by Jane Haddam
“I’m sure you must have a call board,” Gregor said, trying once again. “I’m here to see Miss Verity.”
The blank man was looking mulish. “You leave,” he said. “No up. I call police.”
Oh, fine, Gregor thought. That was all he needed. “I want to see Miss Verity,” he said again, feeling a little desperate this time. “I was invited.” What was he talking about?
“You leave,” the no-longer-blank man said again. By now he had begun to look menacing, hulking, and stupid. Gregor had never trusted stupid people. They got violent much too easily.
“You leave now,” the man insisted. “I throw you out. I call police. You leave now.”
Gregor didn’t know what he would have tried next if he had had to try something. He was just about to repeat himself yet again—as if that were going to do him any good—when the rumbling started.
Actually, the first thing Gregor heard wasn’t a rumbling. It was a ping, the sound of metal against metal, ball bearings falling to the surface of a stainless steel table. The next thing he heard was a mechanical punch, and then he had sense enough to be scared.
“Get down,” he said, grabbing the mulish man by the arm. “Get down now!”
The mulish man fought back, but he was in worse physical shape than Gregor was and it didn’t matter as much to him what happened next.
A second after the two of them hit the lobby’s carpet, the elevator doors exploded outward in an arc of cheap sheet metal and shards of glass.
PART THREE
First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage, Then Comes the Marriage Counselor and Six Sessions of Psychotherapy at Least
ONE
1.
NOBODY HAD ACTUALLY PUT a bomb in the elevator. It took a while to figure that out—and a lot of help from firemen and ambulance drivers and police officers—but where and why the bomb had been was the first thing anyone wanted to know, and it was what they worked hardest at besides rescue. The rescue was, in Gregor’s eyes, bizarre. There weren’t many people in the building at that time of day. It was the sort of place that would have been inhabited exclusively by artists and writers in New York City. The apartments were big and the space was appealingly “alternative.” In Philadelphia that just meant the place was not as expensive as it might have been, given the amount of care that had gone into outfitting the rooms and laying down the carpets. It was the middle of the day. Almost everybody was out at work. Wandering through the empty halls, watching out for the progress of the small fire that had started up on four, rescue workers went through one empty hall after the other. There was an old woman hiding in her closet in 3B, convinced that the street gangs of Philadelphia had armed themselves and started a war. There was a small child and her Peruvian nanny on six. The nanny thought they were in the middle of an earthquake and was trying to get away down the fire escape. There was Liza Verity.
“At least, we assume it was Liza Verity,” John Jackman said disgustedly after the crews had been at it for at least half an hour. He was standing next to Gregor in the lobby, looking through the door at the crowds gathered outside. Gregor would never have imagined that so many people would be able to collect in this one place, considering how few people there had been before anything happened. The people weren’t all derelicts and bag ladies either. There were two or three young men in suits, and several young women in the brightly colored clothes Gregor had come to think of as “secretary uniforms.” There were people from the press out there too. Gregor kept catching sight of camcorders and portable mikes. God only knew what they were saying out there to explain this thing to the people watching the news.
“The important thing is that we get back up there as quickly as possible,” Gregor said. “There were a couple of things—”
“The firemen are adamant that we don’t do any such thing,” Jackman said. “There’s been structural damage to the building. The whole thing could collapse under our feet.”
“No, it couldn’t. It was a pipe bomb.”
“It blew out the elevator.”
“You said yourself that was an accident. One of the bombs rolled out Liza Verity’s door—”
“It might not have been an accident, Gregor. It might have been on purpose. Have you considered that?”
“Yes.”
“Have you considered that whoever did this might be wandering around here still?”
“I’ve considered it the same way you have and I’ve rejected it for the same reason you have. There would be no point to it. Why should she hang around?”
John Jackman went back to the door and peered out. There was a judas window there, which is what the doorman had been using when Gregor was trying to get in. Gregor had tried to use it himself, but it distorted everything. The woman from ABC looked like she had a head the size of a watermelon.
“Do you still think it was a ‘she’ who did this, Gregor?” John Jackman asked. “Do you still think it was Patsy MacLaren Willis?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I’ve been thinking lately that maybe Julianne Corbett was right. Maybe the woman is dead. Maybe she never even existed. If I hadn’t seen the body out at Fox Run Hill with my own eyes, I’d begin to wonder if I was making all this up.”
“There’s a body upstairs right this minute, John. There’s Karla Parrish in the hospital. There’s that poor woman with her antifur buttons—”
“I know, I know. But it would make more sense if we were dealing with terrorists or something.”
“We’re dealing with a fairly clever woman with a fair amount of acquaintance with amateur revolutionary publications, that’s all. It’s not so surprising if you think about it. She went to college in the sixties.”
“Bennis went to college in the sixties. I’ll bet she doesn’t know how to make a pipe bomb.”
“I’ll bet she does. And a few things more serious too. Let’s go back upstairs, John.”
John looked around. There were people going back and forth across the lobby, but the body hadn’t come down yet. One of the firemen propped the front door open. The delivery doors at the back were already open and being used for personnel going back and forth with axes and hoses and bits of debris. There were at least two mobile crime units at work. The place still looked deserted. It was as if it swallowed people whole.
“Do you have any idea why Liza Verity would end up dead?” John Jackman asked.
“Of course,” Gregor told him. “So do you. If you think about it.”
“I have thought about it.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with me, if that’s what you were trying to make fit,” Gregor said. “I doubt if Mrs. Willis even knew that Ms. Verity had called me. Though I suspect she suspected that Ms. Verity would do something of the sort sooner or later.”
“You mean Liza Verity died because Patricia MacLaren Willis was afraid she would talk?”
“Yes.”
“Things don’t happen like that, Gregor. You’re the one who taught me that. Maybe in mobs and gangs things happen like that, but ordinary people don’t go around offing their neighbors for fear that their neighbors are going to talk to the police. Ordinary people trust their defense attorneys. And they’re right too.”
“This is a special case,” Gregor said. “Liza Verity knew Patsy MacLaren.”
“A lot of people knew Patsy MacLaren. Julianne Corbett knew Patsy MacLaren. She’s not dead.”
“I could say she might have been dead,” Gregor pointed out, “because of that bomb at that reception she threw, but I won’t, because it would be deliberately misleading. The point is that Liza Verity had seen Patsy MacLaren very recently.”
“So had all those biddies out in Fox Run Hill.”
“I know. But they’d never seen her before that.”
“Christ,” John Jackman said. “You’re impossible. Do you actually know what’s going on here?”
“I think I do, yes.”
“Then tell me, for God’s sake.”
Gregor smil
ed weakly. “Let’s just say that a very cautious person was hedging her bets,” he said, “and then let’s go upstairs and look around. The nature of this thing is such that we can’t just go charging in like the cavalry, making accusations. We have to be reasonably sure.”
“Reasonably sure of what?” John Jackman sounded exasperated.
“Reasonably sure of just who Patsy MacLaren really is. She really is a very cautious person, you know. Careful to a fault.”
“Right,” John Jackman said. “Pipe bombs blowing up the landscape in all these public places. India, for God’s sake. If Patsy MacLaren is running around blowing up everybody who’d seen her in the last ten days or whatever, who died in India with Julianne Corbett in attendance?”
“Patsy MacLaren.”
“The next time I need a consultant, I’m not going to get you, Gregor. I’m going to hire a psychic. It’ll be easier on my nerves.”
Gregor stepped out into the lobby. The elevator shaft was open and two firemen were working over it, directed by a bald man in a white lab coat from the mobile crime unit. The bomb squad, having done the emergency work of making sure there was nothing else around to go off, was standing by. Just in case.
“Let’s go up,” Gregor said again, gesturing to the door at the side that led to the stairwell. They had already been up it once since the rescue teams started arriving.
John Jackman sighed. “If they don’t have that body in the bag when we get there, I’m leaving right away. Stabbings I can deal with. Shootings I can deal with. People getting blown up make my stomach turn. I think it’s a good thing I never got drafted.”
“I got drafted,” Gregor said. “I never saw anybody blown up until I joined the FBI. Let’s go.”
2.
Out of the lobby, the building got better and better: neater, cleaner, brighter, newer. It was really a very nice place, except that it was in this neighborhood and guarded by a rogue troll, or whatever that doorman was. The stairwell was well lit. The hallways were well kept and newly painted and well lit too. Every once in a while Gregor saw a door with a bit of decoration on it, bright plastic eggs left over from Easter, little wooden “Pennsylvania Dutch” welcome plaques. Teachers and nurses, second assistant bookkeepers and car insurance agents—most of them, Gregor was sure, living alone. If you got married, you moved out of a place like this, to a little house somewhere in one of the less important suburbs. You only went on and on about how convenient it was to be close to the museums and the theaters when you didn’t have children to put through school.
They got up to the fourth floor and found the fire door shut. Gregor opened it and looked through, only to be confronted by the massive head of a fireman in a very bad mood.
“This entrance is not operative,” the fireman said. “The staircase is not operative. I don’t know where you came from, but—”
John Jackman pushed himself forward. “Jackman,” he said, holding out his shield case. “Homicide.”
“Oh,” the fireman said. He stepped back.
If anything, the fourth floor was in even worse shape than it had been the last time Gregor had been there, right after John Jackman arrived, when they were looking through the debris trying to figure out what happened. Still, Gregor thought, it was obviously a pipe bomb that had gone off, and not something bigger. The door to 4C was off its hinges, but the firemen or the bomb squad had done that. There was a lot of mess on the hall carpet and a little singeing on the hall wallpaper. There was not much else, except in 4C itself, and that was a total mess.
“We cleaned it up some,” the big fireman said. “And the cops from forensics, they’ve put a lot into plastic bags.”
Gregor went to the door of 4C and looked inside. The corpse was in a bag, lying on the living room floor, blank under white canvas. A pair of orderlies in white fatigues was unfolding a stretcher next to it. A tall man in a black suit was standing next to the orderlies, taking off a pair of clear plastic gloves. The man in the suit looked up, saw John Jackman, and nodded.
“Mr. Jackman,” he said. “We’re all done here. I’ve got to do an autopsy. Pipe bomb, my ass.”
“It was certainly a pipe bomb,” Gregor pointed out. “One of the first things we found was the pipe.”
“This is Dr. Halloran,” John Jackman said formally. “From the medical examiner’s office. This is—”
“Gregor Demarkian,” Dr. Halloran said. “I know. Phil Borley’s here from the bomb squad. You ask him. Pipe bomb. Bunch of Chinese fireworks, that’s what it was.”
“Now, now,” John Jackman said. “Let’s not get too politically incorrect here. We haven’t even been drinking.”
“Are you trying to tell me it wasn’t a pipe bomb?” Gregor asked.
“Phil!” Dr. Halloran shouted. “Phil, come over here. Of course it was a pipe bomb. It was just a little pipe bomb.”
“It blew out the elevator,” Gregor pointed out.
“That was because it was stuck in an enclosed space,” Dr. Halloran said, distracted. He was suddenly joined by a short, slight, middle-aged man who looked eerily like one of those economic advisers the Clinton administration was always trotting out to talk to television reporters about the economy. “This is Phil Borley,” Dr. Halloran said. “He’s with the bomb squad.”
“Hi,” Philip Borley said.
“Pipe bomb, my ass,” Dr. Halloran said again.
“I think Dr. Halloran is trying to say this wasn’t a bomb,” John Jackman said. “Or that it wasn’t much of a bomb. Or something—”
“It wasn’t much of a bomb,” Philip Borley confirmed. “I’m going to take it down and run it through a few tests next to the ones we’ve got already, the one from the garage and the one from the other night. I figure we’ve got a good chance of them all being the same thing, don’t you?”
“We’ve been counting on it,” Gregor Demarkian admitted.
Philip Borley nodded sagely. “I guess you would be. I can’t see us having two mad bombers running around at once though. Not that this one is much of a mad bomber. Lots of noise. Lots of mess. Not much damage.”
“How can you say there hasn’t been much damage?” John Jackman was indignant. “There are at least two people dead, not including the one she shot, assuming it’s the same person—”
“It’s the same person,” Gregor Demarkian said. “She should have stuck with guns.”
“Why didn’t she stick with guns?” John Jackman demanded.
“Because she didn’t think she was going to kill anybody else,” Gregor said patiently. “She thought she was going to kill her husband, blow up the car, and disappear. And that was going to be it.”
“Well, she did disappear,” Phil Borley said. “If it’s this Mrs. Willis you’re talking about. I’ve been reading the papers just like everybody else. She’s gone.”
“She’s in the papers,” Gregor pointed out. “I don’t think she expected that to happen.”
“She blows up her car in a municipal parking garage and she doesn’t expect to get into the papers?” John Jackman was skeptical.
“Oh, she expected to get into the papers with that,” Gregor said. “It’s too bad she couldn’t have picked her time better. I think she was probably in a bind, or she would have. As it turned out, she blew up her car during a slow news week, and it got more attention than she had expected. Although it was supposed to get some attention.”
“He talks like this all the time,” John Jackman said. “Sometimes I’m ready to kill him. God only knows what he wants up here now.”
Gregor walked over to the body bag and looked down. “You said it was a small bomb, and yet she died anyway. She must have been sitting right on top of it.”
“Almost literally, I think,” Dr. Halloran said. “The wounds are consistent with that interpretation anyway. I think somebody put it under her like a whoopee cushion.”
“Which would mean it would have to be somebody she knew,” John Jackman said. “Except that according to you, Gre
gor, she was supposed to have known Patsy MacLaren. In college.”
“The message on the phone was garbled,” Gregor said, “but I’m fairly sure that’s what she said. But I don’t think she would have let Patsy MacLaren get into a position to plant a bomb underneath her, do you?”
“What do you mean?” John Jackman blinked.
“Well,” Gregor said, “look at it this way. For a week or so now, the news has been full of stories about how Patsy MacLaren murdered her husband and blew up her car, and lately there have been even more stories about how she’s a suspect in the bombing of the town house where Congresswoman Corbett was giving a reception. This isn’t what I would call a wonderful person to let get behind your back, would you?”
John Jackman looked confused. “You mean it wasn’t Patsy MacLaren who planted this bomb?”
“As far as Patsy MacLaren could do anything, she planted this bomb,” Gregor said.
John Jackman looked disgusted. “Except she couldn’t do even that, because she’s dead. You know, Gregor, we do seem to have a situation here where bombs are going off left and right and people are dropping like flies and there’s no end in sight, and when we get into a situation like that, I begin to feel that it’s not really all right for us to—”
“There’s an end in sight,” Gregor said. “I don’t think anybody’s going to end up dead again anytime soon. Unless Karla Parrish dies in the hospital, God forbid, and that isn’t what you’re talking about.”
“How can you possibly know that nobody’s going to end up dead?” Phil Borley was curious. “I don’t like the MO here, Mr. Demarkian. It’s nuts.”
“No, it’s not,” Gregor said. “Really, you know, it’s all absolutely simple. The only thing that got complicated, like I said, was the timing, because the timing meant that there was a great deal more publicity about it all than there would have been. Or maybe that was a miscalculation on her part. Maybe, what with Fox Run Hill in the picture, there would always have been a fair amount of publicity. I think it might have been much different if the city was in the middle of a gang war or if there was a crisis going on in Korea. As I said, maybe not.”
