Feast of Murder (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “Maybe so,” Gregor said, “but it isn’t Jon Baird who’s dead. Do you think anyone would mind if I brought a couple of these back to my cabin?”

  “I don’t think anyone would mind at all.”

  Gregor Demarkian picked up a bran muffin and a corn muffin, slathered them both with butter, and gripped them both firmly in one large hand. “Well,” he said, “I think I’ll go off and try to find Bennis Hannaford. I haven’t seen her around today.”

  “I’m sure she’s somewhere,” Fritzie said.

  “I’m sure she is.”

  Gregor left the mess, shutting the door firmly behind him as he went, not bothering to look back to her. As soon as he was gone, Fritzie expelled a great gust of breath and stood bolt upright.

  The blueberry muffins were less than a step away from where she stood. She took that step, snatched up a muffin as big as a fist, and stuffed the thing into her mouth, whole.

  Then she reached for the knife and the crock of butter.

  3

  A few doors down the hall, in the dim light cast by the single candle lit at that end of the passage, Bennis Hannaford was returning to her cabin from her “shower.” She was cold and damp and generally disgruntled. In her view it was possible to take authenticity too far, and that shower had been too far. She wanted to wrap her head in a towel and change into something made of flannel. Then she wanted to get something to eat and tell Jon Baird what she thought of him for putting them through all this nonsense. It would have been bad enough if he had really been a nut about authenticity, but he was so haphazard about it. If he had to break his own rules at every turn, he might as well install decent seagoing plumbing.

  She had left the cabin door unlocked, so she let herself in without difficulty. She saw Gregor’s dirty clothes lying in a heap on the chair and decided he’d been back to change. Then she went to her suitcase, found a honey cake neither she nor Gregor had devoured the night before, stuffed it into her mouth, and started rooting around for her best Campbell plaid robe. She was just unwinding it from a tangle of shoes and silk blouses when she saw what she thought was the FBI file on the death of Donald McAdam lying in the middle of her bunk. What made her go for it, she would never know. She had read it thoroughly the night before. She had no interest in reading it again. She just walked over to the bunk and picked it up.

  She had been holding it in her hands for quite some time when she realized what was wrong. The top page of it was the title page, just as it was supposed to be, but instead of reading “AGENT REPORT: MCADAM, DONALD” as it was supposed to do, it said something Bennis could barely comprehend at all.

  It said, “AGENT REPORT: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, BACKGROUND. “GREGOR DEMARKIAN.”

  Seven

  1

  DURING THE LONG COURSE of his career, Gregor Demarkian had known many men who broke the rules and reveled in it. There had been Jack Hartnell in the San Francisco office, who had had about as much use for the exclusionary rule as Santa Claus had for the Grinch who stole Christmas. Jack was always sneaking into hotel rooms and picking people’s pockets—although what good it had done him, Gregor never knew. Jack investigated organized crime and didn’t seem to get very far with it. Then there was Michael DeVere in the Tulsa office, who felt that a talent for cat burglary was necessary for the investigation of interstate fraud. Michael didn’t seem to get very far, either, but Gregor had once seen him go six stories up the side of a building on suction cups. Best of all, there was good old J. Edgar Hoover himself—a man about whom, Gregor was sure, the less said the better. The point was that Gregor had never been like any of these people. He had always followed the rules, and been glad of it. He knew the fine points of evidentiary discovery as well as any lawyer, and he was glad of that, too. The problem was, right at this moment, he would like to shuck the habits and convictions of a lifetime and do the one thing he really wanted to do: search Jon Baird’s cabin whether he had a warrant or not.

  Since he had retired from the Bureau and moved to Cavanaugh Street, Gregor had been a player in five murder investigations. In each one of these he had had the confidence of the local police and the kind of help only police could provide. Crime labs, blood tests, fingerprint identification—all that was very nice, but what you really needed a police force for was to keep the suspects in line. Stuck out here in the middle of the ocean like this, wherever the hell they were, there was no incentive for any of these people to cooperate.

  Gregor came out of the dining hall, pounding along almost as steadily as if he were on land. He was still not moving as quickly, but that had more to do with the low ceiling of the passage than it did with the motion of the sea. He passed the door to his own cabin without giving it a glance, noted that the door to Tony Baird’s was open and that the cabin beyond was empty, and stopped in front of Jon Baird’s door. He really was exasperated beyond all measure. What he wanted to do was kick the door in and shout, “This is a raid!” at the top of his lungs. He’d never in his life done anything even remotely like that. He’d never sprung into firing position and shouted “Freeze!” either. He thought it would be good for his soul. He thought there had to be some way of getting around the fact that if he kicked at Jon Baird’s door, all he’d get for it was a broken foot.

  He took a deep breath, counted to ten, and waited for himself to calm down. It took less time than he’d expected, and he raised his hand to knock at the door. Just as he did, the door opened from inside and Calvin Baird came tumbling into him, looking annoyed.

  “What are you doing here?” Calvin demanded, stepping back a little. “I’d have thought you’d be off investigating something.”

  “I am investigating something,” Gregor said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  Calvin dodged around Gregor and into the passage, leaving Gregor staring through the open door at a perfectly composed Jon Baird sitting in a wood chair. He had a robe on over what looked like silk pajamas and a towel around his neck. Gregor stepped into the cabin and shut the door behind him.

  “I want to talk to you,” he said.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Jon Baird said pleasantly. “Why don’t you give it up?”

  “I’m not going to give it up. I may have to ask somebody else—your present wife, for instance—but I’m not going to give it up. I want to see your bridge.”

  “My bridge?”

  There was a ship in a bottle fastened to a small occasional table at Jon Baird’s side. Gregor stared at it for a moment—the things were all over the boat, it was true—and then looked away. “I want to see your bridge,” he said again. “The one you’re always breaking.”

  “Do you want to see a broken one or an intact one?”

  “Do you have both?”

  “Of course.” Jon Baird got up and went into the inner room. When he came back he was holding what looked like a wad of tissue in his hand. He held the wad out to Gregor and smiled.

  “Take a look for yourself. I broke that the first day we were aboard. I had a spare, of course.”

  “Do you always have a spare?”

  “I make a point of it.”

  “Who provides you with the spares?”

  “If you mean who makes them up for me—well then, my dentist, of course. If you mean who brings them to me when I need them—” Jon Baird shrugged. “I think everybody in the family has brought me one at one point or the other. It’s a very fragile bridge. Too many teeth in too strange an arrangement to fit the peculiarities of my jaw.”

  Gregor unwrapped the tissue paper and looked at the bridge. It did look as if it would be fragile—Jon Baird must be very vain to put up with this instead of putting up with a set of false teeth—but other than that it was a perfectly ordinary bridge. There was a plastic and metal understructure. There was the small row over very white teeth that looked perfectly real. There was the small tooth that had broken in half when the bridge had broken, looking like the hollow shell of a fake pearl. Gregor passed the br
idge back.

  “Is that always where it breaks?” he asked. “Right in the middle of that tooth?”

  “No. Sometimes it breaks in the tooth to the back of that one. Do you really think this makes a difference?”

  Gregor put his hands in his pockets. “When Donald McAdam came to see you at Danbury on the day he died, did you see him alone?”

  “No. Calvin was there every minute, at least, and the lawyers. I wouldn’t have been allowed to see him alone in any case. Danbury is a cakewalk, but it’s not that much of a cakewalk.”

  “Did you give him the contracts yourself?”

  “No. The lawyers gave them to each of us. Then when it was over we passed them all down to McAdam and he took them home.”

  “They were signed?”

  “Oh, yes. By me, of course.”

  “But not by McAdam.”

  “No. I decided to go in for a little insurance. It’s almost impossible to sue on the basis of undue influence if you’ve been allowed to take a set of contracts home to look them over. That’s what I made him do.”

  “But you’d had the contracts yourself, on your own, for at least overnight?”

  “Oh, yes. I’d had the whole package. Charlie Shay brought it to me.”

  “And what was in that package?”

  Jon Baird cocked his head. “Why bother to ask me? Why not ask Mark or Julie or one of the secretaries—one of the secretaries especially. It’s the kind of thing they know. And it’s hardly a secret. The package consisted of three copies of the contract, a stamped envelope addressed to Baird Financial, the descriptive sheets outlining the exact nature and extent of the McAdam corporation holdings as of the previous Friday, a standard set of currency conversion tables, also valid as of the previous Friday, for anyone who had to work through the foreign holdings and didn’t know how to do that, a set of legal waivers for everything on earth, and a check for twelve million five hundred thousand dollars, as per agreement.”

  “You gave Donald McAdam the check before he had even signed the contracts?”

  “Of course we didn’t give him the check. It went into the file. For exactly the same reason and in exactly the same way that your binder check goes into a file when you make an offer for some real estate.”

  Gregor considered. “What happened to that check after Donald McAdam died?”

  “Absolutely nothing. It stayed in the file. It’s still in the file. If we ever come across an heir, we’ll hand it over. If we don’t and the time limit runs out, we’ll hand it over to the state of New York.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said.

  “This is idiotic,” Jon Baird told him. “You must know these questions make no sense. If you weren’t so insistent on turning poor Charlie’s death into something it isn’t, you wouldn’t get caught up in this sort of foolishness.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t,” Gregor said pleasantly.

  Jon Baird looked at him suspiciously, but Gregor wasn’t worried about that. He knew there was nothing to see. He backed toward the door again, opened it up, and stepped into the passage. The passage was still narrow and the ceiling was still low, but all of a sudden he felt much less claustrophobic than he had been feeling. The boat, in fact, no longer felt like a prison at all. It was just a very small place.

  Jon Baird looked like he was about to say something, and then changed his mind. He came to the door and shut it firmly in Gregor’s face. Gregor looked at the polished wood and then turned away, heading for the staircase and the deck above. Claustrophobic or not, he did feel like a badminton birdie on the Pilgrimage Green. First bounce this way. Then bounce that way. Never a third way to bounce. It was maddening.

  Halfway down the hall, right in Gregor’s path, a cabin door opened. If Gregor had been paying attention, he would have noticed that it was his own cabin. Instead, the first thing he noticed was a hand on his wrist and Bennis’s voice hissing loudly into the silent air. “Gregor, quick, get in here. I have something to show you.”

  If Bennis Hannaford’s life ever depended on her calling not even the slightest bit of attention to herself, she would be dead.

  2

  The FBI report was lying on the seat of the chair where Gregor had found Bennis when he came in the night before. When he first saw it, Gregor made the same mistake Bennis had made when she first saw it lying on the bunk. He thought it was the FBI file on the death of Donald McAdam. His eyes went over it without pausing and then surveyed the rest of the room. He noticed that Bennis had made up the bunk and neatly folded their clothes into piles. Then Bennis tugged at his wrist again, and waved the file in his face.

  “Will you look at this?” she demanded. “I found it in here when I came back from my shower. It isn’t what you think it is.”

  “What is it?”

  “Here.”

  Gregor took the file, read the title—“AGENT REPORT: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, BACKGROUND. GREGOR DEMARKIAN”—and flushed. Then he turned quickly to the second page, found what he’d been hoping for, and relaxed. He handed the file back to Bennis.

  “Don’t lose that,” he said. “There’s a little string of numbers on the back of the title page that tell anyone who can read them where that came from. When we finally get off this boat, we can get somebody fired.”

  “Get somebody fired,” Bennis repeated. “Gregor, for God’s sake, doesn’t it bother you? Doesn’t it bother you that somebody had this? Don’t you wonder how it got here?”

  “No to both questions,” Gregor said. “In the first place, I know who had it. Jon Baird had it. He’s the only one who could have gotten hold of it and getting hold of it fits his personality. In the second place, I know who put it here, and that’s Sheila Baird. Tony, Jon, and Calvin wouldn’t have put it here at all. Julie, Mark, and Fritzie would have knocked on my door and handed it over in person. What else would you like to know?”

  Bennis sat down in the chair. “I’d like to know what’s going on around here,” she demanded. “I mean, this thing shows up in our cabin, all marked over with yellow highlighter—”

  “Is it?” Gregor took the file back again and flipped through it. It was definitely marked over with yellow highlighter. He read, “‘Demarkian’s strengths are in determining complex series of transactions over short periods of time’—that’s Bureauese for I’m good at figuring out what happened when and in what order when the times are tight. That’s true enough. Here we go again. ‘He has particular expertise in the uses and effects of common poisons.’ Well, I can do what I do with a lot more than common poisons. This is a second-tier evaluation report. I had no idea I was so well thought of in the Bureau. Would you like this back?”

  “What’s a second-tier evaluation report?”

  “It’s what you get when you ask the Bureau what one of its agents is best capable of doing. You get it for former agents, too, if you have a good reason for asking. One of the police forces I’ve been of aid to over the last two years must have put in a request and got this. Or an excerpt from this. The Bureau wouldn’t have handed over the whole file. Jon Baird must have very good connections. I wonder if he knows someone in the White House.”

  “Your birthday isn’t in it,” Bennis said. She took the report back, turned it over in her hands, and put it down on the floor. “You look different somehow. Calmer. I’ve been driving myself crazy with all this business of being becalmed.”

  “I was driving myself crazy yesterday,” Gregor said, “but I finally got it worked out this morning. Remember how I told you last night that I knew who had killed Charlie Shay?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, now I know I can prove it—or if I can’t prove it in the case of Charlie Shay, I can at least prove it in the case of Donald McAdam, which will do just as well.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course.”

  “The same person who killed Charlie Shay killed Donald McAdam?”

  Gregor was impatient. “What did you expect?” he demanded. “That t
he New York financial community is awash in homicidal maniacs? Of course the same person killed both those men. It was even done in the same way.”

  “With strychnine.”

  “With sleight of hand,” Gregor told her. “Think about what happened to Charlie Shay. He must have been fed that strychnine at dinner last night, in the salad and not the salad dressing—”

  “But—”

  “But I said he must have been fed ipecac, too. And he was. Also in the salad, not the salad dressing, because the salad dressing was being passed back and forth across the table in no particular order. On the other hand, there were at least three people capable of doctoring the salad—Julie Anderwahl, who was sitting beside him, Jon Baird, who was sitting across from him, and me.”

  “Julie Anderwahl saw Donald McAdam on the day he died,” Bennis said slowly. “He was in her office. It’s in that report we were reading. But that was earlier in the day. The times don’t make sense.”

  “They make even less sense for Jon Baird,” Gregor said. “After all, the man not only saw McAdam in the morning, he saw him in jail—and I don’t care how lax Danbury is, they wouldn’t have allowed a vial of strychnine to get into a prisoner’s cell if they’d known anything at all about it.”

  “You mean neither of the people who could have killed Charlie Shay could have killed Donald McAdam?”

  “No,” Gregor said, “I mean you shouldn’t give up on the obvious so easily. What has Baird Financial just done?”

  “Made a deal with Europabanc,” Bennis said dutifully.

  “No. That’s what it’s about to do. What has it just done?”

  “Oh. Well, I guess the last big thing was selling off those junk bonds that belonged to McAdam’s investment company.”

  “That’s right,” Gregor said. “And they made a few hundred million, and the firm is now awash in cash. What have we been hearing from Calvin Baird ever since we got on the boat?”