Act of Darkness (28 page)

“But you didn’t see her go inside it?”

“No,” Patchen said. And sighed. “I just sat on the floor next to my door and watched her go away. She went down to her own room—it’s between here and there—and went in. She said downstairs she left her door open.”

“You didn’t notice that?”

“No. I was a little nervous, you see. I mean, I’d gone to all that trouble to make the room look right, and Stephen hadn’t even seen it yet.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

“Of course I can. If he had, he’d have come to talk to me. And even if he didn’t do that directly, he’d talk to Dan and show him, and Dan would have come to talk to me. And nobody came.”

Gregor nodded. “So,” he said, “you went down to Senator Fox’s room yourself. And you definitely went inside.”

“Definitely.”

“And you found?”

Patchen grinned, triumphant. “Pantyhose,” she said. “
Pantyhose.
Not one pair but three. And all my things had been moved around, messed up. The room didn’t look right at all. It took me fifteen minutes just to get it put back together again. I let them think downstairs that I saw Stephen in there, but I didn’t. I don’t think he was even upstairs, no matter what they say. The room was empty and Stephen had never been in it. But Clare Markey had, and she ruined my effect and then she left pantyhose there that didn’t belong there. I know what she was trying to do. She was afraid if Stephen left Janet he wouldn’t be a senator anymore either, and she didn’t want that to happen. She wanted him around where he could help her. So she went in there and deliberately
ruined my spell.
”

Gregor was about to tell her, for what would have been the fifth or sixth time, that it was the silliest motive for doing anything he had ever heard. A schizophrenic would have done better. Surely, no matter how stupid this woman was, it had to be possible to make her understand—

Perhaps fortunately, he never got the chance to try. There was a knock on the door, and both he and Patchen Rawls turned expectantly toward it. A moment later, Henry Berman came in, looking annoyed.

He looked even more annoyed when he saw that Patchen was still there. He had sat in on the first fifteen minutes of Gregor’s interview with her, and then taken himself off, muttering under his breath. To Henry Berman, Patchen Rawls was not simply a stupid woman. She was a flaming insult to the species
Homo sapiens.

Berman looked her over, decided she had not been changed by her time with Gregor Demarkian, and then turned to Gregor himself.

“I think you’d better get downstairs,” the police chief said. “That Bettinger fool is in the foyer, and all he’ll say to anybody is that he has to talk to you.”

Gregor Demarkian had never been ambivalent in the ordinary way about his service in the FBI. He was not one of those people who wondered if any society ever had any right to allow its police forces to work undercover, or to investigate groups of people whose motives were obscure and might not be wholesome. He was a child of World War II. His older brother had been killed at Anjou, and he could remember, with more clarity than he could remember what he’d had for breakfast the morning before, the day when “spy rings” had meant Nazi sympathizers and been all too real. To his thinking, some very few people were morally good, most people were morally neutral, and a tiny percentage of people were actively evil. Because evil almost always operated by deceit—Gregor was also a child of the Armenian Church; the story of Adam and Eve had not been lost on him—it was not always possible to defeat it by transparency. There were times when you just had to knuckle down and play the game their way, just a little. If you didn’t, you ended up, as a colleague of his had once put it, with “your rear end hanging naked in the wind.”

The problem, as Gregor saw it, was not with playing the game their way, just a little. The problem was with agents and administrators who got so caught up in the process that they forgot about the “just a little.” Gregor had never been entirely comfortable in the Bureau as long as old J. Edgar was alive. It had become much too obvious to him much too early that the Boss wasn’t playing with a full deck, and that what he was playing with was marked. Or worse. There had been rumors from one end of the Bureau to the other about the kind of nonsense the Boss was pulling. Gregor had found those rumors all too believable. It had been a terrible relief to him when the old man had died.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t been a relief for long. While he’d been concentrating first on kidnappings and then on the serial killer liaisons that would eventually give birth to the Department of Behavioral Sciences, a new breed of men had been coming into the Bureau. Brought up and educated in ways Gregor couldn’t begin to fathom, a small minority of them seemed to have no points of moral reference at all. They were not evil in the way Gregor was accustomed to think about evil, but they weren’t good, either. They didn’t think in those terms. If there was anything they were unquestionably committed to, it was Career. If they had any fixed idea of a natural and inalienable value, it was Results. None of them were plotters. All of them were potential loose cannons. And loose cannons, to Gregor’s mind, were very dangerous indeed.

It was in this way—as a potential loose cannon, but not necessarily an actual one—that Gregor had always thought of Carl Bettinger. Bettinger was a fine agent. Gregor had worked with him often enough to know he had a great capacity for work, a first-class talent for analysis, and the mind of a true policeman. Whether he also had the soul of a true policeman was another question. There was something about Carl Bettinger that Gregor had always found a little—slippery.

Standing in the foyer at Great Expectations, Bettinger looked less slippery than worried, and with that Gregor could sympathize. Dan Chester was standing in the foyer, too, and he looked angry. Bettinger had obviously been getting the benefit of Dan Chester’s tongue. Gregor thought it must have been like a public scolding, in school, in the days before child-centered education. The living room space was still full of people, lacking only Patchen Rawls (Gregor wondered where she had gotten to) and Dan himself, who could hardly be said to be absent. There were also two uniformed policemen—the one who had been here with Pulaski at the beginning, and a new one—and the arriving hordes from the medical examiner’s office. Bettinger had to be feeling like a ten year old caught putting his frog in the teacher’s desk.

He was, Gregor saw, destined to go on feeling like that. Dan Chester was for the moment silent, but there were rustlings from the living room space. Coming down the last of the stairs, Gregor looked across at the group there and saw that Victoria Harte had risen and begun walking toward the foyer. Her hair flowed. Her caftan flowed. Her face had an expression on it that reminded Gregor of Judith Anderson playing Medea.

Gregor looked reflexively at Victoria’s feet and saw that Patchen Rawls had been telling the truth about at least one thing. Victoria did wear very high heels, the skinny kind that came almost to a point at the end. On the hardwood floor of the living room space they sounded like pegs being pounded into the holes of a carpenter’s board. On the marble tiles of the foyer, they sounded like bullets.

Gregor stepped off the last of the stairs into the foyer itself just as Victoria reached Carl Bettinger’s side. He caught Bettinger’s eye over Victoria’s head and shrugged a little.

“You,” Victoria said, pushing a finger into Bettinger’s chest, “should have been here an hour ago.”

Carl Bettinger stiffened, and Gregor remembered he had never been good at dealing with women. He was younger than Gregor, but not really young. He was still from the generation before the generation who took mixed sex activity as natural in all things. He looked down at Victoria’s finger, and blanched, and began to straighten his tie.

“Mrs. Harte,” he said.

“I’m not Mrs. Harte,” Victoria told him. “Mrs. Harte is somebody married to somebody named Mr. Harte, and I’ve never been married to somebody named Mr. Harte. At the moment, I’m not married to anybody. And I wasn’t even born with Harte. Where have you been?”

“As I told Mr. Chester,” Bettinger started.

Victoria waved that away. “Don’t try to feed me the kind of crap I just heard you feeding Dan, because I won’t listen to it. You’re the one who came to my bedroom—my bedroom, if you remember—and demanded to know everything there was to know about my son-in-law, and about Dan Chester—”

“What?” Chester said.

“—and about our dear departed Dr. Kevin Debrett—”

“What?” Gregor said.

“—and you told me,” Victoria was going on, unheeding, at full steam, “that it was all because you were interested in protecting my daughter from any kind of scandal. But think about it, Mr. Bettinger, that was three months ago, not one or two—”

“Oh,
Christ,
” Bettinger said.

“And I can count,” Victoria finished up dramatically. “Stephen didn’t start getting those attacks until the first of June. You’ve been sniffing around here for two months longer than that. And then, when my son-in-law is murdered off by that deplorable woman, it takes you forever and a day just to show up at the door!”

Gregor Demarkian had seen people turn green before, even veteran agents, even FBI investigators with a dozen bloody mob killings lodged forever in their memory banks. He had never seen anyone turn as green as Carl Bettinger did now. Bettinger was destined to get greener. Dan Chester had been angry. Now he was on the warpath.

“Mr. Bettinger,” he said, “I’m going to have your balls.”

Gregor thought it was time to put a stop to this. If he didn’t, it would only get worse.

He crossed the foyer quickly, grabbed Carl Bettinger by the arm, and began tugging him toward the stairs. Then he bowed courteously first at Dan Chester and then at Victoria Harte and said, “Excuse me.”

“If it turns out you knew about whatever this is too,” Chester said, “I’ll have your balls along with his.”

Gregor did the only thing he could do, which was ignore him, and got Bettinger onto the first of the steps to the “balcony. Then he got Bettinger up two more. Then he leaned over and whispered in Bettinger’s ear, “Come on now, Carl. Let’s go upstairs and talk about how when Kevin Debrett died you showed up at the door almost before the police did, and when Stephen Whistler Fox died you didn’t show up for two hours.”

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN REACHED THE
balcony of the second-floor guest wing with the intention of taking Carl Bettinger to Bennis Hannaford’s room, because he had taken everyone else there. That room, after all, was the semiofficial temporary headquarters of the investigation. Because Gregor knew that Bennis Hannaford had killed neither Kevin Debrett nor Stephen Whistler Fox, he wasn’t worried about disturbing any vital piece of evidence there. He was also used to Bennis and the way she arranged her rooms. In the bedroom of a stranger, he might be distracted by the trivial details of a private life. In Bennis’s bedroom, he simply wondered how someone whose rooms were so orderly could have a mind that ran like a Rube Goldberg machine.

Of course, he had to admit, those Rube Goldberg machines had always worked.

He got halfway down the balcony and then stopped. On consideration, he did not want to take Carl Bettinger to Bennis Hannaford’s room. Henry Berman had made himself scarce while Gregor was talking to Patchen Rawls, but that was animosity. Henry Berman had developed an instantaneous and unqualified dislike of Patchen Rawls and, with Gregor there to take up the slack, he hadn’t been about to suppress it just to question her. With Carl Bettinger, it would be entirely different. Berman would dearly love to question Bettinger.

Gregor was stopped almost directly in front of Bennis’s door.

Policemen were going in and out of it, passing him and nodding, and then scurrying across the balcony to the senator’s room, to prod the medical examiner’s people. Berman was out of sight, but Gregor had not doubt he was going quietly crazy.

Gregor turned back to Bettinger and said, “One door down. That room is my own. No one will bother us there.”

“Bother us?” Bettinger looked thoroughly bewildered. He had been looking bewildered since Victoria Harte had started attacking him.

“I am trying,” Gregor told him, “to be polite about this. I am trying not to involve the local police until they have to be involved. Isn’t that what you want?”

Bettinger flushed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. That’s exactly what I want.”

“I thought so.” Gregor opened the door to his own room and waved Bettinger inside. Still untouched by the hands of any maid and further disordered by the kind of quick-and-dirty police search that can only be conducted with the consent of the victim, it was a mess. The bed looked as if it had been writhed in, not slept in. The vanity was covered with the metal debris of the half dozen complimentary travel kits Gregor had picked up over the course of his career and stuffed into his favorite suitcase and forgotten there. The clothes he had slept in the night before were lying on the floor of his closet.

Bettinger looked all this over more than once and finally sat down gingerly in a chair. He was, Gregor remembered, a neat man, and a little squeamish about dirt.

“My God,” he said, “that’s a frightening woman. That’s a terrifying woman. That’s a gorgon.”

“You mean Victoria Harte?”

“Of course I mean Victoria Harte. She’s the kind of woman who always makes me—never mind. She’s the kind of woman who eats her young.”

Gregor could have said that Janet Harte Fox did not look, eaten, metaphorically or otherwise. Instead, he went to the window and looked out. The strains of music were stronger now, playing “America.” Along the beach, the flags, the bunting, and the fireworks all seemed to have multiplied a hundredfold. In the weakening light, they looked oddly solemn, like the ritual symbols at a patriotic funeral.

Gregor came away from the window and sat down on the bed. “Well,” he said. “Let’s talk. To be specific, let’s talk about your ongoing investigation into Dr. Kevin Debrett.”