Not a Creature Was Stirring (19 page)

Maybe the murder had knocked all the imagination out of him, so he could no longer make threats to his thumbs seem real. At the moment, nothing seemed real, except the drumming restlessness in his arms and head. He was so tired, he was nearly blind. The last time he’d been this whacked, he’d pulled three all nighters in a row his junior year exam week at Yale. What had happened then was happening now. The air in front of his eyes was full of tiny points of light.

In the seat next to him, Bobby was going through one of those accordion-sheet computer printouts, checking things off with a gold Mark Cross pen. It was ten o’clock in the morning, late by the world’s standards, but Bobby was going to work. He looked it—white shirt, black tie, grey pin-striped suit. Away from Bobby, Chris was never sure people really dressed like that. Looking at Bobby always made Chris feel stoned.

It also made him wonder.

Chris rolled his window down and stuck his head into the cold, wet air. They were nearing downtown Philadelphia, site of the Laedemon Building, where Bobby had moved the offices of Hannaford Financial less than three years ago. It was a monied part of town. The sidewalks were crowded. The store windows were full of decorations that looked expensive by virtue of also looking as if they’d cost a lot of work. Gigantic foil snowflakes, hand-cut in varying patterns. Tableaux of Victorian Christmas scenes, complete with authentically crafted miniature furniture and dolls dressed in velvet and bustles. Did people like doing this sort of thing?

A robed choir had begun to assemble itself on the steps of one of the churches. Because Chris had never liked Christmas carols—they were either sentimental or bloody—he pulled his head back into the car and rolled his window up again. Bobby was staring at him. He had taken his coat off as soon as he got into the car, probably to keep his suit from wrinkling. The open window had frozen his face into a mass of goose bumps.

“You could at least think of Morgan,” he said. “Just because your relatives put up with your nonsense doesn’t mean the servants will.”

“Sorry,” Chris said.

“You’re always sorry. Jesus Christ Almighty, Chris. Didn’t Mother teach you anything?”

Mother had taught him a lot of things, but Chris didn’t want to go into them at the moment. Once Bobby got started on an argument like this, he could go on for hours—and it wouldn’t make any more sense when he’d finished than it had -when he’d started. Chris wondered what Bobby did for excitement. His own restlessness had just jacked itself up another notch, making him feel really wild. Wild and invincible. That was what it was about betting, what betting had that nothing else did. When you got on a real roll, you could do anything. You really could. It wasn’t an illusion. You picked up the dice and you threw them against the board and you saw them in the back of your mind, saw them turning. You made them turn just the way you wanted them to. It was better than being God and better than magic, too. It was even better than being stoned. You got going and the world changed color. Your head exploded. Your skin merged with the air and your nerves plugged right into the great river of cosmic energy and you—

And you stole your mother’s best pair of sterling silver candlesticks.

Chris looked down at his backpack. The doubt was creeping up his spine, spreading across his back like a nasty attack of boils.

He jerked his head away and stared determinedly up at the ceiling, breathing in and out, in and out, in long whooshing streams of air that just might calm him down.

Beside him, Bobby folded the computer printout into some semblance of its original shape and put it away in his briefcase. Bobby’s movements were prissy and awkward, as if he had lost the knack of moving the way he normally moved, and was now trying to reproduce the effect by rote.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Chris told him.

“You don’t look fine.” Bobby dumped the briefcase on the floor. They were moving very slowly through heavy traffic, in a scene that seemed to Chris to be entirely unreal. A stretch limousine with tinted windows. A uniformed driver. A telephone and television and a fully stocked bar, all built into a cabinet between the regular passenger seat and the rumble. What had Daddy been thinking of?

Bobby put his pen away, in a little pocket in his wallet that had been designed for the purpose. “You look like death,” he said. “I know you say you haven’t got AIDS, but—”

“I haven’t got AIDS,” Chris said.

“You ought to get it checked out. You look ready to collapse. You’ve got to be thirty pounds underweight. If you haven’t got AIDS, you’re killing yourself some other way, and let me tell you—

“Don’t tell me. For Christ’s sake, Bobby, don’t tell me.”

“Somebody has to tell you.”

“Bennis tells me,” Chris said. “She appointed herself my surrogate mother years ago. Emma tells me—”

“There’s something wrong with Emma, too. I saw her in the foyer when I was coming out. She looks—I don’t know how she looks. I don’t like the way this family is disintegrating.”

“Right,” Chris said.

“There’s something else. The police seals have been broken. The ones on the door in the study. I was down in that hall this morning, and—”

Bobby was going on and on, trying to explain his way out of what it was impossible to explain his way out of, but Chris wasn’t listening to him. Chris had been looking at the car ceiling all this time. Now he pulled his head down, caught sight of the backpack, picked up no bad vibrations, and turned his attention to Bobby. Bobby was sweating as heavily as a construction worker pounding rivets on a hot August day, and that was very odd.

“Wait a minute,” Chris said. “What do you mean, the police seals have been broken?”

Bobby got a handkerchief out and wiped his face. “They’ve been broken. It’s like I said. I went into that hall to—”

“Don’t tell me why you went into that hall.”

“But it’s important.”

“No it isn’t,” Chris said. “The police seals are important.”

“Chris, there’s nothing to say about the police seals. They were broken, that’s all. Somebody’s gone into the study. I noticed it right away. You know how they were, strips of paper stretched across the door like they do with toilets in bad hotels?”

“I know.”

“Well, they’d been ripped. Very carefully, so that the tears were straight. And then the ripped parts had been taped back together again. If you were standing at the end of the hall, you wouldn’t necessarily notice it. But when you got right up to the door, there it was.”

Chris thought about it. “Which side had they been ripped on?” he asked finally. “The side with the knob or the other one?”

“Why is that important?”

“It shows what kind of trouble whoever it was went to,” Chris said. “If they’re ripped on the knob side, whoever it was just did it and wasn’t thinking clearly. You know the police are going to notice if they’ve been ripped on that side. But if they were ripped on the other—”

“It was the side with the knob,” Bobby said.

“Interesting.”

Bobby turned away. “I don’t see what’s so interesting about it. This is a serious business. You don’t seem to realize. None of you seem to realize. The police are going to want to arrest somebody for this murder, and if we don’t watch out—”

“What?”

Bobby stared down at his black, polished, archaic wing-tip shoes. “It was Myra,” he said. “I saw her coming out of that hall. Just before I went in.”

“Today?”

“Yesterday.”

“When?”

“Around three o’clock. In the afternoon, I mean.”

“I thought you said you went into that hall today.”

“Well, I did. I noticed the police seals today. But I was there yesterday, too, I wanted something from the supplies closet, and Myra was just coming out as I was going in. And you know where the supplies closet is. It’s way up at the foyer end of the hall. I couldn’t see anything from there. But this morning—”

“Bobby,” Chris said, “you’re talking about seventeen, eighteen hours. Or more. If you don’t even know if the seals were broken when you went into the hall yesterday—”

“They weren’t broken at one o’clock,” Bobby said.

Chris raised an eyebrow. “
One
o’clock?”

Bobby turned away. “Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t do anything. I just went down and looked at the door. I couldn’t help myself.”

“Grief for dear old Dad,” Chris said.

Bobby got his briefcase off the floor and put it in his lap. “Just go screw yourself. Just turn right around and stuff it up your own—”

“My own what?”

“Asshole. This is my office, Chris. I have to get out.”

Bobby’s office was half a block up—half a block of slush and grit, the kind of thing Chris was sure Bobby never walked into, no matter what. Even so, Bobby was putting on his coat and rearranging the pieces of his suit. His suit seemed to need a lot of rearranging.

“You sit out in California,” Bobby said, “and you don’t realize what’s happening out here. You don’t realize. Some of our dear bosom relatives have been losing their marbles for years.”

“Like Myra?”

“For one,” Bobby said.

“You know what’s really interesting?” Chris said. “You, trying to implicate Myra in Daddy’s murder. That’s interesting.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You ought to. Myra had the watch yesterday afternoon. She was in Mother’s suite from one until six. I was with her from one-thirty to four. The only way you could have seen her coming out of the study hall door at three was if she’d gone into a trance and thought transferred herself there. And believe me, she never went into a trance. She was beating my pants off at gin.”

The car was still inching through traffic, but Bobby popped his door, swung his legs into the gutter and hopped out onto the pavement. He landed in a puddle, sending up a spray of mud that splattered his pants up to his knees.

Chris transferred himself to the rumble seat, opened the privacy window, and told Morgan where he wanted to go. He felt good again. Oh, yes. He felt excellent. He was at one with the cosmic consciousness, at home in the sea of chance, in love with the spinning of the universe. He was going to hock the hell out of these goddamned candlesticks and then he was going to make himself a killing, the kind of killing you only made once or twice in a lifetime.

The kind of killing that would solve everything. The way killings always did.

He was so hot, he was running a fever.

It was 10:24 A.M.

Out in Chestnut Hill, Myra Hannaford Van Damm had just finished going through the papers she’d found in Bobby’s desk drawers. She was putting them back again, haphazardly, not really caring whether she got them into the right places or not. If Bobby came back and found his desk a mess and his papers rifled and got himself spooked, all well and good. The stupid little bastard deserved to be spooked.

She stood up, went over to the makeshift bar Bobby had set up on one of the bookshelves and poured herself a Perrier and lime. Most of her family thought she was stupid, but that wasn’t strictly true. In some ways, she was enormously stupid. In others, she had a touch of genius. She couldn’t have understood three lines of
War and Peace
. She could, however, read a financial report better than a bank examiner, an IRS auditor, or a computer.

She dropped into a leather wing chair and considered her present problem. It wasn’t the fact that Bobby had been embezzling from Hannaford Financial that bothered her. She’d been embezzling from Dickie Van Damm for ages. Over the past three years, she’d relieved her darling and thoroughly obtuse husband of well over half a million dollars—and got it right out of his checking account, too, where he should have noticed it. Because Dickie hadn’t the faintest idea of how to balance his checkbook, he never would. If Daddy hadn’t discovered what she was doing, she could have gone on with it for another three years. By then, she’d have had enough in secret bank accounts to walk out on her marriage. She wouldn’t have had to worry about settlements or delaying tactics or Pennsylvania’s quaint little custom of allowing for contested divorce.

She got up again and went back to the bar, watching her face in the mirrored surface of the bottle tray as she poured another Perrier. She was beginning to worry about Bobby’s mental health. She really was. What he had done—well, she could hardly believe it. Fake customer orders. Fake stock certificates. Fake bonds. Fake everything—and it all looked fake, too, as phony as a Main Line accent on a Brooklyn-born real estate developer. It was as if Bobby was
trying
to get himself caught.

She squinted at her reflection in the bottle tray and rubbed at a smudge on the tip of her nose. No matter how crazy he made her, Bobby the Embezzler was not her problem. He could embezzle himself right into Leavenworth and she wouldn’t bat an eye. She wouldn’t go with him, either. She’d always been considered much too empty-headed to have anything to do with the business. With the way she’d set things up, if Bobby tried to implicate her, it would be his word against hers.

Her problem was these huge, unexplained waves of cash, these mountains and mountains of cash, that came rolling through the records at unpredictable intervals.

She did not, of course, have anything to do with this cash.

She had not, of course, even known anything about this cash.

If she had, she would have put a stop to it, right away.

The investigation of an embezzlement was one thing. The investigation of stock fraud manipulation was something else altogether. That could go very deep, and get very sticky.

She finished her Perrier and put the glass down on the bookshelf, still full of ice. Then she wandered out of the room and into Bobby’s front hall. Cash. It bugged the hell out of her that she was going to have to save that little asshole’s neck just to save her own.

She had left her coat lying over the banister at the bottom of the stairs. She picked it up, put it on, and went out the front door. The door snicked closed behind her, locking automatically.

What could you do with a man who didn’t even notice his keys were missing when he left for the office in the morning?