by Jane Haddam
She had just gotten to the part where Myra was sitting at breakfast, insisting people only murdered other people for money, when the phone rang. She picked it up, expecting it to be her bank, saying the money she had asked to have transferred from her money market account to her checking account had come through. Instead, she got a high-pitched, whining litany of complaint that made her grit her teeth. In the middle of it, she put her hand over the mouthpiece and told Gregor,
“It’s Dickie. Doing his usual thing.”
“Dickie?” Gregor said.
“Dickie Van Damm. Myra’s husband.” She took her hand off the mouthpiece. “Dickie? This is Bennis, not Myra. … Yes, I thought you knew. … Well, it doesn’t do any good telling me, does it? Why don’t I go get… yes, of course she’s awake, she was at breakfast. … Yes, I understand your mother’s very ill. … Yes… but… I sympathize with you about the publicity, I really do. … I don’t think that’s likely, Dickie. … No… no… I know we’re in the middle of another blizzard. … Yes… yes… why don’t I just go get Myra and you can tell her yourself?”
She put the receiver down on the table and motioned Gregor to follow her, out of the kitchen and into the hall. When the kitchen door swung closed behind them, she rolled her eyes.
“He’s always like that,” she said. “He thinks there’s nobody in the universe but the Van Damms, and he’s such a bore he never has anybody to talk to, so when he gets you on the phone he refuses to shut up.”
“I’m surprised your sister stays married to him,” Gregor said.
“He’s got a lot of money. And it’s like I told you the other day. The Van Damms are very, very, very old Main Line.”
Bennis led him down the hall into the living room. “Myra will be in the television room, listening to soap operas,” she said.
“I don’t think there are soap operas on this early in the morning,” Gregor said.
Bennis smiled. “Myra won’t be listening to today’s soap operas, she’ll be listening to yesterday’s. On tape. Soap operas are on at the wrong time of day for Myra.”
She opened the door on the other side of the living room, ushered Gregor into another hall, and snaked around him so she could lead. “This is where Anne Marie went, to get the drinks tray, that first night you were here. If you go through that door,” she pointed to a large mahogany swing on their right, “you end up in a small butler’s pantry. One of four. My great-grandfather was a flaming alcoholic.”
She came to the end of the hall, opened the door there, and entered another hall. The hall they had just come through was visibly a service space. This was just as visibly a family one. The runner rug was custom cut and thick. The walls were hung with cloth instead of paper. Bennis was so unused to wallpaper, she still couldn’t make herself live with it, even after all these years away from Engine House. On her walls at home, she had paint.
She stopped in front of the last door on the left and listened. “There,” she said. “Can’t you hear it? Days of Our Lives.”
“I can hear it,” Gregor said.
Bennis opened the door, walked in, and stopped. She stopped so quickly, Gregor Demarkian plowed into the back of her, nearly tipping her over.
Days of Our Lives was playing on the television, casting its strained portents of Sturm und Drang throughout the room.
It didn’t need to. The television room had enough Sturm und Drang of its own.
Gregor grabbed her by the shoulders. She could feel him pushing her toward the door.
“Get out of here,” he was saying. “Get out of this room now.”
But she couldn’t get out, she really couldn’t. She had to look at it and look at it, just to make sure it was there.
Myra’s body, lying on the floor, her face battered out of shape into gore. Myra’s big shiny-tin ball brooch, smeared so thickly with blood it looked like it had been painted red.
At Myra’s feet, a heavy cylinder of metal winked and glittered, in the thousands of tiny places where it hadn’t been smeared.
One of great-grandmother Eleanor’s Georgian silver candlesticks from the upstairs hall.
PART FOUR
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 28
THE SOLUTION
ONE
1
IF THERE WAS ONE thing Gregor Demarkian understood, it was what to do when he was first at the scene of the crime. He could go through that drill on automatic pilot, and he did. God only knew he couldn’t have done it any other way. His mind was caught in the vision of the television room and the mistakes he had made that had allowed this murder to happen. Mistakes. God, how he hated mistakes. That was why he had walked off that last case of his. It wasn’t just that Elizabeth had been dying and he’d wanted to concentrate his energies on her. Both of those things were true, but there had been something else. He had been distracted. And, in his distraction, he had started to make mistakes. That was the last thing you wanted to do when faced with a man who was murdering five-year-old boys.
Women.
Gregor shut it out of his mind. Now was not the time. He had to figure out where he’d gone wrong, in this place, with these people. His fundamental discovery was not a mistake. He was convinced of that. Too much—the evidence of the money, the evidence of the notes, the evidence of the book in Emma Hannaford’s room—pointed in that direction. But somewhere along the line, he had made an error. If he hadn’t, Myra Hannaford’s face wouldn’t have been smashed. There would have been nothing about the death that pointed to murder.
The whole thing was making him distinctly jumpy. The only way he could make sense of this particular murder was to assume there was going to be another. That was bad enough, that was god-awful, but he kept getting stuck on the why. He knew what had happened. He even had a guess—and only a guess—as to who had made it happen. But a motive for this mess was beyond him.
Now he stood in the foyer, watching John Henry Newman Jackman getting out of an unmarked car in front of Engine House. Gregor hadn’t thought about it before, but he found Jackman’s personal response to this case very odd. He’d known cops who were intense, and cops who were scared, and cops who didn’t give a damn. Jackman was none of those things. He seemed to be operating on another plane altogether. Gregor had seen him exasperated, puzzled, annoyed, and impatient. He had never seen him angry, shocked, or appalled. Maybe Jack-man found it hard to accept people like the Hannafords as real. Gregor had had that problem himself the first time he’d been forced to deal with someone who didn’t have to work for a living.
Outside, the snow was falling with all the force of hurricane rain. They were in for a world-class blizzard. Even moving swiftly, Jackman couldn’t avoid snow piling up on his shoulders and coating his chest. Every once in a while it hit him in the face, and he blanched.
Gregor moved away from the foyer windows and opened the front doors. He’d had as much of servants as he could take in one day. Every time he turned around there was someone there, in uniform, looking studiously blank. And then there was Anne Marie. She drifted through the house, an omnipresent spirit. He didn’t like it. Lida Arkmanian knew everything there was to know about her cleaning lady: name, age, marital status, and medical history. Gregor Demarkian thought Anne Marie Hannaford knew no more about her maids than what she had to pay them.
The wind was blowing straight at his face, getting snow all over his suit and the foyer floor, so he stood back a little. Jackman came across the terrace to him, shivering.
“Christ,” Jackman said, “can’t these people ever have a murder in good weather?”
Gregor raised his eyebrows, but Jackman didn’t see him do it. He was too busy looking at the chandelier.
“I read a murder mystery once where someone got killed with one of those,” Jackman said. “It was held up with a chain and the chain had been cut through, and just at the right moment—”
“Do you think that’s really possible?” Gregor said.
“Hell, no. But things don’t have to be possible,
in murder mysteries. They just have to be weird.”
The terrace was electrically heated, but the snow was coming down so fast it didn’t matter much. The uniforms and lab men coming up behind Jackman were plowing through minor drifts. Jackman stepped aside to give them room to enter. They stopped, each and every one of them, to wipe their feet on the mat.
“I think you ought to give me a minute,” Jackman said to a tall man in an overcoat so outsize it would have made him look like a Skid Row bum if it hadn’t been so new. “I want to get a look at the scene before you guys mess it up.”
The tall man shrugged. “Anything you say. You take long enough, we’ll be stuck here for the night. Or maybe the week.”
Jackman turned back to Gregor. “This is what it’s like out here. They worry about the weather. They worry about their clothes. They don’t worry about anything important. Which one was it?”
Gregor hadn’t been able to get through to Jackman directly when he called, but he had left a very detailed message. He found it hard to believe Jackman hadn’t gotten it in full.
He said, “It’s Mrs. Van Damm. Myra Hannaford Van Damm. And it’s more like the first one than the second one.”
“What do you mean, more like the first one?”
“Debris,” Gregor said. “Stage sets. Props. A lot of nonsense strewn all over the landscape.”
“To make it look like murder?” Jackman was interested.
“I think at this point, whoever it is knows we’re going to know it’s murder,” Gregor said. “The impression I got was that there was a lot of care being taken to give us clues about motive, say, and suspects. You’ll have to see the body, John.”
“I’m going to see the body. Where are the Hannafords?”
“Cordelia Day Hannaford is in her room. Anne Marie Hannaford is with her. Bennis and Christopher are in what they like to call the ‘living room.’ It’s got a tree worthy of Rockefeller Center in the middle of it. Teddy was asleep, last I heard. I don’t know where Bobby is. Bennis told me he’d left for work early this morning.”
Jackman frowned. “I don’t think we should leave them wandering around the house like this. On their own. Where’s the body?”
“In a room called the television room. It’s at the back of the house, down a little hall. It’s not on a main thoroughfare.”
“Still,” Jackman said.
Gregor smiled. “They could be running in and out of the scene, messing up everything, is that it? I say let them.”
“What?”
“Let them,” Gregor said. “Come on, Mr. Jackman. There are a few things I’d like to show you.”
Jackman started to look mutinous. Gregor turned his back on him and walked away.
He must, he thought, be feeling better. A week ago, Jackman’s attitude would have made him depressed. Now, it made him want to break the idiot’s neck.
2
Gregor could have worked up a police seal for the television room. A tape, some string—there were a hundred ways to do it. He hadn’t used any of them. It was like he’d told Jackman when they’d found the seals broken on Robert Hannaford’s study. In a situation like this, you had two choices. You could post a man outside the door. Or you could accept the fact that the seals were going to be broken eventually. That was it. Because Gregor hadn’t wanted to spend his morning standing outside the writing room door—and because he didn’t see any point to sealing the scene anyway—he’d let it go. The only thing the Hannafords could do to really ruin things was take the body away and dispose of it. Anybody who tried that would get caught at it.
He led the whole crowd of them through the three back halls that were the only route he knew of, feeling all the time like a character in that Shirley Jackson novel about Hill House. You needed a map to find your way to the bathroom in this place, or maybe bread crumbs. Every time he moved around by himself he worried about getting lost. He was a little proud of himself for not, this time. He’d only been back here once before.
He found the door of the writing room, and opened up to look inside.
She was still there, exactly where he had left her, stretched out across the floor like a damaged carpet. Gregor went in and held the door open for John Jackman. Jackman stepped in, looked at Myra Van Damm’s face, and winced.
“Ouch,” he said.
“Not as much of an ouch as it could have been,” Gregor pointed out. “Look at her.”
Jackman looked. It was his job to look. He just didn’t like it.
“The face got worked over after she was dead,” he said finally. “There’s not enough blood.”
“Not enough blood and not the right kind of blood,” Gregor said. “It’s all flecks, no wash. Look at the candlestick.”
“Is that what was used to work her over?”
Gregor shook his head. “There’s not enough blood on that, either. It looks gory, but then you realize it’s too dry. If that had been used on her face, even after she was dead, there would be blood and flesh all over it. All it’s got is that little stain on the felt at the base and some clotted matter in one of the crevices. It was used later, after the real work had been done. Just rolled around in the muck to get it dirty.”
“Ouch,” Jackman said again. He crossed the room and knelt down next to Myra Van Damm’s body, getting much closer than Gregor had allowed himself to. Gregor hadn’t wanted to disturb anything. Jackman leaned forward as far as he could and searched Myra’s face. Gregor could see Jackman liked this even less than he’d liked looking at the body from a distance. He was going a little green around the jawbone.
Jackman stood up, wiped the palms of his hands against his pants as if he’d gotten something on them—which he hadn’t—and took a deep breath.
“Poker,” he said. “I’d almost bet my career on it.”
“I was thinking poker myself,” Gregor admitted. “The problem is, the pokers are over there,” he pointed to a cast-iron stand beside the fireplace, “and they’re all clean.”
“Someone could have used a poker and taken it away,” Jack-man said.
“I’m sure they could have. How would we know?”
“What do you mean, how would we know?”
Gregor sighed. “John, this house has what? Forty rooms? Fifty? Every one I’ve been in has had a fireplace, including the bedrooms and the kitchen. Every one of them has a poker stand full of pokers. There have to be hundreds of pokers in this place. I wouldn’t know how to begin to find out if one of them were missing. And if whoever did this was smart enough to wash what he used immediately—”
“Washing won’t do it,” Jackman said sharply. “There are tests. It’s almost impossible to get blood off a surface entirely.”
“Fine, John. Which surface? Do you want to test a couple of hundred pokers for bloodstains?”
“If I have to.”
“Then do it,” Gregor said. “In the long run, you may even have to. But think about this situation, John. Just think about it. Doesn’t anything seem odd to you?”
Jackman had been backing away from the body ever since he’d made the remark about the poker. Now he backed all the way out of the room, taking Gregor with him. The uniforms and lab men were crowding the hall. Jackman nodded to the tall man in the too-large overcoat, and they surged inside, ready to do all the technical things they were paid to do.
Jackman looked over the hall, pausing briefly on the runner carpet, the paintings, the ceiling. Gregor didn’t blame him. This was a back hall, a secondary part of the house, and it would have cost three or four times Jackman’s salary to buy the things that furnished it. Then there were the Christmas decorations. Jack-man seemed especially taken with those. Red velvet ribbons and little silver bells. In this house, at this time, they had the effect of a casket dressed up as a birthday cake.
There was a bench under one of the paintings on the far wall. Jackman sat down on it and stretched his legs.
“Gregor,” he said, “everything about this situation is weird. I wa
s talking it over with my wife last night, and she put her finger on it exactly. It’s like something out of a Hercule Poirot novel. Do you read Hercule Poirot novels?”
“No,” Gregor said. “I probably ought to. The Inquirer called me an ‘Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.’”
“You’re too fat,” Jackman said, “and you don’t have face hair. Seriously. A murderer who wants me to know he’s committed a murder. Suicide notes that appear and disappear and reappear. And now this—”
“A candlestick smeared with blood to make it look like it was used to batter a face?”
“Right,” Jackman said. “Count on it, that candlestick is going to belong to somebody. The note in Bobby’s wastebasket. The candlestick—”
“Do you remember, the day Emma Hannaford died, we had a discussion about candlesticks?” Gregor said. “In the upstairs hall?”
“Where a pair of them was missing,” Jackman said. “Yeah. I suppose you’re trying to tell me that’s one of them.”
“Well, it’s antique Georgian. It’s old and it’s heavy. The pair upstairs are the only candlesticks I know of that are missing. And there’s this, too. If you search Christopher Hannaford’s room, you’ll probably find the other one.”
Jackman stared at him. “Christopher Hannaford? What would Christopher Hannaford be doing with twelve-thousand-dollar candlesticks?”
