by Jane Haddam
Anne Marie, on the other hand, could spend the next fifty years of her life in a maximum security prison and never be anything but what she was: a Main Line society lady; a volunteer for all things charitable; a devotee of the arts. Her body under the shapeless prison shift was thin and hard and wired strong. Her hair was carefully cut and curled back away from her face. Sometime not too far in the past, it had been dyed, and dyed well.
Henry Lord and Ed Nagelman left the room. So did the two armed men who had brought Anne Marie in. Gregor supposed they had searched her thoroughly before they had ever allowed her to leave her cell, but he wasn’t actively worried about it. He could imagine Anne Marie Hannaford doing a lot of things, but pulling a gun on him and trying to bull through an escape were not two of them.
He had stood, instinctively, as she walked in. Now he sat down as she did, stretching his legs out under the table a little ways. She sat with her legs crossed carefully at the ankles, the way girls were once taught to do at dancing classes, in the days when crossing legs at the knees was a signal that a girl was “fast.”
“Well,” he said, when it became clear she didn’t intend to say anything until he did. “I’m here. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other.”
“Since the trial,” Anne Marie said.
“That’s right. Since the trial. You asked me to come, Miss Hannaford. I came. It’s Bennis who wants to come.”
Anne Marie looked away. It was, Gregor thought, the first time she had blinked since she had come into the room. Then he realized that that couldn’t be right. She must have blinked a dozen times. It only seemed as if her eyes were propped wide open, as if they were arc lights on an empty roadway.
She stood up and rubbed her arms, seeming annoyed. “I know Bennis wants to see me. I don’t want to see Bennis. What would be the point of my seeing Bennis?”
“She’s your sister.”
“Myra was my sister. Emma was my sister. What difference does it make? I did see her once, you know, at a distance. At the funeral.”
“Funeral?”
“Our mother’s funeral,” Anne Marie said. “They let me attend. Sent me out there with enough of an armed guard to secure Panama City. I could have talked to her then, I suppose. I didn’t want to.”
“I think,” Gregor said, “that she feels that, under the circumstances, it would be a way to say good-bye, or to make amends—”
“Or to feel sorry for me, because that’s what she’s always felt for me. Sorry. I was a good person to feel sorry for. When we were young, she felt sorry for me because she was popular and I was not. When we were older, she felt sorry for me because she was pretty and I was not. When we were older still, she felt sorry for me because I was stuck taking care of our mother and she was making herself famous. Except, of course, that I didn’t feel stuck. I would have done that forever, if my father hadn’t been a son of a bitch. Did you know I could use words like that? Son of a bitch.”
“Everybody can use words like that,” Gregor said.
Anne Marie nodded. “I suppose so, yes. But I’m glad it’s over, if you want to know the truth. I know there won’t be a stay of execution this time. Our bloody-minded governor wouldn’t allow it. It means I don’t have to go on pretending anymore. Pretending I’m sorry. Because I’m not sorry. Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe if you tell Bennis that, she won’t want to come.”
“She’ll want to come.”
Anne Marie sat down again. “Tell her to come for the execution. They issue invitations. It has to be witnessed. Teddy is coming for the execution, did you know that? It’s just like Teddy, wanting to see somebody dead.”
This, Gregor thought, was the stupidest situation he had ever been in in his life, and he had spent some time escorting vice presidents of the United States to official FBI functions. He had no idea why Anne Marie had wanted to see him, but she didn’t have anything of interest to say, and so far she hadn’t said anything he wanted to hear. He ought to get up and walk out on her. It would be better for Bennis if Bennis didn’t get a chance to talk to her. It would be better for him if he could get past this feeling that he had no right to make these kinds of decisions for anybody but himself.
“Want to leave?” Anne Marie asked him.
“Very much,” he told her.
“Why don’t you?”
“Because your sister Bennis wants very much to talk to you before you die. And I am trying to make that happen for her.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“Yes.”
“How convenient. But then, Bennis always had half a dozen men in love with her. She was that kind of woman. Does she see only you or does she still sleep around?”
“Your brother Christopher,” Gregor said carefully, “is coming up to be with Bennis during the day you are to be executed. He won’t watch the execution, either. But he will come to keep Bennis company.”
“I think you ought to be very sure what your arrangement is, because she does sleep around. She always did. And she always had such interesting people to sleep around with. Writers. Artists. Rock stars. Did you know about the rock star?”
“I know that I don’t intend to engage in a conversation about Bennis’s sex life with you.”
“Well, that’s typical, too, isn’t it?” Anne Marie laughed. “When we were growing up, we were taught that bad girls do and good girls don’t, but it was a lie, like all the rest of it was a lie. Some girls are good even when they do and some are bad even when they don’t and you’re born with that. It’s all luck. Bennis got lucky, and I did not.”
“Do you really think that your decision to kill three people was a matter of luck?”
“I think you ought to tell Bennis, for me, that she’s not wanted here. Christopher isn’t wanted here. Even Teddy and Bobby aren’t wanted here, and I have a lot less to hold against them. Tell Bennis I don’t want her here to gloat.”
“Bennis doesn’t want to gloat. You know she doesn’t want to gloat.”
Anne Marie stood up. “Tell her from me that I’m glad I did it. I’m glad about Myra. I’m glad about Emma. I’m glad about our father. I’m only sorry I couldn’t finish the job. If they had ever let me out of here, I would have tried. Now call them back. If I go to the door, they’ll panic.”
“Are you sure this is it? Once I leave, I won’t come back. If you want to see her, tell me now.”
“I don’t want to see her. And if I change my mind, they’ll bend over backwards to make it happen. You know they will. They don’t want to get charged with brutality or cruelty or any of those other things the protesters are always screaming at them. Are there going to be protesters at my execution?”
“Protesters and cheerleaders, from what I gather. The protesters are from something called the Seamless Garment Network.”
“Excellent. Nuns. When I was growing up on the Main Line, nobody would admit to being Catholic. Being Catholic was being Irish. It was being—low-rent. Are you going to get me out of here?”
Gregor stood up and went to the door. It had a window in it, and he knocked on that until the guard outside understood what he wanted. Then he stepped back, and the guard came in. Anne Marie stood up.
“It was pleasant to have spoken to you, Mr. Demarkian. Give Bennis my message. Give her all of it. I don’t want to have to hear from her again.”
Out in the hall, Ed Nagelman came up behind the two guards who were coming to get Anne Marie. He stood back politely, because the guards’ work would always come first. It was the most dangerous. Anne Marie, though, was not dangerous in that way, and she went out without a protest, her head held up and back as if she were entering a ballroom.
Ed hurried into the conference room. “That was lucky. I was afraid I’d have to interrupt your talk. There’s a call for you at the security desk.”
“A call for me here? From whom?”
“A Mr. John Henry Newman Jackman, who identified himself as th
e deputy commissioner of police for the city of Philadelphia. I looked him up. There is such a person, and his caller ID matched the phone number we’ve got for him. He says it’s serious. And urgent. He sounded”—Ed Nagelman spread his hand—“highly agitated.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “I wonder what could be urgent.”
“I did, too, but all he told me was to tell you that it had happened again, and this time all bets were off, because it was Father Healy. I don’t like to make guesses about things like this, but I assumed it had something to do with the murder you were looking into. Wasn’t there a Father Healy involved in that murder you were looking into?”
Gregor didn’t answer him. He was half running down the hall in the direction of the security desk, and he thought he was having a heart attack.
PART THREE
Organized religion is a crutch for weak-minded people.
—JESSE VENTURA, GOVERNOR OF MINNESOTA
ONE
1
It was too long a drive. Gregor knew that by the time he got to St. Anselm’s, the worst of the emergency would be over. The police would have the scene taped off. The witnesses would have been rounded up and shunted off to the sidelines somewhere to talk to uniformed officers whose only purpose would be to record whatever they said on steno pads. Of course, there was another possibility, and that was that Roy Phipps had taken to the streets again with his little band of followers—but nothing like that was coming over the radio on the sporadic news broadcasts they were able to pick up as they wound through the hills. It was funny how, living in Philadelphia, Gregor often forgot that Pennsylvania was a mountain state. They were real mountains, too, not as high or as intimidating as the Rockies, and not as new, but not “hills” the way any sane person thought of “hills.” Most of them were rounded at the top and had vegetation all the way up, but for roads people had found it easier to go straight through the middle of them rather than over and around them, and Gregor and Henry seemed to keep getting caught in tunnels. They couldn’t hear anything in tunnels. They couldn’t even hear each other.
Eventually, the mountains and the tunnels were behind them, and the exits on the turnpike were closer together than every fifty-six miles. Gregor began to relax. The worst of his subconscious fears—that they would never be able to find their way back at all—finally appeared on the surface of his mind and made him feel embarrassed. He played with the radio dial until he got what sounded like talking heads and found that he had hit on a talk show instead of a news broadcast. The talk show was called Feels Good.
“Today,” the talk show’s hostess said brightly, “we’re discussing role reversals. Can women reclaim their power by using prosthetic dildos to show the men in their lives what it really feels like to be a woman?”
“Jesus Christ,” Henry said.
“What’s a prosthetic dildo?” Gregor said.
Henry sighed. “It’s a dildo. You know, a plastic version of a man’s penis. It comes on a strap thing so that you can buckle it on and … and … oh, hell—”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“That’s the city,” Henry said.
What he really meant was that that was the suburbs. They had to go through several towns on the Main Line before they reached Philadelphia itself. The traffic was getting thicker by the mile. The drivers were getting angrier. Gregor picked up a real news station.
“There is no word at this time who is dead at St. Anselm’s Church, or what weapon was used in the killing,” the announcer said. It was another woman. She was just as sprightly as the woman who had been talking about dildos. “We do have word that the police have cordoned off the entire block, including the cross streets, to prevent a recurrence of the riot that occurred there earlier in the week—”
Gregor turned the sound down. “That isn’t very helpful.”
“It tells us that Roy isn’t burning down the barn.”
“I suppose.”
“That’s the exit,” Henry said.
Gregor looked up and saw that it was true. He’d lost a block of time, playing with the radio, thinking about nothing. Now he tried to pay attention as Henry shot off the turnpike and onto the complicated series of ramps and overpasses that would land them in city traffic. Gregor had actually learned to drive, once, when he was about thirty years old, because the Bureau had required it, but he had never gotten behind a wheel if he could avoid it, and most of the time he had been able to avoid it. The truth was, he was bad. Most people who had driven with him would just as soon do the driving themselves. Eventually, he had ended up behind a desk in the District of Columbia, and there had been no point at all in having a car. It had been years since he let his last driver’s license lapse. He was almost positive he couldn’t pass a driving test if he were given one.
Henry had actually made it onto a city street. Gregor saw small grocery stores, and butcher shops, and the kind of store that sold newspapers and candy. Gregor had never understood how those stores made enough money to stay in business. Henry turned a corner and then another corner and then another. Neighborhoods got good and bad in succession, without any pattern that Gregor could see. Then there were police cars and pulsing red-and-blue lights, and Henry pulled over.
“Go,” he said. “They won’t let me in in any case.”
“You’re a judge.”
“I’d have to create a fuss, and I don’t want to. Go. Call me up later and let me know what happened.”
Gregor got out of the car and looked around. He could, he thought, have gotten a police escort to bring him up here—if he’d called Jackman and asked for one, he would have gotten it—but it hadn’t even occurred to him, and it didn’t matter now. He was at the end of the block on the cross street. At the other end, St. Anselm’s sat on the corner, its side to this street. There was a small knot of people pressing up against the barriers. Most of them seemed to be homeless people, winos and bag ladies, not so much curious as confused.
Gregor pushed through them to the uniformed officer at the gate. The uniformed officer was very young, and he looked scared to death.
“Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said. “Talk to Detective Mansfield or Detective Emiliani. They called for me.”
“Nobody can pass the barrier,” the uniformed officer said. Gregor thought for a moment of what he could do—go down a few blocks and use a pay phone to get Jackman to get Mansfield to come out and get him—but all the alternatives meant getting this young man in trouble, and that wasn’t what he was here for.
“Look,” he said. “It won’t kill you to get on that walkie-talkie and ask Detective Mansfield and Detective Emiliani if they’re looking for a man named Gregor Demarkian. If the answer is no, you’ll be in no different a position than you are now.”
The young man in the uniform hesitated. Then he nodded a little, said “just a minute,” and turned his back to the crowd. Gregor watched him punch in a code, talk into the receiver, and then hesitate again. He turned around and looked Gregor up and down. He went back to talking into the walkie-talkie. Then he was done. He put the walkie-talkie into a little holster arrangement at his belt and came back to the barrier.
“You do,” he said.
“I do what?” Gregor asked.
“Look like a sort of out-of-shape Harrison Ford. You ought to think about using some weights, Mr. Demarkian. Weight training can change your life.”
Gregor was of the opinion that his life had already been changed as much and as often as he wanted it to be. He slipped through the gap in the barrier that the uniformed officer made for him. The crowd was nonexistent on the other side, and the light was getting to be that way. Sometime, in all the running around, while he hadn’t been noticing, it had started to become night. Why was it, he wondered, that everything that happened on this block seemed to happen in the dark?
When he got up close to the side of St. Anselm’s, there was light again, coming across the parking lot from the courtyard. It was artificial light, but there was a lo
t of it, training on a building on the far side of the space that Gregor was sure he remembered as the rectory. He tried to get through the wrought-iron gate and couldn’t find a way. He walked all the way to the entrance to the parking lot and went in there. There was another uniformed officer stationed there, but this one seemed to recognize him. He even nodded.
Gregor crossed the parking lot and walked onto the frozen ground of the courtyard without worrying about finding the pathways. The ruts in the ground stabbed against the slick leather of his shoes and hurt his feet. The rectory door was open, propped back by something he couldn’t pick out in the shadows. Policemen were walking in and out. None of them seemed to be carrying anything. No ambulance was parked in the parking lot.
Gregor got to the rectory door and introduced himself to the officer stationed there. The officer nodded slightly and called up the stairs for Mansfield.
“It’s all over but the shouting,” he said apologetically. “They took the body out half an hour ago. Had to. We had hysterical nuns all over the place.”
“We had one hysterical nun all over the place,” Garry Mansfield said as he came down the stairs from the second floor. “Hello, Mr. Demarkian. You should come up and see the scene. Not that it means anything. It’s just like the last one. No telling where he got the stuff or when he ate it, except, you know, that arsenic kicks in pretty soon so he’d have to have eaten it pretty soon. No vomit anywhere but in his bedroom. Lou Emiliani is so frustrated, he’s threatening people with death.”
“Do you know when he died?” Gregor asked.
Garry Mansfield was hurrying back up the rectory’s stairs. Gregor was hurrying behind him, except that he didn’t find it possible any longer to really hurry up stairs. Maybe the uniformed officer had had a point with that business about weight training.
