Somebody Else's Music (29 page)

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Authors: Jane Haddam

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“Nobody listens to the supermarket tabloids,” Nancy said stiffly.
“Oh, everybody listens to them,” David Asch said. “But I'm not leaving it at that. My old college roommate now works on the national desk of the
New York Times
. I've talked to him, too. I talked to him a good long time ago, if you want to know the truth, but now the—problem—with Diane is newsworthy. You're newsworthy. And that makes all the difference.”
“I don't see what you think you're going to accomplish,” Nancy said, and now she was not just stiff. She was frantic.
“I really can't make the other girls like her. I can't do anything. What do you think it's going to get you to blackmail me?”
“I'm not blackmailing you,” David Asch said. Then he laughed. That wasn't very nice, either. “I wouldn't bother to blackmail you. There's no point. I'm not telling you what I'll do if you don't help Diane. I'm telling you what I've already done. Oh, I'll do a little more of it. There's no reason not to. But by and large, it's already done.”
“I don't get it,” Nancy said. “I really don't understand what you want. What's the point here? What are you trying to accomplish?”
“Let's just say payback's a bitch,” David Asch said. He was still smiling when he stood up. “The year after next, we'll be gone, Diane will be at a good college and I'll never have to speak to you again. But it would be interesting to see if I can get you fired long before that. Don't you think?”
He closed the attache' case and picked it up. The report was still lying in the middle of Nancy's desk. He made no move to take it. Nancy thought the air was waving, but she couldn't be sure. It was hard to tell what was going on in the real world, and what was just her mind, reeling. She'd heard about minds reeling, but she'd never believed they actually did, until now.
A second later she looked up and was surprised to see that she was alone. David Asch had left without saying good-bye, or taking her hand, or doing any of those other things that are required by politeness. The rain outside was coming down harder than ever, and the thunder was harsh and close. The only light in the world came from the lightning that broke out in sheets to backlight the sky.
This cannot be happening to me
, she thought.
Then she put her head down on her desk and closed her eyes.
The rain got worse. Gregor had never seen so much rain. He kept worrying about floods, but nobody else seemed to. Even Bennis ignored the weather, except to say once or twice how awful it had been to drive in it. Kyle Borden ran in and out of the station house as if nothing were going on. When the thunder got bad enough to rattle windows, Sharon Morobito complained that the storm might take out the power.
Bennis got on the phone and found them a hotel room. “I knew you wouldn't think of it,” she said, heading off to a spare desk in the big outside room with a list of hotels made out by Kyle Borden. He'd put little stars next to the ones he thought were “expensive,” which included the Ramada Inn. “You'd have gotten to tonight and then realized you didn't have anyplace to stay, and by the time you went looking everything would be booked up, and then you'd be stuck in some fleabag on a back road somewhere, wondering why you couldn't sleep.”
“We could just go back to the Toliver house,” Gregor said. “Somebody ought to. If they leave that place empty overnight, somebody is going to break into it.”
“Somebody probably already has,” Bennis said. “And I don't want to go back to the Toliver house. I've never been there in the first place. I've never met the woman. And what
would I say? Hello, Ms. Toliver, I'm Bennis Hannaford. I used to be your lover's lover.”
“She isn't worried about you,” Gregor said calmly. “She's worried about somebody named Julie.”
“Julie Handley, yes. She's a supermodel. I'd worry about her, too. Jimmy was married to her. She was in
Sports Illustrated
.”
“Why was a supermodel in
Sports Illustrated
? Was she in the Olympics before she started modeling?”
Bennis and Kyle Borden both gave him very odd looks, and then Bennis disappeared, mumbling to herself as she went. Kyle pulled out a piece of paper and started to make a list.
“The real problem is not knowing where Betsy Toliver went,” he said. “There are things here from last night that I'd like to nail down. Are they going to skip town, do you think?”
“They weren't meaning to,” Gregor told him. “At the house this morning, they were talking about finding a hotel in the vicinity so that they'd be available for the investigation. From what I've seen of Elizabeth Toliver, she probably meant it. I've never seen enough of Jimmy Card to even guess what he'd do.”
“There aren't a lot of places in the vicinity,” Kyle Borden said. “Especially not ones that a big pop star would want to go to. We could call around.”
“They'd be crazy not to use an assumed name,” Gregor said.
“Right,” Kyle Borden said. He looked down at the piece of paper he had placed on his desk. “Okay, first person I want to talk to is Mark DeAvecca, and I can't. Next people I want to talk to are Emma Kenyon and Belinda Hart. That's right, isn't it? That's who he said gave him a ride home from the library?”
“That's what he said. And they were stupid.”
“At his age, all adults are stupid,” Kyle said. “Except Belinda really
is
stupid. I don't mean mentally retarded or
like that. She's just stupid. It's incredible to try to talk to her.”
“She can't be too stupid, can she? She was one of the girls that night in the park?”
“You think she couldn't be stupid and be one of the girls that night in the park?”
“No, I mean they'd all graduated from high school, from what I remember,” Gregor said. “So she couldn't be too stupid. She graduated from high school.”
Kyle Borden snorted. “Listen,” he said, “it isn't the Main Line out here. You could graduate high school with a brick for a brain if you were just willing to slog it out. And she did slog it out. I think she did a couple of years at a community college or a secretarial school or something afterward, too. Not that it mattered. She got married as soon as she could. He divorced her as soon as she got a little saggy and he got a little itchy turning forty. When you marry a woman because she's got perfect skin, the relationship has a short trajectory.”
“She had perfect skin, I take it,” Gregor said.
“She had perfect everything. You should have seen her. I can still remember the first time I saw her. Perfect skin. Big china-blue eyes. These days, she'd probably go off to New York to see if she could be a model, except maybe she's not tall enough. But there wasn't anything else there. None of them are too bright, except for Maris, but Belinda is—whatever.”
Gregor looked down at Kyle's piece of paper. He'd written the three names in a line:
Mark DeAvecca, Belinda Hart, Emma Kenyon
. He knew that Emma Kenyon's married name was Bligh. He wondered if Belinda Hart used her married name, too.
“So,” he said. “This Emma Kenyon we're talking to. That's the one at the Country Crafts store I went into in town?”
“That's the one. She's easy to find. The store used to be their house—the Kenyons' house, I mean. Emma grew up there. When she got older and her father died, her mother
turned it into that little store, and then when her mother wanted to retire Emma and George took over the store and moved into the rooms above it. George works a little real estate at an agency on Grandview. We can go right over.”
“What about Belinda Hart?”
“She lives in an apartment in a building near English Drugs,” Kyle said.
“Does she work?”
“At the library. I don't know if today is one of her days. The thing is, though, Maris Coleman is staying with her. It's kind of weird, really. Maris doesn't usually stay there because, you know, it's hard to stay there and not go nuts.”
“So why is she staying there?”
Kyle shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe because Nancy Quayde bought a house out in Stony Hill last year. Nancy used to live in town, you know, so Maris could walk—”
“She doesn't drive?”
“Well,” Kyle said cautiously, “she used to. And she does have a car, nice rental Volkswagen, one of those new bugs. She's got it parked back of English Drugs. So I suppose she's still got a driver's license. All you have to do to keep that up is show up to have your picture taken once a year. But she doesn't drive when she comes here.”
“Why not?”
“You ever seen her one hundred percent sober?”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“Like I said, Maris isn't stupid. A bitch of legendary proportions, maybe, but not stupid.”
“Well, at least they're together in one place,” Gregor said. “Maybe we can get to both of them at once.”
“We ought to talk to Nancy Quayde, too,” Kyle said. “She was Chris's best friend, all the way back to when we were all in kindergarten. Dan will be back from Hawaii today. We can talk to him. Then I guess we should think about talking to Peggy Smith. Do you really think this is going to turn out to be about what happened back in 1969?”
“I don't know.”
“I don't either. Peggy was there. Peggy was a part of
that popular crowd, but she's sort of out of it these days.”
“Why?”
“Married a guy from our class. He drinks himself blind, stokes himself up on cocaine, and beats the crap out of her. If we could ever catch him with dope on him, we'd send him away, and maybe she could get free. But don't count on it. I've been out there myself half a dozen times when she's had to go to the emergency room and she will not rat on him. Will not.”
“That's a syndrome, you know,” Gregor said. “There are therapists—”
“Yeah, well,” Kyle said, “that's all well and good, but when you're standing in the emergency room at three o'clock in the morning it doesn't help you much. He blames her for us coming out to begin with, even though she never calls. The neighbors hear it and they call, but Stu won't listen. If we arrest him, he'll blame her for that, too, and if we can't get him successfully prosecuted or she insists on taking him back home he's only going to beat her up worse because of it.
You
tell me how to handle that, Mr. Demarkian, I'd love to know.”
“Gregor,” Gregor said.
“Here's the thing,” Kyle said. “Peggy Smith doesn't have a car. Stu won't let her have one. I think he thinks that if she did have one she'd get in it one day and take off, and he can't have that. She supports him.”
“Does he have one?”
“Yeah,” Kyle said, “but don't go jumping to conclusions. He keeps the keys on a chain around his neck. I suppose she could get hold of them if he passed out cold, but you'd be amazed with these guys. They don't pass out cold all that often. You'd think they'd spend their whole lives passed out cold.”
“They learn to accommodate the alcohol,” Gregor said.
“Nancy Quayde picks her up every morning and takes her to school, because now that the school is out in Plumtrees, she can't just walk there.”
“What about, who is this, Belinda Hart? Does she have a car?”
“Little Escort, bright blue. Keeps it parked behind English Drugs, and they let her. Because they've known her forever. They knew her parents.”
“So,” Gregor said, pulling a chair out of the corner of the room and sitting down himself. “Let's see what we've got. Belinda Hart, Emma Kenyon, Nancy Quayde, Elizabeth Toliver, all have cars and can drive them. Peggy Smith and Maris Coleman can drive, but Peggy Smith doesn't have access to a car, and Maris Coleman tries never to drive hers.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “Elizabeth Toliver's mother's house isn't within walking distance of town. It isn't within walking distance of anything. That means that to get there, to kill the dog, to kill Chris Inglerod Barr, somebody had to drive. And we know already that some of them did drive. Emma Kenyon and Belinda Hart gave Mark DeAvecca a ride back out there from the library. They went out of their way to do it, because they both live in town. They could just have been being helpful, or they could have been driving out to Stony Hill to see somebody else, or they could just have been curious about what Mark was like. Maybe they were even hoping to see his mother.”
“You'd think they'd want to stay the hell away from her,” Kyle said, “but I know what you mean.”
“It's too bad about the way the dog was found. Anyone could have put it there at any time. It's all well and good to say that the dog was still alive when it was found, but we've got no way of proving that. I wonder if there's some kind of significance about late afternoons.”
“It's a time when most people are able to take off work if they really want to?” Kyle suggested.
Bennis came in from the other room. “There's a Radisson,” she said. “I got us a suite. If Elizabeth Toliver and Jimmy have any sense, they'll be there, too. I couldn't find another place within a hundred miles that had suites at all.
Mostly, what you've got here is Holiday Inn.”
“I like Holiday Inn,” Gregor said.
“I know you do. I like suites. I'm going to drive out there and register. We'll be under the name Mr. and Mrs. Tibor Kasparian.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Gregor said.
“I was just picking something everybody could remember. It would be nice if you could come on out for dinner and like that this evening, just so I could see you. It was your idea to have me come out there. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Borden.”
“It was nice to meet you, too,” Kyle Borden said.
Bennis gave Gregor a peck on the cheek. “Talk to you later,” she said. She turned around and went quickly out of the door. The reporters were gone.
Gregor sat back and wished that he'd remembered to grab his raincoat before bolting out of Elizabeth Toliver's house.
They went to Emma Kenyon Bligh's place first, because it was one of the closest, and because she was the most likely to be where she was supposed to be.
“We could try Belinda,” Kyle said as he eased one of Hollman's two police cars out onto Grandview Avenue. “She's just up the block. Thing is, though, she might be at work, or out at the mall, or anyplace. I think she'd live at the mall if she could afford it. And Peggy'll be teaching until three.”
Gregor thought that Grandview Avenue in the rain was much like Grandview Avenue in the sunlight, except that it had a faintly biblical air about it.
God was mightily displeased
, Gregor thought, and then got an image of Hollman in a deluge, rowboats drifting through the water between the tops of nineteenth-century false-front commercial buildings.
Kyle found a parking space as close to Country Crafts as he could. “It's a good thing for the rain,” he said. “Grandview is usually parked solid this time of day. I hate parking in the lot at English Drugs.”
Gregor gave one more thought to his trenchcoat, still hanging in the closet in the little guest room out at the Toliver House. He stepped out into the wet, and slammed the door behind himself. Then he turned and made a run for the Country Crafts porch. When he got up onto the porch itself, Kyle was waiting for him.
“I hate this weather,” Kyle said.
Gregor thought, not for the first time, that it was a good thing the store had an OPEN sign to hang in the window, because there would be no way otherwise to tell if the store was open or shut. He wondered why the Blighs hadn't retrofitted the house with real display windows and a glass front door. Kyle held the front door open and let him through. Gregor went in and was caught, yet again, by the amount of froufrou and knickknacks and sheer clutter everywhere.
Emma Kenyon Bligh was at the back of the store, polishing shelves. She looked up when they came in, then turned away quickly. Kyle and Gregor walked to the back to where she was.
“Don't bother,” she said when they came close. “I talked it over with George last night. I don't have to talk to you if I don't want to. I can have the lawyer here to listen in to anything I have to say.”
“Jesus Christ,” Kyle said. “I'm not asking you for a statement, Emma. I'm just trying to nail down a couple of times for yesterday afternoon. This is Gregor Demarkian.”
“We've met,” Emma said. “Well, I mean, we haven't been formally introduced. He was in here a couple of days ago. How do you do.”
She held out her hand. Gregor took it and kept his mouth shut.
“Mark DeAvecca said that you and Belinda gave him a
ride yesterday,” Kyle said. “You and Belinda did give him a ride, right? From the library?”
“Oh, yes,” Emma said. “We did that. And we didn't even get out of the car, so you don't need to start thinking I killed Chris while we were at it. Belinda will back me up. We never got out of the car.”
Kyle sighed. “If I were you, I wouldn't use Belinda frigging Hart as an alibi. She'll forget what day of the week it was. What time was this, anyway?”
“Three o'clock, maybe quarter after. I don't know. I wasn't paying attention.”
“Was the store closed?” Gregor put in.
Emma looked up from the pile of porcelain display plates she was wiping off and said, “My husband was minding the store. Usually he does real estate, but he didn't have any appointments yesterday afternoon. Why do you let him ask questions? Aren't you royally upset that some hotshot from Philadelphia is coming down here and telling you how to run your police department?”
“I could use a few more. Mr. Demarkian is usually very expensive, and this time he's agreed to work cheap. Why'd you have Belinda with you? She has her own car.”
“We weren't in the car,” Emma said patiently. “At least not originally. George came and took over the store to give me a break, and I ran across the street to see if Belinda had a minute to talk.”
“And?” Kyle said.
Emma got the last of the plates wiped off and put back on the shelf. She leaned forward and put her palms down flat on the floor. Then she put her weight on her hands and slowly began to twist her body until her knees were on the carpet. This, Gregor realized, was what she needed to do to get up.
Emma shrugged. “And nothing. He was there, Mark what's-his-name. Sitting at one of the big round tables in the front room reading something really weird. And Belinda said he was Betsy's son.”
“And?”
“You can't just go on saying ‘and' all the time, Kyle,” Emma said. “It sounds stupid. And nothing, I suppose. We were curious. Belinda and me both. About what he was like. He looked—expensive, if you know what I mean. I mean, he wasn't wearing anything in particular, just jeans and one of those, what do you call them, polo shirts. But you could tell he came from money. He had that kind of aura.”
Emma started moving toward the front of the store, and they moved with her. She went behind the counter and arranged a few things there, needlessly. Kyle came up and pushed a box of pipe cleaners out of the way so that he could lean on his elbow.
“So then what?” he said. “Did you just go up to Mark and haul him off to your car? How did you end up driving him home?”
“It was just one of those things,” Emma said. “Belinda really wanted to talk to him, but you know what she's like. And he kept looking up at the clock. So I sort of drifted over to him and the next time he looked I asked him if there was anything wrong. And we got to talking. And that's how we ended up offering him a ride out to Betsy's house. Her mother's house. You know what I mean.”
“I'm surprised he let you take him,” Gregor said.
“Well, Betsy was late,” Emma said. “She'd forgotten all about him. Which is typical, if you want to know what I think. And anyway, he seemed to have heard all about us.”
“Did he really?” Gregor asked.
“Well, he knew I'd been captain of the varsity cheer-leading squad in high school, and he knew Belinda had been homecoming queen our senior year. Belinda and I thought Betsy must have been talking to him. It seemed odd at first, you know, because if I'd been like Betsy was in high school, I'd never have mentioned it to anybody for the rest of my life. But I think he must have seen her old yearbooks, or something, because he knew an awful lot.”
“He's a bright kid,” Gregor said.
Emma shrugged. “He's weird, really. Just like she was,
except that he's less, I don't know, less prickly. More sure of himself. She was always cringing around, acting like a big crybaby. He's almost—if it wasn't for the books and that stuff I'd have thought he was popular, you know, wherever he went to school.”
“So,” Kyle said. “You got to talking to him, and Belinda got to talking to him, and you offered him a ride home. And he accepted.”
“Yes. Well, you know, Laurel, the librarian. She promised to tell his mother where he'd gone if Betsy came in looking for him, and she told him she knew who we were, and that kind of thing. And then he accepted.”
“Good,” Kyle said. “So, you all went around where, to the back of Country Crafts, to get your car?”
“Right.”
“And Belinda just came along for the ride because she was curious?” Kyle said.
“We were both still pretty curious. We thought maybe Betsy had gone home and gotten tied up and not gotten to the library in time, and we would get there and she would be in the house and we would see her. I'd give a lot to actually be able to see her. In the flesh, if you know what I'm saying.”
“But she wasn't home,” Kyle said.
Emma shook her head. “Nobody was home. It was disappointing. There we were, out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Mark didn't invite you inside?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, he invited us,” Emma said. “He even offered to make us coffee, although I don't know how a man is going to make coffee. You see all these chefs in famous restaurants who are men, but they're all gay, and I could tell right off Mark wasn't gay. And there didn't seem to be any point. If Betsy had come home and found us sitting at her kitchen table, she'd have thought we were lying in wait for her.”
“Right,” Kyle said. “Did you pull into the driveway, or did you park out on the street?”
“We parked out in front. I hate that driveway. It's too long.”
“Could you see down the driveway?” Gregor asked.
Emma shook her head. “If you mean, did we see Chris's car, the answer is no. But why would it be out there, anyway ? Nobody was home.”
“Chris could have just arrived and not realized nobody was home,” Kyle said. “She could have been parked out there meaning to knock on the kitchen door, and when she did nobody would have been there. So—”
“Don't be ridiculous,” Emma said. “If she'd been there and been just getting out of her car, she'd have heard us. Mark stayed on the walk for a good minute talking to us before he went inside, and we sat watching him until he was safely in the house, too. You know how you do that. But he's got a really loud voice, and there isn't anything else around there. She'd have heard. She'd have come around to see.”
“Maybe she was already back in her car and on the way out,” Gregor suggested.
“Then we'd have seen her come out,” Emma said. “I told you. We sat there waiting until we were sure he was back in the house. It's a long drive, but it's not Manderley, for God's sake.”
“Right,” Kyle said.
“Face it,” Emma said. “Chris wasn't there when we were. Why don't you ask Dan what he was doing that afternoon ? Isn't that the way it's supposed to be? The husband is the one who's always responsible.”
“He was in Hawaii,” Kyle said. “At some kind of medical convention.”
“Maybe he hired a hit man,” Emma said. “I wouldn't put it past him. He's cold as anything. She wasn't there when we were there. If she was, we would have seen her, one way or the other.”
Of course, Gregor thought, there was always the possibility that Chris Inglerod
had
been there when they were there, but hadn't been alive—or alive enough to let them know where she was. It was always so hard, in real life, to establish where anybody was, and when. It was only in
murder mysteries that the detective could construct a timetable, and all the times on it would come out right.

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