by Jane Haddam
“If the timing was so important to her, why didn’t she just wait?” John Jackman asked. “Crises in Korea don’t happen every day, but gang wars are frequent enough. She could have found any number of excuses in no time at all.”
“She didn’t have the time,” Gregor said. “She was very close to being found out. If she hadn’t already been found out.”
“You mean by her husband,” Phil Borley said. “Hadn’t they been married for years? What was there new about her that he could possibly have found out?”
Gregor walked over to the wall next to the hallway and looked carefully at the paint and paper. There were no telltale signs of bright and dark, no indications that pictures had hung there for a long time that were now gone. He sighed.
“Everybody always talks about how wonderful the sixties were,” he said, “but have you ever noticed? Nobody ever keeps pictures of it. Nobody has his coffee table full of snapshots of long-haired boys dancing in mud or people with signs marching on the Pentagon. They have posters of that kind of thing, but they don’t have pictures of themselves.”
“You’re looking for pictures of long-haired guys in mud?” John Jackman asked.
“I’m looking for a picture of Patsy MacLaren. The Patsy MacLaren who died in India. Do you think we could get hold of a Vassar College yearbook?”
“Probably,” John Jackman answered. “This doesn’t answer the question of why she didn’t wait. Why kill her husband right when she did? Why blow up her car instead of just leaving it in the airport parking lot with all the other missing cars?”
“Steve Willis was being reassigned to work in his head office,” Gregor said. “Remember? That was practically the first thing you told me about this case. Usually he traveled a great deal, but he was home on the night he was killed because he was being taken off traveling. He was going to be living at home full-time and working in an office just like anybody else. And of course, under the circumstances, that had to be intolerable.”
“To his wife,” John Jackman said.
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “Do me a favor, check a few other things, all right? You’re looking into this degree Patsy MacLaren was supposed to have earned at the University of Pennsylvania—”
“We’re checking into everything,” John Jackman said. “Like I said, that trust officer is off in the Caribbean someplace, but we’ll find him. And we’ll check everything. You don’t have to tell us that.”
“I know I don’t.” Gregor looked into Liza Verity’s bedroom. There was a photograph in there in a shiny aluminum frame, but it was only of Liza Verity herself in a nurse’s cap, holding what looked like a diploma. Gregor went over to her closet and looked into that, but Liza Verity had not been heavily addicted to clothes. She had a couple of the kind of dresses Bennis Hannaford would call “nice,” meaning suitable for semi-ceremonial occasions. Gregor got the impression that they were of a cheaper make than Bennis would have worn herself. She had a couple of pairs of jeans, pressed and draped over hangers. She had several cotton sweaters folded on the shelf over the hanger rod.
John Jackman and Phil Borley and Dr. Halloran were waiting for him in the hall, looking curious.
“So,” John Jackman said. “Have you got it all figured out?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I need pictures.”
“I need Patsy MacLaren. Assuming that Patsy MacLaren exists,” John Jackman said glumly. “Does Patsy MacLaren exist?”
“Yes,” Gregor said.
“Then Julianne Corbett was lying,” John Jackman said. “Patsy MacLaren didn’t die in India.”
“Julianne Corbett wasn’t lying when she said Patsy MacLaren died in India,” Gregor said.
“Crap,” John Jackman said.
“I really do need pictures,” Gregor said. He went back out into the living room. The orderlies had the stretcher assembled on the floor—or was it disassembled? or unfolded?—and they were levering Liza Verity’s body onto it. It seemed to Gregor like a very small body, but he might have been wrong. He had never met the woman. He should have met her. He went into the kitchen. Liza Verity didn’t seem to have been very committed to cooking.
“Well,” John Jackman said, following him. “Tell me this. Am I supposed to feel guilty? Is there something I should have figured out sooner? Could we have kept this murder from happening?”
Gregor shook his head. “I couldn’t have. It didn’t click for me until after I got here, and by the time I got here—hell, John. Practically the first thing that happened to me downstairs was that I watched the elevator blow up.”
“Right,” John Jackman said.
Gregor nodded. “On second thought, I don’t think that was an accident. I think she dropped that second pipe bomb into the elevator shaft on purpose. I think that was how she ensured that she was going to have time to get away.”
“Who?” Phil Borley looked bewildered.
“Patsy MacLaren,” Gregor said.
“Oh, don’t start that again,” John Jackman said.
“Why didn’t she just go out and get another gun?” Dr. Halloran asked. “From everything I’ve heard about what happened to the husband, she was good with guns. A gun would at least be quicker and easier and less messy than this kind of thing.”
“She doesn’t have access to a gun,” Gregor said. “It’s like I said before, if she’d realized she was going to end up killing anyone besides her husband, she would have kept the gun she had. My guess is that she acquired it a few years ago. Knowing that something like this was going to come up eventually. Planning it out.”
“For years,” John Jackman said.
“That’s right,” Gregor told him. “She’s good at that. Planning for years, I mean. It’s what she’s always done best. It’s just unfortunate for her that in this sort of thing, you can’t really plan.”
John Jackman was looking mutinous. “Are we still talking about Patsy MacLaren here?” he demanded. “The woman Julianne Corbett was not lying about when she said she was dead? That one?”
“Yes.”
“So what is she? A ghost? Does her spirit return to wreak revenge on the living? Was it an astral projection who was married to Stephen Willis? What the hell is going on here?”
“Patsy MacLaren,” Gregor Demarkian said carefully, “is a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman who would appear absolutely no different from any other perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman if you had ever met her, which you have, once or twice, although you didn’t know it.”
“I’ve met Patsy MacLaren,” John Jackman said. “Right. When was this? Before she murdered her husband?”
“No. Since.”
“Right. During this investigation.”
“That’s it, yes.”
“So I didn’t know I was meeting Patsy MacLaren.”
Gregor Demarkian shook his head. “John, John,” he said. “Really. You’re doing just what I did up until a couple of hours ago. You’re making it much too complicated.”
“I’m going to complicate your head,” John Jackman exploded. “You can’t do this to me. Goddammit, Gregor. This is a murder investigation. We have three people dead.”
“I know you do,” Gregor said. “Get me pictures.”
“Of what?”
“Of Patsy MacLaren. Get me the Vassar College yearbook for the year they all graduated. MacLaren. Verity. Parrish. Corbett—and two others. There were two others. Remember what Julianne Corbett told us. There were six people who used to hang out together in a group. Those are the ones I want to see.”
John Jackman looked like he was going to explode again, but Gregor decided not to hang around for it. He went down to the stairwell. The big fireman was still there, but he was no longer interested in Gregor. Other firemen were there too, carting things back and forth, checking the walls and carpets. Gregor realized that he had no idea what firemen did besides put out fires, although in big city fire departments they had to do a lot more than that. At the very least, they had to inspect things.
>
Gregor went down the stairs, looked into the third floor hall onto emptiness, went down more stairs. In the second floor hall he saw a girl of ten or twelve sitting on the carpet in front of an open apartment door. She had a pile of magazines next to her and a pair of scissors. When she saw Gregor she held up one of the magazines and smiled.
“Brides,” she said, indicating a tall young woman in a fantastical white dress that seemed to be made of tiers and tiers of lace. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
“Beautiful,” Gregor agreed.
The girl turned away and started to cut the picture out of the magazine.
Brides might be beautiful, Gregor thought as he headed for the lobby, but marriages were complicated, and after a week like this, he didn’t want to think about it.
TWO
1.
THERE WAS A SHOW on one of the cable stations about brides. Dozens and dozens of tall young women with no hips and arms like toothpicks paraded down a runway one after the other, showing off creations in satin and silk. Evelyn Adder watched them move as her husband sat at the kitchen table with Sarah and Kevin Lockwood, looking over some papers they had brought. For most of the time Sarah and Kevin had been there, Evelyn had been starving. It was unheard-of for Henry to be home so long in the middle of the day. Evelyn had the window seat on the landing filled with Hershey’s Kisses and bagel chips. She had two dozen bags of potato chips and six of those dips you could buy on the same shelf as the refried beans. She had a box of frozen White Castle hamburgers that just needed to be fried up. Sarah and Kevin and Henry were all ignoring her. Kevin kept reading bits and pieces of the papers he wanted Henry to sign. Sarah kept talking about their winter vacations in Boca wherever-it-was, making the place sound like an upper middle class street in Victorian England instead of like a piece of Florida real estate.
“Being able to get good help makes all the difference,” Sarah would say. “It changes one’s life completely.”
“The appreciation of land values over the last ten years has been truly phenomenal,” Kevin would say, “especially land directly on the waterfront.”
One of the brides on the runway had a dress that was cut up to her thigh in the front and had a long train. Another one of them had a dress that looked like millions of puffy pastel-green mints held together with string. There was a picture of Evelyn in her wedding dress on the shelf above the television set. She was very thin, and her dress was a plain white thing that could have been a uniform. There used to be pictures of Henry in the house when he was fat, but now there weren’t any. Only Henry’s publisher had those.
“What I like best about Florida is the lack of people,” Sarah Lockwood said. “You wouldn’t think it the way it looks on the news, but really all the overcrowding is down in places like Miami. Up where we are it feels like there’s nobody around at all, except that it’s better than that, because there really is. I think you picked the prettiest piece of land we had.”
Evelyn picked up the remote and went from channel to channel, from shopping to fixing up old houses to cooking in a wok. She felt leaden and gross, the way she always did these days—but for some reason right at that minute it wasn’t so bad. She found another show about brides and one about marriages. If you weren’t careful to keep a psychological reference book on your bedside table at all times, your marriage would surely be doomed. There was a show with Martha Stewart about weddings, explaining how to make favors from bits of net and gold foil. Evelyn chose a local station with a soap opera on it and sat back. The soap opera seemed to be about impossibly thin people who were miserable about almost everything in their lives, although it was hard to figure out why that was.
“Thirty-five thousand will be more than enough for now,” Kevin told Henry. “It’s when you choose what you really want to build that you have to throw some more in. When your architect has plans you want or when you decide on one of the stock plans the development company puts out. Our house here came from a stock plan.”
“Ours did too,” Henry said. “The guy showed us what he intended to build, we walked through a model on the other side of the city, and here we are.”
“I preferred the Victorian myself,” Evelyn said matter-of-factly, knowing nobody was listening. “There were things I liked about this house, but I liked the Victorian better.”
“We bought a stock plan down in Florida too,” Sarah said. “It just seemed so much easier. If you’re really picky, I suppose it would be all right to fuss with architects and all that sort of thing, but I really can’t see it.”
“I just don’t want to wake up tomorrow morning and find that, cashier’s check or no cashier’s check, I don’t own this piece of property because the owner thought someone else had made a better offer.”
“Nobody else is going to make a better offer,” Kevin said. “I’m as near to the owner as you’re going to get. I’m not talking to anybody else but you.”
On the screen, the soap opera flickered and jumped and disappeared, replaced by the dull black-and-white signboard that meant a bulletin was coming. When Evelyn was a child, bulletins meant at least the Cuban missile crisis or a major political assassination. Now they meant any excuse at all, because the local news crews wanted to feel like they were living exciting lives.
“There has been another minor explosion in central Philadelphia,” the talking head said. “Details right after this message.”
Evelyn wondered if there were advertisers out there who stipulated having their ads aired during bulletins. Did the stations have to guarantee the bulletins? The talking head was back. She was a scrawny blonde with limp hair and a strange curve to her lip, wearing too much lipstick. She stared soulfully into the camera.
“Police have been called to the home of a Philadelphia nurse this afternoon and forced to bring everybody from the fire department to the bomb squad with them as the third pipe bombing in under two weeks rocks the city of Philadelphia to its foundations—”
“Horseshit,” Evelyn said under her breath.
“Did you say something?” Henry asked.
“There’s been another bomb.” Evelyn pointed to the television. “In central Philly this time.”
“You shouldn’t watch so much television,” Henry said. “God, it’s bad for your mind and bad for your butt. You ought to get up and move sometimes.”
“I think Patsy must have been one of those SDS Weathermen in hiding,” Sarah Lockwood said. “I mean, what else would explain it. Steve must have been one of them too. And he wanted to turn himself in, so Patsy executed him.”
“I think it would have come out by now if Patsy had that kind of background,” Evelyn said. “The police have been on it for days.”
“Oh, the police,” Sarah said. “I don’t see that they’re much good. They never seem to be able to catch the criminal with the least amount of intelligence. And Patsy had at least that.”
“I thought she was boring,” Henry said. “A boring, pudgy, middle-aged woman. Why do so many women get so boring after they pass the age of forty?”
Sarah Lockwood cleared her throat. “Well,” she said. “I think we’ve got everything done we meant to get done. Kevin and I have an engagement this evening. We have to get dressed.”
“Some people we knew when we were living in London,” Kevin said. “They have a house near us down in Florida too. Lovely people.”
“We’d invite you two along, but you know what the British are like.” Sarah shook her head. “Throw new people at them and they go right into a deep freeze.”
“They’ll be all right once you get to Florida,” Kevin said. “We’ll have a dinner party to introduce everybody to everybody and tell the Brits all about it in advance.”
“Don’t you think this will be fun?” Sarah said.
Another talking head—another scrawny blonde, this time with a hand mike and a bright red blazer—was interviewing that black police detective who had been out at Fox Run Hill just a little while ago. Next to him was Gregor De
markian, looking tired.
Henry came back from seeing Sarah and Kevin out. His face was red and mottled. His knuckles were white.
“You could have been a little less rude,” he told Evelyn. “You could have talked to people instead of sitting in front of the television table like a dinner roll waiting to be buttered.”
“Nobody wanted to talk to me,” Evelyn said. “Even you didn’t want to talk to me. Nobody was the least interested in hearing what I had to say.”
“Maybe that’s true, Evelyn, but if it is, it’s only because of your weight. People are put off by your weight.”
“In this case, I think people would have been put off by my point of view.”
“Oh, don’t start that again,” Henry said.
“I’m not starting anything, again or otherwise.” Evelyn stood up, one fluid motion, a dancer’s exercise she had learned as a young girl in a local children’s ballet class. It had been years since the last time she had tried to do that. It was incredibly gratifying to find out that she still could.
“I’m not starting anything,” she repeated. “I’m just telling you. There’s something wrong with it. It’s some kind of scam. They’re cheating you.”
“Sometimes your background really comes out,” Henry said. “Do you know that? Sometimes you’re really nothing more than one more fat housewife from the Pennsylvania steel country, parochial and suspicious and small-minded and petty.”
“If it’s being small-minded and petty to be able to add, Henry, then I’m small-minded and petty. Come to your senses for a moment. This deal doesn’t add up.”
“It isn’t supposed to ‘add up,’ as you put it. This is a handshake between friends. That’s the way people do things where there’s a willingness to trust and a commitment to mutual advantage.”
“Kevin Lockwood didn’t trust you for that money. He made you bring a cashier’s check.”
“That was to satisfy the legal requirements.” Henry sounded infinitely patient. “You always have to have a cashier’s check when you buy property. It’s standard operating procedure.”
