28 Hearts of Sand (6 page)

“I’ve worked very hard myself,” Caroline had said. “I hate it when you act like you’re the only person in the world who has anything to lose.”

“Well, playing fifties housewifey in the Connecticut suburbs isn’t exactly in the same league as making a name for yourself in medicine.”

“The first I heard of it was when I went to a meeting that night, and Lisa Freedman and Deirdre Nash kept going on and on about how they’d seen her all over town. By then she must have been lying dead in the house on Beach Drive.”

“We’ve been very careful to make sure it’s well kept up. You can’t fault us for that,” Cordelia said.

Caroline could fault her sisters for a lot of things, and she did not exclude the fate of the house on Beach Drive.

“You two should have sold it,” she said.

“It was what Mother wanted,” Cordelia said. “We wouldn’t have kept it otherwise.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m not coming to a funeral,” Cordelia said. “I don’t care what you do with her body. I’m glad she’s dead. Maybe the FBI will take the taps off my phones.”

Caroline had wanted to say that she wasn’t going to hold any funeral, and that Cordelia had no proof that the FBI had ever tapped her phones. But Cordelia had hung up, and Caroline was left sitting at her own kitchen table, looking down at nails she had bitten to the quick.

Her other sister had called last week.

“Don’t listen to Cor,” Charlotte had said. “Of course we’ll have to bury her. It will make a bigger stink in the press if we don’t. And of course we’ll have to do something to keep the funeral from turning into an absolute zoo.”

“We can’t have her cremated at the moment,” Caroline had said, “and we can’t have her buried, because the medical examiner’s office still has the body. There has to be an autopsy, and if the two of you think I’m arranging and running a funeral neither of you have any intention of showing up to attend, you’re both crazy.”

“Of course I’ll attend,” Charlotte said. “Why wouldn’t I attend?”

“According to Cordelia, attending would ruin her life.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Charlotte said. “You’ve got to arrange the funeral. You’re the one that’s there.”

“Come back here and arrange it yourself.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Just get it done and we’ll come out and support you.”

“I’m not going to arrange the funeral,” Caroline said again.

By then Charlotte, too, was off the line, and Caroline was back at that same kitchen table, looking at the double ovens and the granite countertops, wanting to scream.

This morning she didn’t so much want to scream as want to melt. The phone had been busy the entire seven or eight days, and none of the messages had been what Caroline would call “supportive.” Most of them were from the women she knew from the organizations she participated in. The women from the League of Women Voters, the PTA and the Enrichment committee, the Food Pantry in Bridgeport and the Literacy Volunteers of America in Norwalk.

Caroline hadn’t realized that she knew so many women, or that she was as distant and antagonistic to them as she’d ever been to the girls she’d known at Miss Porter’s School.

Now it had been a week, or eight days, or whatever, and she was still sitting at that kitchen table, as if she’d never moved. The young officer from the police department was standing in front of her, holding his hat in his hand. She’d asked him to sit down, but he had refused. He had come with a big sheaf of papers he had put down on the table when he first came in.

He looked like he was squirming.

“We don’t want to be insensitive,” he said, clearing his throat for the fourth or fifth time. “We do have to follow procedure. We will be ready to release the body on this coming Thursday—”

“Why Thursday?”

“It’s because of the consultant we hired,” he said. “Just in case he wants to, you know, look things over himself.”

“This is this Gregor Demarkian person.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is he a pathologist?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. But he will be here on Monday, and then we need to ask him what he needs. It’s for your own good as well as ours. If we don’t get this thing cleared up—”

“This thing hasn’t been cleared up for thirty years. What makes you think you’re going to clear it up now?”

“I think the point is to clear up the murder,” the officer said. “The thing is, we have to release the body to the next of kin. That’s the law. And you’re the next of kin. I’m sorry to intrude on what I know must be a difficult time.”

“Do they teach you to say things like that at the police academy?”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind,” Caroline said.

“I’ll just be going,” the officer said.

“What happens if I won’t take the body?” Caroline said.

The officer stopped his slow backward crab walk to the door. He looked totally flabbergasted. “But you have to take the body,” he said. “You’re the next of kin. The next of kin always takes the body.”

“Surely there are some bodies that have no next of kin,” Caroline said. “Surely you run across murder victims or accident victims you can’t identify. I’m sure you don’t let them just sit in a cold box in the morgue for fifty years.”

“Oh,” the officer said. “Oh. No. We have procedure for John Does. But those are John Does. Nobody knows who they are.”

“And nobody wants this one,” Caroline said.

“Oh,” the officer said. He took a great, big breath. “You don’t really have to decide until Thursday.”

“Once the body’s gone, I can finally get that woman out of my life forever,” Caroline said. “It’s a nice idea, but the Internet is eternal. Chapin Waring is going to be a cult figure for a generation and some idiot is going to put up Skycam footage of my front yard on their Web page for all that time. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

“Still,” the officer said.

Caroline waved him away. “I’ll talk to my sisters. Maybe they want to do something. I don’t know.”

“That’s a good idea. Talk to your sisters.” He’d started backing up again.

Caroline watched him get into his police cruiser and listened to the engine gun up, and the car began to move.

She didn’t move herself, because she didn’t see any need to.

Then something in her head broke, and she stood up abruptly.

She had Babycise and two soccer games and a trip to Home Depot to worry about.

She had a life that was made up of events on a schedule board, and she would have to live it.

FOUR

1

Gregor Demarkian had always liked New York City—sort of. It was closer to the truth that he had liked every version of it he had ever seen, and that he liked this one, too, at least as it appeared in the morning. That was the trouble with New York, as far as he was concerned. It never stayed the same from one visit to the next.

Of course, it didn’t help that the city had a thousand hotels or more, so that he never found himself staying in the same one. The one for this trip was in Greenwich Village, and he was here because Bennis picked it out for him.

“My publisher is always trying to check me into the Hilton,” she’d told him when she printed out the reservation confirmation on her computer, “but I prefer the Village. It’s calmer, for one thing. And it’s manageable. Of course, in a way, it’s a bit like Paris. You think you’re walking into a world of great writers and genius painters, and what you find is tourists and lawyers.”

Gregor didn’t know about the tourists and lawyers, but his appointment at the FBI wasn’t until afternoon, and what he wanted to do more than anything was walk around. Part of him was a little miffed that he was too far from Midtown to walk to it. There were bookstores up there he liked, and he would have been happy to see if the Mysterious Bookshop was still doing business at the same old stand. Of course, it wasn’t. Bennis had told him something about the store moving to TriBeCa, wherever that was.

The hotel was a good one, although Gregor had some trouble finding it on the map Bennis had given him as a guide. It wasn’t large and shiny the way an uptown hotel would have been, but Gregor was willing to bet it had cost the earth. He had a bedroom and a sitting room with a window that looked down on a street that might have been part of the last century, if it weren’t for the fact that everybody walking on it was talking on a cell phone.

Gregor kept his opinion of cell phones to himself and went downstairs in search of coffee. The hotel itself did not run a restaurant, but there were a few open places just down the block, and more across the street. Gregor picked one that looked less determinedly artful than some of the others and ordered a cup of coffee that cost less than a parking space.

The coffee shop was full, and loud, and the longer he sat there, the more he felt as if he shouldn’t. There were people waiting for tables. He couldn’t settle in.

He went out onto the street and began to look around. He went to Washington Square Park and sat down on a bench. He checked his watch. He really had managed to waste a fair amount of time. It was nearly noon. He looked at his notebooks and wished he’d managed to get something done.

He got up and started walking again. He was restless. He didn’t like all these consultations and conferences, all these different people wanting different things from him. It was never a good idea to put yourself in a position where you couldn’t tell where your loyalties should lie. The town of Alwych had hired him. He wished he could just leave it at that.

He was coming around a corner when he saw a young woman busily unhooking and unlatching things on the street. He stopped where she was and found himself in front of a long expanse of plate glass, very bright and very clean—so clean, he wondered if they washed the glass daily. He looked across at the books in the window.

“You’re a bookstore,” he said to the young woman.

“Partners and Crime, Mystery Booksellers,” she said brightly. “Haven’t you visited us before?”

“I don’t visit New York all that often,” Gregor said. “I almost never get down here.”

“Well, if you have the time, you should come in and look around. We’re the largest mystery bookstore in New York. And we carry, really, just about everything.”

“True crime?”

“Of course true crime,” the young woman said. “Although I’ve got to admit, I prefer fiction. But lots of people want true crime these days. It’s a very hot subgenre.”

The young woman flashed Gregor a smile and went back inside.

Gregor backed up a little to look at the facade. The name of the store was painted in gold letters across a black expanse that reminded him a little of the old Scribner building.

He went closer to the windows again. The young woman was fiddling with what looked like a cash register. He made up his mind and went through the front door.

“You’ve decided to come in,” she said, looking up. “That’s excellent. I’ve decided to sell you at least five books, all in hardcover. Is there anything special you might want to see?”

Gregor said, “Do you think you can get me something about a crime that occurred thirty years ago, a series of bank robberies in suburban Connecticut—”

“Oh, that,” the young woman said. Then she peered at him, suddenly seeming uncertain. “You know, you look very familiar. I’m not sure why. But the Waring case, with the murder and all the publicity—well, I do have some items you might find of interest.”

“Already?” Gregor asked. “It’s been—what? A week?”

“They’re not new books,” the young woman said. “But we stocked up. And I’ve got one that you might be interested in.”

“Which one is that?”

The young woman moved out into the store, waving at Gregor to stay where he was. She came back only moments later with a large, coffee table–sized volume that was obviously a picture book.

“There’s not a lot of text,” she said, putting the book down on the counter, “but a year from now, we’re going to be inundated with very good work. We’ve heard that Ann Rule is doing something on the case, on the murder case, of course. And then there’s always the chance that Gregor Demarkian will finally decide to write one of his own. I figure someday, he’s almost going to have to.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like to write,” Gregor said.

“Maybe. Still, if he wrote one, that would be the one you’d want. Anway, this book has got literally hundreds of pictures from the time when the robberies happened, family pictures of some of the people involved, or people the police thought were involved. That kind of thing.”

Gregor flipped through the wide tall pages, past one grainy black-and-white print after another. Every once in a while there would be a photograph in color that looked like an amateur snapshot.

He closed the book.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll take it. You take American Express?”

“We take everything,” the young woman said. “Let me ring this up for you. You really do look very familiar. If you hadn’t said you were just visiting, I’d have thought you were one of our regulars.”

2

When the time came, Gregor took a cab to the FBI office.

Sitting in the cab, he leafed through the book. It was not only large and ungainly, but haphazard and sort of oddly printed. The title was
Gone: The Real Truth About Chapin Waring and the Black Mask Robberies,
but there was virtually no text among the pictures.

Gregor stopped at one that took up an entire half of the page. There were six people, lined up more or less by height. He looked at the caption and found that the two enormously tall men were Kyle Westervan and Tim Brand, that the very tall woman just after them was Virginia Brand. That would be Tim Brand’s sister and, according to Gregor’s notes, later Kyle Westervan’s wife. Then the heights dropped off significantly, so that Martin Veer, who was next, barely made it to Virginia Brand’s shoulders, and Hope Matlock, who followed him, was almost as tall, but not quite. The two of them looked oddly out of place. They were boxy and lumpy instead of tall and willowy. They looked like members of a different species.

The last figure in the line was Chapin Waring, and she was very small indeed. There was, however, nothing boxy or lumpy about her. She was like an exquisite miniature of a pedigreed dog.