Not a Creature Was Stirring (32 page)

“In a room called the television room. It’s at the back of the house, down a little hall. It’s not on a main thoroughfare.”

“Still,” Jackman said.

Gregor smiled. “They could be running in and out of the scene, messing up everything, is that it? I say let them.”

“What?”

“Let them,” Gregor said. “Come on, Mr. Jackman. There are a few things I’d like to show you.”

Jackman started to look mutinous. Gregor turned his back on him and walked away.

He must, he thought, be feeling better. A week ago, Jackman’s attitude would have made him depressed. Now, it made him want to break the idiot’s neck.

Gregor could have worked up a police seal for the television room. A tape, some string—there were a hundred ways to do it. He hadn’t used any of them. It was like he’d told Jackman when they’d found the seals broken on Robert Hannaford’s study. In a situation like this, you had two choices. You could post a man outside the door. Or you could accept the fact that the seals were going to be broken eventually. That was it. Because Gregor hadn’t wanted to spend his morning standing outside the writing room door—and because he didn’t see any point to sealing the scene anyway—he’d let it go. The only thing the Hannafords could do to really ruin things was take the body away and dispose of it. Anybody who tried that would get caught at it.

He led the whole crowd of them through the three back halls that were the only route he knew of, feeling all the time like a character in that Shirley Jackson novel about Hill House. You needed a map to find your way to the bathroom in this place, or maybe bread crumbs. Every time he moved around by himself he worried about getting lost. He was a little proud of himself for not, this time. He’d only been back here once before.

He found the door of the writing room, and opened up to look inside.

She was still there, exactly where he had left her, stretched out across the floor like a damaged carpet. Gregor went in and held the door open for John Jackman. Jackman stepped in, looked at Myra Van Damm’s face, and winced.

“Ouch,” he said.

“Not as much of an ouch as it could have been,” Gregor pointed out. “Look at her.”

Jackman looked. It was his job to look. He just didn’t like it.

“The face got worked over after she was dead,” he said finally. “There’s not enough blood.”

“Not enough blood and not the right kind of blood,” Gregor said. “It’s all flecks, no wash. Look at the candlestick.”

“Is that what was used to work her over?”

Gregor shook his head. “There’s not enough blood on that, either. It looks gory, but then you realize it’s too dry. If that had been used on her face, even after she was dead, there would be blood and flesh all over it. All it’s got is that little stain on the felt at the base and some clotted matter in one of the crevices. It was used later, after the real work had been done. Just rolled around in the muck to get it dirty.”

“Ouch,” Jackman said again. He crossed the room and knelt down next to Myra Van Damm’s body, getting much closer than Gregor had allowed himself to. Gregor hadn’t wanted to disturb anything. Jackman leaned forward as far as he could and searched Myra’s face. Gregor could see Jackman liked this even less than he’d liked looking at the body from a distance. He was going a little green around the jawbone.

Jackman stood up, wiped the palms of his hands against his pants as if he’d gotten something on them—which he hadn’t—and took a deep breath.

“Poker,” he said. “I’d almost bet my career on it.”

“I was thinking poker myself,” Gregor admitted. “The problem is, the pokers are over there,” he pointed to a cast-iron stand beside the fireplace, “and they’re all clean.”

“Someone could have used a poker and taken it away,” Jack-man said.

“I’m sure they could have. How would we know?”

“What do you mean, how would we know?”

Gregor sighed. “John, this house has what? Forty rooms? Fifty? Every one I’ve been in has had a fireplace, including the bedrooms and the kitchen. Every one of them has a poker stand full of pokers. There have to be hundreds of pokers in this place. I wouldn’t know how to begin to find out if one of them were missing. And if whoever did this was smart enough to wash what he used immediately—”

“Washing won’t do it,” Jackman said sharply. “There are tests. It’s almost impossible to get blood off a surface entirely.”

“Fine, John. Which surface? Do you want to test a couple of hundred pokers for bloodstains?”

“If I have to.”

“Then do it,” Gregor said. “In the long run, you may even have to. But think about this situation, John. Just think about it. Doesn’t anything seem odd to you?”

Jackman had been backing away from the body ever since he’d made the remark about the poker. Now he backed all the way out of the room, taking Gregor with him. The uniforms and lab men were crowding the hall. Jackman nodded to the tall man in the too-large overcoat, and they surged inside, ready to do all the technical things they were paid to do.

Jackman looked over the hall, pausing briefly on the runner carpet, the paintings, the ceiling. Gregor didn’t blame him. This was a back hall, a secondary part of the house, and it would have cost three or four times Jackman’s salary to buy the things that furnished it. Then there were the Christmas decorations. Jack-man seemed especially taken with those. Red velvet ribbons and little silver bells. In this house, at this time, they had the effect of a casket dressed up as a birthday cake.

There was a bench under one of the paintings on the far wall. Jackman sat down on it and stretched his legs.

“Gregor,” he said, “everything about this situation is weird. I was talking it over with my wife last night, and she put her finger on it exactly. It’s like something out of a Hercule Poirot novel. Do you read Hercule Poirot novels?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I probably ought to.
The Inquirer
called me an ‘Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.’”

“You’re too fat,” Jackman said, “and you don’t have face hair. Seriously. A murderer who wants me to know he’s committed a murder. Suicide notes that appear and disappear and reappear. And now this—”

“A candlestick smeared with blood to make it look like it was used to batter a face?”

“Right,” Jackman said. “Count on it, that candlestick is going to belong to somebody. The note in Bobby’s wastebasket. The candlestick—”

“Do you remember, the day Emma Hannaford died, we had a discussion about candlesticks?” Gregor said. “In the upstairs hall?”

“Where a pair of them was missing,” Jackman said. “Yeah. I suppose you’re trying to tell me that’s one of them.”

“Well, it’s antique Georgian. It’s old and it’s heavy. The pair upstairs are the only candlesticks I know of that are missing. And there’s this, too. If you search Christopher Hannaford’s room, you’ll probably find the other one.”

Jackman stared at him. “
Christopher
Hannaford? What would Christopher Hannaford be doing with twelve-thousand-dollar candlesticks?”

There was another bench, next to the writing room door, opposite the one Jackman was sitting on. Gregor’s feet hurt and his legs were heavy. He sat down and put his hands on his knees.

“This is just conjecture,” he said, “but I think I’m right, and you can check on it. I think that sometime on the day Emma Hannaford was killed, or before, Christopher took that pair of candlesticks and tried to pawn them.”

“I thought you said nobody in his right mind would pawn them. Christopher Hannaford may be a long-haired weirdo, but he isn’t that kind of nuts.”

“I said no one who knew anything about silver would try to pawn them,” Gregor said. “That includes most of the servants. The butler would have instructed anyone who worked here in what was valuable and what was not, to make sure they didn’t damage anything important. It includes most of the family, too. Cordelia Day would have taught her daughters about those things. Upper-class mothers do. Bobby would have known because Bobby makes it a point to know about
things
. That leaves Teddy and Chris.”

“Why not pick on Teddy?” Jackman grinned. “I’d like to pick on Teddy. Man makes my teeth grind.”

“Teddy was in the house all day the day Emma Hannaford died, for one thing,” Gregor said, “or around the house, anyway. I know, I know. The candlesticks might have been stolen earlier. But look at the two of them. Teddy Hannaford seems to be scrambling a little, and he’s definitely worried about something. Christopher Hannaford is in desperate need of money.”

Jackman’s head came up quickly. “Did you check that out? The information you got us on Bobby Hannaford was wonderful. Does the FBI know something—”

“No, no. You can see it, that’s all. A certain kind of rich person dresses poor these days, but Chris Hannaford’s clothes are worn to shreds. He stopped taking care of himself in the most fundamental ways. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. I don’t think he’s brushed his hair in weeks.”

“That could be dope.”

“I don’t think Christopher Hannaford takes serious drugs,” Gregor said. “The indications aren’t there. He isn’t jumpy and paranoid. That rules out cocaine. He’s not glazed over and he’s not shaking. That rules out heroin. The psychedelics aren’t addictive, just bad for you. Maybe he smokes a little marijuana. He has the smell clinging to him.”

“But if he isn’t taking dope, what would he need money for?” Jackman asked. “He’s got a regular job. It doesn’t pay Lee Iacocca’s salary, but it does pay a living wage. And he’s got that trust fund. That pays just about a living wage, too. What would he need money for?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you definitely think he needs it,” Jackman said.

Gregor nodded. “I think he took the candlesticks to pawn. I think he found no pawnbroker would take them. I think he brought them back and left them in his room.”

“Why didn’t he put them back in the hallway?”

Gregor shrugged. “Lethargy. Fear. Lack of opportunity. Who knows? That young man is not thinking straight. But if I’m right about all this, that,” Gregor jerked his head toward the writing room door, “makes a lot more sense than it might.”

“I’m glad it makes sense to you,” Jackman said. “I’m beginning to think we have an upper-class Charlie Manson on our hands.”

“If we had an upper-class Charlie Manson, we’d have a lot less of this kind of strangeness and a lot more of the messy kind. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about psychopathic serial killers, it’s that they love rituals. And there’s nothing ritualized about this. The murders have been planned, John, but the settings haven’t been.”

“The settings,” Jackman repeated.

Gregor stood up, restless. “Always, always, the murderer is using whatever is at hand. The Demerol. It’s all over this house. There’s a stock of it in almost every medicine cabinet. The death of Robert Hannaford. The statue was in the study. The murderer didn’t bring in something to crush his head with. The death of Emma Hannaford. The second note was in Bennis Hannaford’s handbag. The murderer didn’t write a new one.”

“What about the first note?”

“I don’t know yet, but I think we’ll find it had been left around the house, too. Assuming it wasn’t a real suicide note.”

Jackman rubbed his jaw. “I was thinking about something, last night after you called me about Hannaford Financial. We keep forgetting about that book we found in Emma Hannaford’s room.
The Predator’s Ball
.”

“I haven’t forgotten about it,” Gregor said.

“It’s about the junk bond business. Ivan Boesky and Dennis Levine and all those people. Insider trading. I was thinking Robert Hannaford might have been killed because he’d found out what Bobby was up to at Hannaford Financial, and Emma Hannaford might have been killed because reading this book had given her ideas—”

“John, whatever the reason for those murders, they have nothing to do with Hannaford Financial.”

“Why not?” Jackman said. “It fits, doesn’t it? The mess at Hannaford Financial is the best motive we’ve got, for Christ’s sake. And there doesn’t seem to be any other motive. Cordelia Day Hannaford gets the insurance, but she’s in no shape to go running around this house dropping statues on people.”

“What about the death of Mrs. Van Damm?”

“I say we go looking for a link with Hannaford Financial,” Jackman said. “I’ll say we’ll find one.”

“Maybe you will,” Gregor said, “but if you do you have
another
problem. At least theoretically, Bobby Hannaford wasn’t here when this was done to Mrs. Van Damm.”

“The theoretical isn’t the actual,” Jackman said. “You told me that when I was twenty-two years old.”

“I’m glad you remembered it. But John, if Bobby Hannaford did this, he’d have had to get into the house and stay in it for over an hour without anyone seeing him. It took that long for the Demerol to kill Myra Van Damm.”

“Maybe Bobby fed it to her early this morning, before he left for ‘work.’”

“And came back,” Gregor pointed out, “and got in unnoticed—remember the guard at the gate. There’ll be a record, and there’s no way to sneak onto this property. That was the first thing you checked out. If Bobby left, there will be a record. If he came back, there will be a record. If he was in the house, he had to get around, use a poker on Mrs. Van Damm, hide the poker or wash it or whatever, get the candlestick out of Christopher’s room—”

“Assuming that’s where it was.”

“Assuming that’s where it was,” Gregor agreed. “But my objection stands. This house is full of servants. It’s better staffed than a hotel. Somebody would have seen him.”

“Crap,” Jackman said. He slumped. “Now what are we going to do? I can’t buy hate as a motive in this case. To kill three people out of hate you have to be certifiable. And besides—”

“You don’t think people kill other people out of hate?” Gregor smiled. “I don’t either. At least, I don’t think they kill in this way.”

“Right. Pick up a poker and bash somebody’s head in in a fit of pique, that’s hate. Run around exchanging suicide notes, that’s premeditation. And premeditation means a practical motive.”

“Which we don’t have.” Gregor stopped pacing and leaned against the wall. “I’ll tell you what we do have. Three people dead. Three very particular people dead. And three people involved in attempted frames.”