Feast of Murder (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries) Read online

  Feast of Murder

  A Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mystery

  Jane Haddam

  Contents

  Prologue The Death of Donald McAdam

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Part One November 16–November 17

  One

  1

  2

  3

  Two

  1

  2

  Three

  1

  2

  3

  Four

  1

  2

  Five

  1

  2

  3

  Six

  1

  2

  Seven

  1

  2

  3

  Part Two November 17–November 18

  One

  1

  2

  3

  Two

  1

  2

  Three

  1

  2

  3

  Four

  1

  2

  Five

  1

  2

  Six

  1

  2

  3

  Seven

  1

  2

  Part Three Finis

  One

  1

  2

  3

  Two

  1

  2

  Epilogue The Life of Gregor Demarkian

  1

  2

  3

  Prologue

  The Death of Donald McAdam

  1

  IT WAS TWILIGHT OF a day at the end of August, one of those times when light and dark wrap themselves around each other like tresses in a braid. For Donald McAdam, standing on the corner of Fiftieth and Park, waiting for the light to change so he could go uptown, it was—oddly enough—the best hour of the best day of the best year he had ever had. The oddness came from the kind of year it had been, full of judges and grand juries, subpoenas and district attorneys. Not much more than a year ago, Donald McAdam had been nothing but another Wall Street suit. He’d had an office downtown and this apartment uptown and small branches in Philadelphia and Boston. He’d had a closet full of J. Press suits and a shoe rack full of custom productions from John Lobb and five Rolex watches. When he got his name in the papers it was always in Liz Smith’s column, as the faceless escort of some aging society queen who had just underwritten the Peppermint and Wintergreen Ball for the American Multiple Cancer Homeless Advocacy Association.

  The light changed and McAdam crossed the street, moving carefully, catering to his only real fear. That his fear was real was evidenced by how much it made him forget. Here he was moving into the intersection, and for the first time since he had run into Fritzie Baird downtown, he could not feel the heavy weight of the mason jar in his pocket. The mason jar was full of something called melon rind marmalade, made by Fritzie herself with her precious postdebutante hands. McAdam hadn’t known what to do with it when she thrust it into his hands, so he’d simply stuffed it into his jacket, not bothering to worry about the bulge. Now he didn’t worry about it because he’d forgotten it. From the day he had first come to New York City, forty years ago, he had been secretly convinced that he was going to die by being struck by a car. In the years since, he’d developed a positive genius for arriving at intersections seconds after they became accident scenes. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d put his feet into puddles of blood. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d gone home to be sick about it, either. Today nothing like that seemed to be happening. There was no danger. He thought he could relax. He didn’t even have anyone else on the street to worry about. The street was empty.

  Getting to the opposite curb, he began to move quickly, swinging his arms a little as he went. He was, he knew, the perfect picture of Park Avenue, a silver-haired man in expensive clothes exuding an air of confidence and command. He had been just the same thing a year ago, but then, if someone had spotted him, he wouldn’t have been recognized. Now he still wouldn’t have been recognized, most places—tract house mothers in Levittown and black boys with ghetto blasters in Central Park didn’t read the financial news—but on this street and among the people who lived here, he was famous. He was Donald McAdam, the man who had paid the Feds a $400 million fine and still been left with enough money to live the life. He was Donald McAdam, the man who had gone wired into clandestine business meetings in three states. He was Donald McAdam, who might not have been the most successful man of his generation or the most socially prominent one—but who was going to be the one who sent the rest of them to jail.

  He had managed to cross Fifty-first Street without incident. He had only two more blocks to go before he reached his apartment. He picked up his pace, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. It had been a bad August, hot and still and thick with humidity, but over the last few days it had been getting better. Now there was a breeze coming in from the river. Every time McAdam got to an intersection, he could feel it pressing against the trousers of his suit. Above him, what he could see of the sky was pink and black. Around him, the streetlights had just begun to glow.

  He got to Fifty-second Street just as the walk light went green. He crossed and made his way to Fifty-third. On Park Avenue, it was easy to imagine that New York was a normal city. There were trees in the divider in the middle of the street and flowers in the boxes next to the front doors of the apartment buildings. The doormen were all in uniform and about as alert as sleeping puppies. While McAdam waited for the last of his lights, he saw a woman coming out of the apartment house directly across the avenue from his own. She was an older woman in a longish dress and pearl earrings, much too unfashionable to be one of the older women he knew. Still, McAdam thought, she might be someone who would recognize him. She might turn toward him and look up and start, as if she’d heard a shot. She might even come up to him and try to start a conversation, the way so very many of them wanted to do. Instead, she turned in the opposite direction and began to go swiftly uptown, a woman with a mission.

  The light changed and McAdam crossed, looking both ways twice, trying to understand the mentality of people who left work at noon on Fridays in the summer. McAdam had always been a man obsessed with work and obsessed with image, the only two things that seemed to him to have any real effect on a life. To leave work to take Mrs. Halstead Vandergriff to a benefit—or to spend the weekend at Mrs. Charles Inglesman’s country place in Cornwell Bridge—that was one thing. To leave work to have a few extra hours to spend in a hovel of a beach house out on Long Island Sound was beyond him. And yet people did do it. They did it all the time. That was why the city was so deserted at times like this.

  McAdam walked the half block up to his apartment building, waited patiently—and with a smile on his face—while a doorman he didn’t know opened up for him, and headed for the elevators. He would never have admitted it to anyone, even to himself, but deserted places always made him terrified. Even his apartment, devoid of any humanity besides himself, was intolerable to him. He called for an elevator, watched a set of doors bounce open in front of him with no delay at all, and stepped inside the car. The car had thick pile carpeting on the floor and walls inlaid with colored glass. He ought to calm down now, he told himself. He ought to get his mind organized and concentrate on the future, in spite of the fact that the future held a lot more trials and a lot more depositions. It also held a lot more money, an
d money was something he and everybody else he knew always seemed to need.

  The elevator got to the penthouse floor. McAdam took out the tiny key that would make the elevators open here and used it. The elevator doors opened directly into his foyer and he stepped out. Quiet, quiet, he thought. Then he reached into his inside jacket pocket and came out with a small manila envelope. He felt the hard side of the mason jar bumping against his hip and took that out, too, putting it down on the occasional table. Then he picked the mason jar up again. Maybe he would eat some of this melon rind marmalade. Maybe it would be interesting. He felt himself start to giggle and suppressed it. Quiet, he thought again. Quiet, quiet, quiet. He turned and sent the elevator back downstairs, to all the ordinary mortals who had to get to their apartments through empty corridors and endless halls.

  “Quiet, quiet, quiet,” McAdam said aloud, and then started to laugh.

  A year and a half ago, when the Feds had first approached him with their deal, Donald McAdam had done a few quick calculations. If he played it wrong, he would lose everything. If he played it right, he could save a little or a lot, depending. What he could not do was save it all. If nothing else, the business would have to go. McAdam Investments—a public company by then, with stock quoted on the American Exchange—would have to crash and disintegrate in the glare of scandals and revelations, like Drexel Burnham Lambert before it.

  Except it hadn’t.

  It hadn’t.

  And now—

  The manila envelope was still in his hand. McAdam put it down on his occasional table and turned it over and turned it over again. He picked it up and put it down again. Finally, he picked it up and carried it with him into his living room with the wall of windows looking uptown.

  Quiet, he told himself again.

  And then he started to laugh for real, hard and gasping, because it was so funny.

  2

  For Jonathan Edgewick Baird, the real problem with being in prison was not the stigma—in his case, there wasn’t much of that—but the casual assumptions of half of everybody he knew that because he was in prison, he couldn’t also be in the office. Of course, in some ways that was true. Sixteen months ago, he had pleaded guilty in federal court to three counts of insider trading. Fourteen months ago, he had been remanded to the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury. Since then, his official residence had been a small square room with bars making up one wall and a peculiar hard-plastic covering on the floor. Even so, he was neither down nor out. He had founded Baird Financial Services thirty-two years ago. He had run it ever since. He was running it now, in spite of the fact that his partners—his younger brother Calvin and good old Charlie Shay—were down there in Manhattan on the scene, supposedly making decisions. Like a Mafia don with the unfortunate luck to have landed in Sing Sing, he was ruling his empire from inside.

  Actually, there was nothing Sing Sing–like about it. Danbury wasn’t the poshest of country club prisons—Allenwood was that—but it came close. The inmates were all financial types, with a couple of spies thrown in. Newspapers and magazines were delivered to the mailroom every morning. In the evenings, the cell blocks looked like enforced reading rooms for Yuppies. Behind the bars, men in prison uniforms pored through the fine print of Barron’s and Forbes, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They did deals, too. Almost everybody here had phone and library privileges. Almost everybody here was operating a business or doing a deal or running a scam. Sometimes, listening to the hum that rose and fell around him, day and night without surcease, Jon thought he had not been sent to prison as much as to a form of Business Purgatory. That was one of the reasons why he had been so diligent at his shipbuilding from the day he got here. Shipbuilding was what Jon Baird did for a hobby—building ships in bottles, to be precise. He’d done two since coming to Danbury, including the one he had finished today, sitting proudly on top of his filing cabinet. It was not as good as it could have been, because the bottle he had used was made out of shatterproof glass, the only kind of bottle the prison authorities would allow him to have. It didn’t matter. It was better than contemplating his sins.

  Tonight, Jon was contemplating his roommate, a too-youngish man in his forties named Bobby Hannaford. It had been a long and stressful day, just as long and stressful as any he had ever spent in the Baird Financial offices in the World Trade Center. Like many of the prisoners here, he had almost unlimited visiting privileges. He had seen a stream of people, each and every one of whom had seemed dedicated to giving him a headache. Calvin, Donald McAdam, Courtney his temporary secretary, Charlie Shay: coming on top of yesterday, when Jon had seen his ex-wife Fritzie, it had almost been too much. He was beginning to get on in life now. He was sixty-two.

  He lay on his bunk, a barrel-chested, bandy-legged little man who looked vaguely like a cross between Hemingway and Benjamin Franklin, and considered Bobby’s greying head. Bobby’s greying head was bobbing up and down, back and forth as he paced from one end of the cell to the other. It wasn’t much of a stretch, but Jon knew from experience that it suited remarkably well. Bobby kept running his hands through his hair and swiping the backs of them across his lips. Jon thought he must have looked much the same way, when he’d first been caught doing whatever he had done with Donald McAdam.

  “I’ve thought about it and thought about it,” he was saying, “and the only way I can justify what you’ve done is to think you’ve got some kind of plan in mind. Some kind of trick. You’re supposed to be a financial genius. You could have something up your sleeve.”

  “I could,” Jon said. Then he stared at the ceiling and sighed. His meeting with Donald McAdam had been held behind closed doors, in the secluded room provided for matters of “confidentiality.” So had all his other meetings, both today and yesterday. Word had gotten out all the same. It always did.

  Bobby was standing just above him now, looming. “You could,” he repeated. “Does that mean you do?”

  “No.”

  “But how could you? How could you? This is Donald McAdam we’re talking about. The man who put me in here. The man who put you in here. The man who put half of Danbury in Danbury and half of Allenwood in Allenwood. And he’s sitting in that damned apartment in New York, ordering out for caviar.”

  Could you order out for caviar? Jon supposed you could. He’d never tried. He sat up and sighed again.

  “Bobby, listen to me,” he said, “I don’t like Donald McAdam any more than you do—although it isn’t true, you know, he isn’t responsible for putting me here—but the thing is, I have no choice. Baird Financial owns McAdam Investments. McAdam Investments is sitting on a pile of assets no one will touch as long as McAdam has anything to do with them—”

  “I heard that,” Bobby said. “I hope it’s true.”

  “Oh, it’s true enough,” Jon said drily. “Even the middle management drones at the banks don’t want anything to do with our Donald. I don’t suppose I blame them.”

  “I want to applaud them,” Bobby said.

  “If you’re going to applaud them, you can hardly castigate me.” Jon swung his legs over to the side of the bunk. “I have to get rid of him. The only way I can get rid of him is to buy out his contract. I’m buying out his contract.”

  “If this was a different kind of prison, you could get rid of him in better ways than that. And it would cost you less money.”

  “With my luck at crime, it would cost me twenty to life in Attica and Attica is not like here. Hand me my tooth mug, will you? I broke another bridge last night and my gums ache.”

  “Another bridge?”

  “The same bridge,” Jon admitted. “And that was my spare, of course, Charlie brought it in for me yesterday, we talked about that. Now I’ll have to wait until my dentist makes up another.”

  “Twice in one week,” Bobby said. “You couldn’t do better if you were cracking them with hammers.”

  Jon took the mug Bobby handed him, swirled the salted water in it through his mouth, and p
ut the mug down on the floor. Bobby had stopped pacing, but he hadn’t stopped moving. He fidgeted and bopped like an overexcited four-year-old. Jon wondered what kind of man Bobby had been to do business with—all that bobbing and weaving, all that childishness and neurosis. Jon had made it a point in his life to deal only with grown-ups, but other people didn’t. From everything he’d heard, Bobby had been a successful man. Jon just couldn’t imagine at what.

  He got up, took his tooth mug back to the sink, and left it on the rim. He didn’t want to rinse it out, because it would take the devil’s own time to get a replacement for the warm salt water. He made sure it was steady on the porcelain and went back to his bunk, wandering in and around Bobby on the way. Bobby had gone back to pacing.

  “Listen,” he said, to Bobby’s jiggling back, “let’s talk about something more pleasant. You know I’m getting out on October first?”

  “I’d heard that, yes. Is it certain? The parole people have agreed?”

  “It’s not parole. It’s the end of my sentence. Anyway, I have this boat, replica of the Mayflower. I don’t know if you’ve read about it in the magazines—”

  “I have read about it. Everybody’s read about it.”

  “Yes, well. I’m giving a combined Thanksgiving-dinner, welcome-home-to-myself party there. I mean at sea. I’ve had Courtney out here half the afternoon, working out the details—”

  “I thought you were working out the details of the McAdam thing.”

  Jon waved it away. “There are no details to the McAdam thing. Write a check. Sign a paper. It’s over. Getting to sea in a replica of the Mayflower is a lot more complicated. I’ve always wanted to do it. Journey around for a while. Land someplace. Use all the original cooking methods and the authentic utensils. It’s what I dream about when other men dream about girls.”

  Bobby had finally stopped moving. “If you’re inviting me along for the ride,” he said, “I’ll have to decline. I don’t get out of here for another five years.”

  “I’m asking you for a favor, Bobby. I need an introduction to someone you know.”