by Jane Haddam
Stuart Ketchum sighed into the back of Gregor Demarkian’s head and said, “Once every two or three months. That’s all. Just once every two or three months.”
“Once there was even an emergency,” Franklin Morrison said. “Bear sat down outside the door and wouldn’t move. Poor man didn’t have any way to get out of his house.”
“Man built a sensible house, he’d have a back door to get out of,” Stuart Ketchum said.
Gregor Demarkian got his door open and climbed out onto the gravel driveway. As he did, the noise suddenly and abruptly stopped, mid-bellow, and Bennis Hannaford raised her eyes to heaven.
“Hallelujah,” she cried. “I have been saved. Why did it go off?”
“Because Jan-Mark turned it off, of course,” Franklin Morrison said. He’d gotten out of the car, too, with Stuart Ketchum just behind him. He looked resigned and as tired as Gregor Demarkian ever wanted to see any man. “If Stuart here and Peter Callisher hadn’t been coming up the drive just after Tisha Verek got killed, Jan-Mark would probably have set that thing off then, but there you were, the cavalry had already arrived—”
“—like we were the cavalry, for God’s sake—”
“—and Jan-Mark doesn’t like to waste electricity. The only thing Jan-Mark likes to waste is breath, which he wastes a lot of, especially if he’s drinking. Maybe we ought to go up and knock on the door. Although what we’d knock on it for is beyond me. He’s got to know we’re here. All he’s got is windows.”
He also had to have a reason to shut off the alarm, but Gregor didn’t want to bring that up. Franklin had just said it and forgotten he’d said it, but everybody else had forgotten it, too, and maybe it didn’t matter. They were all tired. Gregor moved to the front of the house and the only thing that might conceivably be a door and looked around for a bell. There wasn’t one. He tried for an intercom. There wasn’t one of those, either. Finally, he knocked.
Gregor had expected a wait, some frustration, a few more futile volleys against the door: That’s what door systems like this one were designed to induce. Instead, he got an instantaneous creak and rattle, and the door pulled back in front of his face in no time at all.
On the other side of the door was a man who looked more like Stuart Ketchum’s description of him than seemed fair. Jan-Mark Verek was indeed a bull, complete with overdeveloped shoulders and short, thickly muscled legs. Jan-Mark Verek looked like Franklin Morrison’s description of him, too—meaning like Brooklyn. Gregor thought the man was more than a little crazy, possibly a borderline sociopath. He had that kind of light in his eyes, that kind of intensity in his every small movement. Jan-Mark Verek was an arresting presence no matter what he was doing, and what he was doing right this moment was just standing there.
A moment later he had backed up and bent over, bowing comically, to let them all in. “It’s you,” he said, sounding pleased. “The Great Detective. And all I was expecting was Stuart in a pissed-off mood.”
“You got Stuart in a pissed-off mood,” Stuart Ketchum said. “Why don’t you just pick up the phone and call me?”
“You’re always out in the yard shooting at cans. You’d never hear me.”
“You could call me,” Franklin Morrison said.
Jan-Mark Verek ignored him, choosing to concentrate on Bennis instead. Bennis had come in last, behind the rest of them, and in the beginning Jan-Mark had not noticed her. Now he had, and his scrutiny was detailed and unmistakable. Gregor was used to men being attracted to Bennis. Men were constantly attracted to Bennis. They weren’t usually as nasty about it as Jan-Mark Verek. Gregor started to growl. Bennis shot him a look that said she knew perfectly well how to take care of herself. Which was probably true.
“Oh, you’re nice,” Jan-Mark told her.
“Only when I want to be,” Bennis said. Then she brushed past him and headed for the stairs, as quickly and unselfconsciously as if she’d been invited. The stairs were open-risered and open-railed and open to the windows. Gregor thought climbing them was going to make him dizzy.
“Come in,” Jan-Mark said, watching Bennis’s retreating back. “Come in, come in. We might as well all go upstairs and review the damage.”
“Damage?” Franklin Morrison asked.
“I’ve been robbed.”
Jan-Mark turned his back on them all and went off in the direction Bennis had taken. After a moment, Gregor and Franklin and Stuart followed. Everything was so open, it would have been impossible to get lost. Jan-Mark went up a single set of risers and then waited, near the kitchen, where Bennis had installed herself on a delicate chair. All the furniture Gregor could see was delicate and quasi-abstract. The art was big and bold and brightly colored and not of Jan-Mark’s making. Jan-Mark went in for trash collages and found objects. The paintings were all standard abstracts of the kind popular in the twenties. They suited the house.
Jan-Mark waited until they were all assembled just outside the tiled floor that marked off the kitchen and said again, “I’ve been robbed. It was the most amazing thing. I must have been robbed in my sleep.”
“You mean you think you were robbed while you were here?” Franklin Morrison sounded incredulous.
Jan-Mark didn’t take offense. “I was taking a nap. I’d had a long night and a long morning, and I was exhausted.”
“You must have been wired,” Stuart Ketchum said.
Jan-Mark threw him a look of contempt. “When I’m wired, I can’t sleep at all. No, that wasn’t it. I was just totally done in. I lay down just around eleven o’clock, and somewhere between then and when I set the alarm off, I was robbed.”
Gregor Demarkian checked his watch. “It’s about half past one,” he said. “Let’s say we first heard your alarm ten minutes ago. That gives your thief about an hour and twenty minutes to get in and out, assuming you fell asleep immediately and went straight past REM time into a coma—”
“Are you trying to tell me I couldn’t have been robbed?”
“I’m trying to tell you your story has some problems in it.” Gregor looked around the kitchen again. Everything was clean. Everything was white. Jan-Mark must pay a cleaning lady. “How did you find out you were robbed?”
“I went up to my studio. And there it all was. A mess and a half.”
“Your studio?”
“My late wife’s office. The studio and the office are two three-sided rooms in the loft.”
“This is above your bedroom,” Gregor said.
“Exactly.”
“And if I wanted to get there, I’d go how?”
“Up these stairs.” Jan-Mark patted the rail of the staircase they had all so recently ascended. “It goes all up and down the four levels, or maybe it’s five, I don’t remember. It’s like a dollhouse here. All the rooms are open to the window wall. All of them are reached by one staircase.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “that means that this thief of yours not only robbed you while you were sleeping, but robbed you while you were sleeping in a room open to the room he was stealing from, and then he had to go tromping up and down a lot of wooden stairs to get there and get out—I take it there isn’t an alternative route?”
“None.”
“That must have made the fire marshal have orgasms,” Franklin Morrison said.
“The fire marshal notwithstanding,” Gregor said, “Mr. Verek may have been robbed, but he wasn’t robbed the way he said he was. Which leaves us with three possible alternatives.”
“Tell me.” Jan-Mark was looking more amused by the second.
“The first one is that you weren’t robbed at all,” Gregor said.
“But I was.” Jan-Mark nodded vigorously. “At least, I ought to say that my late wife was. It’s her things that were taken.”
“All right. The second possibility is that you were out when it happened, but for some reason you don’t want us to know you were out. That would be particularly good if you were trying to establish an alibi for something that has recently happened back in town,
while Mr. Morrison and Ms. Hannaford and I have been at Mr. Ketchum’s farm. That’s what I will go on to assume if there turns out to be another dead body there when we go back.”
“If there was a dead body back there, we would have heard about it,” Franklin Morrison said. “That’s my personal car we’re using, but it’s got a two-way radio in it. And I carry a beeper.”
“The body might not have been discovered yet,” Bennis said blandly.
“There isn’t any body.” Jan-Mark Verek was impatient. “At least, there isn’t one I put there. I will admit I might have taken a tranquilizer or two before I went to sleep.”
“Right,” Franklin Morrison said.
“Phenobarbital,” Stuart Ketchum said. “Without a prescription. And no brand-name packaging, either.”
“I keep telling him I won’t arrest him unless I catch him selling it to the local population, but he doesn’t believe me,” Franklin Morrison said.
Gregor paid no attention. He knew Jan-Mark Verek had been on some kind of drug and that that drug had probably been a depressant. He knew that that would account for Jan-Mark’s not having heard an intruder, if there had been an intruder to hear. With anybody else, he wouldn’t have bothered to go through this song and dance. He hadn’t been that kind of agent in the Bureau, either. His attitude had always been that people ought to be allowed to keep their shameful but not case-related secrets to themselves. He just didn’t like Jan-Mark Verek.
Still, there was a robbery to be investigated, or something to be investigated. That was why Jan-Mark Verek had set off his alarm. Gregor put his hand on the stair rail and gestured up the stairs with his head.
“That way?”
“That way.” Jan-Mark sprang into action. “All the way up. In the loft, like I said. And I’m going to tell you right now that I think my wife was right.”
“About what?” Gregor asked him.
“About a certain person who happens to work for Peter Callisher named Timmy Hall. Come on. Let’s go up. I’ve got a lot to show you.”
2
There was a reason for Franklin Morrison to investigate Tisha Verek’s office. He was the local lawman and Tisha Verek’s husband had just claimed that the office had been robbed. There was a reason for Gregor Demarkian to investigate Tisha Verek’s office, too. Jan-Mark Verek wanted him to. There was no reason at all for Stuart Ketchum or Bennis Hannaford to be investigating Tisha Verek’s office, or wandering around in it, or observing the actions of the three people who belonged in it, but they came all the same. It was part and parcel of the fact that nothing in this case had been very “official,” just as nothing in Bethlehem, Vermont, was very “official.” It all seemed to get done somehow here. Gregor didn’t mind. Since he was going to talk it all over with Bennis later, he thought it would save time if she saw it for herself.
Tisha Verek’s office was indeed in a loft, a very high loft, higher even than the one that served as the bedroom. The house was a series of lofts. They made Gregor, who had never been easy with heights, feel unsteady. He climbed the stairs doggedly, behind Jan-Mark but ahead of all the others. Bennis came up right behind him, muttering all the way. He didn’t like Jan-Mark Verek. Bennis didn’t like Jan-Mark or his house, either, on general principles, and now she seemed to be talking against his carpets. Gregor reached the loft, turned his back on the open rail and looked around.
What the loft reminded Gregor Demarkian of was not so much a dollhouse as a stage set, the kind of stage set where two rooms can be seen at once and two scenes go on almost simultaneously. On one side there was the bare, unadorned studio space that belonged to Jan-Mark himself. Because of the way the staircase was placed, they had to cross in front of it to get to Tisha’s office. Gregor saw canvases stacked against the walls and paints in tubes and jars and bottles on every available surface. There weren’t many available surfaces. To Gregor’s eyes, it was not a happy jumble, but an angry one. Things seemed to have been flung about in continually erupting fits of pique, and left to lie out of spite. Maybe that was a form of projection on his part, because of the way he read Jan-Mark Verek’s character. Gregor had never had a chance to read Tisha Verek’s character, and seeing her office he decided he was glad he hadn’t. This room was neat, but it was no more a cheerful neatness than Jan-Mark’s studio was a cheerful clutter. Gregor’s first thought on seeing the precise stacks of paper and the even-rowed photographs on the corkboard was: what a constipated, nasty woman she must have been.
Constipated or not, nasty or not, those weren’t his problems. He looked around the office one more time and said, “How do you know anything was stolen? Are you trying to tell me the room was usually neater than this?”
Jan-Mark Verek made a face. “Awful, isn’t it? She was the most anal woman. It’s neat enough, even now, I’ll give it to you, but you’ve got to see things are missing.”
“He’s right,” Bennis Hannaford said.
She was standing at the back, near one of the cork-boards, looking up at it and squinting. Gregor walked to where she was and tried to see what she saw. He saw row after row of small, blurry, black-and-white pictures, each one labeled with a name. In the bottom row, there were two missing—or at least two empty spaces.
“All of these spaces were filled?” Gregor asked Jan-Mark. “Every last one of them?”
“Every last one of them,” Jan-Mark said. “Of course, I can’t tell you with what, exactly. She used to change them fairly frequently. Especially on that board. But they were filled and they were up there in alphabetical order.”
“They’re not in alphabetical order now,” Bennis said. “Look, Gregor. There’s Monica Hammond and then John Ziebert and then Billy Welsh and then Elsie Hastings. Two of the HAs were removed.”
“Tommy Hare,” Jan-Mark said. “That’s one of the ones that were removed.”
“Who’s Tommy Hare?” Bennis asked.
Stuart Ketchum and Franklin Morrison looked uncomfortable. Gregor said, “Tommy Hare was a teen-aged boy in Devon, Massachusetts, about twenty-five years ago. Not teen-aged. Twelve, I think he was. Anyway, he got a girlfriend and eventually the girlfriend got another boy. He waited until she was giving a party and sneaked into her patio that night and used a cattle prod to electrocute everybody who happened to be in her pool. A lot of people, from what I remember. He ended up at a place called Checkered Tree. It’s a facility for what we used to call the criminally insane.”
“Oh, yuck,” Bennis said.
“Tisha always said she thought Tommy Hare and Timmy Hall were one and the same person,” Jan-Mark said.
Bennis thought this over. “That won’t work,” she said finally. “Timmy Hall is that man we met with Peter Callisher yesterday, isn’t he, Gregor?”
“That’s right,” Gregor said.
“Well, he couldn’t have been twelve twenty-five years ago. He’s not that old.”
“You just think he’s not that old because he’s retarded,” Jan-Mark Verek said. “There’s no telling how old he is. There’s no way to know.”
“I could know if I wanted to,” Franklin Morrison said, “except there’s no point to it, because I already know he wasn’t in anyplace called Checkered Tree. He was at the Riverton Training Facility right here in Vermont. Teacher of his called me up to tell me about him when he first came down here. Woman I went to high school with.”
Stuart Ketchum turned politely to Gregor and Bennis. “Riverton is a big complex of mental-health facilities in the Green Mountains. They’ve got everything up there. This training school for the mentally retarded. A psychiatric hospital. A sort of summer camp, out-patient, group-therapy arrangement for people with chronic conditions. Oh, and an addiction-treatment specialty facility that does everything from cocaine to overeating.”
“Sounds wonderful,” Bennis said, unenthusiastically. She had wandered across the room and stood now next to Tisha’s computer station, looking at the corkboard there. “There’s been a bunch of pictures removed from here, too,�
�� she said. “I wonder why anyone would take them. There must be a manuscript around somewhere if she was writing a book.”
“There are a couple,” Jan-Mark said. “She made copies of her proposal and gave them to people.”
“A lot of people?” Gregor asked.
Jan-Mark shrugged. “She gave one to Gemma Bury, if you’re looking to construct a conspiracy theory. I think she gave one to one of the ladies at the library, too.”
“You mean it was general knowledge,” Gregor persisted. “It wasn’t a case of someone thinking there would only be one copy and trying to get a hold of it.”
“They might have thought that if they were mentally retarded,” Jan-Mark said. “That’s the point of being mentally retarded. You’re not too bright.”
“Someone as stupid as you’re making Timmy Hall out to be wouldn’t have removed all these pictures so neatly,” Gregor said. “He’d have trashed the place and destroyed the computer and had done with it.”
“Let’s look at what’s missing from here,” Bennis said.
Bennis had sat down at the computer station. She ran her finger across the corkboard and said, “Bateman, Beddish, Yale, Carter—there’s something. Who belongs there?”
“How should I know?” Jan-Mark demanded.
“There’s another one further down,” Bennis said. “Holby, Warren, Hurt. Who would that be?”
“Maybe you have some way of calling up the information on the computer,” Gregor suggested. “Or maybe your wife left notes. Or a manuscript.”
“No notes,” Jan-Mark said. “And as for the computer—”
He looked dubiously at the blank screen and then sighed, almost resignedly, as if necessity were forcing him into the worst of all possible positions, the need to act like an ordinary man. He tapped Bennis on the shoulder, waited until she stood up and then sat down himself. He reached into a side drawer, looked through the diskettes there, and chose one. Then he loaded up.
“This was her index,” he said. “If you want to know the truth, it was the only part of the book I liked. You wouldn’t believe how many innocent-seeming little children have been positively homicidal.”
