Act of Darkness (27 page)

It was the kind of mistake he had never made before, and he didn’t like it. It was the kind of mistake losers made, and he had never been a loser.

Instead of ringing, the phone was beeping at him again. That was all right. He had expected that. He waited a little while, and then Carl Bettinger’s voice came on the line, sounding tired.

“Bettinger here,” he said.

“Dan Chester,” Dan said. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Where are you?”

“I’m in my car,” Bettinger said. “That should be obvious.”

“This number only rings in your car?”

“No. It rings in my office. I’m sorry, Dan. I’m in my car. I’m on my way.”

“You got here yesterday faster than a case of crabs.”

“That was different.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dan said. “Different how? Do you know what’s happening here? Stephen’s dead.”

“I heard, Dan. I heard it on the police band.”

“Marvelous. What have you been doing since? Scratching your ass?”

“I had a few things to clear up. And the roads are bad. I said I was on my way.”

Chester found himself wanting to strangle the man. “I repeat,” he said, “yesterday you were here faster than a case of crabs.”

Dan had expected another apology. He didn’t get it—and, not getting it, he began to feel uneasy. He had brought Carl Bettinger in on this thing himself—or had he? All he remembered was that Stephen had started having those attacks and he had been frantic. He’d gone searching for someone to help him out, someone discreet, and he had asked a friend of his in the White House for a name. The name had been Carl Bettinger’s. But—

But, Dan Chester thought again, and then: Oh, shit.

On the other end of the line, Carl Bettinger cleared his throat. “Dan? Are you still there?”

“I’m still here,” Dan said.

“There’s some kind of parade going on here. The highway is clogged. And it’s getting dark. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

“I’m sure you will.”

“Is Demarkian working out all right? Is he getting involved?”

“He’s running my life,” Dan said. “Never mind, Carl. Just get here. I think I’m going to go back to the fray.”

“I hope you’ve at least calmed down.”

“Right,” Dan said. “I’ve calmed down. You sound very calm yourself, Carl. I’m going to hang up now.”

“Dan—”

“Forget it.”

Dan Chester dropped the phone back into the hook and stood back to contemplate it, marveling. There were people out there who called him a modern Machiavelli, there really were. He had heard them, and he had been flattered. A modern Machiavelli was exactly what he had always wanted to be.

And here he was, in the middle of the worst mess of his life, just waking up to the fact that the man he’d thought was his private asset at the FBI had all along had him suckered.

W
HEN CARL BETTINGER FINALLY
showed up, Gregor Demarkian was talking to Patchen Rawls. Talking to Patchen Rawls was not easy. Listening to her, for any logical person, was worse. She seemed to be incapable of linear thought. Solid facts were scattered haphazardly through a dense mass of trivialities and cosmic philosophies, like raisins in a hot rice pudding. Pseudo-facts were brought out with a ceremonial solemnity that might have suited the election of a pope, and usually had to do with Universal Energy or the Metaprinciple of Destruction or the Great Consciousness. It took no time at all for Gregor to decide two things about Patchen Rawls, absolutely. In the first place, she was a profoundly stupid woman, so stupid it was useless to try to get past that stupidity to any kind of sense. She possessed no sense. She possessed no integrity, either. In these days, when it was fashionable among the people she lived with to be pantheist, environmentalist, and vaguely to the political left, Patchen was pantheist, environmentalist, and vaguely to the political left. In another time and place, when it might have been fashionable to believe in technological progress and the good intentions of Adolf Hitler, she would have been that. Gregor much preferred people like Victoria Harte and Clare Markey. He even preferred people like Dan Chester. They were all people who had analyzed their world and come to their own conclusions. As different as those conclusions might be from his own—or from each other—Gregor could at least understand the process. Patchen Rawls was the kind of person who made him think that somewhere, somehow, the Christian God must exist. She had to be held in existence by some outside force. There was nothing inside her to do it.

The second thing Gregor noticed about Patchen Rawls—and it was the most important thing—was that, in spite of her many declarations in favor of feminism, she saw herself entirely in sexual terms. In fact, she saw everyone entirely in sexual terms. Gregor decided that that was why she was so confounded by the ordinary reactions of the people around her to what she had done in the case of her mother. In Patchen’s mind, the point of life was sex. Before you were capable of it, you were not fully alive. After you were no longer capable of it, you were alive only through a misuse of language.

“Of course, a lot of people stay fully alive long past the age of forty,” she told Gregor, “but to do that you have to work at it. Janet doesn’t work at it. I don’t think she even wants to. She’s just—well, committing suicide, if you see what I mean.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

They were still in Bennis’s room, and Gregor was standing next to the window, looking down on the beach. The weather had now thoroughly cleared. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. On the other hand, it was getting late. The light was fading, and the solar-activated lamps that lined the beach just above the high-water mark were beginning to glow amber. Some time between the time the rain had stopped and now, the service hired to carry out Great Expectations’s part in the Fourth-of-July celebrations had decked those lamps out with flags. The beach looked as if it had been marked out as the route of a parade, with flag concessions set up and waiting for an army of vendors to man them. In the distance, he heard music again, this time “The Star-Spangled Banner” played in brass. He wondered what was going to happen when the sun went all the way down, and the police were no longer able to see clearly. The last time he’d looked, there were more than a hundred people out on the drive, still trying to find a way onto the grounds.

Behind him, Patchen was off again on another of her fugues. “What I can’t understand,” she was saying, “is why what bothers everybody so much is that she wasn’t in a coma or anything at the time. I mean, a coma isn’t everything. You’d think just because someone was more or less awake that meant they weren’t dead. But what I say is—”

“Miss Rawls,” Gregor said.

“I don’t see what was so terrible about taking away the feeding tube, either,” Patchen said. “I mean, she wasn’t on a respirator or a kidney machine or anything. Nothing else would have worked.”

“Miss Rawls.”

Patchen blinked at him, and pouted. “I don’t think you understand, either. I think you’re just as narrow-minded as all those other people. People have a right to die in dignity, you know.”

Gregor didn’t want to get into the issue of the right to die, in dignity or otherwise. He left the window and walked to the chair she was sitting in, then decided nothing would be gained by standing over her. If she began to feel threatened, she would just veer off on one more round of Cosmic Reality. He left the side of her chair and sat down on Bennis’s bed.

“Miss Rawls,” he said for the third time, as patiently as he could. “Do you think we could go back over what happened today? What you did and what you saw? What we started talking about?”

“We don’t have to go back to it,” Patchen said. “I never got off it.”

“Yes. Well. I mean the details. Let me try to get them straight. You say you entered Stephen Fox’s room for the first time this morning around seven o’clock—”

“It was almost exactly, actually. I meant to go in earlier, at five thirty, but I couldn’t. There were too many people around.”

“You said that, yes,” Gregor said. “It seems to me a strange time of the morning for too many people to be around.”

“Well, I’m with you. I got up early on purpose because I thought there wouldn’t be any trouble. But then, when I opened my door, there they all were.”

“What do you mean, there they all were? Milling around in the hall?”

“No, no. Stephen was in his room with the door open. At five thirty, I mean. He was cleaning up. He always did that when he got up too early for the maids. Even in hotels. He hated sitting around in a dirty room.”

Gregor had seen Patchen Rawls’s room. If Stephen had been as fastidious as she said he was, she must have made him crazy.

“Tell me,” he said, “what happened next. As closely as you can in the order in which it happened.”

“Well,” Patchen said, “Clare Markey got a phone call. It woke her up. That was at just about six. She had her door closed, so I couldn’t hear many of the words—”

“Were you listening at the door?”

“No, no. I was in my room, but my door was open. I was watching for the coast to be clear, if you understand what I mean. But she shouted once, and I could hear that. These rooms aren’t all that soundproof, you know.”

Gregor knew. “What did she shout?”

“The word I heard best was a name. Harvey. Then she went on with something that was probably ‘for God’s sake.’”

“Good. Now, the next thing that happened was—”

“Dan Chester went to see Stephen. Stephen let him in and then they locked up. Then Janet came out of her room and went downstairs. Then Dan came out of Stephen’s room and went downstairs, too. Then Stephen came out—”

“—and went downstairs, too,” Gregor finished up. “What about the other people on the hall? Bennis? Me?”

“You were pacing around in your room,” Patchen said seriously. “I know that because I stopped at your door and listened. I don’t think you can blame me for that. I didn’t want you to see me.”

“I guessed that.”

“I listened at Bennis Hannaford’s room, too, but she must have been asleep. Either that, or she went downstairs long before I woke up. I never heard her moving around and I never saw her, either.”

“All right,” Gregor said, “at this point, you went into Stephen Fox’s room. You were carrying a laundry bag full of underwear—”

“Bras and panties only,” Patchen said.

“No pantyhose.”

“No.”

“But you do wear pantyhose? You own them and you brought pairs with you?”

“I own lots. And I always pack lots, too. They run really easily.”

Gregor nodded. Something had just occurred to him that should have occurred to him before. “How tall are you?” he asked.

“Five ten,” Patchen answered promptly.

“Do you know how tall Janet Harte Fox is?”

“Oh, she’s five ten, too. Stephen liked tall women. Usually, anyway.”

Gregor thought the senator’s taste in women had been catholic. To say the least. “What about Victoria Harte,” he asked Patchen. “She’s taller than both you and Janet Harte Fox, isn’t she?”

“No, she’s not.” Patchen grinned. “She wears those terrible spike heels. Four inches at least and they’re probably giving her weak ankles. And all those shoulder pads, too, even on those caftan things. But she’s always been known for that, you know. For being tall. That was part of her trademark when she was really a movie star and not just a used-to-be. So she plays it up.”

“Shoulder pads.”

“But why do you care?” Patchen asked. “I should think the really important thing is—”

Gregor didn’t want to know what the really important thing was. He could just guess.

“Miss Rawls,” he said finally, interrupting while she took a breath. “Let’s get back to this morning and this afternoon. Now, you put this underwear all around Stephen Fox’s room—”

“It was all clean underwear.” I made sure of that. And I was careful about where I put it and how. I didn’t just throw it around. It was supposed to be an artistic statement,”

“Of your love for Senator Fox.”

“Of the bond between us. A bond between two people is always sexual. Even the bond between parent and child is sexual. I’m not so sure we’re smart in calling that sort of thing abuse. If a child is brought up naturally, to really understand and appreciate his own sexuality—”

“Miss Rawls,” Gregor said desperately.

“You really ought to do something about your mental rigidity,” Patchen told him. “It’s going to play havoc with your karma.”

“Right,” Gregor said, and heard the echo of Bennis’s voice in his head.

“Now,” he said. “You put these things around the senator’s room, and then you went back to your own.”

“And meditated,” Patchen told him. “I had to calm down.”

“But you went back to the senator’s room,” Gregor said.

“I stayed in my own room the whole morning until I went out to see what Clare was doing, and that was—well, quarter or ten to one.”

“All right. Let’s go to afternoon. You meditated in the morning, and then what did you do?”

“I read for a while. I have a wonderful book, by Whitley Strieber, about contact with aliens. I love Whitley Strieber, don’t you?”

Gregor didn’t know who Whitley Strieber was. “You must have read for several hours. What made you stop?”

“Nothing, really. I just got tired. And I was restless and a little hungry. I’m always hungry around noon because I fast in the mornings to clean out the poisons. Especially when I’m staying someplace away from home. You can never tell what they’ve put in the food.”

“You didn’t hear sounds in the hall? Nothing like that?”

“No. There were sounds off and on, of course, all day, but I didn’t pay any attention to them. Why should I have?”

“No reason.” Of course, Gregor thought, from her descriptions of her two days at Great Expectations, it seemed to him that Patchen Rawls made a habit of spying, but he wasn’t going to say so. “So you went to your door, intending to go out and instead—”

“I saw Clare in the hall, yes.”

“And she was coming from Stephen Fox’s room.”

“She was standing in the hallway with the door open,” Patchen corrected, “looking into it. Well, not exactly standing. She was sort of backing up, taking these little steps and moving all the time. You could tell she’d been inside it. It was all over her, like an aura.”