by Jane Haddam
He tried the first of the smaller drawers on the side, but it was empty, too. He tried the center one. Empty. He looked at the one on the bottom and then up at Cordelia, questioning.
“Yessss,” she said.
Gregor tried not to wonder how she’d managed to get whatever it was into that bottom drawer, in her condition. Anne Marie could have put it there for her—but if Anne Marie had, it would make more sense for Cordelia to get Anne Marie to bring it to him. He opened the drawer. Inside, there was a small brown accordion folder and a manila file. He took them out.
“A folder and a file,” he said. “Which one?”
“Both.”
Both. Gregor shut the drawer and went back to his chair. Cordelia had lost much of her anxiousness. She was still watching him, but without the urgency she’d brought to it when he first came into the room. Whatever she wanted to tell him must be substantially contained in what he now had.
The manila file was flat, the accordion folder thick. Gregor thought the file would take less time to get through. He wedged the folder between his leg and the chair to get it out of the way.
The file was full of small blue sheets of note paper, the kind supplied to all the writing tables at Engine House, each scribbled over in dark blue ink. He picked up the first one and read:
Dear Bennis: I keep starting this letter and starting this letter, and just not knowing how to go on.
That was it. He dropped it back into the file and looked up at Cordelia. She seemed to be trying to smile again.
“Emma,” she said.
“Emma wrote these?”
“Yessss.” She thought about it. “False—starts,” she said.
“False starts.” Gregor looked at the note again. “False starts of suicide notes?”
“No.”
“Of letters to Bennis? About something else?”
“Yes.” This time she made an effort, and bit off the “s” before it could become a hiss.
Gregor nodded. “You’re saying the first suicide note wasn’t a suicide note at all. It came from this file.”
“Yesss.” The attempt at control didn’t work.
“Was this file here, in your room, the day Emma died?”
“Yessss.”
“Was the note we found in the file then?”
Cordelia closed her eyes. “Don’t—know.”
“No,” Gregor said, “I don’t suppose you would. You must sleep a great deal.”
“Yesss.” She smiled her smile again. “Emma,” she said. “Sick.”
Gregor was startled. “Emma was sick?”
“This,” Cordelia said. The urgency was back in her voice. “This.”
Gregor blinked. “Emma had what you have? She had multiple sclerosis?”
“Yesss. Check—au—au—”
“We should check the autopsy?”
“Yesss.”
“Mrs. Hannaford, are you trying to say Emma did commit suicide? Because she knew she was sick?”
“No. No. Didn’t—did not—know—”
“Emma didn’t know she was sick,” Gregor said. “But you knew.”
“Yesss. May-be.”
“Meaning you don’t know if she knew or not.”
“Yesss. Not—not—”
“Not suicide,” Gregor said.
“Not.” Cordelia closed her eyes again.
Gregor stood up, agitated. This was getting worse and worse by the second, and what it made him think of was worse still.
“Mrs. Hannaford,” he said, “do you know who’s committing these murders? Do you know for sure?”
She opened her eyes and stared at him. She had very blue eyes, big and widely spaced. Her mouth worked and worked, and finally produced a real smile. It was a smile with an infinity of ambiguity in it.
“Yesss,” she said.
“Will you tell me who it is?” Gregor said.
“No. My—child.”
“You won’t say because it’s one of your children.”
“Yesss.”
“Was Emma killed because she knew who had tried to kill your husband the first time?”
Cordelia looked surprised. “Told—you?” she asked.
“Bennis told me,” Gregor said.
“No,” Cordelia said. It took Gregor a moment to understand she was saying no to his original question, not denying it had been Bennis who told him about the day on the bluff.
Gregor turned away and looked up at the picture over the fireplace mantel, a portrait of Cordelia Day Hannaford when young. Anne Marie was right. Cordelia had been a great beauty. She still was one, when she didn’t move. He wished she was anything but sick the way she was. Even if she’d been on her deathbed with cancer, he could have applied a little pressure. She must realize that not only was one of her children committing these crimes, but her other children were dying from them. She must know it made no sense to protect the dangerous one. In fact, Gregor was so convinced of her intelligence, and her stability of mind, he was also convinced she must have a compelling reason for doing what she was doing. He couldn’t imagine what it might be.
He couldn’t pressure her, either. If he tried, he would get nowhere. She would simply retreat behind her illness, and he would look like a monster. Most people didn’t understand the terminally ill. They thought the dying were incompetent at worst and emotionally unstable at best. Even Jackman treated Cordelia as if her brains had melted along with her triceps.
He turned back to her. “Will you tell me why you think Emma was killed?”
Cordelia’s eyes were closed again. “Yesss,” she said. “Money.”
“Money?”
“Mon-ey.” The word came out harsh, the best she could do to make it firm.
“That isn’t a great deal of help to me,” Gregor said gently.
Cordelia seemed to be slipping away from him, drifting into sleep. “Fold-er,” she said softly.
Gregor got the folder from the chair. “There’s something in the folder?”
“Answer,” Cordelia said.
Gregor opened the folder and looked inside. It was thick with newspaper clippings, some old, some new. He pulled them out and thumbed through them. Cordelia and her daughters all dressed up in evening gowns at a charity ball. Cordelia and her daughters all dressed up in velvet party dresses, in a fashion spread from an ancient copy of Vogue. Cordelia and her daughters, all dressed up in riding clothes and standing in front of a little clutch of horses. He looked up, confused.
Her gaze was intent again, urgent. “Rob-ert,” she said.
“Robert had these? Your husband had them?”
“Yesss. Emma—Em—got—”
“Emma got them for you?” Gregor thought of the police seals, broken. “Emma got them for you from the study, after Mr. Hannaford was killed.”
“Yesss.”
“Why? Why did you want them?”
“An-swer,” Cordelia said stubbornly.
“The answer to what?” Gregor asked her.
But it was useless to ask Cordelia anything. In the space of seconds, she had melted away. Her eyes were closed. Her arms were limp. Her skin seemed to have gone slack. He couldn’t have brought her back to consciousness from that even if he’d wanted to. He didn’t want to.
Gregor got the file and the folder both and tucked them under his arm. He’d go down and give these things to Jackman. Maybe the Greatest American Policeman could make more of them than he could.
He just wished Cordelia Day Hannaford didn’t look so dead, when she was only asleep.
THREE
1
THIS WAS THE THIRD time Bennis Hannaford had seen the police take a body out of Engine House, and she wasn’t used to it yet. She was beginning to wonder if anyone ever got used to it, even ambulance men or soldiers in a war, who got to see body bags as a matter of course. She shifted the telephone receiver from her left ear to her right, pulled at the cord—it was snaking back across the hall, into the telephone stall—and wiped fog off the
narrow utility window with the flat of her hand. Outside, it was snowing harder than ever. The police cars already looked buried. The ambulance van looked marooned. On the terrace, the bag with Myra’s body in it was strapped to a stretcher, and four men instead of two were trying to get it down the steps. Poor, stupid, complicated Myra. Four decades of plots and machinations, and it all came down to this. She got out a cigarette, lit up, and tapped imaginary ash into the ashtray she’d left on the window sill. Then she said, “Richard, I know seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot of money. I can count, for God’s sake. I don’t want you to lecture me about it. I want you to wire—”
Richard interrupted—again—and the door at the far end of the hall opened. Bennis tuned Richard out and watched Gregor Demarkian coming toward her. He looked tired, which didn’t surprise her. Talking to mother always left her exhausted, no matter how little time she spent doing it. If he’d come straight here from there, he’d been in Mother’s room for over an hour. He made hand motions asking if she wanted him to leave her in privacy. She shook her head, and motioned for him to wait.
On the other end of the line, Richard seemed to have run out of breath. Temporarily. Bennis gave it another try.
“What I want you to do,” she said, “is wire seventy-five thousand dollars to my account here, from my money market account there. It’s not that difficult. You wire me money all the time. When I was out in Texas last year—”
“That was only five thousand dollars,” Richard said.
“What does the amount have to do with it? I can’t believe your fax machine won’t take a five figure transfer—”
“We don’t use fax machines, Miss Hannaford. We—”
“I don’t care if you use carrier pigeons,” Bennis said. “Will you stop all this nonsense and wire that money to me?”
“I just need to ask a few questions.”
“Why?”
“It’s my responsibility to protect you—”
“Richard.” Bennis took a long drag on her cigarette, counted to ten and waited. “Richard,” she started again, “I’m not a fuzzy geriatric widow who doesn’t know her checkbook from her laundry list. If I need your advice, I’ll ask for it.”
“An investment that requires a cash delivery of this size—”
“I’m not making an investment, Richard.”
“Oh.” Pause. “If you’re in some kind of trouble—”
“I’m not in any kind of trouble. I’m not being blackmailed and I haven’t become secretly addicted to cocaine. I simply want to take available funds from my money market account, where they’re supposed to be deposited on a demand basis, and have them transferred to Philadelphia, where I can get at them. I do have seventy-five thousand dollars?”
“Yes,” Richard said. “In fact—”
“In fact,” Bennis rolled over him, “I have something in excess of three hundred thousand dollars in that account—”
“It’s a very irresponsible use of money, Miss Hannaford,” Richard said. “If you had reinvested it as I advised you to do last month—”
“Let’s not bring last month into it,” Bennis said. “Just wire the money, Richard. Wire it now. Because if it isn’t in my Philadelphia bank tomorrow morning, I’m going to cause you a hell of a lot of trouble.” She started to hang up, realized she was still in the hall, and stalked back to the telephone stall. There, she did hang up, hard.
She came back into the hall to find Gregor Demarkian waiting for her, looking amused. “I thought your friend in Boston was named Michael,” he said.
Bennis sighed. “Richard is what’s called my ‘personal banker.’ It’s code for ‘interfering old snoop.’”
“He’s trying to protect you from yourself,” Gregor said. “He probably has a dozen women coming into his bank every day, trying to invest in bogus gold mines.”
“Just women?”
“Men invest in bogus oil wells,” Gregor said.
“All I want to do is lend some money to Chris.” Bennis looked out the window again. “There goes the ambulance now. There goes Myra.”
They stood together, trying to see through the narrow pane of glass. The ambulance bumped along until it got to the stand of trees, and then disappeared. The rest of the cars stayed where they were, big white lumps, like snow-dusted dinosaur bones. Bennis turned away and leaned against the wall. She didn’t want to watch that. It made her flesh creep.
She looked down, saw the cigarette still burning in her hand, picked up the ashtray and put it out. “Were you up with Mother all this time?” she asked. “It must have been difficult.”
But Gregor was shaking his head. “I was with your mother about ten minutes. I’ve been talking to Detective Jackman. And to your brother with the brace. Teddy?”
“Teddy,” Bennis confirmed. “Theodore, of course. That must have been almost as difficult as talking to Mother.”
“You said you didn’t like your brother.”
Bennis thought about it. “I don’t dislike him,” she said, “the way I dislike Anne Marie, say, or Bobby. I don’t think he’s a bad man. He just—lies.”
“Does he?”
“Don’t go all detectivey on me,” Bennis said. “Of course he lies. You must know that. He’s the kind of person who lies about silly things. He says he went to Woodstock, when he didn’t. He says he’s a full professor when he’s only an associate. He tells people we’re very close—which I wouldn’t mind being, if he didn’t resent me so much. He aggrandizes himself.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, sounding thoughtful. “I got that impression. Did you know he was in danger of being fired from his job?”
“Fired? But how could he be? He has tenure.”
“Some things can get you fired even if you have tenure. Plagiarizing from your students, for instance.”
“Oh, dear.” Bennis winced. “Poor Teddy.”
“Poor Teddy?”
Bennis looked into Gregor’s flat, impassive face. She’d never realized just how flat and just how impassive it was.
“Of course, poor Teddy,” she said. “He’s just so—he wants it so badly. Wants to be important. Wants to be someone. If Daddy hadn’t done all that with the money—”
“But Teddy got money,” Gregor protested.
“Teddy got about twenty-five thousand a year. Maybe less. He should have been a rich man. He’d always expected to be. And being a rich man would have been enough, you know. He’d have joined a lot of committees and made a lot of pompous speeches about the social responsibility of the rich and he’d have been fine. A naming bore, but fine.”
“I think you have a very strange way of looking at things.”
Bennis turned away again. “Maybe. I don’t like to see people’s lives ruined for no good reason whatsoever. And that was Daddy’s stock in trade.”
“Always,” Gregor said, “we come back to your father.”
Bennis said “Mmm,” and stared at the walls and ceiling of the hall. This was not one of her good days with Gregor. He was making her uncomfortable.
She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and turned back to him just in time to see him taking a thick accordion file out of his jacket.
“What’s that?” she said.
Gregor handed it to her. “Your mother gave it to me. She says it was in your father’s study when he died. She had Emma go down and get it out after the police were gone. Open it up and look inside.”
Bennis opened it. She pulled out the Vogue spread and smiled at her twelve-year-old self. She remembered sitting for that spread. The photographer kept telling them to sit still, and she kept pinching Anne Marie on the ass.
She tried to hand the folder back, but Gregor wouldn’t take it. “I know what’s in here,” she said. “Mother’s pictures. Or copies of the pictures, anyway. When we were children, we used to be photographed together a lot.”
“It was your mother’s idea?”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t mine. I used to hate it. So did Anne
Marie. I think Myra enjoyed it after a while. And Emma, of course, was usually too young to know what was going on.”
“In the picture you’re holding, she’s almost an infant.”
“About two. I think. I think I was twelve. She was a very sweet looking baby, wasn’t she? She was a very sweet person, all her life. I wonder why Daddy had this. It wasn’t as if he ever cared.”
“I looked through all the photographs in that folder,” Gregor said, “and one thing struck me. They’re all pictures of your mother and her daughters. There are never any pictures of the boys.”
“But there wouldn’t be,” Bennis said. “There’s nothing strange about that. The society pages and the magazines are always doing mother-daughter stories. It’s a kind of cliché.”
“And that was the only reason? Your mother had nothing—against the boys?”
“The way Daddy had something against his daughters?” Bennis smiled. “No. Mother liked having daughters. Some women get more involved with their sons, but Mother always enjoyed girls. She liked clothes, and she could dress us up. The boys wouldn’t have stood for that, and she wouldn’t have wanted to—to feminize them, anyway. She paid a little more attention to us than she did to them, mostly to counteract Daddy, I think. He didn’t pay any attention to us at all. Unless he was being cruel. I think Mother felt she had to make up to us for the way he was.”
“She seems to have a great sense of obligation, your mother.”
“Oh,” Bennis said. “Yes. An incredible sense of obligation. I don’t think she could have been a modern mother, the kind that works. She would have felt she was depriving us of something. And a lot of women in her position just hire nannies and never see their children at all.”
“Your mother brought you up herself?”
“Very much herself. But she’s the same with people outside the family. Servants, you know, and people who work under her on committees. She’s got a very highly developed sense of the relative importance of things.”
“But not much faith in the relativity of other things?”
“I don’t understand,” Bennis said.
Gregor leaned forward, intent. So intent, Bennis found herself wanting to back away. “You said just now your mother wouldn’t have been the kind who worked, because she thought she would be depriving you of something. Is she also the kind who believes something like that is binding on her, no matter what else is going on in her life? She wouldn’t, for instance, think it all through and try to balance what she wanted with what you wanted? She’d think there were things she should do, whether she wanted to do them or not?”
