Somebody Else's Music

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor looked down at the attache’ case he’d put on the seat beside him and wondered if he should be looking through the reports Kyle Borden had given him—but he’d looked those over once, and in spite of the fact that they were filled with the kind of details that were fundamentally necessary to any murder investigation, he already knew he was going to find them unsatisfactory. The more he knew about Michael Houseman, the more the boy bothered him, not because there was something wrong with him, but because there wasn’t. In Gregor’s experience, there were exactly two kinds of murders: the ones committed by psychopaths, for their own reasons, and the ones committed on the sort of people who had more enemies than hair follicles. Michael Houseman hadn’t had any enemies. He’d been a nice, upright, conscientiously honest boy with a few bad adolescent tendencies to get high on the weekends, a little too much of a straight arrow, a little too much of an Eagle Scout, but not so much of either that he had been perceived by his classmates as a prig. It was so trivial. There was a boy dead, and all the reasons Gregor could think of that somebody might have had to kill him were on the level of the motives in a Hardy Boys’ book. No wonder the police had written off the incident as the work of a stray tramp. At least that would make a certain kind of sense. The problem was, the solution didn’t quite fit the facts as he had read them so far, and especially the fact that those girls had been so close to that body so soon after Michael Houseman had died, or maybe even before he was all the way dead. Even tramps have to be somewhere, and come from somewhere. Why would one be wandering around a small park in the middle of nowhere instead of hanging around the train station? How would he have found the park to begin with? Gregor had spent ten years of his life tracking serial killers. He knew how they worked, and unless you wanted to say that the one who killed Michael Houseman had been an old resident of Hollman come back to haunt, it made no sense that he would be in that park, prowling around for what he couldn’t know would be there. Of course, an old resident wasn’t impossible. Hollman must have produced its share of drifters. Every small town did. Gregor was beginning to make himself dizzy. If he followed his instincts and rejected the idea of a tramp or a drifter or a serial killer, he was left with—what? Nothing. Not even something ridiculous, like an argument over who got to be voted Most Popular Boy or who got to date the captain of the cheerleading team.

  I’m beginning to sound like a Gidget movie, Gregor thought. Luis was turning the car off the road onto Elizabeth Toliver’s driveway, which seemed to be full of vehicles, as if she were having company. The front of the house was dark in the dusk, but as they came around to the big paved area in the back, Gregor could see lights on in the kitchen windows. Mark passed back and forth a few times. The car pulled closer to the garage and Gregor saw Jimmy Card appear suddenly in the window. He was holding a large glass full of something dark. Twenty years ago, it would have been a Manhattan. These days, it was probably a Diet Coke.

  “Oh, boy,” Gregor said, thinking it wouldn’t be long before every celebrity photographer in America knew that Jimmy Card was here and in a house with no security protection whatsoever—and no possibility of providing any, either. The Toliver house was what the Bureau would have called an “undefensible area.” It had no fences or gates, and it was surrounded on all sides by open land. Gregor grabbed his attache’ case, expecting Luis to pull up to the back door and let him out before parking the car in the garage, but Luis didn’t stop. He went straight across the asphalt to the garage and waited while the door pulled up automatically in front of him. If Gregor had been thinking clearly, he would have asked Luis to let him out right then. Instead, he found himself being pulled into the dark garage while security lights flicked on above his head. The garage was half full of things nobody had used for years and nobody would ever use again: an old rotary lawn mower, its long metal handles so thoroughly rusted they looked like sand; a stack of molded plastic garden chairs in black and pink; a pile of boxes marked “Betsy’s Books.” There were a lot of boxes. Elizabeth Toliver must have been a terrific reader as a child.

  Gregor got out of the car. The lights were still on, but the garage door had closed behind them, automatically, the way it had opened. He saw an ordinary door to one side, propped slightly open.

  “I’m going this way,” he said.

  Outside the high windows on the three garage doors, the sky was streaked with bright, hard pink the way it was right before real sunset. The leaves on all the trees nearby were drooping. Gregor let himself out. After the air-conditioned sterility of the car, the air out here was humid and sickly sweet. The house up ahead looked the way houses do in house magazine articles about how to make your house into a home. There was a path that curved around a long, low hedge that had been cropped as closely as it could be and still be left alive. He took that rather than striking out on the lawn, in case the Tolivers cared seriously about the way their grass looked.

  He was at the edge of the hedge, right before the lawn itself started, when he realized that something was wrong, and had been wrong, for a while. The sickly sweet smell was getting stronger. All of a sudden, it seemed to envelope him, the way skunk-smell did when a skunk was hit in the road. This was not the smell a skunk made. He knew this smell very well. He had had it around him more times than he liked to remember. He told himself that, in this case, it was most likely to be another dog, or a cat, or a woodchuck, another animal ritually slaughtered at Elizabeth Toliver’s altar, another prank.

  He looked down at his shoes and saw the snaking curve of something white against them. He was too aware of just how quiet it was. He couldn’t even hear Luis in the garage. No sound was coming from the house. He moved slowly to his right, around the end of the hedge, looking at the ground the whole time. He did not want to do any more damage than he had already done.

  I need a flashlight, he thought idly. The dark was descending at record speed. The snaking white thing trailed around the end of the hedge and back toward the bushes that flanked that side of the garage. There were dozens of bushes, all evergreen, so densely placed that there was no room for anything between them. Follow the yellow brick road, Gregor thought, moving carefully so as not to step on the white thing, not to disturb anything, not to cause any more trouble than he absolutely had to. If he had been one hundred percent certain, he would have gone straight into the house and called Kyle Borden and anybody Kyle could think of to use for reinforcements.

  A second later, Gregor was certain. The long white thing was an intestine, stretched out by some accident he couldn’t begin to determine, and on the end of it was a body, twisted and mauled as if it had been broken in half. Not Liz Toliver’s body, Gregor thought with relief. Then he wished desperately that cell phones worked in these mountains.

  It wasn’t Liz Toliver’s body, but it was the body of a woman, and she had been as thoroughly eviscerated as yesterday’s dog.

  PART TWO

  “Iris”

  —GOO GOO DOLLS

  “Mercedes Benz”

  —JANIS JOPLIN

  “Porcelain”

  —RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS

  ONE

  1

  Her name was Christine Allison Inglerod Barr. Liz Toliver recognized her on sight, in that short moment before Gregor realized she’d come up behind him. He’d just had time to push her away and into the arms of Jimmy Card when she vomited, a thick bulk of tan and pink spraying over the front of the man’s $2,000 sports jacket. For a moment, everything was totally insane—there was Liz, and Jimmy Card, and Mark, all of whom he knew, but there was also another woman, not the nurse, not the mother, a woman with good jewelry smelling just faintly of alcohol. Gregor’s primary thought was of the integrity of the crime scene. He kept trying to herd the whole group back toward the house and as far away from the body as possible. Jimmy Card didn’t look as if he’d noticed that he’d been thrown up on. The woman with the jewelry was smoking a cigarette. Cigarettes were a disaster at crime scenes. Around them, dark was falling very fas
t. It had to be seven o’clock. Only Mark DeAvecca and the woman with the jewelry seemed to be keeping their heads, and Gregor thought the woman with the jewelry might have other reasons for staying calm.

  “It’s Chris,” Liz Toliver kept saying. “I can’t believe it. It’s Chris.”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jimmy Card said. “How could this possibly have happened? I thought you were the great detective.”

  “Want me to call the police?” Mark said.

  “As fast as you can,” Gregor said. “Where’s your brother?”

  “With the bitch nurse and Grandma. Who’s a bitch, too. Did I tell you that?”

  “Call the police now. Swear like a college student later. Don’t let your brother out here to see this.”

  “Right.” Mark turned on his heel and headed back to the house, with the faintly contemptuous air adolescents have when they know they’re behaving more like an adult than any of the adults.

  Gregor turned his attention back to the group, now in the middle of the lawn, Liz and Jimmy huddled together, the woman with the jewelry just about to light another cigarette.

  “Did you drop your cigarette butt on the lawn?” Gregor asked her.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Jimmy said. “Who cares if she smokes at a time like this? I’d smoke if I still did it.”

  Gregor tried to explain, patiently: the nature of forensics; the importance at crime scenes of even small things like cigarette butts and stray hairs. Liz and Jimmy looked at him as if he had to be insane. The woman with the jewelry went on smoking.

  “Go back to the house,” Gregor said finally. “Just go back to the house and sit still until the police get here. You’re not doing any good where you are.”

  “You have to wonder why she didn’t come to the door and ring the bell,” the woman with the jewelry said.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Jimmy Card said again.

  Liz backed away from him. The vomit on his sports coat had rubbed off onto her sweater. They had been holding themselves against each other without thinking. She blinked at the mess and shook her head. For the first time since Gregor met her, she looked as old as she was supposed to be.

  “It wasn’t a stupid question,” she said carefully. “Maris is right. You do have to wonder why she didn’t come to the door and ring the bell.”

  “She didn’t do it because she was out here getting … getting …” Jimmy gave up.

  “It doesn’t make any sense that she was out here,” Liz insisted. “Why would she be off by the side of the drive? And how did she get here? There’s not—”

  “There is,” the woman with the jewelry said. Maris, Gregor told himself. “Her car’s down by the third bay. It’s hard to see because it’s dark. But it’s her car. I recognize it.”

  They all looked toward the other end of the driveway. There were, Gregor realized, several cars now in the parking area—his own, Liz Toliver’s Mercedes, a red Jaguar he assumed must belong to Jimmy Card, and the dark car Maris had pointed to, a Volvo station wagon, the sort of car that in most places belonged to doctors’ wives. Maris took a long drag on her cigarette and blew a stream of smoke into the air.

  “You’ve got to assume she came here to talk to Betsy,” Maris said. “So why didn’t she just come up and ring the bell? It’s just across there. She wasn’t very far.”

  “Whyever would she want to talk to me?” Liz said. “She never did talk to me much when we were growing up. Why would she come here?”

  “You were here all by yourself for an hour before any of the rest of us got here,” Maris said. “You must have seen her. You must have at least seen the car.”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jimmy said.

  Maris’s drag on the cigarette this time was very long, so long it seemed an illusion. “What I’m doing,” she said, overprecisely, “is injecting a little reality into these proceedings. In another hour, or less, there are going to be hundreds of people here, only some of them from the legitimate news agencies. Some of the others are going to be shilling for the Enquirer and the Star. And let me tell you what this is going to look like to them. The last time Betsy spent any time in this town, Michael Houseman got murdered. Now that she’s come back, Chris Inglerod has been murdered—”

  “You came back,” Jimmy said. “You’re back just as much as she is.”

  “But not for the first time,” Maris shot at him. “I’ve been back dozens of times before. I’ve been here to visit my parents. I’ve been here to visit friends. It’s Betsy who took off and never wanted to set foot in this place again. Which is odd in and of itself, if you think about it. Who does that? Everybody comes home from college on vacations.”

  “You,” Jimmy Card said, “are such an unbelievable, unmitigated bitch.”

  “Don’t look at me. I’m not the one who’s going to say this stuff. I’m not even the one who’s going to think it. But everybody else will. And Betsy knows why Chris would be coming here. Chris was going to invite her to something, a party. I told Betsy all about it at lunch—”

  “No,” Liz said. “What you said was—”

  “And there’s the simple fact that all this stuff is happening right in Betsy’s garage,” Maris said, triumphant. “Swear your head off, it won’t matter. This will be in every supermarket tabloid by the end of the week and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.”

  “What about you?” Jimmy said. “How did you get here? You don’t have a car.”

  “Nancy Quayde dropped me off when she got finished with school. Betsy was already here when we got here. Ask Nancy. Ask Betsy.”

  “I didn’t realize it was Nancy in the car,” Liz said.

  “She didn’t want to come in.” Maris looked up over her head. The night was dark enough now so that they should be able to see stars in the sky, but somebody—probably Mark—had turned out the security lights over the garage and the back porch door, and they couldn’t see anything but blackness. “You just don’t get it,” Maris said. “She wasn’t locked in an outhouse this time. She wasn’t beating herself bloody just because of a few stupid garden snakes. She was right here right now and nobody else was.”

  “Geoff was,” Liz said softly. “My mother was.”

  “Geoff is a child. Your mother is worse than a child. You’d have had a shot in hell if the nurse had been here, but she didn’t get back until after I did. Give it up. And then go back in the house and get clean. You’re both disgusting.”

  Maris turned her back on them and strode across the lawn toward the back door to the house, wobbling a little on city heels. For a while they all watched her go, even Gregor.

  “She never came to the door,” Liz said finally. “I hadn’t seen her in years. I hadn’t even thought about seeing her.” She looked down at the vomit smeared across the front of her sweater and on her arms. The sweater had short sleeves. She rubbed her hands against the sides of her slacks to clean them off and then rubbed her face, hard, as if she would never be able to rub it enough to wake herself up. “Well,” she said finally.

  “You need to fire her,” Jimmy Card said finally. “You need to do more than that. You need to get her out of your life. I mean, what the hell, Liz, if you don’t want to marry me, you don’t want to marry me, but there’s no point in letting that woman go on screwing you over. You’re not doing yourself or anybody else any good.”

  “She’s just—miserable, that’s all,” Liz said. “She’s just upset.”

  “She just tried to pin a murder on you. And not one that’s thirty years old, either.”

  Somewhere in the distance, there was the sound of sirens, more than one, meaning that Kyle Borden had taken Mark DeAvecca’s call seriously. They all looked up and blinked, as if they’d been awakened from a light sleep. Liz put her hand on the mess on Jimmy Card’s sports jacket and shook her head.

  “Maybe we should go inside and clean up,” she said.

  “Clean up but leave the clothes i
ntact,” Gregor told her. “Take them off, drop them in a plastic bag, put them aside for forensics. Take a shower and do what you have to do to make yourself feel better. A shot of brandy probably wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Jesus,” Jimmy said. “You really are going to treat Liz as if she—”