True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  “Yeah, Chickie. That one, you can tell that he’s gay.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Garry Mansfield said.

  Lou brushed it away. “We weren’t thinking about arsenic,” he went on. “We weren’t thinking about murder. Not any of us. What we were thinking about was Roy Phipps. You know about the Reverend Roy Phipps?”

  “In detail,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah. Well. What we were all worried about was, we figured if we didn’t give them the go-ahead to get the funeral arrangements made and that kind of thing, old Roy would think Boardman died of AIDS, and then we’d be stuck with another demonstration. The asshole has picketed five of the last six funerals at St. Stephen’s. It’s creepy as hell. So we didn’t get completely stupid. We got the whole autopsy done. We just released the body to the undertaker a little ahead of schedule, so the family and the church could, you know, get things in gear.”

  “Before the chemical analysis tests came back from the lab, is what he’s trying to say,” Garry Mansfield said.

  “One thing at a time,” Gregor said. “The body was released to the family. It was embalmed?”

  “Yeah.” Lou looked depressed.

  “The family had it embalmed? The mother did, or did the father have a change of heart?” Gregor asked.

  “It was the people at the church.” Lou slid down in his chair. “Reverend Burdock and those people. Guy named—Aaron something. He made the arrangements.”

  “Aaron Wardrop,” Garry Mansfield said.

  “Was that acceptable to the family?” Gregor asked.

  Lou straightened up again. “Look,” he said. “You don’t have to tell us that we cut a lot of corners. We cut a lot of corners. And we shouldn’t have. But the thing is, this guy, this Phipps, is not a joke. He’s never pulled anything violent yet, but that doesn’t mean he won’t, and the people who trail around after him are not the most stable eggs in the carton. So we were a little spooked. And the mother—well, the mother couldn’t have taken him home. The father wouldn’t have allowed it. He didn’t even come to the funeral. She doesn’t have any money to speak of. She couldn’t have buried him herself. I mean, what the hell. We were just trying to be decent to everybody involved and head off an incident in the process.”

  Gregor nodded. “So you released the body for burial earlier than you should have. And the body was embalmed. And the body was buried? Yes?”

  “Yes,” Lou nodded.

  “Where?”

  “Martyrs Cemetery,” Garry Mansfield said. “The Episcopal diocese owns it. I think Dan Burdock arranged it.”

  “If the body was buried, it can be disinterred,” Gregor pointed out.

  “Yeah.” Lou got out of his chair. “And isn’t that going to be a can of worms. When Roy gets finished with that, we won’t know what hit us.”

  Gregor drummed his fingers on the table. “The autopsy found arsenic, isn’t that right? How did the autopsy find arsenic? Why did the medical examiner go looking for it?”

  Lou Emiliani was pacing. “There wasn’t enough cocaine to account for the convulsions, according to him. So it bothered him. So he put all the stuff aside. And then, when the Kelly thing hit, and she was full of arsenic, it hit him that arsenic causes convulsions if you take enough of it. So he ran a few more tests, and—bingo.”

  “Enough arsenic to cause convulsions,” Gregor said.

  “Yes,” Lou Emiliani said.

  “Enough to cause convulsions and death before it caused significant vomiting,” Gregor said.

  “Enough to kill a herd of elephants,” Lou said.

  Gregor almost got out of his own seat. “In a church office at six o’clock in the evening with other people in the same room?”

  “I think they were in the next room over,” Lou said, “but yeah. That’s the idea.”

  SEVEN

  1

  At first, Bennis Hannaford thought the call was going to be just one more annoyance. Usually, when people called from the Inquirer or the Star, it was because some reporter somewhere had come up with one more good idea about how to get her to talk about Anne Marie. They all wanted to see a feature with a headline like “Hannaford: The Famous Novelist Talks About Her Notorious Sister.” Lying on the big double bed in her own bedroom, fully dressed except for the fact that her clogs were lying on the carpet under the window, Bennis didn’t see the point of getting up to answer the phone. She was screening all her calls these days, anyway. She had to. As the execution got closer and closer, more and more people came out of the woodwork, looking for a piece of her. There were editors in New York who wanted nothing more than to have her write a “memoir” of the murders, and agents who wanted it even more badly. There were ghost writers by the legion, apparently of the opinion that even a woman with fifteen best-selling novels to her credit would need a little “help” when it came to writing something like this. But she had no intention of writing something like this. She knew that her books gave the impression of being full of self-revelation. It was an illusion. The reason Bennis had always liked fiction was that it allowed her to hide almost entirely behind the antics of characters she had invented and could control. What was worse, what she wanted to hide was the mess they all now wanted her to reveal: the chaotic terrorism of that big house in Bryn Mawr. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she woke up thinking she was fifteen again, home from boarding school for Christmas vacation. If Gregor was there, she was all right. She felt his body beside her and that woke her up, completely. For some reason, she never imagined that he was one of the countless men she had seen fit to traffic in during the years when she’d been “free.” Sometimes, though, Gregor was not there. He was traveling, or she had worked so late that she hadn’t wanted to go upstairs and disturb him. Then it took her minutes to realize that she wasn’t at home again, and she would lie very still, holding her breath, to hear if her father were prowling in the hallways. That was what Bennis remembered most about being home. Her father never slept, and his wakefulness was always pitilessly, viciously angry. Her mother was the only one who could calm him. Her mother was the only one he would not wake.

  When the voice came over the answering machine, Bennis was thinking that, if she hadn’t promised Gregor, she would be smoking right this minute. Surely, that would be the thing it made most sense to do, in these last days before Anne Marie died: smoke, and in the evenings, drink. The odd thing was that, now that she had quit smoking, she couldn’t drink, either. All her favorite drinks suddenly tasted foul. Even Benedictine tasted foul. The only thing that didn’t seem to taste awful without a cigarette to mask it was Drambuie, which actually tasted better, but she couldn’t drink too much of that at once. It was meant to be taken in small glasses, after dinner, as dessert.

  When the voice started talking, Bennis recognized it, but she couldn’t place it, and she missed the name. The next thing she heard was “ … from the Inquirer,” and then she just shut off her brain. The voice sounded familiar because it was one of the reporters who had been hounding her. She didn’t have to deal with it. She drifted off into a memory of Anne Marie’s fifteenth birthday dinner, with them all seated at the long table in the dining room and a cake sent in from some caterer in the city.

  “Fifteen years old and ugly as sin,” her father was saying, and then the voice on the answering machine went, “ … so I thought you’d better look at it, because whoever this woman is, she really has it in for you.”

  Bennis sat up in bed. The answering machine turned itself off. She tucked her legs under her almost-yoga style and reached for the phone and the machine. She pressed rewind and play. Outside her big bedroom window, the thin branches of a single spindly tree twisted and snapped in the wind.

  “Bennis,” the voice on the machine said. “This is Dick Coggins, from the Inquirer. I’m sorry I didn’t catch you home. It’s been a long time since we talked. I’m faxing you a copy of a submission we got this morning from a woman named Edith Lawton. We’re turning it down, but it concerns you,
and if you ask me, it’s really nasty, so I thought you’d better look at it, because whoever this woman is, she really has it in for you.”

  The fax machine started its staccato burping. Bennis got up and watched the first page as it came out. She remembered Dick Coggins. He was on the op-ed page. He’d tried, once, months ago, to get her to write a piece on the execution, but he’d had the incredible good taste to take no for an answer and not come back for more. The page came all the way out, and she picked it up.

  “The Death Penalty Reconsidered,” by Edith Lawton.

  Bennis sat back down on the bed.

  There was, of course, nothing odd about the idea of Edith Lawton submitting an op-ed piece to the Inquirer. Edith wanted to be a writer, and submitting pieces was one of the ways one got oneself started being a writer. Bennis herself had suggested that Edith try the op-ed pages. The editors there read what they got and expected to publish at least some blind submissions. If you made it into an important paper, like the Inquirer or the New York Times, you got read by people who could matter to you in the long run. All in all, op-ed was a good way to get yourself taken seriously on the cheap, if you could do it well. Another page came out of the fax machine. Another page started printing. How had she known, as soon as she saw the title and the by-line, that this was going to be a hatchet job? It was more than Dick Coggins’s warning. She would have known even if he hadn’t warned her. She thought of herself and Edith in that little coffee place out near Independence Hall and felt sick to her stomach.

  The third fax sheet came out and a fourth started. The fourth came out and a fifth started. The printing noise went on and on, and as it did the world got darker, outside and in. I ought to turn on the light, Bennis thought idly, but she didn’t move from where she was. Now the spindly tree outside her window looked as if it were about to disappear. Across the street, the people in the town houses had started putting on their lights. Really, Bennis thought, I’ve got to make up my mind. Either I have to stop helping people who ask me for help, or I have to accept the fact that some of them will be … Edith Lawton.

  The fax machine stopped spitting paper after the sixth page. Bennis got up and got the pages from the table and the floor around it. The table was too small, and faxes were always ending up on the carpet. She sat down on her bed again and turned on the light. It wasn’t night, not really. It was only latish afternoon. She thumbed through the pages, catching her own name dotted across them like pats of butter. She caught three factual errors about the history of the death penalty and two about death-penalty law. Trust Edith, Bennis thought. She can never be bothered to check.

  “Of course, on a human level, it’s more than understandable that Bennis Hannaford would want to put her sister’s life above any abstract principles. But the exercise, in someone who has made a reputation on being the moral watchdog of her generation …”

  “It is ironic that the case where Bennis Hannaford should so desperately seek an exception should be the one case where no exception should be given …”

  “It is incumbent on the rest of us to judge by the facts, and not by the emotions. It will be hard to do, because Bennis Hannaford is a consummate manipulator of emotions …”

  “God, but she’s such a chunky writer,” Bennis said, out loud.

  Then she realized that she was staring at the answering machine, where the red lights were steady and unblinking. Gregor was gone. He had been gone all afternoon, and he had phoned an hour ago to tell her he wouldn’t be back for dinner.

  Bennis got up, folded all six pages of the fax into quarters, and stuffed the wad into a pocket of her jeans. She slipped on her clogs and went out of the bedroom and down the hall into the living room. Her apartment and Gregor’s were exactly the same. The only apartment in this building that wasn’t the same was old George Tekemanian’s, on the first floor, which had been extensively remodeled by his nephew Martin and his wife. She went through the living room to the foyer and out the front door. She ran down the stairs so quickly, she almost fell twice. She didn’t stop in at old George’s apartment, even though she usually did. She went right on outside, into the cold.

  She was wearing a white cotton turtleneck under a flannel shirt—not exactly perfect for February weather—but she was also running, and she didn’t really realize how cold it was until she was standing on the step in front of Donna Moradanyan’s town-house door, ringing the bell. If Lida Arkmanian had seen her, she would have had a fit. Lida was always convinced that Bennis was trying to kill herself by exposure to the elements. Bennis tried to remember what day of the week it was, and found she couldn’t. She tried to remember what Donna did at this time of the afternoon, and couldn’t remember that either. She had no idea what she would do if Donna was not home. Then Donna opened the door, and Bennis breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said. “Gregor is off somewhere. If you’d been gone too, I think I would have exploded.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Bennis pushed past Donna into the town house’s recently renovated foyer. The space was full of decorations for Valentine’s Day, ready and waiting to be put up on the street. Bennis took the fax papers out of her pocket and handed them over.

  “Dick Coggins from the Inquirer sent those to me. They came in today. To him, I mean. They came in to me about five minutes ago.”

  Donna frowned. “Edith Lawton. Isn’t she the one who went on the Net and said that you were phobic about oral sex?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Donna flipped through the fax pages and winced. “Oh, for Pete’s sake. This is awful. Are they going to publish this?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Donna looked around guiltily. “I can’t say ‘thank God’ around Tommy anymore. He tells me not to take the Lord’s name in vain. It’s very disconcerting having a genius for a son. Do you want some coffee?”

  “I want a tranquilizer, but coffee will do. Unless you’re going out. I’m sorry to just burst in on you. I hate to say I haven’t the faintest idea what your schedule is these days. And I’m not thinking straight about much of anything.”

  “It’s okay. I don’t have a schedule today. Russ is picking Tommy up after school and taking him to hockey practice, and then after that they just pick up McDonald’s. Only don’t tell Linda Melajian about that. She’ll think they hate the Ararat and they’re abandoning her. I really can’t believe Lawton wrote this. How could she have written this?”

  “Once she figures out they’ve turned it down, she’ll submit it someplace else. The Star. Someplace. Or she’ll use it on her website or for that column she writes for that freethought newspaper.”

  “Freethought? Oh,” Donna said. “Now I remember. She’s the one who makes some kind of career out of atheism. Why do you suppose she does that? I mean, what’s the point?”

  “Tibor makes a career out of religion,” Bennis pointed out.

  “That’s not the same thing. Do you think she’s trying to start some kind of organization, like that woman, what’s her name—”

  “Madalyn Murray O’Hair.”

  “That’s the one. I’ve got a lot of coffee. Come on back.”

  Donna went off down the hall, waving the pages of the fax in the air as if they were a fan. Bennis took off her clogs and followed. All the floors in Donna’s town house were either hardwood or marble. Walking on them in clogs made you sound as if you were setting off heavy artillery. It was incredible how much better she felt, now that she was here. Edith Lawton would not have her op-ed published in the Inquirer. She might have it published in the Star, but that would be later, and she could deal with it when it came up. It was terrible, the way she lacked perspective, when she was left on her own. She pushed her clogs up against the wall under the coat rack and went down to the back, where the kitchen was.

  Donna was bringing tins of cookies down from the top of the refrigerator.

  “Do you want some of these?” she asked. “Lida and Hanna
h are having some kind of Bake-Off. Or something. Are you still upset?”

  “A little.”

  “She’s an idiot, Bennis. That’s all. And she doesn’t even write very well. Sit down and have something to eat. Gregor has got himself involved in another murder. Think about that.”

  “What murder?”

  Donna went over to the television set that sat in a corner of the breakfast nook and turned it on. “I don’t know exactly, I wasn’t paying any attention, but it will be on if we watch long enough. You really shouldn’t worry about it, Bennis, you know you shouldn’t. She’s just a—gnat. You’ve dealt with gnats before. You always win.”

  The television was turned to ABC, which seemed to be showing some tabloid talk show about girls who had decided to get pregnant at twelve so that they’d have somebody to love. Bennis reached into the closest of the cookie tins and found a heap of loukoumia.

  Donna was right, of course, Bennis thought. Edith Lawton was a gnat, and there was no reason for her to spend her time worrying about her. In the course of her long career, Bennis had run into a dozen such gnats, every one of them desperate “to be a writer,” every one of them as self-destructive as hell. If they got a break, they sabotaged it. Once they sabotaged it, they went looking for someone to blame for their failure, and Bennis was always not only handy, but an easy target, the one person they could not help but bitterly resent. Or something. Donna had thrown the pages of the fax on the table. Bennis picked them up and looked through them. The tissue-thin paper had begun to crinkle. The printing had begun to smear.

  It was easy to say that it had happened before and it would happen again and she should not worry about it, but she was herself, and she worried about everything. Mostly she worried that someday she would not be able to stand it anymore. She would break, and in breaking she would become somebody else, the very bitch people like Edith Lawton wanted her to be, something cold, like a block of ice. Sometimes she felt as if she were freezing to death even now.