by Jane Haddam
—BILLY JOEL
1
Elizabeth Toliver and Jimmy Card were married in Paris on the fifteenth of July, and on the sixteenth, on a hot, muggy morning when the air was so full of water it felt like a casing of sweat, Bennis Hannaford bought a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer so that she could read all about it. The story about Nancy Quayde and Diane Asch and the lawsuit in Hollman was in a bordered box on an inside page, so Bennis didn’t even notice it at first. Actually, she wouldn’t have noticed it even if it had been on the front page. She wouldn’t have noticed an announcement of the second coming. It was barely after seven o’clock, and she was standing at the counter in Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store, buying not only the Inquirer, but everything else she could lay her hands on with Liz Toliver’s picture. The stack next to the cash register included respectable entries like the New York Times and the Washington Post. The only reason Liz’s picture was on the front pages of those was because she had friends on the staff, and Bennis had a suspicion she’d called in some favors to make sure the publicity was as insistent as it could possibly get. Unfortunately, the stack also included some less than respectable entries, including one called Celebrity Sell, which seemed to be nothing but photographs and headlines. In a way, that was the best one, because it was the one with the big wedding picture and the three oddly angled shots inside the reception. That one also had a picture of Peggy Smith Kennedy, placed behind a stylized set of black bars. Bennis scanned it casually—the only time she’d ever seen the woman had been at the Hollman Police Department, and then only for a second or two—and got her wallet out of her big leather and canvas Coach tote. Bennis didn’t usually carry a tote, or anything else in the way of a pocketbook, but today she had to. Instead of her usual jeans, she was wearing a bright red linen “sundress,” which basically meant a huge swath of material with armholes in it and no pockets. It was annoying what happened to you when the weather got hot. If it had been up to Bennis, she would have kept the temperature at forty-five degrees forever, and never taken off her jeans or her turtleneck sweaters. Except that lately, she wasn’t even wearing turtleneck sweaters. The high collars bothered her. Maybe she was having a midlife crisis.
“So,” Mary Ohanian said, ringing up the newspapers without seeming to notice which ones they were, and without cracking up, which was what was important to Bennis. “You got invited. If you’re so interested, why didn’t you go?”
“Gregor got invited,” Bennis said. “I was sort of only along for the ride. And as to why we didn’t go, that’s a good question. Gregor said he’d had enough of them. The people from Hollman, I mean. Although why anybody would think Elizabeth Toliver had anything to do with Hollman, except accidentally, is beyond me.”
“It’s a kick, don’t you think? Jimmy Card marrying somebody practically his own age. Usually they run off with women twenty-five years younger and talk about how they’ve finally found a soul mate.”
“I used to think Jimmy’s only criterion for choosing a wife was that she had to have been featured on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. She came, by the way, Julie did. With Jimmy’s daughter. And she brought her new husband. Number six.”
“Jimmy Card’s daughter has had six husbands?”
“No. Julie Haggerty has. Jimmy was the first. Since him, none of them have lasted more than a year or two. And she always has big weddings and hugely expensive bridal gowns. Of course, she does infomercials now. That’s about as bad as it gets.”
“You have to wonder what she thought about it,” Mary Ohanian said. “Elizabeth Toliver, I mean. Having Jimmy’s first wife at her wedding—”
“Second. Julie was Jimmy’s second wife. The first one was somebody he knew from home. I don’t remember. It was years ago. Anyway. I can’t stand around here. I promised to meet Gregor at the Ararat, and Donna and Grace want me to do something. Grace is making harpsichord arrangements for some traditional Armenian folk music she got from the Very Old Ladies. Something like that. Don’t you ever get out of here and go to a movie?”
“I do when my mother can take over at the counter. Listen, if you see Grace, tell her I’ve got some of that green loukoumia she likes in a box in the back of the store. There wasn’t much of it in the latest batch, so I put it aside just for her, but I can’t keep it forever. If she wants it, she’s got to come get it in the next day or two.”
“Okay. Green loukoumia. I didn’t even know they had the stuff. Talk to you later.”
Bennis gathered up her newspapers and headed out onto the street, up the block to where the Ararat was. She read a little as she was going along—the cover of Celebrity Sells was really quite informative—and then tucked the whole stack under her arm so that she could let herself in through the Ararat’s plate-glass front door. The air-conditioning was turned up to full inside, which was a relief. Bennis marched over to the window booth with its low bench seats and dumped the stack of newspapers on the table. Tibor and Gregor both looked up at her and blinked. Donna Moradanyan and Grace Feinmann both took papers off the top of the stack.
“I think it’s such a shame Gregor wouldn’t go to this thing,” Donna said. “You could have eaten pate in the shape of a gigantic pig, or whatever that is.”
Gregor looked up and sighed. “I’ve been to celebrity weddings. I’ve even been to a wedding in the White House. No, thank you. Not again. Why on earth did you buy all those papers?”
“Just to see,” Bennis said.
Linda Melajian came up, and Bennis asked for some coffee, “But iced coffee, Linda, as cold as you can get it. Four or five cubes of ice.”
“I can shave the ice and pour the coffee over it,” Linda offered. “That’ll make it colder faster. But you know, maybe you ought to wait. It’s pretty cold in here once you get used to it.”
“Shaved ice,” Bennis said. “Trust me.”
Linda Melajian shrugged and moved away. Grace Feinmann picked up Celebrity Sells and turned to an interior page. “That’s a Carolina Herrera wedding dress. She did Caroline Kennedy’s wedding. God, I love that style. It’s like a trademark or something. Who’s the best man? I’ve never heard of him.”
Gregor sighed. “That’s Mark DeAvecca, Liz Toliver’s son by her first husband, the one who died. And don’t go getting ideas. He’s fourteen.”
“Is he really?” Grace said. “In this picture, he looks at least twenty-two. Cute.”
“He’s going to have to beat them off with a stick in a couple of years,” Bennis said. “What have the two of you been doing this morning? When I came up the street, I saw you writing on napkins. You think it would be too hot to worry about anything on a day like this. I’ve got a mind to go back to my nice air-conditioned apartment and spend all day having a fight with KSSY on RAM.”
Gregor frowned. “The Internet again,” he said. “That newsgroup.”
“Rec.arts.mystery,” Tibor said. “I do not fight with KSSY on rec.arts.mystery. There would be no point. No, Bennis, Gregor was telling me. The key to the whole thing was who had something to lose now.”
“Excuse me?” Bennis said.
Gregor pushed the napkin across the table to her. “It’s all well and good to talk about how high feelings run even after thirty years, but the truth is that most people calm down at least a little over time. And there was the reality. Even if somebody did discover who had killed Michael Houseman, the chances are that it wouldn’t matter. Nobody would ever be prosecuted for it. It would just be too hard to prove.”
“But that isn’t always the case, is it?” Bennis asked. “There was that case in Connecticut. The Skakels. And the murder of Martha Moxley. They prosecuted him after twenty-five years, and they didn’t arrest anybody in that case at the time, either.”
“No,” Gregor said, “but they did have a good idea who they ought to arrest at the time. The reason they didn’t was because Skakel was related to the Kennedys. Meaning the presidential Kennedys. I keep forgetting that the people in this case are
named Kennedy, too. For some reason, I always think of her as Peggy Smith.”
“Maybe everybody called her Peggy Smith,” Bennis said. “It happens when you stay in the same town you grew up in. People you grew up with tend to think of you the way they always did, and not by your married name. If you know what I mean.”
“Maybe. My point was that Stuart Kennedy, and by extension Peggy Smith Kennedy, were the only people who had anything to lose in the here and now by a revival of interest in the murder of Michael Houseman. And I mean a revival of real interest. Not a lot of scandal stories in the National Enquirer.”
“I don’t get it,” Grace said. “Why did they have something to lose in the here and now any more than anybody else did? It was thirty-two years ago for them, too.”
“Ah, yes,” Gregor said, “but Stu Kennedy was still doing cocaine and half a dozen other illegal drugs on a regular basis. The danger was that somebody on the state police or with the Feds would take notice. Of course, everybody in town knew all about it, but they weren’t going to bother him. They’d known him forever, and no matter what he’d turned into, they didn’t want to see him locked away in maximum security for ten or twenty years. The state police weren’t likely to feel that way. The DEA guys were definitely not going to feel that way. And they didn’t. A week after we arrested Peggy Smith Kennedy, the DEA staged a raid on the Kennedy house and picked up enough contraband to stock a candy store.”
“You’d think he’d have gotten rid of it and lain low for a week or two,” Donna said. “I mean, he must have realized—”
“Stuart Kennedy isn’t coherent enough to realize the time of day,” Gregor said.
Bennis snorted. “He’s coherent enough. Gregor is leaving a little something out. They found all this contraband, as he calls it, but there was never enough of any one thing to move the charge from possession to possession with the intent to sell. Which, by the way, makes an enormous difference in terms of jail time and that kind of thing. What’s-his-name from Hollman called Gregor about it last week. He was livid.”
“Kyle Borden,” Gregor said. “Under other circumstances, the whole cache taken together might have gotten him a charge of possession with intent to sell, but he’s so infamous as a drug addict, no prosecutor could expect it to stick. So he’s going to accept a possession charge and get remanded to treatment. Kyle’s livid because he thinks that gets Mr. Kennedy off. It won’t.”
“Why not?” Grace said. “That sounds pretty off to me. No jail time. And what’s probation—making sure you don’t get into trouble for a few months?”
“In Mr. Kennedy’s case, it’s going to be five years,” Gregor said. “And that’s my point. Stuart Kennedy will never stay clean for five years. He won’t even be able to fake staying clean for five years. And if he drops off probation more than once, he’s going to jail. My guess is that it’ll take about a year to get him there.”
“What about Peggy Smith Kennedy?” Donna asked. “What’s going to happen to her? Are they, well, you know, are they going to ask for—”
“For the death penalty,” Bennis said. “You can say ‘death penalty’ around me, Donna. I’m not some neurotic heroine in a Hitchcock movie who can’t stand a single mention of her own past. I mean—”
Gregor cleared his throat. “Nobody is going to ask for the death penalty. Mrs. Kennedy is going to plead guilty to a reduced murder charge and receive life imprisonment. She’ll be eligible for parole in about thirty years under the new standards, I think. Whether they will let her out then remains to be seen.”
“Gregor thinks she ought to be locked up permanently in a hospital for the criminally insane,” Bennis said. “Not that he thinks she’s insane in the usual sense, mind you. He doesn’t expect her to start seeing little green men from Mars delivering messages from Jesus—”
“She’s a psychopath,” Gregor said. “Whether she started out that way or got that way from the domestic abuse, I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that at this moment, she’s psychologically no different from a Ted Bundy or a Jeffrey Dahmer or a John Wayne Gacy. It’s unusual that, to find it in a woman.”
“What about that case in Florida?” Donna said. “Arlene or Aileen, I don’t remember—”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “It’s very unusual to find that in a woman. Although you do get it. Usually in connection with a man. Sometimes I think that sex in and of itself is a mind-altering drug.”
“Well, it alters something,” Grace Feinmann said innocently.
Linda Melajian came back with Bennis’s iced coffee, served in a big ice cream soda glass filled to the top with shaved ice. It had a straw stuck in it, too, which was a good thing, since there wouldn’t have been any other way to drink it. On the other side of the table, Gregor and Tibor went back to writing on their napkin, working out the intricacies of where the cars were and who had them when, how Peggy Smith had gotten around when she needed to, how other people had tried to cover up for her and thought they were really covering up for Stu.
Bennis drank iced coffee and listened to Grace tell Donna about how the harpsichord worked and why it was so difficult to compose for it, at least these days, when you wanted something other than the chamber music the instrument had been invented to perform. While she listened, she paged through the newspaper stories about the wedding. She liked the picture of Geoff DeAvecca in his miniature tux, holding the rings on a white satin pillow. She liked the picture of Jimmy Card taking over at the piano during the reception. She liked the picture of Liz Toliver—who was going to keep her own last name, just as she had with her first marriage; the Inquirer mentioned it twice—throwing her veil into a fountain of something that might have been champagne.
We should have gone, she thought. And then she decided that she wouldn’t have anything for breakfast. Even in the air-conditioning, it was just too hot to eat.
2
It wasn’t until Bennis got back to her own apartment that she saw the boxed article about the lawsuit, and for a moment it didn’t really register on her brain. Grace was home, too, upstairs on the fourth floor practicing something on her harpsichord—one of her harpsichords, Bennis amended to herself. Grace had three or four of them, all made by somebody named Peter Redmond in Virginia, which was apparently a very important thing, as Peter Redmond was a very important maker of harpsichords. Or something. Bennis spread the paper out on the bed that was never slept in anymore, since she always spent the night with Gregor these days and Gregor did not like to sleep in beds other than his own. Then she sat down at her computer and booted up. She had an article she had promised to send to Good Housekeeping about herself, which she’d promised the publicity department at her publisher that she’d write, because it was good exposure even if her ordinary reader wasn’t much like the ordinary reader of Good Housekeeping . She had six fan letters to answer, snail mail, because they’d come snail mail and she didn’t have e-mail addresses for them. She had begun to really hate having to put stamps on envelopes. In fact, she’d begun to hate having to use her printer at all. She used it for her books, because she couldn’t send them e-mail without using something called a zip file, which she had no idea how to operate, and because she couldn’t put them on disk. They were so long, they didn’t fit on disk. Other than that, though, she usually got along without making hard copies, and she didn’t really want to return to the process just to write a simple letter.
There was a lot of work she really ought to do, but what she did do was to sign onto the Internet and go to Amazon to see how her books were doing—Amazon listed every book’s rank in sales just under the buying information on the book’s page. Zedalia Serenade was at number 18. Not bad. Then she went to www.booksnbytes.com to see how Vicki had put up the new cover for display. The cover was up and looking fine. Bennis thought Vicki ought to establish Wish Lists the way Amazon did, so that people who wanted to buy a book for a friend’s birthday or a cousin for Christmas would know which ones to get. She also thought that the pictur
e of Jane Haddam didn’t do her justice. Then she looked around for the picture of herself and decided that didn’t do her justice, either, it was just something about pictures published on the Internet when they hadn’t come from a digital camera. She got up and went to the kitchen to make herself some tea. She came back and typed in the Web address of the Times of London, read the front page, and went to the BBC. It was one of those days when nothing was really going on in the world. There was violence in the Middle East, but there was always violence in the Middle East. George W. Bush had done something that one-third of the country found smart, one-third of the country found stupid, and one-third of the country found outrageous. Senator Hillary Clinton had given an interview to Vanity Fair that had conservative pundits muttering about the totalitarianism of the nanny state. Attorney General John Ashcroft had given an interview to Christianity Today that had the liberal pundits muttering about the Taliban. Edith Lawton had a new essay up on her Web site, based on the (incorrect) premise that Humanae Vitae was an infallible document. CNN had pictures up of Elizabeth Toliver’s wedding.
The kettle went off. Bennis got up to get it, got a huge cup down from the cabinet, and poured boiling water over one of the little round coffee bags Donna had turned her onto. She brought the cup of coffee back to the computer and was just starting to sign on to rec.arts.mystery—Tibor was involved in a really insane discussion about gun control—when she saw the boxed article with its two small pictures and its completely uninformative headline: Another Year, Another Outcast. She turned sideways in her chair. She used a big wicker chair to work at the computer. She hated those wheeled swivel things that were supposed to be so good for you. She picked up the paper. One of the small pictures was a formal head shot of the kind they took every year in public schools, the kind that eventually went into the yearbook in the section for seniors. That one was of a girl who, even posed and smiling, looked awkward and ill at ease. Discomfort seemed to flow out of every pore in her face. The other picture was a head and shoulders shot cropped from something larger. Bennis could see the arms and shoulders of other people at the edges of the frame. The woman who faced the camera was middle-aged, but very handsomely middle-aged. She had a good head of hair and a commanding bearing. Bennis looked at the caption and saw: Nancy Quayde. She looked at the picture of the uncomfortable girl and saw: Diane Asch. The pictures meant nothing to her, and the name Diane Asch meant less than nothing, but there was something about the name Nancy Quayde that nagged at her. She read through the article, but there wasn’t much to it. Diane Asch’s father was suing Hollman High School and Nancy Quayde as principal of Hollman High School for harassment, or failing to prevent harassment, or something along those lines. The piece was not exactly clear. It did mention a couple of incidents involving Diane Asch and “three senior students,” who remained unnamed. The incidents were nasty in that casual way adolescent incidents of that kind always are: stealing Diane’s clothes while she was taking a shower after gym; hounding Diane out of a mixer in the school’s auditorium; getting up en masse from a lunchroom table when Diane tried to sit down.
