Deadly Beloved (13 page)

“Why?” Sharon asked.

Liza got a plastic coffee cup from the stack next to the coffee machine and poured herself some coffee. “What are you two talking about? What happened to somebody with money?”

Sharon waved her hand dismissively in the air. “It wasn’t somebody with real money, like a rock star or anything. It was one of those people who lives at Fox Run Hill. You know the place I mean.”

“I’d call ten thousand square feet of house money,” Mia said. “It costs a lot more money than I’m ever going to have.”

“Maybe you’ll win the lottery,” Sharon said.

Liza swallowed half the coffee in the cup at once. “What’s this all about?” she asked again. “What happened to somebody at Fox Run Hill? Mugger get in past those security guards or what?”

“This woman killed her husband,” Sharon said.

“That’s it?” Liza was surprised.

“She had some kind of fancy gun,” Mia said, “and then she drove her car into a parking garage in West Philly and blew it up.”

“She blew up her car?”

“She wasn’t inside it,” Sharon explained. “She left some kind of time bomb in it and disappeared.”

“A time bomb,” Liza repeated. “In a parking garage. Was anybody hurt?”

“There were a few people injured,” Sharon said, “but nobody was killed. That’s why I was saying what I was saying. That it’s race. If it was black people who did all that, nobody would have paid any attention.”

“It’s been all over the news since last night,” Mia explained.

“And what hasn’t been all over the news is that accident,” Sharon said. “I mean, there’ve been some reports on it, you know, here and there, but no real fuss, and all the while they’re going on and on and on about this little murder out in Fox Run Hill. Because the people involved in it are white.”

“Because the people involved in it are rich,” Mia said.

“Maybe it’s both,” Liza told them, finishing the rest of her coffee and pouring some more. “What happened to the wife who committed the murder?”

“No one knows,” Mia said solemnly.

“The problem with these people in the media,” Sharon said, “is they think all black people are animals with nothing on their minds but sex and violence. So a few black people get killed, so who cares? So some black guy takes out a pistol and starts shooting up the landscape, what can you expect? It’s race, pure and simple.”

“I’m not saying it’s not race a lot of the time,” Mia said. “I’m just saying that this time the deciding factor was money. That’s all.”

“Look at O. J. Simpson,” Sharon said. “What was the point of all that fuss except to make it clear to every single American of the white persuasion that it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what a black person accomplishes in his life, he’s still just a hair trigger away from being a thug?”

“All that fuss could have been about violence against women,” Mia said. “I mean, for once the media could have been taking violence against women seriously.”

“When Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend, it was a footnote on the eleven o’clock news,” Sharon said firmly.

Over on the television screen there was a shot of a still photograph of a woman in middle age. There were lines on the sides of her face and bags under her eyes. Her hair was salt-and-pepper gray. Liza drank more coffee and wished she weren’t so tired. The face on the screen looked strangely familiar.

“Here we go again,” Sharon was saying. “The mysterious Mrs. Willis and her awful moneyed murder. Have you ever seen anybody with so little style in your life? If I had money like that, I’d look great.”

“Maybe she didn’t want to look great,” Mia said.

Liza walked closer to the screen and squinted at the picture.

“Oh,” she said.

“What is it?” Sharon said.

“Police today are desperately searching for clues that will explain the bizarre behavior, and present whereabouts, of Patricia MacLaren Willis,” the announcer said.

Liza took a step back. “Who?” she said.

“They called her Patsy,” Mia said. “It was in the
Inquirer
this morning.”

“But that’s impossible,” Liza said.

“Did you know her?” Sharon said.

“I keep forgetting that Liza went to Vassar,” Mia said. “She must know dozens of people like that.”

The coffee in the cup was all gone. The picture on the screen had changed to one of a talking head with a microphone. The talking head was standing in front of a big Tudor house with what seemed to be hundreds of police cars parked in the driveway. Liza rubbed her eyes.

“Police are now saying that we may never know the complete story of why Patricia MacLaren Willis did what she did yesterday,” the talking head said, “because as the hours go by, there is less and less hope that when she is found, if she is found, she will be found alive.”

“Alive,” Liza Verity repeated. And then she shook her head very hard, as if that would clear it. “For Christ’s sake.”

Out in Fox Run Hill, Sarah Lockwood was also saying “for Christ’s sake,” over and over and over again, under her breath. She was standing at the window at the second floor landing of her French Provincial house, looking out on Patsy Willis’s Tudor. She had been standing there for nearly half an hour, while police cars came and went and police detectives spread out across the lawn and half a dozen women from the neighborhood found excuses to do their jogging right in front of the Willises’ front door. Sarah didn’t think she’d ever been this nervous in her life.

“You can’t stay up there all day,” Kevin called out to her every once in a while. “You’re not going to find anything out mooning over a lot of parked police cars.”

Now a new police car was pulling up, a different police car, from Philadelphia instead of from the local force. Sarah watched as a tall black man in a good black suit got out—an astonishing sight, since there were never any black people in Fox Run Hill, unless they were in uniform—and was followed by an even taller white man, older and thicker and running to fat. It took a minute for Sarah to place him. Then she raced from the window, leaned over the stairrail, and called down the well: “Kevin, come quick. Look who’s here.”

“I’m not going to come quick up those stairs,” Kevin replied, “unless you’re announcing the Second Coming.”

“It’s Gregor Demarkian,” Sarah said. “Come quickly.”

There was a short silence from the lower floor. Then Kevin said “Jesus,” and Sarah heard his heavy footsteps beginning to run up the stairs.

“Look,” she said when Kevin arrived on the landing. “There he is. Do you think the local police have hired him?”

“I don’t think it’s possible to hire him. I don’t think he works for money.”

“Somebody must have brought him in though,” Sarah said. “It stands to reason. He doesn’t just show up on his own.”

“Maybe it’s something we ought to worry about,” Kevin said. “Under the circumstances. Considering what we’re up to.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. He isn’t going to be interested in us. It’s Patsy and Stephen he’s going to be worried about.”

“Murder investigations are funny things,” Kevin said carefully. “They can—spread out.”

“I know that.”

“Then maybe we ought to worry about it. Maybe we ought to be a little careful over the next few weeks. Just in case.”

Down in the Willises’ driveway, Gregor Demarkian was huddled in a clutch with a lot of men in suits. Sarah Lockwood bit her lip.

“I think it’s exciting,” she said softly. “I think it makes everything we’re doing much more fun.”

“You’re nuts.”

Sarah turned around and put her hand on the bulge in Stephen’s pants. It pulsed under her fingers and made her smile.

“Of course I’m nuts,” she said. “That’s the point.”

T
HE FIRST GATED COMMUNITY
Gregor Demarkian had ever heard of had been in Florida, on the Atlantic coast, exactly one year after Ted Bundy had been arrested for the murder of Kimberly Ann Leach. Logically, Gregor was sure that those two facts did not go together in any meaningful way. The gated community had probably existed long before anyone in Florida had ever heard of Ted Bundy. Still, in his mind the juxtaposition was significant. He had known enough really rich people who lived behind walls and gates and guards and security systems. There was a positive fashion for that sort of thing in the early seventies in Beverly Hills. Gated communities, however, were not for the really rich. They were for the people Gregor had learned in college to call the “upper middle class,” meaning really successful doctors and lawyers and businessmen, the top management of the larger corporations, the ruling elites of America’s better small towns. Of course, Gregor thought as he got out of John Jackman’s commandeered police car, these days the top managements of the larger corporations were counted among the really rich. They had salaries in seven figures and bonus packages that would be the envy of most rock stars. Their job seemed to be to move as much production work as possible out of Pittsburgh and into Southeast Asia. And as for the really successful doctors and lawyers—

Standing in the driveway, Gregor looked around. This was a good neighborhood. There were rubberneckers, but the rubberneckers were discreet. They looked like joggers who weren’t much interested in what the police were doing. The lawns were beautifully kept too—but Gregor saw that they had been badly planned. They were all the same size and shape, like the lawns in a tract house development, and when you looked at them long enough, you noticed. The architecture had been badly planned too. Each of the houses was carefully unlike any of the others, but too much unlike. Gregor looked over the Willises’ Tudor, and then around at a French Provincial, a brick Federalist, and an elaborately gabled and turreted Victorian. Out on the Main Line, where the really rich people lived, the houses were much more alike, and much larger. These looked oddly like stage sets, studied and self-conscious, uncomfortable.

John Jackman touched his elbow. “So,” he said, “what do you think?”

“Expensive,” Gregor said.

Jackman nodded. “Oh, it is that. Houses go for about five hundred thousand apiece.”

“That was the other thing I was thinking,” Gregor said. “That isn’t expensive enough.”

“I know what you mean. The first thing I thought of the first time I walked in here was Bryn Mawr and that place Bennis Hannaford’s family had—do they still have it?”

“It was willed to Yale University after Bennis’s mother died,” Gregor said.

“Right. But that was really a place, wasn’t it? At least forty rooms. All those servants’ quarters. The stables. You couldn’t have fit it on one of these lots.”

“Is this the first of these gated communities you’ve ever been in?”

“Live and in the flesh, yes,” Jackman said. “We don’t have a lot of them in Philadelphia proper, as you can imagine. And they’re not the kind of places the police tend to get called in.”

Gregor shook his head impatiently. “Why do they do it?” he demanded. “What’s the point of the gates and the guards and all the rest of it? They can’t possibly believe it turns them into successors to the robber barons.”

“Of course they don’t,” Jackman said. “They do it to keep the black people out.”

Gregor shot Jackman a look and started to say something, but he didn’t have time. They were being approached by a large white man in a leather jacket. If the man hadn’t been obviously white-haired and old, he would have been menacing. Gregor caught the patch on the sleeve of his jacket and realized it was some kind of police insignia.

“Dan,” Jackman said, holding out his hand. “Good morning. This is Mr. Gregor Demarkian—”

“—the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” Dan finished.

“I hope not,” Gregor said.

“Dan Exter,” Jackman finished, “chief of homicide for the Heggerd town police. It says something that a place called Heggerd, Pennsylvania, needs a chief of homicide.”

“It’s not exactly that impressive,” Dan Exter said mildly. “The last murder we had out here was four years ago, and it was an assisted suicide we didn’t even prosecute in the end. Couple of old people. If you don’t like being called the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot, what do you like to be called?”

“Gregor,” Gregor said.

John Jackman rocked back on his heels. In one way, he looked out of place there. He was probably perfectly right about the way the people who lived there felt about black people, and he was so very black. In another way, though, he looked much more like he belonged there than most of the joggers. He was less tentative than they were, more sure of himself, more confident of his authority. John Jackman was a young man, but he had a lot of internal authority. Gregor had met him when he was just a rookie cop, and the quality had been evident even then.

“They’ve been holding off going around the neighborhood,” Jackman said, “because they know what a hassle it’s going to be, and I don’t blame them. Still, it’s going to have to be done.”

“I know it’s going to have to be done,” Dan Exter said patiently, “but it isn’t going to help us any and it’s going to be a problem. Let’s get the important things done first.”

“Somebody might have seen her leave,” Jackman said.

“The security guard saw her leave,” Dan Exter said. “Actually, if you ask me, from what this guy said, the woman made a point of making sure he saw her leave. In fact, from everything I’ve heard over the last few hours, she seems to have made a point of being noticed wherever she went. Did John tell you about the money?” he asked Gregor.

Gregor shook his head. “I thought there had to be money in it somewhere, but he hasn’t said anything in particular.”

“She went to a bank in Philadelphia yesterday,” Jackman said. “It was a couple of blocks from where she parked the car. She wrote out a check for fifteen thousand dollars and handed it to a teller.”

Dan Exter scratched his head. “I don’t know about you, Mr. Demarkian, but it’s my guess that a woman who lived like this in a place like this would know better than to write a check for that much money and hand it to a teller. She would have known she had to clear it with an officer of the bank. She would have known the bank would have to do some reporting—do you realize that? The Feds make the banks report any cash deposit or cash withdrawal in excess of $9999.99.”