Act of Darkness (8 page)

“Under what circumstances?”

“Under the circumstances that the house belongs to Victoria Harte in particular,” Bennis said.

They had covered the three, or however many, miles to the gate, and stopped. Their driver had gotten out and gone to speak into a small metal box in the gate’s left wall. He was doing a lot of talking, as if someone on the other end was making up for the inadequate security wall by indulging in verbal annoyance.

Finished with the inquisition, their driver came back to the car and got in. A moment later, the gate popped open, as jerky as an automatic door in a thirties insane asylum. Gregor looked through his window at the asphalt of the drive as they passed on to it and saw that he’d been right. It was studded with polished metal hearts.

“Victoria Harte,” Bennis told him, “is the woman who told the entire Hollywood press corps that her second husband was going to be a kept man and proud of it.”

“What?” Gregor said.

“Victoria Harte,” Bennis repeated. “What I’m trying to tell you is, she’s famous for being—I don’t know what you’d call it. For making sure everybody knows what’s hers is hers.”

“She’s certainly making sure everybody knows this house is hers,” Gregor said.

“You’d think she’d get tired of hearts,” Bennis said. “I mean—never mind. Anyway, according to my mother—”

“Your mother knows Victoria Harte?”

“They’ve met. They were on an American Heart Association thing together in 1972 or something.”

“I didn’t think the Main Line mixed with—actresses.”

“My mother would have mixed with anybody to get money for the Heart Association. At least, she would have back in 1972. Afterward—”

“I know about afterward, Bennis.”

“Yes. Well. Anyway, what Mother said was that Victoria Harte had a little notebook she carried with her everywhere, and every time she did anything she wrote it down. Most people don’t do that, you know, when they’re working for charities. They get a big kick out of toiling in the vineyards, or they say they do. But she wrote it all down, and if there was a press story she got to the reporters and made sure they put in exactly what she had done. You see what I mean?”

“She wanted to get credit for her work,” Gregor said.

“She wanted to own her work,” Bennis said. “That’s something different. Mother said she had her initials on everything, on her clothes, on her compacts. She left her comb at home one day and she went to a drugstore and bought a little plastic one to use instead, and before she used it she took one of those indelible ink laundry pens and put her initials in the corner.”

“Obsessive,” Gregor agreed.

“I’ll tell you something else my mother told me,” Bennis said. This time she looked worse than smug. “She hates her son-in-law. And I mean positively hates him.”

“What?” Gregor said again.

But there was no time for an answer. The drive was a straight shot from the road to the house, and it was not pocked. The Rolls had traveled it at a speed Gregor would have thought impossible when they were back in traffic. They had passed a seven-bay garage with a line of red cars parked just outside its doors. The cars had license plates that started at “VH-101” and ended at “VH-107.” They had passed a cast iron, white-painted, modernistic gazebo with filigree hearts hanging from its eaves. They had passed a heart-shaped fountain made of poured concrete and a heart-shaped reflecting pool filled with tropical fish. Gregor thought it was no wonder the neighbors were supposed to hate this place.

Now they were pulling into the roundabout in front of the main doors—
not
heart-shaped, Gregor saw with relief—and as they did he saw that she was waiting for them, Victoria Harte herself, standing under the portico in a bright red raw silk caftan that fell to the ground. The shoulder of the caftan was held up by a heart-shaped ruby the size of a Kennedy half dollar. Her hair was piled on top of her head and stuck through with ornamental pins. Gregor couldn’t tell if they had hearts on them or not. Her feet, whisked into view every once in a while by a breeze, were stuffed into what he thought of as flip-flops, but not the kind made of rubber. In the few glimpses he got of them, they seemed to be made of the same silk as the caftan, stretched over something hard and unyielding, like wood. They had hearts on them, too.

Gregor looked across the seat to see if Bennis had noticed any of this, and found her strangely absorbed in herself, closed off and shut down, as if she had retreated into a cave or a trance.

Victoria Harte was a woman who believed in the redemptive power of publicity, as if it were the report, and not the fact, that determined the reality. That was how Father Tibor Kasparian had described her, putting her personality together from the bits and pieces he’d read about her in the thousands of magazines he seemed to devour every month, and that was how Gregor had thought of her ever since, when he’d bothered to think about her at all. Now, as the Rolls made the last curve in the roundabout and pulled up in front of the main doors, he turned his attention to her completely, blotting out Stephen Whistler Fox and Dan Chester and Carl Bettinger and all their works. He even managed to blot out the mental echo of Father Tibor’s calm, accented, analytical voice—a necessity, because he trusted Tibor more than he trusted himself. Right now, he wanted his own impressions, unmediated.

The most obvious thing about her was that she was still a beautiful woman, in spite of her age, and without that plastic strainedness around the eyes and jaw that was the mark of too many tucks and too many lifts. Gregor supposed she must have had both, at least once. Gravity was inexorable, and he’d never met anyone, male or female, who’d had a throat that smooth after the age of forty-five. Plastic surgery was not one of the things Gregor Demarkian approved of. To him, it spoke of panic and self-delusion, a desperate desire to pretend that there was no such thing as death. Still, he had to give Victoria Harte credit for being intelligent about it. He’d known too many women who ran off to clinics in Beverly Hills as soon as they turned thirty-five, and every eighteen months after that. By the time they were fifty, they looked like something not quite human.

The second most obvious thing about Victoria Harte was that she was, in the old-fashioned sense, a personality. She was the kind of woman who commanded attention even when she was doing nothing more dramatic than standing still. As Gregor knew, all movie stars were supposed to have that quality. As he also knew, having been assigned to kidnapping detail during his first years at the Bureau, and having met a few, most of them didn’t. It was remarkable how rabbity and inconsequential most movie stars seemed, met in the flesh. Victoria Harte could never have seemed rabbity or inconsequential to anyone.

He looked to see if Bennis was taking any of this in, and found that her new persona had cracked a little. She was staring at Victoria Harte through two layers of smoked glass and biting her lip and shaking her head. She caught him staring at her and said, “Great Aunt Eulalie.”

Gregor raised his eyebrows. “Great Aunt Eulalie,” he repeated. “Your own Great Aunt Eulalie, I take it.”

“My father’s father’s sister.”

“Did you like your Great Aunt Eulalie?”

“She was my father’s father’s sister,” Bennis repeated, as if that explained everything. “She terrified me.”

Maybe, Gregor thought, being old Robert Hannaford’s father’s sister did explain everything. He’d never met the man alive, but he’d met a lot of people who had. The Hannaford side of Bennis’s history was full of—personalities. And he could appreciate Bennis’s point, applied to Victoria Harte. There was something oddly anachronistic about her, something belonging more properly to the generation before his own. He wondered where she’d picked it up. From the little he knew about her background—he should have listened more closely to Tibor; he always got in trouble when he didn’t—she hadn’t come by it naturally.

The car jerked to a stop, far less smoothly than a Rolls was supposed to, and their driver got out, meaning to open their doors. He never got a chance. Victoria Harte was out from under the portico before anyone really saw her move. She was at Bennis’s door, the one closest to the curb, before the driver managed to get there. Then the door was yanked open and a wave of heat poured in, sticky and wet and fetid, like spoiled mayonnaise.

Victoria Harte took Bennis’s arm, pulled her out of the car—by main force, as far as Gregor could see—and leaned in to see what else she had. She found Gregor and smiled a little, showing too many teeth.

“Mr. Demarkian?” she said.

“That’s right.”

“That’s who the gate said you were. But you can’t be too careful. We’ve had five gate-crashers already this morning.”

“Gate-crashers,” Gregor repeated, trying to give himself time to think.

But Victoria Harte had no time, or at least no time she was willing to take. “You ought to get out of the car,” she told him. Then she got out herself, and slammed the door after her.

Gregor felt himself go suddenly chill, assaulted by a wave of air-conditioning that poured out at him through the vent under his seat.

Out on the drive, Bennis Hannaford and Victoria Harte were standing together, not so much making small talk as trading monosyllables. Neither of them was looking at the other. Gregor got the distinct impression that they’d each decided to loathe the other on sight.

Gregor brushed the wrinkles out of his trousers and came around the car to the two women, feeling like a ball of wax melting under the heat of a flame. It was quarter after nine, and the temperature had to be well above the seventy-eight degrees it had been at eight o’clock. It might even be over eighty-eight. The air felt as thick as half-set Jell-O.

He held his hand out to Victoria Harte and said, “What kind of gate-crashers?”

Victoria Harte smiled. “It’s only on holiday weekends,” she told him. “They know Stephen and Janet will be here, and probably bringing a pile of friends, and they think with the confusion—”

“The gate-crashers are looking for Senator Fox?”

“No, no.” Victoria Harte waved this away. “They’re looking for me, naturally. Women my own age mostly, I’m sorry to say. I don’t seem to go over big with the present generation, except with homosexuals, of course. Sometimes I wonder what women my age would do without homosexuals. Are you a supporter of the civil rights of gays?”

“Excuse me?” Gregor said.

“I was a supporter of gay rights long before any of these people thought of it,” Victoria Harte said. “Years ago, even back in the fifties. And of course, I’ve done a great deal of work collecting money for research into AIDS.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

“I’d heard about it,” Bennis said.

Victoria Harte shot Bennis a look and went on. “My son-in-law,” she said, “is not what I’d call staunch in the struggle. Not staunch in any struggle for anything, if you want to know the truth. But Miss Hannaford probably told you that. She used to be a—great supporter of the senator’s.” Victoria smiled carefully.

“I met him a couple of times when I was living in Washington,” Bennis said tightly. “Ten years ago. At least.”

“Not all that much changes in ten years.” Victoria said. “Especially not with Stephen. I’ve known him for twenty, and I don’t think he’s had a single new idea in all that time. I don’t think he’s had a single old one, either. May I ask you a question, Mr. Demarkian?”

“Of course.” Actually, what Gregor really wanted was for Victoria to go on talking, babbling bitchiness, just as she had been doing. It would have given him time to collect himself, and he needed it. The heat was getting to him. He was feeling a little sick.

Victoria must have noticed it. She was moving away from the car, toward the shade of the portico, talking all the way. They both followed her as if drawn, because there was nothing else to do.

“You may have noticed I’m being very patriotic this weekend,” she was saying. “Flags. Red, white, and blue.” She gestured at the decorations on the lawn, which were limp. “Of course, I’m not patriotic in the vulgar sense at any time. The Vietnam War took care of all that for me. All waving the flag around ever does is give governments an excuse to kill a lot of innocent people. Especially this government. But—”

“But?” Gregor said. Then he thought, This would make more sense if she sounded like she meant it, which she doesn’t.

“But,” Victoria Harte went on, “the fact is, I probably wouldn’t have shown the colors this weekend, even for Stephen and Janet’s sake, if it wasn’t for just one thing.”

“What thing?”

“You,” Victoria said.

They were now comfortably under the portico, out of the sun but not out of the heat. Gregor could feel a river of sweat rolling down his spine. Great Expectations had to have central air conditioning. It was the kind of house that was built for it. He desperately wanted to get inside.

Victoria stopped at the doors and turned back to them. “Remember how I said I wanted to ask you a question?”

“Yes, I do.” He bit back the rest of what he wanted to say, which was, Get on with it.

“It’s actually a series of questions. It starts with an easy one. Are you the man who helped John Cardinal O’Bannion with his little problem up in Colchester a few months ago?”

“Whoosh,” Bennis whispered in his ear. “There goes our cover.”

“Are you?” Victoria insisted.

“Yes,” Gregor said.

“Fine. Then I take it you are also the man who founded the serial murderers division at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“It’s called the Behavioral Sciences Department, Miss Harte. And I didn’t found it. It was founded by an Act of Congress and the then-director of the Bureau. All I did was the day-to-day dirty work.”

“I don’t think that’s quite honest,” Victoria said. “But we’ll let it go. It comes down to the same thing, no matter how you phrase it. You’re a specialist in murder.”

“I’m not a specialist in anything, Miss Harte. I’m retired. I’m not a private investigator. I have no license. I have never taken money, as a private citizen, for investigating anything at all.”