by Jane Haddam
“I’ve maybe been a little depressed.”
“No, Gregor. After Elizabeth died, you were depressed. You didn’t sleep. You didn’t eat. You didn’t respond to people when they talked to you. I was like that after Frank died. I know what that is. And that sort of thing is inevitable, I think. It is to be expected. But this is not that. It’s nothing like that.”
“No, it’s not the way I was feeling after Elizabeth died,” Gregor said.
“It makes no sense for you to be arguing with Tibor about God,” Lida said. “We know you’re not a believer. And those of us who didn’t know have guessed, I’m sure. But you seem to be arguing about—about the possibility—”
“About the logic of it,” Gregor said. “That’s all. I don’t see the logic of it. But I wasn’t trying to get Tibor to stop believing, or anything like that.”
“You couldn’t get Tibor to stop believing, or any of the rest of us. What you’re saying is entirely senseless to anybody who does believe. But I do not think it is a good sign for you.”
“I’m fine,” Gregor said. “I really am. And I can’t believe you stayed up all night to do this. Which doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it.”
“That is all right, Gregor. And part of me understands it, too. It’s all going now. The old neighborhood. It’s disappearing into dust.”
“You might say the old neighborhood went a long time ago,” Gregor said. “You remember what this street was like when we were growing up. There weren’t any town houses. There weren’t any floor-through apartments. The buildings were here, but they were run down, there wasn’t much heat, the apartments were small and everybody was crowded. And nobody had a three-quarter-length chinchilla coat.”
“The people were here,” Lida said. “Now the people are going. And I’m not saying that they’re going because they’re dying, like old George. None of us has children living on Cavanaugh Street except the Ohanians, and they won’t stay after they’ve finished college. Donna and Russ are thinking of moving out, did you hear that?”
“Bennis said something about it to me,” Gregor said. “But it’s not like they’re going next week. They’re mostly worried about what happens when Tommy gets ready for junior high school.”
“And they have to worry,” Lida said. “The schools are bad here, and the private schools are expensive. Were the schools as bad when we were in school, Gregor?”
“They were bad relative to the better neighborhoods of Philadelphia, yes,” Gregor said. “But it was a different era, with different priorities.”
“I don’t think it’s about death and dying, the things that are wrong. Going wrong. I don’t know what I’m saying. But I’m not like you. I grew up here, and I never wanted to leave here. I still don’t want to leave here. I suppose I’m being ridiculous.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I’ll admit I did want to leave here. I got out as soon as I could. But I understand why you wouldn’t.”
“Are you and Bennis going to leave, Gregor? I was thinking maybe not, since it’s unlikely that you’d be having children. Not that I’m saying anything about Bennis’s age, of course, but—”
“Bennis and I are not going to leave here,” Gregor said. “It’s going to take at least another decade to get that house we bought into livable shape. And that’s right down a couple of blocks and squarely on Cavanaugh Street.”
“It’s not going to take a decade to get the house finished,” Bennis said, showing up suddenly in the kitchen doorway. “It may take till next Valentine’s Day.”
“She said Thanksgiving at first,” Gregor said. “Then it was Christmas. Now it’s Valentine’s Day.”
“Societies die if they don’t have children,” Lida said.
Bennis came in and sat down at the kitchen table. “What are the two of you doing here at this time of the morning?”
2
Three hours later, Bennis was helping Gregor pack the folders into the sleek Coach briefcase she had bought him a thousand Christmases ago, and Gregor was thinking yet again that the thing didn’t look big enough to hold even a few sheets of paper.
“Briefcases used to be substantial,” Gregor said. “They looked like pieces of furniture. You could carry an entire federal budget bill in them.”
“Nobody should carry an entire federal budget bill in anything,” Bennis said, “and this will hold these folders without a problem. Although I don’t understand why you use these. You’ve got a perfectly good computer.”
Gregor knew he had a perfectly good computer. It was packed into the briefcase with everything else.
“I like to move things around,” he said. “It helps me think. I make little stacks of things here and little stacks of things there and it works better than just staring at a screen. There’s something hypnotic about staring at a screen. I start to go to sleep.”
“So did it help, spending last night moving around little stacks of paper?”
Gregor looked at the folders going into the briefcase. “It did,” he said, “at least a little. The problem is that they didn’t really start thinking about this case objectively until they came and got me, and even then they weren’t doing it. They had their preconceived little scenario, they gathered the information they needed to confirm their preconceived little scenario, and then when the monkey wrench landed in the works, they had nowhere to go and nothing to go there with. There are a million things I need that aren’t here because nobody thought to ask about them.”
“Like what?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “let’s start with the murder victim whose identity we know, Michael Platte. Everything they have seems to say that Michael Platte was having an affair with Martha Heydreich. But I looked through there evidence on this, and all they’ve really got is local gossip. Somebody saw them together. Somebody else says they were spending too much time together. It’s all that sort of thing. There’s no indication that anybody ever caught them in an actually compromising position, no proof of their having rented a hotel room somewhere, nothing. When you actually look at what they’ve got here, it could mean anything at all. It could mean nothing. Martha Heydreich wasn’t a very well liked woman. It could be spite. Michael Platte himself was something of a problem child. There’s nothing substantial here. Do you see what I mean?”
“I think so,” Bennis said.
“Then,” Gregor said, “there’s information that definitely should be here that isn’t. For instance, we know that Michael Platte was murdered. Somebody should have checked up on his life. There’s a note in the files about the incident that got him kicked out of college. He got caught selling cocaine in the dorms, apparently not for the first time. The parents were steady donors. The college didn’t go to the police about it. All right, but then what? Was he still selling drugs? Was he selling them at Waldorf Pines? Was he selling it in town, or farther afield? What kind of money did he have on him? Where did it come from?”
“You mean you think this could be some kind of drug deal murder?” Bennis said.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think this has to do with drugs,” Gregor said. “Or at least not with your regular run of drug dealer and drug buyer. It’s the wrong kind of murder. They both are. Your friendly neighborhood drug lord doesn’t usually respond to problems by hitting somebody over the head and drowning him in a pool. A fire to make it impossible to identify a body is more like it, but in that case there should have been a bullet or a casing somewhere in the stuff they picked up at the scene, and there doesn’t seem to have been either. Somebody went through a lot of trouble to erase not just all possible signs of identification of that body, but all signs of how it might have ended up dead. To pull the same thing on you that I did on them yesterday, mostly out of frustration—we couldn’t actually prove it as a matter of fact that the unidentified body was the result of a murder at all. There’s more than one reason why you might want to get rid of a body and erase all possible means of identification.”
“I can’t even thin
k of one,” Bennis said.
Gregor watched her as she closed up the briefcase. “I’ve got a list in there of things that have to be done before we can even think of solving this case,” he said. “It’s the longest list I can ever remember having. It’s one thing to come in at the beginning of a case, before anything has been done. It’s something else to come in in the middle of a case that’s been horribly bungled. I find myself looking at this stuff and doing just what they were doing, because all the information I have has been skewed to make me think in that direction. I don’t mean me personally, and I don’t mean deliberately, but—”
“I know what you mean,” Bennis said.
“So I made a list,” Gregor said. “I didn’t do any of the things Marty told me to do. I know I should. I know I should be more businesslike about all these things. I don’t even have an agreed fee with Pineville Station, and you know what it’s like when I don’t get that settled up front. But, try as hard as I can, I just can’t find the financial side of things anything but boring.”
“Didn’t you train as an accountant?”
“Absolutely,” Gregor said, “but to tell you the truth, I found accounting boring, too. That’s why I joined the FBI. It was a sheer fluke they didn’t put me on tax cases with the rest of the accountants. I’d better get dressed. I ordered the driver for seven twenty.”
“You ought to learn to drive so that you don’t continually get into these situations where you need a driver,” Bennis said. “Is Lida all right? Is there something going on that I should know about?”
“Lida’s fine,” Gregor said. “Or, at least, she’s as fine as she’s ever been. She’s getting old. I’m getting old. Even Cavanaugh Street is getting old. But I do know how to drive. I’ve even got a driver’s license. I just don’t like to do it.”
“You’re changing the subject. If you don’t want to tell me, don’t tell me.”
“No,” Gregor said. “It’s the absolute truth. Lida and I are having the kind of crisis people have when they realize they’ve gotten old without noticing it. Not old in the sense old George was, you understand. Just sort of out of time.”
“Does this mean you’re going to buy a private jet and start dating blondes who don’t know when Pearl Harbor was?”
“No,” Gregor said. “It means I’ve spent a lot of my life in recent years assuming that things will always stay the same even though I know that nothing ever does. Do I have something besides that awful tie with the red and green starbursts on it? I swear Howard gave me that because he knew it would make me look ridiculous.”
“I’ve got your Looney Tunes tie,” Bennis said, heading out of the kitchen.
Gregor was going to call out that that one would make him look even more ridiculous, but he felt a little guilty about it. It was Tommy Donahue who had given him the Looney Tunes tie, and Tommy Donahue had been seven years old at the time. Tommy had not thought the tie would make Gregor look ridiculous. He had thought it would make Gregor look cool.
Gregor got up and headed out of the kitchen himself.
3
Gregor was sitting in the car taking him to Pineville Station when he found the thing he’d missed all four of the times he’d gone through the paperwork. It was not the kind of thing he would usually miss, but it had been noted in the oddest and least helpful way imaginable. And it had only been noted once. He had only pulled the folder halfway out of the briefcase. He’d been half pulling out folders and checking through them for most of the ride. Now he pulled this one all the way out and laid it down on the seat beside him.
It was a beautiful day out, bright and crisp. He had hoped to miss the rush hour traffic by leaving early, but seemed to only have half made it. There were a lot of cars on the road, and long stretches when they barely seemed to be moving. That actually worked to his advantage. The papers didn’t slosh around too much. He was able to keep track of what he was looking at. He did worry, just a little, that he would look from the outside like somebody who was “being driven.”
He got the paper he needed from the folder next to him and held it up to the light. He reread it twice, just to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. Then he got out his cell phone and accessed the address book.
One of the things Gregor insisted on when he agreed to take a case was that he have contact numbers for all the people responsible for it. And the contact numbers could not be limited. He had to have a way to call anybody anytime, twenty-four/seven, for any reason. Twenty years ago, he would have found that kind of thing excessive. Now he knew better.
He found the entry that said “Farmer, cell,” and punched it. He listened to the ring and wondered what Larry Farmer was doing at this hour of the morning. It wasn’t even eight o’clock. Larry Farmer could be in the shower. He could still be asleep. Gregor didn’t care.
The phone rang long enough so that Gregor began to get worried that it would go to voice mail. If it did, he would simply call it again, and not worry for a moment that he was disturbing someone. Still, voice mail was a nuisance, and calling again was a pain.
The phone was finally picked up, and Larry Farmer sounded as bouncy and perky as he ever did. Gregor gave a brief thought to the idea that Larry Farmer was bouncy and perky when he slept.
“Mr. Demarkian!” Larry Farmer said. “Good to hear from you! Are you here already? I can get right out to the station—”
“I’m in a car on the way,” Gregor said. “I just found something. It’s in the scene of crime notes from the morning when the bodies were discovered, but it’s not in the Buck Monaghan notes for the prep for the prosecution. I have no way of knowing if Buck Monaghan even has this information at all. And that makes me nervous.”
“Really, Mr. Demarkian, we’re very careful to give Buck all the information we have. And he insists on it. He says that if we don’t give him all the information, we’re just asking for the defense to be able to pull something on us at trial. And he’s right, you know, he’s really right. I don’t know what defense lawyers do these days, but they think of everything. Even the public defenders do that. And the kind of lawyer that would be hired by somebody at Waldorf Pines, well—”
“Didn’t Arthur Heydreich have a public defender?” Gregor asked.
“Well, yes, he did, but that was only temporary,” Larry Farmer said. “He’d have gotten a better one eventually. We all knew it.”
“Okay,” Gregor said. “Listen very carefully. I have here a piece of paper with the notes from the scene of the crime on it. It includes a list of things found in Michael Platte’s pocket when he was fished out of the water. You got that?”
“Yes, of course. I remember that. I was there when it was done.”
“Fine,” Gregor said. “The list includes keys, a wallet with fifty-two dollars in it, some loose change amounting to ninety-three cents, a condom still in its wrapper—”
“They all have condoms these days, did you ever notice that, Mr. Demarkian? We never had condoms, not even in college, nobody would give us any. Now they have condom dispensers in the men’s rooms at these places. Anything for safe sex.”
“Back to the list,” Gregor said. “He had a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. The lighter was a standard Bic. Got all that? Okay. Now go back a little, to the keys. The officer very carefully described each of the keys. He’s got two house keys, both identified later and noted as being to his parents’ house at Waldorf Pines. He’s got a trunk key and an ignition key to his own pickup truck, also identified later. Then there are a little collection of keys that are described and not identified. Most of them are irrelevant to anything. One of them sounds like the key to his dorm room at college. He was almost certainly supposed to return it before he left, but he wasn’t the world’s most responsible person, so we won’t worry about it. It’s got the college’s name on it. There’s another one labeled U.S. Post Office. That will be to a post office box. I don’t suppose anybody has checked that out, what post office he had the box in, here or at college, what
he used it for, anything like that?”
“Oh,” Larry Farmer said. “No, no we didn’t. We could, of course, I can see how it might seem significant now—”
“Yes, it’s definitely significant now,” Gregor said, “and it definitely ought to be checked out. But the one I can’t believe is this one. ‘Silver, two inches, bulbed hold, four prongs.’”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “I remember that,” Larry Farmer said. “But there was nothing on it to say where it was from. And it didn’t look very used. I remember that, too. What could that possibly have to do with anything?”
“Did you keep the keys?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, of course we did. We kept everything. We explained to Mrs. Platte that she couldn’t have them until the case was finished because we might need them for evidence, although I do have to admit that I don’t see how any of that could be important.”
“Did anybody show that key to Buck Monaghan?”
“I don’t know if we showed any of those keys to Buck,” Larry said. “We gave him the lists, of course, but I’m not sure—”
“Did you give him this particular list with these particular descriptions on it?”
“I don’t know,” Larry Farmer said. “I suppose you could ask the officers who responded to the scene, or the evidence clerk, or whoever it was, but I still don’t see why this is so important. Do you know where the key is from? Is it something to do with Waldorf Pines security or that kind of thing? I’d really like to know how all those security cameras were made to malfunction at once for two hours. I’d really like to know that.”
“I’d like to know that, too,” Gregor said, “but right now, I’ve got this key. Get it ready for me when I come in. Because from this description, I’d be willing to bet just about anything that what you’ve got there is the key to a safe-deposit box.”
“What?” Larry Farmer said.
Gregor closed his eyes and wished that Larry wouldn’t say “what” so much.
TWO
1
