Deadly Beloved (14 page)

“Drugs,” Jackman said.

“Drugs and the Internal Revenue,” Dan Exter said. “Anyway, when the news hit the airwaves last night, we got a call from the manager of the bank branch where she cashed the check—”

“She did actually cash it?” Gregor put in.

Dan Exter nodded. “According to the bank manager, she did. We haven’t really had a chance to go into it. John has one of his people interviewing the woman this morning—”

“Just to go over loose ends,” Jackman said.

“—and of course we want to know about the account and why she went to that particular branch and all the rest of that sort of thing.”

“The branch was near the parking garage?” Gregor asked.

“That’s right,” Dan Exter said.

“And the parking garage, from what I understand, is near the university,” Gregor went on.

“Exactly,” John Jackman told him.

“There might not be much of a reason for her to have chosen that particular branch,” Gregor pointed out. “The university isn’t in the worst neighborhood in Philadelphia, but it’s not in the best one either. I wouldn’t think they get middle-aged women walking in off the street wanting to cash checks for fifteen thousand dollars every day.”

“They get students who overdraw their checking accounts,” Jackman said.

“Go back to the beginning,” Gregor told him. “Patricia MacLaren Willis left here yesterday morning—when?”

“Early,” Dan Exter said. “It wasn’t even eight.”

“And then what happened?”

John Jackman shook his head. “We don’t know. Not yet. The next time we hear about her, it’s when she’s parking at that garage, about noon.”

“And making herself conspicuous?” Gregor asked.

Jackman nodded. “The guy at the garage I talked to myself. She pulled in there and made him sell her an all-day ticket in spite of the fact that the day was half over. Gave him a complicated financial argument, according to him, which probably means she talked common sense for ten minutes. This is not a rocket scientist we’re dealing with here.”

“Then she parked her car and left the garage,” Gregor said. “Then what?”

“Then she went to the bank,” Dan Exter said. “At least, the times are right that she didn’t do anything between the parking garage and the bank.”

“Where she cashed a check for fifteen thousand,” Gregor said. “Then what did she do?”

“She had a big pocketbook,” Dan Exter said. “Something called a Coach bag, according to the bank manager—”

“Coach is a brand,” John Jackman sighed. “I keep telling him.”

“She had the money packed into this Coach bag and left the bank,” Dan Exter said, “and that’s the last we know until the pipe bombs blew a couple of hours later. Which, by the way, is all I think we’re going to know.”

“Somebody will have seen her,” John Jackman said confidently. “Just wait. Somebody always does.”

“Listen.” Dan Exter appealed directly to Gregor Demarkian. “This is a plain, ordinary middle-aged lady we’re talking about here. Not in spectacular shape. Not unusual in any way. Not dressed to be noticed—”

“No?” Gregor asked.

“She was wearing a thin silk blouse and a skirt that was ‘kind of beige,’ according to the bank manager,” Dan Exter said.

“That’s interesting,” Gregor said.

“Anyway,” Exter went on, “the point is, she wasn’t much to look at and she wasn’t a memorable kind of woman. We may find her eventually, but I don’t think she’s going to jump right out and bite us.”

Gregor turned around in a small circle, looking at the big house, looking at the driveway, looking at the other big houses up and down the street. He could see a head at a window on the second floor in the brick Federalist, but otherwise the place seemed deserted. Even the joggers had disappeared. Gregor scratched the back of his neck and wished he hadn’t worn a suit—but he always wore a suit, even to the beach, he didn’t own anything else to wear. He brushed sweat away from his suit collar and started up the drive, knowing that John Jackman and Dan Exter would follow him.

“We might as well get started,” he said. “The longer we hang around, the worse it’s going to be.”

In a routine police investigation—the kind that involves poor people who live in ghettos, and drug deals, and domestic violence—crime scene investigation takes a few hours at best and half a day at worst. The lab people come in and do their dirty work as quickly and efficiently as possible. The police come in and talk to half a dozen people with conflicting stories and another half dozen who want to turn state’s evidence. But this was not an ordinary crime scene. In the first place, there were elements here that were honestly mysterious, even though they would probably turn out to be not so mysterious in the end. In the second place—well, Gregor knew the drill. You had to be careful when you were dealing with rich people, even quasi-rich people, like the ones who lived at Fox Run Hill. Rich people had lawyers and—more important—knew when to use them. Rich people knew their rights. They thought they ought to have more rights than the Constitution already allowed.

Gregor walked through the cavernous garage and into the mudroom. He checked out the wooden pegs artfully hammered into one wall and the bench that had been machine-cut to look rough-hewn. There would probably be a lot of that sort of thing in a place like this. He looked under the bench and found three pairs of shoes: Topsiders; Gucci loafers with pennies in them; Nike running shoes. All three pairs were the same size and made for a man. There were no clothes of any kind on the pegs. There were two baseball-style caps on a shelf over the bench. One of the caps had the words
CAPITALIST TOOL
printed on the crown. The other had the symbol for the New York Mets.

“Fieldstone,” Gregor said, kicking at the floor.

“This house is big on fieldstone,” Dan Exter told him, “also on beams and dark wood. It’s like a signature.”

“You ought to check out the shoes,” Gregor said. “Just because they’re all the same size doesn’t necessarily mean they all belong to—what was his name again?”

“Stephen Willis,” John Jackman said.

“Mr. Willis.”

Gregor walked up the four steps from the mudroom and opened the screen door there.

“That’s the kitchen,” Dan Exter told him. “Wait’ll you see what it’s like in there.”

Gregor went through the doorway and looked around. What it was like in there was large—too large, like some of the statuary of ancient Egypt, as if sheer size had been the point. There seemed to be two of everything: two sinks, two ovens, two refrigerators, two side-by-side Jenn-Air ranges built into a rounded-corner island. Beyond the island was what looked like an ancient keeping room, complete with an oversized stone fireplace big enough to roast a pig in. Gregor went over there and looked around.

“Can’t you just imagine watching the Eagles on the tube in this place?” Dan Exter asked him, pointing to the enormous television set placed discreetly in a dark wood cabinet, set up in front of a group of black leather chairs. “I’d be worried about making an echo every time I coughed.”

“It’s not exactly homey,” Gregor agreed. “Are those trophies over there on that wall?”

Dan Exter shook his head. “Some of them are, but most of them are decorations. They’re just supposed to look like trophies.”

“What are the real trophies for?”

“Golf,” Dan Exter said.

Gregor walked over to the trophies. Then he walked past them and looked at the bookcase built into the paneling. There were half a dozen books on securities law, one or two on the history of the Civil War, and a collection of the complete works of Tom Clancy in hardcover.

“Was Mrs. Willis a Civil War buff?” Gregor asked.

“Mr. Willis was,” Dan Exter said. “He’s got one of those Civil War chess sets upstairs, you know, where the pieces are soldiers in blue and gray. A really expensive set too.”

“How do you know it belonged to Stephen Willis and not his wife?”

“It was in Stephen Willis’s private closet.”

Gregor looked up at the ceiling. What was above his head right then were dark wooden beams, machine-cut to look hand-hewn. “Is upstairs this way?” he asked, pointing to an archway on his right.

“That’s it exactly,” John Jackman said.

Gregor went through the archway and looked around. There was a broad front foyer out there, and a staircase that curved in an angular sort of way. There was also a closet. He opened the closet and looked inside. There were six men’s coats, including a heavy camel hair and a black cashmere and a leather biking jacket that was much too expensive to have ever belonged to a biker. On the floor were four pairs of rain boots, Wellingtons and fancy galoshes, all men’s too.

“The bedroom’s up here,” John Jackman said, shooing Gregor in the direction of the staircase. “Every house in Fox Run Hill has a formal entry foyer and a grand front staircase.”

“That’s a direct quote,” Dan Exter said, “from the developer who built this place. We talked to him last night.”

Gregor stopped on the landing and looked out the window there, at the road and the houses.

“All the houses in Fox Run Hill have one of these landing things too,” Dan Exter said, “at least as far as I can figure. Or the ones right around here do. You can see it when you’re outside. The window halfway between the other windows.”

Gregor looked out at the big brick house. It had a window just above the entryway, halfway between the windows on the regular floors. “You can hardly tell the police have been here,” he said. “The place is so clean.”

“The place is antiseptic,” John Jackman said. “But you can tell the police have been here when you get upstairs. Just you wait.”

Gregor didn’t have to wait long. He got to the upstairs hall and looked right and left. To one side, the hall seemed as empty and clean as the rest of the house. The wall-to-wall carpeting looked as if it had been fluffed. The walls looked as if they had been polished. To the other side, however, there was chaos. A set of double doors was propped open by what looked like a pair of cardboard boxes. A large young man in a blue police uniform was standing watch between them. Beyond him, Gregor saw mess and insanity. He walked up to the large young man, nodded a greeting, and walked past him into the bedroom. Since John Jackman and Dan Exter were coming up behind him, the large young man did not protest. Gregor walked through to where the bed was and stood at the end of it. The sheets had been stripped from it, showing the bare mattress, still stained with blood. The bloodstains still looked wet.

“I take it he was sleeping when she shot him,” Gregor said to John Jackman and Dan Exter, who had come up behind him.

“Let’s just say the body was in bed when we found it,” Dan Exter said.

“Shot how many times?”

“Three.”

“Any stray bullets?”

“Not that we could find, no,” Dan Exter said. “She fired three shots, she hit him three times.”

“Good hits?”

“One of them was,” Dan Exter said blandly.

“What’s a good hit except that it kills the target?” John Jackman asked. “Jesus Christ, Gregor.”

Gregor walked around the bed to the night table on the right side. This was obviously Stephen Willis’s night table. It had a little brass golf statue next to the lamp. Gregor opened the night-table drawer and found a pack of cards that looked well used and a brown wood pipe with a pouch of cherry tobacco beside it. The pipe was not well used. Stephen Willis, Gregor thought, had been one of those men who wanted to smoke a pipe for the prestige, but who could never get the hang of it.

Gregor walked around the bed to the night table on the other side. There was nothing on this one except the lamp, and nothing in the drawer either, except that sawdusty debris that collects inside wooden drawers after a while. Gregor slid the drawer shut and turned to the line of closets that made up the facing wall.

“Are these all the closets in this suite?” he asked.

“No such luck,” Dan Exter said. “These are his closets, from what I’ve been able to figure out. There are other closets in the dressing room, which is back through there.”

Gregor went “back through there.” The dressing room was large, but mostly with a lot of wasted space. It held a wall of closets and a stationary bicycle that looked even less used than the pipe.

Gregor opened one of the closets. It was the size of a moderately spacious bathroom, and it was absolutely empty.

“Well,” he said.

“You can look at the rest of them if you want,” John Jackman said, “but I already have. They’re all like that.”

“Empty,” Gregor said.

“That’s right,” Dan Exter said.

“She took all her clothes,” Gregor said.

John Jackman walked to the other end of the room and looked out the large plate-glass window there. “There were clothes in the parking garage,” he said, “lots of them, thrown out by the blast. And a lot of stuff burned, of course. We couldn’t prevent that.”

“What kind of a car was it?” Gregor wanted to know.

“Volvo station wagon,” Jackman said. “There’s a lot of room in those station wagons.”

“There isn’t infinite room in those station wagons,” Gregor said. “What did she do? Kill him and then pack?”

“Maybe she packed before she killed him,” Dan Exter said. “We’re running all kinds of tests. We’re trying to find out if he was drugged. We’re trying to find out if he was poisoned. God only knows what.”

“The thing is that it all had to be deliberate,” John Jackman said. “Gregor, no matter how you look at it, it had to be deliberate. It had to be planned. She must have worked it all out beforehand—”

“Assuming she’s the one who planted the pipe bombs,” Dan Exter said. “Don’t let’s jump to conclusions.”

“Who else would have planted the pipe bombs? Who would want to?” Jackman had started to pace. “There’s a record of everybody who comes into this place and out of it. Into Fox Run Hill, I mean. It’s not like dropping a little something off in the ash can outside a brownstone in the middle of the city.”

“The pipe bombs might not have been planted here,” Dan Exter argued. “They might have been planted in the garage. You can’t tell me you trust that idiot from the garage to remember who went in and out all afternoon.”