Not a Creature Was Stirring (23 page)

Politics. If he got onto politics, he’d start sounding like Tibor, and Tibor was an anarchist. He followed Jackman down the second floor hall, glancing right and left at the portraits that lined it. Somebody in this family had had a dynasty complex. The portraits were all framed in gilt and positioned over Queen Anne chests. The chests were covered by lace runner cloths and the cloths were anchored by pairs of candles in sterling silver candlesticks. In the dark, the chests looked like altars.

“I’ve got half a mind to declare this whole damn hall a crime scene,” Jackman was saying. He was swinging along, five paces ahead, as briskly and self-confidently as a CEO in absolute control of his company. Jackman was like that: contradictory internally and externally. One minute, he was playing stupid and honestly feeling inadequate. The next, he was bright and unshakably self-assured. Gregor wondered what went through the man’s mind when he was alone.

“I would declare it all a crime scene,” Jackman said, “if I thought I could get away with it, which I don’t. Technically, I don’t need a search warrant to go through a house where a murder’s been done, but I know what would happen if I tried that here. The place is so damned big.”

“It is that,” Gregor said.

“Fortunately, the Hannafords are either stupid or really in a mood to help. I got Cordelia Day to sign a waiver and then I got what’s her name, Anne Marie, to countersign it. Just in case. It may be a useless precaution, but if one of the boys turns up that other note—”

“You still wouldn’t have a suicide, John.”

They were coming near the end of the hall, Jackman droning on and on, the portraits getting more and more elaborate. The people in the portraits were getting more and more elaborate, too, and much less modern. The men in the pictures that had hung near Emma Hannaford’s room had been dressed in ordinary business suits or, at most, tuxedo jackets. The man in the picture that hung just inside the hall door was in full traditional white tie and tails. Gregor stopped in front of him and read the brass tag screwed into the bottom of the frame:
Robert Hannaford II.

“Wait,” he said.

Jackman was already out of the hall onto the landing. He had to come back to answer. “Now what?” he said. “I’ve got a temporary office set up down in the study. I’ve had people looking over it, too. When I sent my guy down there today, he found the police seals broken.”

“Did he?” Gregor said.

“Breaking police seals isn’t a minor matter, Gregor.”

“It’s an inevitable matter,” Gregor said. “What did you expect? They’ve probably all been in there once, just to look around. The only way you could have prevented that was to stake a man at the door. Since you didn’t do it, I’d guess you didn’t think there was anything left there to find.”

“Okay,” Jackman said. “It was mainly a precaution.”

“Look at this. What do you see?”

Jackman stepped back from the portrait and looked up into Robert II’s face. “Well, it’s a fat old white man with a really evil face and sideburns long enough to braid.”

“What’s under it?”

“A chest. With a little lace thing on top.”

“And no candlesticks,” Gregor said.

“Candlesticks?”

Gregor gestured back along the hall. “Look at them. One portrait between each pair of doors, on both sides of the hall. Each portrait is in a gilt frame. Each is above a chest. Each chest has a piece of lace on it and two candlesticks. Except for this one. This one doesn’t have any candlesticks.”

Jackman walked back along the hall, turned around, and came back to Gregor. “You’re right,” he said. “Does it matter? Maybe they didn’t have enough for this one here. Or maybe the ones that belong here have been taken somewhere to be cleaned.”

Gregor shook his head. “If they were going to leave one portrait without candlesticks, they’d have chosen one of the ones at the end of the hall. Look at them. The most important ones are at this end. By the time you get down to Emma Hannaford’s room, you’re looking at minor members of the family. But they wouldn’t have left a set out in any case. They’d have bought a pair to complete the effect.”

“What about cleaning?”

“In a house like this, silver wouldn’t be taken someplace else to be cleaned. If you have a butler, he’s in charge of the sterling. Once a week, once a month if the house is understaffed, he’ll come up here with an assistant or two and polish the candlesticks where they stand. He’ll do the same with the table silver downstairs. Just take it out of his drawers, put it on the nearest countertop, and wipe it down.”

Jackman rubbed his face. “Are you telling me the damn things have been stolen? Are they worth anything? Who would take them? If you’re implying that some servant—”

“No, no,” Gregor said. “Look at the hall, John. The minor portraits are down there, and so are the minor candlesticks. There’s a picture of a pretty, vacuous woman next to Bennis Hannaford’s door, and what’s under it is a pair of perfectly good but not very interesting Tiffany candlesticks, close to brand new. Now look at the candlesticks as you get closer to this door. Each set is more and more ornate, more and more individual, heavier and heavier. And older.”

“So?”

“So the candlesticks that belong under Robert Hannaford II must be very ornate, very heavy and very old. We’re probably talking a pair of antique Georgian sticks. John, a pair of antique Georgian candlesticks went at auction at Sotheby’s two years ago for over twelve thousand dollars.”

“A pair of
candlesticks
?” Jackman said.

Gregor smiled. “You don’t have to worry about the servants, either. If a servant was going to steal a pair, it would be one of the ones at the other end. Georgian silver was made to order, almost always in a design created especially for the lady of the house. It was as good as a signature. Better.”

“If they were heavy enough, they could have been sold to someone to melt down—”

“Would you want to turn something worth twelve thousand into something worth fifteen hundred?”

“Maybe nobody involved knew it was worth twelve thousand.”

“A professional fence would have guessed,” Gregor said. “He wouldn’t touch it. It would be asking to land in jail.”

Jackman sighed. “Gregor, this is the crack age. The world is different now. People do the damnedest things these days. You wouldn’t believe it—”

“I wouldn’t believe a servant on crack lasting half an hour around Anne Marie Hannaford,” Gregor said. “And Anne Marie Hannaford, from what you’ve told me, is the person who runs this house.”

“True,” Jackman said.

“If somebody took these candlesticks, and somebody must have, that somebody was one of the family. Only a member of the family had a hope in hell of taking them and not getting prosecuted for it. And that brings up a number of very interesting possibilities.”

Jackman nodded. “One of them could be very strapped for money,” he said. “From what the Hannafords told me the other night, the estate goes to Cordelia Day on Robert Hannaford’s death, but Cordelia has to be a much softer touch than old Robert ever was.”

“There’s also the possibility that this isn’t the first theft,” Gregor said, “and that Robert Hannaford knew about the others. Or even about this one. We should talk to that man, Marshall, and find out when he last saw the candlesticks here. But there has to be some explanation of Robert Hannaford’s inviting me to dinner in that strange way. Maybe this is it.”

“You think this was worth a hundred thousand in cash to Robert Hannaford?”

“No,” Gregor said, “but then, that may have been a hoax. You never did find the briefcase. Anything is possible if the man was eccentric enough. And the way they talk about him, he sounds eccentric enough for anything. Then there’s the third—”

Gregor never got to the third. There was a thudding on the stairs, then a clatter and an echoing panting on the landing. Gregor and Jackman turned together toward the hall door. A uniformed patrolman was standing there, looking flushed, sweaty, and out of breath.

“Excuse me,” he said. “There’s a man downstairs. A Mr. Evers. He’s pacing around the study and insisting on seeing you, and I think he’s about to lose control.”

Floyd Evers turned out to be a short man in good shape with sparse hair, dressed in the kind of suit Gregor always thought must be ordered from a lawyers’ uniform supply house. He was not, however, anywhere near losing control. When Gregor and Jackman came into the study, he was sitting in the chair behind Robert Hannaford’s desk, looking exasperated.

Unlike most of the lawyers Gregor had met, Evers gave off neither a fog of evasion nor a bristle of self-importance. He didn’t even have many papers. There was a briefcase in front of him on the desk, but it was neither too thick nor too thin. It contained a small sheaf of typed, legal-size pages bound together with a paper clip. Gregor pegged him instantly as
married, children, Bucks County
. It was a stereotype, but not necessarily an inaccurate stereotype. There were two kinds of lawyers in major cities like Philadelphia. Evers didn’t come off as a man who would do anything for money.

In Gregor’s experience, the kind of man who did had a job in a firm with too many names on the masthead, a condominium in Radnor, and two mistresses.

Evers stood up as soon as they came into the room and extended his hand. It was a mistake. Jackman was in a combative mood.

“You,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you for a week.”

Evers sat down again. Now Gregor saw what the patrolman might have meant by saying Evers was about to lose control. At the moment, the man’s good humor was only tenuously pasted on. Underneath the self-disciplined politeness, he was very angry about something.

He crossed his arms over his chest. “You’ve been looking for me for a week,” he said. “That’s just fine. You’ve been leaving messages for me all over creation, mostly at my office. That’s just fine, too. You’ve made my partners think I’m about to be indicted for child murder at the least. That’s just fine, fine, fine. In the meantime, Mr.—”

“Jackman,” Jackman said.

“Jackman,” Evers repeated. “It’s Christmas, in case you haven’t noticed. If you’d taken any time at all to think the thing through, you’d have known I was where everybody else is who can get the time off.”

“Where?”

“Visiting relatives, Mr. Jackman. In my case, visiting relatives in Vermont, where my wife has family, and in Connecticut, where she also has family. It is not a suspicious circumstance when someone isn’t spending Christmas in his own damned house.”

“Don’t you leave a contact number with your office?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Tsk, tsk,” Jackman said.

“And on top of it all, I can’t for the life of me see what you need me for.” Evers turned to Gregor. “Who are you?”

Gregor introduced himself. Evers nodded, pleased. “That’s good. I’ve read about you. Are you working for the family or the police?”

“The police,” Gregor said.

“Well, it couldn’t hurt.” Evers unfolded his arms from across his chest and put his hands flat on the desk. He looked ready for action, but there didn’t seem to be any action he wanted to take. He had, however, calmed down. He glanced around the study, not lighting on any one thing, looking puzzled.

“It’s like I told you,” he said. “You don’t really need me for anything. The Hannaford situation being what it is, the only one who needs me is Mrs. Hannaford. She’s the one I’ve got to explain things to.”

“I was hoping you’d explain a few things to us,” Jackman said. Gregor was glad to see he’d calmed down, too, or at least decided to abandon his hostility. He dropped into the chair next to the window and said, “There’s been a murder here, you know. There may have been two. If it’s at all possible, we need to know everything there is to know about Robert Hannaford’s will, his—”

“But that’s the point,” Floyd Evers said. “There isn’t any will.”

Jackman blinked. “The man was worth four hundred million dollars and there isn’t any will?”

Evers sighed. “Obviously, you don’t read the newspapers,” he said, “or you weren’t reading them in 1980, when all this happened. There isn’t any will because there doesn’t need to be any will. Robert Hannaford was worth four hundred million dollars, yes, but not when he died. When he died, all he had was the income from most of that. Not the capital.”

“I don’t get it,” Jackman said.

“I think I do.” The last empty chair was stuck way off in a corner, facing the wall. Gregor dragged it into the center of the room, sat down, and turned to John Jackman. “There is something called a living trust,” he said, “for very rich people who want to leave their money to institutions. Foundations for diseases, universities, that kind of thing. Instead of putting those provisions in a will and making the institution wait until you die, you give the money while you’re still alive. The institution then guarantees to pay you an annuity from that money for life.”

Evers brightened. “Right. The foundations like it a lot better than money left in a will. Wills can be challenged. A man can do anything he wants with his money while he’s still alive.”

Jackman looked incredulous. “Hannaford did this with all his money? Every cent of it?”

“Almost,” Evers said. “Also the house, some other property he’s got scattered here and there, whatever. He put about ten million dollars into trusts for his sons—”

“Just his sons?” Gregor asked.

“Just his sons,” Evers said. “Not a dime to any of the girls. And not much for the sons, either, if you want to know the truth. Robert, the oldest son, got a fair amount—I think it comes to about a hundred thousand a year. The other two got less, much less. You don’t make all that much money on ten million, if ten million is all you’ve got—”

“I’d make plenty of money on ten million,” Jackman said.

“You might not think so if you’d been used to all this,” Evers said. “And Hannaford’s children were definitely used to it. Horses, schools, fifty-thousand-dollar birthday parties. He brought them up like heirs to an Arab sheikdom. They didn’t like this one bit, let me tell you.”

“They didn’t see it coming?” Gregor said. “He’d given no indication, beforehand—”