Act of Darkness (25 page)

“I don’t think there could have been a lot of women in the senator’s life who did this kind of thing,” Berman said. “The man’s career would have been in the tank years ago.”

“True. But I don’t think Janet cared much about the senator’s career, either. She wanted her marriage intact, and she had her marriage intact. Patchen Rawls or no Patchen Rawls.”

“Humiliation can be a powerful motive, Mr. Demarkian. Humiliation can lead to hatred.”

“I know. And maybe it did. That’s just not how I read this, or how I read that woman. I don’t think there was a thing Stephen Fox could have done with sex that would have changed Janet’s feelings toward him, unless he left her.”

“And you’re sure he wasn’t going to do that?”

“It would have been political suicide,” Gregor said. “Dan Chester wouldn’t have let him do it.”

Gregor moved into the room and looked it over, once again. The sheer quantity of underwear was astonishing.

“I’ve done this already, of course,” he told Berman, “but I want you to see what I saw. Take a look at the body for a minute.”

Berman went dutifully over to the body, but he looked skeptical. “If he died the way Debrett did, I don’t see what you’re going to find.”

“I wasn’t thinking straight when we looked at Debrett’s body,” Gregor said. “All I could think about was poisons. Look.” He put his hand behind the senator’s head and lifted it off the pillows. “Look at the neck, right along the jaw at the carotid artery. What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“What I see is a little spot of blood.”

Berman blinked and leaned closer. “You’re right,” he said slowly, “there is a spot of blood.” He pulled back. “Are you trying to tell me he was injected with something after all?

Some kind of poison? And what about Debrett? I know there wasn’t anything like that on Debrett.”

“I know there wasn’t either. The trouble you’re having is with the categories you’re using. That was the trouble I was having. Stop thinking injection, and stop thinking poison.”

Gregor laid the senator’s head back on the pillow, carefully and as if it mattered. In death, the senator had become a blank, like one of the pod people in that movie about the body snatchers. It was almost as frightening to look at as the crowd at the gate. Gregor turned away and made himself look at something else. Again.

“Did you ask the M.E. to check for curare, the way I asked you to?”

“Curare,” Berman said solemnly, “is a poison.”

“I know it is.”

Berman sighed. “Yeah. Well. I asked. You know what he told me?”

“It’s almost impossible to get evidence of curare poisoning from a corpse, unless the dose has been massive, death has been instantaneous, and the body is autopsied right away.”

“My, my,” Berman said. “The things they teach you in the FBI.”

“You don’t need the FBI for that kind of information,” Gregor said blandly. “You could get it from Agatha Christie, did he find anything?”

“No.”

“Never mind. When you ask him this time, tell him to test for succinylcholine instead.”

Henry Berman rubbed his hands across his face, scratched the back of his neck, shook out his hair. The room was quiet except for the sound of leftover rain dripping from one part of the roof to another.

“What,” Berman asked slowly, “is—whatever that was that you said.”

“Succinylcholine.”

“Right.”

“Synthetic curare.”

“Mr. Demarkian, I don’t mean to be pesky here, but curare is a poison. Synthetic curare is, therefore—”

“Not a poison.”

“No?” Berman looked surprised.

“Curare isn’t just a poison,” Gregor explained patiently. “It’s got a number of perfectly legitimate medical uses. The problem with the organic variety is that it’s tricky. You’re never entirely sure of the strength of what you’ve got, so you’re never entirely sure of the dose you should be giving. You want to induce a short period of paralysis to aid in some surgical procedure, and instead—”

“Your patient is dead on the table.”

“Or not paralyzed at all. But you’re right. It was mostly dead on the table. That’s what bothered me about the senator’s attacks. They looked like curare poisoning. They behaved like curare poisoning. Every indication I could see screamed curare poisoning. But if they had been curare poisoning, the senator should have been dead a long time before now.”

“Well, it killed him this time,” Berman said.

“No, it didn’t. Suffocation killed him. Trust me. Succinylcholine is used for emergency procedures, surgical crises—”

“Surgical crises.” Henry Berman thought this over. “Didn’t Victoria Harte have surgery? Wasn’t it on the television news? Gallbladder or something like that.”

“And if Victoria Harte kept her head together, she could have stolen some from the hospital while she was there?” Gregor smiled. “Maybe. But any one of the people in this house, Victoria included, would have had easier ways of getting hold of succinylcholine.”

“How? Who?”

“Janet Harte Fox for one,” Gregor said. “She does volunteer work in a home for mentally retarded children.”

“So?”

“Succinylcholine is heavily used in pediatric emergency medicine. Children with Down syndrome frequently have severe medical problems. If that place Janet volunteers in is fully licensed—and with her husband in the news all the time, she’d have to be sure it was—they’d have to have a fully stocked infirmary.”

“I see.”

“Then there’s Clare Markey,” Gregor said. “She’s a lobbyist for a group of people who care for mentally retarded children. She wouldn’t have any trouble getting herself a tour of a facility, or a little supply on the side.”

“Of course not.” Berman was morose. “This is incredible.”

“Well,” Gregor told him, “don’t forget the person with the best access. Don’t forget Kevin Debrett.”

Henry Berman’s eyes seemed to grow to twice their size, threatening to pop out of his head. “Kevin Debrett?” he said. “Kevin Debrett? Mr. Demarkian, for God’s sake, Kevin Debrett is dead.”

“I know—”

“You—”

Gregor almost hated to do it to him. He really did. “Kevin Debrett had his medical bag here for the weekend, didn’t he?”

“How should I know?”

“I know. He said he did, yesterday at lunch, before he was killed. Go find it. There has to be a vial of succinylcholine in that bag, or there’s a vial of it wandering around loose in this house, because he would have had to have it with him. And remember that none of the guest room doors can be locked from the outside, and every guest here got a brochure with a floor plan clipped to the back cover of it. The floor plan makes it perfectly clear which guest was in which room for the weekend. And Debrett was worried about someone stealing that bag, because someone had stolen it, three months or so ago, right before the attacks on Stephen Whistler Fox began to happen.”

“
That
can’t have had anything to do with it,” Berman said wildly. “That happened right here in Oyster Bay. I was called in on it, for God’s sake. It happened at Heston Lodge during one of those Bacchanalia Night parties they throw. Adolescent bull manure—”

“None of the people here this weekend was there then?”

“No. Not a one.”

“What about publicity?”

“Don’t be a damn fool. This is Oyster Bay. The fastest way out of a job, a house, or a life in this place is to annoy the kind of people who belong to the lodge.”

Gregor shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. He was known to take that bag everywhere. All someone had to do was lift the succinylcholine out of it, and they all had plenty of chances to do that.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Henry Berman said. His eyes darted around the room, going from one piece of crumpled underwear to another, stopping for a moment at the window, through which he could see the tip of a flag high on a flagpole, waving in the wind.

The sight of the flag seemed to calm him down. “Wait a minute,” he said, “you keep telling me Stephen Whistler Fox wasn’t poisoned. And Kevin Debrett wasn’t poisoned.”

“They weren’t.”

“Then what was the point of this succinylcholine stuff?”

“Paralysis.”

“What?”

“I’ll repeat, Mr. Berman. Succinylcholine isn’t a poison. It’s been used to kill children—a nurse down in Texas killed a lot of them with it—but to kill an adult with the stuff, you’d have to use a massive dose. You’d certainly have to give it by injection.”

“That mark on the neck—”

“It’s a puncture mark,” Gregor said, “made by a tack or a pin. It’s much too small to have been made by any hypodermic known to Western science. It hit the carotid artery, but I think that was just luck. It didn’t have to, anyway.”

“But why bother with it?” Henry insisted. “Why go to the trouble?”

“Paralyze the victim, for one thing. Make it easy to suffocate him.”

“You could do that by conking him on the head.”

“You could,” Gregor admitted, “but it wouldn’t be the same. In the first place, it would have been obvious. If you’re going to conk them on the head, why not just conk them a little harder and kill them that way?”

“What’s the second place?”

“If you conk them on the head, they’re unconscious,” Gregor said. “It’s considered one of the virtues of succinylcholine, for medical purposes, that it doesn’t paralyze the brain. While our victims were being suffocated—probably with nylon stockings like the one we found in Bennis’s wastebasket—they were fully and gloriously awake.”

Henry Berman looked so sick, Gregor almost wanted to spare him the rest of it. Almost, but not quite.

“There is one more thing,” he said.

“What’s that?” Henry Berman was croaking.

“Do you remember what I said yesterday, about crib death?”

“I remember you using the words.”

“Yes, well. I think we’d better go get ahold of one Mr. Carl Bettinger. I think we’re going to find that Dr. Kevin Debrett knew a good deal more about crib death than anyone ever suspected.”

B
ENNIS HANNAFORD COULD NEVER
remember being so uncomfortable—not grieving, not frightened, not angry, but uncomfortable. There was something about them all sitting there in a little semicircle, each of them staring at their own feet, that made her feel as if she’d wandered into somebody else’s argument. And then there was the atmosphere, if you could call it that. Bennis didn’t want to, because she thought it made her sound like Patchen Rawls. Still, there had to be some word for it. It was odd how the timing had worked out. Yesterday, it had almost been possible to believe that this was no special weekend at all. Whatever preparations were going on down in the town didn’t touch them at Great Expectations, and what preparations were going on at Great Expectations didn’t involve the guests of Victoria Harte. Last night, of course, there had been the fireworks—a crazy, schizophrenic explosion of color that seemed to celebrate the death of Kevin Debrett—but they hadn’t lasted long. Then the rain had started, and the cold, and it might as well have been early March. Now the weather had cleared, and the weekend had gotten back into gear. Bennis was a little shocked to discover how much of it there was, and close. Even here, facing away from the sea and into the dense tangle of incoherent roads that marked out the “private” part of Oyster Bay, she could hear the tinny brass leadenness of marching bands and the sharp reediness of a fife and drum corps. Every once in a while she caught the guttural rhythms of quasi-military grunts. She supposed she was hearing what constituted practice for a drill team.

Across the room, Janet Harte Fox was curled onto the arm of her mother’s chair, one arm draped across Victoria’s heart-shaped ruby. She reached up and tugged at her hair pins, and Bennis looked away from her. The last thing Bennis wanted was to make eye contact with Janet.

At the end of the larger couch, Dan Chester stirred into life. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “what are they doing up there?”

“They’re dusting for fingerprints, of course,” Victoria said, “and doing all that other nonsense policemen do. What kind of fingerprints they expect to find, I don’t know.”

“Ours,” Clare Markey said.

“Well, that wouldn’t be surprising, would it?” Victoria said. “Janet’s and Dan’s and mine will be all over the house, and so will Stephen’s. They might even find Kevin’s up there. Kevin and Stephen were so close. What would it prove? Of course,” she swung toward Patchen Rawls and smiled, “they might find somebody else’s, somebody’s that didn’t belong there—”

“I never go where I don’t belong,” Patchen Rawls said angrily.

“As far as I can tell,” Victoria shot back, “you never go anywhere else.”

Bennis Hannaford winced. Janet was pulling at those pins again, pulling them all the way out sometimes, so that the thin points of their needle ends glinted in the overhead light. Bennis didn’t blame her. Victoria seemed to be verging on mania, out of control, as if she’d had more than enough a million years ago and now decided to do something about it. She was concentrating her full attention on Patchen Rawls, and there was a light of triumph in her eyes, as if she knew something the rest of them didn’t.

Under other circumstances, Bennis might have tried to diffuse the situation. Her mother had trained her well in the ways of hospitality. That was what Main Line mothers did. But Bennis was afraid that if she moved, Victoria would notice her, and that if Victoria noticed her, she would spring. If Victoria was intent on carving Stephen’s mistresses into shark meat, there was more than one mistress for her to use her knives on.

On the arm of Victoria’s chair, Janet was getting more and more nervous. The rest of them, Bennis herself included, had gone deathly still. Suddenly, Janet jumped up and started to run from the room. Her jumping made Bennis jump too, with just a second’s time lag.

“I’m going to go to the kitchen,” Janet said, not stopping, heading full speed for the foyer. “I’m going to make some tea. Does anybody else want some?”

Victoria turned on her. “What are you going to make tea for? If you want tea, we have maids.”

“I know we have maids, Mother. I just want something to do.”

“Maybe she does just want something to do,” Clare Markey said. “Can you really blame her?”