Act of Darkness

by Jane Haddam

  “Oh.” Bennis dropped down on the bed in a single awkward movement, her small body half disappearing among the quilts and her face going very white. “Oh, Gregor, I’m sorry. I should have told you, I know I should have, but it was so long ago. And I was afraid if I did tell you, you wouldn’t let me come along. And I wanted to come along. I had to come along. Not just because it was an investigation. Because I couldn’t stand the idea of being in Philadelphia right now. The trial’s turning into a circus and there are always people hanging around my mother’s house, and my mother is so sick she can barely talk, and—oh, it was just one thing and another.”

  “I know.”

  “How did you know?” Bennis said. “Did somebody tell you? Did Donna Moradanyan?”

  “I haven’t talked to Donna Moradanyan since I got here. I have talked to Tibor. About you, Donna, and sex.”

  Bennis blushed. “Oh, dear,” she said.

  “I’d say it was very wrong of you,” Gregor said, “but at the moment it happens to be very convenient, so I think I’ll let it go. I need some information, and you can give it to me. But next time, Bennis, if there ever is a next time, try not to get Donna so agitated she has to walk off her nerves all over the city of Philadelphia and saddle poor Tibor with a small baby he doesn’t know what to do with.”

  “Tibor would talk to it,” Bennis said dismissively, “and somehow or the other it would understand. Gregor, what killed Kevin Debrett and Stephen Whistler Fox? I heard you say something to Berman about curare—”

  “No. Forget about the curare for a moment. I knew about your affair with Stephen Whistler Fox because Victoria Harte hinted at it when we got here, and because of that convoluted moral discussion Tibor said you had with Donna. I knew it must have been ten years ago because that’s when you spent significant time in Washington, D.C. You told me that yourself months ago. As far as I can figure out, the senator spent most of his time either there or in Connecticut, and you’ve never said anything about Connecticut.”

  “I went to a wedding there once,” Bennis said. “Gregor, listen, you’ve got to believe me. I didn’t know he was married when all that started. I really didn’t. I would never have—”

  “Bennis, it’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right to deliberately have affairs with married men,” Bennis flared. “I’m no Patchen Rawls.”

  “I never said you were.”

  “And I had no reason to know he was married. He wasn’t wearing a ring. Janet wasn’t anywhere in evidence. Although, I can tell you, when I found out she existed and where she was I nearly killed him—”

  “Wait,” Gregor said. He grabbed the chair, dragged it up close to where Bennis was sitting, and sat down in it himself. “Here’s what I want to talk to you about. Janet and where she was then and what else was going on in the senator’s life.”

  “I’m not sure I know what was going on. He wasn’t exactly truthful. And then, when I got up here this weekend, he didn’t even remember he’d ever met me. Ever. He—”

  “Bennis.”

  “All right.”

  “Think,” Gregor told her. “How did you find out that Janet existed? How did you find out where she was and what she was doing? For that matter, where was she and what was she doing?”

  “Well,” Bennis said. “As to finding out he was married, I’d been seeing him for about a month. I was staying with a friend, you know, but my friend was something of a social maniac, so I didn’t see much of her, and she’d light out for the territories and not get back for days at a time. Stephen would come to the house to see me, but she was never there. Except that finally, after a month, the way I said, she was.”

  “And she told you Stephen Fox was married.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did she also tell you that Janet Harte Fox had had a baby?”

  “No. Actually, Janet didn’t have the baby until another six weeks or so after that. I think there was something wrong with her pregnancy. She was spending full time in bed. That was why I never saw her. She was in some clinic up in Connecticut—”

  “Kevin Debrett’s clinic?”

  “I don’t know,” Bennis said slowly. “But I think maybe it must have been, because I know Debrett was her obstetrician. And then later—can I get to later later? Can I tell it in order?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well,” Bennis said. “The first I heard about any pregnancy or any baby was in an item in the Washington Post. It didn’t say much, just that Janet Harte Fox had had a child and that the child had been born with Down syndrome. I was—I can’t tell you what I was. I was a little crazy at the time, or I would have broken off with Stephen when I first found out he was married, but I hadn’t done that. And now I had a pregnant wife and a retarded child on my conscience and I was furious. So I went to see him.”

  “And?”

  “Gregor, it was the oddest thing. I asked him what he was doing still in the District, with his wife up in Connecticut going through God only knew what on her own, and he literally didn’t understand what I was talking about. He said he’d gone up for the day—just that. It must have been the day the baby was born, I figured that out from the details, but he didn’t say that. Just that he’d gone up to see her. And then he said he was going to go up to see her again, at the end of the week.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well,” Bennis swallowed hard. “I asked him about the baby. Didn’t he want to be with the baby? Didn’t he want to see the baby? Didn’t he want to—I don’t know. He listened to me like I was speaking Urdu and then he said, ‘the baby. The baby is mentally retarded.’ Dead flat. Like that. As if he were talking about a car with a rod through its engine block. Gregor, I thought he’d go on from there, but he didn’t. He started talking about politics instead. About how smart Dan Chester was. About how careful politicians had to be, in what they voted for and in their personal lives. I thought he was talking about me. Gregor, I was damned if he was going to be the one to get rid of me. I wasn’t going to allow it. Not under those circumstances.”

  “You said you thought he was talking about you,” Gregor said. “You decided later he wasn’t?”

  “I decided later he mightn’t have been,” Bennis said, “because what happened next was even weirder than what had gone before. As soon as he started talking about politicians and their private lives, I decided to ditch him the first time he paused for breath. And I did. I called him terrible names. I gave him an analysis of his character that would be unprintable even in Screw magazine. I expected him to argue with me or call me names back or something. But he didn’t.”

  “What did he do?”

  “The first time I paused for air, he looked me straight in the face and said, ‘Kevin Debrett is the most courageous doctor who ever lived. He’s got a soul for the twenty-first century.’ That was it. I got the strongest feeling he was quoting.”

  “Ah,” Gregor sat back, satisfied. He still wasn’t entirely sure what Bennis was feeling—he was going to have to work on that—but he knew that he himself was back on track. “That was wonderful,” he told her. “That was perfect.”

  Bennis raised a single eyebrow halfway up her forehead, a Hannaford talent that never failed to impress him. “I’m glad you think it was wonderful. I think it was scuzzy.”

  “It’s a scuzziness that’s going to catch us not one murderer, but two. Now do me a favor. Go downstairs, sit around with everybody else, and pretend we never had this conversation.”

  “If you’re going to catch a couple of murderers, can I watch?”

  “One of the murderers is already dead,” Gregor said. “The other will be unmasked before your eyes. Unless I decide you’re getting out of hand and send you home before then. Get downstairs, Bennis. It’s almost dark.”

  “What does the dark have to do with it?”

  “Not the dark, the fireworks. Go.”

  “Do you really know who did it?”

  “Yes.”

 
“How?”

  “Victoria Harte wears shoulder pads.”

  Bennis stood up, brushed out her skirt, and fussed with her hair. “You’re doing it again,” she said. “Treating me like a half-wit. Treating me like a girl.”

  “Bennis.”

  “I’m gone.”

  She was, too. Before he knew it, she was out on the balcony and slamming the door shut behind her. It was quite a slam. Gregor thought it could probably have been heard in New Jersey.

  When he was sure she was gone, he got up himself and went to the window again. The solar-activated lamps were now on, full blast. Their light made the beach look like glass.

  He reached out to grab the pulley and drew the curtains shut. He didn’t have the time to stand here musing about Bennis, or Carl Bettinger, or even the varied career of Dr. Kevin Debrett. He had told Bennis the truth. It wasn’t the dark, but the fireworks he had to worry about. He had less than half an hour before they would go off.

  He had to find Henry Berman, and he had to find him right away.

  FIVE

  [1]

  JANET HARTE FOX HAD always been good at making herself invisible. She had learned it as a defense against Victoria’s attempts to turn her into part of the Harte public persona, and it had been one of her most valuable assets as a politician’s wife. Now she had begun to wonder if it was possible to be too invisible—if it could be dangerous instead of safe, to be considered simply not there at all. It was eight o’clock at night—how it had gotten so late so fast, she didn’t know—and the sun was as far down as it was going to get until the early hours of the morning. Through the sliding glass doors of the beach room she could see the men who had been hired to run the fireworks strung out across the sand. They had already put out the line of kerosene torches that was supposed to mimic a Minuteman raiding party, or maybe the Boston Tea Party. Janet couldn’t remember. It was all part of what had been promised to the good ladies of Oyster Bay, and Janet preferred not to think of the good ladies of Oyster Bay.

  She leaned a little closer to the doors, and squinted, and saw what she had expected to see. The fireworks men were all ready. The show was set to start at eight-fifteen, and start it would. If everyone had followed directions, it would be the most ostentatious show on the North Shore.

  Janet tugged at her hair, pricked her finger on one of her pins, and sucked at the tiny drop of blood. Then she turned her back to the glass doors and walked slowly toward the foyer and the front of the house. It was mostly empty up there now. The policemen were still going back and forth from the second-floor guest wing, but the guests themselves had dispersed. God only knew where. Janet stopped in the living room space to stare for a moment at the chair Patchen Rawls had been sitting in just before she jumped up, got crazy and ran upstairs. If chairs had had facial expressions, Janet would have said this one looked depressed.

  She went through the foyer, through the twin living room space on its other side, then around the corner to the back hall and the kitchen. She tried the kitchen door half expecting it to be locked. Dan had had that look in his eye, and Janet knew he often locked himself in when he was staying at Great Expectations. But the kitchen door was open and she pushed through it, to find Dan sitting at the kitchen table. She had expected him to be drinking coffee. Instead, he had one of the huge plastic “super soda” glasses the cook collected from McDonald’s and left strewn here and there around the house. It was filled with something dark and thick that looked like Scotch.

  Janet shut the kitchen door and locked it herself. The room felt big to her, too big, and hostile—the way all the world had felt, really, since Stephanie had died. Dan looked too small. It was odd to think how much she had counted on Dan, all these years, how much she was counting on him even now.

  “Dan,” she said, and quailed a little, because she sounded so desperate. “For God’s sake. What do you think you’re doing?”

  Dan must have heard her come in. He wasn’t comatose, and he wasn’t the kind of man to lose himself in thought to the point where he was unaware of the world around him. Still, he hadn’t looked up when she came in, and he didn’t exactly look up now. He just twisted his head more or less in her direction and smiled.

  “I,” he told her, “am getting drunk.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Janet said quickly. “You can’t get drunk now.”

  “Why not? I don’t see what else I can do.”

  “You can get out of here, for one thing. You ought to get out of here. Before—”

  “Something radical happens? Janet, my dear, I think something radical is going to happen whether I get out of here or not. I don’t think it’s up to me.”

  Janet walked away from the door, to the kitchen windows. They were small—the architect must have thought it wasn’t important to light a room that would be used primarily by servants—but they looked out on the beach, too.

  “You ought to call the fireworks off,” she said. “With Stephen just dead, it’s going to look bad. I don’t know what you were thinking of.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of anything. It was your mother’s idea. She said the last thing she wanted at this point was the town of Oyster Bay mad at her on top of everything else.”

  “I don’t care what the town of Oyster Bay thinks. I don’t care about anything. I don’t even care about Patchen Rawls.

  “Ah, yes,” Dan said. “Patchen Rawls.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Sure. She’s out on the portico, meditating. Or chanting something, at any rate.”

  Janet bit her lip. “It isn’t working, is it? They aren’t taking the hint.”

  “You mean they don’t think Patchen Rawls killed Kevin and Stephen? No, Janet. They’re better than that.”

  “Maybe I should have gone for Clare Markey instead.”

  “Maybe you should have left the whole thing alone. Why don’t you ever listen to me?”

  “You know why.”

  “Yes,” Dan said. “I know why.” He knocked back a good third of his drink, as much as one or two ordinary glasses of Scotch, and then put it down on the table to stare into it. Janet had seen men do that countless times, and never understood why they did it. Right now, Dan put her in mind of Patchen’s endless prattle about predestination and crystal balls.

  “I wonder,” Dan said, “what’s going to happen to us when all of this is over. Do you think we’ll still be speaking to each other?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. You’ll go back to California and lock yourself up in that great big house and lock Victoria up there with you, and then in a couple of years you’ll come out and do the great philanthropic shuffle. Open a home for retarded children. Fund an endowment for the study of Down syndrome. Organize a telethon—”

  “What will you do?”

  “Well, that depends, doesn’t it, on what happens in the meantime. I’ve been sitting here telling myself I’ll be lucky just to get the chance to retire and go fishing. I’ve got quite a bit of money in the bank, you know.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “Of course, depending on what happens tonight, I may not feel like that in the morning. I may decide I want to go on with what I’ve been doing. Find another candidate. Build another career. That’s all I ever have done, you know, in all my adult life. Even before. I managed the campaign of the boy who was student council president my senior year of high school.”

  “Do you really think you’ll be able to do that? After all this? After what the publicity is going to be like? After this weekend?”

  Dan grinned. “Well, Janet, let me put it to you this way. Teddy Kennedy is still in office, and Richard Nixon is making a comeback. If you play it right, the great American voting public will let you get away with anything.”

  “There have been people—”

  “Who didn’t play it right,” Dan said. Then he stood up and stretched and picked up his glass of Scotch to drain it. Janet blinked. He had just downed twice a
s much as most men were able to drink in a night, and it hadn’t even made him wobbly. He put the glass down on the table and shook his head, hard, as if to clear it. It made his hair fall, into his eyes.

  “Don’t think,” he said, “that I don’t appreciate what you’re doing. I find it—touching—that you’d go to so much trouble just to get me to save my own neck.”

  Janet found herself thinking that he was going to come over to her, whisper in her ear, start a conversation where everything would be stated and nothing would be repressed. He seemed to be in the mood for it. He even started toward her. A second later, he must have changed his mind. He backed up again, whirled around, and headed for the door.

  When he got the bolt thrown and the door open, he turned back to her and bowed, solemnly, with no hint of mockery at all.

  Then he said, “You’re very, very good at what you do, Janet, but I am much, much better.”

  Then he disappeared.

  Janet Harte Fox stood at the window, with the rumble of celebration preparations going on behind her, and thought she had just heard what she hadn’t wanted to hear.

  [2]

  Patchen Rawls was not out under the portico, meditating. She was out on the deck in the back, sitting cross-legged on the pressed wooden boards, holding a conversation with herself about the safekeeping of extraordinary karma in a treacherous universe. At least, Clare Markey thought Patchen Rawls was holding a conversation with herself, and that that was what the conversation was about. It was hard to tell. Clare had been sitting on the deck herself, alone in the single chair someone had left out after dark, when Patchen arrived. At first, she’d thought Patchen was still rattled by what Victoria had done to her in the living room and needed a sympathetic ear. Now she wasn’t sure what Patchen wanted.

  “The soul is holistic and the body is made of parts,” Patchen said. “That’s what the problem is. We should think with our souls. Instead, we think with our bodies. We disrupt the universe and unbalance the ecology of our spirits.”