Not a Creature Was Stirring Page 14

  “No,” Gregor said.

  “Do you want to be?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Jackman draped himself over the fireplace mantel.

  “What it means, depends,” he said. “Mostly, it depends on what you were doing in Hannaford’s house the night he was murdered.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said.

  “If you were a good friend of his, it wouldn’t work out.”

  “I wasn’t a good friend of his,” Gregor said. “Believe it or not, I was doing a favor for my priest.”

  “Your priest?”

  Gregor poured himself a cup of coffee. It was as thick and black as that awful Turkish stuff no one was ever allowed to mention in an Armenian neighborhood, but he didn’t care.

  This was going to be good.

  3

  The story of how Gregor Demarkian had ended up at Robert Hannaford’s house on Christmas Eve was not a long one, but it was an impossible one, and because of that it took an interminable time to tell. Jackman had comments, especially about that briefcase full of money. Jackman had questions. He had the same questions Gregor had. He kept going back to them, over and over again, as if if he asked them one more time he’d get the answers. Gregor didn’t have the answers. As far as he knew, only one person had ever had those. And he was dead.

  Even so, the conversation had its uses. By the time Gregor had gone over the few facts he had half a dozen times, Jackman was on the floor of the living room—shoes off, legs crossed, hands behind his head—at ease, if not relaxed. His face had taken on a faraway quality. This was insane. This was absurd. This was the kind of thing he saw in the movies that made him think nobody in the whole city of Los Angeles, California had ever met a crime in his life.

  Gregor knew that feeling. He’d had it once or twice himself.

  Gregor poured himself another cup of coffee and waited in silence for Jackman to do something.

  What Jackman did was throw himself down on his stomach and say, “Shit. These people are crazy. These people are nuts.”

  “I did get that impression,” Gregor said. “Will you answer a question for me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “In all logic, we know that, no matter how crazy it seems, there must be internal consistency—”

  “Oh, no,” Jackman said.

  “But internal consistency is important,” Gregor insisted. “You realize that with psychopaths. A psychopath starts with an irrational premise—that he’s the Archangel Michael, say, or that all the women in the world have come together in a great conspiracy to destroy him. It makes no sense, but everything that follows from it does make sense. Once you know his premise, everything he does is strictly logical, entirely consistent. You just—”

  “We’re not dealing with psychopaths here.”

  “We’re dealing with at least one person who must justify to himself, or herself, something that cannot be justified in the ordinary way. This was a particularly deliberate murder, John. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could excuse yourself for afterward as having been done in the heat of the moment. If half my speculations the night of the crime were correct—”

  “Half of them weren’t,” Jackman said wryly. “All of them were. Or all of them we could check out.”

  “He was drugged before he was hit?”

  Jackman sighed. “He had about a hundred fifty milligrams of Demerol in him, his prescription, came out of a bottle in one of his desk drawers. We found traces of it in a cup of hot chocolate he had on the table next to the fireplace. I asked one of the daughters, the fat one—”

  “Anne Marie,” Gregor said.

  “Anne Marie. She said the only way she ever saw him take Demerol was by chewing them, straight, not even water to wash them down. And she said he only took one at a time, and that maybe once a month.”

  “Meaning he hadn’t built up a tolerance to them,” Gregor said. “A hundred fifty milligrams. It’s remarkable he wasn’t in a coma.”

  “Maybe he was.”

  “True.” Gregor sat back, thinking. “Do you see what I mean?” he said finally. “This is a murder that was meant to look like a murder. Somebody went to a great deal of trouble to make sure there was no ambiguity. Why not just put three hundred milligrams of Demerol in the hot chocolate? That would have muddied the issue just enough. We might have suspected accident. We might have suspected suicide—” Gregor stopped. “That’s interesting,” he said.

  “What’s interesting?” Jackman was suspicious.

  “Suicide. Something I heard while I was waiting in that suspects’ room of yours. Robert Hannaford had an insurance policy.”

  “That’s right.” Jackman nodded. “It was a small one for somebody like him. About a million dollars. But it was made five years ago. The restrictions are history. The insurance company would have paid off even if it had been suicide.”

  “What about murder? Was there double indemnity for murder?”

  “Yes,” Jackman said, suddenly thoughtful. “Yes, there was.”

  “Accident?”

  Jackman’s face fell. “Yeah. There was double indemnity for accident, too.”

  “Don’t look so depressed,” Gregor said. “You have to find out something about the man’s habits, that’s all. It’s possible that an accident, an incontrovertible accident, would have been impossible to arrange. Certainly it couldn’t have been done by feeding the man Demerol. The insurance companies don’t operate like the courts. The only thing they need not to pay off is a reasonable excuse for being suspicious.”

  “And Demerol would have given them a reasonable excuse for claiming suicide? I can see that.”

  “So, if there’s no way to arrange a solid, bulletproof accident, the only alternative is to make the murder look like a murder. And I’ll tell you something else.”

  “What?”

  “There are laws in this state, in every state, preventing a murderer from profiting directly from his crime. Do you know who the beneficiary of that insurance policy is? If it’s one of the children—”

  “It’s not one of the children. It’s Cordelia Day Hannaford.”

  Gregor stopped. “Ah,” he said.

  “The only one in the house who couldn’t have committed that crime,” Jackman said. “I know I was being a pain in the butt that night, but I never even suspected her. She’s—”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “Physically incapable.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look frustrated before. Christ, I’m frustrated all the time. Maybe people aren’t always internally consistent.”

  “I didn’t say people were. I said criminals were. And lunatics.”

  “Whatever. Do you want to hear what I really came here about?”

  “Not the murder?”

  “Oh, it’s about the murder, all right. Over the past couple of days I’ve had a really brilliant idea. I want to hire you.”

  “As what?”

  “A consultant. Why not? That jerk out in Oregon or whatever hired himself a phony psychic. I should be able to hire myself a nationally known murder expert, a guy who’s had his picture—”

  “Jackman.”

  “Well, I should. And you’re interested. And you’re bored stiff with being retired. I saw that as soon as I walked into this apartment. You’re living like a monk and you’ve got a pile of puzzle magazines in your bathroom that looks like delivery day at the local newsstand. You’d love to have me hire you.”

  “I don’t have a detective’s license,” Gregor pointed out. “I have no intention of getting a detective’s license.”

  “So who says you have to be a detective? Like I said, you could be a consultant.”

  “Do you know what that is?”

  “No,” Jackman said, “but that’s not the point. Neither does anyone else.”

  Gregor poured himself another cup of coffee. He was being set up. He knew he was being set up. He just didn’t care. He hadn’t felt this good—this invigorated—since E
lizabeth had gone into remission in 1982. He got his lonely bottle of Scotch off the bookshelf, poured a finger into his coffee, and handed the bottle to John Henry Newman Jackman.

  “You have an ulterior motive for all of this?” he asked.

  “Of course I do,” Jackman said. “You seen the newspapers lately?”

  “Mmm.” Gregor didn’t know how “lately” Jackman meant.

  “This is big-time publicity,” Jackman said. “It’s making the networks, for Christ’s sake. Do you know what happens when there’s big-time publicity?”

  “Intimately,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah,” Jackman said. “You would. Well, I’m taking a lot of heat. Be practical, Gregor. If you do this, the publicity will be terrific. I’ll look like an effing hero. And if I look like an effing hero, the bozos will stay off my back.”

  “I see. So, which is it? Am I supposed to consult or am I only supposed to pretend to consult?”

  “Oh, you’re supposed to consult.” Jackman looked alarmed. “If you’ve got any more ideas like the ones you had on the night, I want to hear about them.”

  “Fine.” Gregor sat down again. “I have this idea. I think you’d better get yourself ready for another death.”

  SIX

  1

  THE TROUBLE WITH ENGINE House, Bennis Hannaford thought, is that it’s just like a self-winding watch. If you don’t do something in particular to stop it, it goes on and on and on and on and on. She looked down at the old-fashioned telephone she’d just hung up. It was eight o’clock in the morning, two days after Christmas, Tuesday, December 27. Back in Boston, it was a workday. Michael had just been getting out of the shower when she called. It bothered her he’d been so damn annoyed to hear from her, especially because he’d been expecting to. Eight o’clock was the time they’d agreed on, to get around the little problem of the telephones at Engine House. Cordelia Day Hannaford was an old-fashioned woman. She didn’t want phones in most of the rooms of her house. There was one in the kitchen, because Mrs. Washington would have quit without it. There was one in the study, because Daddy had insisted on it. There was one in Anne Marie’s room, in case of emergency. Other than that, there was this one small telephone stall off the sitting room on the first floor. Engine House was an enormous place, with wings spread out over the landscape. To make a call here, you sometimes had to hike through half a mile of corridors.

  You’re exaggerating, Bennis told herself. It wasn’t the hiking she minded as much as the possibility of being overheard—or the certainty of it. She kept getting these urges to restrict her phoning to business calls, even though she had no business to call about. The new book was in the stores. The new tour was over. The radio and print interviews had been wrapped up months ago. She had nothing to do with her life but read other people’s novels and concentrate on Michael—except all this had come up, and she couldn’t concentrate on anything. She put her cigarette out in the ashtray she’d brought along from the kitchen and then put the ashtray on the upper shelf, where the maid was sure to see it.

  This morning, Bennis thought Daddy’s dying was a lot like the ache you get after riding a horse for the first time. You ride. You feel fine. You think everything is going to be all right. Then, long after you have any reason to expect it, it gets you. They’d been cool enough the night it happened, and they’d been cool enough on Christmas Day—if you could call the way they were when they were together “cool.” Even yesterday hadn’t been too bad. Myra and Teddy had played chess, which they did every Christmas. They’d ended the chess with an argument, which they also did every Christmas. The rest of them had wandered aimlessly around, eating too much and talking about the Flyers.

  Now, with the holiday over and the snow under control, the servants were back in force, and Engine House was having the Christmas Mother had planned for it. Sort of. Through the door of the telephone room, Bennis had seen silver serving tray after silver serving tray being delivered to the dining room. They would be set out on the sideboard and provided with silver serving spoons. The result would be something like the breakfast scene in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, elaborate and barren. Even when Mother was in fine form and nothing out of the ordinary had happened and they were all on their best behavior—say once every ten years—that scene was barren. Today—

  The prospect of today was so daunting, Bennis was almost ready to go back upstairs and hide herself in bed. She would have done it, but she knew she would never get back to sleep. Bennis was an early riser, when she wanted to be, and sometimes when she didn’t. Long, long ago—not so long, really; it just seemed like it—she’d trained herself to get up at four o’clock in the morning and get moving as soon as her feet hit the floor. That was when she was writing her first book and working as a secretary at First Boston Financial. If she’d been an ordinary typing-pool secretary, she might have been able to write when she got home, at six o’clock, like everybody else in her writers’ group. Instead, she was assistant to the second-highest officer in the corporation. She never got home before nine. By then, she was usually just this side of catatonic. Her boss was a full-fledged, manic-depressive, paranoid psychopath.

  On the other hand, it might be just as well she hadn’t been able to write after work. None of the other members of her writers’ group had published as much as a short story.

  Somehow, all this mental nattering about her career felt, well, disloyal to Daddy. Bennis had no idea how she could be disloyal to a man who had spent more than thirty years letting her know how much happier he’d have been if she’d never existed, but there it was.

  She pushed through the green baize door to the dining room and looked at the overloaded sideboard, the overextended table, the huge poinsettia centerpieces with their chokers of holly and mistletoe. Then she looked at Emma, who was standing next to the coffee urn.

  “You look terrible,” she said.

  “It’s the music,” Emma said. “I want them to stop the music.”

  Music was so much a part of Christmas at Engine House, Bennis hadn’t noticed it before. Ten years ago, Mother had made a single concession to modernity. She’d had all the common rooms in the house wired into a stereo system. At the moment, that system was pumping out an organ rendition of “Silent Night.”

  “Idiot,” Bennis said. “He’s got to know there’s been a death in the house. What does he think he’s doing?”

  “Who?”

  “Marshall,” Bennis said. Marshall was the butler. Sometimes Bennis got the strangest feeling, just realizing her mother had a butler.

  Emma looked into her empty coffee cup. “He’s just doing what he was told to do. Anne Marie wrote all the instructions on a piece of paper. I saw it hanging in the pantry.”

  Bennis took Emma’s coffee cup, filled it from the urn, and put it on the table. “Sit,” she said. “You look ready to collapse.”

  “I am ready to collapse,” Emma said.

  The tea was set out in two large pots. One had brew so strong it looked black when it was poured. The other had plain hot water. You were supposed to mix the two. Bennis didn’t bother.

  She shoved enough sugar into her tea to turn it into syrup and set the cup next to Emma’s on the table. “Silent Night” had become “Noel,” played on a harpsichord. The instrument sounded tinny, as if it had been discovered after being long abandoned, and played without being retuned.

  Mother used to play the harpsichord.

  Bennis got out her cigarettes, extracted a crystal ashtray from under the largest of the centerpieces, and lit up.

  “You ought to get some sleep,” she said. “You’re not doing anybody any good staying awake in the night.”

  Emma shrugged. “You’re not getting any sleep either. The rest of them walk around all night, too, you know. I heard them from my room. Bobby—”

  “Bobby? Bobby stayed here again all night?”

  “Myra says he’s going to stay all week. That’s not such a bad idea, Bennis. The weather’s been really ter
rible. And the news last night said there was going to be snow again tomorrow morning.”

  “What was Bobby doing walking around?”

  “I don’t know.” Emma took a tentative sip of her coffee and made a face. “I went to the upstairs library about two and he was there, working with his calculator. It was weird. He just kept punching buttons and punching buttons, but he didn’t have papers or anything to work with. It was like he knew all the numbers by heart. It made me wonder.”

  “About what?”

  “Well,” Emma said. She blushed and looked into her coffee cup again.

  Overhead, “Silent Night” became “The Holly and the Ivy”—played on a virginal. Mother used to play the virginal, too. For all Bennis knew, Mother had played the music she was hearing now, and recorded it, against the time she would no longer be able to make the carols herself.

  The idea was so depressing, Bennis could hardly stand it. She lit another cigarette, realizing too late that the one she’d lit before had hardly been smoked. She put them both out.

  “I just talked to Michael,” she said. “He says that now the holiday’s officially over, the police will get in gear. Things will start to happen—”

  “Things have already happened,” Emma said. “All that questioning.”

  “Well, yes. He meant the wider investigation. Talking to the lawyers and the bank and the insurance company, that kind of thing. Looking for motives.”

  “They don’t have to talk to all those people to get motives,” Emma said. “They just have to talk to us.”

  “I don’t think they see it that way, Emma.”

  Emma finished her coffee and got up to get some more. She fumbled with the spigot on the urn, then filled her cup until it was slopping over. Bennis frowned. That fumbling motion had made her think of something, but she couldn’t figure out what. She tried to see it again, replay it in her mind, but couldn’t make it happen.

  Emma came back to the table. “I’d feel better if they acted as if they cared,” she said. “He was our father. It doesn’t matter if we loved him or hated him, does it?”