Act of Darkness

by Jane Haddam

  “If the bolt is thrown on the connecting door, I’m going to call the police.”

  Bennis shot him a look of long-suffering exasperation. Gregor paid no attention to her. He opened his own door, went in first, and then went immediately to the connector.

  It was unbolted.

  He opened it and looked through, down the narrow connecting hall. He saw one corner of Bennis’s bed, made up, and a wastebasket with a pair of pantyhose dripping over its rim. Nothing else.

  Bennis came up behind him, looked inside, and said, “It all looks okay to me.”

  Gregor went on into the room. The bed was indeed made up, and Bennis’s bags had been put away. A quick look in the closet showed that her clothes had been hung and not left to wrinkle in her luggage. A quick look at the vanity showed that her makeup had been arrayed, in almost military fashion, on a silver makeup tray that lay under a large mirror. Gregor looked back at the pantyhose in the wastebasket and frowned.

  “Did you throw a pair of pantyhose away this morning?”

  “No,” Bennis said, “but I really wouldn’t get too worked up about it. The maid probably found a pair with runs in them when she was putting away my clothes.”

  “Check,” Gregor said.

  “Check what?”

  “Check to make sure they’re your pantyhose.”

  The look Bennis gave him this time said that he’d surely lost his mind, and he didn’t blame her. There was really no reason to think the pantyhose were anyone’s but hers. The room was in admirable order and nothing looked touched in any way it shouldn’t have been touched. She had every right to tell him where to get off. Gregor was relieved when she did as he had told her instead, moving over to the bed, sitting down, taking the pantyhose out of the wastebasket. She searched around the waistband until she found a small tab and put it close to her eyes to read it.

  Then she blinked.

  “Oh,” she said. “I’ll be—Gregor, you were right. These aren’t my pantyhose.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They’re not the right brand, for one thing. They’re also not the right size. I wear L’Eggs, the kind you buy in the supermarket and they come in a plastic egg. These are expensive. And they’re size eight. I’d have to be four inches taller than I am not to have them dripping around my ankles like pudding.”

  “All right,” Gregor said, as calmly as he could. “Now put them back in the wastebasket.”

  “What?”

  “Do exactly what I tell you, Bennis. Put them back in the wastebasket. Then get that floor plan you showed me this morning. We may need it.”

  Bennis put the pantyhose back in the wastebasket, and went to the vanity, and got the oversize brochure from the center drawer. Then she got the floor plan out from under the gold paper clip attached to the brochure’s back cover. She looked thoroughly bewildered.

  “Now what?” she said.

  “Now we go knocking on doors,” Gregor told her. “Find Stephen Fox’s room for me.”

  “He’s on the other side of you. But he’s not in there, Gregor. His door’s open. I noticed it when I came up.”

  “All right.”

  It wasn’t all right, but Gregor couldn’t think of anything else to say. He didn’t think he’d ever felt worse in his life. Even digging into the mass graves that were so often the first evidence the Bureau had of the career of a serial killer was better than this, because there was no uncertainty. You knew what you were looking for and you knew what you were going to find. More important, you knew that you were going to find.

  He went into the hall from Bennis’s door, counted two to the right, and walked down to the room assigned to Senator Fox. As Bennis had said, the door was open, not all the way but not just a crack, either. Gregor pushed it in.

  There was a bed, just like Bennis’s, just like Gregor’s. It had been made up. There was a vanity table, recently dusted. There was a chair. There was a wastebasket, empty. There was nothing else.

  Gregor turned around and looked up and down the hall. Bennis’s door was closed. His own door was closed, and had been when they came in. He remembered opening it. All the rest of the doors were open, just as Stephen Fox’s had been, except one.

  “Who’s that?” he asked Bennis, pointing to the closed door, one of the two on the balcony side, that would face the front of the house instead of the sea. Bennis checked the floor plan.

  “That’s Dr. Debrett’s room,” she said. “The one on the other side of the balcony is Dan Chester’s. Dan Chester doesn’t look like he’s in.”

  “Maybe Dr. Debrett is. I’m going to knock.”

  “While you’re at it, do you think you could stop treating me like a mental defective? What’s all this about, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said.

  And it was the truth. He hadn’t the first idea. He went to Dr. Debrett’s door. He knocked. He waited for someone to answer and counted the seconds while no answer came. Then he turned the door’s knob, pushed the door in, and stood in the hallway, watching Dr. Kevin Debrett stretched out on his carefully made bed, sleeping.

  Except that Dr. Kevin Debrett wasn’t sleeping.

  This was what Gregor hadn’t wanted Bennis to see.

  Dr. Kevin Debrett was dead.

  PART TWO

  Oyster Bay, Long Island July 1–July 2

  ONE

  [1]

  CARL BETTINGER SHOWED UP first—even though Gregor hadn’t called him, and even though there was no reason for anybody to call him. Or maybe there was. It had taken a long time for Gregor to get into gear. So much was out of whack—the scene, which didn’t look like a scene; the body, which looked alive except for the fact that it wasn’t moving. The body looked so alive, Gregor wasn’t sure he would have been able to go on believing Debrett was dead if he hadn’t borrowed Bennis’s hand mirror and held it up in front of the corpse’s nose. He’d only done that after he’d spent half an hour wandering through the ominous open spaces of Great Expectations, gathering the scattered members of the weekend party, and putting them all together in the closest of the “living room spaces” to the foyer. Now, Victoria and Janet sat close together, holding hands, but the rest of them arranged themselves at the edges of an invisible circle, a kind of emotional magnetic field. Even Stephen Fox and Dan Chester wanted little or nothing to do with each other. They were both ashen faced.

  He went back upstairs, got the hand mirror from where he remembered seeing it on Bennis’s vanity, and went in to Kevin Debrett again. Nothing. That was the problem. Nothing. The room hadn’t been disturbed. The body showed no obvious signs of violence, physical or chemical, no blue tinge to the skin or abrasions on the throat or blood. Nothing.

  He put the hand mirror back where he’d found it and came out onto the balcony again. Bennis was there, leaning against the wall next to Kevin Debrett’s room with her arms folded across her shoulders and her eyes closed. She looked even worse than he had expected her to. What had he been thinking of? Nearly half her family had died by violence. One of her sisters was out on bail in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, getting ready to go on trial for murder. All that had happened only half a year ago. She wasn’t over it yet. He had to have been crazy to bring her to this place.

  He went up to her, as close as he dared, and said, “Bennis?”

  Bennis opened her eyes. “I couldn’t stay down there any more,” she told him. “They were driving me crazy. They were bitching at each other—except they weren’t.”

  “Were any of them actually saying anything?”

  “No. But—”

  “Never mind,” Gregor said. “I know what you mean. Did you call the police the way I asked you to?”

  Bennis nodded. “I called right away. I talked to a kind of clerk or something first, and then I got put through to a man named Henry Berman. He knew who you were.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. He sounded nice.”

  Gregor let it go. He did
n’t know what it meant, that a local cop with both a murder and an ex-FBI man on his patch had sounded “nice.” Assuming that Kevin. Debrett had been murdered, of course. Gregor felt instinctively that the doctor must have been, but he couldn’t have proved it by what he had seen in the bedroom.

  “We’d better go downstairs,” he said. “I don’t like the idea of them wandering around where I can’t see them. The police will be here soon. Then you can retire to your room and pretend to have a headache.”

  “I do have a headache.”

  “All right then.”

  Bennis shot a long apprehensive look at the door of Kevin Debrett’s room, and shook her head, and pushed away from the wall. Gregor found himself growing steadily more frightened at how small she looked. She was, in truth, a small woman—only five four, and barely a hundred pounds—but she was the kind of small woman who didn’t usually look small. Her legs were long. Her face was broad and full of angles and planes, like a sculpture both modern and representational. The force of her personality was almost as strong as Victoria Harte’s. Now she seemed to be shrinking.

  “Bennis?” he said.

  She had reached the top of the stairs. As she stood there, hesitating, Gregor realized what else it was about her that was bothering him: her clothes. She was still wearing her red terry cloth beach dress. There was no reason she should have changed out of it—there were a great many reasons why she shouldn’t have—but it looked wrong somehow, as if she had been carefully costumed for the wrong play. The terry cloth beach dress was not just red, but very, very red. It made her skin look as white as talc.

  “The only thing I can say,” she told him, “is that if somebody’s dead, he ought to look dead. Not like—that.”

  Then she turned away from him and ran down the stairs, the leather-lined heels of her sandals slapping a rhythmically against the stair carpet and the soles of her feet.

  [2]

  “What I think,” Victoria Harte was saying, as Gregor made his way down the last of the stairs and reached the foyer, “is that all this is a lot of nonsense. The man must have had a heart attack. You know what doctors are. Not one of them takes care of his own health. And the only symptoms they believe in are yours.”

  Gregor turned from the foyer to face the living room space and found that Victoria was sitting with her legs curled under her in a great blue modernized club chair, wearing a violently jade green caftan, too much jewelry, and an expression of almost unbearable tension. He looked around the circle and saw that they were all unbearably tense, except Janet. Janet was sitting on the arm of Victoria’s chair with her feet planted side by side on the floor and her hands in her lap, like a nun at a tea party. She was the only one who did not begin to stare at him as soon as he appeared.

  Being stared at was not one of Gregor’s favorite things. The modest amount of fame his work had brought him—it was getting less modest all the time, but he refused to think about that—only made him uncomfortable. Being the center of attention always made him want to retire to Borneo, or someplace else where very few people spoke English and no one was interested in true crime. Sometimes, though, there was no help for it. This was one of those times. He felt his hand reach automatically for his tie, checking and straightening. He had a tendency to do things to ties, to make them unravel, by osmosis. The fact that he might be standing in front of a group of people with nothing more than a tassel of threads hanging around his neck always made him feel insecure.

  His tie was fine. What he was really trying to do was give himself an excuse not to look at Bennis. He made himself look—she had found a corner of a love seat and stuffed herself into it, as far away from Patchen Rawls on the other end as she could get—and then he turned his attention back to the assembled company. They now looked not only tense, but hostile, as if he had caused this whole thing and they had every right to lynch him.

  “Well,” Victoria Harte said, “here you are. And you’re going to explain things, of course, because that’s what Dan’s paying you to do. One thing about Daniel Robert Chester. He always gets his money’s worth.”

  Gregor sighed. There was a single empty chair in the circle, a chrome-plated monstrosity nobody had wanted, probably for good reason. He went and sat down in it anyway.

  “Miss Harte,” he said.

  “Ms.”

  “Ms. Harte. I think we have to get one thing clear right now, because if we don’t, this situation is going to be even more unpleasant than it has to be. Mr. Chester is not paying me to do anything.”

  “Nonsense,” Victoria Harte said. “You’re a private detective.”

  “I’m nothing of the kind. I don’t have a license. I have no intention of getting a license. I do not run a business. I was once an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I retired over two and a half years ago. Since that time, I have never—and I mean never—accepted money for—”

  “Meddling in crime?” Victoria Harte said.

  “I don’t see why we’re calling this a crime,” Patchen Rawls said. “I haven’t heard anything that would make me think it’s a crime. It sounds like he just died peacefully in his sleep.”

  “At the age of forty-three?” Janet Harte asked curiously.

  Patchen shrugged. “He was caught in the cycle,” she said. “He’ll be back again in a year or two. Probably as a bug.”

  “Probably on Mars,” Dan Chester said. “For Christ’s sake.”

  Gregor cleared his throat. He hated scenes like this.

  “I have to say,” he told them slowly, “that I tend to the same opinion as Mrs. Fox. Dr. Debrett was a young man. Is forty-three right?”

  “He would have been forty-four in December,” Dan Chester said.

  “Fine. I take it that my impression is correct, that he had no history of heart disease or very high blood pressure, that there had been no rumors of cancer or—”

  “Maybe he had AIDS,” Patchen Rawls said. “Everybody’s going to have AIDS eventually. That’s because the capitalist medical system in this country has no respect for—”

  “Patchen, make sense.” Victoria Harte threw up her hands. “People don’t die like this when they have AIDS. They don’t die like this when they have cancer, either. What he told me,” she looked at Gregor, “was that ‘there was no apparent cause of death.’ Quote unquote.”

  Patchen Rawls sniffed. “I don’t even know what that means. Except maybe that there wasn’t blood all over the room. There wouldn’t be. Death isn’t an enemy. Death is a friend.”

  “You ought to know,” Janet Harte snapped. “You’re the one who murdered your mother.”

  “I did nothing of the—”

  “Stop.” Gregor sighed. This was impossible. This was worse than impossible. He didn’t envy the police officer who got stuck with this case. “I understand,” he told them, “that this is a very tense situation. I even understand that this was a very tense situation long before Dr. Debrett died. What we have to do right now, however, is to work out a few things before the police get here. Just enough so that we can be of some help.”

  “Are the police going to want us to help?” Victoria said.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, Ms. Harte. I don’t think it matters. Help is always welcome in the long run. What I want to do now is to figure out when was the last time we can be sure Dr. Debrett was alive.”

  “We all saw him between two and three o’clock,” Bennis said. “You saw him, too. He was having a very bad time with—” Her head swiveled and came to rest on the figure of Clare Markey, perched on the edge of a couch in unnatural stillness. Clare Markey blushed.

  “With me,” she said. “I suppose I was being a little hard on him.”

  Gregor nodded. “Would you tell me why? You must have known him a very long time. Were you always hard on him?”

  Clare rubbed a finger on the side of her nose. “I suppose I usually had more sense. Dr. Debrett had connections, after all. But today, I—well, Dr. Debrett seemed to feel—”
/>
  “Yes?”

  “Well, as if he were the only one who knew what to do about retarded children. As if he had all the answers, I suppose you would say. What it really came down to was that he thought he ought to get all the money.”

  “Government money,” Gregor said.

  “That’s right.” Clare smiled. “Of course, we all behave like that, everybody trying to get a piece of the federal budget. We all have to, if we want to get anything at all. Mostly it’s a pose. But with Kevin—you know, there are rules to this game, whether people on the outside realize it or not.”

  “Rules to lobbying?” Bennis sounded incredulous.

  “Of course,” Clare Markey said. “We use influence. We use whatever media attention we can manipulate to our advantage. Some people have even falsely accused other people of—things, and then started investigations. That’s something you can’t ignore the possibility of—”

  “That’s within the rules?” Now Bennis sounded shocked. Gregor didn’t blame her.

  Neither, apparently, did Clare Markey. “It’s the principle of direct versus indirect action. There isn’t another lobbyist on Capitol Hill who’d be—let’s call it judgmental—if I called the FBI and said I had evidence that Dr. Debrett was selling drugs on the side. They wouldn’t be shocked if after I’d done that, I called the papers and said there was an FBI drug investigation going on with Kevin at the center of it. It would be something else again if I actually went to the Debrett Clinic and planted half a pound of cocaine in Kevin’s desk.”

  “Well, well,” Victoria Harte said. “It’s so nice you people have moral scruples about something.”

  Gregor wasn’t interested in hearing about moral scruples at the moment. He certainly wasn’t interested in hearing about moral scruples from Victoria Harte.

  “Did Kevin Debrett plant a pound of cocaine in somebody’s office?” he asked Clare Markey.

  Clare was shaking her head. “It wasn’t that clear-cut. And it wasn’t proved. It happened about five years ago.”