Act of Darkness

by Jane Haddam

  Henry Berman was still out under the portico. He turned to Carl Bettinger and said, “You ought to take a little advice. You ought to make yourself invisible. You ought to disappear. Because if you don’t, I’m going to make you disappear myself.”

  [2]

  Of course, Carl Bettinger didn’t disappear. Gregor didn’t expect him to. He was behaving much too much like a man who wanted to, but couldn’t. The uniformed patrolman wouldn’t have let him, anyway. If this was a murder, there was no way of knowing where Bettinger had been when it happened or what connection he might have to the fact that it had happened. Gregor watched him out of the corner of his eye, and saw that Bettinger first followed him inside, and then tried to melt into the small clutch of people waiting in the living room space. It didn’t quite work. As far as Gregor could tell, of the people inside, only Dan Chester knew who Bettinger was. The rest of them didn’t even want to. Gregor thought they thought Bettinger was a spy.

  Out on the drive, the vans were arriving, clattering and screeching, their drivers playing games with their brakes because it was safe here, on private property, where no one would see them. Berman shot a look in the direction of the noise and then turned his attention to the crowd in the living room space. Most of them, Gregor thought, he recognized: Victoria Harte, Stephen Fox, Patchen Rawls, even Janet Harte Fox. On some of them, Berman drew a blank. Neither Dan Chester nor Clare Markey meant anything to him. It was Bennis who caused him the most confusion. He thought she was familiar, but she wasn’t. He thought he ought to know who she was, but he didn’t. He stared in her direction for a full minute and then started to shake his head.

  Bennis blushed. “Excuse me. Have we met? I’m Bennis Day Hannaford.”

  Gregor winced. Bennis only used her full name like that—Bennis Day Hannaford—when she was either very nervous or very angry, and she wasn’t angry. While he had been outside, she had gone through another sea change. Her sea changes were beginning to make him crazy. Upstairs, she had been bouncing off what had happened to her family, reliving the things she was most afraid to face. Now she was jumpy and afraid in an entirely different way, and Gregor didn’t like it. If she’d been anyone but Bennis, he’d have thought she looked—guilty.

  If Berman noticed any of this, he gave no indication. At the sound of Bennis’s name his face lit up, and he began nodding his head instead of shaking it. “That’s right,” he said. “I thought you looked familiar. Swords and sorceries.”

  “Exactly,” Bennis said.

  “There was a story about you in Parade magazine one Sunday. Had your picture on the cover. You don’t photograph so well.”

  “No,” Bennis said. “I never did.”

  “I photograph like an orangutan,” Dan Chester said. “What does that have to do with anything anyway? Who are you people?”

  Henry Berman turned his attention from Bennis and focused on Dan Chester instead. Gregor noted with satisfaction that Chester did not seem to be pleased.

  “I,” Henry Berman said, “am chief of police of Oyster Bay, Long Island. In case it’s slipped your mind, Oyster Bay, Long Island, is where you happen to be. Who are you?”

  “Dan Chester,” Dan Chester said.

  “We didn’t set the fireworks off on purpose,” Janet Harte Fox said, her hand reaching automatically to the pins in her hair. “They were contracted for. And then with everything that was going on I just forgot all about them you see and—”

  “Stop,” Henry Berman said. “Who are you?”

  “Janet Harte Fox. Mrs. Stephen Fox.”

  “Fine. I know all about the fireworks, Mrs. Fox. They were arranged by the towns. They’ve been giving my people headaches for a month and now they’re giving them migraines. Which one of you people called me?”

  “I did,” Bennis said.

  “Fine,” Berman said again. “You called because Mr. Demarkian here asked you to?”

  “That’s right,” Bennis said.

  “I don’t see why he should have done that,” Patchen Rawls said. “I don’t see why we need a policeman here. He said there wasn’t anything like blood up there to make you think—”

  “Shut up,” Victoria Harte said.

  “We’ll find out what’s up there in a minute or two,” Berman said. He stared at the heart-shaped ruby on Victoria’s chest. Then he turned back to Bennis. “Were you the one who discovered the body?”

  “No,” Bennis said. “Gregor did.”

  “But you were with him?”

  “That’s right. Or almost with him. Gregor went into the room, but I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t see what was inside?”

  “Oh, I saw what was inside, all right. But I stood at the door, in the hallway. It’s a balcony thing. You’ll see. Only Gregor went inside.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Well,” Bennis said, “I went to call you, and Gregor went to find the others. Then Gregor came back to look at the body again, and I came up to find Gregor. Then we came downstairs.”

  “You didn’t see anything unusual?”

  “No. And it’s a good thing, too. Nobody ever listens to me.”

  Berman let this pass. Gregor didn’t blame him. He’d heard the same complaint himself a hundred times, from Bennis and every other woman he knew. He even supposed the women had a point. That didn’t make their complaint a proper subject of criminal investigation.

  “Now,” Berman said, “let’s try to think about times. The time the body was discovered, to begin with. Mr. Demarkian, do you know when that was?”

  “Approximately. There was a clock somewhere in the house striking what must have been five thirty—”

  “Must have been?”

  “A half-hour strike is only a chime, Mr. Berman. It could have been any half hour if that was all we had to go on. It had to be five thirty because I actually saw a clock a little while later, when I came downstairs to knock on Mrs. Harte’s door. At that point it was five minutes before six.”

  “Very good. So the body was discovered between five thirty and six. Miss Hannaford’s call came into my office at five forty-seven. You said you came downstairs to make the call. Isn’t there a phone in your room?”

  “There’s a phone in my room,” Bennis said. “There’s a phone in every bedroom upstairs as far as I know. But Gregor didn’t want me to phone from there, because he said the whole upstairs would have to be searched. And fingerprinted.”

  “The whole upstairs?” Patchen Rawls choked.

  “Search Ms. Rawls’s room first,” Victoria Harte said. “It’s so interesting.”

  “Right,” Berman said. “Now, the victim. If he is a victim. You said on the phone his name was Dr. Kevin Debrett.”

  “That’s right,” Bennis said.

  Victoria Harte stirred, majestic and restless. “He was a specialist in the treatment of retarded children. The psychiatric treatment of retarded children. Kevin never did like blood.”

  “He liked blood well enough once,” her daughter said. “He used to be an obstetrician. He was mine, the one time I needed one.”

  “That was years ago,” Dan Chester said.

  “I want to go back to California,” Patchen Rawls said. “I hate it in the East. Everything is so old here. Everything has so much baggage.”

  “Miss Rawls,” Victoria Harte said, “is barely out of her cradle. This particular incarnation, at any rate.”

  Henry Berman wasn’t interested in incarnations. As far as Gregor could tell, he wasn’t interested in Patchen Rawls. Berman was looking from one end of the open house to the other, at the ceilings, at the floors, at the lack of walls. He was looking at the decor, too, all those mirror-image pictures of Janet and Victoria. There was a puzzled expression on his face that grew more marked the longer and more carefully he looked around him. Gregor sympathized. Great Expectations did that to him, too.

  Abruptly, Berman’s tolerance for architectural confusion and mother-daughter solidarity reached its threshold. He snapped hi
s head back so that he was facing the assembled company again, passed his gaze over Carl Bettinger as if Bettinger were a hole in the atmosphere, and said, “You all stay down here. I’m going to take Mr. Demarkian upstairs. When the techies come in, somebody send them up after us.”

  [3]

  Because Bennis and everybody else had been ordered to stay downstairs, the balcony hall was empty when Gregor and Berman got to it. Its doors were still either open or shut, as they had been when Gregor and Bennis had first found Kevin Debrett’s body. The carpeting, now lit only by the unkind glow of track lights that had gone on automatically at the coming of darkness, looked like something that belonged in a Holiday Inn. Gregor found himself telling Berman what it had been like when he and Bennis had arrived: which doors were open, which doors were closed, the strange pair of pantyhose in Bennis’s wastebasket. Berman started out only half-listening, and ended up gaping at Gregor in astonishment.

  “That was it?” he said. “A pair of pantyhose half out of a wastebasket? Good Lord. I mean, I’d heard you were good, but—”

  “You don’t understand,” Gregor said. “It was all wrong. The maids had been in. Or maid. I don’t know which it is. Victoria Harte usually travels with a lot of servants, but there’s a curious lack of them here this weekend. The whole place, my room, Bennis’s room, the hallway, was hospital clean. The windowsills had been dusted. The bedsteads looked polished. The floors were vacuumed. The maid wouldn’t have left the pantyhose like that. If she hadn’t carted them off, she would at least have stuffed them all the way into the wastebasket. And then, of course, Bennis’s room had been locked, from the inside, because the rooms here can only be locked from the inside.”

  “The maids might have locked it,” Berman said, “to keep people out while they were working. They could have forgotten to unlock afterward. You did say Miss Hannaford’s room connected to yours.”

  “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “And? Is that all? You don’t want to tell me what all you people are doing here?”

  Gregor hesitated. There were, on the one hand, the promises he had made to Dan Chester and Carl Bettinger. There was, on the other, the body of Kevin Debrett, lying on a bed no more than ten feet from where he stood. At the moment, Debrett seemed the most urgent problem, but Gregor was not a naive man. Carl Bettinger had not been telling the truth when he said he was only here because the Director was doing a favor for Dan Chester. Carl Bettinger was building a cover, and the computer squint and the calls to Berman’s office for background information gave Gregor a good idea what that cover was for.

  Instead of answering Berman, Gregor went to Kevin Debrett’s door and opened it. Because he had had his naked hand on the knob earlier, and in all likelihood destroyed any useful prints at once, he didn’t bother to ask for gloves. He did ask for gloves to turn on the lights in Debrett’s room.

  “Look,” he said, as the track lighting began to glow, making the room look eerily like a morgue in a movie made from a Robin Cook novel. “Look at him.”

  Berman came to the door and looked. “You sure he’s dead?”

  “Very sure. I checked twice.”

  “What could make somebody die looking like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How long’s he been dead?”

  “I don’t know that either,” Gregor said. “But when we found him, it hadn’t been too long. He wasn’t warm but he was still—pink.”

  “Ahh.”

  “I can tell you what he didn’t die from,” Gregor said. “He didn’t die from a heart attack. There’s none of the convulsive residue there would have had to have been if he’d had a coronary massive enough to kill him at his age. If he’d been eighty something instead of forty something, I could see it. Not now. He didn’t die from an illness in any ordinary sense, either. He wasn’t ill. Everyone staying in this house saw him today. He was fine. Not even sneezing. He looks too fit to have been in an advanced stage of cancer or AIDS. You don’t die from those like this, anyway. And then—”

  “Just a minute,” Berman said. “I can see where you’re getting to. Poison. You’re telling me it’s got to be poison.”

  “No,” Gregor said, sighing. “I wish I could. I wish even more that your medical men would get up here and turn him over and find a stab wound in his back—”

  “There’s no sign of blood.”

  “I know. There’s no sign of abrasions on his throat, either. There’s nothing wrong with his neck that I can see. It doesn’t look broken, and if it were broken badly enough to kill him it would. If I could pin this down as murder and I had to come up with a method, what I’d like is suffocation. I just can’t figure out how it could be suffocation.”

  “Why not?” Berman said. “Maybe somebody got to him in his sleep—”

  “He would have woken up,” Gregor said. “He wasn’t a baby. He was a relatively young man in better than relatively good shape. He would have put up a struggle. He didn’t put up a struggle.”

  “Assuming he died here,” Berman said.

  “Assuming he died anywhere.” Gregor was adamant. “No bruises. No contusions. No scratches. I suppose all that could be on the back side of him, but if it is, it’ll be the first time I ever heard of anything like it.”

  “He might have been drugged,” Berman said.

  “He might have been,” Gregor admitted, “but I wouldn’t count on it. I’d check for it, but I wouldn’t count on it. At least not on the ordinary run of drugs you’d use to do something like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because to do something like that and make it work—first drug him and then smother him while he was drugged—you’d literally have to smother him while he was drugged. Once he was dead, whatever drug it was would stop working its way out of his body.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you can tell?” Berman said. “By looking? Nobody can do that.”

  Gregor wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. He was sweating in spite of the air-conditioning, and he was beginning to feel frustrated and angry—not at Berman, but at himself. He hated knowing and not being able to explain why he knew. It flew in the face of reason, and Gregor was devoted to reason. And yet—

  And then it hit him.

  “The bedspread,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The bedspread. Look at the bedspread. It’s absolutely smooth.”

  “So?”

  “Berman, for God’s sake. Even if he’d been drugged and then poisoned, he would have moved. He would have wiggled at least. He couldn’t have helped himself. But he didn’t move. He didn’t so much as twitch. Just look at that bedspread.”

  “Mr. Demarkian,” Berman said patiently, “I am looking at that bedspread and I do see what you mean, but what I have to say is that I just can’t see—are you all right?”

  Gregor Demarkian was definitely not all right. He was back in the Mondrian study, reading the words spelled out by a dot matrix printer on a perforated computer sheet, the words that had made no sense to an entire team of doctors from the UConn medical center but had made a kind of crazy sense to him: one minute everything’s fine except that I’m a little nervous and the next minute everything just stops. It just stops. My heart stops. My breathing stops. One minute I’m going and the next I’m not.

  Gregor began to feel sick. “Crib death,” he said.

  “What?” Berman asked him.

  “Listen. Do something for me. Have the body checked for curare.”

  “Curare?” Berman looked on the verge of a stroke. “You think Kevin Debrett was killed with curare?”

  “Of course not.” Gregor sighed. “If that had been the case, he would be blue.”

  THREE

  [1]

  IT WAS THE TELEPHONE that woke Clare Markey up the next morning, and it was the telephone that sent her into a spiral slide of despair, a kind of kiddieland amusement park of the stranger emotions. Except, of course, that she couldn’t really blame the telephone. W
hen Alexander Graham Bell had invented the thing, he hadn’t forseen its use by the likes of Harvey Gort. He probably hadn’t even forseen the existence of men like Harvey Gort. Clare had only the sketchiest ideas of history—she had gone through both high school and college during the great days of relevance, so she had only the sketchiest ideas of anything unconnected to her work—but she was convinced that people in the nineteenth century had been nobler than people in the twentieth. At the very least, they’d had the good manners to cloak their shallowness in erudition. Or piety. Or something. She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to Harvey’s voice bouncing down the wires to her from the District of Columbia, thinking about Abraham Lincoln. She would have thought about Henry Clay and Sir Thomas More, but she wasn’t exactly sure when either of them had lived. Along with only the sketchiest ideas of history, Clare Markey had no idea at all of dates.

  Sometime during the night, it had started to rain. Now, at six o’clock, the wet was coming down steadily, blown in spatters against her windows by winds that rose and fell erratically from second to second. If Kevin Debrett hadn’t died, Clare would have been getting ready to go downstairs, to eat breakfast and then retire to the beach room to listen to Stephen Whistler Fox natter on about the needs of the mentally retarded. She hadn’t been looking forward to it—funny, but even the thought of it brought back that crazy need to drink that had driven her out of New York City; it was as if the need to drink and the “needs of the mentally retarded,” as defined by Stephen Whistler Fox, were connected—but it would have been better than this. Anything would have been better than this.

  “What I think,” Harvey Gort was saying, “is that you ought to demand our money back. All of it. Right away. Then you pack up your things and get out of there.”