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

  “Who could I possibly know that you don’t know?”

  Jon thought he could list a host of such people, including wheeler-dealers and con men and financial smoke artists of every description. Jon liked Bobby, but Bobby was naturally bent, and like all the rest of the naturally bent he attracted members of his tribe to his side. Jon didn’t want to hurt Bobby’s feelings, so he didn’t say any of that. He also really needed a favor.

  “If I’ve got my facts straight,” he said slowly, “and I might not. I got them from People magazine. Anyway, if I’ve got my facts straight, you have a sister named Bennis Day Hannaford.”

  “That’s right. She writes fantasy novels. You know, knights and ladies and unicorns and magic trolls. They do really well, I think. Do you want her to go in on some kind of deal?” Bobby looked confused.

  “No, no,” Jon reassured him. “It’s just that I think she might be the means for you to help me with something, if you want to help. I want to get in contact with a man named Gregor Demarkian.”

  “What?” This time Bobby really stopped still, stopped dead. Then he started to grin. “You do have something up your sleeve. You are pulling some kind of trick. You’re going to get Donald McAdam.”

  Jonathan Edgewick Baird was emphatic. “I’m going to do nothing of the kind.”

  3

  Sheila Callahan Baird had worked long and hard to become a trophy wife, but when that job turned out to have unexpected difficulties, she decided to put up with them. God only knew, there were other things she could do. She had a degree in history from Smith. She had her own interior decorating business with offices and showrooms on Madison Avenue. She even had her own private interest income, just like a real tycoon. Of course, the degree from Smith was twelve years old and hadn’t been much use to her even when she’d first gotten it. The interior decorating business wasn’t doing very well, either. If Jon hadn’t been bankrolling it, it would have been bankrupt months ago. As for the private interest income—Sheila didn’t like thinking about the private interest income at all. It was, in fact, the income on a sum of money in trust, and that trust was “revocable.” The word had confused her at first, but she’d figured it out soon enough. It meant that if Jon wanted to, he could take it back.

  Now it was seven o’clock on the last day of August, and she was sitting in front of the mirror in her dressing room, trying to decide if Desert Pink foundation would be too light for a ball at the Metropolitan Museum. Behind her, a hall lined with walk-in closets held the endless parade of dresses, shirts, shoes, slacks, ball gowns, caftans, sweaters, and whatever else that sometimes seemed to her to be the theme of her marriage. Imelda Marcos collected shoes, and Sheila collected the rest of the wardrobe. She collected everything else, too. The chair she was sitting on was a French vanity seat that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette. It had cost $30,000 at auction at Sotheby’s. The table she had spread her makeup across was a Viennese occasional that had once belonged to a Hapsburg. She had picked it up for $42,000 on the Avenue Foch. The dress she was wearing was a custom Dior, strapless and backless, satin and velvet, $12,568. The diamond earrings in her ears were six carats each and flawless. Jon had bought them for her, but she had made sure to check them out. They had literally cost millions. If a trophy wife was a wife to hang trophies on, Sheila Callahan had definitely reached her goal.

  She decided against Desert Pink foundation and picked up the Night Blush instead. She applied a little to her right cheek, squinted at it, and frowned. Then she turned to the pale-faced woman sitting on the ottoman next to her and said: “The problem with all this nonsense about business is that nobody minds their own. I mean, this thing with Donald McAdam. It only happened today. I only heard about it because Calvin came by to talk to me last night—to warn me, he said, and he was right. Everybody knows about it already. Everybody calls me about it. I don’t know what it is they think I’m supposed to do.”

  The pale woman on the ottoman was named Lydia Boynton, and as far as Sheila knew, she wasn’t anyone in particular. She was, in fact, a first wife, the daughter of one rich man and the divorced wife of another. In her grass widowhood, Lydia had set up shop as a “social image adviser,” meaning as one of those women who sell their connections to the inner circles of debutante balls and benefit committees to the climbers coming up. Sheila had hired her because she was bored. With Jon away for over a year, getting social seemed to be the only thing left in the universe to do.

  Lydia was dressed in a long satin gown that looked exactly like a shirtwaist. Sheila wondered how long it would be before she could fire the woman and go it on her own. As long as it took Jon to get out, she supposed. With Jon back in circulation, Sheila would get invited to everything as a matter of course.

  “What makes it all worse,” she went on, abandoning the foundation for the mascara. For a ball this big, she should have hired a makeup artist. They charged $3,000 to do your face, but it was worth it. “What makes it worse,” she repeated, “is that I’m in the middle of all this mess. I mean, Jon’s getting out on the first of October. I have to plan for that. Then there’s this party he wants to throw. Did I tell you about this party he wants to throw?”

  “I don’t know,” Lydia said doubtfully. “You told me about Thanksgiving dinner. On his boat.”

  “It’s not just a boat,” Sheila said impatiently. She glared at the mascara, looking fake in the hard lights that surrounded her mirror. “It’s an exact replica of the Mayflower. No motor. No bathroom in the ordinary sense. He wants to get the whole family on it—including Fritzie, by the way, and Charlie Shay—and sail it up to Massachusetts someplace and land on this island. I think he may own the island.”

  “Isn’t Fritzie his first wife?” Lydia asked. “Could he get her to agree to that? Could he get you to agree to it?”

  “He could get us both to agree to anything,” Sheila said. “All those trusts he set up are reversible any time he wants to reverse them. And Fritzie’s got an old family name, but she’s stone broke on her own and she’s much too old for anyone to want to marry her. I mean, she must be forty-five.”

  Lydia Boynton coughed.

  “Anyway,” Sheila said, “I’m having the headache of my life setting up for Thanksgiving, and then this thing comes along with Donald McAdam. Could you please tell me what I’m supposed to know about Donald McAdam? Except that he’s a crook, of course. That was in all the papers.”

  “Well,” Lydia said, “the fact is, he is a crook, but he tattletold on all the other crooks, and the other crooks went to jail and he didn’t. I’m sorry to sound like a kindergarten teacher, dear, but it’s really that simple. The people who have been calling you have probably been—hurt by Mr. McAdam. As you have too, of course.”

  “I have? Why?”

  “Because it was Donald McAdam who put your husband in prison,” Lydia said. “At least, that’s who I understood it was. Without Mr. McAdam’s testimony, your husband wouldn’t be in jail.”

  There were twenty-two shades of eye shadow in the makeup tray at her elbow, six with glitter in them. Sheila passed over the glittery ones and settled on a deep rose, thinking all the time. What Lydia said didn’t sound right, although she couldn’t put her finger on why not. There was something about there not being a trial, and something else about some securities in a safe deposit box—the particulars of Jon’s case always confused her. In the end, he had simply pleaded guilty, or guilty to a lesser charge, and that had been that. She couldn’t remember anything at all about Donald McAdam.

  “I still don’t get the point,” she said to Lydia. “So Donald McAdam belongs in jail and he isn’t there. Go complain to the district attorney.”

  “Mr. McAdam has immunity,” Lydia said. “There’s nothing you can do about that. And it’s not the same thing as paying him twelve and a half million dollars.”

  “Is that what the company is paying him? Twelve and a half million dollars?”

  “That’s what I heard, yes. That’s what it
takes to buy out his contract. Some people do feel that paying him that money is—rewarding him for being a traitor.”

  “Twelve and a half million dollars,” Sheila said again. “That really is remarkable. But you’re wrong, you know, Lydia. He couldn’t have been responsible for Jon’s going to jail. If he had been, Jon would have done anything before he paid him any money. He’d have killed him first.”

  “A lot of people wish they had,” Lydia said.

  “If they really wanted to they would have,” Sheila said confidently. “Isn’t he one of those people who takes strychnine? I heard he was.”

  “What do you mean, one of those people who takes strychnine? How can you ‘take’ strychnine? It’s a poison.”

  “I know. But it’s gotten to be a big thing the last two or three years. People mix a very little bit of it with their drug of choice—you know, cocaine, or downers or whatever—or else they do it with baking soda. Then they snort it up in lines. I think the danger is half the point. If you make a mistake, you end up dead. But they do it.”

  “Dear God,” Lydia said.

  “All you’d have to do is slip him a little extra at a party or something,” Sheila said. “Make him a present of some cocaine if he takes that and have the cocaine stuffed full. I mean, everybody knows his habits. The police would just think it was his own damn fault.”

  “Mmm,” Lydia said, and looked pale.

  Sheila decided that her face looked just fine and that she would have to live with it. Since she had excellent genes for both bone structure and wrinkling, it would have looked fine without any makeup at all. She picked up her gold-link minaudière—$72,500 at Tiffany’s—checked to make sure it held a lipstick, a fold-up comb, and a hundred-dollar bill, and stood up. The Dior ball gown was perfect for her, obviously expensive but not at all conservative. Her arm needed a bracelet and she got the one that matched the earrings. Then she let herself feel just a little guilty that she had all this real jewelry in her apartment. She knew she wasn’t supposed to wear real jewelry. She was supposed to have it copied and wear the fakes. Sheila had never been able to see the point.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll tell you what I think. I think it would be a good thing if somebody did slip Mr. McAdam a little something. He’s ruining my life. Missy Berringer was so upset, she disinvited me to her birthday party.”

  “I thought you’d decided not to go to Missy Berringer’s birthday party.”

  “I had. But I hadn’t told her that. I was waiting until the last minute. Now she gets the points and I get the shaft. It isn’t fair. Are you coming, Lydia?”

  “Of course I’m coming,” Lydia said.

  “Good,” Sheila told her. “Eight o’clock is incredibly hick for a dinner party, but it is the Metropolitan Museum, and there’s nothing we can do. Maybe Mr. McAdam will be there and I can kill him.”

  “Mmmm,” Lydia Boynton said.

  Sheila swept out past her, never looking back. Really, with Jon coming home, it would be all to the good to get rid of Lydia. It would be so damn nice not to have to cater to a woman who was shocked by everything she said. As for Mr. McAdam, she decided to add him to the list of people she prayed hard for the deaths of, the list that included her mother, her stepfather, and the boy who had thrown her over for Monica Jess in the third grade.

  At the top of that list was her husband, Jon Baird.

  4

  Anthony Derwent Baird was usually known as Tony, and he didn’t want Donald McAdam to die as much as he wanted him to disappear. Disappear was probably the wrong word for it, too. Cease to exist. Never have existed. Become real only on an existential plane. Tony kept thinking there had to be something that would cover it. He just couldn’t seem to find it. He kept thinking there had to be some way to fix it, too. In his saner moments, he knew that was impossible.

  It was now seven o’clock on the last day of August and not one of his saner moments. Tony was sitting in a back booth at the Grubb Clubb, under a tangle of wires and pipes and raw insulation in a corner just far enough away from the noise to make conversation feasible. The noise was coming from a rap-and-thunder group called Heckler Dick, which was as local as you could get in Manhattan and also very bad. The conversation was coming from Mickey Kendrick, who had been Tony’s roommate at St. Paul’s and suitemate at Yale and who was wearing a suit. Tony himself was stretched out along the bench shoved up against the back wall, a tall lanky man in jeans and a black chambray work shirt. Tony took after his mother’s family, and people often said he looked nothing at all like his father. It wasn’t true. He had Jon Baird’s eyes, right down to the glint at the center of them that told anyone with any sense at all that this was not a man to mess with.

  “So,” Mickey was saying, “why don’t we go about this rationally? Why don’t we start from the beginning and go through the middle and get to the end. Maybe that way I’ll understand what you’re talking about.”

  Tony Baird took a sip of his beer and sighed. Mickey was such a straightforward person, such a natural straight. He always did exactly the right thing at exactly the right time for exactly the right people, never even considering the possibility that the wrong thing might be more interesting. Even Mickey’s rebellions had been straight. He’d known he was supposed to have them. He had therefore had them, getting dutifully drunk in Concord and stoned in New Haven and laid enough times to catch crabs in New York. Now he was making his way cheerfully up the ladder at Kidder, Peabody and looking for a girl who had come out at the Grosvenor. He was only twenty-two years old, but in Tony’s estimation he might as well have been dead.

  Tony had run his life in a very different fashion. He had been reasonably circumspect in prep school—although less circumspect than Mickey; a rabbit could have been that—but once he’d gotten to New Haven he’d started making a serious run at getting a little broadened experience. Now he was twenty-five years old, the owner of the most outrageous performance art gallery in Soho, and the next best thing to a celebrity in the world of New York art. He had spoken at a rally organized to defend the National Endowment for the Arts from Jesse Helms. He had been interviewed in Interview magazine. He had gone to bed with women without number, all of whom seemed to be named some variation of “Viveca.” He was also bored out of his skull and thinking of chucking it all right after Christmas, but that was beside the point.

  He took another sip on his beer, considered Mickey’s proposal, and said, “I can’t do it that way, because it won’t work that way. I mean, if it wasn’t for the twelve and a half million dollars, it wouldn’t be anything at all.”

  “Well,” Mickey told him, “I’ll agree that twelve and a half million dollars does tend to make something out of nothing if it wants to, but that’s not your end of it, is it? I mean, you have nothing to do with the twelve and a half million dollars, do you? Assuming the twelve and a half million dollars exists.”

  “Oh, it exists all right. Dad told me about it last time I was up to see him at Danbury. Two weeks ago. I thought it was going to happen right away.”

  “Maybe your Dad had second thoughts,” Mickey said. “Paying off Donald McAdam. Yuck.”

  “Yuck on every possible level,” Tony said. “The guy’s a sleaze, let me tell you. I mean, not a sleaze sleaze. Not like one of those Arabian bankers that turned out to be running the BCCI scam and I kept telling Dad about and he wouldn’t listen to me—”

  “Did he ever?” Mickey was curious. “I mean, when BCCI broke did you go to him and say I told you so and did he admit—”

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “Dad’s good with that. No ego in the ordinary sense and credit where credit’s due. But McAdam.” Tony shrugged. “You can feel it. Bent.”

  “Bent,” Mickey repeated. “But he was a friend of your father’s, so—”

  “I thought he was a friend of my father’s,” Tony said, “at the time, which was about a year and a half ago, maybe a little more. Before anyone knew he was talking to the Feds. He was still commuting back a
nd forth to Philadelphia, or at least he said he was, and that was why he needed the stuff.”

  “Strychnine,” Mickey said solemnly.

  “Cocaine with strychnine in it,” Tony said. “Do you remember when people used to do that? You don’t hang around here very much. Maybe you don’t. Cissy Esterhaven bought it right in the middle of the dance floor at The Hang Out. Just started jerking around like she’d been electrocuted and ended up dead on the floor. It wasn’t a fad that lasted long, do you know what I mean? Too many people ended up dead.”

  “I took cocaine once,” Mickey said. “It gave me a headache.”

  “I took cocaine once, too. Exactly once. I took everything exactly once. I thought I was being smart. Then Len Bias died.” Tony shrugged again and looked back up into the tangle of pipes. The problem with going out to cram your life full of experiences was that it was like going out to cram your mouth full of chocolate. After a while it began to seem pointless. It didn’t even taste good. He held his bottle of beer up to the light and saw that it was empty. He thought about ordering another one and decided against it. Maybe after Mickey was finished nursing his whiskey sour they could go uptown and find a bar that was lighter and airier and full of more expensive people.

  “Anyway,” Tony said, “he shows up at my apartment door one morning at eight o’clock, Thursday morning, I had Cheka Lee doing nude art with tempera and poster board in the gallery the night before and I was washed. He comes in, he explains who he is, he says he wants to ask me a favor. I tell him I have to hit the john. I get up, lock myself in there and make a phone call. You know I’ve got a phone in the bathroom?”

  “You’ve got a phone in the pantry. Who did you call?”

  “Uncle Calvin. Under more normal circumstances I would have called Dad, but like I said, this was about eighteen, twenty months ago. Just around the time the indictments came down. Dad was in Washington or somewhere with the lawyers. I should have waited until I could get in touch with him. Uncle Calvin. For God’s sake.”