Great Day for the Deadly (32 page)

“You’re sure she’s not?” Gregor asked him.

“Positive. I can use a pair of binoculars as well as anyone else. You can see the body, Gregor, you just can’t touch it.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said again.

Pete turned the car off Londonderry Street and onto something called Farrow. Farrow wound around the base of a small hill and turned into something called Fox. From Fox, Gregor could finally see it: first a glow on the horizon, then the pulsing red of fire about to go out of control. The car spun off Fox onto Huntington and he was faced with what could only be the very best part of town. It was a street of graceful brick two-stories on graceful wide lawns, a uniformity broken only by the great stone pile with the fire engines and police cars parked in front of it: Miriam Bailey’s Huntington Avenue house. The neighbors on either side of it and across the street were out on their front steps, watching the action. Pete Donovan skidded by them with a shudder of disgust.

“You’d think people like this would know better,” he said. “My mother always told me it wasn’t good manners at all to chase fires.”

Gregor had known a president of the United States who liked to chase fires. “Maybe they’re chasing a murder,” he told Pete Donovan.

They turned into the Bailey house’s drive and went up as close as the knot of vehicles there would allow them.

“Come out to the back and see it while you still can,” Donovan said. “By now the kerosene fumes ought to be mostly cleared out. They were so strong when I got here, I almost vomited.”

“Really,” Gregor said.

Pete hopped out onto the drive and waited for Gregor to follow him. “We go this way around back. It gets you the closest you can be. God only knows what’s left of her now.”

The import of that statement became clear almost as soon as Gregor got out of the car. Because of the way the house was built, it was difficult to see anything of what was going on at the back. Gregor discovered later that the floor plan was a fat tee, with the short wide end at the front. It was possible, however, to feel what was going on. Now that it was full dark, the air was hard and cold. The stars above their heads looked like chips of mica against black velvet. The wind was cold, too, but it brought with it intimations of something else, short gusts of heat that came and went so quickly, they might have been fantasy. That they weren’t was attested to by the glow of red and the spirals of black smoke rising up from the back. Pete Donovan got Gregor by the wrist and pulled him along.

“Move,” Donovan said. “We really don’t have much time.”

Gregor moved as fast as he was able, and in no time at all he could see what Donovan was getting at, about everything. Donovan had been wrong about the kerosene. The smell of it was thick in the air. Gregor found himself thinking that she must have poured it on in buckets. God only knew where she’d gotten hold of all of it. Then there was the position of the conservatory, and the greenhouse. Donovan had brought Gregor around the building to the right. Farther to the right were broad lawns covered with untouched carpets of snow. To the left were trees, ancient and massive. Up from the middle of them rose the glass panes of the roof of what must have been a three-story greenhouse. Just behind those panes, just where the trees cleared, the house was in flames.

“You’ve got to climb the wall,” Donovan told him. “I mean, you’re supposed to climb the wall. It’s got a ladder built into it. Miriam’s father built it as an observation post for sky watching. He used to have the local Boy Scouts out here. You just—”

But Gregor shook his head. There was indeed a ladder in the wall Pete Donovan was talking about. The wall itself created a division between the property’s front and back yards. Gregor and Donovan had had to walk through the gap between it and the house to get to where they were now. The wall was made of stone and the “ladder” was made of the lack of stones, here and there, in a hand-over-hand pattern that made Gregor seasick just to look at. It went up three stories and ended in a little square roofless turret.

“I don’t think so,” Gregor told Donovan. “I don’t think it’s my kind of thing. Is this as close as you’ve been able to get?”

“Hell, no,” Donovan said. “When we first got here I walked right up under her practically. I put on one of those asbestos suits they’ve got and went right through the fire until I was standing in the middle of all those animals. I broke a couple of windows and let the animals out.”

“Good idea.”

“I wanted to get her out,” Pete Donovan went on, “but the fireman said there wasn’t enough time. The conservatory was going up really fast and you can’t get to the greenhouse any other way. It’s like I told you. With those trees you’re stuck going in through the conservatory or not at all.”

“You said she was on a ledge?”

“Like a shelf,” Pete Donovan said. “The greenhouse has got these glass shelves, or clear shelves anyway—”

“Could they have been some kind of plastic?”

“I guess. Do you need that for something?”

“No.” Gregor sighed, “not exactly. Go back to telling me about this shelf. How far off the ground was it?”

“Ceiling of a room second story up,” Donovan said promptly. “I could reach it without a ladder, and there wasn’t a ladder.”

“In a greenhouse? In a greenhouse where they keep animals?”

“I thought that was fishy, too,” Donovan said. “The way I look at it is, we were never supposed to find her—Miriam, I mean—but she took the ladder away just in case. Ann-Harriet I’m talking about now.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, “I thought you were.”

“Yeah,” Pete Donovan said. “Well, Ann-Harriet killed Miriam, stuffed her up there on that shelf by carrying her up a ladder and dumping her in a heap, doused the conservatory in kerosene and lit a match.”

“Why the conservatory?”

“Closest thing that would light. It’s got wood floors. The greenhouse has tile floors. Maybe she doused the body, too, to be safe. It’s a good plan, Demarkian, much better than I would have expected from Ann-Harriet. It has all the elements. If Josh hadn’t panicked and called us, the place would have burned down and the body would have been reduced to ash before we ever saw it. We’d never have been able to prove that Miriam hadn’t burned to death.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said for the third time. Then he left Donovan’s side at the edge of the wall and advanced across the lawn in the direction of the fire. He supposed it was just possible that it had happened the way Donovan said it had, that she had killed and then transported the body up a high stepladder to that shelf. In fact, it must have. Gregor had worked the whole thing out over the last few hours, the who, what, when, where, how, and why. He knew he couldn’t be wrong, because there was no other possible explanation that fit all the facts. Even this fact—this body left in an inaccessible place to be destroyed—could be accounted for in no other way. Still, he was even more impressed with her than he had been. It couldn’t have been easy. She had more determination than any other murderer he had ever met.

He got as close to the fire as he could, right up to the point where the heat began to make his face feel ready to blister. He was held back at that point by a frightened looking boy in a yellow slicker. The slicker had a shield with “Maryville Volunteer Fire Department” written into its borders.

“Can’t go past here,” the boy said. “It’s dangerous.”

“I won’t go past,” Gregor told him. “I was looking for someone who might have seen the body. Someone might be able to answer a few questions.”

“I saw the body,” the boy said. His face went green and he turned away, to look at the flames. “Only for a minute, though. I threw up.”

“Was it that bad?”

The boy heaved. “It was the back of her legs,” he said. “She was all curled up there on her side with her legs sticking out into the room and they had bubbles on them. You could just see the bubbles. It was—”

“Never mind,” Gregor said. “I know what it was. Do you know someone named Josh Malley?”

“Oh. Oh, yes. I do.”

“Is he around here somewhere?”

“He’d be a good person to ask about the body,” the boy said. “He saw it before it was—before the heat got to it. I heard Pete Donovan tell my chief. I heard Pete Donovan tell my chief Miss Bailey was murdered, too.”

“Does that make it worse,” Gregor asked him, “that she was murdered?”

“Just so long as she was dead before the heat got to her.” The boy turned and looked around, into the arch lights, into the flame light. The lawn was becoming more and more of a mess by the minute. The hose trucks and the hooks and ladders were parked around to the other side. It had been easier to get them there, with no star-gazing wall to get in their way. The activity on this side was heavy even without them. The boy peered at one face after the other and shook his head.

“I don’t see him,” he said. “He was talking to Pete Donovan for a while, though. And then he was talking to Harry Demos from the state police. He’ll be around here somewhere. All right?”

“All right.”

“I don’t mind anything as long as she was dead when the heat got to her,” the boy said again. “That’s all I could think of when I saw her, with those shoes with the high spiky heels and the heels were starting to melt it was so hot in there and then the skin—”

“She was dead long before the heat got to her,” Gregor said.

“That’s all I wanted to know.”

There was what felt like a gust of hot wind but was instead a puff of heated air breaking through a window. Shouts went up from the other side of the house, followed by banging that must have been axes against wood. Gregor looked up to see that the conservatory had lost the integrity of its shape. There was nothing left of it now but charred broken rafters and fire. The rafters were black and growing smaller by the minute. The fire was triumphant and swelling. Gregor couldn’t see any stars in the sky at all anymore. Instead, even the puffs of breath that hung in the air every time he exhaled were tinged with red.

He backed up away from the boy, and looked around. Pete Donovan was in the middle of a cluster of policemen, state and local, talking earnestly to a tall man in a Smokey the Bear hat and riding boots. Gregor had never understood why state police everywhere went in for riding boots. He walked over to the group and pulled at Donovan’s sleeve.

“There’s one more thing I have to check out and then I think we’d better hurry,” he said. “I know this is the middle of nowhere, but I can’t believe we’ll have much time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time to pick her up.”

“What are you talking about?” Donovan demanded. “She isn’t going anyplace. Why would she bother? She thinks she’s got it made. Miriam dead, Josh ripe for the plucking, a ton of money in Bailey bank accounts or whatever it is that Josh inherits.”

“We don’t know that he inherits anything,” Gregor said irritably. “And not one of these three people was killed because Ann-Harriet Severan wanted Miriam Bailey’s money.”

“They weren’t.” Pete Donovan was stupefied. “Well tell me,” he exploded, “why were they killed? Why else could they have been killed? Do you think I’ve got two or three murderers running around town? Why kill Miriam Bailey at all if you aren’t after her money?”

“Exactly,” Gregor said. “Why kill Miriam Bailey at all? Brigit Ann Reilly was killed because she stole a postulant’s habit and brought it to a building down on Diamond Place to be picked up by someone she liked and trusted. She was killed on the day she was killed because that was the day the bank packaged up the old money to be sent to the Federal Reserve for new bills—”

“You mean Ann-Harriet stole the old bills?”

“If she had, Maryville would have been invaded by federal marshals long before now,” Gregor said. “It wasn’t old bills that were stolen. It was new ones. If you check the bank’s computer system I think you’ll find evidence of a fraud, a very small and confusing fraud, going back some months. That’s what would have been used to cover the missing cash, at least temporarily. It would have to be very temporarily.”

“You’ve gotten yourself into the bank’s computer?” Donovan demanded. “How?”

“I didn’t get myself into anything, Mr. Donovan. I’m extrapolating. You’ll find that fraud because it has to be there. Go looking for it. Don Bollander was killed because he saw what he thought was Brigit Ann Reilly wandering around in the bank a quarter of an hour before Brigit was found dead.”

“Right,” Donovan said.

“It’s a good thing we’re dealing with such monumental arrogance,” Gregor said. “If we weren’t, she’d have had time to get all the way out of the state by now. She might have had time to get out of the country. Do you know where Josh Malley is?”

“Yes”

“Good,” Gregor said, “let’s go talk to him. Just in case there’s even the slightest chance I might be wrong, let’s make absolutely sure.”

Donovan looked like he was about to make a protest, stopped himself and turned. Then he marched into the crowd with no attempt whatsoever to make sure

Gregor could keep up with him.

They found Josh Malley sitting by himself, alone and ignored and dressed only in a heavy sweater, against the end of the stone wall closest to the house. There was a lot of activity going on around him. Men and women walked in and out through the gap, carrying equipment and notebooks and talking to each other in loud voices meant to carry through the shouts of firefighters still battling away at the house. They ignored Josh and Josh ignored them. Gregor thought he had never seen a more thoroughly dejected man, or a more ineffectual one. Josh at this meeting was just as Josh had been this afternoon outside the bank. Most of the boys who sold themselves for money—to men and women both—were psychopaths. They had neither scruples nor emotions and weren’t interested in acquiring either. Josh was just a floater, a perfectly harmless type but lacking in organization and purpose and especially in intelligence. He went from one thing to another without knowing why or where or what it all meant. If it turned out badly he was upset. If it turned out well, he was surprised. Gregor almost felt sorry for him.

When Gregor and Donovan reached him, Josh looked up, blinked, and tried a smile. Then he slumped down again and shrugged.