Act of Darkness (18 page)

“That was it?” he said. “A pair of pantyhose half out of a wastebasket? Good Lord. I mean, I’d heard you were good, but—”

“You don’t understand,” Gregor said. “It was all wrong. The maids had been in. Or maid. I don’t know which it is. Victoria Harte usually travels with a lot of servants, but there’s a curious lack of them here this weekend. The whole place, my room, Bennis’s room, the hallway, was hospital clean. The windowsills had been dusted. The bedsteads looked polished. The floors were vacuumed. The maid wouldn’t have left the pantyhose like that. If she hadn’t carted them off, she would at least have stuffed them all the way into the wastebasket. And then, of course, Bennis’s room had been locked, from the inside, because the rooms here can only be locked from the inside.”

“The maids might have locked it,” Berman said, “to keep people out while they were working. They could have forgotten to unlock afterward. You did say Miss Hannaford’s room connected to yours.”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“And? Is that all? You don’t want to tell me what all you people are doing here?”

Gregor hesitated. There were, on the one hand, the promises he had made to Dan Chester and Carl Bettinger. There was, on the other, the body of Kevin Debrett, lying on a bed no more than ten feet from where he stood. At the moment, Debrett seemed the most urgent problem, but Gregor was not a naive man. Carl Bettinger had not been telling the truth when he said he was only here because the Director was doing a favor for Dan Chester. Carl Bettinger was building a cover, and the computer squint and the calls to Berman’s office for background information gave Gregor a good idea what that cover was for.

Instead of answering Berman, Gregor went to Kevin Debrett’s door and opened it. Because he had had his naked hand on the knob earlier, and in all likelihood destroyed any useful prints at once, he didn’t bother to ask for gloves. He did ask for gloves to turn on the lights in Debrett’s room.

“Look,” he said, as the track lighting began to glow, making the room look eerily like a morgue in a movie made from a Robin Cook novel. “Look at him.”

Berman came to the door and looked. “You sure he’s dead?”

“Very sure. I checked twice.”

“What could make somebody die looking like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long’s he been dead?”

“I don’t know that either,” Gregor said. “But when we found him, it hadn’t been too long. He wasn’t warm but he was still—pink.”

“Ahh.”

“I can tell you what he didn’t die from,” Gregor said. “He didn’t die from a heart attack. There’s none of the convulsive residue there would have had to have been if he’d had a coronary massive enough to kill him at his age. If he’d been eighty something instead of forty something, I could see it. Not now. He didn’t die from an illness in any ordinary sense, either. He wasn’t ill. Everyone staying in this house saw him today. He was fine. Not even sneezing. He looks too fit to have been in an advanced stage of cancer or AIDS. You don’t die from those like this, anyway. And then—”

“Just a minute,” Berman said. “I can see where you’re getting to. Poison. You’re telling me it’s got to be poison.”

“No,” Gregor said, sighing. “I wish I could. I wish even more that your medical men would get up here and turn him over and find a stab wound in his back—”

“There’s no sign of blood.”

“I know. There’s no sign of abrasions on his throat, either. There’s nothing wrong with his neck that I can see. It doesn’t look broken, and if it were broken badly enough to kill him it would. If I could pin this down as murder and I had to come up with a method, what I’d like is suffocation. I just can’t figure out how it could be suffocation.”

“Why not?” Berman said. “Maybe somebody got to him in his sleep—”

“He would have woken up,” Gregor said. “He wasn’t a baby. He was a relatively young man in better than relatively good shape. He would have put up a struggle. He didn’t put up a struggle.”

“Assuming he died here,” Berman said.

“Assuming he died anywhere.” Gregor was adamant. “No bruises. No contusions. No scratches. I suppose all that could be on the back side of him, but if it is, it’ll be the first time I ever heard of anything like it.”

“He might have been drugged,” Berman said.

“He might have been,” Gregor admitted, “but I wouldn’t count on it. I’d check for it, but I wouldn’t count on it. At least not on the ordinary run of drugs you’d use to do something like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because to do something like that and make it work—first drug him and then smother him while he was drugged—you’d literally have to smother him
while
he was drugged. Once he was dead, whatever drug it was would stop working its way out of his body.”

“Are you trying to tell me you can tell?” Berman said. “By looking? Nobody can do that.”

Gregor wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. He was sweating in spite of the air-conditioning, and he was beginning to feel frustrated and angry—not at Berman, but at himself. He hated knowing and not being able to explain why he knew. It flew in the face of reason, and Gregor was devoted to reason. And yet—

And then it hit him.

“The bedspread,” he said.

“What?”

“The bedspread. Look at the bedspread. It’s absolutely smooth.”

“So?”

“Berman, for God’s sake. Even if he’d been drugged and then poisoned, he would have moved. He would have wiggled at least. He couldn’t have helped himself. But he didn’t move. He didn’t so much as twitch. Just look at that bedspread.”

“Mr. Demarkian,” Berman said patiently, “I am looking at that bedspread and I do see what you mean, but what I have to say is that I just can’t see—are you all right?”

Gregor Demarkian was definitely not all right. He was back in the Mondrian study, reading the words spelled out by a dot matrix printer on a perforated computer sheet, the words that had made no sense to an entire team of doctors from the UConn medical center but had made a kind of crazy sense to him:
one minute everything’s fine except that I’m a little nervous and the next minute everything just stops. It just
s
tops. My heart stops. My breathing stops. One minute I’m going and the next I’m not.

Gregor began to feel sick. “Crib death,” he said.

“What?” Berman asked him.

“Listen. Do something for me. Have the body checked for curare.”

“Curare?” Berman looked on the verge of a stroke. “You think Kevin Debrett was killed with curare?”

“Of course not.” Gregor sighed. “If that had been the case, he would be blue.”

I
T WAS THE TELEPHONE
that woke Clare Markey up the next morning, and it was the telephone that sent her into a spiral slide of despair, a kind of kiddieland amusement park of the stranger emotions. Except, of course, that she couldn’t really blame the telephone. When Alexander Graham Bell had invented the thing, he hadn’t forseen its use by the likes of Harvey Gort. He probably hadn’t even forseen the existence of men like Harvey Gort. Clare had only the sketchiest ideas of history—she had gone through both high school and college during the great days of relevance, so she had only the sketchiest ideas of anything unconnected to her work—but she was convinced that people in the nineteenth century had been nobler than people in the twentieth. At the very least, they’d had the good manners to cloak their shallowness in erudition. Or piety. Or something. She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to Harvey’s voice bouncing down the wires to her from the District of Columbia, thinking about Abraham Lincoln. She would have thought about Henry Clay and Sir Thomas More, but she wasn’t exactly sure when either of them had lived. Along with only the sketchiest ideas of history, Clare Markey had no idea at all of dates.

Sometime during the night, it had started to rain. Now, at six o’clock, the wet was coming down steadily, blown in spatters against her windows by winds that rose and fell erratically from second to second. If Kevin Debrett hadn’t died, Clare would have been getting ready to go downstairs, to eat breakfast and then retire to the beach room to listen to Stephen Whistler Fox natter on about the needs of the mentally retarded. She hadn’t been looking forward to it—funny, but even the thought of it brought back that crazy need to drink that had driven her out of New York City; it was as if the need to drink and the “needs of the mentally retarded,” as defined by Stephen Whistler Fox, were connected—but it would have been better than this. Anything would have been better than this.

“What I think,” Harvey Gort was saying, “is that you ought to demand our money back. All of it. Right away. Then you pack up your things and get out of there.”

Clare decided to sit up. Lying down, she felt like an Aztec virgin on a sacrificial altar. She molded her pillows into a pile against the headboard and propped herself up on them, then thought about the rain coming down over her head. With flat roofs like this, it sounded louder than it should have, and harder, like ball bearings pumped out of a shotgun.

“Harvey,” she said, “give me a break, will you please? I can’t get out of here.”

“Why not?”

“Because the police won’t let me, for one thing. They won’t let any of us. Out of Oyster Bay, I mean.”

“You could go to a motel.”

“No, I couldn’t. This is Fourth of July weekend. There’s an enormous festival going on up here. There are fireworks every night.” She looked dubiously in the direction of her windows, covered tightly with thick curtains that had been weighted with lead to make them stay put. There wasn’t any point in telling Harvey Gort about the rain. “Harvey,” she said, “there isn’t a vacant hotel room on all of Long Island.”

“Hotels and motels,” Harvey said in a singsong voice. He did that sort of thing sometimes, like an old-time priest suddenly breaking into plain chant. Clare had never understood why. “Let me think,” he said. “It’s important now. With that bastard Debrett out of the picture, there’s no reason for Fox to get that much of our money.”

Out of the picture.
Clare pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it. Squawking noises came from the earpiece. Harvey was rambling on. She put the receiver back to her ear and listened with mounting astonishment.

“The only thing I want to know,” Harvey was saying, “was whether it was cocaine or AIDS. That’s it. You know it’s got to be one or the other. They’re all like that, the effing sons of bitches with their effing M.D. degrees. All sniffing it up one end and getting it porked up the other and then acting like the rest of us are—”

“Harvey.”

“You know it’s true, Clare. You spend all your time with them. You know—”

“What I know is that I’m sick to death of listening to you eff this and eff that all day long. Don’t you ever let up?”

“It’s a perfectly respectable Anglo-Saxon word, Clare. The only reason you object to it is because you’ve been brainwashed by—”

“Stuff it,” Clare said. “I’m not interested in another lecture on capitalist sexual oppression and I’m not interested in another lecture on using the weaknesses of establishment structures to bring about social change. Why do you think the police won’t let us leave Oyster Bay?”

“Because they’re pigs, that’s why. They like throwing their weight around.”

“I could give you a lecture on recent decisions in constitutional law, Harvey, but it’s like I said. I’m not interested in lectures at the moment. They’re keeping us here because they think Kevin Debrett was murdered.”

There was silence on the other end of the line, long and hollow, that made Clare feel instantly better. Finally, finally, after six years, she had managed to bring Harvey Gort to a full stop.

“Well?” she said.

Harvey cleared his throat. “I listened to the eleven o’clock news,” he said. “I’ve got the
Early Bird News
on right this minute. There isn’t anything about murder.”

“There wouldn’t be, would there? There won’t be until they’re sure.”

“How can they not be sure?”

“Let’s say there are some very strange things about this death, Harvey. Let’s say something else. If they have to pick a likely suspect, somebody with a motive right out there for everybody to see, I’m the prime candidate.”

“You?”

Clare thought about developing this for him, but decided not to. It seemed so obvious to her that it also seemed impossible that anyone could miss it.

Suddenly, sitting up in bed felt as confining as lying in it had. Clare threw off the covers, swung her legs over the side, and stood up. It was all jumbled up together in her mind. Kevin Debrett and the death of Kevin Debrett. The Empowerment Project. Harvey Gort. Herself. She would have said she didn’t care if Harvey and his people got their cut of the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children, but it wasn’t true. She devoutly hoped they wouldn’t get a dime. She took the phone away from her ear again, and stared at it again, and shook her head. What could she possibly be thinking of? This was like contemplating suicide.

She put the phone back to where she could use it and said, “Harvey?”

“I’m here,” Harvey said. “I still think what I was saying was valid. You can’t tell me they’re really holding seminars up there this weekend. After this, I mean.”

“I don’t know what we’re doing. Nobody’s said anything. Everybody’s in shock.”

“Bull dung.”

“It may be bull dung to you, but a lot of these people have known Kevin Debrett for a long time. And remember something, Harvey. Even if Debrett is dead, his clinic isn’t. There’s that. There’s also the obvious, which is the thing you never think of.”

“What’s obvious now?”

“There’s nothing to say there has to be an Act in Aid of Exceptional Children. There’s nothing to say it shouldn’t die in committee. If Dan Chester decided to take exception to your behavior, or mine—”

“He can’t do that, Clare. There’s been too much publicity. He has to go ahead with the act. If he drops it, Stephen will look like a fool.”

“There’re a lot of ways to kill a bill, Harvey. And there’re a lot more ways to kill you. Chester could always get Fox to go with vouchers.”

There was another long silence on the line, then the sound of heavy breathing turning into snorts, and Harvey Gort said, “Shit.”