by Jane Haddam
“Jesus,” John Jackman said.
Gregor pushed him out the front door onto the stoop—but the street was just as bad, really. They must have done it while he was out and around with John yesterday, he thought, and he just hadn’t noticed when he got back. Maybe it had been this way for weeks, and he just hadn’t noticed at all. The street was a mass of silver and gold and white. It was more decorated than Gregor had ever seen it decorated before, even for Christmas, and Christmas was Donna Moradanyan’s holy calling. There were at least three bows on every lamppost. If whatever department it was that was responsible for the lampposts ever decided to lower the boom on Donna Moradanyan, God only knew what would happen. The fronts of the town houses and the brownstones were all covered with bows too. Lida Arkmanian’s window had a huge display of candles in it, all white with electric flames, all dripping fake but glittery wax off their uneven tips. The candles made Gregor feel instantly better. He knew they hadn’t been there yesterday. He would have noticed them even if he had noticed nothing else.
“They must have been at it all night,” he told John Jackman. “They’re incredible.”
“It’s not Bennis who’s having the wedding,” John Jackman said. “You’re sure of that?”
“Of course I’m sure of that. Who would marry Bennis?”
“Mick Jagger,” John Jackman said solemnly. “Harrison Ford. The next candidate for president for the Republican Party.”
“Bennis wouldn’t marry a Republican.”
“In this case she ought to, Gregor. He’s probably going to win.”
Weddings were bad enough. The last thing Gregor wanted was to get dragged into a discussion of party politics, Tibor’s favorite pastime. He’d had enough of politics during the elections. He was going to have more than enough of it during the next elections.
The gray metal garbage cans had been covered over with silver plastic bags and tied with silver and white bows. The concrete frames of the basement windows had been painted over with silver paint and dotted with tiny faux pearls. Down the street, at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church, it looked as if the façade had exploded in little, tiny oyster eggs. Gregor turned his eyes determinedly toward the Ararat, and got moving.
“Incredible,” John Jackman said when he finally caught up. “It really is incredible. You think there’s any way you can get me asked to this wedding?”
2.
The Ararat was not as bad as the street was, but it was edging in that direction. When Gregor brought John Jackman in that morning, he found not only the bows on the little candles on all the tables, but bows on Linda Melajian as well. She was carrying a big pot of coffee across the main dining room with a white and silver bow in her hair, making the bow sway and shudder against her skull every time she moved her feet. Linda Melajian had very short hair. Gregor led John Jackman to the front booth with its cushioned benches and ignored his protests about how hard the thing was going to be to get into and out of. Of course it was hard to get into and out of. Gregor had problems with it every morning of his life. It was also the best booth in the restaurant, and the biggest, and they needed the room.
Gregor pushed aside a little candle with a bow and a little pot of silk flowers with ribbons all over it—silver and white, always silver and white—and began to spread the printouts across it.
“Come and talk to me,” he said to John.
John Jackman sat down. Linda Melajian brought over her pot of coffee, noticed that neither one of them had a cup, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. It was a good thing the food here was good, Gregor thought, because they certainly took their regular patrons for granted.
“So,” Gregor said. “Tell me about it.”
John Jackman took his attention off the door through which Linda Melajian had gone and applied himself to the printouts. “In the first place,” he said, “Julianne Corbett was telling the truth, at least as far as we can find out. A young American woman named Patricia MacLaren did die in New Delhi in 1969. The death certificate is on file with the authorities there.”
“Are you sure this was our Patsy MacLaren?”
“I’m as sure as I can be, Gregor. A young woman named Patricia MacLaren left the United States on a Pan American flight in the late spring of 1969 in the company of another young woman, who was definitely Julianne Corbett, as far as we can be definite about these things. This isn’t the Soviet Union, Gregor. This isn’t even England. People don’t have to carry identity papers or tell the police where they are.”
“I know. Keep going. They went Pan Am.”
“Right. They did. They went around for a while, in Europe some but mostly in India and Nepal and Pakistan and places like that. Then they both came down with dysentery.”
“Both?”
“Yeah,” John Jackman said. “I spoke to a couple of very nice people, Gregor, and they all spoke English, but there were language barriers just the same. Still, I think I got this straightened out. Julianne Corbett came down with dysentery first. Patsy MacLaren—they kept calling her the redheaded one; did you know she had red hair?”
“She didn’t by the time that we saw her. But she was middle-aged by then. And mostly gray.”
“She had red hair in 1969,” John Jackman said. “Anyway, she brought Julianne in and stuck with her all the time she was sick and then just as Julianne was getting better, Patsy got sick herself. They put her in a hospital bed and filled her full of rehydration therapy stuff, but it didn’t do any good. She never got any better. And one day she just died.”
“Of dysentery.”
“Right. I don’t think that was a well-hidden murder, Gregor. Dysentery is pretty distinctive stuff. I couldn’t begin to imagine how someone would bring on a fake attack of it in someone else. And it takes time. It’s not like poison. It goes on for weeks sometimes before people die of it.”
“All right. What happened then?”
“Well, the next thing was, in arrived this other friend of theirs, who from the description sounds to me like Karla Parrish. She was at least well, which Julianne really wasn’t at that point. Parrish looked into making some arrangements about bringing the body back to the States for burial, but it couldn’t be done right then. There was a cholera outbreak at the time and the State Department was holding up the repatriation of bodies—isn’t that bizarre, that you have to repatriate a body?—anyway, they were holding that up for a few months in cases like Patsy MacLaren’s, cases where there had been disease, because they didn’t want to risk causing a cholera outbreak here. So—”
“Did they repatriate the body at all?” Gregor asked. “Did they bury her in India?”
“Just relax, will you?” John Jackman said. “They buried the body there. They had to, I think. Refrigeration was expensive.”
“Patsy MacLaren was rich.”
“Patsy MacLaren was only sort of rich,” John Jackman corrected Gregor. “Anyway, the person I think was Karla Parrish went off and got all the forms to fill out for the United States Embassy and all those people, reporting the death of an American citizen abroad, and she made a bunch of arrangements with the funeral parlors and the caretaker of a Christian cemetery and that kind of thing. And then she gave them all to Julianne Corbett.”
“And then?”
“And then they had the funeral, a very small funeral with just the two of them in attendance, and the person I think was Karla Parrish left for Africa.”
“Did you talk to the person who conducted the funeral?”
“No,” John said, “but I talked to the priest who’s taken his place since and he went through his files and found me what I needed. He even faxed a copy of the death certificate and the paperwork they keep on Catholic burials. Somebody named Patricia MacLaren was definitely buried in a Catholic cemetery in New Delhi in that year.”
“What about the consulate and the embassy and all those people?”
John Jackman smiled. “Well, there, Gregor, you’ve got a few problems. Remember all those
papers I was telling you about? The ones Karla Parrish got?”
“I remember.”
“Well, Gregor, not one of them was ever filed. Not one. There isn’t any record in the embassy in New Delhi at all of there ever having been a Patsy MacLaren in India, never mind a Patsy MacLaren who died in India. Of course, the embassy doesn’t always know all the Americans who are on hand in a foreign country.”
“This isn’t the Soviet Union,” Gregor said mildly. “And in the event of it, even the Soviet Union seems not to have been the Soviet Union.”
“But they do usually get record of a death. I thought I was really onto something, but the woman I talked to at the embassy shrugged the whole thing off. She said it wasn’t unusual for deaths not to be formally reported to them, especially when the American in question was being buried abroad. And she pointed out that we were dealing with a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears college girls here. They might have thought they had reported the death to the embassy at the time that they inquired about shipping the body back to the States. If you see what I mean.”
“I see what you mean. Patsy MacLaren was buried and nobody notified anybody back here.”
“That’s it.”
“Karla Parrish went to Africa.”
“If that’s who that was, yes. If Karla Parrish ever wakes up, we can ask her.”
“What happened to Julianne Corbett?”
“She came back to the States. She took another Pan Am flight. She went back to Bethlehem and stayed with her family for a while, but it didn’t work out. It seldom does when a working-class girl like that has been off at a place like Vassar. She applied to graduate programs at Penn and came up to Philadelphia to enter one.”
“And at the same time, Patsy MacLaren—who was supposed to be dead but who wasn’t dead—Patsy MacLaren was also taking courses toward a degree at the University of Pennsylvania.”
“No,” John Jackman said.
Gregor raised his eyebrows. “No?”
“We checked all that with the university,” John Jackman said. “The woman who ever afterward called herself Patsy MacLaren did tell people that she was in a graduate program at Penn at the time she met her husband. She certainly told her trust officers that. For all I know, she told Stephen Willis that. But she was never really registered.”
“The money for her tuition was paid directly out of the trust to her?” Gregor asked.
“According to the lawyer, it was paid directly to the university when they submitted a tuition bill, but I checked that out, Gregor. That was easy. All whoever this was had to do was wait till the end of the first week of classes, formally withdraw, and pick up the money at the cashier’s office. No questions asked.”
“Which is what Patsy MacLaren did.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you know what she did with the money?”
“No,” John Jackman said. “I don’t.”
“Do you know what she did with herself?”
“No.”
“Do you know where she might have lived?”
“I don’t think she lived anywhere, Gregor. I don’t think she existed except for the purpose of getting money out of that trust fund. It’s too bad she wasn’t just a little richer than she was.”
“Why?”
“Because with really big estates, trusteeships are a personal thing. Trustees know the people they’re handling the money for. I sent a guy over to that bank; there wasn’t a person in it who had ever met Patsy MacLaren, dead or alive, ever. There were a couple of people who knew her father. That was it.”
“Is there any money left?”
“No,” John Jackman said. “There was never all that much money, just enough to get Patsy through college and graduate school and a couple of years of hacking around. She spent it and the bank stopped worrying about her.”
“So the money Patsy MacLaren took out of her checking account on the day she blew up her car wasn’t money from her trust fund,” Gregor Demarkian said.
“It was Stephen Willis’s money,” John Jackman said emphatically. “I’ve got the paper on that stuff too, if you want to look at it. As far as I can tell, Patsy MacLaren had been bleeding her husband dry for years.”
“And doing what with the money?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t know that either,” John Jackman said. “Spending it, I suppose. Maybe she’s got it with her now, wherever she is. Maybe that was the whole point. Marry the man, bleed him dry, kill him, and take off. Shazam.”
Gregor looked skeptical. “Most people don’t wait twenty-five years before they kill him and take off. She must have decided it was worth it to stay married to him at least part of that time.”
“I know. Why did she marry him at all? This can’t be the real Patsy MacLaren, can it? Somebody did die of dysentery in India.”
“Somebody definitely did die,” Gregor said. “No, no. You have to assume the obvious here. The point of keeping a fictional Patsy MacLaren alive, at least at that point, had to be to drain the rest of what was in her trust fund. The interesting point here is that this fictional Patsy MacLaren stayed alive. For twenty-odd years.”
“Over twenty-five,” John Jackman said.
“The question becomes, why be Patsy MacLaren at all, when you’re married to Stephen Willis? Why not marry Stephen Willis as yourself? Why the deception?”
“Maybe we’re talking about bigamy here. Maybe this lady was married to somebody else. Maybe she had a husband or a boyfriend who beat her up, and she was looking for a new identity and she got one. Just like that.”
“No,” Gregor Demarkian said.
John Jackman raised his eyebrows. Linda Melajian had come back to the table with a tray full of plates and cups and knives and forks and spoons and the full pot of coffee too. She set the crockery and stainless steel dinnerware out on the table, bustling a little too much around John Jackman as she did it.
“Gregor’s going to have one of his awful cholesterol specials,” Linda said to John. “Do you want something actually healthy? Fruit? Oat bran? I’ve got really wonderful whole wheat muffins.”
“Pancakes,” John Jackman said. “With butter and syrup and a side of breakfast sausage.”
“Try the hash browns,” Gregor said. “Linda’s mother makes wonderful hash browns.”
“Hash browns,” John Jackman said. “That sounds wonderful. Get me some of those.”
Linda Melajian poured them both cups of coffee and left, looking disgusted. John Jackman poured a stream of half-and-half into his and then doused it with sugar. This was one of the things he had in common with Bennis. Bennis liked a lot of sugar in her coffee too. It was really too bad that the two of them didn’t get along better than they did, Gregor thought. It was really too bad that circumstances so often intervened between people in real life.
Gregor cleared his throat. “So,” he said. “We’ve got work to do today. I want to go to the hospital.”
“I know you do. So do I. I go to the hospital every day.”
“I want to check a few more records.”
“Check away. My people are already ready to kill you over what we’ve checked so far, Gregor. I lost a secretary over one of those printouts. She was threatening to go to work for one of those companies that’s just had an oil spill.”
“These are simpler records,” Gregor promised. “You’ve got to remember: You don’t, at this point, have to prove that Patsy MacLaren murdered Stephen Willis. You already know that.”
“I know. If we couldn’t get that one through court, we’d be even more incompetent than the mystery books make us out to be.”
“What you don’t realize is, you don’t even have to prove who set those bombs. Although the bombs are an interesting point. They’re the key to this whole thing. Why bother with the bombs?”
“I don’t think I want to work through these puzzles anymore, Gregor. I just want to get on with it. Can you get on with it?”
“Sure. Make sure you’ve got a guard at Karla
Parrish’s room at all times for the foreseeable future, all right?”
“She’s unconscious, Gregor.”
“She could wake up at any time. It might be a good idea if you got somebody in there who looks like a nurse but isn’t one. It might be a good idea if that person was on the job when we went in there this morning to visit. If you see what I mean.”
“You’re sure it’s necessary?”
“No,” Gregor said, “but I think it might be necessary. Although I have to admit it, I can’t see Patsy MacLaren blowing the hell out of a hospital room. That just doesn’t fit.”
“I don’t see why,” John Jackman said gloomily. “She’s blown the hell out of everything else.”
“Well,” Gregor told him, “there are limits. Just try to remember what it is we’re doing at the moment. We’re not trying to prove Patsy MacLaren guilty of murder. You can do that later. What we have to do right now is to prove that Patsy MacLaren exists. Period.”
“That she didn’t die in India,” John Jackman said wearily. “That they didn’t bury her in a Catholic cemetery in New Delhi. That not one but dozens of people are lying to us, from a congresswoman to the staff of the Indian hospital to the Catholic priest at the cemetery—”
“No, no,” Gregor said. “Relax, will you please? If we had to prove all that, we’d be doomed. Eat your breakfast and then come with me. I want to go out to Fox Run Hill for a moment. Can you arrange that with Dan Exter?”
“Sure.”
“Then I want to go into the hospital and see Karla Parrish. I want to talk to Evan Walsh. Then I want to go across town and talk to Julianne Corbett. Really. We’re going to have a very full day. Eat your breakfast.”
