Deadly Beloved (31 page)

“Oh, she expected to get into the papers with that,” Gregor said. “It’s too bad she couldn’t have picked her time better. I think she was probably in a bind, or she would have. As it turned out, she blew up her car during a slow news week, and it got more attention than she had expected. Although it was supposed to get some attention.”

“He talks like this all the time,” John Jackman said. “Sometimes I’m ready to kill him. God only knows what he wants up here now.”

Gregor walked over to the body bag and looked down. “You said it was a small bomb, and yet she died anyway. She must have been sitting right on top of it.”

“Almost literally, I think,” Dr. Halloran said. “The wounds are consistent with that interpretation anyway. I think somebody put it under her like a whoopee cushion.”

“Which would mean it would have to be somebody she knew,” John Jackman said. “Except that according to you, Gregor, she was supposed to have known Patsy MacLaren. In college.”

“The message on the phone was garbled,” Gregor said, “but I’m fairly sure that’s what she said. But I don’t think she would have let Patsy MacLaren get into a position to plant a bomb underneath her, do you?”

“What do you mean?” John Jackman blinked.

“Well,” Gregor said, “look at it this way. For a week or so now, the news has been full of stories about how Patsy MacLaren murdered her husband and blew up her car, and lately there have been even more stories about how she’s a suspect in the bombing of the town house where Congresswoman Corbett was giving a reception. This isn’t what I would call a wonderful person to let get behind your back, would you?”

John Jackman looked confused. “You mean it wasn’t Patsy MacLaren who planted this bomb?”

“As far as Patsy MacLaren could do anything, she planted this bomb,” Gregor said.

John Jackman looked disgusted. “Except she couldn’t do even that, because she’s dead. You know, Gregor, we do seem to have a situation here where bombs are going off left and right and people are dropping like flies and there’s no end in sight, and when we get into a situation like that, I begin to feel that it’s not really all right for us to—”

“There’s an end in sight,” Gregor said. “I don’t think anybody’s going to end up dead again anytime soon. Unless Karla Parrish dies in the hospital, God forbid, and that isn’t what you’re talking about.”

“How can you possibly know that nobody’s going to end up dead?” Phil Borley was curious. “I don’t like the MO here, Mr. Demarkian. It’s nuts.”

“No, it’s not,” Gregor said. “Really, you know, it’s all absolutely simple. The only thing that got complicated, like I said, was the timing, because the timing meant that there was a great deal more publicity about it all than there would have been. Or maybe that was a miscalculation on her part. Maybe, what with Fox Run Hill in the picture, there would always have been a fair amount of publicity. I think it might have been much different if the city was in the middle of a gang war or if there was a crisis going on in Korea. As I said, maybe not.”

“If the timing was so important to her, why didn’t she just wait?” John Jackman asked. “Crises in Korea don’t happen every day, but gang wars are frequent enough. She could have found any number of excuses in no time at all.”

“She didn’t have the time,” Gregor said. “She was very close to being found out. If she hadn’t already been found out.”

“You mean by her husband,” Phil Borley said. “Hadn’t they been married for years? What was there new about her that he could possibly have found out?”

Gregor walked over to the wall next to the hallway and looked carefully at the paint and paper. There were no telltale signs of bright and dark, no indications that pictures had hung there for a long time that were now gone. He sighed.

“Everybody always talks about how wonderful the sixties were,” he said, “but have you ever noticed? Nobody ever keeps pictures of it. Nobody has his coffee table full of snapshots of long-haired boys dancing in mud or people with signs marching on the Pentagon. They have posters of that kind of thing, but they don’t have pictures of themselves.”

“You’re looking for pictures of long-haired guys in mud?” John Jackman asked.

“I’m looking for a picture of Patsy MacLaren. The Patsy MacLaren who died in India. Do you think we could get hold of a Vassar College yearbook?”

“Probably,” John Jackman answered. “This doesn’t answer the question of why she didn’t wait. Why kill her husband right when she did? Why blow up her car instead of just leaving it in the airport parking lot with all the other missing cars?”

“Steve Willis was being reassigned to work in his head office,” Gregor said. “Remember? That was practically the first thing you told me about this case. Usually he traveled a great deal, but he was home on the night he was killed because he was being taken off traveling. He was going to be living at home full-time and working in an office just like anybody else. And of course, under the circumstances, that had to be intolerable.”

“To his wife,” John Jackman said.

“Exactly,” Gregor said. “Do me a favor, check a few other things, all right? You’re looking into this degree Patsy MacLaren was supposed to have earned at the University of Pennsylvania—”

“We’re checking into everything,” John Jackman said. “Like I said, that trust officer is off in the Caribbean someplace, but we’ll find him. And we’ll check everything. You don’t have to tell us that.”

“I know I don’t.” Gregor looked into Liza Verity’s bedroom. There was a photograph in there in a shiny aluminum frame, but it was only of Liza Verity herself in a nurse’s cap, holding what looked like a diploma. Gregor went over to her closet and looked into that, but Liza Verity had not been heavily addicted to clothes. She had a couple of the kind of dresses Bennis Hannaford would call “nice,” meaning suitable for semi-ceremonial occasions. Gregor got the impression that they were of a cheaper make than Bennis would have worn herself. She had a couple of pairs of jeans, pressed and draped over hangers. She had several cotton sweaters folded on the shelf over the hanger rod.

John Jackman and Phil Borley and Dr. Halloran were waiting for him in the hall, looking curious.

“So,” John Jackman said. “Have you got it all figured out?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I need pictures.”

“I need Patsy MacLaren. Assuming that Patsy MacLaren exists,” John Jackman said glumly. “
Does
Patsy MacLaren exist?”

“Yes,” Gregor said.

“Then Julianne Corbett was lying,” John Jackman said. “Patsy MacLaren didn’t die in India.”

“Julianne Corbett wasn’t lying when she said Patsy MacLaren died in India,” Gregor said.

“Crap,” John Jackman said.

“I really do need pictures,” Gregor said. He went back out into the living room. The orderlies had the stretcher assembled on the floor—or was it disassembled? or unfolded?—and they were levering Liza Verity’s body onto it. It seemed to Gregor like a very small body, but he might have been wrong. He had never met the woman. He should have met her. He went into the kitchen. Liza Verity didn’t seem to have been very committed to cooking.

“Well,” John Jackman said, following him. “Tell me this. Am I supposed to feel guilty? Is there something I should have figured out sooner? Could we have kept this murder from happening?”

Gregor shook his head. “I couldn’t have. It didn’t click for me until after I got here, and by the time I got here—hell, John. Practically the first thing that happened to me downstairs was that I watched the elevator blow up.”

“Right,” John Jackman said.

Gregor nodded. “On second thought, I don’t think that was an accident. I think she dropped that second pipe bomb into the elevator shaft on purpose. I think that was how she ensured that she was going to have time to get away.”

“Who?” Phil Borley looked bewildered.

“Patsy MacLaren,” Gregor said.

“Oh, don’t start that again,” John Jackman said.

“Why didn’t she just go out and get another gun?” Dr. Halloran asked. “From everything I’ve heard about what happened to the husband, she was good with guns. A gun would at least be quicker and easier and less messy than this kind of thing.”

“She doesn’t have access to a gun,” Gregor said. “It’s like I said before, if she’d realized she was going to end up killing anyone besides her husband, she would have kept the gun she had. My guess is that she acquired it a few years ago. Knowing that something like this was going to come up eventually. Planning it out.”

“For years,” John Jackman said.

“That’s right,” Gregor told him. “She’s good at that. Planning for years, I mean. It’s what she’s always done best. It’s just unfortunate for her that in this sort of thing, you can’t really plan.”

John Jackman was looking mutinous. “Are we still talking about Patsy MacLaren here?” he demanded. “The woman Julianne Corbett was
not
lying about when she said she was dead? That one?”

“Yes.”

“So what is she? A ghost? Does her spirit return to wreak revenge on the living? Was it an astral projection who was married to Stephen Willis? What the hell is going on here?”

“Patsy MacLaren,” Gregor Demarkian said carefully, “is a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman who would appear absolutely no different from any other perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman if you had ever met her, which you have, once or twice, although you didn’t know it.”

“
I’ve
met Patsy MacLaren,” John Jackman said. “Right. When was this? Before she murdered her husband?”

“No. Since.”

“Right. During this investigation.”

“That’s it, yes.”

“So I didn’t know I was meeting Patsy MacLaren.”

Gregor Demarkian shook his head. “John, John,” he said. “Really. You’re doing just what I did up until a couple of hours ago. You’re making it much too complicated.”

“I’m going to complicate your head,” John Jackman exploded. “You can’t do this to me. Goddammit, Gregor. This is a murder investigation. We have three people dead.”

“I know you do,” Gregor said. “Get me pictures.”

“Of what?”

“Of Patsy MacLaren. Get me the Vassar College yearbook for the year they all graduated. MacLaren. Verity. Parrish. Corbett—and two others. There were two others. Remember what Julianne Corbett told us. There were six people who used to hang out together in a group. Those are the ones I want to see.”

John Jackman looked like he was going to explode again, but Gregor decided not to hang around for it. He went down to the stairwell. The big fireman was still there, but he was no longer interested in Gregor. Other firemen were there too, carting things back and forth, checking the walls and carpets. Gregor realized that he had no idea what firemen did besides put out fires, although in big city fire departments they had to do a lot more than that. At the very least, they had to inspect things.

Gregor went down the stairs, looked into the third floor hall onto emptiness, went down more stairs. In the second floor hall he saw a girl of ten or twelve sitting on the carpet in front of an open apartment door. She had a pile of magazines next to her and a pair of scissors. When she saw Gregor she held up one of the magazines and smiled.

“Brides,” she said, indicating a tall young woman in a fantastical white dress that seemed to be made of tiers and tiers of lace. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

“Beautiful,” Gregor agreed.

The girl turned away and started to cut the picture out of the magazine.

Brides might be beautiful, Gregor thought as he headed for the lobby, but marriages were complicated, and after a week like this, he didn’t want to think about it.

T
HERE WAS A SHOW
on one of the cable stations about brides. Dozens and dozens of tall young women with no hips and arms like toothpicks paraded down a runway one after the other, showing off creations in satin and silk. Evelyn Adder watched them move as her husband sat at the kitchen table with Sarah and Kevin Lockwood, looking over some papers they had brought. For most of the time Sarah and Kevin had been there, Evelyn had been starving. It was unheard-of for Henry to be home so long in the middle of the day. Evelyn had the window seat on the landing filled with Hershey’s Kisses and bagel chips. She had two dozen bags of potato chips and six of those dips you could buy on the same shelf as the refried beans. She had a box of frozen White Castle hamburgers that just needed to be fried up. Sarah and Kevin and Henry were all ignoring her. Kevin kept reading bits and pieces of the papers he wanted Henry to sign. Sarah kept talking about their winter vacations in Boca wherever-it-was, making the place sound like an upper middle class street in Victorian England instead of like a piece of Florida real estate.

“Being able to get good help makes all the difference,” Sarah would say. “It changes one’s life completely.”

“The appreciation of land values over the last ten years has been truly phenomenal,” Kevin would say, “especially land directly on the waterfront.”

One of the brides on the runway had a dress that was cut up to her thigh in the front and had a long train. Another one of them had a dress that looked like millions of puffy pastel-green mints held together with string. There was a picture of Evelyn in her wedding dress on the shelf above the television set. She was very thin, and her dress was a plain white thing that could have been a uniform. There used to be pictures of Henry in the house when he was fat, but now there weren’t any. Only Henry’s publisher had those.

“What I like best about Florida is the lack of people,” Sarah Lockwood said. “You wouldn’t think it the way it looks on the news, but really all the overcrowding is down in places like Miami. Up where we are it feels like there’s nobody around at all, except that it’s better than that, because there really is. I think you picked the prettiest piece of land we had.”

Evelyn picked up the remote and went from channel to channel, from shopping to fixing up old houses to cooking in a wok. She felt leaden and gross, the way she always did these days—but for some reason right at that minute it wasn’t so bad. She found another show about brides and one about marriages. If you weren’t careful to keep a psychological reference book on your bedside table at all times, your marriage would surely be doomed. There was a show with Martha Stewart about weddings, explaining how to make favors from bits of net and gold foil. Evelyn chose a local station with a soap opera on it and sat back. The soap opera seemed to be about impossibly thin people who were miserable about almost everything in their lives, although it was hard to figure out why that was.