Deadly Beloved (18 page)

“There was nothing abnormal about that,” Sarah was positive. “He worked for some company that had oil interests or something. I don’t remember what it was. He had to travel for work.”

“A lot of people have to travel for work. They don’t just disappear for a month.”

“I’m sure she heard from him, Molly. Really, you know, you shouldn’t make this kind of—of inference—”

“I wasn’t making any kind of inference.”

“—it could be taken the wrong way, especially in circumstances like these. The man is dead, after all. And Patsy…” Sarah Lockwood shrugged.

“I think he was a bigamist,” Molly said.

Sarah looked startled. “What
are
you talking about? How could Stephen Willis have been a bigamist?”

Molly tried to be careful. She hadn’t thought this up on her own. She had read it in
The Star
, in an article about another case entirely, but it seemed so obvious to her that all the same elements were there. She didn’t let people in Fox Run Hill know that she read
The Star
, though, or the
National Enquirer
either. She bought them in a supermarket in Philadelphia proper, where nobody knew who she was.

“Listen,” she said eagerly. “If you think about it carefully, it all fits. It really does. He would be gone a month at a time and once or twice he was even gone longer—”

“Yes, yes, Molly, but it’s like I told you. That was for his work.”

“It was also a perfect opportunity. I’ll bet he didn’t spend any more time here than he spent away. He’s probably got another family someplace who thinks he’s still on a business trip right now.”

Sarah sniffed. “They could hardly think he’s still on a business trip. His picture has been all over the newspapers and the television stations for days.”

“The family might not be here in Philadelphia.”

“I’m sure the story has been reported nationwide, Molly. His name has probably been mentioned on the TV news.”

“He might not have been using the same name.”

“Oh, Molly.”

“No, no. Really. It all fits. He goes away to this other place and he has another wife and another name and she doesn’t know about it, but then she finds out and she shoots him. That at least makes sense.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Yes, it does,” Molly insisted. “And even if his other family is right here in Philadelphia, they might not have seen a picture of him. I mean, there have been a couple on the news, yes, but not half so many as the ones there have been of her. It’s like now that he’s dead, he doesn’t matter anymore.”

“I still say this is an absolutely impossible scenario. Seriously. Wives kill their husbands every day.”

“There must be some reason they kill their husbands,” Molly insisted. “It can’t be that they just wake up one morning and go boom. I mean, that’s crazy.”

“Most people were crazy to get married in the first place,” Sarah said. “I think really good marriages are very rare. Most people are simply miserable. Then one day it gets to be too much and—” Sarah shrugged.

“I’d never do something like that to Joey,” Molly said. “If I got really mad at him, I’d just divorce him.”

“Divorce can be expensive, and it doesn’t always solve things. Let’s not talk about this anymore. It depresses me. I brought over some pictures of the new house.”

“The Florida house?”

Sarah was unpacking Polaroid snapshots from the big patch pockets of her skirt. “Kevin said he talked to Joey about it last night, and Joey said something about wanting to look into buying land in Boca Magra. Really, I don’t see how you’ve gone this long without a winter vacation house. Winters in Philadelphia are so grim.”

“Mmmm,” Molly said.

Sarah spread her snapshots across the table. “It’s a gated community, of course,” she said, “because Kevin and I think it’s foolish to buy in any other kind. Otherwise, you can’t be sure of your investment, can you?”

“Mmmm,” Molly said again, but she wasn’t really listening. Maybe it was really high rent to think about your winter vacation house while a murder investigation was going on, but Molly hadn’t gotten that high rent yet. Her head was still full of speculations about Stephen Willis’s secret life and Patsy MacLaren Willis’s secret hatreds. Molly decided that when she saw Gregor Demarkian again, she’d rush right out, introduce herself, and tell him all about it.

“This is what we’re doing with the dining room,” Sarah Lockwood said firmly, shoving a picture of a white, high-ceilinged room under Molly’s nose. “We’re very, very, very fond of the Moorish look for Florida.”

Miles away, in the Sheraton Society Hill hotel in central Philadelphia, Karla Parrish was lying in the middle of a big double bed, trying to make sense of a story in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. This story said that a woman named Patricia MacLaren Willis was assumed to have shot her husband Stephen to death with a semiautomatic pistol, destroyed her car by fire bomb in a Philadelphia parking garage, and then disappeared. It said this more than once, and it repeated the name in every other paragraph.

Patricia MacLaren Willis.

Patricia MacLaren Willis.

Patricia MacLaren Willis.

It didn’t make any sense.

Karla rolled over on her stomach and tried again. No matter how many times she read the story, it still said the same thing. But it couldn’t, she was sure of that. It would be far too much of a coincidence.

“Evan?” she called out.

Evan was in the living room of the suite, unpacking her photographic equipment. He stuck his head in through the bedroom door and wagged it.

“Not now,” he told her. “I have some work to do.”

“Did you ever take drugs?” Karla asked him. “Hallucinogenic drugs?”

“I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Well, I never took any drugs,” Karla said. “I never even tried cigarettes. And right now I feel like I’m on some kind of acid trip.”

“Nobody says ‘acid trip’ anymore, Karla. It’s passé.”

“Whatever. What do you do when you see something that can’t possibly be real?”

“I go back to bed. Preferably with company.”

“Be serious. Have you ever heard of somebody named Gregor Demarkian?”

“Sure. The world’s most famous private detective. Except I don’t think he really is a private detective. He’s a consultant or something like that.”

“Is he good at what he does?”

“He’s supposed to be.”

“Do you think you could put me in touch with him?”

Evan leaned against the doorjamb, curious. “I could, but I don’t really have to. He’s been invited to that reception Julianne Corbett is giving for you. I could call and see if he’s intending to show up.”

“Do that,” Karla said positively.

“You want to tell me what this is all about?”

Karla shook her head. “Not yet. I’m probably just having the vapors. You want to get us some breakfast?”

“Sure,” Evan said, but he hesitated one more moment in the doorway before he disappeared.

Karla rolled over on her back. She was exhausted. That was the trouble. She was exhausted and jet-lagged, and if she wasn’t she wouldn’t be having this fantasy.

And she wouldn’t be so scared.

D
ONNA MORADANYAN DIDN’T CHANGE
the ribbons. All the next day, and the day after that, Gregor watched, getting up from his kitchen table every hour or so to look out his window at Cavanaugh Street, going out four different times to get a pot of takeout coffee at the Ararat. His table was covered with forensics reports, background checks, financial tracking schemas, lateral witness interviews. John Jackman was good and the organization he had built the homicide department into was better than Gregor had ever imagined it could be, but most of this, Gregor knew, was confetti. It was impossible to know anything about the woman from reports like these. Preferably, Gregor would have been able to meet her, to hear her talk and see her walk. Since that was impossible at the moment—coming in after the fact on cases did that to you—the next best thing would be to find someone who had heard her and seen her. But that was proving surprisingly difficult. Gregor and John Jackman and Chief Exter had gone out to Fox Run Hill to conduct some interviews, but the only interviewing they had done had been of a woman named Molly Bracken, and they had talked to her before.

“She invents things,” Dan Exter had said when the interview was over—and of course it was true. Molly Bracken wanted to be part of a great adventure. She was clearly overjoyed that John Jackman and Dan Exter, who had interviewed her initially on the evening of the day the murder and the explosion happened, had returned with Gregor Demarkian.

“She doesn’t know Stephen Willis was involved in bigamy.” John Jackman shook his head and sighed. “She has no real reason to believe Stephen Willis was involved in bigamy. She just wants to think Stephen Willis was involved in bigamy.”

“She got it out of one of those damn supermarket tabloid newspapers,” Dan Exter said. “Trust me.”

“Fox Run Hill doesn’t look like the kind of place where people read those supermarket tabloid newspapers,” John Jackman objected.

Gregor thought John Jackman was right, but he thought Dan Exter was right too. There was something about Molly Bracken that did not quite fit at Fox Run Hill. Gregor believed that in spite of the fact that he had never met any of its other inhabitants, except for the joggers who always seemed to jog especially slowly when the police were in the community. Walk the walk and talk the talk, that was how the slang went. Molly Bracken didn’t. Every time she opened her mouth, Gregor expected to see gum.

He tried to explain this to Father Tibor Kasparian when Tibor came by at the end of the afternoon, but he only sounded like a snob doing it.

“I wish you could see this place,” he told Tibor. “It’s odd. Strange. Like a neighborhood of haunted houses from a 1950s movie.”

“I thought you said this Fox Run Hill was well kept.” Tibor was rummaging through Gregor’s refrigerator. There wasn’t much of anything in Gregor’s refrigerator, but there was always the hope that Lida or Hannah or one of the other women had left something there. Tibor found a carton of cherry yogurt so old it was growing mold, and threw it out. “I thought you said that this was one of those places where they had groundskeepers and staff and all that kind of person.”

“It is.”

“Then it doesn’t sound to me like haunted houses, Krekor. Haunted houses don’t have caretakers.”

Actually, Gregor thought, some haunted houses did have caretakers—wasn’t Manderley supposed to have had one, even after it burned? That was beside the point.

“It’s just that the houses are so big,” he told Tibor. “Not as big as the house Bennis grew up in, not like that—”

“That was like an institution.” Tibor sniffed. “That could have been a school. I think this Yale University Bennis’s father left it to sold it to some people to make a school.”

“Yes, exactly. These aren’t that big. But they seem emptier. You look at them, I look at them, and imagine big hollow wooden shells, with nothing inside them.”

“You don’t usually get poetic, Krekor.”

“I’m not getting poetic. I don’t like this place. In fact, I hate this place.”

“Because the buildings seem so big and empty?”

“Because
everything
seems so big and empty,” Gregor said. “The houses, the grounds, the people, everything. I have to talk to more of them on a regular basis. From what I’ve seen so far, they’re just not really there. I keep imagining Mrs. Willis being like the women I’ve met so far at Fox Run Hill, and then the idea that she shot her husband and then blew up her car seems impossible.”

“But she did it. People are people, Krekor. Nothing is impossible.”

“Granted. But the women I’ve met so far in that place don’t have the emotional energy to kick their dogs.”

Tibor left to lead his Bible study group. Gregor went back to looking through reports and making lists: things to check into; people to interview; places to see, as a last resort. Finally he did something he hadn’t needed to do since he was an agent in training. He got all the pieces of paper together and wrote a biography of Patricia MacLaren Willis. Actually, this was something he had been taught to do with the victim, usually the victim of a kidnapping. Gregor had worked kidnapping details for years before he had found his niche as director of the Behavioral Science Department. Unit, he reminded himself now. Since he had left the Bureau, they had decided to stop calling their subdivisions departments and to start calling them units. Gregor didn’t know why, but he suspected it was the budget. If you didn’t spend all the budget Congress gave you, Congress decided you didn’t need so much money and reduced your appropriation. It was therefore death for any director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to save any cash. If he got to the end of the year with money on his hands, he had to find a way to spend what he had. Christmas bonuses and that sort of thing were mostly out. The public had caught on to that one, and they didn’t like it. Having to order an entire new set of letterhead stationery, with new terms and new names and all the rest of it, was really beautiful, because nobody would question why the FBI needed paper. Of course they needed paper. They needed a lot of paper. Gregor Demarkian was a Franklin Delano Roosevelt liberal and probably always would be. He believed in Social Security and minimum wages and the federal safety net. Sometimes, though, he thought he could understand why there were so many people out there who thought government didn’t work.

By the time Bennis came in at a quarter to six, Gregor was hunched over his computer printouts, writing rapidly on a long sheet of yellow lined legal paper with a pencil so dull his handwriting looked as if it were growing moss. Bennis leaned on his shoulder, looked at his writing, and then shook him.

“Gregor, for God’s sake, come on. We’re due downtown at a cocktail party at seven. Remember? I told you—”

“I remember,” he said. He did too. He just didn’t want to. He hated cocktail parties. He hated parties of all kinds, except the ones they gave on Cavanaugh Street, where he was allowed to pile a plate high with food and take it off to sit on the sidelines with Father Tibor.