by Jane Haddam
Charlie looked at column three, halfway down what he was holding, and found:
“Rumors on the street suggest that the long-anonymous ‘significant bidder’ in the Europabanc buyout may be none other than Baird Financial Services—”
Charlie put the paper down. “Well,” he said.
“Well,” Calvin echoed. He looked down at the papers on his desk and rubbed his eyes. “I’ve been going over it and over it,” he said. “All the people who were privy to the information. All the people who might have had reason to sell the information, or give it away, for that matter. It’s an impossible job.”
“It ought to be,” Charlie pointed out. “The secretaries must know. And if one secretary knows—”
“—all of them know, unless a matter’s been stamped confidential. And this one hasn’t. I don’t even know if it matters if anyone knows. Jon said to keep it tight, but he wasn’t fanatical about it. You know how he can get. It wasn’t like that. I don’t even suppose he’ll really mind. But I really mind. I keep thinking I have to know. Especially now with this thing with McAdam.”
“It was probably McAdam who leaked the news about McAdam,” Charlie said. “How long have we known Donald?”
“Too long,” Calvin said. “You’re right, of course. He leaked the news himself. He would.”
“Do we at least have the deal signed, sealed, and delivered?”
Calvin shook his head. “Jon wouldn’t hear of it. He gave McAdam the copies of the agreement and a stamped, self-addressed envelope—self-addressed to the firm, that is—and told him to go home and think it over very carefully. McAdam thought he was nuts and so did I, but Jon is Jon. But I thought you knew all this. I thought you brought all that stuff out to Jon when you went to Danbury.”
“I went to Danbury yesterday,” Charlie said, “but the papers were in an envelope. I didn’t open it. I was too busy trying to find a way to carry Jon’s bridge in that flimsy little box without breaking it myself.”
Calvin laughed. “Jon broke it. The same day you brought it to him. We got there this morning and one of his cheeks was sucking in like an old man’s. God. All the time we were there, I was wondering. Whether the rumors are true, if you know what I mean. Whether it was McAdam who shopped Jon to the Feds.”
Charlie was startled. “I don’t think so,” he said. “If that had been the case, I don’t think McAdam would have gotten his deal. Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know,” Charlie said with conviction. “If that had been the case, Jon would have hired a hit man if he’d had to, but McAdam would be dead. I think it’s just more of those rumors you’ve been worried about. And the fact that McAdam has shopped everybody else to the Feds.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right,” Charlie said. He got up off Calvin’s visitor’s chair and shook out his pants until the pleats were hanging straight. Calvin kept the air-conditioning in the offices up so high, Charlie always felt like wearing a sweater, no matter how hot it was outside. He checked his back pocket to make sure he had his wallet—he had been losing weight lately and things had been falling out of his clothes, often in the most awkward places—and began to drift toward Calvin’s door.
“So,” he said, “I guess I’ll be heading on home. Are you sure you don’t want to come with me?”
“I’m due up at the club to play bridge,” Calvin said, “and I have to clean up here. We’re getting old, Charlie.”
“Oh, I already got old,” Charlie said. “I’ve been enjoying my golden years with scarcely a break for months now.”
“Do you mind it, Charlie?”
Charlie didn’t answer. He was already out in the hall, for one thing. For another, it was a complicated question to answer. It was far more complicated, for instance, than the possibility that Donald McAdam might have turned Jon Baird in to the federal authorities for insider trading.
That, Charlie was sure, wasn’t possible at all.
If it had happened at all, Jon Baird wouldn’t have needed a hit man. He’d have found a way to kill Donald McAdam with his bare hands.
Since Donald McAdam was alive and well and soon to be in possession of twelve and one half million of Jon Baird’s dollars, Charlie dismissed the allegation out of hand.
He found it far more pleasant to plan what he would wear for all those days on Jon’s little boat, a modern-day Pilgrim to an upmarket Plymouth Rock.
8
In the end, Donald McAdam decided not to wait. The envelope was lying there on his occasional table, and his mind kept going back to it, worrying at it, gloating over it, no matter what. He had waited a long time for his twelve and a half million dollars. Now that he had it he wanted to have it, all wrapped up, beyond the possibility of anything going wrong. Exactly what could go wrong, he didn’t know. The papers were there and Jon had signed them. As soon as McAdam signed them himself, the money would belong to him. It was just that he had been around long enough not to trust Jon Baird.
He laid out five short lines of cocaine on the marble surface of the small table he kept pushed against the wall of windows that looked out across Manhattan. Now he stopped in the middle of reaching for his silver straw and changed his mind about how his day would end. He got up and got the envelope from the occasional table, looked curiously at the mason jar full of marmalade, and brought them both back.
It was all in there, just the way it was supposed to be, three copies of the agreement (each signed by Jon acting for Baird Financial) and a stamped, self-addressed envelope. It was all on Baird Financial stationary and neatly typed. He had already read through it three times today, but he decided to read through it again, very carefully, just to be sure nothing was wrong. It took him half an hour of what was really hard work, but he knew for certain that what he had was what he was supposed to have. He looked up and out the windows. While he had been concentrating on other things, the city had moved closer to night. The lights lit in the windows in the distance looked like thousands of candles held up to the dark.
The melon rind marmalade looked like the jar with the pulsating brain in it from some Z-grade 1950s horror movie. McAdam got up, went to the kitchen, and came back with a spoon. He pulled the cotton cover off the top of the jar and dug through the clear wax underneath. The marmalade was greenish black and oddly mobile, as if it were alive. McAdam got a small quivering blob of it on the end of the spoon and licked at it experimentally. It was outrageously sweet, a distillation of pure sugar. It made him feel sick on contact.
The copies of the agreement were still lying on the table. McAdam signed all three, put one copy aside, and folded the other two. He put the two folded copies into the stamped, self-addressed envelope and sealed it. Then he turned the letter over, stared for a moment at the address, and stood up. He was being paranoid and he knew it, but he couldn’t help himself. Someone could break into the apartment during the night and steal all three copies of the agreement. There could be a fire. He could have a heart attack. He went back to the elevator, punched himself in, and rode down to the lobby.
Three minutes later, he was back home, feeling proud of himself and a little relieved. The agreements had been mailed. The doorman had been greeted and dismissed. The fat woman in the elevator who had seen his picture on the cover of Forbes had been fended off and forced to depart on her own floor. Now he had the weekend in front of him, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do with it.
He sat down at the marble table, picked up the silver straw, and smiled. The first line went up his nose feeling as cold as menthol. The second went up feeling like nothing at all. By the time he’d gotten to the fifth he was not only high but happy, jumping, perfect, clear. He felt like dancing and singing and shouting at once, but most of all he felt like being out in the open air. He went to the French doors and let himself out onto the roof garden, high above the city. It all looked so wonderful out there, so perfect, exactly the way he had always expected it to be. It all looke
d so clean and he was going so fast, so fast, he was jumping and—
—and then it began to hit him, the pain, and the jerking convulsions he could not stop. In one awful moment he felt his body snap and grab and trip and jerk, whipping back and forth as if he were a flag being shaken out in a gale-force wind. He was out of control and the pain was getting worse. He was dipping and riding and jumping back and forth and back and forth in no known pattern and making no known sense and then he saw it—
—the railing—
—the end of the roof and the air, the air, the railing was nothing but two thin lines and not nearly high enough, not nearly high enough—
He felt himself slam into the railing, and jerk upward and push out. He felt himself in the air, still snapping and still in pain. He thought of the cocaine and the time and then he couldn’t think at all.
It was twenty-two minutes before eight o’clock at night on the last day of August and he was floating high above the city, in the air and free, and any minute now he was going to start falling down.
Part One
November 16–November 17
One
1
ON THE DAY THE very young man from the Federal Bureau of Investigation came to Cavanaugh Street, Gregor Demarkian found a picture of the Pilgrimage Green in the morning mail. Actually, the morning mail was the only mail he had—and from what he’d heard from friends who lived in other parts of Philadelphia, he was damned lucky to get it in the morning. His problem with the mail was the same as his problem with half of the rest of his life lately. Gregor had spent twenty years in the FBI himself, ten of those years as founder and head of Behavioral Sciences, the department that coordinated interstate manhunts for serial killers. Like any other high Washington official—like senators, congressmen, presidents, cabinet secretaries, and heads of major departments—he had lived a life free of bureaucratic bungling, management inefficiency, and general bad service. The Bureau made it a point not to bungle with the sort of people who could influence its next appropriation. For the ten long years of his reign at BSD, Gregor had had tax refunds that showed up in his mailbox two weeks after he’d filed his return, phone equipment that got fixed within an hour or two of his making a complaint, and mail that arrived at his office at least twice a day. The Social Security Administration never botched his name or got his number confused with that of a retired miner from Bozeman, Montana. The Post Office never delivered his Visa payment to the Vi-Sal Hair Salon in downtown L.A. He lived, in fact, in a kind of paradise, except for two little problems. In the first place, his wife was dying, painfully and slowly (but much too fast for Gregor) of cancer. For another, long before she started dying, he had begun to hate his job. Sometimes, in his sleep, he saw the cases he had handled strung out before him like beads of blood: the young man who had roamed through Alabama, Mississippi, and northern Florida, killing small girls and taking their right hands for souvenirs; the old woman in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona who had gone from one live-in elderly help job to another, offing each of her charges as she went; the sweet engaged couple from western Virginia who had first murdered all of her living relatives and then all of his. Back at the beginning, when there was no Behavioral Sciences Department, and getting one started had been a holy crusade, Gregor had kept a picture in his office that was meant to remind him how important his work was and why he had to keep going no matter how much pain they made him take. The picture was of a twelve-year-old girl named Kimberly Ann Leach, the last of the countless victims of a man named Theodore Robert Bundy. In the end, not even Kimberly Ann Leach could motivate him. It was one thing to pick up a serial murder case here and there, over the years. It was another thing to live for nothing else. He tried to sleep and the crime scenes played back on the inside of his skull, crime scenes made more vivid and more lurid because he had not actually been at them. For some reason, those badly lit five-by-eight color prints were as potent as lime rickeys made with 151-proof rum.
On the day the picture of the Pilgrimage Green came in the mail—and the FBI reentered Gregor’s life with a typically two-left-footed crash—all that was at least three years in the past. Gregor’s wife was dead. Gregor’s career with the Bureau had ended with his polite letter to the director two years before the old mandatory retirement age. His life in the District of Columbia—if he’d ever had a life in the District of Columbia, which was doubtful—was something he preferred not to remember. He lived on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia now, the very same Cavanaugh Street on which he’d been born. It had transmuted itself from an immigrant Armenian ghetto to an upscale urban enclave, but Gregor had owned his third-floor floor-through apartment across the street from Lida Arkmanian’s townhouse long enough to be used to that. There was no reason at all why he shouldn’t be completely adjusted to life as he expected it to be for many years to come. There was no reason why he should keep flashing back to life as he had gratefully left it in the past. There were and weren’t reasons, but none of them mattered, because here he was.
Where he was, precisely, was standing at his living room window, looking down on as much of Cavanaugh Street as he could see. It was ten o’clock on the morning of Friday, the sixteenth of November, less than a week before Thanksgiving. On the other side of the street, the facade of Lida’s modest stone palace was hung with brown and yellow cardboard cornucopias and sprightly turkeys made of quilted crepe paper fans. If he had been able to see his own building, Gregor knew, he would have found the same sort of thing. Down on the street, the store windows were plastered with Thanksgiving decorations, too. An hour ago, he had watched as the children of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School marched from their classroom building (at the north end) to the church basement, decked out as Pilgrims and Indians for their parts in the school play. It was business as usual for Cavanaugh Street. Give these people the slightest excuse for a holiday and they would run with it. Gregor was used to it. What he wasn’t used to was—the other thing.
At the moment, “the other thing” was represented by a crudely colored, and oddly tentative, paper flag, drawn on the inside of a carefully cut up grocery bag and hung from Lida’s third-floor guest-bedroom window. It was crudely colored because Lida had drawn it herself. Donna Moradanyan, Gregor’s upstairs neighbor and the street’s only real artist, had been out on the Main Line visiting her parents overnight. The flag was tentative because it had to be. The Republic of Armenia had declared its independence from the Soviet Union on September twenty-fourth. Since then, a positive rain of Armenian flags had descended on Cavanaugh Street. So had a positive rain of Armenians.
Gregor pressed his face to the glass, and looked down on the street again, and sighed. There was a little knot of them sitting on the steps of the church, young men in jeans so new and pressed the legs had creases, young women in brightly colored sweaters bought in the last week or so at K mart and Sears. If Gregor had had to guess what they were doing, he would have said reading the paper, although reading didn’t quite cover it. They puzzled it out, with the help of dictionaries and passersby. They were terribly proud of themselves when they were done, and asked questions about municipal elections and the state lottery. Every last one of them bought at least one lottery ticket a week, just in case.
“Why not?” Gregor asked himself now. “Old George Tekemanian buys half a dozen lottery tickets a week.”
Then he backed away from the window, rubbed his hands against his face, and told himself he had to get going. He had promised more people than he could count that he would do more things than he could count today, and he had to pack and be ready to leave tomorrow morning on top of it. Bennis had probably had her suitcases ready and waiting in her hall closet for a week.
At the thought of Bennis, Gregor Demarkian stopped, crossed his fingers, and listened. He was disappointed. No clatter of fitful typing came from the heating grate at his feet. No clang and clash of pots and pans rose up from the second-floor apartment’s kitchen. Bennis had to be taking the day of
f—and that meant, of course, that Bennis had to be resting. When he went downstairs, he’d find the standard sign on her door: ASLEEP UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
“I wish I was asleep until further notice,” Gregor said to no one in particular, but that sort of a thing wasn’t even a hope to him. Bennis Day Hannaford was one thing. Gregor was another. The people on Cavanaugh Street allowed him to get away with much less.
“Snobs,” Gregor said.
Then he grabbed his jacket and headed for his front door.
2
The picture of the Pilgrimage Green—sealed into a brown envelope with the logo of Baird Financial in the upper left-hand corner—was sitting on the hall table with the rest of the mail when Gregor came downstairs, meaning that someone (probably old George) had picked it up off the floor and sorted it out. Gregor got the envelope open just as old George got the door to his first-floor apartment open and began to peer out. Old George was eighty-something and had to have a first-floor apartment because he hated elevators and couldn’t take stairs. At least, according to old George’s grandson Martin’s wife, old George couldn’t take stairs. Old George’s grandson Martin’s wife was a bit of a terror. Old George’s grandson Martin was a bit of a nut. He bought his grandfather all the gadgets his wife wouldn’t let him have himself, so that old George’s apartment was filled with things like sterling-silver liquor decanters in the shape of National Football League helmets and egg timers that sprouted crowing roosters instead of ringing bells when their cycles were done.
Eighty-something or not, there was nothing wrong with old George’s eyes. He spotted the photograph in Gregor’s hand and bobbed his head, excited. Old George was always excited about something. That was what made his grandson Martin’s wife so crazy.
