Act of Darkness

by Jane Haddam

  He held his hand out to Victoria Harte and said, “What kind of gate-crashers?”

  Victoria Harte smiled. “It’s only on holiday weekends,” she told him. “They know Stephen and Janet will be here, and probably bringing a pile of friends, and they think with the confusion—”

  “The gate-crashers are looking for Senator Fox?”

  “No, no.” Victoria Harte waved this away. “They’re looking for me, naturally. Women my own age mostly, I’m sorry to say. I don’t seem to go over big with the present generation, except with homosexuals, of course. Sometimes I wonder what women my age would do without homosexuals. Are you a supporter of the civil rights of gays?”

  “Excuse me?” Gregor said.

  “I was a supporter of gay rights long before any of these people thought of it,” Victoria Harte said. “Years ago, even back in the fifties. And of course, I’ve done a great deal of work collecting money for research into AIDS.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said.

  “I’d heard about it,” Bennis said.

  Victoria Harte shot Bennis a look and went on. “My son-in-law,” she said, “is not what I’d call staunch in the struggle. Not staunch in any struggle for anything, if you want to know the truth. But Miss Hannaford probably told you that. She used to be a—great supporter of the senator’s.” Victoria smiled carefully.

  “I met him a couple of times when I was living in Washington,” Bennis said tightly. “Ten years ago. At least.”

  “Not all that much changes in ten years.” Victoria said. “Especially not with Stephen. I’ve known him for twenty, and I don’t think he’s had a single new idea in all that time. I don’t think he’s had a single old one, either. May I ask you a question, Mr. Demarkian?”

  “Of course.” Actually, what Gregor really wanted was for Victoria to go on talking, babbling bitchiness, just as she had been doing. It would have given him time to collect himself, and he needed it. The heat was getting to him. He was feeling a little sick.

  Victoria must have noticed it. She was moving away from the car, toward the shade of the portico, talking all the way. They both followed her as if drawn, because there was nothing else to do.

  “You may have noticed I’m being very patriotic this weekend,” she was saying. “Flags. Red, white, and blue.” She gestured at the decorations on the lawn, which were limp. “Of course, I’m not patriotic in the vulgar sense at any time. The Vietnam War took care of all that for me. All waving the flag around ever does is give governments an excuse to kill a lot of innocent people. Especially this government. But—”

  “But?” Gregor said. Then he thought, This would make more sense if she sounded like she meant it, which she doesn’t.

  “But,” Victoria Harte went on, “the fact is, I probably wouldn’t have shown the colors this weekend, even for Stephen and Janet’s sake, if it wasn’t for just one thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “You,” Victoria said.

  They were now comfortably under the portico, out of the sun but not out of the heat. Gregor could feel a river of sweat rolling down his spine. Great Expectations had to have central air conditioning. It was the kind of house that was built for it. He desperately wanted to get inside.

  Victoria stopped at the doors and turned back to them. “Remember how I said I wanted to ask you a question?”

  “Yes, I do.” He bit back the rest of what he wanted to say, which was, Get on with it.

  “It’s actually a series of questions. It starts with an easy one. Are you the man who helped John Cardinal O’Bannion with his little problem up in Colchester a few months ago?”

  “Whoosh,” Bennis whispered in his ear. “There goes our cover.”

  “Are you?” Victoria insisted.

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  “Fine. Then I take it you are also the man who founded the serial murderers division at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “It’s called the Behavioral Sciences Department, Miss Harte. And I didn’t found it. It was founded by an Act of Congress and the then-director of the Bureau. All I did was the day-to-day dirty work.”

  “I don’t think that’s quite honest,” Victoria said. “But we’ll let it go. It comes down to the same thing, no matter how you phrase it. You’re a specialist in murder.”

  “I’m not a specialist in anything, Miss Harte. I’m retired. I’m not a private investigator. I have no license. I have never taken money, as a private citizen, for investigating anything at all.”

  “After you left Colchester, Cardinal O’Bannion paid twenty-five thousand dollars into the Armenian Refugees Relief Fund in the name of Father Tibor Kasparian. Father Kasparian is your parish priest.”

  “Father Tibor,” Bennis said automatically.

  “Father Tibor and the cardinal,” Gregor said, “have been close friends for several years.”

  “Really. I suppose it’s even true. But I’ll tell you something that isn’t true, Mr. Demarkian. You, as a campaign contributor. Especially as a campaign contributor to Stephen Whistler Fox. You’re much too intelligent for that. Do you want to know what else isn’t true?”

  “What?”

  “You, as the fat, middle-aged lover of this wayward debutante here.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said.

  “I am not a wayward debutante,” Bennis said.

  Victoria pulled open the great front double doors of her house, stepped into the foyer, and told them, “If the two of you were lovers, she’d be wearing a great deal less underwear.”

  THREE

  [1]

  AT NINE FIFTEEN, DAN Chester was standing at the single window of his bedroom, looking down at the Rolls-Royce in the drive and the people who’d got out of it. The scene interested him, because although he’d talked to Gregor Demarkian and knew him by reputation—had known of him, in fact, long before that little twerp Carl Bettinger suggested bringing him in—Dan had never actually seen him. He hadn’t even seen Victoria Harte’s pictures of him, clipped from the pages of People and Time, the way the fans she detested most clipped pictures of her. If Victoria had offered, he would have looked, but Victoria hadn’t offered. Victoria never offered him anything. If she could have, she would have barred him from the house. Instead, she gave him this bedroom, one of the two small ones facing the drive and not the sea. It was supposed to keep him in his place.

  He had left a stack of file folders on the top of the bureau next to the window, and now—having noticed that Demarkian was a large, tidy man who wore suits in summer—he picked them up. He knew he ought to read through them one more time, but he also knew he wouldn’t. He’d gone to bed at one o’clock in the morning and gotten up again at twenty to five. Between twenty to five and now he’d taken two dozen calls from the staff office in Washington and spent two hours talking into a tape recorder, answering a stack of mail three and a half feet thick. Now he was feeling both restless and caged—restless, because since Stephen had started keeling over at parties, the entire world had seemed to be on hold; caged, because there were too many people in the house. The invitations to this seminar had been explicit. Arrival time was set for four o’clock today. Instead, Clare Markey had shown up at eight, Kevin had come in after dinner last night, and Patchen Rawls had appeared out of nowhere to take a place at the breakfast table.

  He left the window, crossed the room, and put his ear to the door, listening for sounds in the hall. It was quiet out there. Having made the monumental mistake of intruding on Victoria’s privacy before they’d been given permission, they’d all locked themselves out of sight until the emotional weather cleared. He opened the door a crack and looked out on the empty carpeted hall, a wide strip of royal purple plush that seemed to stretch west to infinity. He stuck his head out farther and saw the double doors to Janet’s bedroom, shut.

  He let himself into the hall, closed his bedroom door behind him, and crossed the plush to knock on Stephen’s. Stephen had a window that faced the sound, but other than that hi
s room was no bigger or better than Dan’s own. Victoria didn’t like him either. Dan listened, heard the sound of pacing, then knocked a second time and said, “Stephen?”

  The pacing stopped. Footsteps came close. Breathing came closer. Stephen was just on the other side of the door.

  “Dan?” he said.

  “That’s right. Open up. I’ve got something to talk to you about.”

  There was the sound of a bolt being thrown—Victoria had made sure that every room in the house could be locked, but only from the inside—and then the door swung open, revealing the Great White Hope in a dirty T-shirt, a pair of ragged jeans, and bare feet. Stephen looked on his way to a bed of bench in a public park. “Come in quick,” Stephen said. “That Markey woman’s been around three times already this morning. Asking after my health.”

  Dan slipped into the room and shut the door behind him. “Are you sure it was Clare Markey? It could have been Janet.”

  “It wasn’t Janet. Janet isn’t speaking to me.”

  “Maybe you ought to get rid of Patchen Rawls.”

  Stephen reached past Dan and threw the bolt again, then wandered back into the middle of the room, oblivious. That was Stephen’s great weapon, being oblivious. It was particularly effective because it was not an act.

  “What did you want to tell me?” he said. “If you came to give me another lecture about Patchen Rawls, you could have saved yourself the trip.”

  “That Demarkian man’s here. I just saw him get out of his car.”

  For the first time, Stephen looked interested instead of distracted, almost focused. He sat down on the bed and contemplated his feet.

  “What’s he like? Is he wearing a gun?”

  “Why would he be wearing a gun?”

  “I don’t know,” Stephen said. “I thought all those FBI guys wore guns.”

  “He’s not in the FBI anymore, Stephen. He’s retired. I told you that. And I don’t know what he’s like. I didn’t meet him. I just saw him.”

  “You’ve talked to him on the phone.”

  “That was weeks ago. I told you everything we said over the phone.”

  “Well, I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea that somebody is trying to kill me.”

  Stephen’s window looked out on the long weathered expanse of dock that ran from Great Expectations’ boat house to the deeper waters of Long Island Sound. Through it, Dan Chester could see that a length of clothesline had been strung up and festooned with tiny American flags, but not what the clothesline was anchored to.

  There was a single chair, modernized to the point of absurdity, shoved against the wall next to Stephen’s bureau. Dan pulled it out and sat down in it.

  He had been avoiding the knowledge for weeks, but he could not avoid it now. Stephen was cracking up. Dan had expected it, but actually having to deal with it made him even more nervous than Janet did. It confirmed something he had always believed, but never let himself consider: for Stephen, everything but the purely physical—culture, self-control, knowledge, ideas, style, ambition, hope—was a game to be played only in moments of relaxation. Stephen had less self-discipline than a kitten. His concentration could be broken by the slightest distraction. Faced with something much worse than a slight distraction, he was splintering.

  It had taken Dan Chester twenty-five years to invent Stephen Whistler Fox, twenty-five years of training, twenty-five years of lecturing, twenty-five years of trying to force simple common sense into a brain so fragmented it was no better than a sea of disconnected molecules creating chaos in a void. He suddenly found it unbearable, the idea that it was all going to go to waste.

  Dan Chester considered himself a practical man, free of sentimentality and clear-sighted in his ambition. He was beginning to wonder if he was something else as well: a fanatic in the service of a religion that had no name, no rituals, and no moral code, but whose god looked disturbingly like the midnight fantasies of Mary Shelley.

  The chair turned out to be impossible to sit in. Every time he moved, it poked him. He got up and crossed the room to look down at Stephen on the bed. Think, he told himself. Stephen has two emotions, greed and fear. Right now you have to work with the fear.

  “I do not,” he said, “think someone is trying to kill you.”

  “What do you think?” Stephen asked him. “Why would you bring that Demarkian man here if someone wasn’t trying to kill me?”

  “Because I think someone’s trying to ruin you.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Dan Chester wanted to point out the obvious—being ruined meant walking around without a job in the U.S. Senate; being dead meant lying six feet underground in Brainard Green—but he didn’t. He sat down on the edge of the bed and started talking about coincidences instead.

  [2]

  Clare Markey had never been afraid, really afraid, until she’d woken up in bed at five o’clock this morning, stared up at the ceiling of her room in the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, and realized that she desperately, undeniably, unequivocally wanted a drink. The incident was all the more terrifying because she didn’t really drink. Once a month or so she’d take a glass of white wine while watching the eleven o’clock news, and every two years she’d pour herself a glass of Scotch while watching the House election returns, but on a day-to-day basis she stuck with fruit juice and Perrier. A lobbyist who drank was a liability. Nobody got paid what she got paid for wandering around cocktail parties in less than full possession of her faculties. Besides, she had never liked liquor. It tasted terrible and very small amounts of it made her fuzzy headed and nauseated in the morning.

  Still, she had lain in the great double bed and contemplated the hanging lamp and thought about being drunk—if thought was the right word for it. It was more as if she had willed herself into being drunk, tried to reach oblivion by force of imagination. When that hadn’t worked, she had found herself thinking about liquor stores and Times Square, what would be open and what would not, where people went when they needed a good bolt of Scotch and it was outside legal hours. Then it had occurred to her that she was in New York, where the bars opened at eight o’clock, and she’d jumped up and headed for the bathroom.

  An hour later, she was fully dressed and pacing around her room, rubbing her hands up and down against her arms, wondering what she was going to do with herself. If she stayed in the city, she was sure she would end up getting plastered, as soon as possible. She wouldn’t be able to help herself, and she was sure that once she got started she wouldn’t be able to stop. She would drink her way right through the time she was supposed to pick up her car at National Rental, and then right through the time she was supposed to arrive in Oyster Bay. Part of her thought she might drink her way right through the Fourth-of-July weekend.

  She was thinking about Fourth-of-July weekends, and patriotic cocktails, when the second terrifying thought struck her, and that was that she wouldn’t give a damn if she never got to Senator Fox’s seminar at all. She wouldn’t care if the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children got passed with everything in it the Empowerment Project didn’t want. She wouldn’t care if Harvey Gort fired her. She wouldn’t care if the entire city of Washington was sucked into Chesapeake Bay.

  She was standing in the middle of her room then, looking down at the suitcases she’d left piled up against the foot of the bed, and in that moment she felt like a twenty-year veteran nun who’d just realized she had no vocation for the religious life.

  Now she stood in the middle of the bedroom Victoria Harte had assigned to her, taking off her shoes, listening to the waves coming in from the sound and wishing she could calm down. She reached under her skirt and started to wriggle out of her pantyhose, wondering vaguely how thin she would have to be before pantyhose wouldn’t bind.

  She had the pantyhose off and her skirt unzipped when she heard the knock on the door, and it stopped her dead.

  She let her skirt drop to the floor, unbuttoned her jacket—why hadn’t she taken off her jacket firs
t?—and said, “Who is it?” Then she stripped off her shirt, dropped it on the bed, and walked over to the door. Then she scolded herself for feeling ridiculous, standing there in only a bra and panties.

  “Who is it?” she demanded. On the other side of the door, someone coughed, a man. A deep voice said, “It’s Kevin Debrett. Can I come in?”

  Kevin Debrett. Clare Markey looked down at herself, at the fine blond hairs that coated her thighs like the down on baby ducks. She had spoken to Kevin Debrett a hundred times, but never alone and never about anything in particular. After all, they were on opposite sides.

  She turned away from the door and headed for the smaller of her two suitcases, where she knew she’d put her terrycloth beach dress. She unzipped the suitcase and found it there, right on top, her reward for being such a good and careful packer. She turned back toward the door and said. “Just a minute,” in her loudest voice.

  She slipped the dress over her head, stuffed her suit out of sight under the bed, and went to answer the door. What was waiting for her there was indeed Dr. Kevin Debrett, and he looked annoyed.

  In Clare Markey’s experience, Dr. Kevin Debrett always looked annoyed.

  “What were you doing in here?” he said. “Crossword puzzles?”

  Clare shrugged and stood back, letting him pass. He was wearing chinos and an alligator shirt, but he looked exactly as he always did, as if he were being strangled by a badly knotted tie. She watched him cross to one of the chairs, and sit down, and look at her expectantly. She let the door stay open and went to sit down herself. “So,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

  “What are we doing with the door still open?”

  “Guess.”

  “Oh, come off it. I don’t commit rape. I don’t have to.”

  “Then you shouldn’t mind the door open.”

  “Maybe I have something to say to you I’d rather not have anyone else overhear.”

  “Who?”

  “Dan Chester. He has the room just across the hall and one down, in case you didn’t know.”