Skeleton Key

by Jane Haddam

  “Go to McDonald’s,” Gregor said, thinking that one place would be as awful as another as far as the food was concerned. “But stop at the inn first. I want to run up to my room and check on some things.”

  “It’s not exactly on the way,” Stacey Spratz said.

  “Make a detour. I want to check my messages. And I want to check on Bennis. I’ve left her flat for the past two days.”

  “The real problem up in the Hills is that there isn’t anything, you know what I mean?” Stacey Spratz said. “There’s trees and scenery and lots of old New England, but you have to drive for an hour before you can get a decent hamburger. Or do any shopping that isn’t going to cost you like you were John D. Rockefeller. Do you think the Rockefellers have as much money as Bill Gates?”

  “I doubt it,” Gregor said. Sometimes he thought Stacey must have one of those learning disorders—attention deficit disorder, one of those things—because it seemed like the only explanation for why he jumped from subject to subject the way he did.

  Stacey pulled into the parking lot of the inn. Gregor tidied his stack of notes into a pile and put them up behind the sun visor on the passenger side of the car.

  “You can come in if you like,” Gregor told him.

  “I’ll wait in the car,” Stacey told him. “If you don’t mind. I mean, I don’t want you to feel hurried or anything like that. But you did say you wouldn’t be long. So I thought—”

  “I won’t be long,” Gregor promised. “You can wait in the car.”

  He got out into the crisp cold air as quickly as he could, if only to forestall the need to listen to Stacey going through yet another stream-of-consciousness philosophy. He walked across the parking lot to the inn’s front entrance. He thought it had to be the height of the lunch hour. The parking lot was full of vehicles, when it was usually at least a third empty. Women were coming and going in groups of three and four. The working women wore shirtwaist dresses and little heels. The wives wore shorts and tennis shoes and white socks. It was as if everybody was in uniform.

  Gregor stopped at the front desk and found that no messages had been left for him. Then he went upstairs and walked down the long hall to his and Bennis’s room. The hall was dark as always, but dark in the way that the halls in the homes of very rich people are dark—dark because of its length and height, not because of was cramped or without ventilation. It was incredible, the way he worried at the whole concept of rich and poor now that he was here. In spite of the fact that nobody ever talked about it—that nobody even mentioned the odd extremes of wealth and poverty that seemed to be as much a part of the landscape of this place as maple trees and swiftly flowing streams—it was on his mind all the time.

  He opened the door to his own room and stepped in. He called out Bennis’s name and got no response. It occurred to him that he should have checked for her car in the parking lot. It was an unusual car. He usually had a hard time missing it.

  He went into the small bathroom and washed his face. He went to the bedroom and found his good hairbrush. He was feeling ragged and filthy. That was what came of riding around in cars all day. He was feeling reluctant to go back to Stacey Spratz, and the car, and the prospect of McDonald’s. He was going to have to get over that

  The phone rang while he was in the bedroom. He went to the small table at the side of the bed and picked it up.

  “Bennis?” he said.

  “No,” a familiar voice said. “Donna. I’m glad I got you. Where’s Bennis?”

  “Out driving around, I’d guess. How are you?”

  “If Bennis is out driving around, does that mean you’re stuck in the hotel?”

  “It’s an inn, and I’m not stuck. I’m being driven around by a police officer. Who’s expecting me downstairs at any moment. Are you all right? Is something wrong?”

  “Not exactiy. I’m glad I got you. I talked to Bennis earlier.”

  “And?”

  “And I thought of something. With Peter, you know.”

  “Peter.”

  “Peter Desarian. You know Peter. Peter is Tommy’s father.”

  “Yes, yes,” Gregor said. “It’s just that there’s a Peter involved in this mess up here. He was Kayla Anson’s boyfriend.”

  “Well, Peter Desarian would love to be the boyfriend of some woman with two hundred million dollars. He’d probably even marry her. At the moment, however, he’s trying to stop Russ from adopting Tommy, and that means that I’ve got to do something.”

  “I remember,” Gregor said. He sat down on the edge of the bed. What was it that Donna had said?

  “Anyway, I talked to Bennis about this,” Donna said, “and she said that if you even heard about it you’d have a fit, but I thought I’d ask. It couldn’t hurt to ask. And I want to know why you’d have a fit.”

  “Why I’d have a fit about what?”

  “I was thinking that the best thing to do would be to charge Peter with child abuse. The next time he comes to see Tommy, which is practically never, but now with all this stuff going on in court he wants to come up and take Tommy out for the day. And you can just guess how Tommy feels about that. This is not good just to begin with. And I thought that after Peter brought Tommy back I could say—”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “That’s what Bennis said. But why not?” Donna demanded. “It’s not like I’d be doing any real injustice to Peter Desarian, is it? He’d deserve the trouble he got into. He deserves more than that right this minute.”

  “Do you think you could get Tommy to he?” Gregor asked. “Do you think you could get him to lie consistently enough so that nobody would ever find out that he’d lied?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean child abuse charges have to be substantiated. If you made a charge against Peter, the court would be required to bring in psychologists, pediatricians, whole rafts of people to see if you’d made it all up. And they’d be assuming that you had made it all up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you aren’t the first person who’s ever thought of this. In the past ten years or so there have been a raft of these cases, and judges are fairly fed up. Fed up enough so that the first thing that would happen is that the judge wouldn’t believe you. And the next thing that would happen—assuming Tommy couldn’t keep himself from telling the truth, which is probably the case—is that the court would reject your bid to terminate Peter’s parental rights.”

  “They’re going to do that anyway. You said that yourself.”

  “Yes, I did,” Gregor said. “And it’s probably true. But that’s all they’ll do with things as they are now. If they think you’re engaged in some kind of vendetta—that you’ve become emotionally unstable and are unable to provide Tommy with a positive image of his father—they might end up handing custody over to Peter.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the wire.

  “Peter wouldn’t take it,” Donna said finally. Her voice was very unsteady.

  Gregor sighed. “Peter wouldn’t take it, but that harridan mother of his might. Do you really want to jeopardize Tommy’s future this way? Is it really necessary?”

  “I want Russ to be able to adopt Tommy.”

  “I know you do.”

  “I want Tommy to have a father, Gregor. A real honest-to-goodness father.”

  “He’s already got a father, in Russ, even without the adoption. The adoption is a legal construct, that’s all. It would be better if it went through. Life wouldn’t end if it didn’t go through. Your marriage wouldn’t end. Tommy’s relationship with Russ wouldn’t end. There’s no need for a scorched earth policy to deal with Peter Desarian at this time.”

  There was another long pause on the phone. Gregor wondered where Donna was—in the living room of the apartment above his own, in the living room of the new townhouse down the block, sitting on the steps of Lida Arkmanian’s townhouse with a cell phone in her hand. He wondered if Donna was trying to keep this
secret, or if she’d decided that there was no hope of that in any case.

  “I think a scorched earth policy is the only way to deal with Peter Desarian,” Donna said. “If that had been my policy from the beginning, I would have ended up in far less trouble.”

  “You would have ended up without Tommy. On this one, Tibor’s right. Don’t regret what gave you the best thing you have.”

  “Well, Gregor, let me tell you. Don’t blame me if I wish the whole thing had happened by artificial insemination. How long are you and Bennis going to be out in Connecticut?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, the papers are full of you up here. You wouldn’t believe it. Do you know who did it yet?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad. I used to think you always knew, right from the start. You just looked over the suspects and you could tell. Tell Bennis to call me when she comes in.”

  “I’ll leave her a note.”

  “There really does have to be something I can do about Peter Desarian, Gregor. There really does. I’m not going to just sit back and let him get away with this.”

  “Don’t do anything without the advice of your attorney,” Gregor said.

  “Very funny. But I mean it. I’m sick of being a football. I’m sick of that idiot just tearing my life up every time he gets bored. And I don’t believe for a second that he cares one way or the other if Russ adopts Tommy. He’s just trying to spoil things. It’s what he does.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Gregor said again.

  “I do stupid things every day. I don’t seem to be able to help myself. I won’t charge Peter with child abuse.”

  “Good.”

  “I won’t even have a fit when he comes to spend his day with Tommy.”

  “Also good.”

  “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to like it. I’ve got to get out of here, Gregor. I’ve got to help Lida Arkmanian make pastry. If you come back fast enough, you may get a chance at some pretty good food. Father Tibor has decided that the street ought to hold an Armenian festival.”

  “What?” Gregor said.

  “I’ve got to go,” Donna said.

  The phone went to dial tone in his ear. Gregor held it back and looked at it. An Armenian festival? What kind of an Armenian festival? And when? In some ways, he hated to be away from Cavanaugh Street. As soon as he got out of touch, people in the neighborhood started doing things.

  He put the receiver back in its cradle and stood up. He would leave a note for Bennis and then he would go back down to Stacey Spratz. He just really wished that he could remember what Donna had said that had caught him up so short.

  There was another advantage to being back on Cavanaugh Street. His mind worked better there. He didn’t forget things he should remember.

  He went to the little desk in the corner of the room and started looking through it for notepaper.

  2

  The most difficult thing about any case of murder, Gregor had always thought, is getting used to the fact that everybody is going to lie to you. And he did mean everybody. Even people who could not possibly be suspects in the case, who had iron-clad alibis, who had been in labor at the time the murder happened or who were too close to blind to be able to fire a fatal shot—even those people lied, and lied often, when presented with the police in search of an explanation for why a dead body had ended up dead. The truth of it was, of course, that people simply lied all the time. Even he lied. Nobody wanted to present themselves to the world in the full reality of what they were in the privacy of their own minds. Nobody was the person he wanted himself to be, or even the person he thought he ought to be. Nobody was without some corner of his life that embarrassed or shamed him.

  The problem with the way people lied in murder investigations, though, was that they lied about specifics. They said they were places they hadn’t actually been, or weren’t in places they had been. They fudged times. They invented emotional attachments to the deceased that had never existed, or put indifference in the place of what had been a hot and angry connection. Some of them were like Margaret Anson, clear enough about the reality that had been but not exhaustive. You got one part of the story and nothing else.

  At the McDonald’s on Straits Turnpike, Stacey Spratz insisted on getting out to eat.

  “I don’t like to eat in the car,” he told Gregor. “It’s too much like—I don’t know. Some movie about some loser who couldn’t get a wife, I guess.”

  Gregor didn’t like eating in cars, either. It reminded him of kidnapping detail. Everything about driving always reminded him of kidnapping detail. He was sure that kidnapping detail had been the most miserable experience of his life, although not the most painful. The most painful had been watching his Elizabeth die.

  He got out of the police cruiser and followed Stacey Spratz into the McDonald’s. It was a big, airy space with a sunroom built onto the end and furniture made of blond wood. There had been a fair number of cars in the parking lot, but the restaurant was almost empty. There were no lines at the registers at all.

  “I always get a Big Mac,” Stacey said helpfully. “But some people prefer a double Quarter Pounder with cheese.”

  Gregor didn’t want a double Quarter Pounder with cheese. He wanted a bowl of yaprak sarma, followed by a plate of something sweet, like those farina-and-honey cakes Lida was always making lately that he didn’t know the name of. He wished he hadn’t left Cavanaugh Street in such a hurry this time. When Lida and Hannah Krekorian knew he was leaving and going to be away for any length of time, they sometimes packed him big picnic baskets, full of Armenian food.

  He ordered a crispy chicken sandwich and large everything. It startled him a little to find that instead of being given a Coke, he was given a cup and sent to fill it up on his own.

  “It’s because you get free refills,” the young woman at the counter explained helpfully.

  If Gregor had known he could refill his drink at will, he would have gotten a smaller one. He took his tray to the soda machine and pushed the button for ice. Something that sounded like a volcano opening up in front of his face started spewing little nuggets of cold into the air.

  “I’ll get that,” Stacey said, coming up behind him.

  Gregor let him get it, too. He was not cut out for this sort of thing. He liked restaurants with waiters, even the kind of waiters who insisted on telling you their first names.

  Stacey threw little packets of ketchup and a small mound of napkins on Gregor’s tray. He got a cup lid and a straw for the Coke. Then he picked up the tray and headed for the sunroom in the back.

  “This way,” he said. “I got us a table in the warm.”

  The table was a large square. The chairs were just the kind Gregor liked, sturdy instead of ornamental. He sat down and looked at his food with uncertainty. Even when he and Bennis were traveling in the car, and going a long way, they brought their own lunch instead of stopping at fast-food places. The only people he knew who spent time in McDonald’s with any regularity were Donna and Russ, and they did it so that Tommy could get the toy in the Happy Meal.

  “So,” Stacey said, as Gregor said down. “Have you got it figured out yet? Do you know who killed Kayla Anson?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t you think that thing at the Swamp Tree was weird? I keep running scenarios through my mind. Somebody killed her and then went out to the country club and cleaned out her account. Somebody had already cleaned out her account and she found out about it and that’s why they killed her. Somebody—”

  “It was the blonde woman,” Gregor said, trying out his sandwich, which was, in fact, not actively bad, although it had too much mayonnaise on it. “Sally Martindale.”

  Stacey looked startled. “What was Sally Martindale?”

  “The person who took the money. She’s the—what? The bursar? Something like that?”

  “Well, yeah, I know, but—”

  “No buts,” Gregor said. “I’ll guarantee it. My gu
ess is that she’s been stealing from quite a few accounts over an extended period of time. The question is if she’s been careful or not. If she’s been careful, they won’t catch her, no matter how hard she tries. If she hasn’t been, they will. That is, assuming that she manages to stop taking money now that she knows they’re looking out for it.”

  “But of course she’d stop,” Stacey said. “I mean, if she’s really the one. Why wouldn’t she stop? She an educated woman. We’re not dealing with one of these west mountainers, you know, or the idiots down in Waterbury. Sally Martindale has an MBA.”

  “She’s also a compulsive gambler.”

  “What?”

  “Trust me. I know the signs. I know them backward and forward. Is she married?”

  “She used to be. To Frank Martindale, this hotshot arbitrage lawyer. Except I’ve never known what arbitrage is, exactly. Just that he got paid a ton of money for it. But they got divorced a year or so ago—ah.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Jesus,” Stacey said. “Did she kill Kayla Anson, too? To hide the fact that she’d taken the money?”

  “I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “I wouldn’t rule it out at this stage, but I don’t think it’s very likely. She doesn’t have the nerve. It took nerve, killing Kayla Anson. And then killing Zara Anne Moss. In the garage like that.”

  “Do you think Kayla Anson was killed in the garage?”

  “No.” Gregor drummed his fingers on the table. It was a good table for drumming. It sent up a satisfying hollow-wood sound, even though the wood was probably not hollow. Gregor pulled the pile of napkins off his tray and his pen out of the inside pocket of his jacket. The trick to writing on napkins was to write on them folded, not spread out. If you spread the napkin out, it tore with every movement of the pen.