreet thing to say over the phone.”
“Only if he shows up murdered,” Myra said. “All right, Bobby. It’s all set up. Anne Marie’s expecting you on the twenty-third. Try to make it for dinner. There’s a guest.”
“With Mother this ill?”
“You know Daddy.”
The phone went to dial tone.
Bobby replaced the receiver. His mouth felt dry. His chest felt heavy. It hit him suddenly that he was forty-four years old, no longer too young for a heart attack.
6
In the telephone stall off the first floor sitting room at Engine House, Myra stared at the old-fashioned metal phone and wondered if she’d done the right thing. Get them here, Bobby had said. She had certainly done that. Or would have, when they arrived. Which every last one of them would.
Still, it might have been better if she’d told them the truth. The whole truth. Like the fact that Mother wasn’t securely home from the hospital and doing just fine, but dying. Like the fact that Anne Marie was having some kind of nervous breakdown. Like the fact that Daddy was on the warpath for real this time.
Of course, with that kind of information, some of them might not have come.
She tapped the phone table restlessly, then reached up to stroke the brooch she was wearing, a shiny tin Christmas ball Mother had made as a child. On the table’s polished obsidian surface lay an oversize white visiting card, scribbled over and splotched with fountain pen ink. “Grego
r Demarkian,” it said. “Head, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Retired.”
Here was something she hadn’t told anyone about—Daddy’s dinner guest. Two hours ago, she’d never heard of him. Now she just wished she hadn’t. There he was: a man with a funny name who had held the second-most-important position in the most Irish Catholic organization in the U.S. government, a man with a reputation for being both obsessive and fanatical about his work, a man with an even bigger reputation for being right. Myra wondered what he looked like. Myra wondered what Daddy wanted from him.
She tucked the card into her shirt pocket and got up. Anne Marie had taken to listening in on phone conversations, and Myra had no way of knowing if she’d listened in on that last one. She hoped she hadn’t. Things were in enough of a mess already.
It was going to be a hell of a Christmas.
PART ONE
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18–SATURDAY, DECEMBER 24
THE FIRST MURDER
ONE
1
WHEN GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS very young, his mother told him stories about Armenia. Her Armenia wasn’t the historical Armenia, because she’d never seen that. She had been born in Alexandria and come to the United States before she was twelve. It was Gregor’s grandmother who had been in Yerevan that November of 1915 when the Turks had come. Blood everywhere, horses everywhere, a million and a half dead in less than a year: the stories had come pouring out into the dark of Gregor’s room every night when his mother came to put him to bed. Even now, after more than forty years, he could smell the stink of dying. He thought his grandmother must have been a truly great storyteller. Either that, or his mother had had a genius for imagination. Whichever it was, he found himself—at the age of fifty-five, after a bachelor’s degree at Penn and a master’s at Harvard and a twenty-year stint in the FBI—firmly anchored in the agony of a country he had never seen.
