by Jane Haddam
Gregor didn’t comment on the man’s use of the word “discretion”—which, in its obviousness, was even worse than the “secret” door. He just went through into the back room and let the man come in behind him. The room was smaller than the dining room outside and had nothing in it but booths, each fitted into the wall behind heavy velvet curtains that could be drawn on shiny corded ropes. All of these curtains were now open, and all the booths but one were empty. A tall man, not Jimmy Card, stood up in the one occupied booth and then slid out into the room. A second later, Jimmy Card followed him, as if he’d been waiting for the signal that would tell him nobody was coming in he didn’t want to see.
“Very good,” the man in the tails said. “I’ll send your waiter in a moment. I hope you have an enjoyable meal, gentlemen.”
They all murmured incoherent things, and the man in tails bobbed solemnly and “withdrew,” walking backward all the way until he reached the “secret” door, as if he were dealing with royalty and in a distinctly outdated fashion.
Gregor waited until the door was firmly shut and they were alone and then said, “When I was in the army, I went to a place like this in New Orleans. Rich men would bring high-class call girls there for dinner, and they’d have the curtains so that they’d be safely out of sight if their wives came looking for them.”
“Ha,” Jimmy Card said.
“Why didn’t the wives just draw back the curtains?” the tall man said.
“Maybe they did. Or maybe they just had sense enough to stay home. I never saw a run-in with a wife.” Gregor looked Jimmy Card up and down, but he looked no different in person than he did on television: a short, dark, trim man just beginning to flesh out with middle age, the kind of man who worked out to stay in shape, but didn’t work out enough to stay in perfect shape. For some reason, Gregor found that comforting.
“I’m Gregor Demarkian,” he said.
“We recognized you from People,” the tall man said. “Or at least, I did—”
“Of course I recognized him,” Jimmy Card said. “What do you take me for?”
“You say you never read People,” the tall man said.
“I watch the news. I read the papers. Give me a break.”
“I’m Bob Haverton,” the tall man said. “I’m Jimmy’s lawyer. It used to be a full-time job.”
“Used to be?” Gregor said.
“Bob’s of the opinion that Liz has mellowed me out,” Jimmy Card said. “I keep telling him he’s got it backward. It’s not that Liz mellowed me out. It’s that I mellowed out and that got me together with Liz.”
“At least she isn’t likely to try to use the divorce courts to turn you into a financial basket case. Jimmy used to have that short ethnic guy’s insecurity thing with women. He could only marry tall upper-middle-class WASP blondes. He just couldn’t get it through his head that they always marry for money.”
“Oh,” Gregor said.
“You’re going to make Mr. Demarkian think you’re a bigot,” Jimmy said.
“I’m a realist,” Bob Haverton said. “My own sister is a tall upper-middle-class WASP blonde, although hardly in the same league with either of Jimmy’s wives. One of the perks of being a pop star is that you get to marry the kind of women who show up on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. And Jimmy did. Twice.”
“Right now, I’d like to marry a short brunette,” Jimmy said, “except that she keeps saying no and now she’s trying to go off and commit suicide, which is why we’re here. We do have a reason why we’re here. Maybe we should all sit down and discuss it.”
“Maybe we should find another restaurant,” Bob said. “You know the food in this place is going to be god-awful.”
“If we find another restaurant, we’ll be photographed,” Jimmy said. He looked around. The room really was awful. The food really would probably be worse. “At least let’s sit down and discuss this and see if we can come to some kind of arrangement. It will all come out eventually. I’m just hoping to give Mr. Demarkian a head start. Sit.”
“The only way you could give me a head start is to put me in a time machine and send me back thirty-two years,” Gregor said, sliding into the booth anyway. “Before we do anything at all, Mr. Card, I need to stress that. The possibility that you can actually solve a case that’s over thirty years in the past is virtually nil. It’s been done, but it takes luck, and you can’t plan for luck.”
“I know,” Jimmy Card said. He looked at the ceiling, and at the table, and at the palms of his hands. The light around him seemed to shift, and for a moment he looked like what he would look like in another twenty years, when the hope was gone. The effect was faintly shocking, and it made Gregor far more sympathetic to him than any appeal he might make could have done. Most “celebrities” managed to keep from looking old, not only through diet and exercise and plastic surgery, but through arrogance as well. You didn’t get old when you still believed that you would live forever.
“So,” Gregor said. “If you still want to go through with this, even if you know it’s probably going to fail, I’ll be happy to help you out, for Bennis’s sake, if for no other reason. But I feel dishonest doing it.”
Jimmy Card and Bob Haverton looked at each other. Bob Haverton drew in a deep breath and said, “There are other considerations here, besides finding out who killed Michael Houseman. If you manage to find out who committed the murder, we’ll be ecstatic. But what we really need for you to do is to find out something else—”
“Not find out,” Jimmy said. “We already know.”
“Find the proof of something else,” Bob amended. “So, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to lay this whole thing out for you from the beginning, and then you can tell us what you think.”
3
They waited until they could order, and they each seemed to be intent on ordering as little as possible. The menu was a horror of pretentiousness that included things like “sea bass en croute” and “crepes Madeleine,” both described in flourishes that made the restaurant critic for Gourmet magazine sound like Ernest Hemingway. It was, Gregor thought at one point, the Banana Republic catalogue of restaurant menus. Every offering had a story, and every story had a wry, whimsical, pixie-sophisticated tone to it, like the brightest kid without ambition in an Ivy League freshman class. He asked for something he hoped would turn out to be a steak, and Perrier, because it was obviously going to be impossible to get something as simple as a glass of ginger ale. They did have Diet Coke on the menu, but Gregor never drank Diet Coke. He couldn’t imagine asking for a Cafe’ Creme Virginite, which seemed to be a Kahlua and cream made without Kahlua. The other two men asked for salads, with dressing on the side, probably the safest thing, under the circumstances. If they couldn’t cook it, they couldn’t ruin it.
They all waited, talking about nothing, until the food was served. Gregor’s lunch turned out to have something to do with steak, but only vaguely, as it was covered in grapes and a thick brown sauce that reminded him of the stuff that came with Egg Foo Yung. He ignored it in favor of the green beans, which had nothing more complicated on them than almond slivers and melted butter.
“I warned you,” Jimmy Card said.
“I’m not in the habit of eating at restaurants in central Philadelphia,” Gregor told him.
Bob Haverton picked up his attache’ case, laid it on the clear end of the table, and snapped it open. He had his initials on it in polished brass, and the brass sparkled in the light.
“I’ve had our people put together as complete a dossier on this case as it’s possible to get,” he said. “It is, as you’ve pointed out, over thirty years in the past, but the records are still available, not only police records but newspaper files, the file from the Parks and Recreation Service, a couple of articles that ran in the true crime magazines. It’s not as good as being there at the time, I admit, but it’s something to go on. Would you like to see?”
Gregor took the thick stack of papers Haverton was handin
g out to him and put it down next to his plate. “I can keep these?”
“If you take the case, yes. I’ve got copies.”
“Have you read them?”
“We both have,” Jimmy Card said. “I’ve read them over and over again. I think, from what Liz told me, well, I hadn’t expected—”
Bob Haverton cleared his throat. “Liz told him they locked her in an outhouse with some snakes. She didn’t tell him that she’d had a phobic reaction and beaten herself bloody on the outhouse door, trying to get out.”
“Beat herself bloody and practically unconscious,” Jimmy said. He gestured at the papers. “It’s all in there. When they found her, the skin was flailed off her arms and the sides of her hands and she just fell out onto the ground at this police officer’s feet. There were still snakes in the outhouse, two or three. She—”
“She really is phobic,” Bob Haverton said. “Genuinely. She can’t be in the room with a picture of one, and we found school records going back to kindergarten of her panicking when there was one on the playground, having complete screaming fits—”
“So,” Gregor said. “All the people she knew, knew she was afraid of snakes? And one of these people locked her into an outhouse and put snakes in there with her?”
“Right,” Jimmy said. “A lot of them, according to Liz. But the thing is, with Liz and snakes, a lot could mean only three. And she really doesn’t know how many.”
“What was the point?” Gregor asked. “Were they trying to kill her? People have died of shock from phobic reactions.”
“I doubt they were actually trying to kill her,” Jimmy said. “They were all, what? Eighteen. Seventeen. And this was 1969. And it wasn’t the first time.”
“It wasn’t the first time they’d locked her in an outhouse with a lot of snakes?” Gregor’s eyebrows raised.
“Liz,” Bob Haverton said carefully, “was not exactly popular in high school. Or in elementary school. As far as we can make out, she was one of those kids who’s sort of like a target, the one all the other kids pick on. It had been going on for years. And some of the incidents were pretty damned nasty. They took all her clothes while she was showering after gym once. They told her they wanted to meet her at this place they all went to—”
“The White Horse,” Jimmy said. “It was a bar. The kind of place you could go drinking and not get carded.”
“Right.” Bob nodded. “Anyway, they told her they wanted to meet her there and then they took off for a different place in a different town and left her stranded so that she had to walk home, in the dark, or call her parents and tell them where she was. She walked home. Jimmied her locker and took all her books. Spray-painted ‘big wet turd’ in red on the back of her best black sweater during an assembly and then laughed at it all day—”
“And this was everybody in the whole school?” Gregor asked. “Nobody told her about the spray paint?”
“A teacher did, eventually,” Jimmy said. “But you know, I’ve seen it happen, mostly with girls. Boys get cut a lot more slack. But some girls are just—I mean, even the teachers can’t stand them, they’re just—”
“Targets,” said Bob Haverton wryly. “I’ve had a better education than Jimmy did. I actually went to college, instead of just hauling ass to New York City to make my fortune. You can tell by our bank accounts who made the wiser choice.”
“It was only Adelphi,” Jimmy said.
“It was Yale Law. My point, however, is that I’ve read Lord of the Flies a few times. And that’s what this was, as far as I can make out. Lord of the Flies on a somewhat attenuated scale. Although, considering the thing with the outhouse and the snakes, it’s probably just as well that she was getting out for college the following fall.”
“I think that’s part of what did it,” Jimmy said. “Drew them over the edge, I mean, into doing something that could have been dangerous. Because she got into a good college and that just made them madder.”
“Back up,” Gregor said. “This was when—the day it happened?”
“July twenty-third, 1969,” Bob Haverton said.
“And what time of day?”
“Early evening,” Jimmy said. “A lot of them worked, you know, and when they got off work they’d go to this park where there was a lake for swimming and a lifeguard. And the park had woods around it and this set of outhouses—”
“Set?”
“I think it said four stalls in a row,” Bob Haverton said.
“Okay,” Gregor said. “It was early evening, and people went to this park, including Ms. Toliver. Was she getting off work, too?”
“No,” Jimmy said. “Her father was this hotshot lawyer. She was taking the summer off. She used to go to the park in the daytime when pretty much everybody she knew was working, and then she’d leave as they started to drift in.”
“But this evening she stayed?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t think so,” Jimmy said. “I think she was going to leave the same as always, but then things happened. One of them called her over and told her they needed her to see something, and I suppose she should have known better by then, I mean, for God’s sake, it had been going on long enough, but she went to look. And that’s when they pushed her into the outhouse and locked the door.”
“To be specific,” Bob Haverton said, “they nailed it shut.”
“What?” Gregor said, bolt upright. “They nailed it shut?”
“That’s what I said.” For the first time, Haverton looked thoroughly disgusted. “I know adolescents can be evil, but this was a bunch of sociopaths, if you ask me. They gathered a bunch of snakes, granted small black snakes, perfectly harmless—”
“—except to somebody like Liz,” Jimmy said.
“Except to somebody like Liz,” Haverton agreed. “Anyway, they put them in there, and then one of them, Maris Coleman, called her over and asked her to look inside, I don’t remember what the pretext was—”
“He can ask Liz himself when he gets to Hollman,” Jimmy said.
“—and when she looked in the rest of them rushed up from out of the bushes where they’d been hiding and pushed her in. Then they slammed the door and nailed it shut. She says she was screaming the whole time, and I believe her. I’ve seen her around snakes.”
Gregor considered all this. “Most of them were hiding. How many of them is most of them?
“Six,” Jimmy said. “Maris Coleman, Belinda Hart, Emma Kenyon, Nancy Quayde, Chris Inglerod, and Peggy Smith.”
“We don’t actually know that all of them were there, or that all of them were involved,” Haverton said, “but that was the group of them and they were together later, when the body was found, along with a couple of other people who were not ordinarily part of their circle. Liz says she heard them laughing while they nailed up the door.”
“And Ms. Toliver was screaming all the time?” Gregor said. “Why didn’t somebody else hear her?”
“There may not have been anybody to hear her,” Haverton said. “The lifeguards go off at five. They left promptly. This might have been fifteen or twenty minutes later.”
“What about the other people in the park?” Gregor said. “Surely, there were other people in the park. This boy, the one who died, Michael Houseman—”
“He was sort of part of the same crowd,” Jimmy said. “He dated one of the girls, or something like that. I’m not exactly clear on that. And yes, later, there were a few other people in the park. When the body was found there were maybe fifteen people present, at the bank of a small river that runs through the place—”
“And those people should have been able to hear Elizabeth Toliver scream?” Gregor asked.
“Yes,” Jimmy said.
“And they didn’t investigate what was happening? They didn’t try to help her? Or did they? Did somebody go try to release her?”
“The cops released her when they came to look at the body,” Jimmy said. “They heard her screaming and they went to see what was up. It’s in the polic
e reports.”
“So you’re saying that she stayed in this outhouse, screaming her head off, for—how long?”
“At least an hour,” Bob Haverton said.
“An hour. While screaming her head off within hearing range of two dozen people. And nobody went to help her. Nobody went to see what was wrong with her. Nobody paid any attention at all.”
“I told you it was like Lord of the Flies,” Haverton said.
“It’s more like Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Hasn’t it occurred to any of you, hasn’t it occurred to her, that this makes absolutely no sense? People don’t behave this way, not even in groups. Lord of the Flies had a hero. Put that many people into one place and at least one of them should go see what’s wrong and try to do something about it. Instead, they did what? Wandered around the park? Had a campfire? What?”
“Chris Inglerod and Peggy Smith said they went swimming,” Jimmy said. “Maris Coleman says—said—whatever.”
“She told the police that she went with Belinda Hart to the lake to sit by the water. She says now that she and Belinda took a walk by the river.”
“You’ve talked to her recently,” Gregor said.
“I talk to her every day,” Jimmy said. “Much as I’d prefer not to. She works for Liz.”
“Works for her?” Gregor blinked.
“She’s some kind of personal assistant,” Jimmy said. “Liz hired her when she got fired a few years ago. When Maris got fired, that is. For the third time. In two years. Don’t get me started. She’s going down to Hollman with Liz. You’ll meet her yourself, if you decide to do this for us.”
“That’s what we meant about there being something else to this than finding the person who murdered Michael Houseman,” Bob Haverton said. “We’re both—Jimmy and I are both—convinced that it’s Maris Coleman who’s been feeding those stories to the supermarket tabloids. In fact, we don’t see who else it could be. We just need you to prove it.”
