28 Hearts of Sand

by Jane Haddam

  “They’d have found it,” Jason Battlesea said.

  Hope got up off her chair and went to the fireplace. The mantel was made of a thick plank. The surround was made of what seemed like the same wood, but polished.

  Hope fiddled with a space just to the left of the surround itself. A big hunk of wood came off all at once. She put the hunk of wood on the floor and reached into the opening. Her arm went in all the way up to her shoulder, and when it came out she was holding a bound stack of one-hundred-dollar bills.

  She put them on the floor in front of her and looked around, at nothing. Then she went back to her chair and sat down again.

  “It never even occurred to them,” she said again. “They didn’t even ask. Maybe they didn’t really take me seriously. By then everybody knew it was Marty and Chapin who had done the robberies anyway.”

  Jason Battlesea went over to the fireplace and looked into the hole. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “It isn’t all there anymore,” Hope said. “I burned some of it. I never liked having it here. The television news kept saying that the money was worthless because the police had all the serial numbers and if anybody ever spent any of those bills, they’d be caught right away. It didn’t even feel like real money to me. But then my parents died and I kept trying to make a living and it kept being so damned impossible and I’d take some of the money out sometimes and look at it. And then I’d burn it, so I wouldn’t try to use it. She said she’d tell the police what happened in the car if I ever used it.”

  “And she’d come back every once in a while to remind you of it?” Gregor asked.

  “Not right away,” Hope said. “It was maybe ten or fifteen years. And then she’d show up all of a sudden and ask me to go over to the house. And I would, because I was afraid not to. And she always had a way to get into the house so the alarm wouldn’t go off. And it was just like that. I thought she was going to ask for the money someday, but she never did.”

  “But something must have changed, this time,” Gregor said.

  Hope nodded. “She wanted to come back home, that’s what she said. She said she didn’t care if she had to spend the rest of her life in prison, she just wanted to stop all this and come home, and she was going to tell the police everything so that it could all get worked out and she wanted me to know that. I don’t know what she expected. I don’t know why she would have thought I’d just listen to her and nod and let anything that was going to happen happen, but that’s what she must have thought. So I said I had to go to the bathroom and she said the water wasn’t on and I said it didn’t matter anyway, and I got the knife from the kitchen and I came back in. And I stabbed her. And she had a gun. I stabbed her and she sort of reeled back and then the gun was there. I don’t know where she kept it. But it was there and she started shooting up the place and I just ran. I thought she’d follow me, but she didn’t. She just kept shooting at the mirrors and then all of that just stopped. And I didn’t know what to do. So I just waited. And there was no more noise. And I went back into the living room and she was dead on the floor. And then I just sat down and tried to think.”

  “You sat there?” Jason Battlesea said. “With Chapin Waring dead on the floor?”

  “I sat there until somebody came around,” Hope said. “I don’t know who it was, but I could hear them walking around on the terrace and in the bushes. I waited until whoever it was went a little bit away and then I went out through the kitchen and then across to the beach.”

  “Angela Harkin saw her shoes through the glass doors to the terrace,” Gregor said. “The curtains were a little ruffled, and she saw a woman’s feet in espadrilles.”

  “Everybody out here wears espadrilles.”

  “I thought Angela was imagining things,” Jason Battlesea said.

  “I wouldn’t have killed Kyle if he hadn’t said all those things about how we should tell the whole story and bring an end to it,” Hope said. “I really didn’t think he remembered seeing anything at all, and then he came to talk to me and said he knew what was going on, because he just knew, because he knew about Marty. I don’t even understand why he did it. He called me just after it happened and asked me to hold some things for him and said he’d pay me to hold them, some tapes he said needed to be secret, but then he changed his mind. And all that time, he didn’t say anything about Chapin or about Marty and I just thought he didn’t know. We had the crash and the shock and he didn’t remember. But then he started talking about how I’d never feel right unless we all told the truth about everything, and I just didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “you could have told the truth about everything. You’ll have to now, whether you like it or not.”

  Hope shook her head.

  “I’m not going to have to say anything,” she said. “Just wait and see.”

  EPILOGUE

  The face was missing wrinkles, as though the aging process had stepped out for a cigarette break and been hit by a bus.

  —Keith Snyder, in The Night Men

  1

  It had been Father Tibor’s idea that he could foster a cat better than either Bennis or Donna, and the decision nearly brought all three of them to blows. They were hardly calmed down when Gregor reminded them that the cat was going to go to live permanently with Hannah Krekorian as soon as Hannah bought the equipment she thought she needed to keep it. Hannah seemed to believe that cats required a great deal of equipment, some of which could only be obtained by going into the heart of Philadelphia and consulting a cat feng shui advisor.

  “Do you think she’ll redecorate the entire apartment if the feng shui advisor says she has to?” Donna asked.

  “She didn’t redecorate the apartment when there’d been a dead body in it,” Gregor said. “What in the name of all that’s holy is a feng shui advisor for cats?”

  “Well, Krekor,” Father Tibor said, “the principal foundations of feng shui—”

  “I know what feng shui is,” Gregor said.

  “I am working on the principle of financial fraud,” Father Tibor said. “Do you think when this is settled with the cat, you could sit down with Russ Donahue and me and figure out what Federal agencies we’re supposed to be contacting? Russ says we can sue, but it would be better to get somebody arrested.”

  “They’re trying to foreclose on three whole houses they don’t even have mortgages on,” Donna said. “Russ told me about it last night. I don’t understand how they can do that. I mean, if they don’t own the house—”

  “They think they own the house,” Tibor said. “They have digital records.”

  “But the digital records are wrong,” Gregor suggested.

  “I think somebody just invented them and now here we are,” Father Tibor said.

  “I want to hear more about the murder,” Bennis said. “Isn’t that what we started with? Gregor was telling us about the murders, and then—”

  Gregor twisted around in his chair. He made a face as if the chair were uncomfortable, but that wasn’t what his problem was. The cat was climbing up his right leg. It was digging its claws in as far as they could go to get a good grip on things. The claws went right through the fabric and into his skin.

  “There really isn’t much to tell,” Gregor said, trying to remove the cat without also removing several inches of himself. “Like most of these things, it was easy enough when you looked at it the right way. And I had an advantage. I knew who the murderer had to be before I knew how to look at it the right way.”

  “You mean you did one of those things where you knew the murderer right from the beginning?” Bennis asked.

  “No,” Gregor said. “I did know, from the beginning, that there were only five people who could possibly be serious suspects. I knew that from the notes, before I ever got to Connecticut. It’s not always safe to rely on notes, even good notes, but in this case it was fine. Then there were three possible people. The other two—Virginia Brand Westervan and Tim Brand—were right out of
it.”

  “They had alibis?” Tibor suggested.

  “Heavy-duty alibis,” Gregor said. “Virginia Brand Westervan is a United States congresswoman running for the United States Senate. On the night Chapin Waring died, she was attending a fund-raiser at this place called the Atlantic Club, and before the fund-raiser she was doing events, appearances, and meetings all day long. Tim Brand is a doctor who runs a free medical clinic.”

  “For poor people?” Donna asked.

  “For poor people and anybody else who walks through the door. He was at the clinic himself all evening, and before that he was on his own, but he was visibly on his own. He went to Mass. He went jogging. And then,” Gregor said, “I met the two of them. They’re fraternal twins. They might as well be identical twins as far as personalities are concerned. They’re both absolute moralists. They have two entirely different codes of morality—well, maybe not entirely, but you know what I mean—but they’re the same personality type. If either of them had known where Chapin Waring was, he wouldn’t have killed her. He’d have called the cops and turned her in.”

  “So,” Bennis said, “it couldn’t be those two. It could have been how many other people?”

  “Well, up to the murder of Kyle Westervan, there were a few,” Gregor admitted. “There was a woman named Caroline Waring Holder, who was Chapin Waring’s youngest sister. There was Evaline Veer, who was the sister of Martin Veer, who was Chapin Waring’s accomplice in the robberies. There was Kyle Westervan himself, part of Chapin Waring’s little group, and Hope Matlock, who was also part of Chapin Waring’s little group.”

  “All right,” Donna said, “but then Kyle Westervan died? And that changed everything?”

  “Absolutely,” Gregor said. “It was the medical examiner’s reports. Chapin Waring, who was very short, was killed with a downward thrust of a knife. Kyle Westervan, who was very tall, the tallest person in this case, was killed with an upward thrust of the knife. Even if you look at Kyle Westervan’s murder as committed entirely separately, and by another person than the person who killed Chapin Waring, that immediately leaves out Virginia Westervan and Tim Brand, because they’re both very tall. Neither one of them would have thrust upward if they’d been stabbing the man in the back. They’d raise their arms up and then thrust down. That left Caroline Waring Holder, Hope Matlock, and Evaline Veer—and Caroline Waring Holder isn’t exceptionally short. She’s not exceptionally tall, mind you, but the ME’s report insisted that the knife was thrust upward, that it entered the body going up. And for that, you need tiny.”

  “And that left you with?” Bennis asked.

  “Evaline Veer and Hope Matlock,” Gregor said. “They were the only two who were physically able to have committed both these crimes in the way in which they were committed. And once I had that, it was only a matter of figuring out which one of them would have wanted just those people dead. And it was something Evaline Veer said to me that finally made it click.”

  “What did she say to you?” Father Tibor asked. The cat had gone over to him and was now sitting very calmly in his lap, as if he’d never dig a claw into any human being anywhere.

  “She said,” Gregor said, “that when she looked back to thirty years ago, she saw a different crime than everybody else did. She didn’t think about the robberies, which weren’t very important to her, even if she admitted that her brother had had a hand in them. She was talking about the accident. And she did think it was an accident. Everybody did. Evaline Veer just thought that it was a crime that Marty’s friends hadn’t stopped him from driving when he was that drunk.”

  “Well,” Bennis said. “They should have.”

  “They certainly should have,” Gregor said, “but the alcohol wasn’t what made Martin Veer crash. What made him crash was that Hope Matlock grabbed the wheel and made it turn until it had to crash. And three people saw her do it: Martin Veer, Chapin Waring, and Kyle Westervan. Chapin Waring was in the backseat but in the center, so that she was looking right over Hope Matlock’s shoulder. Kyle Westervan was on the other side of Hope.”

  “And they knew she had done it deliberately?” Father Tibor said. “And they did not tell the authorities?”

  “Chapin Waring was on the run nearly immediately afterwards,” Gregor said, “and she was able to use what she knew to get some help to get away. I think Kyle Westervan just felt sorry for Hope. He always felt sorry for her. If he hadn’t felt sorry for her, she would never have been able to kill him.”

  “She killed him because he felt sorry for her?” Bennis looked doubtful.

  “I didn’t say that was why she killed him. I said that was why she was able to kill him. He knew she’d killed Marty, but that was nothing. He thought she’d been drunk and a little crazy at the time, not that it was something she’d done deliberately. But he also knew she’d killed Chapin Waring, and he had to know that one was deliberate. You’d think anybody with half a brain in his head would have known better than to let that woman come up behind him.”

  “I’d think anybody with a brain in his head would have known better than to meet her in an empty parking lot in the middle of the night,” Bennis said.

  “Hope’s explanation for that is that he’d been helping her out, on and off, for years, and when she called him and said it was an emergency, he didn’t even think about refusing. I don’t know if that’s true or not,” Gregor said. “Whatever the reason was, he came. And then, like I said, he felt sorry for her. He saw her as—what she actually was, to an extent. Small. Out of shape. With the start of a heart condition. Weighing close to five hundred pounds. I don’t think he was capable of being afraid of her. Which meant—”

  “Which meant that she killed him,” Bennis said.

  “Which meant that as soon as his back was turned, she just stepped right in, shoved the knife in his back, and gave him one good, hard push.” Gregor shrugged. “When I first heard the story of those robberies, I thought I had two sociopaths and four fairly decent people. It was really three and three.”

  “Which was because Martin Veer had disguised himself in a way that was supposed to throw suspicion on Hope,” Bennis said. “He padded himself so that he sort of looked and walked like her so that if there was ever any interest in him, he could lay it off on her. Do you really think he could have gotten away with that?”

  “Probably not, in the long run,” Gregor said. “But I don’t think Hope Matlock was worrying about whether or not the ruse was going to work. She was just furious and panicked because it was being done at all. It meant that he was about to dump her, and she was about to be dumped out of the clique she’d spent her life getting into and keeping herself in. So she grabbed the wheel and pulled, and she was never the same again. Everybody remarked on it. She went through the motions of getting herself a life, but she never carried through with any of it.”

  “Did she really burn a hundred thousand dollars?” Donna asked. “That’s what they said on CNN, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

  “I think the actual tally was forty thousand,” Gregor said. “She would pull money out of the place she’d hidden it and burn it in the fireplace. She was poor to the point of pain, and she had to do something to keep herself from spending any of it. Because once she spent any of it, the law would have been down on her like a ton of bricks.”

  “And you think it makes sense that the police never found it?” Father Tibor asked. “Police searches are very thorough, Krekor. The police are not idiots, and in this case there was also the FBI.”

  Gregor shrugged. “It was not the kind of place anybody would have expected was there. You’d have to know something about seventeenth-century Colonial architecture. And my guess is that Hope Matlock was actually way down on the list of probable suspects right from the beginning. And, as I’ve said, Hope Matlock never spent any of that money. Chapin Waring got luckier than she should have been with that. Although she did work at it.”

  “By going back to Alwych and talking to Hope Matlock
every once in a while,” Bennis said. “They got lucky there, too.”

  “Not really,” Gregor said. “Plenty of people are out there who have been fugitives for twenty years or more. Eventually, the police lose interest. They’ll look into it again if somebody comes up with a credible lead, but if you can go a decade without being caught, the chances are good that you can go forever if you don’t come to the attention of the police for any other reason or you’re not picked up by America’s Most Wanted so that your neighbors start poking into your business. And she was in New York. Her neighbors probably never noticed her.”

  The doorbell rang. Father Tibor got up and headed toward the door. It was pushed open before he got to it, and Gregor made a note to himself to lecture the man, one more futile time, about why you had to keep your doors locked when you lived in the city of Philadelphia.

  Father Tibor stood back, and a small woman with frizzed gray hair came marching in, dumping a huge pile of packages as soon as she reached the coffee table.

  The packages did not land on the coffee table. They landed everywhere. Hannah Krekorian looked at them and said, “I’d better ask the Ohanian boy to help me get these over to my place. I’m pretty certain I’ve got everything we’ll need. I got the sweet little thing a day bed and a night bed. The psychologist I talked to said that was absolutely essential. Otherwise, they get confused between naps and bedtime, and they never learn a proper schedule.”

  “She’s going to get a cat on a schedule,” Donna said, whispering.

  Hannah went over to the couch and got the cat from where it had settled after Father Tibor stood up. Then she wrapped her arms around it and gave it a big kiss on the head. The cat looked as smug as the one that was supposed to have gotten the canary.

  “I’m going to call him Tolstoy,” Hannah said, “because he’s a genius, and geniuses should be named after geniuses.”