by Jane Haddam
Then he sat back and looked over what he had.
“Why do some of them say ‘arrest’ and others don’t?” Kyle said.
“Because whenever the Kennanburg municipal police got in touch with the state police, some of the suspects were under arrest and some weren’t. Which means sometimes they were asking for help with supporting evidence and sometimes they were asking for help finding the perpetrator.”
“Why is it only Kennanburg?”
“Kennanburg is a denser population area. Denser population areas have more crime. They’re also more likely to know who to talk to if they want help from the state. And, like I said, this is not a complete list. It’s not anything like it. All kinds of mayhem could have been going on, and all kinds of mayhem could have been reported to the state police, without it actually showing up in this report. Even now, when we try to be careful about this sort of thing, we miss a lot.”
Kyle came around to Gregor’s side and leaned far over the table. “Look at that,” he said. “Murder, weapon razor. Twice.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, what about it? Did they arrest the guy who did it? Did they find the murder weapon? What? Because Michael Houseman could have been killed with a razor. We always thought it was a knife, but I never heard anything except that whatever it was had to be really sharp. And they never found the weapon.”
“I think it would be a fair guess to say it was probably a linoleum cutter,” Gregor said.
“Yeah?” Kyle brightened. “Jeez, you are good. I called a friend of mine up in Connecticut because I knew he’d met you up there and he said you were. Good, I mean. But, what are we talking about here? A serial killer? I thought you said that the murder of Chris Inglerod and the murder of Michael Houseman were connected.”
“They are.”
“So what have we got? A serial killer who just went out of business for thirty years until Betsy Toliver came back to town? Or maybe it’s Betsy Toliver who’s the serial killer? But that doesn’t make any sense. I don’t care about Hannibal Lecter. The guys who are serial killers are messes, most of them. They don’t go running off to succeed on television. What about those murders? Did they find the perpetrators? Did they find the weapons?”
Gregor glanced back over the pages with actual report findings on them. “No and no,” he said. “Not at the time the police filed the report, at any rate. They could have found both later, and we’d have no way of knowing from this. We’d have to check the files in Kennanburg itself.”
“Well, then,” Kyle said. “They could never have found either, right? And Michael Houseman would have been one of this guy’s victims—but why come out here for that? I mean, why not just stay in Kennanburg? If you were this guy, would you come out to some small town? Except maybe he did, and maybe it’s just not on the report. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
“It’s a possibility, yes.”
“You don’t sound very happy,” Kyle said. “I’d be ecstatic, if I were you.”
Gregor put all the fax papers together and folded them up again and stuck them in his jacket pocket again. He was suddenly aware of the fact that it was raining outside again, slowly and steadily, without thunder. He felt as if he had conducted this entire case in Noah’s flood.
He pushed back the chair and stood up. “So,” he said to Kyle, “are you ready to come to the hospital with me and arrest Peggy Smith Kennedy for the murder of Chris Inglerod Barr?”
SIX
1
After two and a half hours of waiting, Maris Coleman was more than merely nervous, except that she wasn’t, because she was anesthetized. “Anesthetized” was what they used to call it at Vassar, when they’d run off to Pizza Town right after their last final exam. She was in an odd floaty state that she couldn’t quite keep hold of. It was like the state she got into when she “did something” about the bills, which usually meant turning the ringer off on the phone so that she didn’t have to hear the people from the credit-card companies tell her that it was really important that she did something about her account as soon as possible. The credit-card companies. The telephone people. The mortgage people never bothered her, because Betsy had done something about that, Maris couldn’t remember what. She did remember that she resented the fact that she had had to buy that apartment. It was a good location, but the apartment itself was so very small, and really only one room, when Betsy had that entire town house on the East Side and didn’t even live in it. It was Jimmy Card who was messing things up and, of course, Debra, who had been scheming to get her out of the way since the day Betsy had hired her. Hired me, Maris thought, but now her head was starting to pound the way it did sometimes when she had too much to drink too fast or tried to get over a hangover more quickly than she had a right to. She should never have given up cocaine. She wanted to take an aspirin, but she was afraid to. It could be dangerous to mix alcohol with aspirin, or with anything. Karen Quinlan had ended up in a coma by taking acetaminophen with alcohol, and then her family had fought to take out her feeding tubes. In the year that that had been the big story, Maris had been working for a Wall Street law firm as a paralegal. That was the job that she had kept the longest, and for years she had believed—honestly believed—that she was indispensable. She should have gone to law school. She should have—she couldn’t think of what she should have done. The universe seemed to her to be a huge conspiracy aimed directly against herself. The game had been fixed from the start. It wouldn’t have mattered what she’d done. Even back when they were all in high school, there were forces working behind the scenes. She was flying high, but it was only a matter of time. She should have killed Betsy when she had the chance. She should have done something about Debra, too. She wanted to cry, and when she didn’t want to cry she wanted to smash things. Would Betsy disappear without ever seeing her again? She’d left the house this morning without remembering that Maris had been there the night before, and was likely to be there still. Ever since she’d met Jimmy Card, she’d been more and more distracted, more and more distant. Maris knew the signs. She had known them every single time she’d been fired. She had seen them coming for months. She really did want to cry. It was like Belinda said. It wasn’t fair.
When she heard the voices in the stairwell, she was drinking straight out of her Chanel No. 5 bottle. She capped it quickly and put it away in her bag, feeling guilty in the same way she had when she was a child and her mother almost caught her stealing cookies off the plate as they came out of the stove.
“I’m not sure she’s in the apartment,” Belinda said, sounding petulant and put out.
“I don’t see why you think you can just waltz in here and treat the place like your own. I do have a life, you know. I’m very busy.”
“I only need to talk to Maris for a moment if she’s in,” Betsy’s voice said, perfectly calm, perfectly reasonable. “If she isn’t, we’ll go right back downstairs.”
“What if she is? What then? Did you ever think that I might want to get some things done around the apartment? Did you ever think I might want a little private time?”
“It really will be just a minute,” Betsy said.
“I don’t even know who this person is,” Belinda said. “You’re bringing strangers into my house and you haven’t even been invited.”
I wonder who the stranger is, Maris thought. She had her feet stretched out on Belinda’s coffee table, which would make Belinda livid, but right now it wouldn’t matter. Belinda would never criticize her in front of Betsy Toliver. Belinda was sounding like a shrew. Maris suspected she often sounded like that, and that that had been one of the reasons her husband had left her. God, but that woman could shriek.
Behind her, the apartment’s door opened. There was a shuffle in the doorway. Maris did not turn around.
“Don’t think I’m going to offer you coffee,” Belinda said. “I don’t want you here any more than I wanted you at my lunch table in high school.”
“I think that’s M
aris over there asleep on the couch,” Betsy said. “I won’t be but a moment. Keep your britches on, Belinda. You never were very good at self-control.”
“Why, you little bitch,” Belinda said.
“Oh, and by the way. The name is Liz, or Elizabeth, or Ms. Toliver. It has not been Betsy for many years, and you’re being a damned fool to go on calling me that. Between CNN and People magazine, aborigines in the Australian outback know that people who are friendly with me call me Liz.”
“Well, I call you Betsy,” Belinda said. “I’m not friendly with you. You’re nothing but a two-bit creepy little loser, and you’ll never be anything else.”
“My, my,” a voice Maris didn’t recognize said. It sounded a little like Katherine Hepburn’s. “Are people around here always this rude?”
“Habitually,” Betsy said. “They mistake it for a religion.”
“God, you’re such a little snot,” Belinda said. “Just listen to you. ‘Habitually.’ Don’t we know lots of great big words.”
The voices were closer now. There were footsteps coming across the kitchen. Maris sat up a little straighter and turned around. Belinda looked insane. She must have been out in the rain. Her hair was frizzed up like the Bride of Frankenstein’s. Betsy was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of those straight black linen pants she seemed to wear all summer and a blazer that looked old enough to have been worn in in every possible way. You could still tell it was expensive. Maris smiled at her slightly, because that was the kind of thing you did in situations like this. Maris had been in them before.
“Well,” Betsy said.
“Who’s this?” Maris asked, nodding toward the other woman, the small but perfect one with the black hair. “Have you started picking up women in bars?”
“This is Bennis Hannaford,” Betsy said. “She’s a friend of Gregor Demarkian’s. You’ve met Mr. Demarkian.”
“How do you do?” Bennis Hannaford said.
“Dennis?” Belinda said. “What kind of a name is that for a girl? Or is this one of your fancy schmantzy friends from college who went to one of those snob schools where all the girls have boys’ names?”
“It’s not Dennis with a D,” Bennis Hannaford said. “It’s Bennis. With a B. As in boy.”
Betsy came around the back of the couch and took a seat on the very edge of the ottoman. She leaned forward and clasped her hands. “I promised Belinda I wouldn’t be long, and I won’t be. I don’t want you coming back to the office after this trip. You’re fired, effective now. You’re owed a two-week severance check. I’ll call Debra and make sure she cuts you one immediately. She’ll pack up your desk and ship your things to you. Your mortgage account has enough money in it to cover your mortgage until the end of June. After that, it will be closed. If you give our office as a recommendation when you look for a new job, I will tell Debra to tell the truth about you as far as it is possible without sounding as if she’s exaggerating.”
“I could sue you for that,” Maris said. “And you know how it would look. I’m not the one that would come off like trash.”
“You know, all the way back to Vassar, I thought I knew what was going on,” Betsy said. “I heard it, you know. That girl screaming. Slit his throat, she was saying. Slit his throat. And all that time, I thought it was you. When you started drinking like a crazy person in college, I thought that was what had caused it. I thought you’d gotten caught up in something and then in the heat of the moment one of you had killed poor Michael Houseman and now you were falling apart about it. I felt sorry for you.”
“You felt sorry for me in college? I was a star in college. You were nobody at all.”
“You were drinking every single night. I wasn’t the only one who noticed it. You were completely out of control. And you were, of course, an utter bitch to me, relentlessly. But then you’d always been. And I thought I knew why you were behaving so oddly, and then, when we ran into each other in the city and you were so much of a mess—”
“I have never been a mess,” Maris said. “Not ever.”
“And you didn’t have a job and you’d been fired all those times and it was obvious you were drinking. And then I didn’t just feel sorry for you, I felt guilty, really, because I’d always thought of you as perfect. As golden. As destined for success in just the same way I was destined for failure. It’s odd how ideas like that can lodge in your head and refuse to leave. And I thought that it was all just an accident. You’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time with all those mediocre people and the moment had overwhelmed you and your life was ruined. And it was just chance. It was just fate. Just like I thought it was just fate that I’d landed at CNN and Columbia, just a matter of being in the right place at the right time instead of the other way around. And it seemed so unfair.”
Maris smiled. “Excuse me,” she said, reaching down into her bag. She came up with the bottle of Chanel No. 5, uncapped it, and took a long swig. “We don’t need to observe formalities, here, do we? It’s not like you don’t know what I keep in this thing. It was fate, you know. It was all chance and circumstance. There’s nothing else on earth that could have gotten you where you are.”
“On the night Michael Houseman died, I did hear a girl screaming ‘slit his throat,’ but it wasn’t you. It couldn’t have been you, and if I’d been thinking straight I would have realized it. You were with Belinda and Emma, right from the beginning. The three of you were hiding out in the stand of trees just up the fork from that outhouse because you wanted to see what I’d do when you got the door nailed shut. It wasn’t you screaming ‘slit his throat,’ it was Peggy.”
“Crap,” Belinda said. “Why would Peggy Smith want to slit Michael Houseman’s throat? She barely even knew him. He wasn’t one of our crowd.”
“So I started to think about it,” Betsy said. “I started to wonder. If you weren’t behaving the way you were behaving because you were traumatized by having taken part in the death of Michael Houseman without meaning to, then why were you behaving the way you were behaving? Do you want to know what conclusion I came to?”
“Do tell,” Maris said.
“It seems to me that there’s only one reason why you do what you do. Because you want to do it. You’re not having a mental breakdown caused by post-traumatic stress syndrome or whatever I thought it was. You really are one of those mediocre people. You just happen to be one of them with decent grades, and that got you into a good college, and so for a year or two you looked more impressive than you really were. But you belong here, Maris. You’re Hollman through and through. Small-minded, petty, envious, spiteful, and tenth rate—”
“Oh, dear. Let me tell a few strategic people all about that one. Won’t that one look lovely in People magazine.”
“What did you think she was going to do?” Betsy asked. “Did you expect her to murder me? What was the point of all this this past week?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Maris said.
“She had the keys to your car,” Betsy said. “To your bright yellow Volkswagen rental car. I saw her driving it on Grandview Avenue that day we had the big fight at the Sycamore, the day Chris Inglerod was killed.”
“So maybe she stole the keys out of my purse.”
“She wouldn’t have been capable of it, and you know it. You may sell that line to the police, Maris, but you won’t sell it to me. You gave her the keys to that car, and you told her when you thought I’d be home, and you were wrong both times, and that’s where the trouble was. You must have known she was dangerous. My children were in that house, or they were supposed to be.”
“I know you’re having a wonderful time playing like you’re the great detective,” Maris said, “but I don’t know anything of the sort. I don’t think Peggy Smith did kill Michael Houseman, and I don’t think she killed Chris Inglerod, either. I think you’re just speculating to give yourself an excuse to trash me.”
“An excuse?” Betsy said. “Do I need an excuse? After you’ve spent the la
st two years planting stories in the tabloids that make it sound as if I were the one who had killed Michael Houseman? And that even though you knew perfectly well that I could not possibly have done it? You nailed me into that damned outhouse yourself.”
“Not all by herself, she didn’t,” Belinda said. “It wasn’t just Maris. It was everybody who hated you.”
Betsy didn’t look as if she’d heard. Maris took a long swig on the Chanel No. 5 bottle. “If you do fire me,” she said, “I might find it necessary to fight back a little. I might find it necessary to sell my story to the National Enquirer, for instance. How Elizabeth Toliver used me like a slave and then dismissed me like a servant and left me to starve. Or something along those lines. I think I did lay them out that day at the Sycamore, didn’t I?”
“Well, yes,” Betsy said, “you did. But at the time I saw no reason to respond. So let me respond now. If you try anything of the kind, I will make sure that Debra releases the detective files we have on you from the last two times we’ve kept you out of jail. The first time when you forged my signature on a check for two thousand dollars on September third last year. The second time when you forged Debra’s signature on a check for five thousand on this past January seventeenth. Did you really think we hadn’t noticed? Why do you imagine it suddenly got so hard for you to lay your hands on the checkbooks?”
“You had detectives follow me?” Maris said.
“Debra was worried you might be abusing drugs. It turns out you were only paying bills, and buying very expensive crystal at Steuben glass. I’m going to go now, Maris. Bennis probably wants to get back and Jimmy’s probably frantic that I’ve been set upon by reporters, but I only care that I never lay eyes on you again. Don’t come back. Don’t even try to come back. And don’t do anything stupid. If you try any more crap with the National Enquirer, I’ll have you prosecuted.”
Betsy stood up. Maris didn’t move. She didn’t think it was possible to move. Betsy didn’t look anything at all like somebody who would be called “Betsy” now. And it was so cold. Maris had never been so cold. The woman Betsy had brought with her looked stunned. Liz, Maris thought. She’d have to remember to call that little creep Liz. It wasn’t any fun to call her Betsy when calling her Betsy didn’t bother her.
