And One to Die On (8 page)

“We won’t be late.”

“I would like to arrive on time without having had you drive me at your usual pace. And drink coffee. I want to make sure you’re awake.”

Bennis got out another cigarette and lit up instead. “Really, Gregor,” she said. “You’re such an old fuddy-duddy about cars.”

Gregor didn’t know if he was an old fuddy-duddy about cars. He did know that in a sane world, compassionate laws would have prevented a woman like Bennis Hannaford from buying a car that was described as “a true 140.” “A true 140,” Bennis had explained to him, was a car that ran best at 140 miles an hour. Driving it more slowly was possible, but not very good for the engine. Gregor didn’t think Bennis had ever driven him at 140 miles an hour. If she had, he must have passed out cold and forgotten all about it. But she did drive him fast enough to turn his stomach into a mass of knots and make his head feel stuffed full of cotton wool.

“There’s no point in driving as fast as you do,” Gregor told Bennis, over and over again. “You barely save five minutes of time on any one trip, and you’re spending a fortune on speeding tickets.”

“Five minutes is a lot of time,” Bennis replied solemnly. “Five minutes here and five minutes there. It can really add up.”

“What it’s going to add up to is your losing your license. And I’m not going to blame the state of Pennsylvania one bit.”

Gregor wouldn’t have blamed the state of Massachusetts if it had impounded Bennis’s car and forced her to go on foot. He had heard his share of jokes about Boston drivers, but he didn’t think even Boston had ever been able to handle Bennis Hannaford.

“That was a speed bump we just bounced over,” Gregor pointed out, as they came tearing out of the parking garage. “It was supposed to slow you up.”

“It didn’t.”

Bennis went down a one-way street, turned right onto another one-way street, turned right again. It was getting close enough to rush hour so that the streets were filling up. There were a lot of eighteen-wheeler trucks on the road. There were a lot of people on bicycles weaving in and out among the cars. Bennis was driving as if she were on a pristinely clear test track at the Bonneville Salt Flats, and they hadn’t really gotten started yet.

“Maybe we should take U.S. One,” Gregor suggested. “You know, the scenic route.”

“Too slow,” Bennis answered. “I want to get on I Ninety-five.”

Gregor gave up. He checked his seat belts twice, making sure that both the lap belt and the shoulder strap were tight. Then he closed his eyes. He got along so much better with Bennis driving if he couldn’t actually see what it was she was doing.

What was it again that Bennis had said, about Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh and all those other people who were supposed to be in Maine for the weekend, that had upset him so much? Oh, yes. Cavender Marsh’s daughter. Some lawyer had insisted that Cavender Marsh’s daughter be on hand for the birthday party, even though she hadn’t seen or heard from her father since she was three months old.

Gregor Demarkian had spent twenty years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had spent the last ten of those years either organizing or heading the Department of Behavioral Sciences, which was the division of the Bureau that coordinated nationwide manhunts for serial killers. He had stood at the edge of a shallow grave and watched a team of forensic pathologists bring fourteen bodies up into the light. He had sat in a darkened room and listened to a boy of seventeen tell him—in a voice that was eerily reminiscent of an old-fashioned grade-school teacher’s lecturing a class on the proper way to parse a sentence—that before he slit the throats on the prostitutes he abducted, he cut off the smallest toe on each of their right feet for a souvenir. Gregor Demarkian knew crazy when he saw it, and he didn’t throw the word around carelessly.

In this case, however, he thought he was justified.

Whoever had decided to ask Cavender Marsh’s daughter along on this weekend was crazy—and Cavender Marsh was just as crazy to have gone along with it.

S
HE WAS STANDING ON
the boardwalk leading to the piers when Bennis and Gregor drove up, a trim, compact woman with pure white hair and small hands and a deep purple suit that somehow wasn’t flashy. Gregor Demarkian noticed her right off. In fact, she gave him something of a shock. There he was, bouncing along in his self-inflicted stupor, ignoring Bennis’s driving completely—and then he was sitting straight up in his seat, rigid and cold and eager all at the same time. It took him a minute to understand what was wrong. Bennis was guiding the tangerine orange Mercedes into the big open lot with the sign on it that read, “
PARKING SHORT AND LONG TERM
.” The wind was turning the sea into black glass and whitecaps and crawling down his neck. The trim, compact woman with white hair was pacing back and forth on the boardwalk, moving very carefully in her mid-level stacked heels. Bennis backed the car into the space closest to the parking lot attendant’s shack, and Gregor finally got it: the trim, compact woman reminded him of Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was the reason Gregor had left the FBI and gone back to the small Armenian-American neighborhood where he had grown up, on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia. Elizabeth was Gregor’s wife of many years, and just before he had retired she had died of cancer after a last, long, agonizing year that Gregor still saw over and over again in his dreams. He had been so exhausted by her dying, he had decided he never wanted to deal with death again. He certainly never wanted to deal with death delivered by lunatics and psychopaths again. He hadn’t realized how wearing living with all that was. Elizabeth had always protected him from it. Elizabeth had made it possible for him to be an emotional blank at the Bureau, because she had always been waiting at home to warm him up when he was through. Once she was gone he had two choices. He could either go on working and become an emotional blank for good, the law enforcement equivalent of the psychopaths he chased. Or he could quit.

The woman did not really look like Elizabeth. Her body type was very similar, but her face was too tame. Elizabeth had been an Armenian-American woman with high cheekbones and large black eyes. This woman was some derivation of Northern European and rather middle-of-the-road in terms of looks. Hazel eyes. A short, straight nose. Small, pretty teeth. It was her attitude that reminded Gregor of Elizabeth, and the way she carried herself. This, Gregor thought, was a woman of enormous self-respect and enormous competence. This woman believed that manners were important and that true femininity resided in common sense.

Bennis got the car parked to her satisfaction, pulled her keys out of the ignition, and sighed.

“I hate leaving it out here in the open like this. I mean, there must be joyriders even in a place like Hunter’s Pier, Maine.”

Gregor looked around. “There doesn’t look like there’s much of anybody in Hunter’s Pier, Maine.”

“Don’t be snide, Gregor. People around here probably just have the sense not to build their houses too close to the ocean. Can you imagine what it’s like in the middle of a storm?”

“I don’t want to imagine it.”

Bennis got out of the car. “I’m going to talk to the attendant and see if I can’t make some kind of reasonable arrangement for the protection of this car. Why don’t you go over to the boardwalk and talk to the lady. She has to be one of us.”

Gregor thought she was too, but he was curious. “Why would you say that?”

Bennis looked disgusted. “Well, Gregor, I wouldn’t expect it’s customary for your ordinary inhabitant of Hunter’s Pier, Maine, to go running around town in a
real
Chanel suit. Will you get out of the car now and go make sense?”

Gregor got out of the car. He was wearing a suit, as always, although today, in deference to the weather and the venue, he had a sober navy blue sweater on under his jacket instead of a vest. He walked across the asphalt of the parking lot and stepped over the low concrete curb to the boardwalk. The trim, compact woman was watching him.

“Excuse me,” she said, in a pleasant, no-nonsense voice, as he began to walk toward her. “Are you Mr. Fenster or Mr. Pratt?”

“Neither,” Gregor said, catching up to her. “I’m Gregor Demarkian. I’m here with Bennis Hannaford.”

The trim, compact woman looked over Gregor’s shoulder, not at Bennis herself, but at Bennis’s car. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Miss Hannaford. Mr. Marsh’s relation.”

“Vaguely.”

“I’m Lydia Acken,” the trim, compact woman said, holding out her hand for him to take. “I’m very glad to meet you. I was—intrigued—when I saw your name on the final guest list.”

“There’s nothing to be intrigued about,” Gregor said firmly. “Miss Hannaford is a friend of mine. She seemed to think this situation was one that might call for moral support.”

Lydia Acken laughed. It sounded like water from a spring, clear and soft. “It probably will. I should have thought of that myself. But still, Mr. Demarkian. It
is
intriguing. A famous detective and investigator of murders, coming to a house of someone once accused of murder.”

“When Cavender Marsh was accused of murder, I was five years old. Quite frankly, I don’t care what he did when I was five years old. I don’t care if he butchered an entire village on the Côte d’Azur. It’s none of my business.”

“I, too, was five years old when Cavender Marsh was accused of murder,” Lydia Acken said. “We must have been born in the same year. But I grew up hearing about the case, you see. My mother was a rabid fan of Lilith Brayne’s back in the ’20s, and she went on and on and on about the death and the people involved in it. She was a very isolated woman. I suppose she didn’t have much else to do.”

Gregor saw Bennis coming out of the parking attendant’s shack. She was hiking along with her shoulder bag balanced against her back and a glum look on her face. Gregor didn’t think she’d gotten the answers she wanted out of the parking lot attendant. She stepped over the curb and came walking toward them on the boardwalk. The rubber soles of her shoes made her the only one of the three who looked really steady on her feet on the wet wood.

“Look up the road.” Bennis pointed into the air behind Lydia Acken’s left shoulder. “Look at what’s coming.”

Both Gregor and Lydia turned to see what Bennis was pointing at. At first, all Gregor saw was a blur of motion on the road. Then the blur came into focus and he realized what it was: a white-and-gold Cadillac stretch limousine, one of the custom-made extra-long ones, with whitewall tires and shiny wheel spokes plated in chrome.

“Oh, my,” Lydia Acken murmured.

At just that moment another car pulled into the parking lot, a small white Toyota Corolla with rental stickers across the back bumper. The Toyota wedged itself into one of the spaces facing the sea and came to a stop. A tall young man, very slight and very flexible, unfolded himself from behind the wheel. The young man was very Asian- and very American-looking at the same time. He also looked very hip. His straight black hair was parted at the side and seemed to sweep around his head when he moved. His tight black jeans and black leather jacket had come right out of a SoHo specialty store. New York, Gregor thought automatically, and tucked the information away in the back of his brain.

The tall young man gave his keys to the parking lot attendant without much discussion—oh, the joys of driving a car you don’t care what happens to—and walked toward them with a rolling gait that had been copied, Gregor was willing to bet, from a 1950s Marlon Brando movie. The tall young man was looking at the white Cadillac limousine just the way the rest of them had been, but unlike them he was not in awe. He had a smirk across his face.

“Hi,” he said, as he climbed over the curb. “Are you people all waiting to go out to Tasheba Kent’s island? I’m Carlton Ji.”

“Oh.” Lydia said it repressively. “The reporter.”

“Reporter?” Gregor asked.

Carlton Ji came the rest of the way to them. “Hi,” he said, sticking his hand out to Gregor. “Who are you? How much do you want to bet it’s going to take Her Highness Miss Hannah another five minutes to get down here, just so she can be sure that everybody in town has had a chance to see her?”

“Who’s Hannah?” Bennis asked.

“Hannah Graham,” Carlton Ji said with relish. “Lilith Brayne’s daughter. Everybody’s always saying that she’s Cavender Marsh’s daughter, but it takes two. I think she’s much more like her mother.”

“She’s certainly dramatic,” Lydia Acken said.

Carlton Ji suddenly realized that Gregor Demarkian was either not going to shake his hand, or had shaken his hand and then taken his own away without Carlton noticing. Whatever the explanation was, Carlton’s hand was hanging in the wind with nothing whatsoever to do. Carlton stuck it into the back pocket of his jeans.

“I work for
Personality
magazine,” he said to nobody in particular. “This is going to be a great weekend. I can hardly wait.”

The white-and-gold limousine had turned off the main road and begun its winding way through the narrow streets that led to the pier. There were not very many of these streets and none of them was very long, but the car was inching as carefully as if it had been crossing a minefield with a map. Maybe Carlton Ji was right, Gregor thought. Maybe Hannah Graham was making an entrance. If that was her intention, she was doing a very good job. All through the tiny town, people had come out to see the limo pass. There was even a pack of boys sitting on the one flat roof in town, above the pharmacy. The car stopped at every corner, in spite of the fact that there were neither traffic lights nor traffic. Children ran out and touched it and then raced back inside the houses and stores. Hannah Graham probably thought they were impressed, but Gregor doubted it. He thought they were laughing at her, as being another damned fool southerner who didn’t have sense enough not to spend her money on stupidities.

The car turned the last of the corners it had to negotiate to get to the pier. It bumped across a couple of potholes and came to a stop at the little ramp that led from the street to the boardwalk. The people who worked on the pier were now out and watching like the rest of town. The parking lot attendant was standing in the open door of his shack. A grizzled, middle-aged man had come out of the larger shack farther down on the pier and started to mend his ropes outside.