by Jane Haddam
“I told you, her husband wasn’t there.”
“—or for anybody. Miss Kelleher—”
“Ms.”
“Ms. Kelleher, collusion in murder is almost as bad as murder. In the eyes of the law, there’s not a great deal of difference. In some states, you can get the death penalty for it.”
“I don’t think Ginny’s colluding in murder,” Maggie Kelleher said in exasperation. “I don’t think she’s covering up for anybody, not in the way you mean. You don’t understand my point.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t. But I’m trying. What is your point?”
Maggie Kelleher came to some sort of decision. She hopped off her stool and picked up her cup of coffee. She hadn’t drunk much of it while she was sitting next to Gregor, but it had cooled off a little. It was no longer steaming.
“Never mind,” she said. “I don’t know what point I’m trying to make either. I should never have started this conversation. And I’ve got to go.”
“But—” Gregor said.
At that moment, Betsey Henner came out of the back room with Gregor’s breakfast. It was on a big, thick, oval white porcelain plate, the kind that Gregor thought must have been invented just to supply diners everywhere. Betsey put the plate down in front of Gregor and stepped back.
“There you go,” she said.
“Jesus Christ,” Maggie Kelleher said. “What are you trying to do, give yourself a heart attack?”
Five
1
IN GREGOR DEMARKIAN’S EXPERIENCE, there were two kinds of small-town police departments: the kind that was all uniforms and noise, and the kind that knew what it was doing. The Bellerton Police Department seemed to be the latter kind. It was only quarter after seven when he got over there, after eating his breakfast and wandering down Main Street for a second time. By then there were children on the sidewalks and young women hurrying onto porches to put mail in their mailboxes. A couple of Main Street stores hung out their American flags. The police department was in the basement of Town Hall. Standing on the Town Hall lawn, Gregor could look into the window well and see the department, or what there was of it, in operation. A big man in a uniform shirt and khaki pants was working at a desk. He wasn’t wearing a hat of any kind, and if he was wearing a gun, Gregor couldn’t see it. A smaller man, also in a uniform shirt and khaki pants, was typing on an ancient machine at a long counter. Gregor couldn’t see a gun on him, either, but he was wearing a holster. There were neither prisoners nor anyone else in the small room. There weren’t even any reporters. In fact, Gregor thought, he had managed to get lucky, waking up early the way he had. There were no reporters anywhere in Bellerton, as far as Gregor could see.
The front door to the Town Hall was locked. Gregor had tried it. He had gone around to the side of the building in search of another door, and found instead a statue in honor of Bellerton’s Civil War dead. The statue was of a slouching Confederate soldier with a ragged coat standing on a pedestal. The pedestal had six names engraved into the side of it. Gregor went around to the back and found a small parking lot with three cars in it. He also found a door, although not a door to the basement. You had to go up a rickety set of steps to get to it.
Gregor was just wondering whether to try this door or to go around to the one side of the building he hadn’t seen yet when the door opened, and a well-preserved middle-aged woman came out, wearing a flowing flowered dress and very high heels. Gregor worried about women in heels, especially when they were trying to negotiate steep stairs like this set. This woman sailed down them without looking at her feet, and hardly touching the banister. The banister was just a thick metal pipe anyway, tacked on, it looked like, at the last minute, because somebody less surefooted than this had fallen.
The woman was looking him over without pretending not to be. Her gaze seemed to be neutral. Gregor stepped away from the stairs and put his hands behind his back.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked, when she got to the little patch of sidewalk at the bottom of the steps. “Are you looking for something?”
“I’m looking for the police department,” Gregor said. “I found it, in a way. I looked straight into one of its windows. It seems to be open. I just can’t figure out how to get in.”
“The police department’s always open,” the woman said. “Not that there’s a lot of crime out here. But we’ve got drunks just like every place else.”
“I’m sure you do.”
The woman cocked her head. “I thought you were another of those reporters, but you aren’t, are you? You’re that man they wrote about in the paper, the one who’s a friend of David Sandler’s. Gregory—”
“Gregor Demarkian.”
“That’s right. The world’s most famous detective. So what is it now? You and Dr. Sandler don’t think the police department in a place like Bellerton is up to investigating a thing of this kind?”
“I think the police department in Bellerton is doing a wonderful job.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because David Sandler asked me to come. Because I got a letter from a man—Clayton Hall, I think the name was—saying it would be a good idea if I came. In his opinion, that is.”
“Clayton knew you were coming? He thought it was all right?”
“He wrote me a letter. He said he thought it was all right.”
“We get tired of it, you know,” the woman said. “All this hogwash about what a backwards little place we are. Oh, they don’t come out and say it. They don’t stand up there on the six o’clock news and announce that Bellerton is a hick little hollow full of mental defectives. But they imply it. They go out of their way to imply it.”
Gregor cleared his throat. “I’m sorry if they do,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t had much time to watch the news of this on television.”
“It’s the people they pick to talk to,” the woman said. “I learned that when I was up at the university in Chapel Hill. This town has dozens of good people in it. Dozens of intelligent people, too. So who do these television people put in front of a camera as soon as they have a chance? Bobby Marsh and Ricky Drake.”
“Isn’t Bobby Marsh the child’s father?”
The woman ignored this entirely. “None of them understands any of it anyway. They don’t understand what it was like down here, just twenty-five or thirty years ago. They don’t understand where these people are coming from.”
The woman seemed to snap out of it. “Never mind,” she said, smoothing her hands along the sides of her dress skirt. “It doesn’t matter. You want to see Clayton Hall?”
“If he’s in. I want to go to the police department.”
“You just go around the side of the building there. There’s a little set of steps going down, like cellar steps except right out in the open and they’re made of concrete. There’s a police car parked around that side, too. That’s how you can tell.”
“I was just going to check that side. Thank you for telling me.”
“The first four or five days, there were reporters just spilling out of there, and all over the Town Hall steps, and everywhere else you could see. And equipment with cables, too. You’ve got to worry about children around cables, you know.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Do you think Ginny Marsh killed her daughter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Clayton Hall thinks she did. Damned idiot. Anybody with a brain in his head could see that Ginny Marsh never did any such thing.”
“She could be covering up for somebody who did. For her husband. Or her boyfriend.”
“Bobby Marsh was out at Henry Holborn’s place when the baby was killed. Everybody knows that. Even Clayton knows that. Do you believe in religion?”
“Believe in it?”
The woman snorted. “Well, I’m not going to ask you if you’ve accepted Christ as your personal savior, am I? I mean, do you think religion is good for people?”
“Sometimes,” G
regor replied. “I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at—”
“They think it’s all some kind of mental illness.” The woman tossed her head in the direction of Main Street. They might not be out there yet, but Gregor knew who they were supposed to be. “They think it’s all voodoo and fanaticism. You can hear it when they talk. You have to give Dr. Sandler that much. He doesn’t talk to people like that.”
“Oh,” Gregor said.
The woman got a set of keys out of the pocket of her dress. “I’m not a religious person, you know. I don’t go to church and I’m not even one hundred percent sure I believe in God and whenever Rose starts in with all that angels I business, I go right up the wall. But people have a right to have their beliefs respected. They have a right not to be laughed at by people who don’t for one minute intend to even try to understand what’s going on. That’s part of being an American.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“You go find Clayton Hall,” the woman said. “I hope you do a little good around here instead of what all the rest of them are doing. I hope you have some consideration.”
“Right,” Gregor said again.
“And just remember this.” The woman now had a single one of her keys in her hand, as if she were about to open a door, “Ginny Marsh didn’t kill her daughter. Ginny Marsh didn’t collude in the killing of her daughter. Ginny Marsh never hurt anybody in her life and won’t hurt anybody as long as she lives. But she scares easily.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve got to get moving,” the woman said. “I’m supposed to open the library at nine, and I have to get all the way out to my house and back again before then. I have a very busy day.”
“I’m sure you do, Miss—”
“Ms. Brent. Ms. Naomi Brent. I run the library. I don’t have any more time for this kind of talk, Mr. Demarkian. I have to go now.”
She turned away from him then and half ran across the parking lot. Gregor watched her skirt billow out around her. She got to the small green Ford Escort and opened it up and got in. Gregor suddenly remembered that Donna Moradanyan had just bought a Ford Escort. That one was a station wagon, though. And it was blue.
What am I doing? Gregor demanded of himself.
Naomi Brent had started her engine and begun to back her car out of its space. Gregor started around the last side of Town Hall, still in search of the Bellerton Police Department.
2
ACTUALLY, THE BELLERTON POLICE Department was not hard to find, once you knew where to look. The steps were exactly where Naomi Brent had said they were going to be, carved into the flat ground on the side of the building. Gregor had the impression that it was not very usual to have basements in this part of North Carolina. In fact, from what he remembered, all the South tended to prefer slab and crawl space foundations. This foundation had been raised a good five feet above grade, however, and the administration of the town at the time it had been built had gone to what must have been a great deal of expense to do it all right. Gregor went down the concrete steps and opened the wooden door at the bottom of them. There was no musty smell of mildew and damp rushing out at him. In spite of the fact that there had been a major hurricane here only a couple of weeks ago, the basement was entirely dry and very fresh-smelling. It was also heavily air-conditioned. Gregor felt the cold hit him like a wall. He was almost sorry he hadn’t worn his sweater. He closed the outside door behind him and looked up at the wall next to it, where there was one of those plastic plug-in letter boards with departments written on it.
Tax Department, Gregor read. Water Department. Sewage Department. Police Department.
He had been hoping for directions, but he wasn’t going to get any. This was not a town that expected strangers to be wandering around in the basement of its Town Hall. Anybody who lived in Bellerton would know where he was going without having to be told.
From the place where Gregor was standing, the hall went in two directions, right and left, Gregor tried to orient himself, and decided that the front of the building was probably to his left. He went that way, past the Water Department, and got to a corner. He turned the corner and found the office of the tax collector. Obviously, the basement was laid out like a gigantic doughnut, with a concrete block instead of a hole in the middle. Gregor passed a ladies’ room and kept on going.
Finally, when he turned the next corner, Gregor heard signs of life. Somebody slammed a door. Somebody called out to somebody else. There was a fire door set up in the middle of the hall—because of worries about fires? because of worries about security?—and Gregor went through it. On the other side of it he found a big sign with the words BELLERTON POLICE DEPARTMENT written on it. He also found an open door with light spilling out of it.
Gregor went to the open door and looked in. The big man he had seen first was now standing at a coffee machine, fiddling with coffee grounds and water. The smaller man was now sitting at a desk and reading. There was a radio in one corner of the room, tuned to the state police band. It was giving out information on traffic conditions on Interstate 95.
Gregor knocked as loudly as he could on the frame of the door and waited. The big man didn’t hear him. The small man heard him, and looked up, and jumped to his feet.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”
The big man turned around now, and looked Gregor over. Then he looked at the small man and said, “You shouldn’t swear like that, Jackson. You don’t know who you might be talking to.”
“Well, I’m not talking to a preacher now, am I?” Jackson demanded. “Look at him. He’s one of those reporters.”
“I’m Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.
The big man came across the room and held out his hand. “I know you are,” he said. “I read an article about you in People magazine. I’m Clayton Hall.”
“How do you do.” Gregor shook the man’s hand. He never shook hands anymore, except in small towns. People in cities seemed to have given the practice up.
Jackson was looking back and forth between Clayton Hall and Gregor Demarkian. He dropped back down in his chair and said, “My, my. Gregor Demarkian. You finally got here.”
“Now, now,” Clayton Hall said.
“Tell me something,” Jackson said. “Are you a religious man, Mr. Demarkian?”
Gregor was beginning to think he ought to become a Buddhist, at least for as long as he was going to stay in Bellerton. He was also wondering if Jackson was this man’s first or last name.
“You don’t want to get started on all that religious stuff,” Clayton Hall said. “Mr. Demarkian just got here. I hope you don’t mind too much, Mr. Demarkian. The religion thing has become a sore point down here over the past few weeks. People are beginning to feel—harassed.”
“Harassed isn’t the half of it,” Jackson said. “Persecuted is more like it. Persecuted.”
“Certain members of the media from up North,” Clayton Hall said, “seem to think that belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible is irrefutable proof of mental retardation.”
“They think it turns you into an ax murderer,” Jackson snarled. “They think it makes you crazy.”
“Mr. Demarkian didn’t come here to talk about religion,” Clayton Hall said. “Or I don’t think he did. Why don’t you come in and have a seat, Mr. Demarkian. Drink a cup of coffee. David Sandler says you’re a very intelligent man.”
“David Sandler says you’re a very intelligent man.”
There was a full coffeepot sitting next to the coffee maker, which was just beginning to pour dark brown liquid into an empty one. Clayton Hall picked up the full pot and poured some coffee into a small white Styrofoam cup.
“Have a seat,” Clayton Hall said again.
Gregor made his way into the room and found a chair to sit in. All the chairs were wooden and cheap and uniform, the kind of chairs they used to have in schoolrooms when he was a ch
ild. The air-conditioning, he realized, was even stronger in here than it had been in the hall. Neither Clayton Hall nor his associate Jackson seemed to notice the cold. Because of it, Gregor took the coffee gratefully when Clayton finally handed it to him, in spite of the fact that he knew what it would taste like. Police department coffee tastes the same everywhere, all over the world. Police departments in Bolivia serve up the same awful brew that sits ready and waiting in police departments in New York. Gregor took a long sip and was instantly warmer. He also felt instantly a little sick.
“I’ve been walking around town,” he said. “Looking at things. I had breakfast in a place called Betsey’s House of Hominy. It was interesting.”
“I’ll bet everybody thought you were a reporter,” Jackson said.
“They did at first. There was a woman there named Maggie Kelleher—”
“Oh, Maggie,” Clayton Hall said. “Now, Maggie is an interesting woman. Good-looking, too.”
“She’s got to be forty,” Jackson said scornfully.
“She knew who I was,” Gregor said. “Some other people might have, too, but she was the one who said so. There was also somebody there named Ricky Drake.”
Jackson dropped his head into his hands. “Oh, dear sweet Jesus.”
Gregor let this pass. “Then when I came over here, I met a woman coming out, who said her name was Naomi Brent. From the library.”
“That’s right,” Clayton said. “She does run the library. Has for years now. She’s not exactly your old maid librarian, though.”
“She didn’t seem so to me, no,” Gregor agreed. “But what I’m trying to get to here, what struck me, is that what everybody wanted to tell me was that there was no way they thought Virginia Marsh could have killed her baby. In fact, it seemed to be a general consensus.”
Clayton Hall and Jackson looked at each other. “It is a consensus,” Clayton said slowly. “In town, at any rate.”
“I’d been given the impression by David Sandler that the consensus ran exactly the other way. That one of the reasons he wanted me down here was that he was afraid it was being taken as a foregone conclusion, that Virginia Marsh was guilty, and that he wanted someone here who would look at things differently for a while.”
