Skeleton Key (45 page)

“You didn't come here to discuss Sally Martindale.”

A waiter appeared out of nowhere. Gregor asked for a plain Coca-Cola. Peter asked for a Glenfidditch on the rocks. It wasn't what he'd had before. Whatever that was in the glass the waiter was taking away, it had been clear and bubbly.

“So,” Peter said after the waiter had left. “You were going to say.”

“Kayla Anson,” Gregor said.

“Oh, absolutely. Kayla Anson and Zara Anne Moss and Margaret. Margaret was a bitch, did you know that?”

“I had gotten that impression, yes.”

“Everyone got that impression. The woman was truly a piece of work. Even Kayla hated her, and God only knows she hated Kayla. She hated Kayla the way the Republicans hate Bill Clinton. Or worse.”

“Margaret Anson would have been the easy one. She was right there. You wouldn't have had to get her out there. My guess is that she called you, almost as soon as Annabel Crawford called her. Because unlike Annabel, she would have known who got the money.”

“Margaret,” Peter Greer said carefully, “always had a very suspicious mind.”

“Zara Anne Moss was harder. You had to get her out to the Anson place. I think at that point, you were still trying to throw suspicion on Margaret. That was a large part of the idea from the beginning. So you called her up and you made an appointment and you said—what? That Margaret wanted to see her? That you did? That there were spirits in the garage out at the Anson place that wouldn't be quiet until they'd been healed by a witch. She could have told somebody where she was going.”

“Did she?”

“No.”

“It wouldn't have fit her,” Peter Greer said. “She loved to be mysterious, did you know that? She loved to make everything an enigma.”

“I'm sure,” Gregor said. “She also saw you bumping the
Jeep into the back of Kayla Anson's car, but she wasn't really smart enough to put two and two together and figure out who you were. She might have eventually, though. So you decided not to wait.”

“I'm not very good at waiting.”

The waiter was there with their drinks. Peter picked his up off the tray without giving the waiter a chance to hand it to him, tilted his head back, and swallowed half of it Then he looked up at the waiter and said, “Why don't you get me another one right away?”

The waiter left. Gregor said, “When you killed Zara Anne Moss, you went around to the back of the house to avoid the reporters. You came up through the woods from One-oh-nine and in through the back door of the garage. You went out that way, too.”

“Did I?”

“But the most elaborate of the three was the murder of Kayla Anson, because it had to be so carefully planned. So carefully planned that you wouldn't be forced to do another one. You never wanted to do more than one.”

Peter finished the rest of his scotch. The waiter came back with his second. This time, Peter put the glass down in front of him and didn't touch it

“You knew Kayla Anson was coming back from Waterbury and you knew approximately when. You knew which way she would come, because she didn't like driving on the highway at night and if she wasn't going to do that there really was only one way. You drove your own car out to Capernaum Road and then off onto the little dirt access road and parked. Then you walked to Faye Dallmer's and stole the Jeep. It wasn't far to walk. It was less than a quarter of a mlie.”

“Things are very close around here,” Peter said.

“Yes, they are. Much closer than I'd realized, when I started. The roads make it confusing. But you weren't limited to the roads. So you stole the Jeep, and you parked it off to the side someplace, and you waited for Kayla Anson to come through. And when she did, you pulled out onto
the road and followed her, as closely as possible, until you got to Capernaum Road. At that point, you forced her off to the side and onto Capernaum Road. Then you forced her off to the side again on the dirt access road. It wouldn't have been hard. You only needed to do some ordinary crowding and to not care if the Jeep got hurt. And she wouldn't have had anyplace to go but where you wanted her to go.”

“And?”

“And,” Gregor said, “you got out of the Jeep and she got out of the BMW, and then you hit her over the head and shoved her into the passenger seat of her own car. And then you strangled her. Because she wanted the money repaid. And when she wasn't getting satisfaction from you, she'd decided to tell her lawyers about it and let them handle the collection. I take it you're more or less flat broke.”

“Everybody who runs a small business is more or less flat broke.”

“You didn't want anybody to know you'd borrowed the money. You never wanted anybody to know that. Because you like all this. You like people like these to be your friends. And you couldn't borrow money from your teen-aged, over-rich girlfriend without giving yourself the kind of reputation the people here would not forgive. They would have winked at sex, or even at drugs and drinking. But they have no mercy on people they think are out to take their money.”

“It's like walking over the Grand Canyon on a tightrope,” Peter said. And then he smiled, and shook his head, and drank his scotch.

“You strangled Kayla Anson in the front passenger seat of her own car. Then you got into the driver's seat of that car and drove out to Margaret Anson's place. You left the car in the garage. If Margaret heard it, she'd just think Kayla was coming home. After you dumped the body there, you got out of the car and left by the garage's back door. You went through the little woods there to One-oh-nine. And then you walked back to the Litchfield Road.”

“That's a long walk,” Peter said. “Have you any idea how long a walk?”

“Sure. It's just about ten miles even. I checked. But that explains the times, you see. Because a number of other things happened that night, but they didn't happen until nearly midnight. They couldn't happen. You were walking back, and taking your time about it, too. There was no reason to be in a hurry. Nobody ever goes onto that access road, and if they did, what would they find? Your car and the Jeep. As far as you knew, nobody could connect the Jeep to Kayla Anson anyway.”

“I must have been cold.”

“In more ways than one. When you got back to Capernaum and the access road, I think you had to move the Jeep in order to get your own car out. On that part, I'm not completely sure. But whatever the reason, you got into the Jeep and started to move it and miscalculated in the dark, because you were trying to do all this without lights. You didn't want anybody coming by on Capernaum to see you on that road. And while you were moving the Jeep, you smashed into your own car and caused a lot of damage. A fire engine red Ferrari Testarosa. That's why you're driving a rental car at the moment I noticed it when we came to your house to talk. We have the Testarosa, by the way. We impounded it this morning.”

“Marvelous.”

“You needed to do something to erase the traces of the Testarosa from the Jeep. You did the only thing that might have a hope in hell of accomplishing that You staged another collision. You drove the Jeep down to Capernaum and rammed it into a telephone pole, several times. You knocked the pole over. Then you took the Jeep up the hill into the Fairchild Family Cemetery. But you still didn't think you were safe.”

“Obviously.”

“So you went around back and up to the hill, trying to see if there was anything you could find that would help take our attention away from Capernaum, to move it in the
other direction. Just in case. What you found was the Litchfield Museum, complete with a brand-new skeleton exhibit and doors left unlocked and security system left turned off. So you took what was on hand—the skeleton—and went and put it down on the Chandling brothers' front porch. And it worked. Everybody worried about the skeleton. Everybody concentrated on how that and the Jeep were connected. It didn't occur to anybody, then, that they weren't connected, at least not in any straightforward sense. It didn't occur to anybody, then, that the skeleton wasn't the point.”

“It occurred to you.”

“That's what I'm called in to do,” Gregor said. “That's my job. Anyway, you left the Jeep in the Fairchild Family Cemetery, turned over on its side for good measure. You went back to the access road and got back into the Testarosa. Fortunately, it still ran. So you just went home. The next morning, you took the car into the shop and got yourself a rental. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

Peter Greer stirred his scotch, very carefully. It occurred to Gregor that he really did not like the look of unblended scotch. It was clear, and it looked thick, like anisette. Gregor really did not like anisette. Peter Greer took a long drink and put his glass back on the table.

“The thing is,” he said, “it isn't history. That's the point. It's a nice story, but you haven't any proof of it. Not really.”

“You must have deposited the money,” Gregor said. “There's that. And there's the car, and the Jeep, which should yield some interesting results, once they've been tested.”

“I suppose so. But you know, I'm not a fool. I know you can't use most of this as evidence. You can't even use anything I say here as evidence. You haven't given me my Miranda warnings, and you're employed by the police.”

“Do you want me to give you your Miranda warnings?”

“No.”

“Did you kill Kayla Anson?”

“Oh, yes,” Peter said. “And Zara Anne Moss and Margaret, too. But I'll deny it if it ever gets to court, and you know I will. I should have killed Margaret first. She was something worse than a bitch. She liked to destroy things just for the sake of destroying them. She wanted to destroy me.”

“She may manage it, in the end.”

“Maybe. But not without a fight. Never without a fight. I've fought all my life, to have money, to have status, to be
here.
I'm not Sally Martindale. I won't confess and make it easy for everyone. I won't indulge in one of the cheaper forms of repentance.”

“Connecticut has the death penalty these days. Repentance might not come cheap.”

“I'll take my chances. You would, too, if you were in my shoes. Anybody would.”

“Possibly.”

Peter finished the rest of his scotch and stood up. “I've got to go down to the locker room and have a shower and change,” he said. “I'm an escort at that party tonight. When I was in high school, the debutantes wouldn't even talk to me. Now they line up to see who I'll deign to escort to the country club ball. I've planned it all very carefully. I don't intend to give it up.”

“And if you get arrested?”

“I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. Good evening, Mr. Demarkian. I hope you have a nice trip back to Philadelphia, whenever it is you intend to go.”

Peter had not been gone from the table for a full second before Mark and Stacey rushed up. They were too frustrated-looking to have been able to hear any part of that last conversation, or they had only heard Gregor's own part of it, which of course would be of no use to them at all. It was what Peter had said that they needed to hear. All Gregor could do was tell them, knowing that they would know, just as he did, that the information was useless.

“Well?” Mark Cashman demanded.

“Well,” Gregor said. “It's time we found me a way to get back to Philadelphia.”

In the end, they drove him all the way down to Bridgeport to catch the train. It was all they could do. Gregor thought about hiring a limousine, but he couldn't find a limousine company willing to take him all the way to Pennsylvania. Mark Cashman checked into commuter flights, but there was nothing leaving Hartford until eight o'clock the next morning, and Gregor didn't want to wait that long. He also didn't want to ride in a little commuter plane, but he didn't say anything about that. It made less than no sense to tell everybody on earth just how much he was afraid of flying.

Stacey couldn't go, since resident troopers were required to be available at all times, through radio connections if in no other way. Mark had only to wait half an hour until he was officially off-duty. In the meantime, Stacey drove Gregor back to the inn and gave him a chance to pack.

“I'm going to be sorry to see you go,” he said, while Gregor piled shirts into his suitcase in a jumble. “You were the first really interesting person I'd had to talk to in months.”

Interesting, Gregor thought. And then he let it pass. He let everything pass. Now that he was sure about Peter Greer, he had nothing on earth to think about but how worried he was about Bennis.