by Jane Haddam
“But there wasn’t a body in the Volvo when it blew up,” Gregor said. “There was no one in the car.”
“Maybe there was supposed to be. Maybe the bomber is just inept. Maybe Patsy is afraid now and she’s in hiding.”
Gregor Demarkian nodded. “I think she’s in hiding. What about her husband? Do you think somebody other than Patsy MacLaren Willis shot her husband?”
Evelyn looked back at the brick Federalist. Henry was no longer in the driveway. The house looked blank. She adjusted the hat on her head again.
“It’s funny,” she said. “I completely forgot about Stephen. I mean, he was never around, do you know what I mean? He had some job that made him travel for weeks at a time and he was just never here. I’d heard that was going to change though. He was getting promoted or something and he was going to be able to stay put in the Philadelphia office instead of traveling all the time. Had you heard that?”
“Yes. Yes, I had.”
“Nobody else could have killed him though.” Evelyn felt suddenly depressed. She motioned back at the Federalist. “I live there. I was sitting in my window seat almost all that morning. I saw Patsy leave. With all those clothes, you know.”
“She was carrying clothes?”
“She had tons and tons of them loaded into the Volvo. But it was just her. Nobody else came out of the house with her. She left all on her own.”
“Did she take anything with her besides the clothes?”
“Nothing that I could see. I don’t want you to get the impression that I was spying. I wasn’t spying. I sit in my window seat a lot at that time of the morning. Mostly, there isn’t anybody at all around except maybe people coming out to get their newspapers. The newspapers are supposed to be delivered right to your doorstep, but they end up on the lawns a lot.”
“Did you see Mrs. Willis when she started to pack things into her Volvo?”
“I think so. I saw her when the Volvo was almost empty, and then she began to go back and forth into the house for the clothes, and I thought she was putting together her dry cleaning.”
“Weren’t there a lot of clothes for dry cleaning?”
Evelyn shrugged. “It’s spring. People do that in the spring. Take all their things to have them dry-cleaned, I mean. There wasn’t anybody in the whole neighborhood then except Molly Bracken picking up her paper.”
“Do you know what time this was?”
“I think so. It was six-thirty or so when Patsy left. I heard my cuckoo clock go off. And I sat there a long time, until my husband woke up at ten minutes to eight, and nobody else came out of the Willis house. Nobody at all.”
“That’s good to know.”
“Yes,” Evelyn said, feeling embarrassed again. “Well.” The pair of police detectives seemed to be hovering just behind Gregor Demarkian’s back. They made Evelyn feel uncomfortable. “Well,” she said again, backing up a little. “I have to go now. We just got back from shopping, my husband and I did. I have to unpack the groceries.”
“Thank you for coming forward,” Gregor Demarkian said.
Evelyn continued to back up. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help. I really am. I didn’t know Patsy all that well. I don’t know anybody here all that well. I don’t go out much.”
“You’ve given us some very valuable information.”
That was supposed to make her feel good about herself. Evelyn knew it. It wasn’t working. She backed up faster.
“I’ve got to go,” she said again, and then she was practically running down the drive, jogging back across the road, puffing up her own drive with heavy pumping motions that made her thighs hurt and her feet feel like glass about to break in a thousand pieces. Henry was nowhere to be seen. Evelyn hoped he was hiding out at the back of the house, sulking in privacy.
She made it to the top of her drive and into her garage. She went through her garage and into her mudroom. For most of this last little run she had had to hold her hat on her head. Now she sat down on one of the benches and took the hat off. Underneath it, lying against the top of her skull, she had a twelve-pound pork roast she had shoplifted from the meat bin at the Stop ’N Shop while Henry had been off on his own pawing through the fresh vegetables and lecturing nobody and everybody about the benefits of dietary fiber.
Evelyn put the pork roast in the box she used to keep her slippers in. She put the box under the bench she was sitting on. The pork roast would have to thaw. She could come back for it when Henry was out of the house, and then her only problem would be cooking it and getting rid of the smell of it before Henry caught her.
Evelyn loved pork roast. She loved the thick fat that lined the outside of it. She loved the thick fat that lined the outside of herself.
2.
If Liza Verity had kept her promise to Congresswoman Julianne Corbett, she would have been at the reception for Karla Parrish when the pipe bomb went off. Instead, she had allowed herself to be bullied into working late for the first night in almost two years. Liza had spent the evening monitoring an EKG machine attached to a six-year-old boy with a rare heart abnormality. The boy was supposed to have open-heart surgery in two days, and he was terrified. This was important work and Liza was happy with herself for doing it, but she was also aware that she wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t had to have an excuse that Julianne was sure to accept. She herself wasn’t sure why it had become so important to her not to attend that reception. Maybe it was just that one more Really Successful member of the old Jewett House group was more than she could bear. Maybe it was just that she hadn’t wanted to look dowdy and bought-her-dress-at-Sears in the middle of all those people who had paid thousands to look good while they were having cocktails. Maybe it was just that she was sick to death of Julianne.
Whatever it was, Liza had worked all night, gone home at six in the morning for four hours’ sleep, and then come back to the hospital to do her regular shift. Now it was noon and she was sitting at a table in the hospital cafeteria, trying to drink enough very strong coffee to keep herself awake. Her uniform felt scratchy and cheap. The coffee tasted horrible. She hadn’t eaten in so long, her stomach hurt, but she was much too tired to eat. On the other side of the table, a very young and very new RN named Shirley Bates was reading through the latest edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer, exclaiming every second or so about just how horrible all this violence was getting to be.
“Really,” Shirley Bates said. “I was warned before I came here, but you never understand until you see it for yourself. That’s true, don’t you think? I was warned, but the first time I saw a baby come in here with a gunshot wound, I nearly died.”
“Mmm,” Liza said.
“And now this thing with Congresswoman Corbett. A woman like that. It just goes to show. Nobody is safe anymore.”
“Mmm,” Liza said again.
“They took all the people at that party to St. Elizabeth’s. They should have brought them here. We’ve got much better facilities here.”
“St. Elizabeth’s was closer to where they were.”
“Closeness isn’t everything. Oh, well. There’s a woman who’s dead, you know. And this other woman, the one the reception was for, this Miss Paris—”
“Parrish.”
“Well, she hardly sounds like somebody who leads a calm life, what with all this going off to war zones and all that, but that’s just my point. I mean, she’d just come back from some civil war in Africa and she’d been just fine and she’s here for hardly a day and boom. Isn’t that ironic?”
“It’s certainly something.”
“The paper says it’s the same kind of bomb in a pipe that blew up that car in the parking lot a couple of days ago. You know the one. Where the woman was supposed to have killed her husband.”
“Yes,” Liza said. “I know the one.”
Shirley Bates let a smug little smile paste itself over her face. Shirley was a plumpish little woman, the kind who always seems to be on a diet to lose just five more pounds. She was on
e of the least intelligent nurses Liza had ever known.
“You know what I think?” Shirley said. “I don’t think that woman killed her husband at all. I don’t think she had anything to do with any pipe bombs. No matter what the papers have to say. The papers have all been taken over by liberals anyway.”
“What?”
“It will be black gangs, you just watch. That’s what it always is these days. No wonder Africa is always in the middle of some kind of war. These are very violent people we’re dealing with here.”
“What are you talking about?” Liza demanded. “You’re not making any sense at all.”
“Of course I am,” Shirley said. “I’m talking about Negroes. Except we’re not supposed to call them Negroes anymore because the liberals won’t let you do anything. The liberals suck up to them. But everybody knows the truth anyway. You can’t avoid it.”
“I don’t think I want to continue this discussion,” Liza said.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Shirley said, “but I get tired of pretending that I can’t see what’s going on right in front of my nose. I mean, just look around this place. Look around down in ER. All that blood. Children coming in battered. Children coming in drugged up. People shot. It’s always Them.”
I ought to get up out of this chair and move, Liza told herself. I ought to slap this silly woman’s face. I ought to do something. But she was too tired. Her legs felt full of lead. Up at the checkout to the cafeteria line, Liza saw Leyla Williams, one of the best nurses in the Peds ICU and as black as the skirt on a witch’s dress. She started to wave frantically.
“There’s Leyla,” she told Shirley Bates. “Maybe she’ll come over to join us.”
“Leyla?”
Leyla saw them and nodded. Liza started to feel a little better. “Leyla’s one of my oldest friends at this hospital.”
Shirley turned around, saw Leyla coming toward them, and made a face. “And that’s another thing,” she said. “They really can’t keep this up with the affirmative action. Affirmative action. What a name for it. It just means letting in people who aren’t qualified and pretending they can nurse.”
“Affirmative action,” Liza said. “I get it. That’s how you got this job.”
“Pardon me?”
“Never mind,” Liza said.
Shirley Bates gathered her papers together and got up. “I’m going back to work now. I know I have to live with these people, but I don’t have to pretend to like it. You ought to consider these things, Liza. You ought to consider what it means to you to have liberals running the world.”
“Right,” Liza said.
Shirley Bates said, “You shouldn’t let those people fool you. Look what they did to that Congresswoman Corbett, who always made out she was such a big friend of theirs. I mean, most of them are still jungle savages.”
“Good-bye,” Liza said breathlessly, feeling distinctly dizzy. “Go away.”
“I’m certainly going to go away before she gets here,” Shirley Bates said.
Shirley disappeared just as Leyla came up. Liza leaned across the table and pushed a chair out for Leyla to sit down in.
“I just had the most extraordinary conversation,” Liza said. “I can’t believe I really heard—”
“We’re all still a bunch of savages and we’d still be cannibals, too, except the police put a lid on it,” Leyla said equitably. “Haven’t you ever talked to Shirley before?”
“Somebody should have warned me.”
“Well, now you’re warned. Don’t worry about it too much. She won’t last long. She has an IQ of minus twelve and she’s a terrible nurse.”
“How did she get the job?”
“She’s the niece of the vice president of the board of directors.”
Liza giggled. “Affirmative action,” she said.
Leyla hooted. “Back when I got hired at this place, the only kind of affirmative action they had was the kind that said people who looked like me couldn’t work here. Did you know I got hired as a nurse’s aide?”
“You mean you came here before you did your training?”
“When I came here, I had an RN from Penn State and a master’s degree in nursing from the Women and Children’s Crisis Program at Columbia Presbyterian. Welcome to affirmative action and 1962. What about you? You can’t look that awful just because Shirley shocked the shit out of you.”
“What? Oh, no. It’s not that. I did a night detail last night and then I came back on shift. I haven’t had much sleep.”
“You shouldn’t do things like that. It’s no better for the patients than it is for you.”
Liza looked down at the table. She had a copy of that day’s Philadelphia Inquirer too, but it was still folded and unread next to her cafeteria tray. She looked at the black-and-white photograph of the wreckage of Julianne Corbett’s party and bit her lip.
“Have you ever, I don’t know how to put it, have you ever had information about something important except that the information didn’t make any sense?”
“Like what?”
“Well, you know that woman who’s supposed to have killed her husband and blown up her own car with a bomb?”
“Sure. Patricia Willis. Today they’re saying maybe she tried to blow up Congresswoman Corbett’s cocktail party with a bomb.”
“I know. The thing is, when I first heard the name—the whole name, Patricia MacLaren Willis—anyway, when I first heard the name I thought it was a coincidence, because I used to know a Patsy MacLaren. And then when I saw the picture, I realized that I did know this Patsy MacLaren. I mean, this Mrs. Willis. Except it’s kind of strange. It doesn’t really make sense.”
“It doesn’t make sense how?”
“I don’t know how to put it. I look at the picture, and I definitely recognize it, but it doesn’t look the way it ought to. I shouldn’t be able to recognize it.”
“I think you need more sleep,” Leyla said solemnly.
“I know I need more sleep,” Liza admitted. “It’s just—well, what do you know about this Mr. Demarkian?”
“The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot? I know what I read in the papers. I think that if the Inquirer doesn’t let up on that joke, the man’s going to sue them.”
“Do you think he’d be, you know, patient about listening to what I had to say? In spite of the fact that it isn’t very coherent?”
“I don’t know. Do you really want to talk to him?”
“I think I do, yes. I mean, I really don’t want to talk to Julianne, I don’t know why but I don’t—”
“I forgot you knew Julianne Corbett. Vassar.”
“That’s right. Vassar. I don’t know, Leyla, maybe there’s too much rivalry there. Too much jealousy. For me. And I don’t want to go to the police. That doesn’t feel right to me at all. So I thought I’d talk to this Mr. Demarkian and explain what I had to explain and maybe he would listen to me.”
“I don’t see why not,” Leyla said. “Only you’d better be better at explaining it to him than you were at explaining it to me. I still don’t have the faintest idea of what you were talking about.”
“Maybe I don’t have the faintest idea either. It’s right there, you know what I’m saying. It’s right at the edge of my mind. I can’t seem to get ahold of it.”
“So go see this Gregor Demarkian. You’ll have a story you can tell in the cafeteria for weeks. People around here won’t be able to get enough of it.”
“Right,” Liza said, standing up. “I guess I’d better go now. I told them I’d be only about fifteen minutes and it’s been more like half an hour. What an idiot that Shirley Bates is.”
“The world is full of jerks,” Leyla said.
“Right.” Liza picked up her tray. “And my supervisor is one of them. I’ll leave the newspaper for you. I didn’t have time to read it with Shirley blathering away at me.”
“When you meet Gregor Demarkian, find out if he’s really sleeping with that Bennis Hannaford woman
,” Leyla told her. “The newspapers are always so vague. It could make a person crazy.”
THREE
1.
GREGOR DEMARKIAN SOMETIMES WONDERED why he had ever become involved in law enforcement at all. Unlike a lot of the men he had trained with, all those years ago in J. Edgar Hoover’s America, he hadn’t grown up listening to radio serials and dreaming about being Eliot Ness. In his last years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he had often felt like the housekeeper at a fraternity house. There was just so much mess and it kept coming at you. All you could do was sweep it back and shop for bigger brooms, aware from the start that you were never going to get the place cleaned up so that it would stay clean. In Philadelphia these days, he felt more like he was unraveling wool. Crime was a fabric made of yarns and threads. If you picked at it long enough, it came apart in your hands. That was the kind of thing Tibor was always saying, and Gregor didn’t really believe he’d started to think like Tibor. What he was trying to work out was why he felt so much more responsible about it all these days, when he wasn’t paid to investigate criminals, when he wasn’t sworn to eradicate crime. Sometimes he felt as if the Federal Bureau of Investigation was a machine that had worked well with him and worked just as well without him. Now he was out where there were no machines, and nobody else seemed to be taking care of business.
Gregor certainly felt responsible for what had happened to Bennis Hannaford in spite of the fact that it had been her idea to go to that silly cocktail party. Gregor had received an invitation of his own and ignored it. What kept nagging at him in the aftermath of the explosion was that he had known of the link between Julianne Corbett and Patricia MacLaren Willis, thin though it was. He had known that Patsy MacLaren had contributed money to Julianne Corbett’s political campaign. Of course, if that was enough of a link to get somebody’s cocktail party blown up, the entire Philadelphia Main Line ought to look like a Fourth of July fireworks display every Sunday evening in the summer. What Gregor really felt about the breaking of Bennis Hannaford’s arm was scared to death. She hadn’t been seriously hurt, but she had been very close to people who were seriously hurt. One woman was dead. Karla Parrish, the woman Bennis had been standing right next to, was in a coma and no one knew how long it would take her to come out of it, if she ever did. There were people with damage to their eyes and their faces. If Bennis hadn’t been on her way out to have a cigarette, she could have been—anything. It was the first time Gregor Demarkian had ever been grateful for Bennis Hannaford’s nicotine habit.
