Somebody Else's Music

by Jane Haddam

  “When Kyle comes in, tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Gregor said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t let any of them into the station house if you can help it.”

  “Well, I can’t help it, can I? It’s a public building. The doors opened to the public half an hour ago.”

  “I’ll be in as soon as I can,” Gregor said. Then he hung up. Now there was a thought: dozens of reporters from every single one of the national magazines and important newspapers, crowding the waiting area at the Hollman Police Department.

  Gregor got out his phone card and called Cavanaugh Street. He tried his own number, and then Bennis’s, and then Tibor’s. Nobody was home. He wanted to scream.

  Instead, he swept the rest of his change into the palm of his hand, put it back in his pocket, and went over to where Luis was once again sitting in a plastic chair, only inside this time instead of out.

  “I guess we’d better go out to the house and make sure they all get away the way they’re supposed to,” he said. “Then I’d appreciate it if you’d drive me into the police department. They’re having a little disturbance over there this morning, too.”

  “Foreigners,” one of the other men in the plastic chairs said solemnly.

  Luis got up. Out in the wind and the rain, a siren sounded. A moment later, an ambulance went hurtling by with its lights all flashing and its noise cranked up as far as it would go.

  Gregor was relieved. No matter what else did or didn’t manage to get done, there would at least be this—unless, of course, the ambulance managed to crash before it got to the house.

  3

  At first, Gregor thought he would have to go all the way back to the Toliver house to make sure Jimmy and Liz and the boys got away as they needed to, and that the ambulance for Liz’s mother actually got hold of Liz’s mother. In the end, he hadn’t had to go to that kind of trouble. It was a good thing, because he was as tense as he could ever remember being. It was the lack of logic and of linear thought that got to him. He hated states of unalloyed chaos, where decisions seemed to be made on the basis of hysteria or on no basis at all. He couldn’t believe that any of the photographers trying to storm the Toliver home were thinking, logically or otherwise. At least some of them had to realize they were a disaster waiting to happen. He hated sitting in the gas station, listening to the men on the plastic chairs talk about local sports and national politics. He hated the rain, which was not letting up. At half past nine, when Jimmy Card’s driver pulled in to the garage’s parking lot to tell Gregor he was headed out to the house, the rain was coming down just as hard as it had been when Gregor had first called the police department. It was hard not to think about Noah and the forty days and forty nights. It was hard not to think about floods.

  At quarter to ten, Jimmy Card’s driver came back by the gas station, blowing his horn in three hard, sharp bursts, to let Gregor know that everything had gone well at the house and there was no need for him to return there to check on the inhabitants. Gregor watched as a dozen cars crowded up so close to the limousine’s rear that there would have been a multicar pileup if Jimmy’s driver had done as much as stop short at a traffic light. Then he went back to Luis and asked to be taken into town to the police station.

  Luis had gone back to being uncommunicative. The town, once they got to it, looked like it had always looked. There were no signs of invasion by hordes of salivating celebrity journalists. Grandview Avenue was empty of people and nearly empty of cars. The one or two parked along the curbs were so wet they reminded Gregor of what it felt like going through a car wash.

  The police station, when they got there, did not look inundated with reporters. Luis turned off onto Grand Street and pulled into the driveway and back into the parking lot.

  Gregor got out of the car and pulled his suit jacket up over his head. He hunched his shoulders and made a run for the front of the building. The asphalt on the driveway was slick, and the pavement that led around to the front was even slicker. He pounded up the steps and hurtled himself in through the front doors.

  The vestibule just inside the doors was empty. It was only when Gregor went through the next set of doors—plate glass; even if it was bulletproof glass, it wouldn’t help, because bulletproof glass wasn’t really bulletproof—that he saw that Sharon had had some reason for being worked up. The big reception room was full of people, all on the right side of the counter for the moment, but all restless. Some of them were taking up the long waiting benches that lined the wall. The rest of them were pacing around, not doing much of anything.

  When Gregor walked in, one or two of them perked up.

  “Mr. Demarkian!” the youngest of them called out. “Have you been called in to consult on the Toliver murder case?”

  “No,” Gregor said, quite truthfully. He hit the bell on the counter.

  The men on the benches were restless. Gregor wondered why there were so few women. He rang the bell again and held his breath. Finally, Kyle Borden stuck his head out of one of the rooms at the back and looked relieved.

  “It’s you,” he said, rushing up to the counter to let Gregor through. “I thought you’d never get here.”

  “Then you have been called in to consult on the Toliver case,” the young man said, jumping up to follow Gregor through the opening Kyle Borden had made in the counter, and being pushed back just in time.

  “No,” Gregor said again.

  Kyle grabbed him by the arm and dragged him along. “This is insane,” he said in a voice so low even Gregor had trouble hearing it. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Sharon is hiding in the bathroom. That’s because I yelled at her.”

  They were at Kyle’s office door. He pushed Gregor through it, came through himself, and shut the door behind them. Gregor immediately began to feel claustrophobic.

  “What happened to your man out at the Toliver house?” Gregor asked. “I just came from there, and I didn’t see a policeman anywhere.”

  “There wasn’t one,” Kyle said. “We don’t have a whole department. That was a part-time deputy I left there yesterday evening and he had to go home at midnight. I didn’t have anybody to assign until this morning, and it isn’t usually a problem, and oh, for Christ’s sake, this is such a mess.”

  “I think you can safely assume that your crime scene is now thoroughly contaminated,” Gregor said. “I’d say it was now thoroughly destroyed. With any luck, you got everything you needed last night. When do you get an autopsy report?”

  “They’re promising us preliminary findings at noon.”

  “All right. There isn’t going to be a whole lot you can do until then, except maybe trace this woman’s movements during the day. And keep your mouth shut. I wonder if any of them will figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “I may be wrong,” Gregor said, “but from what I remember of our discussions yesterday, the woman who died is the same woman who gave Michael Houseman his ride to work on the last day of his life, and would have given him a ride home that same day if he’d been in any shape to come home.”

  Kyle Borden had been pacing around the office. Now he stopped still. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “It was the first thing I thought of. The question is, will they think of it?”

  “How could they?”

  Gregor shrugged. “I’ve got to assume that at least some of them have been through whatever newspaper archives exist on the Houseman murder. Granted, those will almost assuredly be the men from the supermarket tabloids, but once the information is out and confirmed, they’ll all use it. Of course, it’s a small detail, or it would have been, in that case. It only becomes important now because Miss Inglerod—Mrs. Barr—is dead. But trust me, in the next day or so, they’re going to go back to those archives and go over them half a dozen times, and eventually they will pick up on it. Even if that particular detail isn’t in any of the newspaper reports, the fact that Miss Inglerod was in that park that night almost certainly will be.”

/>   “Crap,” Kyle said. “Yeah, that’ll be there, I remember it. It went around town for weeks, who had been out at the park that night and who hadn’t. And who, you know, was involved in nailing Betsy into the damned outhouse.”

  Gregor pulled out a chair and sat down. “So,” he said. “Do you think it’s connected? The murder of Michael Houseman and the murder of Chris Inglerod?”

  “How the hell do I know? It doesn’t make too much sense, does it?” Kyle said. “Why would anybody bother to kill Chris over something that happened over thirty years ago?”

  “There’s no statute of limitations on murder,” Gregor said. “Somebody may still have good reason to fear being caught.”

  Kyle Borden snorted. “Crap on that,” he said. “How’d we ever convict him? Thirty years will wipe out reasonable doubt faster than Windex will wipe out water spots.”

  “Not necessarily,” Gregor said. “I’ve seen old cases end in convictions more than once. If you don’t think the murders are connected, you’re stuck with figuring out why Chris Inglerod was killed now, in that place, and in that way. Do you know of a reason why somebody would murder Chris Inglerod now?”

  “She was an insufferable snot,” Kyle said. “But a lot of people are that, and we don’t off them. Maybe we should.”

  “Can you think of a reason why Liz Toliver would murder Chris Inglerod now?”

  “Betsy Toliver?”

  Gregor sighed. “There’s a certain amount of logic to the idea Maris Coleman was putting forward yesterday. Michael Houseman was murdered when Liz was living here, and nobody else was murdered until Liz came back. Now that she is back, somebody is dead, and dead on her own mother’s lawn. The only problem is, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it, unless you’re going to assume that Liz Toliver is secretly a sociopath carrying out some kind of vendetta against all the girls who hated her in high school.”

  “There’s also the fact that Betsy Toliver is the one person in this town who couldn’t have murdered Michael Houseman,” Kyle said. “This is not a murder mystery. The outhouse isn’t going to turn out to have had a back door or a crawl space she could have gone in and out of. She was nailed into that thing and by the time she was found, she’d lost so much blood, she had to be taken to the hospital for a transfusion. She spent the whole rest of that summer bandaged up like a mummy. It’s a good thing Vassar didn’t start classes until after Labor Day. She’d have missed the first week of school.”

  “I know,” Gregor said.

  “So what is it you’re getting at?” Kyle said.

  Outside, somewhere beyond the door, there was a sudden burst of loud, frantic activity. The bell on the counter rang out sharply. A hundred people seemed to be talking at once.

  “Damn,” Kyle said.

  Gregor moved out of the way. “You’ve still got a town here. Maybe there’s some business today that doesn’t have to do with Elizabeth Toliver.”

  Kyle threw back the door and walked out, just as a woman wrapped in layer after layer of rubber poncho flipped back the counter’s hinged opening and stepped through.

  “You can’t just walk in here,” Kyle shouted at her. “Visitors have to stay on the public’s side of the counter.”

  “Jesus,” Gregor said as the woman began to flip layers of rubber off her head and shoulders.

  “Jesus yourself,” Bennis Hannaford said. “I’ve been driving all night. I got lost on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, my cell phone won’t work, and I’m wet. The last thing I need is a lecture on how I goddamned have to stay on the goddamned public’s side of the goddamned idiot counter. If somebody doesn’t give me a cup of coffee now, I’m going back to smoking cigarettes.”

  FOUR

  1

  Maris Coleman knew, in that deep-gut visceral way that was the only way she ever really knew anything, that the way she was behaving now could—possibly—be considered out of control. She left the qualifier there because she wasn’t sure if she meant it. Sometimes, like at the Sycamore at lunch with Betsy, or out there on the lawn after Chris’s body had been found, she heard her voice spiking up into the stratosphere. Sometimes it seemed to her that she had been going at this for years, for decades, ever since she had first seen Betsy Toliver in the kindergarten classroom at Center School. That left out a lot of her life, including the seven years from the time she had finished college and run into Betsy again in New York, and the seven years after that when they had been in the same city, on and off, but never seen anything of each other. There really had been a time when she had not been obsessed either with Betsy or with Hollman. Or she thought there had. When she tried to think of the way she had been then, her mind went blank. The only image she saw was one of herself in Bloomingdale’s, carrying bags and wearing espadrilles. She had no idea why, when she imagined herself, she always saw herself wearing espadrilles.

  Now she lay very still, listening, and decided that they had finally gone—Betsy and Jimmy Card and the two boys and the mother and the nurse. She had been lying very still for the better part of three hours, refusing to allow herself so much as a swig out of her Chanel bottle. She was most afraid of having to get up to go to the bathroom. The nearest one was half a level up and there were often people in it.

  She’d still been drunk as hell when she’d made the phone calls the night before, and all she’d been able to think of was that if there was enough fuss and she stayed out of sight, nobody would remember she was in the house. Then she’d had to wait until Geoff was asleep and Mark had come upstairs to get something from the refrigerator, so that she could go downstairs, unseen, and set herself up in the little basement room. Then she had remembered that she’d forgotten about the phones, and had to do it all over again. She waited until Mark went to the bathroom, that time, and went out the sliding-glass doors to the patio and up against the side of the house to where the single phone line snaked in from the poles that lined the road the way they had in that Alfred Hitchcock movie about the birds. After all, they couldn’t be trapped if they could call out. It had been late, and dark, and she had been frightened the whole time that one of them would come into the pantry and see her at the side of the house. The little window in the pantry looked right out on where she was. There was no sign of the cop who had been left to guard the crime scene. Maris suspected that he had gone home to bed. Leave it to Kyle Borden to do his job in a thoroughly half-assed way.

  Right now, the house was not just quiet, but dead silent. She tried to see the time on her watch, but it was too dark. There were no windows here at all. She sat up and swung her legs off the couch she had been sleeping on. It was something worse than lumpy.

  If there was a cop upstairs, or anybody else, she could say that she’d fallen asleep down there, and just woken up, and didn’t know what was going on. It came in handy when people thought (falsely) that you were an alcoholic. She went up the half flight of steps to the family room. The sofa beds were still pulled out and their sheets and blankets rumpled.

  Maris stopped in at the bathroom and washed her face and hands. She felt positively foul, but there was nothing she was going to be able to do about it until she got back to Belinda’s. She went up the steep flight of stairs to the main floor and came out near the kitchen. There were kitchen things left on the table in the breakfast nook, cups half full of coffee and curdling milk, a half-eaten piece of toast with margarine on it. Betsy always had margarine, never butter, the way she always had store-brand canned goods instead of the brand-name kind. It made Maris insane. She went through into the living room and then down the little hall to the bedrooms. Nobody was anywhere. Betsy’s mother’s room was so empty, it could have been a guest room nobody ever slept in. Maris went back into the kitchen and looked out the window at the backyard, but there was still no policeman where the crime-scene barriers had been put up. It was raining the way it did during hurricanes.

  Maris went into the living room and opened the front door. Rain spattered on her shoes and face. The one car still par
ked at the edge of the road was not one she recognized, but she hadn’t expected to. All the other times she had met with Eddie Cassiter, it had been in New York, and he hadn’t been driving any car at all. Now she stood very still with the door open and waited. The blue Ford Taurus sedan waited, too. Maris counted to fifteen. Eddie Cassiter got out of the car when she reached twelve.

  “It’s late,” he said, coming toward her at a run, his head and jacket drenched black. “For a while there, I thought you’d taken off with the rest of them.”

  “Did you see me taking off with the rest of them?”

  “Honey, I didn’t see anything. The drivers pulled those cars right up to the doors, and the ambulance got even closer. What is it with the ambulance thing, by the way? The old lady have a heart attack?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been busy staying out of sight. If I hadn’t stayed out of sight, you wouldn’t be getting in here.”

  “God, this is a dump, isn’t it?” Eddie Cassiter said, stepping through the front doors. “It was probably hot stuff back in 1965, though. I can see that. What about you? Doesn’t this place make you nuts?”

  “I never think about it.”

  “Show me where they slept. Liz Toliver and Jimmy Card. If the bed’s still a mess, I can get a photograph.”

  Maris considered telling Eddie what she had already told him half a dozen times before. Liz and Jimmy did not sleep together when the boys were in the same house. Liz thought it was tacky, since they weren’t married. She showed him down the hall to the bedrooms instead, and was glad that Liz was using the master with the big double bed and not one of the side bedrooms, which just had twins. Then she left Eddie there to root around in the mess of makeup and costume jewelry still spread across the top of the vanity table. If she hadn’t cut the phone line, she could have called Belinda. If she wasn’t so worried that they’d get caught, she could relax.