Deadly Beloved (38 page)

“But she didn’t disappear for good,” Julianne Corbett pointed out. “At least according to the papers, she’s been all over everywhere, setting off pipe bombs, causing havoc. I’m disappointed, Mr. Demarkian. I’d think you’d know I was more intelligent than that. If I’d wanted to kill—who? That poor woman with her antifur slogan button?”

“Karla Parrish,” Gregor said. “Also Liza Verity. The two people anywhere around who might be able to identify the photograph of Patsy MacLaren Willis for who it was. Karla Parrish was more of a danger to you than Liza Verity. You’d seen quite a bit of Liza Verity over the last few years. She was used to seeing you in a ton of makeup. She was used to thinking of you as a woman wearing a ton of makeup. That photograph of Patsy MacLaren Willis bothered her when she saw it, but she couldn’t tell right away why. The last time Karla Parrish saw you, you didn’t have a dab of foundation on your face. She knew who that photograph of Patsy MacLaren Willis reminded her of right off.”

“And so I blew her up with a pipe bomb,” Julianne said sarcastically. “I put the bomb under a table at a reception I was giving and just let it go off. I killed some woman I didn’t even know. What I read in the papers was that Stephen Willis was killed with a gun. If I wanted to kill Karla Parrish, why didn’t I just shoot her?”

“Because you couldn’t get hold of a gun,” Gregor said. “I think that if you’d realized what kind of trouble you were going to be in after the death of Stephen Willis, you would have kept the gun you had. Instead, you left it at the side of the bed where Stephen Willis died, wiped clean of prints. That way, nobody could trace it to you, nobody could see it on you, there was no way you could be caught trying to dispose of it. It was disposed of. The pipe bomb in the car made a big fuss that obscured the whole mess and made it look more mysterious than it necessarily was. And you were back in your office by midafternoon, with the last fifteen thousand dollars from Patsy MacLaren’s bank account and your makeup in place. But you couldn’t get another gun, Ms. Corbett. You’re not just anybody anymore. You’re a member of the United States Congress. It would have been much too risky.”

Julianne Corbett walked away from the window and back to her desk. She sat down behind the green felt blotter and put the palms of her hands down flat against the wood on either side of it. Her skin color was back to something like normal again. At least, Gregor couldn’t find any skin color under the mask of makeup. He couldn’t find anything at all in Julianne Corbett’s eyes.

“I think,” she said, “that this is all extremely interesting. I think you could probably sell it as a novel. But I don’t think I have to take it seriously.”

“I have to take it seriously,” John Jackman said, suddenly reminding them both of his presence. “Gregor, for Christ’s sake. Have you got any proof of any of this?”

“Of course he hasn’t,” Julianne Corbett said. “He couldn’t possibly have. All of this is nonsense.”

“It sounds like nonsense,” John Jackman said.

Gregor Demarkian was nodding his head slowly, slowly. Outside, the storm was growing stronger and nastier. The wind had begun to whistle and howl and rattle the windows. The sky was absolutely black.

“There are a number of ways to prove what I’ve been saying,” Gregor said, “starting with a very simple trace of the amounts of money Patsy MacLaren Willis contributed to your political campaigns.”

“We already know she contributed to my political campaigns,” Julianne said coldly. “We knew that even before Karla got hurt in that blast.”

“We could also look into the days and times when Stephen Willis was home from his traveling and correlate them with the days and times when you were unavailable for work or meetings.”

“I’m always available for work and meetings,” Julianne said. “I have to be. I don’t know how it is you think people get into the position I’m in, Mr. Demarkian, but it isn’t by taking out great whacking blocks of time to mollify phantom husbands.”

“And then there’s the trump card,” Gregor said. “There’s the simple fact that Karla Parrish is now very much awake and very eager to talk. And her friend Evan Walsh has a few things he wants to say too.”

Gregor didn’t know what he expected Julianne Corbett to do then, but it wasn’t what she did do, which was essentially nothing. Everything in Gregor’s body had gone tense, expecting trouble. Julianne Corbett not only gave no trouble, she seemed to resign from existence.

She sat behind her desk with her hands still flat against the wood, looking as if she had been turned to stone.

Here Comes the Bride… There Goes the Neighborhood

V
ERY EARLY ON THE
morning of Donna Moradanyan’s wedding, Bennis Hannaford came up to Gregor Demarkian’s apartment, dressed in six yards of lace, smoking a cigarette, and ready to kill somebody. She used her key to get in. Gregor was really only half out of bed, with his thick red terry-cloth robe wrapped around his thin navy blue cotton pajamas and his slippers lost somewhere he couldn’t begin to guess. He was standing at the counter in the kitchen, trying to remember how to work the coffee machine. Bennis found him with a coffee filter in his hand, looking confused. She took it away from him and started to make coffee.

“He came in at twenty after ten last night,” she said, dumping black stuff into the filter. Gregor hated the way coffee looked when it was being made. The grounds. The black swampy slime. He turned away and took a seat at the kitchen table.

“I take it you’re talking about Peter,” he said.

“Of course I’m talking about Peter.” Bennis did something with water. It didn’t look to Gregor like the same thing he did with water when he tried to run that machine. “Anyway, Donna’s mother had gone home for the night or I don’t think there would have been a problem because really, Gregor, I think she would just have killed him, but she was gone, and it was just me and Donna, and Donna was acting like Donna, so here we are.”

“Where are we?” Gregor asked.

“What? Oh. I don’t know. Peter is sleeping on my couch. I have to give Donna that much. And Russ doesn’t know anything about this yet. But Tommy does. Tommy woke up last night.”

“And?”

Bennis stopped fiddling with the coffee machine and gave a little smile of satisfaction.

“And,” she said, “he didn’t even know who Peter was. It’s been that long. He didn’t know who Peter was and he didn’t like him much either. Which ought to have brought Donna to her senses if nothing else did.”

“Did it?”

Bennis sat down at the table. “I don’t know, Gregor. The best thing right now would be if Peter would just disappear, but I don’t think he will. He’s down there on my couch, sleeping away, and he wants to talk to Donna before the wedding. Which is bad news, Gregor, because I don’t know what Donna will do.”

“Donna is in love with Russ,” Gregor said.

“Of course she is.”

“And she’s not in love with Peter,” Gregor said. “In fact, the last I heard, she didn’t even like Peter much.”

“I know all that, Gregor.”

“Well then,” Gregor said. “I don’t see what the problem is. Donna is in love with Russ. Donna is not in love with Peter. Donna will not jeopardize her marriage to Russ in order to accommodate Peter.”

“Honestly.” Bennis stood up to go look at the coffee machine. “I don’t know how you got a reputation for being such a great detective. You don’t know a thing about human nature.”

Bennis made coffee. Gregor drank it. Then Bennis went upstairs to see what was going on in Donna Moradanyan’s apartment, and Gregor sat at his kitchen table, thinking it through. Really, he thought, it was much easier to understand why people killed each other than to figure out why they did what they did for love. Or even sex. Gregor had settled the love and sex questions for himself by marrying Elizabeth and staying married to her. He had settled those same questions for himself since Elizabeth’s death mostly by staying out of the game entirely. He much preferred working on the motives of somebody like Julianne Corbett, who could at least be counted on to be logical.

Peter, Gregor assumed, was still downstairs in Bennis Hannaford’s apartment. Gregor got out of his kitchen chair and went out onto the landing. Above him, he could hear Bennis and Donna and Donna’s mother talking about lace and trains. The landing was strewn with silk flowers and satin ribbons. Gregor didn’t know if they were accidental overflow from the fourth floor or Donna’s latest attempts at decoration. He went down the stairs to the second floor and stood in front of Bennis’s door. He was going to knock, but it occurred to him that Bennis usually left her door unlocked, and there was no reason to let Peter Desarian know he was coming. He tried the doorknob and found that it turned. He pushed the door open and went inside.

Peter was in Bennis’s living room, stretched out on Bennis’s black leather couch, drinking coffee from a delicate china cup he had placed without a saucer on Bennis’s glass-topped coffee table. The china cup was from the set Bennis never used, the one that had belonged to her mother. Getting moisture rings on the glass-topped coffee table was one of the few sins Bennis wouldn’t allow in her house. Gregor had forgotten how startlingly handsome a man Peter Desarian was. It was not a handsomeness that photographed well. In photographs, Peter looked like just one more prep school boy who wasn’t ever going to be able to grow up.

One more prep school boy was all he was, Gregor reminded himself. One more prep school boy was all he was ever going to be. Gregor closed Bennis’s front door firmly and walked into the living room, determined to do he wasn’t sure what.

Peter Desarian looked up when Gregor came in and smiled. “Gregor,” he said. “I was wondering where everybody had gone to. Isn’t this Bennis Hannaford’s apartment?”

“I live upstairs,” Gregor said.

“Donna lives upstairs,” Peter said. “God. Everybody lives on top of everybody else around here. How can Donna stand it?”

“The last I heard, Donna was having a fairly good time.”

“It’s Tommy we have to think about.” Peter picked up his coffee cup and took a sip. He made a face and put the cup down again. “You know, before all this happened, I never thought about it. But environment matters. It matters a lot. Environment can make all the difference.”

Heredity can make all the difference, Gregor wanted to say. Saying something like this was the intellectual equivalent of saying that grass was green.

“Is there something about Cavanaugh Street you suddenly don’t like as an environment for Tommy?” Gregor asked.

Peter Desarian sat up very straight. “I haven’t been taking my responsibilities seriously up to now,” he said solemnly. “I realize that. I should have been much more careful. But I was very young when, you know, when Donna and I—”

“I know how young you were,” Gregor said. “I was living in this building when Tommy was born.”

“I was afraid of responsibility,” Peter Desarian said. “I admit that now. I was afraid of responsibility. But it never occurred to me that Donna didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know what?”

“Didn’t know that it wasn’t permanent,” Peter said. “Didn’t know that I’d come back for her someday. I mean, it was only a matter of time.”

“When Donna got pregnant with Tommy, you disappeared. When you were found, you wanted her to have an abortion.”

“I was panicking,” Peter said. “I haven’t said I wasn’t panicking.”

“So what are you doing now?” Gregor asked. “Donna is just hours away from getting married, and here you are. What do you want?”

Peter looked confused. “I want to stop it, of course. Didn’t Donna tell you? I thought she told everyone.”

“You want to stop the wedding.”

“Yes. Right. Of course.”

“Why?”

“Because Donna doesn’t love him, that’s why,” Peter said. “She couldn’t possibly. He’s a policeman.”

“He’s a lawyer. He used to be a homicide detective. He is not now, nor has he ever been, Clancy on the beat.”

“I don’t care,” Peter said. “She doesn’t love him. And it wouldn’t be good for Tommy, growing up with a man like that. After all, Tommy is my son.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Peter said. “Donna was a virgin when I met her. I could tell.”

It figures, Gregor thought.

Peter stood up. He wasn’t wearing pajamas or a robe, just a pair of Ralph Lauren bikini briefs. He seemed to think it was perfectly natural to stand there like that, half naked.

“I have to tell you, Gregor,” he said, “I’m not going to sit still and let this happen. Donna doesn’t want to marry this man. If she did, nothing could stop her. But I can stop her. And I will.”

“For Tommy’s sake,” Gregor said.

“I’ve got to get dressed,” Peter said. “I’ve got to go up and talk to Donna. I don’t want to leave it to the last minute.”

“I wouldn’t go up and talk to Donna now,” Gregor said. “Her mother’s up there. You’ll get thrown out.”

Peter Desarian broke out in a big grin. “Thanks for the advice. Donna’s mother is a gorgon. I’m glad somebody around here can see reason. God, the way Bennis has been going on, you’d think she wanted Donna to marry some low-rent cop and spend the rest of her life making corned beef and cabbage for Wednesday night dinner. What’s wrong with you people anyway?”

There was nothing wrong with anyone on Cavanaugh Street, Gregor decided ten minutes later, that a little prudent homicide wouldn’t cure. After he had left Peter in Bennis’s apartment, he had gone up to his own and thrown on some clothes. These were not the clothes he was supposed to wear to the wedding, only a few hours away, but hack-around things he almost never wore, that were easy to put on. They allowed him to get to the street before he would ordinarily have been able to get out of his bedroom. He walked up the sidewalk toward Holy Trinity Church humming softly to himself. In the three days since the arrest of Julianne Corbett, Donna (or somebody) had gone all-out. Now everything in sight was wrapped in white and silver satin. The windows all had bows in them, even his own. The trash cans were concealed under silver plastic bags.

The front of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church looked like a big white cake, two inches thick with icing. Gregor passed it by and went around the back through the little courtyard that led to Tibor’s apartment. Donna didn’t usually bother to decorate back there, except for Christmas. The courtyard couldn’t be seen from the street. This time she had wrapped every tree branch in ribbons and even made a big papier-mâché display of candles for the courtyard’s unused little birdbath. Tibor didn’t fill the birdbath because, as he put it, “I do not like providing appetizers for cats.”