Act of Darkness (33 page)

“This Stephanie Fox,” Tibor said, “was she the first?”

“Probably. I don’t think we’ll ever really know.”

“I don’t understand this Victoria Harte,” Tibor said. “Why did she not kill them all then? Why wait so long, Krekor, and then do this?”

Gregor sighed. “In the beginning, I think she was confused. Her focus was always on Janet—what would be best for Janet. She was pathologically identified with Janet. It was the first thing you noticed when you walked into Great Expectations. Victoria had these huge blown-up photographs on the wall, facing each other across the living room, and at first glance you thought they were all Victoria. But they weren’t. On one side there was Victoria. On the other, there were pictures of Janet that looked like Victoria, when Victoria was younger. When the three of them killed Stephanie Harte Fox, Victoria wasn’t sure what effect it would have on Janet. As far as she knew, it might have been for the best. It was only later, when she realized what the death of Stephanie had really done to her daughter, that Victoria began to get seriously angry.”

“What had the death of Stephanie done, Krekor?”

“Made Janet one of the walking dead. Just knocked her out completely. If the first thing you noticed about Victoria was her obsession with Janet, the first thing you noticed about Janet was her passivity. She did what she was supposed to do. She kept her mouth shut about her husband’s women and she appeared on his arm when politics demanded it, but she was on autopilot. My guess is that Victoria has spent the last ten years scared out of her mind that Janet was going to commit suicide.”

Tibor cocked his head. “Was she, Krekor? Was Janet Harte Fox going to commit suicide?”

“I don’t know. I’d feel better about her mental state if she’d ever worked up the energy to divorce that idiot.”

“Well,” Tibor said. “You still haven’t answered the important question. Why now?”

Gregor smiled. “It’s called the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children, and Victoria would have been wildly in favor of it, except for two things. In the first place, it was a fraud. Dan Chester dreamed it up to position Stephen Whistler Fox for a run at the White House, and he was using it to buy campaign contributions from one end of the country to the other. In the second place, it was the vehicle that let Dan turn Stephen into a martyr over the death of Stephanie Harte Fox.”

“And your Victoria Harte was enraged by the—the hypocrisy.”

“My Victoria Harte was enraged by the lack of consideration for Janet. And by the possibility that Stephen, Dan, and Kevin could be made to look like saints over what they had done to her daughter and her granddaughter.”

“I don’t know, Krekor. I think she sounds crazy. I think she will not go to jail.”

“Well, she ought to go to jail. Try to keep in mind that this was a premeditated set of crimes, a
very
premeditated set of crimes. She stole that succinylcholine from somebody somewhere, probably from Kevin Debrett’s medical bag at one of the parties they were at together. She set up those attacks on the senator, and she made sure Patchen Rawls was there for each one. Also Clare Markey—at one point Victoria had her invited to one of the senator’s speaking engagements. Clare thought it was Dan Chester’s idea, but it wasn’t. Then Victoria did two things about the Fourth-of-July weekend. First, when Dan had a brochure printed up for the guests, she had a floor plan of the guest wing made and attached to the back of it, so that nobody would be able to say they didn’t know where somebody else’s room was. Then there was the pantyhose. Victoria took them out of Patchen’s room and left them each time where they would be found and where they would be incriminating. Then there were the servants—”

“Servants?”

“Victoria Harte usually travels with a personal entourage. Personal trainer, personal shopper, the sort of people who never leave her alone. This weekend, none of those people was in evidence. They all had the full four days off. What was the point of that if not to make sure she wouldn’t be disturbed?”

“I don’t understand the point of anything, Krekor. When you tell me these things, I am simply fascinated.”

“I’m glad I amuse you.”

“It is not amusement, Krekor. It is admiration. That was a brilliant psychological analysis.”

“Thanks.” Gregor grinned at him. “It’s just too bad it wasn’t what I used to figure it all out.” Tibor stroked the baby’s back gently, looking uncertain and confused. “How else could you figure it all out? You have said nothing about fingerprints, Krekor, or footprints in the mud. And suffocation—”

Tibor gave an elegant shrug, and Gregor laughed. “All right,” he said. “The first thing I figured out was that Kevin Debrett was under investigation for serial murder, and that the people he was suspected of murdering had to be infants. Do you see?”

“You have told me all this, Krekor.”

“Yes, I have. Take it a step further. The infants he’s murdering are probably infants with Down syndrome, because those are the infants he has access to.”

“I see.”

“Now, ten years ago, a child was born to Stephen and Janet Harte Fox, and that child had Down syndrome, and that child died. Either I have to believe in a series of extraordinary coincidences, or I have to assume that Kevin Debrett killed Stephanie Harte Fox. And that, you see, leaves me with three people with possible strong motives for the murder of Kevin Debrett.”

“Three?”

“Of course. I have to at least consider Stephen Whistler Fox. He could have been faking attacks on himself. He could have been giving himself small doses of succinylcholine. He was hardly mentally stable. Why not?”

“He was murdered, Krekor.”

“Yes, of course. He was murdered, and that left me with the two women, Janet and Victoria. How do you choose between them?”

“The psychology—” Tibor faltered. Gregor shook his head.

“I didn’t work out the psychology until I was on my way back to Philadelphia. Not consciously, at any rate. No, Tibor, it was nothing so cerebral. It was the weapon.”

“The weapon,” Tibor repeated. He looked thoroughly boggled. The baby looked thoroughly boggled, too, although probably for other reasons.

Gregor stretched his legs, wriggled his ankles, rearranged his back against the back of the chair and wished he wasn’t so tired. “Succinylcholine,” he told Tibor, “has to be delivered directly into the blood or directly into the muscles. If you swallow it, it doesn’t do much of anything at all. Like curare itself, however, it doesn’t have to be actually injected. Primitive South American tribes have been killing their enemies with curare for centuries, and they’ve never heard of a hypodermic.”

“They probably have by now, Krekor.”

“Maybe. Anyway, both Janet and Victoria habitually wore things that could be used to deliver succinylcholine. Janet had these antique Victorian ornamental hairpins she wore stuck in her French twist or whatever. Victoria had a heart-shaped ruby brooch she wore day and night, as a kind of trademark. It was big and it was heavy and it was one of a pair. She had the pair made as a mother-daughter thing for Janet’s twenty-first birthday.”

“That sounds like psychology to me, Krekor.”

“Well, it’s not.” Gregor’s grin grew wider. “Janet had a habit of picking at those hairpins, pulling them out and sticking them back in again, completely absentmindedly. Quite often, she stuck herself often enough to draw blood. If she’d been coating one of those things with succinylcholine and carrying it around on her head off and on for over a month, she’d have exhibited a few symptoms of her own to go along with Stephen’s. Victoria Harte, on the other hand, wore her ruby brooch high on her left shoulder. Do you remember I told you it was heavy?”

“Yes, Krekor.”

“I saw a videotape of Janet wearing hers when I first got to Great Expectations, and it made the material of the dress around it sag enough to tear. But Victoria’s never made the material of her caftans sag. I noticed it, but I don’t know enough about women’s clothes. Patchen Rawls explained the reason to me, quite by accident.”

“What was the reason?”

“Shoulder pads,” Gregor said solemnly. “Those caftans Victoria wears have shoulder pads. She could coat the pin in that brooch with succinylcholine, stick it through one of those shoulder pads, and never have to worry about it coming in contact with her skin.”

“Tcha,”
Tibor said.

Gregor laughed.

At that moment, the baby woke up, gave a sharp but not uncongenial cry, and began to wriggle. Tibor picked it up off his lap and smiled at it. It must have smiled back. Tibor smiled wider and put it down on his knee, to bounce.

“It is silly what the books tell you,” he said, “that they don’t smile until they are a year old. This one smiles all the time and he knows what he is doing. I think he is very intelligent, Krekor.”

“All Donna’s genes and none of Peter’s?”

“
Tcha.
We won’t talk about Peter. We “won’t talk about Victoria Harte again now either. She makes me ache. Are you coming with us to the parade?”

“Are you going to take the baby?”

“Of course we will take the baby, Krekor. He will enjoy it. They will play music and he will smile. Then we will bring him back here and he will smile some more, because of what Donna and Bennis and Lida and Hannah are now doing. Do you know what they are doing?”

“Cooking.”

“Making a chocolate cake with ice cream between the layers and the frosting to look like a flag. My Tommy likes frosting very much. Also, maybe there will be a high-school band at this parade and they will play his favorite music. Wop do.”

“Do wop,” Gregor said.

“Whatever. This is Philadelphia, Krekor. This is the best place for the Fourth of July.”

And Tibor, Gregor thought, was right. From the day when fifty-six men had written their names on the bottom of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia had definitely been the best place for the Fourth of July.

There would probably even be fireworks.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries

Tuesday, October 29

Once upon a midnight dreary,

while I pondered, weak and weary

Over many a quaint and curious

volume of forgotten lore—

—E. A. Poe

T
HE INVITATION TO TEACH
philosophy for one semester at Independence College came to Father Tibor Kasparian on the fifth of July. It came out of nowhere, with no advance warning. It descended into nowhere just as quickly, buried in that pile of papers and magazines Tibor thought of as his “things to do that will never get done.” Most of the things in that pile were simple nuisances: copies of supermarket tabloids with stories about kidnappings by aliens in them, collected for a paper Tibor half intended to write on popular delusions; letters from women’s groups in Armenian parishes across the country, asking him to speak on “living out your Christian faith in a Communist country.” The alien kidnappings had begun to depress him. Too many people believed in them because they wanted to believe in them, because they found an irrational universe more appealing than the one the good God had actually made. The women’s groups were simply impossible. Tibor had nothing against talking about what had happened to him—he did it all the time, with his best American friend, Gregor Demarkian—but he didn’t know how to talk about it without telling the truth, and the truth had a lot of blood in it. He couldn’t imagine delivering a sermon on the virtues of genital torture across a sea of melting ice cream, the
pièce de résistance
to a lunch of lemon veal.

The problem with the invitation to teach was somewhat more complicated. In a way, it was a miracle of biblical proportions, an affirmative answer to an impossible prayer. Teaching philosophy was what Tibor Kasparian had once set out to do, before he’d found both Christ and tyranny, before he’d begun to understand what the world was really like. Teaching philosophy was even what he’d been trained for, in the back rooms and root cellars of Yekevan, during that fragmented and dangerous process that substituted for the seminary in the worst days of Soviet rule. Unfortunately, teaching philosophy was also what had first gotten him into so much trouble.

He took the letter out of the mailbox, opened it on the spot, and read it. Then he went upstairs and put it on the pile. Then he came downstairs again and told himself the thing was safely in his study. He didn’t have to answer it. He didn’t have to see it again. He didn’t have to tell anyone it had ever come. Only he knew—and his Anna, who was with God.

Two weeks later, in the middle of an argument about the Articles of Confederation, Tibor Kasparian sent Gregor Demarkian up to the study to find a book. The book was in a stack of books on a shelf behind the desk that held the pile. The letter from Independence College was still on the top of that pile, in spite of the fact that the pile had been added to a dozen times since the letter had come. Gregor Demarkian was by nature and profession a snoop.

Later, Tibor decided he had done it all on purpose. He had wanted to be saved from his fear. Most of all, he had wanted to be relieved of his guilt—the guilt that told him he should not accept this offer, because he and Anna had once plotted to come to America to find a place that would let him teach, because Anna had died in blood before they’d ever gotten started.