Act of Darkness

by Jane Haddam

  She saluted his arrival by sitting back, squaring her shoulders, and lifting her cup of coffee. The big red ruby winked and rippled in the dim light sent down by the overhead tracks.

  “Well, Goddamn,” she said. “Of all the people in this house who might have had sense enough to be worried, the only one who shows up for breakfast is you.”

  [2]

  Victoria Harte was not a woman Gregor thought he could ever like. From the beginning, she had seemed to him defensive, brittle, bitchy, and just plain nasty. Then, too, there was a feminine quality about her he was no longer used to, because it had passed out of style ten years ago or more. Gregor supposed it might never have been in style. Women like his Elizabeth had never had much respect for women like Victoria Harte, although the Elizabeths of his world had been “feminine” too in a way that was no longer fashionable. It was a different kind of feminine. Elizabeth had been gentle and indirect, drawn to comfort children in tears and men in pain—but very sure of herself, and with a seam of self-respect that was deeper and wider than any he’d ever seen in a man. Victoria Harte, Gregor thought, wasn’t sure of herself at all, and she had let her self-doubt fester into narcissism. This was the sort of woman men had once described as being like a cat—insinuating, sexual, and in love with the sharpness of her claws.

  He got a cup of coffee from the urn and took the place to her right, because he thought it was expected of him. He had never understood how dining arrangements of this kind were supposed to function, and he had found Bennis’s explanations of the protocol bewildering. Sitting at Victoria’s right seemed sociable, so he did it, and then immediately was sorry for it. She was wearing too much perfume. She was wearing too much makeup. Gregor could see the makeup shift and crack.

  “Well,” Victoria said again, when he was settled. “Here we are. I suppose you didn’t get any sleep at all?”

  “Not much,” Gregor admitted.

  “I tried to get Janet to come down and stay with me, but she wouldn’t do it. She said she would lock her door. I sat up all night wondering if she really did it.”

  “Is that all you were wondering?” Gregor said.

  Victoria shrugged. “What else was there to wonder about? That and maybe that we’ve got some maniac on our hands, that Markey woman or somebody else, going around killing people. Maybe our dear sweet Patchen Rawls is casting spells for something besides her sex life, for once.”

  Gregor took a sip of his coffee, realizing with surprise that Victoria was serious. She wasn’t simply being bitchy about Patchen Rawls, although Gregor thought she had the right.

  “Funny,” Gregor said, “I never took it seriously. Patchen Rawls and all those things people say about her odd—uh—religious convictions.”

  “Would you really call what she’s got religious convictions?”

  Gregor wanted to tread carefully. “When we talked last night, she talked a great deal about God. She called it the Great Consciousness, I think. It sounded like religion to me.”

  “Well,” Victoria said, “I’m sorry, but to me religion is the Congregational Church. Or the Catholics. Or even the Jews. I heard Janet talking to you about what Patchen did to her mother.”

  “No, not exactly. Janet referred to it, but we didn’t discuss it. What she said about Patchen Rawls was that Patchen Rawls believed in magic.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.” Victoria got up and went to the urn. Gregor wondered how many cups of coffee she’d had already. “I saw you were surprised about the spells. She really does do them, you know. She didn’t when I first met her, but she does now.”

  “You’ve known her a long time?”

  “About five years or so. She was working in the theater in New York and then she got a job on a sitcom that didn’t make it. Good for her, that was. It’s almost impossible to go from being a television star to being a movie star, and being a movie star is really a good deal more fun.”

  “Did you meet her through your work?”

  “No,” Victoria said. “I met her at a fund-raiser for the Democratic party. One of those rock-concerts-to-raise-money things. There was a party afterward and she was there.”

  “I’m surprised you were.”

  “Because I don’t look the rock music type?” Victoria smiled. “You’re right. I’m not. I am, however, the type who gives a great deal of money to political causes. Rock stars are very good at serving the bottom line.”

  Considering the fact that some of them made a hundred million dollars a year, Gregor thought, they must be. He asked, “Is Miss Rawls still interested in political causes? She hasn’t talked much about them since I’ve been here.”

  “She’s interested in banning fur coats,” Victoria said, “and in some of the peripheral issues. Of course, she’s very interested in euthanasia, but that figures, under the circumstances. If you’re asking if she still goes in for real politics, the answer is no.”

  “She isn’t interested in this act the senator is working on?”

  Victoria hooted. “Good grief,” she said. “Patchen is no more interested in retarded children than I am in—well, in rock music. There are really only two things Patchen cares about at the moment. One of them is getting my son-in-law to leave my daughter. Notice I didn’t say she was interested in my son-in-law. The other of them is Wicca.”

  “What’s Wicca?”

  “The fashionable name for witchcraft. They’ve got a whole movement going. Massachusetts even has an official witch. But they’re much better equipped than they were in the old days. They’ve got drugs now, and chemicals of all kinds, from what I can see. Patchen likes to get hallucinatorily high.”

  “I think you’re trying to tell me Patchen is responsible for what is happening to the senator. And maybe what happened to Kevin Debrett.”

  “Do you find that possibility out of the question?”

  Gregor didn’t answer her. He didn’t find it out of the question, but he wasn’t fond of it as an explanation, either. Anyone who thought it through for two minutes could come up with a timetable, and it went like this: first Stephen Whistler Fox had announced the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children; then the attacks had started; then the seminar, supposedly concerning the act, had started; then Kevin Debrett had died. Gregor was sure the act had to be tied up in all this somewhere, but Victoria had just said Patchen Rawls wasn’t interested in it. Gregor agreed with her. From their brief conversation of the night before, Gregor had his doubts that Patchen was interested in much of anything corporeal.

  His own coffee was drained to a stain at the bottom of his cup, so he got up and got some more. The coffee was as hot as it had been before. He thought idly that the urn must be electrically heated, run on batteries so cleverly concealed he couldn’t guess where they might be.

  “Tell me something,” he said, sitting down again. “Do you know anything about Clare Markey?”

  “Clare Markey? Why would I?”

  “She’s a guest in your house.”

  “She’s Dan Chester’s guest. She happens to be in my house.”

  “All right. But she’s in an odd position here, as far as I can tell. She and Dr. Debrett were the two most concerned with the act the senator is sponsoring, the two who could be described as being here because of the act. But Dr. Debrett was a long-time friend of the family. Clare Markey is a stranger.”

  “Are you including Patchen Rawls among the friends of the family?”

  “Her interests here are personal, Ms. Harte, yes. Clare Markey’s interests, at least on the surface, are totally professional.”

  Victoria Harte waved a languid hand in the air. “I’m sure they are,” she said. “I can’t imagine that woman has much of a personal life. Of course, in my day women didn’t run off to become political lobbyists, but careers are careers. I know how you get to the top very fast and very young. I did it myself. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she got her sexual kicks here and there, but I would be surprised if she had any kind of committed relationship.
She wouldn’t have time.”

  “To your knowledge she’s never been close to any of the people here? Dr. Debrett? Dan Chester?”

  Victoria’s smile this time was swift, sharp, and vicious. “She hasn’t even been close to my son-in-law, and that couldn’t be said for half a dozen women in Washington.”

  “What about the act? Was she in involved with it in any way? Did she help write it? Did she think it up?”

  “Dan Chester thought it up, Mr. Demarkian. Dan thinks everything up. And no, I don’t think Clare Markey had anything to do with it. If she had, it wouldn’t have been written the way it was. Not that that’s carved in stone at this point, you understand.”

  “How was the act written?”

  “If you mean what’s in it, at the moment a lot of stuff about competency exams for the teachers of the mentally retarded, and payment schedules that give more money to doctors than to day-care workers, and that kind of thing. It’s really a clinic bill, a bill for specialists. Clare Markey works for a union of day-care workers and teachers who specialize in taking care of retarded children. They don’t like this bill at all, the way it is.”

  “Do many retarded children need that sort of thing? Specialists and clinics?”

  “That, Mr. Demarkian, is beside the point.”

  Gregor had been afraid of that. “I take it Dr. Debrett did like this bill, the way it was written.”

  “Oh, yes,” Victoria agreed. “I’m sure he liked it very much. I’m sure he was consulted. He was consulted about everything else. He and Dan and Stephen have always been very close.”

  “What about you and your daughter? Were you consulted?”

  “No.” Victoria had been holding her coffee cup in her hand. Now she put it down in its saucer with a thump. “The first we heard of that bill was the night before it was announced in the press. I said announced in and not announced to because that’s the way they did it to us. First they told the Washington Post what they were going to do. Then Stephen came home and had a little talk with Janet. He knew how she’d feel. He knew I’d be furious.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we both hate hypocrites, Mr. Demarkian, and a hypocrite is exactly what Stephen’s being with this act. Good Lord, he cares less about retarded children than Patchen Rawls. He doesn’t even think they’re human.”

  “Wait,” Gregor said. He was, he realized, too tired to be having this conversation. His head felt stuffed with facts that wouldn’t sort themselves out. “I thought your daughter gave birth to a retarded child—”

  “Years ago,” Victoria said.

  “But it was also Stephen Fox’s child?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s the way Dan has it playing in the press, of course. It’s perfect. Stephen’s great personal tragedy. It’s also nonsense.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it wasn’t as if Stephen were broken up when Stephanie died. I don’t think he felt anything at all. He looked at her, and saw she was damaged, and in his addled little brain she simply ceased to exist. As for Dan Chester, I think he was relieved.”

  “Relieved? Why?”

  “Because it would have slowed Janet down,” Victoria said. “Dan knew she’d never agree to put Stephanie into an institution and leave her there. Janet isn’t like that. It takes a lot of work to bring up a child with Down syndrome and make a good job of it. They need constant stimulation. Janet couldn’t have done that and gone traipsing around the political cocktail circuit at the same time.”

  “And that would have mattered?”

  Victoria nodded. “In those days, it would have mattered a great deal. It would matter even now. There’s something I’ve learned about politicians, Mr. Demarkian. They all—and I do mean all, left or right—like to do a lot of talking about how concerned they are with the weak and the sick and the feebleminded. There isn’t an elected official in the District of Columbia who would come out against compassion if you offered him the Kingdom of Heaven. They do not, however, have any patience with the kind of compassion that would interfere with somebody’s professional life.”

  “They don’t have any respect for people like Mother Teresa?”

  “Mother Teresa doesn’t have a professional life. Washington people look on her as a charming crank who has the uncharming habit of making Nobel Prize speeches against abortion. Is there anything else you want to know?”

  Actually, there was a great deal more that Gregor wanted to know. Victoria was practically purring at him, and that was a very bad sign. A purring Victoria was a Victoria who had just put something over on someone—and there was no one here for her to put anything over on but him.

  His coffee cup was still half full. He thought it would be bad manners to leave it that way for the maid. He got up and poured it into the drain underneath the urn.

  “It’s raining,” he said.

  “It’s been raining since three o’clock this morning,” Victoria said, “and it’s going to rain some more before it stops. Before you came in, I was sitting here praying for it to go on raining all weekend.”

  “It would put a crimp in the Fourth-of-July celebrations.”

  “It might empty out the motels. Then I could send all these people away from here. Are you all right, Mr. Demarkian? You’re listing.”

  “I’m tired,” Gregor said. “Maybe I should go up and lie down in bed.”

  “Maybe you should.” Victoria put her chin on her hand and frowned down the length of the table, looking suddenly tired and old and resigned, and not like a movie star at all. “It’s all silliness anyway,” she said. “It’s just wishful thinking. Tourists are even worse than politicians. It wouldn’t matter if a hurricane hit the island this weekend. They’d still expect to get their celebration, and they still wouldn’t go away.”

  FIVE

  [1]

  THE PHONES AT GREAT Expectations, like most of the furniture, had been custom-made. Instead of ringing the way they were supposed to, they brred. Gregor heard the brring through the sleep he had fallen into as soon as he got upstairs from breakfast. It went on and on and seemed to be located in one of the outer folds of his left ear. He turned over to get away from it, but that didn’t work. It was very loud.

  Outside, the rain was thrown against his windows by fits of wind. It pounded against the skylight and sounded as hard as hail. He turned over again, back in the direction of the brr, and opened his eyes. He saw the bedspread in a pile on the floor. He saw the base of his lamp. Finally, he saw the telephone. It not only didn’t sound much like a telephone, it didn’t look much like one, either. It reminded him of what the Golden Arches would have looked like if they’d been especially resilient and run over by a truck. He sat up and reached for it.

  He found that he had managed to pick up, but not to pick up. He held the instrument away from him and stared at it. It was dead. There had to be a switch or a—

  There it was, a small black button just above the mouthpiece, labeled “on/off.” He pressed it.

  “Yes?” he said.

  He expected to hear a voice he didn’t know, probably a servant’s, or Dan Chester’s. He heard instead a fit of coughing and then the lilt of a familiar accent, singsongy and mild, “Krekor? Is that you? The phone has been ringing and ringing for half an hour.”

  There had been a time when Gregor Demarkian had not been sure he should have come back to Cavanaugh Street. He had been born and brought up there, but he had been away for more than thirty years by the time Elizabeth’s death propelled him back. In those years he had lived in places as different from that small Armenian-American neighborhood as the streets of Bangkok were from the beaches of Tahiti. Now he was sure that Cavanaugh Street was where he belonged—except on those rare occasions when its inhabitants shocked him. Actually, those occasions were not so rare. This was one of them.

  He pulled the phone away from his ear again and stared at it. What was Tibor calling him for? Had somebody died? Was somebody in trouble?

  He lodged the phone bet
ween his ear and his shoulder and said, “Tibor?”

  “Yes, Krekor. This is Tibor.”

  “Are you all right? Is something wrong? If there’s some kind of an emergency I’ll come right back—”

  “The only emergency, Krekor, is that I don’t know how to change diapers and this baby needs to be changed. It needs to be changed very badly. I did not realize babies could make this kind of mess. I called Lida Arkmanian—”

  “What baby?”

  “What baby do you think? What other baby do we have at the moment? There is Hannah Krekorian’s granddaughter, of course, but Hannah’s daughter-in-law lives on the Main Line, so—”

  Gregor knew from experience that this could go on forever. There would be daughters and granddaughters without number, cousins and sons-in-law into infinity, and somehow or other it would all end up at the Greek Schism. With Tibor, everything ended up at the Greek Schism.

  “Tibor,” Gregor said. “You have Donna Moradanyan’s baby.”

  “Lida is on her way over,” Tibor said. “She’s bringing some food and also Hannah. Then the baby will be changed and I will get something to eat.”

  “I don’t hear the baby crying, Tibor.”

  “The baby is not crying. The baby is spitting up over my shoulder onto my best collar. I had a diaper over my shoulder for it spit up on instead—Donna told me to do that—but the baby took the diaper off.”

  They always did, Gregor thought. He remembered that from his nieces. He stood up and took his own jacket off. He had slept in it and it felt wrinkled and foul. Then he went over to the window and looked out at the rain.

  “Tibor,” he said finally, “what are you doing with Donna Moradanyan’s baby?”

  “I am taking care of it while Donna is out. Didn’t I tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “Krekor, I know you are very busy. I know you are on government business and—”

  “I’m not on government business.”