by Jane Haddam
Gregor reached into his jacket and brought out a little stack of clipped photographs. He had gone at the Vassar College yearbooks with a pair of scissors for hours the night before. He put one photograph on the desk and tapped it with his index finger.
“This,” he said, “is the real Patsy MacLaren. She was five feet eight inches tall. She had very red hair, very blue eyes, and very white skin. She also had freckles.”
“I remember Patsy MacLaren,” Julianne put in harshly. “I knew her for years. I buried her. I told you.”
“Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “You quite definitely buried her. In New Delhi. In 1969. I checked.” He put another photograph down on the desk. “This is the Patsy MacLaren who murdered her husband a couple of weeks ago. The matron of Fox Run Hill. She was five feet four inches tall. She had slightly olive skin. She was on the sturdy and stocky side.”
“I don’t see why that has anything to do with me,” Julianne Corbett said. “That doesn’t look anything at all like me.”
“It doesn’t look anything at all like you look now,” Gregor conceded, “but nothing looks like you now. You wear too much makeup.”
“I’ve always worn this makeup. You can check. I wore it in graduate school. I wore it when I worked in state government.” Julianne waved her hands at the newspaper photograph of Patsy MacLaren Willis. “I’ve never in my life gone around looking like that.”
“You did at Vassar,” Gregor said. He went through his photographs again and came out with one that was longer and taller than the others. It was the photograph of six girls standing in a too-formal, too-impersonal-looking living room, the common room for a dormitory somewhere. One of these girls was clearly the Patsy MacLaren of the first photograph. Her willowy delicacy was unmistakable. One of the others was what Gregor would have recognized anywhere as a younger version of Liza Verity. Liza Verity hadn’t changed much in growing older except to get a little thicker and a little grayer. Karla Parrish hadn’t changed at all. Gregor pointed at a fourth figure.
“There,” he said, “is what Patsy MacLaren Willis looks like. That woman there.”
“And you think that woman is me,” Julianne Corbett said.
“I know that woman is you. I can check this picture against the official picture in the senior section of the yearbook, but I know it’s you.”
“You can’t check it,” Julianne said. “I didn’t have a picture in the senior section of the yearbook. It cost money and I couldn’t afford it.”
“I’m surprised your friend Patsy MacLaren didn’t offer to pay for one. From everything I’ve managed to dig up about her, it sounds like the kind of thing she would have done.”
“It was the kind of thing she would have done,” Julianne Corbett agreed. “But I wouldn’t have let her. I wouldn’t have let anybody. I wasn’t built like that.”
“All right.”
Julianne Corbett shifted a little in her chair. “If you think you’re going to make this one of your grand murder plots, give it up,” she said. “I didn’t kill Patsy MacLaren. I didn’t even want Patsy MacLaren to die. She died of dysentery.”
“I know.”
“It was terrible, really.” Julianne Corbett shook her head. “It was all Patsy’s idea to go to India and Pakistan and places like that. I wanted to go to Europe. But Patsy had been to Europe. She thought it was too bourgeois. She wanted to seek enlightenment.”
“Did she find it?” Gregor asked.
Julianne laughed. “She didn’t find anything. Neither of us did. Practically the first thing that happened to us in Pakistan is that our packs got stolen, and Patsy had to wire home for money. Money for both of us, of course. I didn’t have anyplace to get money. And it was all awful. Really awful. Everything was dirty and everyone was poor. And we had so little cash we kept eating from the stalls and the stalls weren’t safe. Not for people like us. Not for people who had never been exposed to those kinds of germs.”
“So Patsy got sick.”
“We both got sick,” Julianne corrected Gregor. “I got sicker.”
“And Karla came to try to help out,” Gregor said.
Julianne got up and walked to her office window. Rain was being blown in gusts against the glass.
“Karla was taking photographs,” she said, “and she came to see us by a kind of prearrangement, except that instead of being in the hotel we were supposed to be in, we were at the hospital, and Patsy was dying. So Karla tried to do all the practical things. I’m usually very good at practical things, but I wasn’t that time. I was sick.”
“You didn’t tell the embassy that Patsy had died.”
Julianne turned away from the window. “Patsy MacLaren was a friend of mine,” she said positively. “I didn’t kill Patsy MacLaren.”
“I never said you did.”
“Then what did you say?”
“I said you became Patsy MacLaren,” Gregor said gently. “Not all the time, not every minute of every day, but when you needed to. You called yourself Patsy MacLaren when you dealt with the trustees who handled Patsy’s money, so that you could use that to put yourself through graduate school.”
“I worked when I was in graduate school,” Julianne Corbett said quickly. “I had two fellowships.”
“I’m sure you did. It was probably a very good thing, because Patsy MacLaren didn’t have all that much money, and what was being spent was the principal. You used the principal. And you used Patsy MacLaren’s name when you started seeing Stephen Willis.”
“But why would I? Why would I?”
“I don’t know for certain,” Gregor said, “but what I guess is, Stephen Willis was a kind of insurance policy. You were ambitious even then, but you weren’t sure that you would be able to realize your ambitions. And you didn’t want to go back to being what you had been before you went to Vassar. So you did what a lot of poor girls have done. You married a man on his way up.”
“I could have done that under my own name,” Julianne Corbett said. “I could just have married Stephen Willis and gone on being Julianne Corbett.”
“I don’t think it would have suited you. I don’t think it would have given you enough latitude to do the things you wanted to do.”
“I don’t see how I could possibly have had any latitude, as you put it, at all,” Julianne said. “Marriage is not usually a liberating institution, you know, Mr. Demarkian. Husbands tend to like to know where their wives are and what they’re doing.”
“Your husband was on the road,” Gregor pointed out. “Stephen Willis traveled in great six-week blocks of time several times a year. In fact, he was away most of the time.”
“And while he was away I was running around pretending to be myself,” Julianne said.
“That, and siphoning off his money. It’s expensive to get places in politics these days. It’s expensive to get anyplace at all in any business at all. I think Stephen Willis’s money came in very handy.”
“And you think he just sat still for it.”
“I think you were very good at hiding it, and would have gone on being very good at hiding it right up until the conditions of Stephen Willis’s job changed. That’s what had happened right before Stephen Willis died. He finally got something he was looking to get for a long time. He finally got assigned to a stationary job where he wouldn’t have to travel. At that point you had to get rid of him. Practically everything you have now is dependent on nobody ever finding out that you have spent the last twenty-five years being two people.”
“And so I killed him.”
“That’s right.”
“And then I blew up a Volvo station wagon with a pipe bomb.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?” Julianne Corbett demanded. “Why make all that fuss? Why call attention to myself?”
“But you weren’t calling attention to yourself,” Gregor said. “You were calling attention to Patsy MacLaren. And Patsy MacLaren was about to disappear. For good.”
“But she didn’t disappear
for good,” Julianne Corbett pointed out. “At least according to the papers, she’s been all over everywhere, setting off pipe bombs, causing havoc. I’m disappointed, Mr. Demarkian. I’d think you’d know I was more intelligent than that. If I’d wanted to kill—who? That poor woman with her antifur slogan button?”
“Karla Parrish,” Gregor said. “Also Liza Verity. The two people anywhere around who might be able to identify the photograph of Patsy MacLaren Willis for who it was. Karla Parrish was more of a danger to you than Liza Verity. You’d seen quite a bit of Liza Verity over the last few years. She was used to seeing you in a ton of makeup. She was used to thinking of you as a woman wearing a ton of makeup. That photograph of Patsy MacLaren Willis bothered her when she saw it, but she couldn’t tell right away why. The last time Karla Parrish saw you, you didn’t have a dab of foundation on your face. She knew who that photograph of Patsy MacLaren Willis reminded her of right off.”
“And so I blew her up with a pipe bomb,” Julianne said sarcastically. “I put the bomb under a table at a reception I was giving and just let it go off. I killed some woman I didn’t even know. What I read in the papers was that Stephen Willis was killed with a gun. If I wanted to kill Karla Parrish, why didn’t I just shoot her?”
“Because you couldn’t get hold of a gun,” Gregor said. “I think that if you’d realized what kind of trouble you were going to be in after the death of Stephen Willis, you would have kept the gun you had. Instead, you left it at the side of the bed where Stephen Willis died, wiped clean of prints. That way, nobody could trace it to you, nobody could see it on you, there was no way you could be caught trying to dispose of it. It was disposed of. The pipe bomb in the car made a big fuss that obscured the whole mess and made it look more mysterious than it necessarily was. And you were back in your office by midafternoon, with the last fifteen thousand dollars from Patsy MacLaren’s bank account and your makeup in place. But you couldn’t get another gun, Ms. Corbett. You’re not just anybody anymore. You’re a member of the United States Congress. It would have been much too risky.”
Julianne Corbett walked away from the window and back to her desk. She sat down behind the green felt blotter and put the palms of her hands down flat against the wood on either side of it. Her skin color was back to something like normal again. At least, Gregor couldn’t find any skin color under the mask of makeup. He couldn’t find anything at all in Julianne Corbett’s eyes.
“I think,” she said, “that this is all extremely interesting. I think you could probably sell it as a novel. But I don’t think I have to take it seriously.”
“I have to take it seriously,” John Jackman said, suddenly reminding them both of his presence. “Gregor, for Christ’s sake. Have you got any proof of any of this?”
“Of course he hasn’t,” Julianne Corbett said. “He couldn’t possibly have. All of this is nonsense.”
“It sounds like nonsense,” John Jackman said.
Gregor Demarkian was nodding his head slowly, slowly. Outside, the storm was growing stronger and nastier. The wind had begun to whistle and howl and rattle the windows. The sky was absolutely black.
“There are a number of ways to prove what I’ve been saying,” Gregor said, “starting with a very simple trace of the amounts of money Patsy MacLaren Willis contributed to your political campaigns.”
“We already know she contributed to my political campaigns,” Julianne said coldly. “We knew that even before Karla got hurt in that blast.”
“We could also look into the days and times when Stephen Willis was home from his traveling and correlate them with the days and times when you were unavailable for work or meetings.”
“I’m always available for work and meetings,” Julianne said. “I have to be. I don’t know how it is you think people get into the position I’m in, Mr. Demarkian, but it isn’t by taking out great whacking blocks of time to mollify phantom husbands.”
“And then there’s the trump card,” Gregor said. “There’s the simple fact that Karla Parrish is now very much awake and very eager to talk. And her friend Evan Walsh has a few things he wants to say too.”
Gregor didn’t know what he expected Julianne Corbett to do then, but it wasn’t what she did do, which was essentially nothing. Everything in Gregor’s body had gone tense, expecting trouble. Julianne Corbett not only gave no trouble, she seemed to resign from existence.
She sat behind her desk with her hands still flat against the wood, looking as if she had been turned to stone.
EPILOGUE
Here Comes the Bride… There Goes the Neighborhood
1.
VERY EARLY ON THE morning of Donna Moradanyan’s wedding, Bennis Hannaford came up to Gregor Demarkian’s apartment, dressed in six yards of lace, smoking a cigarette, and ready to kill somebody. She used her key to get in. Gregor was really only half out of bed, with his thick red terry-cloth robe wrapped around his thin navy blue cotton pajamas and his slippers lost somewhere he couldn’t begin to guess. He was standing at the counter in the kitchen, trying to remember how to work the coffee machine. Bennis found him with a coffee filter in his hand, looking confused. She took it away from him and started to make coffee.
“He came in at twenty after ten last night,” she said, dumping black stuff into the filter. Gregor hated the way coffee looked when it was being made. The grounds. The black swampy slime. He turned away and took a seat at the kitchen table.
“I take it you’re talking about Peter,” he said.
“Of course I’m talking about Peter.” Bennis did something with water. It didn’t look to Gregor like the same thing he did with water when he tried to run that machine. “Anyway, Donna’s mother had gone home for the night or I don’t think there would have been a problem because really, Gregor, I think she would just have killed him, but she was gone, and it was just me and Donna, and Donna was acting like Donna, so here we are.”
“Where are we?” Gregor asked.
“What? Oh. I don’t know. Peter is sleeping on my couch. I have to give Donna that much. And Russ doesn’t know anything about this yet. But Tommy does. Tommy woke up last night.”
“And?”
Bennis stopped fiddling with the coffee machine and gave a little smile of satisfaction.
“And,” she said, “he didn’t even know who Peter was. It’s been that long. He didn’t know who Peter was and he didn’t like him much either. Which ought to have brought Donna to her senses if nothing else did.”
“Did it?”
Bennis sat down at the table. “I don’t know, Gregor. The best thing right now would be if Peter would just disappear, but I don’t think he will. He’s down there on my couch, sleeping away, and he wants to talk to Donna before the wedding. Which is bad news, Gregor, because I don’t know what Donna will do.”
“Donna is in love with Russ,” Gregor said.
“Of course she is.”
“And she’s not in love with Peter,” Gregor said. “In fact, the last I heard, she didn’t even like Peter much.”
“I know all that, Gregor.”
“Well then,” Gregor said. “I don’t see what the problem is. Donna is in love with Russ. Donna is not in love with Peter. Donna will not jeopardize her marriage to Russ in order to accommodate Peter.”
“Honestly.” Bennis stood up to go look at the coffee machine. “I don’t know how you got a reputation for being such a great detective. You don’t know a thing about human nature.”
2.
Bennis made coffee. Gregor drank it. Then Bennis went upstairs to see what was going on in Donna Moradanyan’s apartment, and Gregor sat at his kitchen table, thinking it through. Really, he thought, it was much easier to understand why people killed each other than to figure out why they did what they did for love. Or even sex. Gregor had settled the love and sex questions for himself by marrying Elizabeth and staying married to her. He had settled those same questions for himself since Elizabeth’s death mostly by staying out of the game en
tirely. He much preferred working on the motives of somebody like Julianne Corbett, who could at least be counted on to be logical.
Peter, Gregor assumed, was still downstairs in Bennis Hannaford’s apartment. Gregor got out of his kitchen chair and went out onto the landing. Above him, he could hear Bennis and Donna and Donna’s mother talking about lace and trains. The landing was strewn with silk flowers and satin ribbons. Gregor didn’t know if they were accidental overflow from the fourth floor or Donna’s latest attempts at decoration. He went down the stairs to the second floor and stood in front of Bennis’s door. He was going to knock, but it occurred to him that Bennis usually left her door unlocked, and there was no reason to let Peter Desarian know he was coming. He tried the doorknob and found that it turned. He pushed the door open and went inside.
Peter was in Bennis’s living room, stretched out on Bennis’s black leather couch, drinking coffee from a delicate china cup he had placed without a saucer on Bennis’s glass-topped coffee table. The china cup was from the set Bennis never used, the one that had belonged to her mother. Getting moisture rings on the glass-topped coffee table was one of the few sins Bennis wouldn’t allow in her house. Gregor had forgotten how startlingly handsome a man Peter Desarian was. It was not a handsomeness that photographed well. In photographs, Peter looked like just one more prep school boy who wasn’t ever going to be able to grow up.
One more prep school boy was all he was, Gregor reminded himself. One more prep school boy was all he was ever going to be. Gregor closed Bennis’s front door firmly and walked into the living room, determined to do he wasn’t sure what.
