by Jane Haddam
He grabbed Javier’s hand and shuffled the three of them off down the hall. Bennis watched Donna watch them go, a peculiar look on her face.
Donna turned back to the table. “It’s me, of course,” she said. “Charlie’s really too big for that high chair now, or any high chair. She’s too big to be carried everywhere, too. And she doesn’t like it. She’s very independent.”
“She’s very beautiful,” Bennis said. “Look, Donna, you know I love you more than I ever loved any of my own sisters. And I was very happy when you came back. But maybe you shouldn’t have.”
Donna had a cup of coffee in front of her. She tasted it and made a face. “He isn’t even Armenian,” she said. “I kept thinking that this isn’t my home. Okay, I didn’t grow up here. I grew up in the suburbs. But I came here as soon as I was finished with college. And I had Tommy here. And for God’s sake, Bennis, I married Russ here, right in Father Tibor’s church. I keep asking myself why I have to lose my home because Russ turned out to be—turned out to be—”
“Crazy?”
“Is that what he is?” Donna asked. “He still calls here, you know. I never answer the phone straight out. I let him leave messages on the machine. Maybe I should get rid of the machine, but if I did, one day I’d pick up and there he’d be.”
“You could—”
“I know. Tommy told me that, too. And Tibor. And Gregor. I could talk to the prison and they’d forbid him from making the calls. You know what the funny thing is? I think if I just told him, straight out, he’d stop making the calls all on his own. This whole thing is so odd. He’s so different, but in a lot of ways he’s so much the same. And he’s not a bully. And he’s not a stalker. And he always takes no for an answer.”
“Do you want to hear from him?” Bennis asked. “Gregor could probably arrange something.”
“I want to hear something else from him,” Donna said. “It’s always the same thing, now. It has been, ever since—ever since he shot Gregor in the face. It probably was before that, but I don’t think he used to talk about it. At least he didn’t talk about it all the time.”
“About how we’re about to be in a civil war,” Bennis said.
“The whole world is coming apart and we’re going to start shooting at each other in the streets. The whole thing is going to collapse into violence and there’s going to be blood everywhere and we have to protect ourselves. We have to get together as many resources as possible and hide ourselves because when it starts they’ll come after the women first, me, and—and Charlie. They’ll do things to Charlie I can’t even say out loud, but he says them—”
“Donna.”
“I know,” Donna said. “I know. I think that what keeps me going, the reason I don’t cut off contact, is that I’m pretty sure he means it. He isn’t putting on an act. He really believes all these things he’s saying. And he’s scared to death. It’s like one day he looked up and all the world was ugly and violent and mean. All the people except us were evil and—I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. It’s like reality just morphed around him and now he’s living in a world I don’t recognize.”
“And Tommy?”
Donna shrugged. “Tommy says he wishes I’d decorated the house for Christmas. He doesn’t mean inside, you know. We do have a little tree up and we did stockings and the rest of it last week. I just couldn’t get all that enthusiastic. No, he meant the house. The outside of the house.”
“We all miss it,” Bennis said. “You do know that, right? It used to be one of the hallmarks of Cavanaugh Street.”
“Bennis, I just can’t.”
“I know,” Bennis said. “We all understand. I’m sure Tommy understands, too.”
“I wish I understood,” Donna said. “I don’t think Cavanaugh Street is what Russ keeps describing the world as. I don’t think it ever was that way and I don’t think it is that way now. But it’s the oddest thing. Sometimes when I’m sitting by myself in the living room, it feels to me as if the world really is like that, right across the street from us, right around the corner. Maybe Russ is crazy, but maybe he isn’t. Maybe he sees things I don’t. That we don’t. Maybe the world out there really is getting to be what he says it is. Then I think that if I decorate the house, if I wrap the place up in silver tinfoil and put bows on it, it would be like a beacon. All those people out there would see it. And then—”
“Donna.”
“I know,” Donna said again. She began to look through the packages on the table, putting aside each one old Mrs. Ohanian had marked with a “D”: the loukoumia; two kinds of cheese; spice packs; mint leaves; a big pack of lamb hunks for stew.
“I start cooking sometimes and I stop in the middle of it and I can’t understand why I’m doing it,” Donna said. “We have to eat, but it seems too much, making things, using the recipes I got from the Very Old Ladies. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore, putting in the effort to make us a family.”
“Well, if you don’t want to make the effort, come over to our house next week, after school starts,” Bennis said. “I’ve got Javier, and I’m putting in the effort. I’m just not very good at it, and you know how I cook. I tried yaprak sarma right before Christmas, and Gregor thought I was trying to poison him. But I want to put together a dinner thing, with lots of people from the neighborhood, a sort of coming out party for Javier as he starts school. It’s too bad we don’t have much in the way of kids that age around here now.”
“It’s New Year’s Eve in three days,” Donna said. “It hardly seems possible.”
To Bennis, Donna hardly seemed possible, but everything she could think of to do about it seemed even less possible, and on this day on Cavanaugh Street, nothing was getting fixed.
3
The best thing about upper management was that, if you told them something was going wrong with the tech, they believed you. They didn’t know what you were talking about. They didn’t want to know what you were talking about. They assumed that all the computers in the world were both zombies and maniacs, busily humming along making all life miserable.
It wasn’t hard to get out from under the mess that had been caused by that unpaid bill. It wasn’t even hard to fix the system to the point where the accounts were no longer sending off warning signals. Middle management wasn’t much more comfortable with the tech than upper management was, and Clare McAfee knew better than to actually talk to any of the techies who knew anything. A few of the lower-level techies knew less than she did. They were okay.
Clare herself was not okay. The day of putting out fires had been miserable, and she had spent her evening almost haunted by her memories of home. Not that Lithuania had ever felt like home to her when she was living there. Home should be a comfortable place, and a refuge. At best, Lithuania had been familiar. It was occupied territory, run by a foreign power, hostile to its own history. There were beautiful buildings in her country, but she was never allowed to go into any of them. She lived with her parents in a big cement-block building in a bigger collection of cement-block buildings. She went to school in another cement-block building. She looked at pictures of Stalin and statues of Lenin and tried to memorize tables of mathematical facts so that she could pass her examinations and go on to another cement-block building that would not be a cement-block building full of factory work. She did what she could to put one foot in front of the other. She did what she could to wait it out.
Of course, the United States didn’t feel like home to Clare, either. She’d been taught a formal English based on British school standards. Nothing was formal here. She had learned elaborate rituals of politeness that had no place in Philadelphia and probably had even less place in the smaller towns and cities outside it. People thought she was “cute.”
Then there was the money. She hadn’t realized what it would mean that you were expected to do for yourself, no matter what happened. You didn’t have to be a political liability to end up on the street here.
Clare wasn’t really worried a
bout ending up on the street. She wasn’t even worried about going to jail, although she was sure she could be sentenced to decades for all her side businesses. What bothered her was the possibility that she could be deported. She’d looked it up when she started. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the American government had stripped a whole little cabal of people of their citizenship and sent them back to their home countries—Italian mobsters and members of the Mafia, mostly. Then they had stopped doing that and hadn’t done it since. Now there was this latest administration. Nobody knew what was coming next.
Everybody at the bank who did direct business with Cary Alder had Aldergold. The bank’s top brass was not entirely comfortable with this, but it wasn’t unusual for the management of international banks to have social dealings with their biggest customers. By now, nobody thought it was suspicious that Clare would have lunch with Cary Alder in one of Cary Alder’s special places. It could look suspicious eventually if she wasn’t careful.
Clare went to the bar at the Alder Palace. It was on the very top of the building, encased in darkened glass. It had a waterfall and a lagoon. It had taken Clare most of the morning to find out that this was where he would be, and to convince him to sit still until she got there.
She handed a piece of Aldergold to the man at the desk when she walked in. He called another man, who walked her across the wide room to the booth where Cary was sitting. The place was nearly empty. All the places that required Aldergold were always nearly empty. That was part of the point. There were no crowds. There was no waiting. There was no crush. There were just these spaces that belonged only to those of our own.
Cary looked up when Clare came to the booth. He looked at the man who had brought her and said, “The young lady is going to want a Bloody Mary.” Then he looked at Clare and said, “You should sit down. You sounded frantic on the phone.”
He did not stand up. Clare let it go. She sat down on the other side of the booth and folded her hands on its polished wood surface. A moment later, a Bloody Mary arrived, as if out of nowhere.
“It can’t be a coincidence,” Clare said. “You can’t just be accidentally hiring only men.”
“What of it?”
“It’s illegal in this country, isn’t it? They taught us that when I first came to the bank. You are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex.”
“You didn’t come here to talk to me about discrimination on the basis of sex.”
“I came here to try to pound some sense into your head,” Clare said. “You can’t do what you just did, Cary. We can set things up fifteen different ways and we can both make a lot of money, but the requirement is that you fulfill your part of the bargain. There can’t be any red flags. And you can’t disappear into thin air when there are red flags. Where have you been for the last twenty-four hours?”
“Believe it or not, I’ve been home.”
“Not answering the phone,” Clare said. “Do you want to know how many times I called? The mess at the bank would have been bad enough on its own, but then I started watching the news and looking at the websites and what did I see? That woman. The one you said you’d taken care of.”
“I know.”
“So now I’ve got a mess at the bank and a murder investigation. The police in this country are not idiots. And they’re thorough. And now they say they’ve brought in that man, that Gregor Demarkian. God only knows where this is about to get to.”
Cary Alder shifted suddenly in his seat. “She’s not dead,” he said.
“Somebody’s dead,” Clare said. “It was on the news.”
“She’s only in the hospital. She’s in a coma.”
“Cary, what are you doing? You’re acting drugged. I almost had to invent an entire computer-hacking conspiracy to get myself out of that mess. And you. I was getting you out of it, too. Don’t think if this thing comes apart I’m going to sit tight with my mouth shut. If something is going wrong here, if we need to reconsider our positions and regroup, you’d better tell me now. The more time I have to cover our asses, the more likely I’ll be able to cover our asses. Don’t put me in a position where I’m scrambling to get out from under the Feds.”
“Okay.”
“Cary.”
“I already arranged for the partial payment this morning. It should have been through to your desk before you came over here.”
“The whole partial payment.”
“All of it.”
“Right now.”
“Already taken care of.”
Clare felt as if she were about to throw up. The room around her was cavernous but also too close. She had spent the last couple of days trying to talk herself out of the obvious. There was exactly one thing that could kill the two of them absolutely, without a hope in hell of either of them being able to dig their way out.
“Just tell me one thing,” she said. “Just tell me you haven’t run out of money.”
FIVE
1
The call from John Jackman came while Gregor was sitting in the squad room, drinking bad coffee with Horowitz and Morabito and watching the avalanche of information come pouring over their heads like snow in a movie about a Swiss disaster. It would have been helpful if some of this information had been organized. It would have been more than helpful if any of this information had been sorted. Worse yet, the forensics were going to “take time,” as usual. He could stare at that tire iron for six months and know in his heart it had been used to smash Marta Warkowski over the head. He couldn’t do anything about it until people in lab coats checked all the blood and hair.
There was one thing Gregor could do, and he did it.
“You need to do a house by house, lot by lot, block by block in a radius of at least six blocks of the place we found this thing,” he told Morabito and Horowitz. He felt a little like an idiot. Usually by the time he was called in to consult on a case, the police were well past this stage of the investigation. All he had to worry about were the reports they’d already filed.
“There’s no way on earth this guy went driving around the city with his rear doors flapping in the wind without getting noticed,” Gregor said. “There had to be a place to park that van close to where Marta Warkowski was dropped. Someplace it could be parked, out of sight, and left with some security.”
“It could just have been some kind of vacant lot,” Horowitz said. “There aren’t a lot of garages and things out there.”
“A vacant lot would be too open,” Gregor said. “If it’s just sitting where anybody could see it, either the police would have stumbled over it or it would have been stolen. There has to be something else. An alley we’ve overlooked. Maybe one of those weird little places some people put their garbage before they put it out.”
“It won’t tell us who the van belonged to,” Morabito said. “New Jersey plates.”
Gregor’s phone went off. He looked at it to see John Jackman on the caller ID. John didn’t show up as himself, but as “Lamb Chop,” the old puppet from the Shari Lewis show. Gregor didn’t want to think about it.
Gregor picked up. “Give me a second,” he said. “I’ll be right with you.” He looked at Morabito and Horowitz. “Private call.”
One of the policewomen motioned to him. He followed her out of the squad room and across the hall. There was a small interview room. None of the chairs looked comfortable.
“That is two-way glass,” she said, pointing to the window along one wall, “but nobody’s looking. You should be all right here.”
“Thanks.” Gregor went back to Lamb Chop. “You’ve got spectacular timing, John. This whole thing has blown completely up.”
“I’ve been hearing about it,” John said. “I take it you now have an actual murder on your hands.”
“Is there a point to this? We’re waiting for forensics to bring back a ton of information it’s going to take them a week to get to. We’ve got a body in the morgue with the back of its head blown off. I’ve got a bunch of leads on Marta Warkowski fro
m the hospital I haven’t been able to look into yet. This entire mess has to be connected somehow and I don’t know how as yet. I don’t know what you expect me to be doing here.”
John cleared his throat. “There are—things happening. On the Cary Alder front.”
If Gregor Demarkian had ever smoked cigarettes, he would have smoked one now. “What kind of things happening?”
“The FBI and the SEC are going to be ready to move on the bank fraud within the next week. They’d rather do it sooner. We’d rather get some handle on the other thing first. Did you have a chance to look at the material on the other thing?”
“I looked at it.”
“And?”
“And what, John? I’m not a forensic accountant. At least not anymore. You’ve had forensic accountants looking at that material for months. At the raw material, not just the summaries. You know what you’re looking at. I know what you’re looking at. I can’t tell you any more than they have. Accept the evidence of your own eyes and get on with it.”
“A coyote operation,” John said cautiously.
“A coyote operation,” Gregor agreed. “Assuming the information you provided me with is complete and without bias, there’s no other possible interpretation. He’s moving people from south of the border all the way up here, or at least some of them. My guess is that if you could look hard enough, you’d find that he’s staffing almost all his properties with illegal immigrants. John, this isn’t even all that odd. A lot of these guys do it. It looks like Alder is doing a lot of it personally, and most of them don’t expose themselves that way, but what the hell. He’s supposed to be something of a nut anyway. He’s bringing them into the country. He’s probably putting them to work.”
“A modern form of slavery,” John said. “They can’t leave. They can’t control their employment. Or their living conditions.”
