by Jane Haddam
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.
3
“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.
TWO
1
FOR 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 t
he 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.”
“I think that’s fairly normal.”
“Do you? I don’t think it was normal at all. And it was worse because of the alibis, or the lack of them, or whatever. We were all wandering around the house. And now this.”
“Now this,” Gregor agreed. “Was this sister the one you were closest to?”
“Of the sisters, yes. Not of the family. Emma was too much younger than me for that.”
“She looked up to you,” Gregor said.
“Oh, definitely. She looked up to Mother, too. She was a hero-worshiping kind of person. I don’t think I ever took her seriously, except once, and now I’m beginning to wonder about the once.”
“What happened that once?”
They had reached the top of the stairs and come out on a great, sweeping landing that reminded Gregor of the balconies at opera houses. It was that large and that formal. A waist-high railing ran across one edge of it, on either side of the stairs, decked out with clusters of bells and balls, cherubs, and full-grown angels. To the left and right and center there were doors. The one on the left was closed. The one on the right was open, but blocked off by a sawhorse and guarded by another young patrolman.
Gregor would have had no trouble finding his way to Jackman without a guide. He saw Bennis notice him notice and decided not to call her on it. He had a feeling it had happened not because she was practiced at deception, but because she was no good at it whatsoever.
She stood back to let him pass and said, “Maybe, when you’re done with Mr. Jackman, you should let me take you out and buy you a drink. Someplace away from the house.”
“And away from the police?”
“I don’t really care about the police, at the moment. I’m more worried about being overheard by the Lollipop Brigade. There isn’t one of them that’s going to have sense enough to realize everything’s changed.”
“I’m going to have to tell John Jackman anything you tell me,” Gregor said. “You must realize that.”
“I do and I still don’t care. I’m not trying to hand you information I don’t want the police to have. It’s just what I said. I’d find it easier talking to you than talking to him. And I don’t think what I have to say is unimportant.”
“It’s about this one time you took your sister Emma seriously?”
Bennis grimaced. “It’s about why I thought Emma killed Daddy,” she said. “It’s about why I was convinced of it. When Anne Marie came down today and told me she’d committed suicide, I thought it made perfect sense.”
2
John Jackman was standing in the middle of Emma Hannaford’s bedroom, waving his arms and delivering a lecture about Why Fingerprints Weren’t Going to Be Important in This Case. He had come in a good wool three-piece suit, but two of the pieces—vest and jacket—were now hanging on one of the posters of the bed. His tie was undone. His shirt was open at the collar and rolled up at the sleeves. He looked like a politician in a campaign commercial about “excellence.”
Gregor made a few pleasantries with the man at the door and slipped inside. The room was huge, an immense cavern of a space with a fireplace at one end. One wall was taken up with oversize windows, each double-curtained in damask and net. The bed was dwarfed, even though it was queen-size and postered and made of thick mahogany. There were half a dozen people in the room, but they didn’t come close to filling it.
“Check with what’s-his-name,” Jackman was saying, “you know, the lawyer guy, Evers. And check with the security people, too. I don’t want some prosecutor on the phone, making this sound like something out of Mickey Spillane. And bag that cup, for Christ’s sake. I’ve told you three times. And—” He saw Gregor and stopped. “You. I thought you’d had an accident. Why didn’t I hear the siren?”
“Because there was no siren to hear,” Gregor said. “I made your patrolman turn it off.”
“I’ll have that kid’s head.”
“If you do, I’ll have yours.” Gregor gave the dark back corners of the room another look, but they were just as empty as they’d seemed when he was standing at the door. He sighed. “It’s a lot like being with the Bureau. By the time you get to the scene, it isn’t really a scene anymore.”
“It wouldn’t have been in any case, this time,” Jackman said. “It’s like I told you on the phone. She wasn’t dead when we got here. Close, but not done. The ambulance guys worked her over for nearly half an hour.”
“They didn’t take her to the hospital?”
“They said it was too dangerous to move her. If I’d found her by myself, I wouldn’t have known she was breathing. I don’t know how long she’d been in here—”
“Where? On the bed?”
“That chair.” Jackman gestured across the room, toward the fireplace, where a chair had been pulled away from the rug and left standing on the hardwood. “Before you ask, nobody moved the chair. That’s where we found her. We’ve had a lot of luck this time. Starting with the fact that we got here at all.”
Gregor checked out the chair. Next to it was a side table, bare except for a large shiny cherub brooch.
“Since she wasn’t dead, I’m surprised you did get here,” Gregor said. “I was just talking to Bennis Hannaford. She said Anne Marie thought it was a suicide attempt, and she thought it was a suicide attempt, until you started saying otherwise. Why on earth did they call you?”
“They didn’t,” Jackman said. “I was listening to the police band. I do that sometimes. Believe it or not, it puts me to sleep. I told you we’ve had a lot of luck. In case you haven’t noticed, the weather’s turned nasty again.”
“I noticed.”
“Th
e ambulance had trouble getting through. There was a traffic call. When I heard where it was for, I came running.”
“And found what?”
“This.” Jackman reached into his shirt pocket and came up with a small folded sheet of notepaper, the stiff kind sold by jewelry stores and overpriced gift shops. “It was lying over there on the night table next to the bed, weighted down by the alarm clock.”
Gregor unfolded it. “Dear Bennis,” it said. “By now you must know this was all my fault, all of it, and the more I think about it the worse it makes me feel. I can’t understand why I cause all this trouble, or what I’m supposed to do about it afterward. Right now I’d rather be dead than alive. Sometimes I just get so confused. If I was dead, would it matter to you? Emma.”
Gregor folded it up again. “It’s a very credible note. More like what suicides actually write than most people would think. Fake notes tend to be—more direct.”
“I know. That’s because this isn’t a fake note.”
“I thought you said on the phone-—-”
“I did. I said I had a suicide note that wasn’t a suicide note. And that’s true. Emma Hannaford wrote that”—-Jackman gestured at the note again—” to Bennis Hannaford as a letter, about three months ago. It worried the hell out of Bennis, so she kept it. She says she’s been meaning to talk to Emma about it ever since they all got to Engine House, but she hasn’t had the chance. And this morning, that note was sitting in her pocketbook, on her bed, in her bedroom, just where she’s been keeping it since the day she got it. She says she saw it there at ten-forty-five.”
“I take it there’s some significance to ten-forty-five,” Gregor said.
Jackman shrugged. “Not as much as I’d like, but enough.” He looked around until he found his notebook, discarded absent-mindedly on top of the windowseat. He picked it up and flipped through the pages. “I took some time and made out a table, as far as I could, from the little questioning I’ve been able to do since I got here. It’s not complete, but it’s got some interesting points. You want to hear them?”
