Deadly Beloved

by Jane Haddam

  “I doubt if anybody murdered that poor woman on purpose. She was from out of town. She wasn’t anyone particularly important. There’s nothing we can find in her background to link her to Patricia MacLaren Willis. There doesn’t seem to be anybody in her life with any real interest in doing her in.”

  “You know all that about her already?” Bennis asked. “How can you have that kind of information so fast?”

  “We can’t,” Gregor admitted, “but we have preliminary information, and we have some threads to go with. Like the pipe bomb.”

  “Which points to Mrs. Willis.”

  “Well, it would seem to, wouldn’t it? Now, we do have some information on that. It was an almost identical bomb to the ones that went off in that parking garage. A length of aluminum cylinder packed with mothballs and chlorine bleach. An electric watch with leads running off it. You could have gotten the whole thing out of The Anarchist’s Cookbook.”

  “Maybe it was a copycat.”

  “There’s more than one recipe for a bomb in The Anarchist’s Cookbook. It would be too much of a coincidence if Mrs. Willis and a copycat picked the same recipe.”

  “Do you think Mrs. Willis planted the bomb?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said.

  “Do you think the bomb was meant to kill Julianne Corbett?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “I’m disappointed in you,” Bennis said. “Usually by this point you know practically everything. Or else you say you do. Have you heard about Karla Parrish? Is she going to be all right?”

  “Karla Parrish is in a coma. Come on, Bennis. Get up and I’ll take you to dinner. If you can go out with that thing on your arm.”

  “I’ve got a kind of brace for it for walking. I think it’s a good thing for Karla Parrish that she was showing me that picture. I think she spent the whole night before that standing right behind the punch bowl at that table. She would have been blown to pieces. I’ll bet Mrs. Willis is trying to kill Julianne Corbett. I wonder why.”

  “Maybe Mrs. Willis thinks Ms. Corbett doesn’t keep her campaign promises,” Gregor said. “Come on. Get up and get moving.”

  “I don’t move too fast these days,” Bennis said. “I hate politics, don’t you?”

  Actually, Gregor never thought much about politics beyond voting in presidential elections. What he was thinking about was what Bennis had just said about Julianne Corbett and Karla Parrish and Patricia MacLaren Willis, and it suddenly struck him that he hadn’t looked at the problem from quite that angle before.

  FOUR

  1.

  GREGOR TOOK A TAXI down to John Jackman’s office the next morning. When he had first come back to Philadelphia from Washington, he had liked to take public transportation as often as possible, because it was a way to reacquaint himself with the city, because it was a way to tell himself that this was really home. Washington had never really been home, and couldn’t have been. Gregor had had something like the opposite of Potomac fever. All the buildings in the District of Columbia looked too big to him, and too cold, and too gray. Marble and limestone are not good materials to build your city out of when that city is going to be full of working internal combustion engines. Statues and monuments weren’t good things to fill your city up with if people wanted to live there. Gregor had never been sure if anybody actually wanted to live in the District. There was Georgetown and Foggy Bottom, of course, and a lot of poor people in tenements, but somehow at 6:45 every evening the entire city of Washington seemed to become uninhabited.

  Big patches of the city of Philadelphia seemed to be uninhabited all the time these days, eaten up by soaring concrete highway ramps with no cars on them. Maybe it was just the time of day, after rush hour but before the shoppers came out in earnest. This was why Gregor didn’t travel on public transportation anymore. He kept getting caught in places like this. The air-conditioning in his cab was going full blast. He didn’t dare roll his window down, even though the morning wasn’t hot yet. He pressed his face against the glass and looked at thick concrete abutments and at the blank arc lights that hung over them. Obviously, there was some need to keep this stretch of road lit after dark. Then the cab went too quickly around a curve, throwing Gregor against the back of his seat. By the time he was sitting upright again, Gregor was in another landscape. This was the kind of landscape he could understand. The tenements were in bad shape, but they were full of people. The sidewalks were full of people too. Gregor assumed that a lot of the people he saw were Spanish, because a lot of the signs on the stores were Spanish. The cab pulled up to the curb in the middle of a block and he looked out to see a cluster of dumpy, middle-aged women at a newsstand, poring over a copy of Bride’s magazine.

  “June,” Gregor said to no one in particular, getting his wallet out of his back pocket.

  “What?” the cabdriver said. He was looking at the women looking at Bride’s magazine too. “You wonder what it is they’re reading there. They don’t speak English. I bet not a one of them speaks English.”

  “Maybe they like looking at the pictures of brides in wedding gowns,” Gregor said.

  “Why?” the cabdriver demanded. “They can’t any one of them be getting married in a white dress anytime soon. They must be forty.”

  “Maybe it’s like fashion magazines. Women look at them even when they can’t wear the fashions.”

  “Maybe. You’re that guy in the paper, aren’t you? The Lebanese-American Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Armenian-American. I’m Armenian-American. Except that isn’t true either, because I was born right here in Philadelphia, so I guess I’m just American.”

  “Whatever.”

  Gregor decided he had enough change together and got out of the cab. He handed the money back through the window the driver had left open for him and watched a big Mack truck rumble toward the nearest stoplight, its side proclaiming it to be the property of Goldman’s Kosher Deli. Up the block a pack of children were playing something marked out with chalk on the sidewalk. A little way up from that, one of the stoops was full of slightly older children, all girls, smoking cigarettes and listening to music on a boom box. This was the city as Gregor remembered the city. He felt better than he had in days.

  “Interesting neighborhood,” he told the cabbie.

  The cabbie shrugged. “Got a great big police station sitting right in the middle of it. Even the junkies aren’t stupid enough to pull a drive-by right in front of the police station.”

  Gregor had heard of plenty of junkies stupid enough to pull drive-bys right in front of police stations. The people who pulled drive-bys were not notable for their high practical intelligence. Gregor stepped back on the sidewalk and let the cab pull away from the curb. The women who had been looking at Bride’s were now looking at Modern Bride. One of the storefronts on the other side of the street had a long white wedding gown in its plate-glass window. It took Gregor a while to realize that this was the St. Vincent de Paul shop, a charity outlet that sold secondhand clothes. Gregor wondered who gave her wedding gown to the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Then he wondered who got her wedding gown from the St. Vincent de Paul Society. No matter how poor you were, would you want a gown from a wedding that had failed to live up to its promise? Or was it the marriage that would have failed to live up to its promise? And what did marriage promise? Gregor could remember his marriage to Elizabeth, what it had felt like to be married, what he had felt it made him obligated to do and be, but it wasn’t easy to put that sort of thing in words. Whatever the words were, they would have nothing to do with the cover of the latest Cosmopolitan, which also had a bride on it, although a bride with exposed breasts. The white headline to the right of the bride’s head read: Our Exclusive Quiz! Is Your Marriage Destined to Explode? Underneath that there was another headline that read: 12 Surefire Ways to Make Your Honeymoon Hotter Than Hot!

  Gregor went up the broad stone steps to the police station and through the double bulletproof security doors into
the vestibule. The security doors were fitted into a steel frame that had been fitted into the dark wood of the station’s interior. Back before the days of drive-by shootings, it had been possible to make an aesthetic statement with a building full of law enforcement officers. Of course, there had been drive-by shootings of a kind even in the twenties; the FBI had committed a few of them itself. Wasn’t that the point of what happened to Bonnie and Clyde? Gregor gave his name to the enormous African-American man in the sergeant’s uniform behind the desk and asked to see John Jackman.

  “Gregor Demarkian,” the sergeant repeated. He flipped through a card file on his desk, found something he liked, and nodded. Then he picked up the phone, pressed a button, and said, “Mr. Demarkian to see Mr. Jackman.”

  He put the phone down again. “You can go right up,” he told Gregor. “Through that door and up in the elevator to three. When you get out on three, you will have to submit to a weapons search.”

  “A weapons search? In a police station?”

  “If it was up to me, I’d put a metal detector at the front door, but it isn’t up to me. Jackman and Company think metal detectors would inhibit access to the general public.”

  “I’d think they’d at least do that,” Gregor said.

  “Of course,” the sergeant went on, “that leaves the question of whether you really want this general public to have access, which depends on how you look at it and what you think it is that wants access to here, but I’m not going to bend your ear with it. I think Mr. Jackman is in a hurry.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  “They shot a cop,” the sergeant said. “A bunch of kids did. Fifteen-year-olds. Shot him right out there on the steps. Right in the head. He was dead before we got to him.”

  “Oh,” Gregor said.

  “Soon as I get my twenty,” the sergeant said, “I’m moving to Montana.”

  Gregor turned around and went through the door the sergeant had indicated. He went up in the elevator and got out on three. There was indeed a weapons search station right outside the elevator doors. It was manned by a young woman in uniform and an older man, also in uniform, whose main virtue seemed to be that he was absolutely huge. Gregor wondered where they found regulation blue to fit him. He gave the young woman his Mark Cross pen and spread his legs apart so that she could run the obligatory hand up and down the inside pants legs.

  “That’s fine,” she said after a minute. “You can go on through, Mr. Demarkian. I’m sorry if we’ve caused you any inconvenience.”

  “No inconvenience,” Gregor said.

  “You can go through,” the big man said.

  The big man was sitting down. Gregor got the impression that he was always sitting down, unless there was trouble, which there probably was very little of. Gregor went down the hall to another desk and gave his name to the clerk there. She was in uniform too, but she wasn’t really a cop. Instead of a badge on her chest she had an embroidered patch that read PPD—SUPPORT.

  “I’ve read all about you in the paper,” she told Gregor with satisfaction. “And Mr. Jackman talks about you all the time. Mr. Jackman is a really superior police detective, don’t you think?”

  What Gregor Demarkian thought was that John Jackman was a hell of a lot more than this young woman would be able to handle, but he didn’t say so. He grunted a vague, all-purpose assent and wondered why it was that Jackman’s support people never seemed to last from one of his visits to the next. Gregor understood the turnover in front-line people—the desk sergeants, the patrolmen. As a rule, Jackman didn’t work in wonderful neighborhoods. He didn’t have wonderful people coming into his office to visit him. After a while the desk sergeants had to get tired of being shot at and screamed at and the uniformed patrolmen had to wonder if it wouldn’t be an easier life working bunco. It was the rapid turnover of clerks and secretaries that bewildered Gregor. Did they all fall in love with Jackman and not get their love returned? Did they all go to bed with him only to realize that fun was all he was interested in? Did he give them too much typing? What?

  The door behind the clerk opened and John Jackman came out, his coat thrown over his shoulders like Apollo’s cape in the Rocky movies. The clerk glowed at him. The middle-aged woman holding the door for him beamed with motherly affection that didn’t quite strike the right maternal note. Gregor had the uncomfortable feeling that given half a chance, maternal instinct could turn into something much hotter with very little effort at all.

  “Gregor,” John Jackman said.

  “Put your coat on,” the middle-aged woman told Jackman. “There’s going to be a storm out there.”

  The coat was a raincoat, but even so. It was June. It was going to be hot as a sweatbox any minute now. Gregor raised an eyebrow at John Jackman; John Jackman shrugged.

  The clerk at the desk grabbed something from next to her phone file and held it up.

  “Look,” she told John Jackman. “My sister’s wedding pictures came in last night. Didn’t I tell you she had the most outrageous dress in the history of creation?”

  Wedding dresses did not seem to Gregor to be the kind of thing John Jackman would be interested in, but watching women around John was like watching men around Bennis, and Gregor found it easier just to ignore the whole thing. He started back toward the metal detectors, sure that John would follow him.

  “I’ll look at the pictures when we get back,” John was telling the clerk. “We’ve got an appointment with a congresswoman.”

  2.

  When Gregor Demarkian was still an active agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he had far and away preferred to interview people in their own homes rather than in their offices or a neutral setting. A home said a lot about state of mind and general psychological makeup. What was more, it was a safe place to most people, which was why it was also a place where people got careless. In the case of Congresswoman Julianne Corbett, unfortunately, they had no choice. According to her secretary, Ms. Corbett kept a residence in her congressional district, but she no longer actually lived there—or she wouldn’t, soon, because she was moving to Washington. She also kept an office in the district, but Gregor was under the impression that this wouldn’t be her real office for very long either. That one would be on Capitol Hill. What was it about getting elected to public office that made so many people metamorphose into aliens from another planet? Julianne Corbett’s constituent office was in one of those blank-faced office buildings with generic elevators that looked like it could turn itself into a warehouse at a moment’s notice. All the way down the hall to Suite 323, John Jackman was looking at a scrap of paper in his hand and saying, “Tiffany Shattuck. Her secretary’s name is Tiffany Shattuck. Can you believe she has a secretary named Tiffany Shattuck?”

  Gregor could have believed she had a secretary named Harry Winston Liebowitz, but that was not a point it seemed useful to make at the moment. He opened the door to Suite 323 and looked inside. There was a bland blue-walled waiting room with a few Danish modern chairs in it and a low coffee table covered with ancient magazines. It looked like the office of a not very well-heeled dentist. At the far end of the room there was a desk. At the desk there was a young blond woman reading a copy of Modern Bride. The magazines must have come out today, Gregor thought. That was the only reason he could think of that they would be all over the place like this.

  Tiffany Shattuck put her magazine down and blinked at them. “Mr. Demarkian,” she said. Then she frowned at John Jackman. “You were at the explosion the other night. You’re some kind of policeman.”

  John Jackman sighed.

  Just then the door behind Tiffany Shattuck’s desk opened. As always, Julianne Corbett seemed to Gregor to be less a person than an advertisement for Max Factor. She was wearing enormous gold earrings made of nesting circles of hammered metal. Her eyes had been made up to look like wings.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “Mr. Jackman.” She turned to Tiffany Shattuck. “Do you think you could get me a printout of tha
t health care thing from Holland and send a copy to Mort Elstain in Bethlehem? I promised him I’d do it last week and I just haven’t gotten around to it.”

  “Okay,” Tiffany said.

  Julianne Corbett made a face at Modern Bride magazine. “Why don’t the two of you come in here,” she said, looking straight at Gregor Demarkian. “Tiffany can get us all some coffee and we can be comfortable.”

  Gregor followed John around Tiffany Shattuck’s desk to the door Julianne Corbett was holding open. He went through into her private office expecting some kind of revelation of the woman’s character, or at least a significant change from the faceless blandness of the waiting room. He got neither. Julianne Corbett’s private office was eerily reminiscent of a bad room in a second-rate motel. Even the carpet looked like the kind of thing that belonged outside near a wading pool, installed instead of tiles because it was less likely that someone could slip on it.

  Gregor sat down in one of the Danish modern chairs. Julianne Corbett’s desk was empty except for a single photograph in a frame. Gregor leaned forward and turned the photograph around. It was the picture of six young women arranged in a living-room-like setting that looked like it might be the common room of a college dormitory. Most of the young women were unrecognizable. One of them was definitely Karla Parrish.

  “Are you in this photograph?” Gregor asked Julianne Corbett.

  Ms. Corbett shrugged. “I suppose that depends on the sense you mean that. Sometimes I think I didn’t really come into existence until I was practically forty. Until then I was nothing but a bundle of neuroses. Karla’s in that picture though. Did you recognize her?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “I did. She seems remarkably unchanged from a picture that must be—how many years old?”

  “Oh, more than twenty-five. I hate counting these days, but that was taken at Jewett House at Vassar College in 1967, I think. We were all juniors then.”