Feast of Murder (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “I suppose for the same reasons they marry anybody else.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t like Europeans, if you want to know the truth. I spend a lot of my time dealing with them. One of our soon-to-be partners from Europabanc took Jon aside once and said that he ought to get a man in to supervise me. I had much too important a position for it to be entrusted to a woman.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “People think it’s the Japanese who don’t think like us,” Julie said. “They ought to meet the Swiss. What about you? Mark says you’re sure Charlie Shay was murdered. He says he agrees with you.”

  “Do you?”

  “I didn’t see much,” Julie said. “I was in the back of the crowd up here when all that was going on. And I was too sick to be in the mess hall last night, of course. I was a little surprised that you didn’t come rapping on my door demanding to interrogate me.”

  “I don’t think we’re in that kind of a hurry,” Gregor said drily. “I did want to ask you a few questions, though.”

  “Did you?” Julie held herself very still. Gregor got the distinct impression she was trying to make up her mind about something. The decision she came to seemed to be negative. She shook her head sharply and looked away. “So ask me,” she said. “I’d be interested to know how your mind was working.”

  “And you think my questions will tell you that?”

  “Well, they should, shouldn’t they?”

  Gregor agreed they should. In his experience, they rarely did. He said, “Tell me something about Baird Financial. You run their public relations department, is that right?”

  “That’s right. I’m vice president for, in fact.”

  “Do you know anything at all about the housekeeping functions in your department? How things are filed? How correspondence is dealt with?”

  “Some.” Julie bristled. “I’m not a secretary, though, Mr. Demarkian. I never was a secretary.”

  “I know that. It’s policy I’m interested in here. In my experience, firms file their correspondence in one of two ways—with the envelope it came in or without. Do you know which Baird Financial does?”

  “Oh.” Julie looked confused. “Well, I think it depends. In Public Relations we always throw away the envelopes. There’s no point to keeping them. I have heard that Financial keeps them, though. For tax purposes.”

  “What about whatever department handles general firm business? Like the Europabanc deal.”

  Julie laughed. “They’ve kept absolutely everything about the Europabanc deal,” she said. “The joke in the typing pool is that after one of our conferences with the Europeans, the secretaries are required to go around and preserve the ashes in the ashtrays. We have an entire separate office suite in the Trade Center that does nothing but hold papers relating to Europabanc. Trust me, we keep envelopes with the correspondence.”

  “Would you do that in any other case?”

  “I told you. Financial does it. I don’t see why you’re making such a big fuss over this. A lot of firms operate this way. A postmark is very good evidence in the event of a lawsuit where time is an important factor. It’s very good evidence when you have a little trouble with the tax people, too. As far as I know, we keep envelopes of any correspondence having to do with money and we keep them for at least five years. After that, I don’t know what we do with them.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said. “That’s what I thought. About the envelopes.”

  “What do envelopes have to do with the death of Charlie Shay?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” Gregor looked up into the rigging over his head. The sails were still flat. He wondered how long the ocean could remain untouched by wind. He was worried the answer might be “weeks.” He turned back to Julie. “You said something before I wish you would clarify. I said there ought to be some way to call the Coast Guard in an emergency, and you said there probably is. Do you mean Jon Baird has flares somewhere and isn’t telling us about them?”

  “No. I meant everything on this boat is done with fires. I didn’t realize Jon had refused to call the Coast Guard.”

  “He made out that it was impossible.”

  “I don’t see how it could be. We have fires to cook with and candles and matches. I’m sure somebody must have a cigarette lighter. Your friend Bennis smokes. Tony smokes sometimes, too—”

  “I don’t think Tony would be much help.”

  “Taking his father’s side?” Julie was sympathetic. “Tony is nearly a fanatic on the subject of his father. It’s upset the hell out of Fritzie since the divorce. I think after Jon married Sheila, Fritzie just expected Tony to take her side. Instead, he behaved like a man.”

  “That must have been disturbing.”

  “It was worse than disturbing, it was insulting.” Julie eased herself up from the spool she’d been sitting on, gripping the ridge along the inside of the bow, and took a deep breath. “Let’s go downstairs and find Mark,” she said. “I wanted you to talk to him anyway. And he knows all about this kind of thing. He used to go to wilderness camps when he was in high school.”

  “What in the name of God is a wilderness camp?”

  “It’s a place where you go to rough it in a national forest for a couple of weeks. The most famous one is Outward Bound. They take people out and let them live off rattlesnakes in the desert or roots and berries in the forest with no modern conveniences or ways of getting them. They have guides, of course.”

  “Of course,” Gregor said. “And I thought Jon Baird was an isolated eccentric.”

  “He’s eccentric enough, all right.” Julie straightened her back, took a deep breath, and seemed to get better hold of herself. Her face lost a shade or two of its green tint and her smile was genuine and unforced. “Let’s go find Mark. He’ll know a way to rig up a flare that won’t blow us up when we use it. Maybe we can rig up a couple and get the Coast Guard to rescue us.”

  What Gregor thought he needed the Coast Guard to rescue was the body of Charlie Shay, but he didn’t say that. Julie was beginning to look green again. He gripped her firmly by the elbow and guided her carefully into the narrow passage leading out of the bow. She put her hand out and steadied herself against the side of the boat. She almost missed. The low bow rail was like a cutout in the boat’s side. At one point there was nothing at shoulder height but air, and at the next there was a thick polished wall. Julie’s hand came down on the dividing line between the two and she stumbled.

  “Careful,” Gregor said.

  “I am being careful,” Julie said, “I—oh, there’s Mark.”

  “Where’s Mark?” Gregor looked up as soon as he spoke, and when he did there was no avoiding Mark. He was standing at the back, beyond the wheelhouse and the stairs to the deck below, on the way to the stern. He had his back to them, but he looked tense.

  “Mark?” Julie called tentatively.

  Mark didn’t hear her. He jerked his arms above his head, brought them down again in fists, and yelled, “Tony Baird you son of a bitch.”

  Then he launched himself into nothingness.

  2

  Gregor would have moved faster if he hadn’t had Julie Anderwahl at his side. His instinct told him to get her away from his side as quickly as possible—and it wasn’t sexism, either. He’d seen women agents at the Bureau who had been taught to fight. He’d also seen women like Julie, who had been taught not to fight, get messed up in a fight. He helped her forward anyway, at least far enough so that she had another spool to sit on. Then he left her and went running into the stern.

  Coming up behind Mark Anderwahl, Gregor had not been able to see Tony Baird or anything else in the stern. He didn’t know what to expect. Everything else that had happened on the Pilgrimage Green had happened in a crowd, as far as he could tell. Maybe that was why he was half-convinced he would find a crowd when he got to the stern. He didn’t. Tony Baird was there, flat on the deck with Mark Anderwahl on top of him. Both of them were fighting like men who had never been in a fight before. That was
what happened when you did away with the peacetime draft. Men didn’t learn how to punch each other out. They probably didn’t learn how to punch each other out at Groton, or wherever these two had gone, either.

  Tony’s face was turning blue. Gregor thought Mark Anderwahl was strangling him. From the way Mark was lying on Tony, it was hard to tell. Mark Anderwahl was kicking his feet into the deck, pounding them like a child having a tantrum. The tips of his shoes were splintering against the wood. Gregor looked them both over and went for Mark Anderwahl’s ankles. That seemed to Gregor to be his mission on this trip: to go for people’s ankles.

  Gregor Demarkian was fifty-six years old, tall and broad but twenty pounds overweight and out of shape. Mark Anderwahl was a well-muscled young man in his thirties with a membership in a fashionable gym. It didn’t matter. Mark was an amateur and at a positional disadvantage. Gregor jerked him loose with no trouble at all and hauled him across the deck. The action brought back to Gregor one of the primary truths of his life. He was not a physical man. He was not supposed to do things like this. He was supposed to think.

  He dropped Mark Anderwahl against the inside curve of the stern and turned back to Tony Baird. Tony was sitting up and rubbing his hand against the side of his throat, still angry.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Gregor told him. “After you two tell me what’s going on, you can go back to killing each other. Before you do you can just sit right where you are. Both of you.”

  “He threw it overboard,” Mark Anderwahl said. “He had a walkie-talkie or a radio or something and he threw it overboard.”

  “He’s out of his mind,” Tony Baird said.

  “I saw him,” Mark Anderwahl insisted.

  The two young men were now both standing again, and instinctively squaring off. Gregor tried to interpose himself between them without letting it become too obvious that that was what he was doing. The last thing he wanted was to end up in the middle of this fight.

  “You had something on you the day we arrived,” Gregor said to Tony Baird. “You dropped it on the pier when Bennis Hannaford and I were coming through the fog to come on board. At the time I thought it looked like a child’s walkie-talkie.”

  “It was probably a cigarette lighter.”

  “I know what a cigarette lighter looks like, Mr. Baird.”

  “Cigarette lighters look like anything. I’ve got one in the shape of a football.”

  “You wouldn’t have tossed a cigarette lighter out to sea,” Mark Anderwahl said. He turned to Gregor, appealing. “I came up on deck to look for Julie. I was just wandering around when I came back here, and there he was, standing at the side, holding his arm back like he was going to pitch a baseball. And then at the last moment I saw it. A radio.”

  “There was no radio,” Tony said.

  Mark brushed this aside. “It was like he said when I was talking to him last night before we went to bed. About how he doesn’t believe Charlie Shay was really murdered and about how you only want to cause trouble. And then he said it would all be much better if the investigation took place in Massachusetts, because the Bairds had ways of protecting themselves in Massachusetts that they don’t in places like Virginia and New Jersey and Delaware. We were right there in that room next to the mess hall with all the ship models in it—”

  “Ship models?” Gregor was bewildered.

  “Ships in bottles,” Tony said. “He’s very good at it.”

  Gregor thought of that great elaborate thing in the mess hall. “Did he do the clipper ship with the flags—”

  “In the mess hall?” Tony said. “Yes, he did. He did all the ships in bottles on this boat.”

  “What do ships in bottles matter?” Mark Anderwahl said. “The radio, that’s what matters. It doesn’t matter if we’ve got a murder or not. We’ve got a dead man on this boat and my wife’s sick. We’ve got to get help.”

  “You’ve got to get help,” Tony Baird said coldly. “You need a psychiatrist, Anderwahl. And a pair of glasses.”

  “Why you son of a—”

  Gregor thrust out his arms and pushed hard against Mark Anderwahl’s chest. Then, fractions of a second before it would have been too late, he whirled around and pushed against Tony’s. Tony went stumbling backward. Mark Anderwahl sat down abruptly, like a man who had been sent into shock.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Julie said. It was the first sound she had made since all this started. “You’ve got to stop this, both of you. What good is it going to do to cause another death on this boat?”

  The three men turned to look at her. Gregor felt vaguely surprised. He had forgotten she was here. Tony and Mark both looked astonished and ashamed of themselves, like small boys caught fighting by their mothers. They also looked distinctly resentful. Here we are again, their faces seemed to say, with women coming around and spoiling all the fun.

  It was the impression of a moment. A moment later, Gregor might have imagined it. That was when Mark broke away from their circle and hurried to his wife, holding out his arms to her as if she were a child he needed to comfort.

  “Julie,” Gregor and Tony heard him saying. “Julie, I’m sorry.”

  “He probably is sorry,” Tony muttered, and then, seeing that Gregor had heard him, shrugged. “I don’t understand how he lives. I don’t understand what he wants out of life. I don’t understand what you want out of life, either. I’m going below now.”

  “Did you throw a radio or some kind of communicating device overboard?”

  “Some kind of communicating device?” Tony smiled. “You mean like a spy phone or a laser satellite contact pencil or whatever it is James Bond is carrying around these days?”

  “I mean like an emergency beeper.”

  Tony shrugged again. “I don’t see that it matters anyway. If I did it’s gone and you’ll never be able to prove I had it. If I didn’t, this is just a lot of fuss about nothing. I am going below now.”

  “So go.”

  “Maybe I’ll stop in and see how Bennis is doing. At least there’s one person on this boat who appreciates what I’m up against.”

  “If you mean Bennis, I don’t believe you.”

  “Actually, I meant my father, but you weren’t supposed to notice.”

  Tony turned away and nearly jogged down the deck, past the embracing Julie and Mark, toward the ladderlike staircase that led below. Gregor watched him until he disappeared, and then turned his attention to the other two.

  Love and marriage were all well and good, in Gregor’s opinion. In fact, they were even better than that. The problem was, you could only indulge them so far under emergency conditions.

  These, Gregor was sure, were emergency conditions. Murder always made the part of the world it touched spin a little out of control. It was that much harder when the people connected with that murder wanted to make the spin go faster and faster by the minute.

  Besides, all this nonsense between Mark Anderwahl and Tony Baird made Gregor think of something.

  Six

  1

  MARK ANDERWAHL WAS VERY conscious of the fact that his wife wanted him to talk to Gregor Demarkian about the things they had seen and heard around the time Donald McAdam died. Once he was well away from Tony Baird and calmed down to the point where he could think again, he remembered that. He rarely remembered much when he and Tony got into fights—and down through the years, he and Tony had gotten into many fights, although most of them hadn’t been physical. There was something about the idea of Tony as Heir Apparent that made Mark hot. Tony was brilliant and Tony was good-looking and Tony was brave—but Tony was also lazy as hell and spoiled rotten. Mark would never have allowed himself, or been allowed by the people around him, to indulge in Soho art galleries. He’d gone to prep school and he’d gone to college and then he’d gone to work. If he’d ever suggested he needed “time off” to “find himself,” he’d have been shown the back of his mother’s hand and ended up flipping burgers at the Home of the Whopper. That, his mother
had told him, was the old-fashioned way. When she was growing up, rich young men were not indulged in their whimsies. They were trained to take up their responsibilities. Of course, Mark had never been a rich young man. His mother hadn’t had that much and his uncles weren’t the kind to pass out cash without a reason. Unlike Tony, he’d never found himself wandering around Paris at four o’clock in the morning, scared to death that the two thousand dollars in his pocket were going to get him mugged.

  He smelled Julie’s warm, soft skin, caught himself wondering what it would be like to make love to a girl with a spike in her ear, and stopped himself. He straightened up and looked at Demarkian, who was hanging back and half-concentrating on the state of the ocean. The state of the ocean was flat. Mark coughed.

  “Mr. Demarkian?”

  “Mr. Demarkian wants us to make a flare to call the Coast Guard with,” Julie said.

  Mark leaned closer to Julie’s ear and whispered. “Aren’t we going to tell him about the other thing?” he asked her. “Isn’t this the perfect time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They both looked over at Gregor Demarkian, who was looking more distracted by the second. Mark was sure Demarkian hadn’t heard a word they’d said, even though they were close and they hadn’t been whispering all that softly. Mark drew in his breath and coughed again.

  “Mr. Demarkian?”

  “Excuse me,” Gregor Demarkian said, shaking his head. He gazed back at the water again and then seemed to force himself to look their way. He smiled, but the smile seemed surreal. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go downstairs.”

  “Below,” Julie said automatically.

  “You can go below in a minute,” Mark said, “Julie and I—”

  Gregor Demarkian cut him off. “There’s one thing I’ve been meaning to ask somebody,” he said. “I don’t know if you two are necessarily the ones to ask, but we’ll see. This deal that Baird Financial is doing with Europabanc. It was in gear before Jon Baird was indicted on insider trading charges? Not just before he went to jail, mind you, but before he was indicted?”