by Jane Haddam
“I thought you said arsenic,” Cherie said.
“Arsenic, too. Arsenic for Mark. Cyanide for Edith Braxner because you wanted that to be quick. I don’t know what you put that in, but the police will find out. They always do. Edith Braxner snooped into people’s accounts. My guess is that she knew something was wrong with yours, but I think she still thought it was mostly sloppiness. Given the police presence, though, and me here, you couldn’t risk it, so you didn’t.”
“This is ridiculous,” Melissa said. “We don’t have to listen to this.”
“You killed Michael because he got hold of your walletwith the student IDs inside. That’s how you were stealing what you were stealing here. You’d get the IDs and the students would think they’d lost them. You’d put in for new IDs that were supposed to be changed in some way in case the old ones had been stolen, but if we check we’ll find that they weren’t changed at all. You just didn’t bother to ask for the change in the first place. So you had the IDs, and you could use the accounts. As I said we found them, ten of them together, all boys, and I’d venture to say all residents of this house. We found something else, too.”
“What?” Cherie said. “A smoking gun.”
“In a way,” Gregor said gently. “We found a bank card from the First National City Bank of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, in the name of M. C. Medwar. Melissa Medford. Cherie Wardrop. It’s really just that simple. All we have to do is talk to the tellers, go to the bank, and look at the records. It won’t be hard to trace the account to the two of you. And then there’s that timing I talked about. Nobody else could possibly have killed Michael Feyre, and nobody else could possibly have poisoned Mark DeAvecca, and that means nobody else could or would have wanted to kill Edith Braxner. A prosecutor will be able to stack this evidence up in court and hang you both.”
“They don’t have the death penalty in Massachusetts,” Cherie said absently, but she had sat down abruptly on the floor and she was in tears.
Part Four
Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.
—Isaac Asimov
1
Bennis Hannaford was not on Cavanaugh Street when Gregor Demarkian got home. He climbed the stairs past old George Tekemanian’s first-floor apartment and Tibor in Bennis’s second-floor apartment and walked through his own front door, hoping to find her sitting in front of the computer she had installed in the living room, but she was nowhere to be found. It was a cold first Friday in March, and he thought that the least he should have been able to expect was that she would sit still to fight. That, he had finally realized, was what had so disturbed him about the last week. It wasn’t that Bennis was mad at him. Bennis got mad at him. There were times when he thought she practically made a hobby of it. The real shock was that Bennis didn’t want to talk, not even to yell at him. It wasn’t like her. What was worse, it was ominous as hell. A nontalking Bennis was a violation of the natural law, like a river that flowed upstream.
He got out of his traveling things and left his clothes on the floor of the bedroom when he took them off—if she was anywhere in the vicinity, that would get her yelling at him—and took a shower. When he got out of the shower, he looked around again, but she was still gone. He changed into “casual clothes,” which these days meant he wore a sweater instead of a jacket but still wore a tie. He stared at the clothes on the floor and then picked them up. It wasn’t only Bennis who yelled at him when he did that. His wife had yelled at him, too. He’d come to think of it as the definitive mark of having a woman in his life: as long as she was with him, clothes could be in closets, or in hampers, or even over the backs of chairs, but they couldn’t be on the floor. He was just about to go back out into the living room when he saw the white envelope lying on his pillow, his own first name written across the front of it in Bennis’s strong, sloping hand.
His first instinct was not to open it. If she had left him—but why would she leave him? What was all this about?—there was some advantage in not reading her letter. When she got back in touch with him again, he could say that he’d never found it. She would have to get back in touch with him again because her clothes were still here. He’d seen them in the closet. He got up and went through the drawers. Yes, most of them were still here. Even her underwear was still there. He sat down on the edge of the bed, on her side of the bed, and opened the envelope. It was one of her Main Line envelopes, the thick, cream stationery she had monogrammed every year at some place in the city of Philadelphia.
“Gregor,” the letter said. He tried not to wonder what it meant that it didn’t say “dear.” He couldn’t even remember if she ever started letters with “dear.” They didn’t write each other many letters.
I don’t want you to think I’ve run out on you. I haven’t. I’ve just taken off for a week to think. I haven’t been thinking much since we first met. I saw you, and Cavanaugh Street, as a chance at salvation, a road out of the emotional insanity of my family, a safe place. There’s nothing wrong with safe places. We all need them, and I need this one, still. But it seems to me that that really isn’t enough in a situation like ours. It never occurred to me, before these last few months, that you might see me as something else than a woman you loved, or that the love you say you feel for me might be something other than what I feel for you. I’m all grown up, Gregor. I need a safe place, I even need protection, but it is the protection of strength and not the shelter you give to a wounded child. I’m not even wounded anymore. I need to be to you what I would have been if you had never seen me as a waif you had to rescue, and I don’t know if that’s possible. I hope it is. I hope you 7/take the time I’m gone to figure it all out. Figure out what it is you want from me, and who it is you think I am. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and your idea of me and my idea of me will match. If not, there’s nothing lost, no matter how much it feels there is. I haven’t left an address or a phone number. I don’t want to talk for a while. Ill see you on the twenty-first of March, unless you want to run out on me and buy yourself tickets to Pago Pago so I won’t find you waiting when I get home. I love you. Bennis.
Gregor put the letter down on the bed and stared at it. The woman was insane. He’d never in his life seen her as a waif, and he’d certainly never considered the possibility that he had to rescue her. She could walk through a snake pit and come out the other side without a mark on her. Had she really spent all her time on Cavanaugh Street feeling like a needy child being taken care of by the grown-ups? He looked at the letter again. That wasn’t what she had said. What she had said was that something he’d done recently had made her think that that was the way he saw her. This was rapidly turning into one of those things women found desperately important but men couldn’t figure out at all. Men couldn’t even figure out what the topic was.
He stuffed the letter into the pocket of his pants and went into the living room. He picked up the phone and called downstairs to see if Tibor was in his second-floor apartment. There was no answer. He checked the clock and realized it was almost five. Tibor was probably at the Ararat, not to eat—he ate late, most of the time—but to hang out with everybody and talk. He wondered if they knew Bennis was gone. Then he stopped himself. This was Cavanaugh Street. Of course they knew that Bennis was gone.
He got his coat back on and went out onto the landing, careful to lock the door behind him. People in this building were so complacent about the safety of Cavanaugh Street, they forgot there was a relatively unsafe city all around it and didn’t bother to lock up. He practically ran down the stairs to the ground floor, if you could call slipping on the stair edges running. He went out onto Cavanaugh Street and turned toward the Ararat. It was getting dark, but not as darkas it had been at this time of night just a few days ago. Gregor wondered if that was the result of the year marching on, or of the fact that he was now farther south. He decided he was going insane. His thoughts were no longer connecting to reality. He passed the church, still under reconstruction. It looked no more finished than it had been w
hen he left.
He turned into the Ararat and saw Tibor sitting at a big, round table in the middle of the room with old George Tekemanian, Howard Kashinian, and Grace Feinman. Grace lived on the fourth floor of his building and played the harpsichord. He hadn’t even realized he wasn’t hearing it. He had no idea if he loved Bennis the way Bennis wanted him to love her—What the hell was that supposed to mean anyway? Why did women say things like that? Why wasn’t love just love, for God’s sake?—but he did know that he cared for her enough so that he hadn’t even noticed that the nonstop harpsichord music that had become the background to his life was not in fact in attendance. The Ararat was nearly empty. This was a good thing because Gregor had no intention of talking to Tibor in front of half the neighborhood.
He made his way over to Tibor’s table, grabbed him by the shoulder, and said, “Excuse me” to Grace, Howard, and old George. He pulled Tibor over to a table along the wall and checked the window seat table to see who was there: Lida Arkmanian, Sheila Kashinian, Hannah Krekorian, and one of the Ohanian women, probably plotting another fund-raising project for the new church. He turned his mind away from the question of whether he would be asked to dress up like the Easter Bunny this time in order to collect a few thousand dollars to buy pew cushions, took the letter out of his pocket, and handed it over to Tibor.
“Look at that,” he said. “Tell me what that means.”
Tibor opened the letter, read it through—it was at least short; given the fact that Bennis’s novels ran to eight hundred pages or more, that was unexpected—and put it down on the table.
“It means,” he said authoritatively, “that she wants you to ask her to marry you.”
This was not what Gregor had expected to hear. “She does? Why?”
“Because it is getting to the stage where she feels she needs to be married?” Tibor ventured. “I’m not a mind reader, Krekor. I can only tell you what I think.”
“But if that’s what she wants, why doesn’t she say so?”
“Because she doesn’t want to say so. She wants you to think of it.”
“But I did think of it,” Gregor said, “and she stopped talking to me. For a week. I thought she hated the idea. And then, and then, Tibor, she called me while I was in Massachusetts, got me on the cell phone while I was standing in the wind on a hillside in subzero weather, and hung up on me. Hung up on me. This is insane.”
“It is possible she does not actually want to get married,” Tibor said. “It is possible that she needs only to be sure that you want to get married.”
“If you keep that up, I’m going to take to drink.”
“I’m just trying to cover all the mounds,” Tibor said. He shook his head. “Bases. All the bases. I’ve been listening to Tommy again. Krekor, really, it is all right. Tell me about your case in Massachusetts. I’ve been listening to the news, but they never tell me very much. Bennis will be back next week. You can think about it then.”
“Do you know where she’s gone?”
“No. And I am not lying, Krekor. I am no use keeping a secret. I don’t know where she’s gone. Donna might know.”
“I’ll go talk to Donna.”
“She and Russ have taken Tommy to see a musical and then to dinner. You must calm down, Krekor. It is all right. It is only that Bennis did not realize before that she loved you, and now she does. She doesn’t know what to do with it.”
“She’s been telling me she loves me for quite some time.”
“Yes, Krekor, I am sure; but that is being in love, that is not loving. You should know that yourself. Tell me about the case. It will take your mind off it.”
Gregor doubted if anything would take his mind off it. He had a sneaking suspicion that that was the point of theletter—although, he had to admit, he’d have been no calmer or less obsessive if Bennis had taken off without leaving a letter. Linda Melajian came over with the menus and two glasses of water. She put the water on the table and said, “You two need these, or do you just want to tell me what you’ll have?”
“Yaprak sarma,” Tibor said.
“A steak the size of Kansas,” Gregor said, “and french fries.”
“Yaprak sarma and oil and vinegar on the salad,” Linda said, “and something the man could have picked up in any white bread restaurant in central Philadelphia and blue cheese on the salad. Glass of wine for the father. You want me to bring you a beer and a shot just to let you finish off this little fit of yours?”
“I’ll have a glass of red,” Gregor said. “I’m not in the mood for this; I’m really not.”
“The first thing everybody on this street is going to do when Bennis gets back,” Linda said, “is tell her all about this steak.”
She walked off. She hadn’t bothered to write down a thing on her pad.
“I’m living in one of the largest cities on the planet,” Gregor said, “and I might as well be living in a village in the old country. They know my blood type around here.”
“And usually you like it,” Tibor said. “Pay attention to me, Krekor. Tell me about your case. It won’t do you any good to dwell on it. It will only make you crazy.”
He would dwell on it as soon as he got back to the apartment and found himself on his own. Gregor knew he would. It was the kind of thing he not only dwelt on, but that he was meant to dwell on. There had to be some sort of middle ground here. Women should be expected to meet you halfway. They never did. Why was that? Why did they get away with it? Why couldn’t you just tell them to make sense and have them do it?
The salads came. His had enough blue cheese dressing on it to reconstitute France on the North American continent.
He was suddenly very happy that nobody on Cavanaugh Street had gone in for renaming things Freedom Fries.
“Krekor?” Tibor said.
Gregor shrugged. “There isn’t much to tell,” he said. “It looked complex on the surface, but it wasn’t. These two women, Cherie Wardrop and Melissa Medford, had been ripping off schools for years. Cherie would get a job at some expensive private school as a biology teacher and take a place as a houseparent, which wasn’t difficult because most people would rather not be houseparents. You can’t blame them. They want to live on their own without having to be at work twenty-four seven. Anyway, they’d do that. Melissa would take an apartment in the nearest town. They’d look around and figure out the best way to skim the system, and then they’d do it: house accounts, student drawing accounts, all kinds of things. It only required patience and ingenuity, and they had both. Brian Sheehy, the police chief in Windsor, was just calling around to the other places they’d worked when I left. He’d found at least three other scams that the schools hadn’t even caught. They never stayed very long in one place just in case. And they had a bank account in the name of M. C. Medwar—that was supposed to be clever, a combination of the two names—to stuff the money in that wasn’t their own accounts, which were clean.”
“This was it? There was no complicated motivational background, a bad childhood, a hidden rape?” Tibor said. “It doesn’t feel right somehow. It doesn’t feel like an American crime.”
“I know what you mean.” Gregor was finished with his salad. He pushed the bowl away. “At Windsor they were ripping off the student drawing accounts. Parents deposited money in school accounts, which students were allowed to draw from; but as a safety precaution they had to sign off on the transaction with their houseparent before they took the cash. Then they used their student ID as a debit card. The IDs had those magnetic strips on the back.”
“Ah, yes, I see,” Tibor said.
“Well,” Gregor said, “Cherie and Melissa stole the IDs, which wasn’t hard to do. Kids leave their wallets all over the place; they leave the IDs in backpacks and wherever. They’d pick them up. The student concerned would report an ID missing. They’d put in for a new one for the student, and when they did they were supposed—well, Cherie was supposed to; she was the responsible faculty member—they were supposed to change t
he PIN number. And sometimes they did, but the thing is, also as a safety precaution, the PIN had to be on file and guess who kept the files?”
“Oh,” Tibor said, “that was very stupid.”
“The school seemed to think that since the student IDs could only access the drawing accounts, it was more important for the school and houseparents to be able to get into the accounts than it was to make sure they couldn’t be stolen from. Anyway, there they were, it was a perfect setup, and they were able to skim more than two thousand dollars a week.”
“A week? I think students have much more money now than when I was one,” Tibor said.
“I’m sure they do,” Gregor said. “But they’d stayed at Windsor a lot longer than they had anywhere else because they were making a lot more money and it was a lot easier. Then, when Mark and Michael Feyre started school this fall, things started to fall apart. First they made a mistake with Mark and made a withdrawal at a time he knew he couldn’t have made it himself. It didn’t matter that they’d forged his signature on the account book. He knew where he had been at the time he was supposed to have been signing it, several miles away in Boston. So the first thing they had to do was to neutralize him so that he couldn’t pursue it, and Cherie took care of that by making him sick with arsenic. Then, while he was in the infirmary, she went up to his room and tampered with his multivitamin capsules by putting a very small amount of arsenic into each one. That kept him sick, and it kept him screwed up, and they figured that if that went on long enough, he’d flunk out or be asked to leave. Which is probably what would have happened if it hadn’t been for Michael Feyre.”
