by Jane Haddam
“Oh, good,” he said when Gregor came in. “I’m glad you’re up. We’re hoping you can help us out of this.”
“Help you out of what? I take it there’s press outside?”
Jimmy Card smiled thinly. “The last time I saw press like this, Julie and I were getting a divorce and Julie had just made the tabloids with pictures of herself sunbathing nude in the south of France. And she wasn’t alone. Take a look, if you want. Just be careful how you do it.”
Gregor went over to the window and pressed himself against one wall to the side of it. He flicked back the draperies just a little and looked out at what was on the front lawn—and not only on the front lawn, but on the porch of the house itself, everywhere, in the road. There were hundreds of people, all of them with cameras, and beyond them cars, half-abandoned in the road gutters and on other people’s lawns. Gregor let the draperies drop.
“My God,” he said.
“It’s because Jimmy’s famous,” a little voice piped up. Gregor looked around to find Liz’s younger son, Geoff, settled in an enormous armchair with a Game Boy.
“I should have expected it,” Jimmy said. “It’s not like I don’t know the routine. Instead, I didn’t even notice until about half an hour ago, and by then it was too late. Everything was nuts.”
“Have you called the police?”
“The phone lines are dead,” Mark said, coming back from nailing Gregor’s window shut. “We think they must have cut the phone lines. And the cell phones don’t work.”
“The idea is to force us to come out,” Jimmy said. “If we can’t call out, we’re going to have to come out eventually. And they know it.”
“We’re going to have to come out sooner rather than later,” Liz said, “because my mother needs to be taken care of. She’s not well in the best of circumstances, and that thing with the window really tore it. She was completely hysterical. She needs to be hospitalized at the least, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Chris was found dead in my own backyard, I think I’d pack her up and take her back to Connecticut. I suppose it wouldn’t look very good if I tried to duck out of a murder investigation and go back home.”
“We’ll have her hospitalized,” Jimmy said. “That will get her out of the glare for as long as we have to live with it. The trick is to figure out how to get her and us out of here with a minimum of trouble. You drive a car, don’t you, Mr. Demarkian?”
Gregor hesitated. “Well,” he said, “I have a driver’s license.”
“You don’t drive a car?” Liz Toliver looked appalled.
“I can drive a car,” Mark said. “Just let me go and—”
“That’s just what we need,” Liz said. “Pictures in every paper in the country of Liz Toliver giving her fourteen-year-old son the keys to her car.”
“It’s been a while since I’ve driven,” Gregor said finally, “but I can surely drive a car far enough to get to a phone. There must be someplace reasonably near here—”
“Go out of the driveway and turn right,” Liz said. “It’s about half a mile. Some kind of gas station or body shop—”
“They’ll follow him,” Mark said.
“I wish they would,” Jimmy Card said. “I wish they all would. That would be the best possible solution. Unfortunately, they won’t follow him. Once they realize who he is, they won’t bother him at all.”
“Give me a couple of minutes,” Gregor said. “I need to throw myself in for a quick shower and get on some clean clothes.”
He turned around and went back the way he had come. Now that he knew what to pay attention to, he could hear clear evidence that they were being besieged. The low hissing noise he had noticed and dismissed as wind when he was still lying in bed was talking, frantic overwrought talking, dozens of people who hadn’t slept much recently all going on to each other in high gear. Gregor locked himself in the bathroom and dropped the rest of his dirty clothes on the floor as he took them off. The window here had already been nailed shut, and it wasn’t much of a window, just a small square high up in the wall. He turned on the water as hard and as hot as he could stand it and stepped under it. He applied soap and shampoo to himself the way bricklayers apply mortar to a wall. He was in and out before he felt as if he had been in at all. He wrapped the robe around himself and went down to his room. He flipped through the things in his suitcase until he found clean socks and underwear. Clothes fell on the floor. If Bennis had been here, she would have picked them up. He wasn’t going to take the time.
When he was mostly dressed—complete with tie, although not with suit jacket—he went to the window Mark had just nailed shut and looked through it, standing sideways against the wall again, so that nobody would realize he was there. From this angle, the problem was not so awful. What looked, from the living-room window, like an endless stretch of cars and people, actually ended only about fifteen feet up the road in one direction and maybe six feet up the road in the other. It was the sea of faces looking straight at you that caused the illusion. You looked at them instead of at the landscape. Gregor got on his shoes and took a fresh jacket from his suit bag. Then he went back out into the little hall and down it to the living room.
“Well?” Jimmy Card said.
“I’m ready,” Gregor told him.
“I’ve got everything written down,” Liz Toliver said, handing him a three-by-five card with the neatest, smallest printing on it that he had ever seen. “The most important thing right now is to get in touch with my mother’s doctors. We need an ambulance and maybe a hospital. Tell them what happened and what’s going on here. They’ll know what to do.”
“You really think an ambulance is the way to go?” Gregor asked. “That’s likely to increase the fuss rather than calm it—”
“An ambulance can be backed up almost to the door,” Jimmy Card said. “It’s the only way we’re going to get Liz’s mother or the nurse out of here without getting them mauled. If we can get the ambulance and my driver here at the same time, we might be able to create a diversion that will allow us to leave without—”
“I don’t think so,” Liz Toliver said. “Neither do you, really. We’ve got dark glasses. If we can get your driver here and a few police officers—did I tell you you should call the police, Mr. Demarkian?”
“I was intending to call the police,” Gregor said.
“Yes, of course you were, good,” Liz Toliver said. “I’m sorry. I don’t handle this kind of thing well yet. I’m not this kind of famous. Here, take my keys. You can take the Mercedes—”
“Do you really think it makes sense to trust me with a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar car?” Gregor asked gently. “I’m sure I can make it far enough up the road to get to a pay phone, but I haven’t been behind a wheel in eight years.”
“The Mercedes is in the driveway, parked facing out to the street,” Jimmy Card said. “And it’s automatic transmission. You don’t have to do anything but turn on the engine, step on the gas, and go forward until you hit the road. Then you turn right and go forward until you find the whatever it is—”
“Andy’s Body Shop and Garage,” Mark said, sounding thoroughly exasperated.
“The thing is,” Jimmy said, “we’re trying to make it easy for you. If you bang up the car a little, it can be fixed. But at least you’ll get where you’re going.”
“Right,” Gregor said. He took the keys Liz Toliver held out to him. Then he went out of the living room, into the kitchen. “Why don’t you all go back to the living room,” he said when he realized that the rest of them had followed him, even Geoff, who had that bright, bright look on his face that children get when the grown-ups are doing something very, very fascinating. “There’s no point in letting them catch you at the door.”
“Somebody has to lock up after you,” Mark said.
“I’ll do it,” Jimmy said.
“Stuff it,” Mark said. “You’re the prize turkey in this turkey shoot. Mr. Demarkian?”
“Ready,” Gregor said.
Mark DeAvecca undid the bolts and locks on the kitchen door and pulled it out so that Gregor could pass.
As soon as he did, there seemed to be a thousand people rushing the building at once.
2
It was both worse and better than he had expected it to be. It was worse, because the crowd was far more aggressive than he had counted on. He had seen crowds like this before. He’d been in the entourage of presidents—in an official capacity—and he’d had a number of clients with “high name recognition.” He’d never been near anything this wild. What he couldn’t put out of his mind was the one time he had allowed Bennis to take him to a rock and roll concert, to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers perform in Philadelphia. It had been an eerie evening, full of an energy and anger he had never been able to trust. This was like that, except that there was no overlay of good feeling and anticipation. People were just revved up and angry as hell, and as he made his way to the car they pushed against him and pulled at his clothes. It was like swimming in mayonnaise. Gregor found himself forgetting what it was he was supposed to be trying to do and just plowing along.
Gregor had just started in on the kind of mental nattering that drove Bennis crazy—what did it mean, for instance, that a former rock and roll star got more press and more exposure than any public policy initiative floated by the United States Congress?—when he reached the door of the car. The day was overcast and just a little chilly. The clouds overhead were black and heavy. Now a wind kicked up and it began to rain, softly but steadily, in large scattered droplets. Gregor made his way around the car by holding on to metal all the way, so that when photographers pushed cameras into his face and set off their flashes, it didn’t matter if he was blinded. He got to the driver’s side door and took out his keys. For the last five years, he’d been nagging Bennis and everybody else on Cavanaugh Street to lock their cars and lock their doors. Now he wished Liz Toliver hadn’t been so conscientious. There was more than one key on the ring she had given him. There were dozens. He was scared to death he was going to drop the ring on the ground and spend the next half hour trying to figure out which key went into the car door lock.
He got the car open. He got behind the wheel. He got the door closed after him. There was a photographer lying across the hood in front of him, pointing a camera at him through the windshield. The photographers seemed to be taking pictures of anybody and anything. Gregor got the key in the ignition and let the motor roar. He looked down at the instruments and saw, with some relief, that they weren’t too confusing. “D” would be “drive,” and “P” would be “park,” which is what the indicator pointed to now. He stepped hard on the brake and got the automatic gear thing shifted to “D.” He lifted his foot a little and the car began to roll. The photographer hopped off the hood. Half a dozen people scattered away from his front end. He was afraid to step on the gas. He might roll over one of the reporters. It was a relief to see that they pulled away from him as he came along the drive.
The good news was that it was much easier to handle the car than he had expected it to be. Getting out of the driveway was no problem. Except for one small correction with the steering wheel, all he had to do was roll forward. He got to the road and put on the brakes again. He turned the steering wheel before he started to move, and then, as he did start to move, he had to let up on it a little. He knew he couldn’t just bump along the road at a roll, the way he had along the driveway, so he put his foot on the gas a little and waited to see what would happen. He picked up speed. None of the reporters or photographers was getting into a car to follow him. He wondered why not.
The road itself was nowhere near as clogged as it looked from the house. What seemed to be a sea of cars was broken in the middle by a thin ribbon of unobstructed road. Gregor was not comfortable navigating this ribbon, because he was sure he was going to sideswipe one of the parked cars, and that would mean a moral dilemma. He couldn’t very well get out and leave a note on the windshield with his name and address on it, but it wouldn’t feel right to just let it go.
This must be stress, Gregor thought, and then, just like that, he was past the cars. There was nothing around him but grass and trees and the occasional driveway that went nowhere, since there were no houses in sight. He sped up and decided that that wasn’t too bad. He did not feel completely out of control of the car just because he was doing thirty-five miles an hour. He kept his eyes on the right side of the road, where Andy’s was supposed to be. Part of him thought that he shouldn’t be able to miss it. There were so few buildings out here, Andy’s would surely stand out. Part of him thought that the garage would be hidden the way the houses were. You’d only be able to find it if you knew exactly where it was and exactly what to look for in the way of a driveway into the trees.
As it turned out, Andy’s was impossible to miss. It sat right on the road, in a big clearing, entirely surrounded by weather-beaten cars and trucks that looked as if they would never move again. Gregor had no idea if the vehicles were abandoned or in for repairs. He made his way carefully between them. The last thing he needed was to have escaped an accident at the house only to get into one here. There was an open space on the garage’s side. There was another open space near a chain-link fence at the back, straight ahead. Gregor took that one.
He got out of the car and looked around, and the first thing he saw was Luis sitting in a plastic chair at the garage’s open front door. Luis saw him a split second later, and stood up.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said in a flat Queens accent that had nothing at all Hispanic about it. “Why didn’t you call me? Mr. Card said you didn’t know how to drive.”
In other circumstances, Gregor might have spent some time wondering at the fact that, after all this time, the man was actually able to talk. Under these circumstances, he just walked over to where Luis was standing and wished he’d brought an umbrella.
“I can’t,” he said. “At least, I haven’t driven in years. I didn’t kill anybody. There’s a little problem out at the house.”
He gave Luis a rundown on what was going on with Jimmy Card, Liz Toliver, and all the rest of the people in Stony Hill, and Luis nodded his way through the explanation, unfazed.
“Right,” he said. “We should have expected it. You should have seen what it was like when Mr. Card got divorced from Miss Handley. You want I should go out and pick the bunch of them up?”
“I think they want Mr. Card’s driver to do that,” Gregor said, “and they have to wait for the ambulance anyway. Is there a phone where I could—?”
“It’s a nuisance, not being able to use the cell phones.”
There was a pay phone just inside the garage’s office, hanging open on a wall, with not so much as a little perforated head barrier to make for privacy. Gregor got out the little card Liz Toliver had given him and all the change he could find and started dialing numbers. He dialed the doctor’s offices first, and was relieved to find that there was somebody actually on hand. He had no idea what he would have done if he’d gotten the answering service. He explained who he was and what the problem was and got a promise of an ambulance, as soon as possible, at the Toliver house.
“At least in this case, we don’t have to worry about the insurance,” the young woman on the other end of the line said, and then hung up, apparently not at all curious about reporters, cut phone lines, or rock and roll stars.
Gregor dialed the number of the hotel where Jimmy Card’s driver was staying. The phone in the room rang and rang without being picked up. He hung up himself, called the hotel back, and made a point of the fact that this was an emergency. If they didn’t believe it, they could turn on any television station. He had no idea if that were true, but he thought—given the insanity at the house—that there was a good chance it would be. In the end, he got Jimmy’s driver, fresh out of the shower, and told him what was going on.
“Right,” the man said. “Here we go again. Let me tell you, Mr. Demarkian, I’ve seen enough of it. I never want to be famo
us.”
Gregor declined to talk to him about it—although it would be an interesting speculation, whether the things you got from fame like this were worth what else you got with it—and hung up. Outside the garage’s big plate-glass front window, the rain was coming down hard. The sky was full of thunder and lightning. Luis had come inside, as had the three men who had been sitting in plastic chairs near Luis when Gregor first showed up. It was raining the way it did in hurricanes and floods.
“Maybe this will thin out the crowd in front of the house,” Gregor said, to Luis as much as to anybody.
“Nah,” Luis said. “They put up with anything. Fire. Rain. Flood. Tornadoes. This is what they do. This is what they’re famous for. They always get the story.”
“Right,” Gregor said. He went back to the phone and searched through his change for another couple of quarters. He dialed the police department and waited. A woman’s voice answered and didn’t sound happy about it.
“This is the police department,” she said. “If you’re a reporter you can just hang up and talk to yourself, because I’m not going to talk to you.”
Gregor explained who he was. He knew that voice. It belonged to the woman he had met in the department the first time he’d met Kyle Borden.
“Oh,” she said. “All right. What do you want?”
“Kyle Borden,” Gregor said.
“He isn’t in yet. I did call him. And I called Ben Shed-man, too, he should be here. Nobody’s here except me.”
“Is Kyle Borden coming in?” Gregor asked.
“As soon as he can get here,” Sharon Morobito said.
The rain outside was coming down in sheets. The thunder sounded like mortar fire. The lightning streaked and rattled, lighting up the sky more often than leaving it dark. If those reporters didn’t get off the Toliver lawn, one of them was going to get electrocuted.
