Skeleton Key

by Jane Haddam

  “The thing is,” she said, getting off the subject of Gregor’s inability to drive for the fifth time in thirty seconds, “I wouldn’t mind if I thought he actually wanted a relationship with Tommy. I mean, he’s Tommy’s father. Tommy should know his father. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. This was still in Philadelphia, at the very beginning of the day, so he was more than a little wound up himself. He couldn’t have fallen asleep if he’d wanted to, then, but even the air around him looked too bright. Philadelphia looked dirty and vibrant, which is how he thought of it when he was being kind.

  “And the thing is,” Donna said, “that of course I’ve talked this over with Russ, and for the first time, I’m just about ready to kill him. I mean, he thinks like a lawyer. Have you ever realized that?”

  “He is a lawyer.”

  “Well, yes. I know. But this isn’t his work we’re talking about. This is his life. My life. Tommy’s life. Don’t you think it would be a good thing if Russ adopted Tommy?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  Donna Moradanyan and Russ Donahue had married only a few months ago—back in June, in fact, when Gregor had been distracted, too. Donna had a small son from a previous liaison, as Lida Arkmanian called it, with a man named Peter Desarian. Actually, Peter wasn’t really a man. He was no older than Donna, who was barely twenty-one herself, and he was, in Gregor’s opinion, one of the great examples of arrested development. Some boys grew up to be men. Peter Desarian had grown up to evolve a strategy for avoiding responsibility. Whenever he got into more trouble than he could handle, he moved back into his mother’s house.

  “Anyway,” Donna said, “the thing is, according to Russ, if Peter wants to fight the adoption he can stop it. Because the law wants to keep families together. I mean, does this make any sense to you? Peter and I were never a family. We were never even a couple except when he wanted to, urn, I mean—”

  “I think I get the point,” Gregor said.

  “Well, it embarrasses me. I mean, no woman wants to admit that she lost her virginity to a jerk.”

  “No woman has to worry that she’s alone in that circumstance.”

  “I guess not. But you see what I mean. First he wanted me to have an abortion. Then when I wouldn’t have one, he refused to have anything at all to do with Tommy for years. Bennis went to the hospital with me when I was in labor. Lida Arkmanian bought him his christening gown. Father Tibor and old George Tekemanian taught him his first words. I mean, where was Peter Stupid Desarian?”

  “He came back for your wedding,” Gregor said drily.

  “Don’t remind me. Okay. I had cold feet or something. I don’t know. Something. But the fact is, he’s back again now, and I’m just not going to put up with it. Tommy’s very happy with Russ for a father. He really is. He’s got somebody to play board games with on Sunday afternoons. He’s got somebody who understands the Cartoon Network. I mean, Father Tibor’s a really wonderful man and all, but his idea of a bedtime story for Tommy was passages from the Odyssey.”

  “I think you’ve got to go around here or you’re not going to have anywhere to park.”

  Donna leaned over the steering wheel and made a pretense of paying attention. Traffic was almost nonexistent—it was quarter to six in the morning, and the yuppies were still at home in bed. If there were still yuppies. Gregor thought he might be out of date. He also thought that he had reached that point in lack of sleep when his condition was on the verge of dangerous.

  “So,” he said.

  Donna had made the turn. They were gliding down a short block whose tall buildings all seemed to be made out of beige stone. Donna adjusted her rearview mirror.

  “So,” Donna said, “I’ve thought it all out, and I’ve decided that you’ve got to do something about it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve got to do something about it,” Donna insisted. “I mean, it obviously can’t be allowed to go on the way it’s going. Peter’s a spoiler. He’ll wreck everything if he can manage it. And you know that. So you have to do something about it.”

  There was a parking space just ahead of them. In fact, there were several. Donna didn’t even have to parallel park. She glided up along the curb and positioned the car’s nose right in front of a parking meter.

  “Gregor,” she said.

  Donna and Bennis were very good friends. Sometimes, Gregor found that hard to understand. Now he thought it made perfect sense, because in at least this way they were exactly alike. He turned around and looked at his big black suitcase in the backseat of the car.

  “Donna,” he said carefully.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Donna said. “So don’t bother. You got him away from me at the wedding.”

  “That was different.”

  “Exactly. That wasn’t anywhere near as important. This is vital. Tommy doesn’t need Peter Desarian hanging around his life. He really doesn’t. Nobody needs Peter Desarian hanging around his life.”

  “Peter is still Tommy’s natural father.”

  Donna got out of the car and opened the back door. She got his suitcase out and put it down in the street. The street cleaners had done a good job this morning. There were no stray papers or cigarette butts in the gutters that Gregor could see.

  He got out of the car himself.

  “I can’t just do something,” he said reasonably. “Peter is Tommy’s natural father. And that matters. It’s even going to matter to Tommy one of these days.”

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

  “But the thing is—”

  “Don’t you want Russ to adopt Tommy? You’ve said all along that it would be a good thing. It would be a good thing. And you know it. And you can do something about it if you think it over long enough.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like find a way for us to prove abuse or neglect,” Donna said triumphantly. “Russ explained it to me. If there’s cause to believe that Peter abused or neglected Tommy, then we can get his rights terminated and Russ can go ahead with the adoption. And Lord only knows, Peter has neglected Tommy. He’s barely set eyes on him the whole time he’s been alive.”

  “I don’t think that’s the kind of neglect that qualifies—”

  Donna turned around, so quickly that Gregor was startled into stepping back. Her blue eyes were large and dark in her white face. Her body was very still. Gregor suddenly realized that he had never seen her really angry before, white hot angry, angry to the bone. He’d seen her blow up at Russ. He’d seen her exasperated and annoyed. He had never seen her like this.

  Donna’s going to be very beautiful when she gets older, Gregor thought, with the half of his mind that was operating on automatic pilot. You could see the change that would come in her face. It was there right under the surface. The anger made it plain.

  “Listen to me,” she said slowly. “I have no intention, no intention at all, of letting Peter Desarian mess this up. Which means we’re going to have to find a way to fend him off, and find a way soon, because Russ was meaning to file those adoption papers next month. And he’s going to. So start thinking, Gregor. We have to do something.”

  Then she bent over, picked up Gregor’s suitcase in one hand, and headed out across the street for the train station. In the faint gray of the early morning not-quite-light, she looked like a Valkyrie.

  Other men found docile women who made breakfast for them and cleaned house without complaint Other men found pliant women who wanted only to please, or directionless women who wanted only a man to guide them, or even simply polite women who believed it was only fair to let a man have his own way at least every once in a while.

  Gregor Demarkian found Valkyries.

  There was a moral in there somewhere, but Gregor was too tired to think of what it was.

  2

  The ride up to Connecticut was more than just long. It was interminable. From Philadelphia to New York was not too bad. It was fast, at lea
st, although it did seem as if Amtrak stopped at every small town in the hinterlands. The shuttle from Pennsylvania Station to Grand Central wasn’t too bad, either, although it was definitely strange. Gregor always forgot just how odd New York really was, especially underground. Today there were three transvestites in the shuttle with him, obviously coming off an unbroken night of something. One of them had his wig off and lying in his lap, so that it looked as if his legs were erupting into curly blonde hair. Gregor didn’t mind the transvestites at all. He did mind the two young men huddled in the seats at the front of the car, clearly wasted on drugs and close to being sick. This was how he understood that he was not a modern man. It was inconceivable to him that anybody would want to do this with his life—and yet they were everywhere, these people, cowering in doorways, curled up in abandoned buildings. It was even more inconceivable to him that anyone could fail to realize that this was the kind of thing that happened to you if you insisted on taking drugs, and yet children—even intelligent children—started taking drugs every day.

  In the world in which Gregor Demarkian grew up, even alcohol was confined to parties, and those came only two or three times a year. He couldn’t imagine anything more shameful on the Cavanaugh Street of his childhood than for a man to be known as someone who drank. Women never had more than two or three glasses of wine a year. Nobody had ever heard of drugs—or if they had, it was mostly rumors, passed on from people who had been to other places, like the army, where farm boys from Texas and mechanics from New Mexico sometimes brought little bags of marijuana to sell to anybody who would pay.

  Gregor got off the shuttle at Grand Central and made his way upstairs. He found the next train to Bridgeport on the New Haven line and headed for track 19 on the main concourse. He had only fifteen minutes before the train left. That meant that the train would be parked in its appointed slot and open to take on passengers. That was a good thing, because there didn’t seem to be anyplace to sit in Grand Central anymore. Everything looked boarded up, or worse. The concourse itself was full of litter. The boards that hid what had once been the seating areas were covered with graffiti. You had to ask yourself how quick these kids were, with their spray cans. Grand Central was policed continually, from what Gregor could see. Patrolmen paced the corridors from one end to the other without stopping. When did anyone have time to spray three big red initials and a number on a barrier, without getting caught?

  When Gregor was growing up on Cavanaugh Street, even almost-grown children, boys of seventeen, girls as old as twenty, went to church every week with their parents, walking in straight and unyielding lines down the block to the high steps of Holy Trinity Church. The old priest from Armenia who had been at the church in those days would stand out in front of the big doors and wait for them all to come in. He was a filthy old man, and nasty in his habits in more ways than one, but they all stopped in front of him and greeted him. They took his hand and wished him well. That was God’s representative on earth, that old man. You could feel the power of omniscience behind him.

  When it got close to time for the liturgy to start—the old liturgy, the one that seemed to take hours and probably had—the priest would turn his back to them and go inside. He would disappear behind the iconostasis to dress. The children would sit in the long wooden pews with their hands held together in their laps and wait, unprotesting, until it was time to pray. They all had special clothes for church. The girls had white dresses and white socks. The boys had miniature little suits with ties they borrowed from their fathers and tucked inside their shirts. The old ladies wore black lace kerchiefs on their heads and black lace gloves.

  The church itself was a cavernous space, filled with icons, and many of the icons were bloody. A saint pierced in the breast by a long sword. Another tied to a stake with his back whipped into shreds of skin and bright red wounds. They were all reminded, over and over again, that the martyrs had died horrible deaths for the faith, that it wasn’t so much to ask them to sit still and be quiet for a couple of hours every week.

  And then, of course, when it was over, there was always a little reception in the basement of the church. The ladies put out thick black coffee and little pastries on a table covered with a plain white cloth. The fast before Communion was so long that everybody was starving. They took little round plates and passed from one kind of pastry to another, trying to decide. Nobody ever took more than one. That might have meant that somebody got nothing. Gregor remembered Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian, standing side by side, in an agony of indecision—until two of the old ladies came up and took the last of the banirov kadayif and the indecision was over. There was nothing but loukoumia left.

  Did I really think that was a suffocating life? Gregor asked himself, as he tried to get comfortable on the hard plastic seats. It seemed he had. It was to escape the suffocation that he left Philadelphia the first time, for the army—and then, when the army was over and he had come home, left it a second time for the Harvard Business School. Those were the days when all special agents of the FBI were required to have a degree in accounting and a degree in law, and he had been sure he would never be able to stomach the full course in a law school.

  It was a suffocating life, but it had edges. Maybe that was the thing. The lives some people led these days seemed to have no edges at all, so that drifting into a heroin stupor looked no different to them than going to night school for their GED, or even making love. Equal opportunity indirection, Gregor thought, and then he thought that it made no sense. He had no idea what he was trying to get at.

  Outside on the platform, a man who was probably homeless was bending over to pick three quarters up off the dirty floor. There were always coins on the platforms, because people lost them while they tried to get things out of their pockets and walk at the same time. The man was wearing clothes so ragged that the bottom of his pants looked like a fringe. His hair was matted to his skull.

  Gregor twisted on the seat again, and prepared to sit up awake and miserable all the way to Bridgeport.

  3

  The first time Gregor Demarkian fell asleep, they were just outside Stamford. He would have gone right on past Bridgeport, and maybe all the way to New Haven, except that the young woman in the seat next to him woke him up.

  “Didn’t you say you were getting off here?” she asked him. “This is Bridgeport. Didn’t you say you had to make a connection?”

  She was really very, very young. Gregor thought she was a student She was reading Peter Kreeft’s gloss on St. Thomas Aquinas, A Summa of the Summa. Maybe she was just religious, or the kind of person who enjoyed philosophy as a hobby. She had very wide eyes and pretty glasses. Gregor said that he did, indeed, need to get off at Bridgeport, and thanked her for waking him up.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I fall asleep on this train all the time. But New Haven is the last stop, you see, so I don’t have to worry.”

  The train station in Bridgeport was very clean and very small. Considering the kinds of things Gregor had heard about Bridgeport—that it was drug and gang central, that it was decaying into an unbroken slum, that it was so violent even its own police refused to live there—he was very favorably impressed. He got himself a copy of The New York Times from one of those vending machines and a cup of coffee from the little diner in a corner and checked the time for the train to Waterbury. He had just about fifteen minutes. He sat down in a molded plastic chair and wished that his coffee was stronger. There wouldn’t be anything about the death of Kayla Anson in the Times, of course. The body had probably been discovered after the paper had been printed. There would be something in the paper tomorrow, however, and probably in every other paper in the country. Gregor wondered if Bennis had considered the implications of that.

  Gregor still had half a cup of coffee when his train was called. He went back out onto the platform to find that it was the wrong platform. He had to take the long tunnel to the other side of the tracks.

  There were two other men and a
woman heading for the same train. They all went racing through together, although they were all middle-aged. Going up those two flights of stairs at the end wasn’t easy for any of them. When they came out on the platform they found not a train, but a single train car, oddly built, so that it could go in either direction. Gregor went inside and found a seat next to a window in the back of the car, near one of the exit doors.

  “They used to have runs up to Waterbury four or five times a day,” the woman who had come over with the rest of them said to him. “But I suppose this is better than nothing. Do you know that Governor Rowland wanted to eliminated this service entirely?”

  “No,” Gregor said.

  “Then there wouldn’t be any public transportation out of the Northwest Hills at all. It’s the way they think of us out in Hartford, and down on the Gold Coast. As if we were all a lot of movie stars with our own limousines. Susan St. James. Meryl Streep. As if nobody else lived up in the Hills at all. Although you’d think Governor Rowland would know better.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Governor Rowland is from Middlebury. That’s right on the border of Litchfield County. You’d think he’d know better.”

  “Oh,” Gregor said.

  The woman was that sort of not-quite-thin, not-quite-fat that women in their late forties and fifties often got if they had had a couple of children and no dedication to serious exercise. She was standing in the aisle near Gregor’s seat, as if she were waiting for the train to start before she let herself sit down. Gregor sipped his coffee and stared at her politely. He wanted to read his paper and think about Bennis, in jeans or otherwise.

  The woman shifted from foot to foot She adjusted the strap of her black leather bag on her shoulder.

  “You’re that detective, aren’t you?” she asked him suddenly. “The one that was in People magazine. Gregory Demarkian.”

  “Gregor,” Gregor said. It was automatic.

  “Gregor. I’m sorry. But I remember that story. Or rather I remember you. You have a very unusual face.”