Not a Creature Was Stirring (17 page)

The cab had pulled to a stop in front of the church, a perfect landing. Gregor got out his wallet, paid the fare, and gave the driver an extra-large tip, because of Tibor’s cigarette. Gregor had no way of knowing if the driver minded, or if it was legal to smoke in cabs in Philadelphia. He did know that no one ever challenged Tibor’s right to smoke. With priests and foreigners, people never did.

Out on the sidewalk, Tibor was pulling up the collar of his coat against a new onslaught of snow. Gregor, who felt as if he’d been snowed insensible over the last few days, didn’t bother with his own.

“Maybe the college students have a point,” he told Tibor, searching through his pockets for the gloves he never remembered to bring with him. “We were in Liberty Square. You must have noticed people sleeping in the street.”

“Of course I saw them.”

“But what did you think of them?”

Tibor shook his head. “Gregor, Gregor. Christ said, ‘Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless.’ Not, ‘Be sure to vote for the congressman who promises to build the most low-income housing.’”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning, Gregor, that if the people who called themselves Christians behaved like Christians, there wouldn’t be any people sleeping in the street.” Tibor smiled shyly. “You should come to visit me, Gregor, in my apartment. I have given you an invitation. And you might like to meet my houseguests.”

Houseguests, Gregor thought. He felt struck dumb.

Could Tibor really be picking up strangers off the street and filling his apartment with them? Gregor opened his mouth to argue against this craziness—to argue against it in the same way and for the same reasons he would have argued against Tibor’s taking a pleasure hike on the West Bank—but when he looked down, Tibor had disappeared. Gregor saw no sign of him when he looked up, either. The man had dematerialized.

Gregor turned away from the church and headed down Cavanaugh Street toward his apartment. Christianity was all well and good, but a third of the homeless were supposed to be mentally ill, outpatients who should never have been let out. Another third were supposed to be addicts of one kind or another, alcoholics and junkies. Tibor was going to end up getting his throat cut. Or worse.

Gregor had never been the kind of person who saw blood in his dreams. If he had been, he would never have survived in Behavioral Sciences. Now he was having technicolor visions of carnage. Tibor dead. Tibor murdered. Tibor slaughtered, and all because the man was some kind of idiot saint—

He had his eyes on the ground and his mind on another world, so preoccupied he almost missed the entrance to his building. He would have missed it, except that the man who had been sitting there stood up as he approached, and came down to the sidewalk, and stopped him.

“Mr. Demarkian? Excuse me. I think maybe I ought to start with an apology.”

An apology.

Gregor blinked.

It took him nearly a full minute to realize he was looking at John Henry Newman Jackman.

John Henry Newman Jackman didn’t like Gregor Demarkian’s apartment. Because nobody ever liked it, Gregor decided not to apologize for it. He ushered Jackman through his foyer into his living room, sat him down on one of the two chairs, and headed for the kitchen to make coffee. He heard Jackman get up almost as soon as he was out of the room. Pacing.

They had gone through it all on the stoop, and again on the stairs, but Gregor knew they would go through it once again, in here. That was the way things were turning out to be between Jackman and himself. It was too bad. From what Gregor could make out, Jackman had done a remarkable job in the less than forty-eight hours since Robert Hannaford’s death. Jackman had certainly done a remarkable job on him, and he was both the least important and most difficult of the subjects Jackman had to deal with. If Jackman had been half as good with the rest of his case, he must have broken the Hannafords into molecules by now.

The truth of it was, you never got over having been the subordinate of a man you truly respected. Gregor had been that way with his first superior in the Bureau. Jackman was that way with him now—even though they’d only worked together that one time, and under conditions that kept them apart more often than threw them together. Gregor was worried. With the wrong kind of man—and he didn’t know Jackman well enough to know if he was wrong or not—a situation like this quickly became infantilizing, and finally generated resentment. The last thing Gregor wanted was John Henry Newman Jackman nursing a resentment. Jackman had brought the Hannafords back to him. After a dismal Christmas Day and an even more dismal afternoon spent trying to get drunk enough to feel happy, Gregor was rejuvenated.

Maybe I am going crazy, he thought. I’m beginning to have emotions I don’t even recognize until four or five hours later.

It hadn’t been four or five hours. It had been barely two.

Gregor put the coffee and everything else he could think of on a tray and carried it out to the living room.

Jackman, caught pacing, blushed. He sat down again, quickly. “I’m sorry,” he said, for what must have been the fiftieth time. “I didn’t mean to be a son of a bitch. I really didn’t.”

“You weren’t.”

“You were making me nervous,” Jackman said. “I mean, I walked into that room and there you were, looking over the scene, and I thought—what was I supposed to think?”

“I told you I was retired,” Gregor said.

“I know you did. But this is the federal government I thought I was dealing with here.”

“You thought I was lying?”

“Never mind,” Jackman said.

“I’m very retired.”

“Yeah,” Jackman said, “so they tell me. But I couldn’t be sure about that. And you said all those things, about the murder—”

“I kept trying not to. I didn’t want to interfere. No,” Gregor amended, “that’s not true. I wanted very badly to interfere. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.”

“It got to you, did it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“It got to me, too. I stood around in that house thinking I could have taken my vacation this week. Last week. Whatever. I could have taken my vacation and been in the Bahamas when this call came, and instead there I was, stuck with it.”

“Stuck?”

Jackman laughed. “Look at me. I should have stayed in Philadelphia. I went out there because they offered me a lot of money. I have a good rep and I’m the right color—and don’t think it doesn’t matter. Everybody on earth is trying to make their quotas. Don’t ask me what I think of it, because I don’t know. I do have a good rep.”

“I’d think you would,” Gregor said. “You were only a rookie when I met you. You did exceptionally well.”

“For a rookie? For a black man?”

“For a cop.”

“Fine.” Jackman sighed. “So here I am,” he said, “or there I am, in Bryn Mawr, investigating one of the founding families of the Philadelphia Main Line. Did you know that’s what they were?”

“I’d have suspected it. I knew they were railroad money.”

“Railroad money. Oil money. Banking money. Do you know how much Hannaford was worth? Four hundred million dollars.”

“Four
hundred
?”

“That’s what I said.”

“You are in a lot of trouble,” Gregor said.

Jackman stood up. Gregor was beginning to think it was just as well he hadn’t noticed the coffee. Jackman’s restlessness was almost a mania. And it seemed to be getting worse by the second.

“Look,” Jackman said, “Myra Hannaford told me you were some kind of private detective, but I checked into that. You aren’t, are you?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“Do you want to be?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Jackman draped himself over the fireplace mantel.

“What it means, depends,” he said. “Mostly, it depends on what you were doing in Hannaford’s house the night he was murdered.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

“If you were a good friend of his, it wouldn’t work out.”

“I wasn’t a good friend of his,” Gregor said. “Believe it or not, I was doing a favor for my priest.”

“Your priest?”

Gregor poured himself a cup of coffee. It was as thick and black as that awful Turkish stuff no one was ever allowed to mention in an Armenian neighborhood, but he didn’t care.

This was going to be good.

The story of how Gregor Demarkian had ended up at Robert Hannaford’s house on Christmas Eve was not a long one, but it was an impossible one, and because of that it took an interminable time to tell. Jackman had comments, especially about that briefcase full of money. Jackman had questions. He had the same questions Gregor had. He kept going back to them, over and over again, as if if he asked them one more time he’d get the answers. Gregor didn’t have the answers. As far as he knew, only one person had ever had those. And he was dead.

Even so, the conversation had its uses. By the time Gregor had gone over the few facts he had half a dozen times, Jackman was on the floor of the living room—shoes off, legs crossed, hands behind his head—at ease, if not relaxed. His face had taken on a faraway quality. This was insane. This was absurd. This was the kind of thing he saw in the movies that made him think nobody in the whole city of Los Angeles, California had ever met a crime in his life.

Gregor knew that feeling. He’d had it once or twice himself.

Gregor poured himself another cup of coffee and waited in silence for Jackman to do something.

What Jackman did was throw himself down on his stomach and say, “Shit. These people are crazy. These people are nuts.”

“I did get that impression,” Gregor said. “Will you answer a question for me?”

“Maybe.”

“In all logic, we know that, no matter how crazy it seems, there must be internal consistency—”

“Oh, no,” Jackman said.

“But internal consistency is important,” Gregor insisted. “You realize that with psychopaths. A psychopath starts with an irrational premise—that he’s the Archangel Michael, say, or that all the women in the world have come together in a great conspiracy to destroy him. It makes no sense, but everything that follows from it does make sense. Once you know his premise, everything he does is strictly logical, entirely consistent. You just—”

“We’re not dealing with psychopaths here.”

“We’re dealing with at least one person who must justify to himself, or herself, something that cannot be justified in the ordinary way. This was a particularly deliberate murder, John. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could excuse yourself for afterward as having been done in the heat of the moment. If half my speculations the night of the crime were correct—”

“Half of them weren’t,” Jackman said wryly. “All of them were. Or all of them we could check out.”

“He was drugged before he was hit?”

Jackman sighed. “He had about a hundred fifty milligrams of Demerol in him, his prescription, came out of a bottle in one of his desk drawers. We found traces of it in a cup of hot chocolate he had on the table next to the fireplace. I asked one of the daughters, the fat one—”

“Anne Marie,” Gregor said.

“Anne Marie. She said the only way she ever saw him take Demerol was by chewing them, straight, not even water to wash them down. And she said he only took one at a time, and that maybe once a month.”

“Meaning he hadn’t built up a tolerance to them,” Gregor said. “A hundred fifty milligrams. It’s remarkable he wasn’t in a coma.”

“Maybe he was.”

“True.” Gregor sat back, thinking. “Do you see what I mean?” he said finally. “This is a murder that was meant to look like a murder. Somebody went to a great deal of trouble to make sure there was no ambiguity. Why not just put three hundred milligrams of Demerol in the hot chocolate? That would have muddied the issue just enough. We might have suspected accident. We might have suspected suicide—” Gregor stopped. “That’s interesting,” he said.

“What’s interesting?” Jackman was suspicious.

“Suicide. Something I heard while I was waiting in that suspects’ room of yours. Robert Hannaford had an insurance policy.”

“That’s right.” Jackman nodded. “It was a small one for somebody like him. About a million dollars. But it was made five years ago. The restrictions are history. The insurance company would have paid off even if it had been suicide.”

“What about murder? Was there double indemnity for murder?”

“Yes,” Jackman said, suddenly thoughtful. “Yes, there was.”

“Accident?”

Jackman’s face fell. “Yeah. There was double indemnity for accident, too.”

“Don’t look so depressed,” Gregor said. “You have to find out something about the man’s habits, that’s all. It’s possible that an accident, an incontrovertible accident, would have been impossible to arrange. Certainly it couldn’t have been done by feeding the man Demerol. The insurance companies don’t operate like the courts. The only thing they need not to pay off is a reasonable excuse for being suspicious.”

“And Demerol would have given them a reasonable excuse for claiming suicide? I can see that.”

“So, if there’s no way to arrange a solid, bulletproof accident, the only alternative is to make the murder look like a murder. And I’ll tell you something else.”

“What?”

“There are laws in this state, in every state, preventing a murderer from profiting directly from his crime. Do you know who the beneficiary of that insurance policy is? If it’s one of the children—”

“It’s not one of the children. It’s Cordelia Day Hannaford.”

Gregor stopped. “Ah,” he said.

“The only one in the house who couldn’t have committed that crime,” Jackman said. “I know I was being a pain in the butt that night, but I never even suspected her. She’s—”

“I know,” Gregor said. “Physically incapable.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look frustrated before. Christ, I’m frustrated all the time. Maybe people aren’t always internally consistent.”

“I didn’t say people were. I said criminals were. And lunatics.”

“Whatever. Do you want to hear what I really came here about?”

“Not the murder?”

“Oh, it’s about the murder, all right. Over the past couple of days I’ve had a really brilliant idea. I want to hire you.”