by Jane Haddam
There was a young patrolman in full uniform standing near the side of the house, looking uneasy and very inexperienced. He had the palm of his right hand resting on the butt of the gun in his holster. He was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.
“Stewart!” Mike Held called.
“This is Stewart Crone,” Jack Mann said. “Stewart, this is Gregor Demarkian.”
“Are you guys going to want to come in and look around?” Stewart asked. “I’ve been in already once and there isn’t anything. I mean, there really isn’t anything. It’s spooky.”
“We got a call from the security company?” Mike Held asked.
“Oh, yeah, exactly,” Stewart said. “And I didn’t expect to find anything. We get calls all the time. People come snooping around and trip the alarm, or the help does, or sometimes it’s animals. But this time the front door was open. It was just open. Maybe an inch or two.”
“Had it been forced?” Gregor asked.
“It doesn’t look like it,” Stewart said. “I was very careful. I moved it back and forth with a pencil so I wouldn’t smear much in the way of prints. And the other thing is, I’m pretty sure it’s unlocked.”
Gregor thought about it. “Could it have been left unlocked after the investigation?”
“No,” Jack Mann said. “Every time we’ve come to this house, I’ve locked and unlocked it myself. And I’ve always been careful to check.”
“There aren’t dead bolts or that kind of thing for backup?” Gregor asked.
“You don’t use dead bolts when you leave a house,” Stewart said. “That’s for when you stay in. Anyway, this door has one of those locks that turn with a little half circle key. I’m pretty sure horizontal is locked and vertical is unlocked, and it was vertical when I got there.”
“Anything disturbed?” Mike Held asked.
“I wouldn’t know how to check,” Stewart said. “I did a quick tour and nothing seemed out of place, but any number of things could have been taken that I wouldn’t notice.”
“Tell me you took an inventory the night of the crime,” Gregor said.
“It was the day after,” Mike Held said, “but we took it. And we’ve got a copy at the station and another one we gave to Mrs. Holder.”
“Mrs. Holder is—?” Gregor said.
“Caroline Waring Holder,” Mike said. “She’s the youngest sister.”
“We get your drift, Mr. Demarkian,” Jack Mann said. “We should double-check against the inventory. We will.”
“Let me just make sure I have this part straight,” Gregor said. “The security company called in to the police station to say that the alarm had gone off in this house. When Officer Crone got here, he found the front door open and probably unlocked. The door had been locked by the police when they last investigated the scene of the crime. Could anybody else have been in this house legitimately between then and now?”
“The sister could have,” Mike Held said. “Mrs. Holder.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Then we’ve got two possibilities: Either this Mrs. Holder came into the house for reasons of her own over the last few days and accidentally left the front door unlocked when she left, or somebody with a key to the front door let himself or herself in and then let the alarm go off, and then left.”
“Why does that sound ridiculous when you say it?” Mike Held asked.
“Because,” Gregor said, “you have to assume that anybody who legitimately has a key to this house must also have the code for the security system. Without it, the key is pretty much useless. There is always the possibility that somebody has an unauthorized key to this house, but then we run into the same roadblock. The key without the security code is worthless. And anybody who actually knew anything about this house would know that.”
“So, what are you saying, exactly?” Jack Mann said. “Nobody tried to get into the house? Because somebody seems to have tried to get into the house.”
“Why?” Gregor asked.
“To tamper with evidence,” Mike Held said. “Isn’t that why people usually do these things?”
“Yes, that’s why they usually do them,” Gregor said, “but in this case, we’re back to the problem. Anybody who knew anything about this house would know there was a security system here. I’d assume that most of the houses on this road have security systems.”
“All of them,” Mike Held agreed.
“But on top of that,” Gregor said, “this is a house with a history. Everybody in town knows about it. People five states away know about it. Even someone who stole a key, or managed to get a copy, would at least be able to guess that there was a security system here. And that means that if somebody who didn’t have the security code wanted to get in to tamper with or remove evidence, they’d have to know exactly where that evidence was and it would have to be easy to tamper with it or remove it. There wouldn’t be any time for mucking around, looking for it. The alarm would go off in a minute or two, and the police would be here sooner rather than later.”
“Maybe whoever it was was desperate,” Jack Mann said. “Maybe he decided to take a chance because it was now or never.”
“He’d have to be desperate enough to get stupid,” Gregor Demarkian said, “and that’s a lot of desperate for a case that, until now, has generated not a single suspect that I know of. Unless I missed that part in the notes.”
“There are suspects,” Mike Held said, “sort of. But not—you know what I mean. We know a lot about the people Chapin Waring knew when she was here thirty years ago. Those people are at least possible suspects.”
“My point exactly,” Gregor said.
He took his cell phone out of his pocket and used it to push the front door open. He walked into a high-ceilinged, expansive foyer. A staircase with a heavy carved wood banister rose up to the right. The walls on the left had a small cluster of framed prints on the clean white wall. The prints looked like copies of things by Braque.
Gregor went back outside and looked at the door again. Stewart Crone was right. There was no sign that the lock had been jimmied. Of course, it was also possible that the front door was not the point of entry. That idea opened up yet another can of worms.
He started to walk toward Mike Held and Jack Mann, to explain the alternate-entry idea, when there was a noise on the road and a long, black Volvo Cross Country station wagon came barreling up the drive, screeching to a halt just millimeters from the back of Jack and Mike’s municipal car.
A second later, the driver’s door opened and a tall, thin woman with wild hair jumped out, looking ready to kill somebody.
“For God’s sake,” she said. “Can you people get anything done right?”
2
There was a small moment when Gregor felt as if he’d seen this woman a hundred times before—and then he knew, of course, that she was Chapin Waring’s sister. What he was looking at was mostly Chapin Waring’s face, but much older than it had been in the newspaper photographs and memorabilia from the time of the robberies. There were four sisters. He wondered if the two he hadn’t seen resembled each other as closely as these two did.
This one was loaded for bear.
“The one thing in the entire universe that you’re supposed to do,” she said, advancing on Mike Held and Jack Mann, “is to keep people away from this God damned house. You were supposed to do it before, but by God, you’d think that with a murder in the living room, and having to haul Gregor Demarkian out here to save your asses from not being able to detect tapioca pudding, you’d think you’d be able to do it now. What’s wrong with you? I thought you were supposed to have a guard out here twenty-four/seven.”
“Now, Mrs. Holder, you know we weren’t going to do that,” Jack Mann said. “We explained it to you. The department doesn’t have the kind of manpower we’d need to keep this place under surveillance twenty-four/seven. If that’s what you want, you’re going to have to hire your own man.”
“I’m going to have to hire a good lawyer t
o sue your asses off sooner rather than later,” the woman said. “I’m going to do something, because I’m sure as hell Fed up. First Chapin turns up out of nowhere when all of you were supposed to be looking for her—”
“We weren’t looking for her,” Mike Held said. “It’s the feds that have been looking for her.”
“—she turns up here when you were supposed to be looking for her. She’s seen by half the people in town. You do absolutely nothing about it and then she turns up dead. And do you know what’s happened to me, seriously? My life has become one long defense against my telephone. I’ve got reporters staking out my house. I’ve got my children being asked God only knows what at school and now it’s all over the television again. And you can’t even keep the tourists out of the house.”
“We don’t know it was a tourist,” Mike Held said.
The woman looked at him as if he were pond scum clinging to her Wellingtons. “For God’s sake,” she said. “Who else would it be?”
Gregor gave a little cough. The group all turned their heads to him. The woman blinked.
“Who’s this?” she asked.
“This is Gregor Demarkian,” Mike Held said. “He just got in this morning.”
“He doesn’t look like much,” she said. “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Maybe if you don’t look like much, people tell you things they shouldn’t.”
“Mrs. Holder—” Mike Held said.
Caroline Holder ignored him. “Are you actually going to do something about this mess?” she asked Gregor Demarkian. “Or will you say you’re going to do something about it and then you never do?”
“I’m going to try to do something about it,” Gregor said. “I’d like to know why you’re so sure the alarm was set off by tourists.”
Caroline Holder looked infinitely tired. “Because it always is tourists,” she said. “Even before the murder, it was tourists—there were just fewer of them. God, I hate those cable channels. It was bad enough before, what with ‘retrospectives’ and all that other crap every few years. And then there was America’s Most Wanted, which for a minute or two I was stupid enough to think might do some good. Now there’s American Justice and City Confidential and Deadly Women and all the rest of them, rehashing the case and rehashing the case and rehashing the case until you’d think it had become some kind of cult. And then there was the murder, and the town is full of people who just want to get a look. Even Darlee Corn’s full up, and the prices she charges ought to be illegal.”
“We came out here to investigate,” Mike Held said. “We came, not just the patrol officer. So if you would just—”
“Just what?” Caroline Holder said. “Just trust you to know what you’re doing? Well, I don’t. I don’t trust you to have the brains to pick your own noses. And I don’t see why I should. You’ve got to keep this place under surveillance, or that alarm will go off every other day and by the time you get here, whoever it was will be gone and taken a little souvenir to say they’ve been here. I’m sick to death of losing half the kitsch from my childhood because you won’t face reality.”
“Mrs. Holder?” Gregor asked.
“What is it?”
“I just want to get a couple of things straight. Tourists come, you say, and break into the house. How do they do that?”
“How do they do what?”
“How do they get into the house?” Gregor asked.
“Oh,” Caroline Holder said. She put a hand in her wild hair. It didn’t help. “Well,” she said. “Mostly, they come up by the beach. The house on that side is right on the beach. There’s a terrace, and then past the terrace there’s sand. And Long Island Sound. They walk along the beach and then come up from there.”
“And how do they get in?”
“There are sliding glass doors to the terrace,” Caroline Holder said. “Except we’ve got rods in the slider slots now. It didn’t used to be very hard. Even if they were locked.”
“And you changed that so that there were rods in the slots?” Gregor said. “When did you do that?”
Caroline Holder blushed. “It was after the murder,” she admitted. “Before that, it hadn’t been absolutely impossible for a while. Even with the television shows, you know, the crimes were so far in the past, and nobody saw or heard from Chapin—”
“I thought lots of people saw her,” Gregor said. “I thought people in town saw her fairly often.”
“Well, they said they did,” Caroline Holder said. “But really, Mr. Demarkian, how could that possibly have worked? You had half the Federal government trying to find out where Chapin was. Do you really think she could have shown up here in town half a dozen times in the last thirty years, been identified and called in by dozens of people, and they would never have caught her?”
“No,” Gregor agreed. “What I want to know about is this house. Why keep it all these years, when nobody was living in it? And I take it nobody has been living in it.”
“Nobody’s lived here since—maybe since a couple of weeks after Martin Veer’s funeral,” Caroline Holder said. “We couldn’t, really. There was a nationwide manhunt for Chapin. There were reporters everywhere you looked. People came right up to the front door and knocked. My parents decided we’d be better off somewhere else, so they moved us all to this place we had in the Adirondacks for the summer. Then, when the summer was over—” Caroline shrugged. “When the summer was over, my parents didn’t want to come back. And I can’t say I blamed them.”
“Where did they go?” Gregor asked.
“Out to California for a while,” Caroline said. “They put us in school out there and kept their heads low. Then, when I left for college, they traveled. And then they died.”
“And they never tried to sell the house?” Gregor asked.
“I think they did try, once,” Caroline said. “I was still very young, but I seem to remember something about it, except all they got was people who wanted a look.”
“And when they died, the house came to—who, exactly?” Gregor asked.
“To me and my sisters,” Caroline said. “We all got equal shares of everything.”
“All?” Gregor asked.
“If you’re asking if Chapin also got an equal share, then the answer is yes, Mr. Demarkian. And that should answer your other question. Charlotte and Cordelia and I would have been happy to sell the house, but we couldn’t do it without Chapin’s agreement, and we couldn’t find Chapin. We couldn’t even have her declared legally dead. And we tried. The United States government intervened in the case and the judge refused to do it.”
“So you’ve kept up the house ever since?” Gregor asked.
“Charlotte and Cordelia pay for most of it,” Caroline said. “I’m the one who gets stuck here on the ground, dealing with the day-to-day stuff. The break-ins. The periodic vandalism.”
“It’s been years since there’s been any vandalism,” Mike Held said.
“It doesn’t matter how many years it’s been,” Caroline Holder said. “It matters that it’s happened at all. And then there’s the management. We have a maid service that comes in once a month and a lawn service that comes in every week during the spring and summer and repair people for specific jobs, like painting and that kind of thing. Somebody has to hire and fire those people and make sure they’re doing their jobs. And I’m here.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “You are.”
“If you’re thinking that one of us came in here and killed Chapin because we wanted to sell the house—well, it’s not possible. Charlotte and Cordelia both live out of state, and I don’t know if I would have recognized Chapin if she came right up to me and told me who she was. It had been thirty years, Mr. Demarkian, and I was only eight.”
“But you did identify the body,” Gregor said.
“I went down to the morgue and looked,” Caroline Holder said. “What I saw was a woman who looked a lot like me. So I stated the obvious. I told them I thought it could be Chapin. I think they finally made the definit
ive identification some other way.”
“And you were where on the day the murder happened?” Gregor asked.
Caroline Holder smiled. “I’ve been waiting for somebody to ask me that question. On the evening when I think they’ve decided it happened, I was at my children’s school. I’m part of a group that helps to bring musical instruments into the schools. We were discussing a harpsichord.”
“And earlier in the day?”
“Earlier in the day,” Caroline Holder said, “I was doing what people do earlier in the day. I did some shopping. I did some housework. I did some gardening.”
“You don’t work?”
“No,” Caroline Holder said. “I don’t need to work, financially. My husband does well enough even without my money. I thought I’d give my children the kind of childhood I’d always wanted to have.”
“The one that was interrupted by your sister,” Gregor said.
“Oh, the mess started long before that,” Caroline Holder said. “You’ve got to grow up in a place like Alwych to know just how awful that can be.”
Gregor raised his eyebrows slightly. Caroline Holder put her hands in her hair again.
“I think I’ll get out of here before you can start the whole ‘poor little rich girl’ thing,” she said. “Yes, I know. There was always enough money and none of us ever wanted for anything.”
“Except love?” Gregor said.
“Don’t be maudlin,” Caroline Holder said. “That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it. Now for God’s sake, let’s not have this happen again.”
“You’re going to have to hire your own security man,” Mike Held insisted.
“One more thing,” Gregor said. “Who has keys to this house?”
“Keys?” Caroline said. “Well, I do. And my sisters do. The cleaning service has a set. They have to, or I’d have to let them in every time they need to be here. And the police have a set.”
“That’s since the murder?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Caroline said. “As far as I know, the police have had a set at least since my sisters took over caring for the house. We want them to be able to get in and out of here if there’s a problem.”
