Skeleton Key (44 page)

“Look,” Donna said now. “We've caused a relapse.”

“We would not cause a relapse if you would not lecture
her about cancer,” Tibor said. “It does nobody any good at this point to jump to conclusions.”

Bennis turned over on her back again. Then she sat up again. It made her feel dizzy.

“Listen,” she said. “I want the two of you to get out of here. And then I want to see Lida.”

“Of course,” Donna said quickly. “We're making you exhausted. We'll send Lida and Hannah in and—”

“No. Just Lida. I'll talk to Hannah later. Maybe. If I'm up to it.”

“Hannah is going to be very upset about it,” Donna said dubiously. “Are you sure you want to, well, you know—”

“I need to talk to Lida,” Bennis insisted.

Tibor and Donna looked at each other. Bennis wished they weren't behaving so much as if they were granting her her last wish. Then they each leaned over the bed in turn and kissed her on the forehead.

“Just a moment,” Tibor promised. “We will send Mrs. Arkmanian down to talk to you.”

Bennis took the time just after they left to rearrange the pillows so that she could sit up better. Then she remembered something she had forgotten about hospital beds and went looking for a button. She found it on a sort of remote-control thing that wasn't really remote, since it was hooked into a wire. She couldn't think what to call it. She pushed the button and the top half of the bed began moving upward.

Lida came in just as Bennis found a bed position she liked. Lida Kazanjian Arkmanian had been the prettiest girl in Gregor Demarkian's grammar school class, and she was still a remarkable-looking woman, with high cheekbones and good hair. She also had a truly remarkable three-quarter-length chinchilla coat.

“I wish I had that,” Bennis said, as soon as Lida came in. “I'd use it as a blanket.”

Lida shrugged off the coat and spread it out over Bennis on the bed. “This should be better than what they give you here. And later this afternoon, maybe I'll bring you some
real blankets and some food. Will they let me bring you food?”

“Absolutely. I can eat anything. I'm supposed to eat anything. It was just last night and this morning you know, when they were leading up to the biopsy.”

“Yes,” Lida said.

Bennis hunkered down under the chinchilla coat. “Look,” she said, “I don't mean to pry or anything, but are you still in contact with my brother Chris?”

Lida cleared her throat. “Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact, I am. Not quite in the same sort of contact I once was, if you understand—I don't know, Bennis, but I think I'm getting old—but we still talk at least once a week.”

“Good. Because Chris and I hardly talk at all, and I lost his new address after he moved last spring, and now I want to get in touch with him. Do you think you could get in touch with him for me? Do you think you could tell him I want to talk to him?”

“Of course I can, Bennis. I can do that tonight Do you want him to fly out here? Do you want him to be with you?”

“No, that's not necessary, really. I just want to talk to him. I can't tell Gregor everything, after all. Sometimes I try, and he just doesn't get it.”

“None of them get it, Bennis. At your age, you ought to know that. Some of them are very sweet, of course, but none of them get it.”

“No, I guess they don't. But I want to talk to Chris anyway. Okay?”

“Of course.”

“Now, do you think you could do me a bigger favor and tell the assembled horde out there that I'm not up to seeing any more visitors? Just tell Hannah I fell asleep or something, will you? I'll make it up to her later.”

“She'll be very upset.”

“I know she will. But I just—can't, if you know what I mean. I just can't”

“It will be all right, Bennis. We'll work something out. And maybe you should sleep.”

“I will sleep. They'll come in here in about half an hour and fill me full of Demerol. I won't be able to help but sleep.”

“That wasn't what I meant.”

“I know.”

“I will be going now,” Lida said. “Do you want to keep the coat?”

“Somebody would steal it.”

“Yes.”

Lida picked up the coat and put it around her shoulders. Then she leaned over and kissed Bennis on the forehead, too. Bennis couldn't remember a time in her adulthood when so many people had kissed her on the forehead.

As soon as Lida was out of the room, Bennis put the bed back down flat and turned over on her side.

If it really was cancer, she had no idea of what she was going to do.

They impounded the car.

That, and picking up Faye Dallmer's Jeep, was all they could think of to do. The financial records would be on their way as soon as all the authorizations were in and the bankers felt protected from any possible future lawsuits. Gregor Demarkian did not think there was much chance that what he believed would be there would not be there. After all, nobody takes a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in cash and just leaves it lying around the house. Something has to be done with money of that kind. Someplace has to be found to put it. Even in the event of the nearly unthinkable—that the check had been cashed and the cash put into a safety deposit box, say—there would be some record of the check
being
cashed. No bank would ever have handed over the money without it.

The question was—was it going to be enough? That was the difficulty with well-heeled, well-educated perpetrators. If they kept their heads, they could get away with almost anything. Evidence was such a tricky thing. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” was even trickier. And then there was the obvious, well known to every law enforcement officer and every district attorney: juries hated to convict personable, successful, well-mannered white people. Gregor had seen it a hundred times, in cases he had been personally involved in and in cases he had only followed in the newspapers. Rapes so egregious they left the victims scarred for life. Assaults so violent the victim required decades of plastic surgery before he would be whole again. Even murders, done carefully, so that the evidence was obvious only to those people who had to deal with evidence all the time. Sometimes, Gregor thought that juries these days were
made up of people who had watched entirely too many episodes of
The Fugitive.

In the long late afternoon, sitting in the conference room at the Washington Police Department, Gregor watched what evidence they had piling up. There was, he knew, also the status differential. In general, juries tended to find the lives of men more important than the lives of women—where they might convict a woman of murdering a man, the same evidence would be deemed insufficient to convict a man of murdering a woman. This was also the case for blacks and whites, and for rich people and poor people. It was as if crime were being judged on a discount scale, or maybe as if the days of aristocracy had never ended. On the other hand, it didn't really do to be too rich, or too young, or too arrogant. Juries were not made up of members of the Swamp Tree Country Club. The question in this case was how a jury would gauge the life of Kayla Anson. Zara Anne Moss would be too kooky. Margaret Anson would be too old and too easily portrayed as a bitch. It was Kayla Anson whose death a jury might be willing to avenge, and then mostly because they would see her as assailed on every side, a victim of forces that saw her less as a person than as a fountain of money. Poor little rich girl. Cinderella in a golden tower. Gregor didn't understand why people couldn't see things clearly, and understand that murder was always wrong, even if the person who had been murdered was better off dead.

It was about quarter to five when he decided that he couldn't wait any longer. He had already tried to call Cavanaugh Street four times, and on the two occasions when he'd found somebody to talk to, their answers had been vague and unsatisfactory. He was worried as hell, and the more he tried to concentrate on the case, the more worried he got. Bennis had gone to the doctor's. That was last night sometime. After she'd gone to the doctor's, though, he had no idea what had happened to her. She hadn't gone home. He'd called her apartment more times than he could count. He'd called his own apartment half a dozen times, in case
she'd decided to use it instead. She liked some of the games she had given him for his computer, that she did not have for her own. He'd called Donna Moradanyan Donahue, too, but that had elicited nothing but the information that she still didn't know what to do about Tommy's natural father. He had called Father Tibor Kasparian, but Tibor just kept lapsing into Armenian and Latin. He knew without a doubt that they were all keeping something from him. He didn't for a moment like the ideas he'd had for what it might be.

“The problem,” Mark Cashman said, when Gregor had made his suggestion, “is that we're not really clear on location. It's going into Friday night—”

“I know,” Gregor said. “Try that country club. The Swamp Tree. That seems like a good bet for Friday night. Under the circumstances.”

“Right,” Stacey Spratz says.

“And if I'm right, make sure you do something to hold the situation steady. Enlist the aid of the club manager, what's his name, Mortimer—”

“It's the weekend. It would be the assistant club manager, Ruth Grandmere,” Mark Cashman said.

“Even better. But we've got to do something.”

Stacey and Mark looked at each other. They thought they ought to do something, too, but Gregor knew that this was not the sort of thing they thought they ought to be doing. They wanted to go into someplace or the other with their guns drawn and a SWAT team at their backs, although Gregor doubted there was a SWAT team in all of the Northwest Hills. In Waterbury, maybe, although Waterbury didn't look like it would be able to afford one. Why was he thinking about SWAT teams?

All the explanations he could imagine for Bennis's sudden disappearance were bad. She had had an accident and was lying in the hospital somewhere—although Tibor and Donna had both been adamant that there had been no accident. She had decided that the relationship wasn't working out and had gone off somewhere to think. She had met up with an old lover and not been able to resist a nostalgic
fling. On second thought, that last one didn't make much sense. Bennis was never on good terms with the lovers she left, and she was always the one who left. Bennis's forte for the last four or five years, before they'd started this up together, had been a form of emotional hit-and-run.

Mark Cashman came back and gave him the thumbs-up. “At the country club,” he said. “You want us to drive you out there?”

“You want us to wire you?” Stacey asked helpfully. “Then we'd be able to hear everything the two of you said and maybe—”

“Get the case thrown out of court over illegal evidence,” Mark Cashman finished.

Gregor got up. The conference table was littered with Styrofoam coffee cups and the wrappers from dozens of packages of junk food. Hostess cupcakes. Twinkies. Doritos chips. Potato chips. Slim Jims. Gregor had actually eaten a Slim Jim. It had been as tough and unyielding as one of the plastic dog chew toys Sheila Kashinian kept for her Pekingese. He was going to have to get back to Cavanaugh Street just to make sure he didn't starve to death.

He dug his notes out from underneath the debris, and headed out to the car with Stacey and Mark.

The Swamp Tree Country Club looked much better at night than it did in the day. It looked bigger, for one thing, because the lights that came from inside it seemed to stretch in two endless lines from the brightly lit entry in the center. They all stopped in the foyer and got permission to go on through. It wasn't difficult, because this time they were expected. Gregor half expected Ruth Grandmere to come out to greet them, as Mortimer had, but she stayed out of sight. The foyer was decorated in silver and white, as if for a wedding, but no wedding seemed to be going on or to have gone on. Gregor found the explanation on the events board,
an elaborate affair of wood cut into slots and square wooden blocks with letters on them that had to be threaded through. It was the kind of thing nobody would ever own unless he had an employee who was available to go to the trouble,
HARVEST MASKS DANCE
, the events board said.
DINNER, 8 P.M. DANCE 10 P.M.
Debutantes.

Stacey and Mark were both nervous. Stacey was more nervous than Mark.

“Is there a bar?” Gregor asked them.

Stacey pointed solemnly down the hall to their right, where a discreet little sign jutted out saying
CLUB ROOM
. Gregor headed for it, not bothering to check if Stacey and Mark were following. He didn't want them in on this conversation anyway, and they knew it. They'd even honor it. It was part of the consideration you got for being a consultant

Gregor went into the club room and looked around. At first, he thought he might have been mistaken. There were dozens of people at the tables and the bar, but none of them seemed to be Peter Greer. Then he saw him, sitting off by himself at a corner table for two. He most certainly was trying to fend off intruders, because he'd picked the one spot in the room where it would be virtually impossible for anyone to join him. Gregor threaded his way through the other tables, past women still in sports clothes, past other women still dressed for the evening. All the men, except Peter Greer, seemed to be in suits.

“Do you mind?” Gregor asked, when he got to Peter's table.

Peter looked up and shook his head no. “Not at all. I was just sitting here being morose. Have you heard about our crime at the country club?”

“No.”

“Sally Martindale, the club bursar. And a member here, which isn't all that usual. But it was complicated. She was caught embezzling funds from the member accounts.”

“Ah. Actually, I had heard something about it. I didn't realize that that was what you were talking about.”