Not a Creature Was Stirring (27 page)

“The young are ‘them.’” Flanagan said it firmly.

Gregor took another sip of his coffee, decided he was not feeling suicidal enough to try to finish it, and pushed the mug away across the desk. “The thing is,” he told Flanagan, “I didn’t just come to talk. I need some information I don’t even know if you have.”

“Really? What did you do? Decide to go private?”

“Not exactly.” Gregor explained his arrangement with Jackman and his involvement in the Hannaford case. He was gratified to see that Flanagan was impressed. “The problem with it all,” he said, “is that I’m sure Jackman is right. Bobby Hannaford is not straight: Bobby Hannaford is in trouble up to his eyeballs. It’s the easiest thing in the world to see.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it is. And from the look on your face, Flanagan, I’d say you think so, too.”

“I know so,” Flanagan admitted. “I want to know why you know so.”

“Because he spends more money than he has, but he doesn’t have that—that look people get when they’re in serious debt. I was thinking about it today when I was out at Engine House. One of the other brothers, Christopher, he has that look. Kind of an adrenaline worry and a paralysis at the same time. Bobby Hannaford looks like a man who thinks he can do something about his problems. Do you see what I mean?”

“No,” Flanagan said.

“It figures,” Gregor said.

“I never could see what you meant,” Flanagan pointed out. “I don’t know how many times you gave me that lecture of yours about internal constituency—”

“Internal consistency.”

“Whatever. I could never figure out how to do it. Nobody could but you. The younger guys used to finish working on a case with you and walk around for weeks, talking like they’d been present at a miracle. I don’t think you do miracles, but I don’t usually think you’re wrong.”

“Am I right this time?”

“Spell it out for me,” Flanagan said. “Give me a laugh.”

Against his better judgment, Gregor tried the coffee again. His throat was dry, and he needed something. Unfortunately, Flanagan’s coffee was not it. He put the mug down again.

“If you ask me, there’s two things going on. One of them definitely involves the oldest sister, Myra—”

“Myra?”

“Myra Hannaford Van Damm. If you haven’t turned her up, I’d check on her. There’s something going on between those two. You can feel it when you see them together. And I think Mrs. Van Damm may need money. Her father didn’t give her any. She’s married to a rich man, but that’s not the same as having her own.”

“Ah,” Flanagan said.

“But I think there’s something else. Bobby Hannaford is a neurotic. He’s addicted to possessions, yes, you can see that, but he doesn’t really care about them. He cares about his father. I think he hated the man. But I don’t think he killed him.”

“Internal consistency again?”

“It wouldn’t be internally consistent to leave a lot of hundred-dollar bills in a wastebasket with what’s supposed to be a suicide note. It wouldn’t be internally consistent to stage a murder that looks like a murder when what you wanted was to avoid discovery of financial manipulation. Tell me that for a start: Do you know anything about Robert Hannaford doing anything whatsoever in the last six months to indicate he might suspect his son of embezzling? Stock fraud? Insider trading? Anything?”

Flanagan had a pipe. He got it out, lit it up, and watched it die. He didn’t try to get it going again. “On the first of November of this year,” he said, “Robert Hannaford used his voting stock to force the board of Hannaford Financial into scheduling a directors’ audit. It’s supposed to commence right after the first of the year.”

“All right.”

“Will you tell me something? If you’re so sure Bobby has nothing to do with the death of his father, why are you also so sure he really had a motive?”

“Think.”

“I’ve done too damn much thinking in my life.”

“First we have a supposed suicide,” Gregor said. “Then Jackman shows up and refuses to buy it. Then we find a suicide note—not genuine, almost certainly—in a wastebasket with a lot of money in it. If the crime is going to be internally consistent, Flanagan, we know two things. One, there must be some reason somewhere, as yet undiscovered, why we could be led to believe that Emma Hannaford would make a credible murderer. There must also be some reason why Bobby Hannaford would make one. No motive, no sense.”

“Maybe there’s something else going on altogether. Maybe you’re right about your Mrs. Van Damm. Maybe neither of them had anything to do with it, and she wants to do her brother in for some reason of her own.”

“Maybe. Am I right about Bobby Hannaford? Did he have good reasons for wanting the old man dead?”

Flanagan stood up. “He had the best reasons in the world and none at all.”

“Meaning,” Gregor said, “you’re already onto him, but he doesn’t know it yet.”

Flanagan went to his file cabinet, opened the top drawer, and drew out a thick manila file. He tossed it on the desk in front of Gregor. “Here. It’s insider trading, by the way. It’s not mine and it’s sensitive, but you might as well know. Hell, you already do know, practically. I wish to hell I knew how to do that.”

“Internal consistency,” Gregor said.

“Right.” Flanagan dropped down into his chair again, looking old and tired and grim. “Let me tell you all about a man named Donald George McAdam,” he said.

An hour later, Gregor was on the street again. He knew more than he really wanted to about Donald McAdam. He knew all he could about insider trading, considering the fact that he knew nothing about stocks and even less about the operations of the market. He had what he had gone to get, confirmation of just how Bobby Hannaford’s neuroses had played themselves out in real life.

Unfortunately, he also had a problem. He could see a way to make the killings of Robert and Emma Hannaford make sense. He could devise an internally consistent scenario for what had been going on at Engine House with no trouble at all. But if that scenario was right, then the framing of Bobby Hannaford could not be happening.

“So maybe it isn’t,” he said to the wind and the rain.

Then the cab Flanagan had called for him drew up at the curb, and he got in. He leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and started to worry. He worried all the way home, through a Philadelphia still locked in an orgy of Christmas celebration and a wariness about the weather.

He only stopped worrying after he’d gotten out of the cab on Cavanaugh Street, tipped and paid the driver, and started walking up the steep stone steps to his vestibule. That was when he saw Bennis Hannaford, leaning out old George Tekamanian’s front window.

She looked very Christmasy, in a bright red sweater with a large shiny tin bell brooch spread across the shoulder.

B
ENNIS OPENED THE FRONT DOOR
for him. George was enthroned in his very best easy chair, wedged between a drinks cart and a pile of hardcover books, wearing an emerald green sweater someone must have given him for Christmas and a pair of reindeer socks. The socks were noticeable because George wasn’t wearing shoes. A pair of tasseled Gucci loafers had been abandoned unceremoniously in the middle of his carpet. Gregor could hardly believe his eyes. George looked deliriously happy. Bennis looked bemused.

She ought to look bemused, Gregor thought. She had drunk her way through half of one of George’s Yerevan Specials, a time bomb that consisted of vodka and just enough lime soda to make you think you had nothing but a nonalcoholic punch. Gregor had been ambushed by one of those himself, the first week he knew George. He recognized the glass.

He shut the door behind him, shrugged off his coat, and hung it up on George’s coatrack. Bennis wasn’t wearing any shoes either. Hers, a pair of L. L. Bean’s Maine Hunting Shoes just like Donna Moradanyan’s, were lying on the fireplace hearth.

At least she wasn’t wearing reindeer socks.

She went to sit on the floor at George’s feet and took a book off the hardcover stack.

“Look, Krekor,” George said, “Martin brings me all the books in real hard covers for Christmas, and now Bennis, she signs them for me.”

“All nine of them,” Bennis said.

“Are either one of you sober?” Gregor said.

Bennis made a face at him and bent over the book in her lap, writing. She wrote for a long time. Gregor wondered what she could be finding to say.

He took a chair from the edge of the room and dragged it to the center. They looked comfortable together, these two—and he was surprised to find he was
not
surprised at that. He didn’t put much credence in the evidence of novels. Elizabeth had told him, over and over again, that a great many men who had written wonderful things had been terrible people in their private lives. It was the Bennis Hannaford of the stairs at Engine House whom Gregor had known would do so well on Cavanaugh Street. Now she finished with the book in her lap, put it aside, and picked up another one. All the books looked impossibly long.

“Would you like me to get you a drink, Krekor?” George said. “I’m so tired, I keep forgetting myself.”

“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “I don’t need a drink right now. Miss Hannaford here has offered to buy me one.”

Bennis stopped writing. “Was everybody terribly angry at me for bugging out? I mean, I know I should have hung around for the police—”

“It is customary in a murder investigation,” Gregor said.

“—but everybody was getting crazy, and I knew it was just going to get crazier when Bobby got home, so I got out. I just did some shopping and then came over here as fast as I could. I wasn’t trying to avoid you.”

“No,” Gregor said, “you were just trying to avoid John Jackman.”

“I make it a policy to avoid men who are prettier than I am,” Bennis said. “If you were a woman, you would too.”

“She was just standing out there in the cold,” old George said. “And I recognized her from her pictures.”

“He’s been very nice,” Bennis said.

Old George sighed. “We called Tibor, Krekor, but he was not home. He was not at the church, either. Somebody must be feeding him dinner.”

“Did you try Lida’s?” Gregor said.

“Is that Mrs. Arkmanian?” Bennis asked. “We did try her. She wasn’t home either.”

Old George sighed again. “He will be very disappointed, Krekor. And I will be disappointed, too. I try and try, I can’t make her tell me what happens to Rogan le Bourne. Tibor, he could make her.”

“No he couldn’t,” Bennis said. “I don’t know what happens to Rogan le Bourne. And stop worrying about your friend Tibor. I’ll come back and sign his books for him if he wants me to.”

“I think he only has the paperbacks,” Gregor said.

“I’ve got a supply of the others.” Bennis snapped shut the cover of the book she was writing in, abandoned it, and took another. “You are angry at me, aren’t you? I know I should have stuck around. And I know I shouldn’t be flip. Not about Emma. Emma—well, I don’t want to get into Emma.”

“She’s told me all about it,” old George said. “This is a terrible thing, Krekor.”

“This is a dangerous thing,” Bennis said. “That’s what worries me. And I did come here.”

“It was dangerous from the beginning,” Gregor said.

“No it wasn’t.” Bennis shook her head vigorously. “Not if what was going on was what I thought was going on. But now it can’t have been, and I just don’t know—” She threw up her hands.

Gregor sat back and looked her over, curious. She had been crying again, recently enough so that her eyes were as red and puffy here as they’d been back at Engine House this afternoon. He would never have called her flip. Even when she tried to be sarcastic, the sarcasm didn’t come off. He had a feeling that Bennis and Donna Moradanyan might have more in common than hunting boots. Bennis was prettier, of course, and more intelligent and more accomplished and more sophisticated and more of everything else. Unlike Donna, she had developed a rock-hard foundation of self-confidence that the mere opinions of other people could not shatter. What was similar was that air of innocence. In Donna, Gregor had thought it was sexual innocence, and been wrong. Now he put another definition to it. Bennis Hannaford and Donna Moradanyan were two young women who believed, at the core, that the world was a good and righteous place where virtue triumphed and evil failed, where people always wanted to do the right thing and only did wrong out of ignorance or confusion. And no matter how much evidence they got to the contrary, they would go on believing it.

Gregor watched as Bennis finished the last of the books and restacked the whole mess next to old George’s chair.

“There,” she said, “finished. When I have the next one, I’ll send you a copy.”

“No, no,” George said. “Send Father Tibor a copy. He can’t afford to buy them. I have Martin.”

“Martin is his grandson,” Gregor said.

“He told me. Electric carrot crinklers.” She stretched out her legs. “Do you still want that drink? I was thinking, under the circumstances, it might make more sense if I bought you a whole dinner.”

“Under what circumstances?”

“Well,” Bennis said, “for one thing, I’m hungry.”

“I’m hungry, too,” Gregor said. “I’ve been living on coffee all day.”

Bennis waved her Yerevan Special in the air. “I’m also a little drunk,” she said.

“True,” Gregor nodded.

“But the real reason, of course, is that this story is going to take a little time. It may take quite a lot of time.”

“What story?”

“Ah,” Bennis said. “Well. Mostly, it’s the story of how Emma tried to do it once before—or how we all thought she did.”

“Tried to do what?” old George asked.

“Tried to kill our father, of course.” Bennis looked into her Yerevan Special, took a deep breath, and swallowed half of what was left.

Gregor didn’t know if taking Bennis to Ararat was foolishness or incitement to riot. It was certainly an experience. As soon as they had been seated in one of the back booths, heads began popping out of the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. Old and young, the women of Ararat wanted to get a look at Gregor and his presumed “date.” The news—that Gregor was having dinner with a woman, and a much younger woman at that—would be all up and down the street in no time. Their only hope for an uninterrupted meal was the possibility that Lida was out because she’d gone to visit her grandchildren in Paoli. Even without Lida, they were going to have to suffer through better than average service.