by Jane Haddam
The exception showed up in the middle of January, at one of those parties Rosamund threw in a halfhearted attempt to turn herself into a Washington hostess, if Rosamund had really wanted to be a Washington hostess, she would have been one. Instead, she only thought she ought to want to be one. Rosamund had never been much good at doing what she ought to do. The party in January, populated by half the House of Representatives and most of the Senate, was a combination of embarrassment and farce. The embarrassment came from the decor, which Rosamund had dragged out of her attic for the occasion and which consisted of oversize posters from the sixties, each featuring a large muddy pig standing over a sign identifying it as one or another public official: senator, congressman, president. The farce came from Rosamund’s behavior, which was calculated to ruin her forever. She kept jumping on top of tables and doing the cancan.
It was too much. Bennis soon wanted to escape from that party almost as much as she had once wanted to escape from Boston. Because she didn’t have any place private to go—Rosamund’s house was one of those contemporary concoctions with the bedrooms off a balcony overlooking the main living room; with a party going on there would be as much noise in Bennis’s room as there was around the bar—she headed for the relative quiet of the garden.
She was contemplating the rump of a marble Aphrodite that rose from a patch of wilting bougainvillea when her exception appeared. She had had just a little too much noise and just a little too much to drink. She was feeling all floaty and discontented, as if she’d been promised a special Christmas present and gotten a pair of socks instead. He stepped out of a tangle of wisteria with a champagne glass in his hand and said, “That’s what I like to see. A woman with a little meat on her bones.”
Bennis didn’t know if he was talking about Aphrodite or her, but she wasn’t sure she cared. Here in front of her, she thought, was a man who was good-looking and well-turned-out and sophisticated. He was friendly. He was coming on to her. He was even blessedly free of a wedding ring, meaning he might not be just one more power junkie on the sexual make. He could, she thought, in her alcoholic party haze, be the answer to all her problems.
Of course, Bennis thought now, brushing off the scattering of ash that had fallen from her cigarette to her skirt when the Rolls went over a pothole at seventy miles an hour, he was nothing of the sort. None of the answers-to-all-her-problems she had spent her time discovering in those days ever had been. It was hard to put your life in order when you were never entirely sober and even less frequently sane.
Still, she thought, looking back at Gregor, still sleeping, the one thing she hadn’t expected was that this idiot would cause her problems, more than ten years after the fact. She accepted the long-term consequences of her youthful stupidities with equanimity, by and large: the smoking she now seemed incapable of giving up, the headaches she always got from drinking as little as a single glass of wine, the boredom she had developed with the whole subject of sex unconnected to the promise of a commitment at least as strong as that which cemented her parents’ marriage. It was just that love affairs were supposed to be over when they were over. They weren’t supposed to come back from the dead and kick you in the ass.
She didn’t want to tell Gregor about the drinking. She didn’t want to tell Gregor about the marijuana. She didn’t want to tell Gregor about the men.
Most of all, she didn’t want to tell Gregor that she had once spent four months having an affair with Stephen Whistler Fox.
TWO
[1]
IN A WAY, GREGOR Demarkian’s first sight of Great Expectations was a shock. It wasn’t that the house was bizarre. He had expected that. Great Expectations was infamous for being one of the most flagrant examples of modernist architectural abuse ever constructed, and Victoria Harte was even more infamous for the way she had rammed its plans through the stiff-lipped, tradition-bound snobbery of Oyster Bay’s notorious zoning board. People said she must have blackmailed half the North Shore just to get permission to break ground. In an enclave of nineteenth century buildings and buildings made to look nineteenth century, Great Expectations looked not so much out of place as impossible. Ostentatiously impossible. Most of the big properties on the North Shore were landscaped for concealment, but Great Expectations was not. If anything, more trees had been cleared than necessary, so that the house seemed to be framed in grass and posed for exhibition. Its more striking particulars were visible from as far away as the highway: rooflines that soared to unpredictable heights at unpredictable angles in unpredictable places; windows that had been cut into lopsided trapezoids and asymmetrical triangles; extensions and porticos that reminded Gregor vaguely of the last New York World’s Fair. It was as if a UFO had landed on the lawn of Buckingham Palace during the reign of Queen Victoria.
Actually, Gregor thought, backtracking, it was more as if the men from Mars had come to give aid and succor to the American Revolution. He’d been so involved in private speculations on the character of Stephen Whistler Fox, and the political character of the coming weekend, he’d almost forgotten which weekend it was. He’d certainly failed to register the determinedly patriotic decoration of the landscape around him, the American flags hanging from almost every house and store, the papier-mâché Minutemen statues on the lawns of empty-for-summer-vacation schools, the red-white-and-blue banners strung across the main streets of one small town after the other. He had been peripherally bothered by the fact that their driver had gotten off and on the highway to no apparent purpose, taking them down two-lane blacktops and through half a dozen tiny hamlets. Wouldn’t staying on the interstate have been quicker? Now he realized it would have been anything but quicker. There was a yacht parade in Long Island Sound this weekend, and four days of fireworks displays that had been advertised as “more spectacular than the bicentennial.” The island was filling up with tourists, and the interstate was probably filling up with cars. Gregor wondered if their driver was using a CB to keep them out of trouble. The thought of a CB in a Rolls limousine made him want to laugh.
By now, they were off the interstate for good, on the flat winding road that led to Great Expectations’ front gate. The gate, in fact, was right in front of them, not quite blocking off the world at the end of 300 feet of lawn and asphalt. Even at this distance, Gregor could see that there were polished metal hearts dotted across the cedar shingle roof shakes. There were polished metal hearts linked together to make that gate. Just beyond the gate, Gregor was sure he saw even more polished metal hearts, studded into the drive.
He turned to Bennis, who seemed to have put her manuscript away for good and taken up smoking as an avocation, and said, “You won’t believe this, but I feel like an absolute ass.”
Bennis tapped ashes into the tray beside her and said, “What for?”
“For the way I’ve been thinking about these people,” Gregor said, gesturing at the gate in front of them, coming closer by the minute, but not at any great speed. The road was narrow and pocked, and the driver was more interested in protecting the Rolls than in getting them anyplace in a hurry. “I’ve been so—fixated—by Senator Fox and his problems, I’ve been thinking of this house as his.”
“You’ve been thinking of Victoria Harte’s house as his?”
“I know whose house it is, Bennis. I always did. I just meant—”
“I know what you meant.” Bennis’s cigarette was out. She lit another one. “It’s just funny, that’s all. Under the circumstances.”
“Under what circumstances?”
“Under the circumstances that the house belongs to Victoria Harte in particular,” Bennis said.
They had covered the three, or however many, miles to the gate, and stopped. Their driver had gotten out and gone to speak into a small metal box in the gate’s left wall. He was doing a lot of talking, as if someone on the other end was making up for the inadequate security wall by indulging in verbal annoyance.
Finished with the inquisition, their driver came back to the car and go
t in. A moment later, the gate popped open, as jerky as an automatic door in a thirties insane asylum. Gregor looked through his window at the asphalt of the drive as they passed on to it and saw that he’d been right. It was studded with polished metal hearts.
“Victoria Harte,” Bennis told him, “is the woman who told the entire Hollywood press corps that her second husband was going to be a kept man and proud of it.”
“What?” Gregor said.
“Victoria Harte,” Bennis repeated. “What I’m trying to tell you is, she’s famous for being—I don’t know what you’d call it. For making sure everybody knows what’s hers is hers.”
“She’s certainly making sure everybody knows this house is hers,” Gregor said.
“You’d think she’d get tired of hearts,” Bennis said. “I mean—never mind. Anyway, according to my mother—”
“Your mother knows Victoria Harte?”
“They’ve met. They were on an American Heart Association thing together in 1972 or something.”
“I didn’t think the Main Line mixed with—actresses.”
“My mother would have mixed with anybody to get money for the Heart Association. At least, she would have back in 1972. Afterward—”
“I know about afterward, Bennis.”
“Yes. Well. Anyway, what Mother said was that Victoria Harte had a little notebook she carried with her everywhere, and every time she did anything she wrote it down. Most people don’t do that, you know, when they’re working for charities. They get a big kick out of toiling in the vineyards, or they say they do. But she wrote it all down, and if there was a press story she got to the reporters and made sure they put in exactly what she had done. You see what I mean?”
“She wanted to get credit for her work,” Gregor said.
“She wanted to own her work,” Bennis said. “That’s something different. Mother said she had her initials on everything, on her clothes, on her compacts. She left her comb at home one day and she went to a drugstore and bought a little plastic one to use instead, and before she used it she took one of those indelible ink laundry pens and put her initials in the corner.”
“Obsessive,” Gregor agreed.
“I’ll tell you something else my mother told me,” Bennis said. This time she looked worse than smug. “She hates her son-in-law. And I mean positively hates him.”
“What?” Gregor said again.
But there was no time for an answer. The drive was a straight shot from the road to the house, and it was not pocked. The Rolls had traveled it at a speed Gregor would have thought impossible when they were back in traffic. They had passed a seven-bay garage with a line of red cars parked just outside its doors. The cars had license plates that started at “VH-101” and ended at “VH-107.” They had passed a cast iron, white-painted, modernistic gazebo with filigree hearts hanging from its eaves. They had passed a heart-shaped fountain made of poured concrete and a heart-shaped reflecting pool filled with tropical fish. Gregor thought it was no wonder the neighbors were supposed to hate this place.
Now they were pulling into the roundabout in front of the main doors—not heart-shaped, Gregor saw with relief—and as they did he saw that she was waiting for them, Victoria Harte herself, standing under the portico in a bright red raw silk caftan that fell to the ground. The shoulder of the caftan was held up by a heart-shaped ruby the size of a Kennedy half dollar. Her hair was piled on top of her head and stuck through with ornamental pins. Gregor couldn’t tell if they had hearts on them or not. Her feet, whisked into view every once in a while by a breeze, were stuffed into what he thought of as flip-flops, but not the kind made of rubber. In the few glimpses he got of them, they seemed to be made of the same silk as the caftan, stretched over something hard and unyielding, like wood. They had hearts on them, too.
Gregor looked across the seat to see if Bennis had noticed any of this, and found her strangely absorbed in herself, closed off and shut down, as if she had retreated into a cave or a trance.
[2]
Victoria Harte was a woman who believed in the redemptive power of publicity, as if it were the report, and not the fact, that determined the reality. That was how Father Tibor Kasparian had described her, putting her personality together from the bits and pieces he’d read about her in the thousands of magazines he seemed to devour every month, and that was how Gregor had thought of her ever since, when he’d bothered to think about her at all. Now, as the Rolls made the last curve in the roundabout and pulled up in front of the main doors, he turned his attention to her completely, blotting out Stephen Whistler Fox and Dan Chester and Carl Bettinger and all their works. He even managed to blot out the mental echo of Father Tibor’s calm, accented, analytical voice—a necessity, because he trusted Tibor more than he trusted himself. Right now, he wanted his own impressions, unmediated.
The most obvious thing about her was that she was still a beautiful woman, in spite of her age, and without that plastic strainedness around the eyes and jaw that was the mark of too many tucks and too many lifts. Gregor supposed she must have had both, at least once. Gravity was inexorable, and he’d never met anyone, male or female, who’d had a throat that smooth after the age of forty-five. Plastic surgery was not one of the things Gregor Demarkian approved of. To him, it spoke of panic and self-delusion, a desperate desire to pretend that there was no such thing as death. Still, he had to give Victoria Harte credit for being intelligent about it. He’d known too many women who ran off to clinics in Beverly Hills as soon as they turned thirty-five, and every eighteen months after that. By the time they were fifty, they looked like something not quite human.
The second most obvious thing about Victoria Harte was that she was, in the old-fashioned sense, a personality. She was the kind of woman who commanded attention even when she was doing nothing more dramatic than standing still. As Gregor knew, all movie stars were supposed to have that quality. As he also knew, having been assigned to kidnapping detail during his first years at the Bureau, and having met a few, most of them didn’t. It was remarkable how rabbity and inconsequential most movie stars seemed, met in the flesh. Victoria Harte could never have seemed rabbity or inconsequential to anyone.
He looked to see if Bennis was taking any of this in, and found that her new persona had cracked a little. She was staring at Victoria Harte through two layers of smoked glass and biting her lip and shaking her head. She caught him staring at her and said, “Great Aunt Eulalie.”
Gregor raised his eyebrows. “Great Aunt Eulalie,” he repeated. “Your own Great Aunt Eulalie, I take it.”
“My father’s father’s sister.”
“Did you like your Great Aunt Eulalie?”
“She was my father’s father’s sister,” Bennis repeated, as if that explained everything. “She terrified me.”
Maybe, Gregor thought, being old Robert Hannaford’s father’s sister did explain everything. He’d never met the man alive, but he’d met a lot of people who had. The Hannaford side of Bennis’s history was full of—personalities. And he could appreciate Bennis’s point, applied to Victoria Harte. There was something oddly anachronistic about her, something belonging more properly to the generation before his own. He wondered where she’d picked it up. From the little he knew about her background—he should have listened more closely to Tibor; he always got in trouble when he didn’t—she hadn’t come by it naturally.
The car jerked to a stop, far less smoothly than a Rolls was supposed to, and their driver got out, meaning to open their doors. He never got a chance. Victoria Harte was out from under the portico before anyone really saw her move. She was at Bennis’s door, the one closest to the curb, before the driver managed to get there. Then the door was yanked open and a wave of heat poured in, sticky and wet and fetid, like spoiled mayonnaise.
Victoria Harte took Bennis’s arm, pulled her out of the car—by main force, as far as Gregor could see—and leaned in to see what else she had. She found Gregor and smiled a little, showing too many
teeth.
“Mr. Demarkian?” she said.
“That’s right.”
“That’s who the gate said you were. But you can’t be too careful. We’ve had five gate-crashers already this morning.”
“Gate-crashers,” Gregor repeated, trying to give himself time to think.
But Victoria Harte had no time, or at least no time she was willing to take. “You ought to get out of the car,” she told him. Then she got out herself, and slammed the door after her.
Gregor felt himself go suddenly chill, assaulted by a wave of air-conditioning that poured out at him through the vent under his seat.
[3]
Out on the drive, Bennis Hannaford and Victoria Harte were standing together, not so much making small talk as trading monosyllables. Neither of them was looking at the other. Gregor got the distinct impression that they’d each decided to loathe the other on sight.
Gregor brushed the wrinkles out of his trousers and came around the car to the two women, feeling like a ball of wax melting under the heat of a flame. It was quarter after nine, and the temperature had to be well above the seventy-eight degrees it had been at eight o’clock. It might even be over eighty-eight. The air felt as thick as half-set Jell-O.
