Feast of Murder (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “I can’t diet,” Cassey had told Fritzie once. “Every time I start I get crazy. I can’t concentrate. All I can think about is food. I never get anything done.”

  Fritzie was carrying a plate of cookies covered in powdered sugar in from the pantry. She put it down on the coffee table in front of Cassey and retreated. She was tempted to give Cassey another lecture about her weight—it had been a while—but since the divorce her heart had gone out of it. There was Cassey, 200 pounds if she weighed an ounce, with her husband who adored her and a pack of children who worshiped her in spite of it. Fritzie was sure it must be “in spite of it,” because for Fritzie weight was something that could never be neutral, or positive. Whatever it was, here was Fritzie, on her own again at the age of fifty-odd, with a son who barely seemed to tolerate her. Here was Fritzie, with her hold on the only kind of life she had ever wanted to live beginning to slip—the magazines weren’t calling as often; she wasn’t being chosen as automatically to head the committees or serve on the governing boards. Here was Fritzie, thin as a rail and just as pure. It didn’t seem right somehow.

  Cassey looked over the plate of powdered-sugar cookies, took one, and said, “So from what I can see, you don’t have any obligation in this thing at all. You are divorced from the man. That does mean you don’t have to do what he wants you to do. What I’d do if I were you is just tell him to stuff it.”

  “I can’t tell him to stuff it,” Fritzie said. “He’s got control of my income. That trust he settled on me can be reversed at any time.”

  “Maybe. But it won’t be. That was part of the court settlement, remember? I’d think the last thing Jon wants to do now is land in court again.”

  “It’s the last thing I want to do now.”

  “Just don’t let him know that. Really, Fritzie, you’re all grown up. You’ve got to learn how to operate with these things. Jon Baird has got no right to expect you to drop everything and spend a week or more on a leaky old boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in the company of his much younger wife.”

  And that, Fritzie thought, was certainly absolutely true. It was also certainly absolutely beside the point. She picked up the cup of tea she had left on the coffee table when she went out to get the second plate of cookies and sipped it gingerly. Sometimes her friends did very odd things to sabotage her diet, like putting sugar in her tea when she was away from the table. She’d never been able to understand what they were afraid of. Even after she got down to her ideal weight, she would still love all the people she loved now. She would still cherish them. This tea was unadulterated. She took an immense gulp to fill the hard painful hollowness of her stomach and put the cup down.

  “The thing is,” she said, “it’s more than Thanksgiving or the boat or—or Sheila. It’s all this other business, too. I had a call from Margaret Denton today. Do you remember Margaret Denton?”

  “Peggy Devereaux?”

  “That’s right. She was all upset, because Jon’s company has decided to pay this man Donald McAdam—you met Donald McAdam here once, I don’t know if you remember—”

  “Oh, I remember all right, Fritzie. For goodness’ sake. It’s not every day you sit down to dinner with a man who shows up in the paper two days later indicted for everything.”

  “I suppose you’re right. Well, Jon’s company is going to pay Mr. McAdam a very large sum of money to get him to quit his job, which doesn’t make sense to me but seems to be necessary because for some reason they can’t fire him. It was supposed to be a great big secret, but somebody told somebody, and Peggy heard about it and she called me. It was a terrible phone call, Cassey, it really was. She shouted.”

  “About what?”

  “About how awful it was that anybody would pay Mr. McAdam—oh, I don’t understand it all. I really don’t. When we were growing up, women didn’t have to pay any attention to business and I don’t want to pay attention to it now. And it shouldn’t be my problem, should it? Jon and I are divorced.”

  “Right,” Cassey said.

  “But anyway,” Fritzie said, “Peggy is a friend of mine and she was so upset and everything that I decided to see what I could do. I decided I’d go over there and talk to him.”

  “What?”

  “Well,” Fritzie said defensively, “why not? He’s been part of our—my—circle for years, hasn’t he? He’s been to dinner in this house. He contributes to the Cancer Society and the Metropolitan League. He’s supposed to be one of us in spite of all these things he seems to have done. So I thought I could talk to him.”

  “Talk to him about what?” Cassey marveled. “About giving up this money you say Jon is going to pay him? Is it a lot of money?”

  “I brought him a jar of my melon rind marmalade,” Fritzie insisted. “You know how I’m always making marmalade. I brought him some of that. I only bring it to very important people in my life.”

  “I know,” Cassey said drily, just drily enough so that Fritzie began to wonder about her tone of voice. “But it’s hardly worth—what? How much money?”

  “Peggy said it was more than twelve million dollars.” Fritzie looked away, toward the kitchen, where she had more melon rind marmalade. She had thirty jars of it, in fact, because last week had been one of those very bad times when only cooking could keep her from eating. Cassey was staring at her. She plunged on. “I wasn’t going to talk him out of taking the money, Cassey,” she said, “I’m not that naive. I’m old enough to know that anybody will do anything for the money. No, I was just going to talk to him about keeping quiet about it.”

  “But what good would that do?” Cassey said. “If it really is that much money we’re talking about, Baird Financial would find it necessary to issue a statement.”

  “They will now,” Fritzie said, “but that wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be an absolute secret. After Peggy called I called Calvin, just to check; I didn’t want to go off half-cocked on the strength of a rumor. And Calvin hit the roof. That was this morning. The agreement hadn’t even been delivered yet. Mr. McAdam was supposed to pick it up from Jon at the jail—”

  “At the jail?”

  Fritzie waved it away. “They all do it. All those men in Danbury. You’d be surprised. The point is, nobody was supposed to know about it. It was supposed to be an absolute secret. And of course Calvin knew there was only one way the news could have gotten out.”

  “What way was that?”

  “Why, Donald McAdam must have been spreading it, of course. Calvin said that was the kind of man he was. That he liked publicity. So I decided to go over there to talk to him.” Fritzie looked into her teacup, empty now, and reached for the sterling silver pot in its nest of sterling silver filigree. She had to be careful with the tea in the pot, too. There was nothing to say that sugar could only be added to the cup. “I thought,” she explained slowly, “that under the circumstances I might be able to bribe him. Not with money—”

  “Not on the heels of twelve million dollars,” Cassey said drily, “no.”

  “But there are other things. There are. Especially with someone like Mr. McAdam. He’s a terrible social climber, Cassey, he really is. He’s always trying to get himself invited to things and on the boards of things. He hasn’t been having a good time of it lately, either. With all these indictments, he’s been really out in the cold. So I thought, I’m chairing the Anniversary Gala for the Hayes-Dawson Museum of Contemporary Art. I still have open places on the committee. If he was willing to stop talking to people about this deal of his, I could give him a place. It would be a small price to pay. I don’t like being hounded by people.”

  “Mmm,” Cassey said again, and Fritzie got the uncomfortable feeling that she had just said something very stupid. Maybe she had. This whole thing had made her feel very confused and bumbling, and the deeper she got into it the worse it seemed to get. She gulped at her tea again and scalded her throat.

  “Well,” she said, “I didn’t see him when I went to his apartmen
t because he wasn’t there, but I ran into him later, around five o’clock, outside the Cosmopolitan Club downtown. I don’t know what he was doing there. It’s a woman’s club.”

  “Maybe he was just passing in the street.”

  “Maybe he was. I did talk to him about it then. In a way.”

  “I take it he didn’t bite?”

  Fritzie frowned. “I don’t know if he understood what I was talking about. I was trying to be very discreet about it, trying to go at it by indirection, but maybe I was being much too subtle. He interrupted me right in the middle of everything and then he said the oddest thing. The oddest thing in context, I mean. Considering what I was talking about.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Greed is the drug of choice for otherwise sober people.’ Just like that.”

  “Did you ask him what he meant?”

  “Of course I asked him what he meant,” Fritzie said. “All he would tell me was that he’d been trying to figure something out for weeks and he finally had, and then he said he had a stock tip for me. ‘Go out and buy Europabanc Limited,’ he said, ‘and watch very, very carefully what it does.’ Then he started laughing, right there on the street.”

  “And that was it?”

  “That was it. He said good-bye and walked away. He didn’t even offer to see me home.” Fritzie sighed. “Peggy’s going to call me back again today and she’s not going to be the only one. And I won’t even be able to say I’m divorced from Jon and it’s none of my business, because with this Thanksgiving dinner party it’s going to look like a very different kind of divorce than the one it is. Or at least, than the one it is when Sheila’s around. Do you think that’s a nice name for a woman? Sheila?”

  Cassey Hockner was eating her way through a powdered sugar cookie. Fritzie stared at her and almost leapt. It got that way with food sometimes, she got so hungry she wanted to tear it out of people’s hands. But that was neurosis. Real hunger wasn’t like that at all. Real hunger didn’t hit you when you’d already eaten your 800 calories for the day. Fritzie poured herself another cup of tea.

  “Calvin said the oddest thing when I called,” she told Cassey. “Do you know what it was? He said the way Mr. McAdam was behaving, he knew half a dozen people who if they had a chance to kill him, probably would.”

  7

  Ever since Charlie Shay’s wife had left him and gone to Vermont—to find herself, to find a tree, just to get away from him—he had been feeling rootless and upset, as if he were a helium balloon without a string, attached to nothing, floating. The floating feeling was exacerbated by the subtle change that had come over his status in the office since Jon had gone to jail. It was a change that had as much to do with how he saw himself as with how the others saw him, but it bothered him that he couldn’t pin down when it had started or why. Lately, he had been having a difficult time pinning down much of anything. Charlie Shay had always been one of those people adept at moving on. Leaving high school, he had abandoned his high-school friends for new ones at college. Leaving college, he had abandoned his college friends for new ones in business. Leaving one business, he had abandoned his work friends for new friends at his new place of work. People had always drifted into Charlie’s life and then out again, barely noticed, until he met Jon Baird. Now, after over thirty years, it was Jon who was drifting out.

  Except that he wasn’t, not exactly. Jon was still in Danbury, expecting a visit from Charlie Shay once every other week. The office was still where it had always been. Calvin and Julie and Mark and all the other people Charlie had gotten used to during the past few years were still taking up space in the hallways of Baird Financial. Even the holiday schedule was still the same. Charlie’s life had emptied out to the point where he had to spend Christmas at his club and his birthday buying himself a drink, but this year, as for every year but one since he had first met Jon, Thanksgiving was taken care of. The exception had been last year, while Jon was in jail and Sheila was so distraught she’d had to go on a cruise to Bermuda to quiet her nerves. Now Jon was getting out and the Thanksgiving party was on and Charlie was invited. That this invitation seemed to have nothing to do with him—that it had been extended to everyone with a significant emotional investment in fortunes of the business—bothered Charlie Shay not at all.

  What did bother Charlie Shay was that it was seven o’clock on a Friday night and he was still in the office. Years ago, that wouldn’t have been very unusual. As a young man he had been very ambitious. What he had been ambitious for was no longer completely clear and he couldn’t have said if he’d achieved it—but that was the way life went, after all, and he didn’t feel entitled to complain. You worked and worked and worked and worked and then one day you looked up and decided you were tired. That was what had happened to him. He was tired. The only time he perked up was when he had an errand to do for Jon, like bringing the McAdam papers and the spare bridge out to the prison so that Jon could review the deal and not have to chew with his gums while he did it.

  Charlie Shay was at the office at this late hour because he had gotten lost in a book of crossword puzzles. Crossword puzzles were what he did with himself most of the time these days. Over time, he had developed a mild compulsion—always buy the Times, always do the crossword puzzle, first thing—into an elaborate mania, so that he knew the names and styles of most of the puzzle constructors and the weaknesses of each. He’d even entered the Games magazine national crossword championships this year and come in third. Today, coming back from lunch with a new collection and a determination to have nothing more to do with Donald McAdam or his deal, Charlie had shut himself into his office and let himself go mentally missing. He would have been mentally missing for hours yet, except that Julie Anderwahl was having an argument with Mark in the office next door and she had thrown something. The something had bounced against the wall Charlie shared with Mark, bringing Charlie to. Charlie had wondered for what must have been the millionth time if the two of them behaved the same way in bed, complete with screams and curses and sharp-edged flying objects. Charlie had never had anything but the most conventional forms of sex, and the idea of variations with a little violence (on the part of the woman) intrigued him.

  Julie called Mark a son of a bitch in a voice loud enough to be heard across the river in New Jersey, and Charlie stood up, went to his door, and looked into the hall. This was the hall where most of the really important offices were, the offices of the senior executives and the one or two lower-level people expected to make it all the way up, and as Charlie would have suspected, most of those offices were still inhabited. Calvin Baird’s office was certainly inhabited, sitting down there at the end of the hall next to Jon’s illuminated shrine like a dog at its master’s feet. At Baird Financial, there had never been any ambiguity about who ran the company or from where. Jon had pleaded guilty to a count or two of insider trading, not to major fraud. He hadn’t been barred from the securities industry or made ineligible to own or run a bank. What he’d been jailed for wasn’t even illegal in Europe and Japan. He was the founder, chairman, chief executive officer, and patron saint of Baird Financial—and if he’d been sent to jail for ten years instead of just over one, it would still have been his company.

  Charlie edged out into the hall, past Mark Anderwahl’s door—passing strangers in the halls had sometimes been pulled in to Mark and Julie’s fights; Charlie didn’t want any part of that—and then started making time toward Calvin’s door. Mark and Julie seemed to be arguing about the McAdam thing, which figured. To Charlie’s mind, there was a lot to argue about in the McAdam thing. On the other hand, it had been Jon Baird’s personal decision, and that really ought to settle it. Charlie got to Calvin’s open door, looked in at Calvin bent over a spread of papers on his desk, and knocked.

  “Cal?” he said. “Don’t you think you ought to go home?”

  Calvin Baird wasn’t much like his brother Jon. Instead of being barrel chested and bandy legged, he was tall and thin. Ins
tead of having eyes full of humor and a mouth that crinkled up at the edges, he had the face of a Puritan preacher. He was angled and sharp, self-righteous and cold, impossible to deal with—at least on the surface. Charlie had known Cal for what felt like forever and not been able to figure him out yet.

  Charlie knocked a second time, and coughed, and said, “Don’t pretend you don’t hear me. I know it’s been a long day. That’s my point.”

  Calvin Baird looked up from his papers and sighed. It was mostly in profile that he looked intransigent. Full-face, he simply looked exhausted.

  “Charlie,” he said. “Hello. It has been a long day.”

  “Is that more on Mr. Donald McAdam? I’d think you’d be sick of him by now.”

  “I am sick of him. You don’t know how it annoys me that Jon couldn’t wait to get out of jail to do this thing. If he had waited, at least it would have been his problem and not mine. But, no. This isn’t Mr. McAdam. This is Europabanc.”

  “Everything going smoothly?”

  “As smoothly as it can when you deal with the French.”

  “Ah,” Charlie said. He came fully into Calvin’s office then and sat down in the single chair kept for visitors. Calvin was one of those people who preferred to keep his appointments in public places, like restaurants. “I heard Mark and Julie having a fight just now. About McAdam. About selling McAdam.”

  “There’s no way to sell McAdam,” Calvin said. “I tried to tell her that. She’s too much of a perfectionist. In the meantime I’ve got this Europabanc thing, and there’s been a leak. In the middle of all this McAdam business nobody seems to have noticed, but someone will.”

  “Noticed what?”

  “Noticed this.” Calvin reached into the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a copy of the Wall Street Journal, folded carefully back to a center page. Calvin passed it across the desk to Charlie and said, “Column three. Halfway down what you’re holding.”