Act of Darkness

by Jane Haddam

  “Mmm,” Clare said. She wasn’t entirely sure what a soul was, but she knew what she’d been doing before Patchen came out. She hadn’t been thinking with her mind. She hadn’t been thinking with her body, however that was done. She’d been giving free reign to her emotions, and those emotions had presented her with a fait accompli.

  She did not have to go back to Washington to quit her job, because she had already quit her job in all the ways that counted. All she had to go back to Washington for was to clean out her office, clean out her bank accounts, and pack.

  And tell Harvey Gort what he could do with his organization, his politics, and his foul language.

  If the police hadn’t been tying up most of the phones in the house most of the time, she would have been talking to Harvey right now. Considering how she felt, it was probably a good thing for the future of her reputation that she wasn’t.

  Did she need a reputation, if she wasn’t going to have a public life?

  Over at the edge of the deck, Patchen Rawls stirred. “I saw you,” she said suddenly. “Did you know that?”

  “Saw me?”

  “Going into Stephen’s room. I told that Demarkian person about you. I told him everything.”

  Patchen had been sitting with her back to Clare from almost the first moment she’d come out. Now she turned around, swiveling on her bottom so she didn’t have to stand. She came to a stop in just the place where the outdoor lamp shed its light directly on her face. The lights bounced into her eyes and out again, making them look like midget beacons.

  “You were in Stephen’s room,” she said. “You were there almost at the right time.”

  “I wasn’t in Stephen’s room,” Clare corrected. “I passed by it and saw his door open and looked in.”

  “You saw my things.”

  “Yes,” Clare said. “Yes, I did.”

  “You messed them up. You went in and messed them up.”

  “No,” Clare said. “I didn’t.” Would it be possible to explain to Patchen Rawls why she had not gone in, and why she had said nothing about what she had seen later, after Stephen was killed? Would Patchen understand damage control, or protecting a professional position? At that point, Clare had still thought she was going back to work, that career was everything. It wasn’t until later that she’d decided, she wanted to chuck it all.

  “I just didn’t want to get involved,” she told Patchen lamely. “I didn’t want people to think—”

  “You put pantyhose in there,” Patchen said. “You ruined everything.”

  “Patchen, I didn’t put anything in there. I didn’t go inside.”

  “Somebody put pantyhose in there.” Patchen turned around to look at the beach again. “I told Gregor Demarkian about that. I told Gregor Demarkian everything. He’ll believe me.”

  Clare was completely bewildered. Patchen must have been watching the hall. There was no other explanation for this conversation. But it was more than that. Clare wasn’t worried that Gregor Demarkian would suspect her of murder. She thought they understood each other. But Patchen, Patchen—

  And then, Clare saw it. The studied childishness, the deliberate air of confusion, the quasi-metaphysical mumblings—all of it, every bit of it, was a cover for pure, unadulterated malice. Clare had always thought of Patchen as silly and trivial, and because of that, she had never taken the time to study her. But she had been wrong. Patchen was not silly and trivial at all. She was a single-minded machine for the operation of triumphant narcissism, and that narcissism had a nasty edge of envy to it. Patchen Rawls was one of those people who was happiest not when she won but when she could watch other people losing.

  Ten minutes before, Clare would have said there was nothing in her Washington experience that would ever be any use to her in her life to come. Now she saw that she had been wrong about this, too. There was at least one thing she had learned from Harvey Gort and all his kind that could come in very useful indeed.

  Clare kicked off her shoes, and tucked her feet under her, and wrapped her arms around her knees. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been sitting out here thinking. Thinking about changing jobs, if you want to know the truth. I’ve been considering a cause very close to my heart.”

  “It can’t be a real cause,” Patchen said. “You wear leather.”

  “Oh, I think this is a real enough cause. When I was in college, I wanted to go into PR. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it turned out the kind of people I wanted to do PR for couldn’t pay me too much money. They don’t have too much. But I’ve been a lobbyist for years now, and I’ve got money. I wouldn’t have to go for the biggest salary now.”

  “So?” Patchen sounded supremely bored.

  “I was thinking of volunteering. Bringing what I know to the aid of the Senior Citizens’ Defense Fund.”

  Patchen sat up straight, rigid, wary. “What are you getting at?” she demanded. “What are you trying to pull?”

  “I’m not trying to pull anything, Patchen. It’s just that, being here this weekend, watching you, has given me an idea. The Senior Citizens’ Defense Fund is on a campaign to get laws passed that would stop doctors and relatives from—well, what they want is to make it illegal to remove a feeding tube from any patient, comatose or otherwise.”

  “It’s a silly law,” Patchen said. “Sometimes there’s no other way—”

  “To kill someone? Yes, Patchen, I know. I also know we don’t call it killing any more. We call it ‘dying in dignity.’ But you know, I can think of a campaign, a television and print campaign, that might turn that around. I read the stories about your mother. They were—a little vague. Oh, so sophisticated. All that talk about bioethics and cost-benefit analysis and what happens when an old person will just go on costing and costing their family without any hope of the cost ever stopping except by death. And you, prattling about how your mother would be in pain, and then she took four days to die. Four days, Patchen. Can’t you just see what I could do with that in a thirty-second spot?”

  “Those people can’t afford thirty-second spots.” Patchen was shrill. “They don’t have any money. They spend it all making their lives go on and on and on when they’re useless, just no use to anybody anymore and—”

  “I’ve got the money for thirty-second spots, Patchen.”

  “You bitch,” Patchen Rawls said.

  [3]

  There was a mirror in the Mondrian study, which was why Victoria Harte had gone there. It had been a bad day and, as always at the end of bad days, she had an irresistible need to look at herself, to make sure she was who she thought she was. The police were all over the house now, even in her bedroom, but that didn’t matter. She kept a Shaker sewing basket full of extra makeup supplies under the side table next to the living room sofa. When their little group had finally broken up—dispersed more by their weariness at their tension in being together than by any need to get anything done—she had come down here and upended the basket over the desk. The vials and tubes and jars and boxes had scattered everywhere, and some of them had fallen on the floor. She hadn’t bothered to pick them up.

  What she had done was to take the heart-shaped ruby brooch off her chest, look it over, fix it up, and put it back again. Then, when she had been sure it was secure, she had gone to work on her face. Now she was presentable, and calmer, and ready for action. When somebody died, there was always so much that had to be done.

  Before she’d come down here, she’d told Dan Chester she was going to need him at eight fifteen or just before. There were details that needed to be decided on. She thought they ought to be decided on immediately. She just needed a chance to collect herself a little first. She thought it had to be close to eight fifteen already, that the fireworks would start at any minute. She wondered where Dan was.

  I am not sorry about any of them, she told herself. I will never be sorry about any of them.

  There was a knock on the door and she said, “Come in.”
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br />   Dan Chester came in, looking just a shade drunk—which, as Victoria knew, meant he must have drunk a great deal indeed. She turned away from him, so that she wouldn’t be tempted to give him a. lecture on his responsibilities. It was the sort of thing she didn’t need to say and he didn’t need to hear. Not now. She looked up at the shelves above the mirror and said, “I wanted you to help me get some boxes down. Boxes of things that belonged to Stephen.”

  “Here?” Dan Chester said.

  “They’re clippings mostly. Of the wedding and the years just after. I put them here right after Stephanie died, so that Janet wouldn’t see them, and then I forgot all about them.”

  “And they can’t wait until morning?”

  “No.”

  “They can’t wait for one of the yardmen to help you with the heavy lifting?”

  Victoria turned away from the shelves and looked at him and now she was smiling, the malice clear and plain, everything out in the open. “Some of them are from—you know what. Would you really want that, for the box to maybe fall and scatter clippings everywhere for any stranger to see?”

  “All right,” Dan Chester said. Then he gave her a smile, hot and vicious, and kicked the door shut behind him. “If we’re not going to have strangers see, we might as well keep the relatives out of it, too.”

  Victoria turned back to the shelves and looked at the two cardboard boxes pushed well to the back of the top one. Dan had come up behind her, surveyed the situation, and started to climb on the chair. “You should have gotten one of the tall people to do this for you,” he said. “I’m going to have to stand on the desk.”

  “It’ll hold.”

  “I’m sure it will. Stand on the chair and prop up my back. I don’t want to break my skull falling backward.”

  Dan got up on the desk and Victoria got up on the chair. He reached for the closest of the boxes. She reached for her shoulder and began to play with the great heart-shaped ruby resting there. When she felt the clasp come undone, she stopped.

  “Down,” he said.

  She got down, and then he did, with the box in his hand. It was heavy and awkward, so heavy and so awkward he couldn’t keep himself from swaying under it. He motioned her away and dropped to the floor, teetering. Then he dropped the box on the desk and turned to say something to her…

  … and found her standing there, right next to him, with the needle-pointed back pin of the heart-shaped ruby held between her thumb and forefinger of her right hand. He started to move away but got caught. The desk was behind him and he had nowhere to go. She reached out and stuck him, firmly, in the throbbing artery under his chin.

  Barely a second later, he was on the floor, limp but conscious, and she was standing over him.

  She reached into her sewing basket and came out with a pair of pantyhose. They belonged to Patchen Rawls. She had taken them out of the top drawer of Patchen’s bureau—the place where the maids always packed pantyhose—the afternoon of the day Patchen arrived. At the time, she’d thought it was great good luck that Patchen had arrived so early.

  “What I just gave you,” she told Dan Chester, “is called succinylcholine. I got it out of Kevin Debrett’s medical bag. It’s what Kevin used when he killed Stephanie. To keep her still while he suffocated her. You probably know that. Stephen wouldn’t know, even though he was part of it, because Stephen couldn’t keep things straight. He was never very bright. But you would probably know. You were the one who thought the whole thing up.”

  She unfolded the pantyhose and leaned closer to him. She stuffed wads of pantyhose into both nostrils and then began to stuff a bigger wad into his mouth.

  “I heard the three of you talking, just after she was born. I was supposed to be down in Janet’s room, but Janet was asleep. So I walked up to see Stephanie, and I stayed to listen to you instead.”

  She reached into her basket again and came up, this time, with tape. “I used pillows the last two times,” she said, “but I won’t do that now. The succinylcholine only lasts three to five minutes. I have so much to say. Because I did hear the three of you, talking. Talking about what a disaster it was that she had been born, and what a drag taking care of her was going to be on Stephen’s career, and what a fool Janet was going to be because you knew Janet would insist on not putting her in an institution. She’d want to take care of her herself and what would happen to Stephen’s perfect political wife then? And then Kevin said she should never have been born. Janet should have had amniocentesis and gotten an abortion. Then he said if it was all right to abort a child at birth minus five days, it ought to be legal to abort a child at birth plus five days. He couldn’t see any difference. And he knew they did abortions that late in that place because he’d done them himself.”

  She took a strip of tape off the roll and hung it on her thumb, the way teachers kept tape in reserve when they were hanging children’s pictures on a wall. “If you’d tried to kill her then and there, I could have stopped you,” she said. “But you didn’t. Kevin just talked about succinylcholine, and then he said how you could suffocate a baby and it would look just like crib death, just like. It wouldn’t even come as a surprise. Children with Down syndrome often don’t live very long anyway. A lot of them die before they leave the hospital. It’s nothing unusual. He could use the succinylcholine to keep her still and then after she was still he could stop her breathing. And nobody would ever know.”

  She now had four pieces of tape draped over her thumb. She took the longest one and put it over Dan Chester’s mouth, then took two more and reinforced it at the corners. “You said you wanted to think about it,” she said, “and you all went away, and I went back to Janet’s room. Then the next morning Janet had a crisis and I spent all day and all night waiting in hallways, waiting to hear what had happened. When I got back to the ward, Stephanie was dead. And so was Janet, Dan, that’s what you never understood. So was Janet. From that moment on, she was a walking corpse. When the three of you put together that act, you thought you were finally going to bury her. I could have forgiven you for Stephanie, Dan, but I will have my revenge for Janet. I will have it.”

  She took another piece of tape off her thumb. “I’m going to put this over your nose, Dan. The succinylcholine will keep you from pulling it off. You’re going to die and when you’re dead it’s going to look just as if you died from—crib death. Do you see?”

  “No,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  Victoria looked at the tape in her hand and then at Gregor Demarkian. Her eyes were wild and her face was ugly. She was electrified. She picked up the heart-shaped ruby brooch and held its sharpened bar in the light.

  “Get the hell out of here,” she said, “or I’ll stick you, too.”

  Outside, there was a rumble that turned into a roar, and the great plate glass window that was the Mondrian study’s north wall lit up in a thousand colors.

  The fireworks had started.

  EPILOGUE

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania July 4

  [1]

  IF SOMEONE HAD ASKED Gregor Demarkian, a minute or two after he’d walked in on Victoria Harte’s attempted murder of Dan Chester, how he was least likely to spend his Fourth of July, he would have said back on Cavanaugh Street, in Philadelphia, with the people he most wanted to spend it with. Even an hour later—when Dan Chester had recovered and been fortified with another huge glass of Scotch and Victoria Harte had been taken away, spitting and vile, by a young patrolman glass-eyed with terror and Janet Harte Fox had gone to call every lawyer she’d ever heard of—Gregor would have found the possibility of getting away from Oyster Bay before the passage of at least a week no possibility at all. There were details to be taken care of, questions to be asked, questions to be answered. The detectives in the murder mysteries Bennis gave him to read for relaxation always knew everything about everything before they presented the murderer to a baffled police department. In real life, Gregor had always been satisfied to know who the murderer was and how to bring him to trial
. After that, he got what he could get when he could get it. Some puzzles were cleared up at the arrest. Some had to wait for the trial. Some had to wait for a conviction. Others had to wait through ten years of death penalty appeals. With Victoria Harte, he got lucky. Whatever else she had been after, in the whole long mess of passion and accident that had brought her to this place, concealment was not part of it. In the end, Henry Berman had to have her dragged out of Great Expectations by force, just to keep her from spilling everything before the lawyers got there. By then, the situation outside had reached its crisis stage. The crowd that had been waiting at the gate for all those hours had had enough of their passivity. As Berman’s patrolmen put Victoria in a black-and-white, a small crowd of tourists began to come over the wall, onto the lawn. Only quick work by one of the gate guards stopped them from getting any farther. In the dark that was too dark and too silent after the lights and noise of the exploding fireworks, there seemed to be vampires and shape changers on the grass.

  In the meantime, Gregor had written his statement, answered what he could for a bewildered Clare Markey, and wondered vaguely what had happened to two people: Bennis Hannaford and Patchen Rawls. He got an answer to the question of Patchen Rawls before Victoria Harte left the house. He was writing out his statement at the coffee table in the living room, and she came into the foyer, breathing fire and carrying a plastic suitcase.

  “I’m getting out of this place,” she said to no one in particular. “I just got back into my room. Someone put that mink bedspread back on my bed.”

  On the other side of the coffee table, Clare Markey giggled. Gregor looked up at her and she winked.

  Forty-five minutes later—when Victoria was finally gone and Gregor’s statement was finally finished and he was just beginning to wonder how long it would be before they let him get some sleep—Bennis found him. She came marching in from outside, walked straight up to his chair, and managed to look tall by staying on her feet while he found it impossible to rise to his.