Feast of Murder (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “Oh, yes,” Mark said. “Well before. A couple of years at least.”

  “A couple of years in negotiation?”

  “We went into serious negotiation with Europabanc for the first time about three months before Uncle Jon was indicted.”

  Gregor nodded. “And Europabanc didn’t mind. They didn’t care they were going to get a jailbird as head of the firm.”

  “Of course Europabanc didn’t mind,” Mark said. “The charges weren’t all that serious anyway—they weren’t even really a felony. The only reason Jon was in jail for over a year is that the judge got exasperated and made him serve his sentences consecutively. And what he went to jail for isn’t even illegal in Switzerland and France and the other places Europabanc operates. Even not paying your income taxes isn’t illegal in Switzerland. They just think we’re nuts.”

  “And when the indictment came down, there was never any suggestion that someone else at the firm might be implicated? Your Uncle Calvin, for instance?”

  “If there had been, I’d have known the charges were bogus,” Mark snorted. “Uncle Calvin, for God’s sake. Uncle Calvin is such a tight-assed old maid, he wouldn’t—”

  “Mark,” Julie said.

  “Well, he is,” Mark said stubbornly. “Mr. Demarkian only wants to know. What he should know is that the SEC and the people from Morgenthau’s office came in and investigated us to death over the course of three months and didn’t find a thing.”

  “Except for what they discovered about your Uncle Jon,” Gregor pointed out.

  Mark Anderwahl shook his head vigorously. “They didn’t discover a thing about Uncle Jon,” he insisted. “All they had on Uncle Jon was the records of four transactions through a blind account in the Cayman Islands and those were handed to them. I mean they showed up at Morgenthau’s office in the mail.”

  “Recent transactions?” Gregor asked.

  Mark shrugged. “I think so. I think they were maybe four or five months old when the investigators got hold of them. But there was no corroboration at the office, Mr. Demarkian, and there was no evidence of anybody else having been pulling any junk. We run a pretty tight ship at Baird Financial.”

  “Ah,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  Julie leaned forward. “Now we want to talk to you,” she told him, and Mark nodded behind her approvingly. “We discussed it between ourselves last night and we think—”

  “Excuse me,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  “Where are you going?” Mark Anderwahl said.

  “Julie will tell you all about the flare,” Gregor called back to them over his shoulder.

  Mark stared after him, nonplussed. “What was that all about?” he demanded of Julie. “I thought we were going to talk to him. Didn’t you tell him we had something important to say?”

  “I wanted to leave it until we could tell him together,” Julie said. Then she went to the rail by herself and looked out over it. It was high back here and perfectly safe. Mark found himself feeling a little relieved to see that she wasn’t looking as sick as she had been.

  He went up to the rail, leaned against it as close to her as he could get without actually touching her, and said, “I’m glad to see you’re feeling better. If I’d known how seasick you got, I’d never have insisted we come along on this trip.”

  Julie blew an exasperated raspberry. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “What do you mean, what’s the matter with me?” Mark was bewildered. Julie had always bewildered him, but lately she had gone past enigmatic to inscrutable. “What could possibly be the matter with me? I’m only concerned about your health.”

  “Mark,” Julie said, “how much debt are we in?”

  “No more than we can handle.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I don’t know,” Mark told her. “A lot. There’s the mortgage on the co-op for one thing, that’s a pile, and then we have run up the cards a little—why are you worried about what kind of debt we’re in?”

  “What would happen if I quit work?” Julie demanded.

  “Why would you want to quit work? Julie, you’re not making any sense.”

  “Oh, yes, I am.”

  “If you quit work, we’ll go bankrupt.”

  Julie took a deep breath. “Well,” she said, “then get ready, because I’m going to quit work and I’m going to do it soon and I’m going to tell you why.”

  “Good,” Mark said a little desperately.

  “A,” Julie held up a finger, “I have come to the conclusion that public relations is the silliest endeavor ever invented by human beings. B,” another finger went up, “I am sick of it. And C—pay attention to this one here, Mark, it’s the clincher—I am four and a half months pregnant and I have every damn intention of having the baby. Put all that where it’ll do the most good and learn to live with it.”

  “Right!” Mark said in the kind of voice cheerleaders use to celebrate touchdowns. His head was spinning, his stomach was raw, and he figured he was going to be seasick himself in a minute, but he figured all that could wait until he got a hold on just what was going on here.

  For some reason, he couldn’t seem to make his mind think any more kind thoughts about girls with spikes in their ears.

  2

  From the beginning—from the very minute when she had received the invitation to spend Thanksgiving on this trip with these people—Fritzie Baird had been worried about one thing, and that was that Thanksgiving wouldn’t really get celebrated at all. Of course, Jon had always had a positive obsession about the Mayflower and the fact that his ancestors had come over on it. Fritzie had known a lot of people who had that obsession in their lives. In Jon’s case, it didn’t translate into what you might expect. Jon was so cold, really, so out of touch with the emotional side of life. He wanted to spend all his time concentrating on the “deep” things. He never understood why the things he considered superficial—like pleasantry and decoration—were so important to other people. In the normal course of events, Sheila would have been expected to take care of all that. Sheila was, after all, Jon’s wife. Sheila was also, after all, Sheila. That was why Fritzie had brought what she’d brought in her small suitcase—not the jewelry she would have been expected to bring (and that Sheila had undoubtedly brought) but the makings of a real Thanksgiving holiday. In Fritzie’s mind, the makings of a real Thanksgiving holiday had nothing to do with food, except in the sense that everything in Fritzie’s life had to do with food. What Fritzie wanted here and now was decoration. Her small suitcase was full of multicolored corn and ribbons and even candles. The candles made her feel a little foolish, because there were so many candles already on the boat. The other things gave her a great sense of peace. As soon as she’d taken her turn in the makeshift shower, she went back to her cabin and got them all out. Sheila had breakfast in bed. Fritzie didn’t have to worry about her. Jon was somebody Fritzie actually liked to talk to. As for the rest of them … Fritzie didn’t care about the rest of them. They came and went. They wouldn’t bother her.

  She put the multicolored corn and the ribbons and the two packages of pipe cleaners in a brown paper bag and headed for the mess hall, which was the only room on the boat with a table big enough to accommodate what she wanted to do. She looked inside and found the room deserted, but the table set with food. She went in and shut the door behind her. The anachronistic, battery-operated toast warmers and samovars from the day before had not been resurrected here. There were only good china plates and sturdy wooden baskets lined with colored cloths. Still, the food was not “authentic” in any sense of the term. No one would have eaten it if it had been. The Puritans were very big on meat dried rock hard and lard. They drank a lot of liquor and fried almost everything they put into their mouths. What had been put out on the mess hall table were corn muffins and blueberry muffins and bran muffins and scones, each plate or basket flanked by a crock of butter and a crock of cheese and a small silver butter kn
ife. It was just the kind of breakfast Jon had preferred when he was still living at home with her. It made Fritzie warm and soft inside, just to look at it.

  Actually, it made Fritzie hot and pained inside just to look at it. She didn’t eat butter and she didn’t eat cheese—too many calories in both—and she’d given up on bread around the time that Robert Kennedy was shot. What she had for breakfast when she had breakfast was a half a grapefruit, untouched by sugar. It was good for her and it should have tasted good to her, but she had never gotten over hating it. For a while it had made her wonder if she was crazy. Then all the research about eating disorders had come out, and Fritzie had been able to relax. She was just one of those people whose psychological needs overwhelmed their physical ones entirely. She couldn’t love the foods that were good for her the way normal people did because there was something wrong with her brain. If she hadn’t hated therapy almost as much as she hated grapefruit, she would have gone in for it. Instead, she found herself wishing she could have a different kind of eating disorder than the one she had. She wished she could be an anorexic.

  It won’t hurt me if I have just one blueberry muffin, she thought to herself. I promise not to put any butter on it

  She moved tentatively away from the door, realized she was still carrying her brown paper bag full of corn, and put it down on the floor. Over the last few seconds, she had become so tense she could barely move. Every muscle in her body seemed to have been stretched out into a wire. She edged toward the table, slowly, slowly, dragging herself against some invisible undertow. She thought if she moved any faster she would leap at the plates and eat them along with anything that was on them.

  She had made it halfway across the floor, inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter, when she heard the latch on the door jiggle. Fritzie froze in place, unable to breathe. The latch jiggled again and then the door opened. Fritzie looked at the plate piled high with blueberry muffins and bit her lip. Then she turned around to see who had come in behind her.

  Who had come in behind her was Gregor Demarkian, and that made Fritzie confused. Gregor Demarkian didn’t know anything about her. He didn’t know what a terrible pig she could be about food or how hard it was for her to have any control over her eating. If she ate the entire plate of blueberry muffins in front of him, he would think she was an ordinary person with a larger than usual appetite this morning. He wouldn’t jump to condemn her. Fritzie looked back to the blueberry muffins again. Rationalizations aside, there wasn’t anything she could do about the blueberry muffins. As long as Mr. Demarkian was there to watch, she couldn’t allow herself to eat them.

  “Well,” she said, “if it isn’t Mr. Demarkian. I was just going to have a cup of tea. Will you join me?”

  “I take coffee,” Demarkian said. “And I’m going to have a lot more than that. Would you like me to pass you a muffin of some kind?”

  “No, thank you. I don’t eat breakfast, as a rule.” Fritzie walked determinedly to the hot water kettle, poured now tepid water into a cup over a teaball she had found beside the spoons, and sat down. Where she was was as far from the food as it was possible to get and still sit at the table, but that wasn’t very far. Fritzie felt dizzy.

  “Well,” she said again, “I suppose you’ve been detecting. Trying to find out what really happened to poor old Charlie Shay.”

  Gregor picked up a plate, put a blueberry muffin and a bran muffin and a scone on it, then added a huge slab of butter to the mix. Then he looked around for a chair and sat down.

  “I’d forgotten all about breakfast,” he said. “Forgetting about food happens a lot on this boat. I say it’s a terrible way to celebrate Thanksgiving.”

  “That’s what I was doing here, trying to find a way to make the boat more festive for Thanksgiving.” Fritzie waved at the brown paper bag, abandoned now in the middle of the floor. “It’s full of the makings for decorations. I thought I’d put up some multicolored corn and make a cornucopia. Jon was never much for decorations. If it were up to him, all he’d have adorning his life would be things like this.”

  Fritzie gestured dramatically at the ship in the bottle that reposed in a niche in the wall at the back end of the table. It had been there all along, of course, but the food had driven it away from her attention. Besides, she had lived for years with Jon and his ships in bottles. Mr. Demarkian was looking at it curiously, though.

  “It’s very elaborate, isn’t it?” Fritzie said. “Jon started doing them when he was a boy, and as far as I know it’s his only form of relaxation. And practice makes perfect, you know, and he is in the way of being nearly perfect. Even the people who do this for a living admire Jon’s work. I’ve heard them say so.”

  “It fits him,” Gregor Demarkian said. “He didn’t seem to me to be the kind of man who could have a real hobby, something he didn’t mind doing half-well because it made him relax.”

  “He certainly wouldn’t like doing anything half-well,” Fritzie said. “I don’t think Jon could tolerate doing anything even ninety-nine percent well. He’s not like that.”

  Mr. Demarkian slathered his scone with butter. “I suppose that made him very different from Charlie Shay,” he said. “The general consensus I get, asking around on the boat, is that Mr. Shay wasn’t exactly a high performer.”

  The butter on Gregor Demarkian’s scone was at least an inch thick. Fritzie was sure of it. It was so yellow and thick and strong, she thought she could smell it, even though she knew you couldn’t smell butter unless it was cooking or until it went bad. It smelled like salt.

  “Well,” Fritzie said again, turning her head away. “Charlie Shay.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Charlie Shay was sad, really. I’d known him all my married life, of course. He was a friend of Jon’s from college or prep school or somewhere. And there are people who say he was better in those days, when everything first started, but he wasn’t. He was always—sad.”

  “By sad do you mean ineffectual?”

  “I don’t know.” Fritzie couldn’t seem to remember what “ineffectual” meant. The definition had got caught up in a river of butter. “I mean he was always a gopher, as they put it these days,” she said. “He was always the someone who ran errands. It wasn’t as bad as it got after Jon went to prison, of course, but it was always true.”

  “Why ‘of course’?” Gregor asked curiously. “Why should Charlie Shay have turned into more of a gopher just because Jon Baird went to jail?”

  “Because Jon wasn’t at the office to protect him, for one thing,” Fritzie said. “But the real reason was Jon himself and the way Charlie felt about him. Charlie always idolized Jon. And once Jon went to jail, he needed a lot of help. He was stuck in that cell and he couldn’t just jump up and do things by himself. So he asked Charlie to do them.”

  “And Charlie didn’t mind,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  “Charlie thought the mere fact that Jon Baird asked him to do something made that something important.” Fritzie smiled wanly. “Aren’t you wondering how I know all this? After all, Jon and I have been divorced for a while. He’s married to that woman now, although I must say I don’t know for how long. Doesn’t it seem odd to you that I know all this?”

  “Should it?”

  “It shouldn’t if you really knew Charlie Shay, but you didn’t.” Fritzie got up, walked slowly and deliberately to the kettle, and made herself more tea. Then she walked just as slowly and deliberately back to her chair again and sat down. “Charlie would call me up and tell me all about it. All the things Jon had asked him to do. All the errands he had run. He was so proud of it all, and so much of it was humiliating.”

  “What was humiliating?”

  “Well,” Fritzie said, “for instance, Jon made one of those ships in bottles in prison. Charlie trotted back and forth getting him all the things he needed, the glue, the string, the bottle.”

  “That could have been affection,” Gregor pointed out. “Here was Charlie Shay’s friend, in prison. Here
was Charlie Shay, in a position to make that prison time pass a little more easily. After all, everything Charlie Shay was asked to do wasn’t humiliating. I’ve been told by half a dozen people that it was Shay who delivered the final McAdam contracts to Jon Baird so that Baird could give them to Donald McAdam.”

  “Three copies of the contract and a stamped, self-addressed envelope to bring it all home to Baird Financial,” Fritzie recited. “Yes, I know. I’ve heard all about how it worked. But you know, even when Charlie brought the contracts in, Jon didn’t let him get any ideas about his place. It was the same day Charlie brought the contracts in that Jon made him bring in the bridge.”

  “The bridge?”

  “Jon has this bridge for the lower left-hand side of his jaw,” Fritzie said. “Because of the way it’s made it’s very delicate and it breaks. Jon was very worried about that when he was going into prison, so he had a spare made. And sure enough, right around the time McAdam was supposed to sign his contracts, Jon broke his bridge. So he sent Charlie Shay to get the spare and to deliver it, and Charlie never once thought what an awful thing that was for Jon to do.”

  “Why was it so awful?”

  “Because you don’t ask for that sort of thing from a business partner,” Fritzie said. “That isn’t how the world works. That’s the kind of thing you ask from a wife.”

  “Was this spare bridge somewhere where his wife could have gotten hold of it? Did Jon Baird keep it in his apartment?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think maybe you’re making too much out of Charlie Shay’s feelings,” Gregor said. “It’s been one of the hardest things I’ve had to learn, but I have learned that not everybody takes offense at the same things I do. There are things I care about desperately that many people don’t care about at all.”

  “Do you think it could have been like that?” Fritzie asked. “I don’t. I don’t think there’s a man on earth—and I mean man, not human—who doesn’t think of his pride first, even if he tries not to. I think Charlie must have been only inches away from striking Jon dead.”