Act of Darkness (11 page)

“Well, I can’t believe Victoria Harte had these things made up just for fun. It would have been too expensive. And they’re new, too. You can still smell the ink on them.”

“New,” Gregor said thoughtfully.

“There’s a whole section in the middle somewhere about the pillows they use, if you can believe that. All about the special fiber they’re made of that was developed by the space program and how they hold your head up or mold to your body or something. Contouring, I think they call it. And then—”

“How new?” Gregor asked her.

Bennis stopped in midsentence, rolled over on her back, and looked at him. “What do you mean exactly,
how new?
”

“You said you could smell the ink on them. How long would that last? Days? Weeks? Months?”

“It would depend on how often they were handled. If they weren’t handled at all and the ink was good, you could get traces of the smell for a year or more.”

“Is what you smell just traces?”

“No. It’s stronger than that.”

“So?”

Bennis shrugged. “If you want my guess, I’d say this one isn’t more than a couple of months old. If that. But it’s not evidence you could take to court, Gregor. There are a lot of factors and my nose isn’t exactly licensed as a weapon, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m surprised you can smell anything with all the cigarettes you smoke. But maybe we should take the easy way out of this. Maybe we should just ask somebody when they were done and what they were for.”

“Brilliant,” Bennis said. “I’d never have thought of it. Is all this important? I know it’s weird, but I can’t see it’s sinister.”

“I didn’t say it was. It just bothers me. And I was wondering if we’d gotten it all backward when we were talking about it in the beginning.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it doesn’t make much sense for Victoria Harte to have had this printed, unless she was trying to sell the house. But it would make sense if Stephen Fox or Dan Chester had had it printed. It would be the perfect kind of thing to hand out to the people who came to these seminars. Something they could take home, if you see what I mean.”

Bennis brightened. “Also something to help them get around in the house. That paper clip thing at the back is holding down a floor plan. Upstairs and down. Not that there’s much to get around, with practically no walls, but you know what I mean. The place is big.”

“It’s that that bothers me. I can see Dan Chester having the brochures made up. I can’t see him using a heart-shaped paper clip.”

“Maybe it was some kind of deal. Maybe Dan Chester wanted the brochures made up and the only way Victoria would let him do it was if he used the paper clip.”

“Maybe.”

Bennis jumped up, tightening the belt on her robe. “You’re using that tone of voice again. Like I’m some sort of flake.”

“I don’t think you’re—”

“When you start treating me like a flake, it’s time for me to go”

“Bennis—”

“Bye.”

She marched over to the connecting door, and disappeared behind it, a flutter of faint perfume and terry cloth that seemed to make its own wind. Gregor stared after her for a while, thinking, and then picked up the folder she had left him.

Half an hour later, having ingested a monumental amount of information he couldn’t imagine ever finding a use for—the pillows were made of a special material, as were the bedspreads, but not of the same special material; the window shades were abstractions of Incan and Aztec symbols for all kinds of things and meant to bring good luck to a house; the kitchen was fully electronic and could produce food processors and pasta makers from special openings in its seemingly seamless tile counters with the press of a button—he decided it was time to go downstairs. He wanted to be a little early, the person waiting and not the person waited for. It was the kind of thing he knew would put the man he imagined Dan Chester to be off balance. He got off the bed and stood in front of the mirrored wall, straightening his suit, straightening his tie, and making ineffectual swipes at his still-thick hair.

When he had himself in what he could think of as reasonable order, he let himself out of his room onto the balcony and headed for the stairs. It was odd, he thought, how quiet this place was.

Getting to the stairs, he felt his shoelace come loose, and stopped to fix it. He was standing there like that, bent over, when he realized the atmosphere around him had changed. It was a small thing, but it was there: one of the double doors to the room at the east end of the hall had opened slightly, and stayed open, as if there was someone behind it who wanted to come out but didn’t dare as long as he was there. He finished with his shoelace, straightened up, and started down the stairs.

All the way to the foyer, he thought about the floor plan at the back of the folder, and the names printed into the little squares of rooms.

That particular room, at that particular end of the hall, belonged to Patchen Rawls.

G
REGOR HAD NOT EXPECTED
to have any trouble finding the study, because he hadn’t really believed there was any such thing as a “study,” just a small square of floor someplace whose demarcation from the rest of the house was more psychological than actual. As it turned out, he was grievously wrong. Getting to the bottom of the stairs, he stopped in the foyer and looked right, left, and down the center toward the back. He saw pictures of Janet, pictures of Victoria, and even more pictures of Janet. There was no sign of anyone who could be Dan Chester, or of anyone at all.

He might have stood there forever, lost in bemused contemplation of heart-shaped objects of every size and material and that same picture of Janet Harte Fox crammed into every conceivable type of frame, if he hadn’t been rescued by a blast of Chanel No. 5 and the sound of soft leather slapping against carpet. He looked up and saw a woman coming toward him, wearing a tight little smile that distorted her features and closed her eyes to slits. He barely recognized her. She was so much older, and so much less animated, than the girl whose picture surrounded him.

Janet Harte Fox.

She saw him register her and gave him a very different smile, one that pulled across the entire lower third of her face. It was, Gregor thought, no less nervous a smile than the other. She had to be a woman under a great deal of stain. She put her hand up to her hair and pulled at the ornamental pins stuck in it. One came out, and Gregor could see it had a wicked point.

She put out her hand to him and said, “It’s Mr. Gregor Demarkian, isn’t it? I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I’m Janet Harte Fox.”

Gregor restrained himself from saying “I know.”

“I’m glad to meet you, too,” he said. “If you want to know the truth, I’m glad to meet anyone. I’m supposed to be on my way to the study, and I thought it was going to be easy to find, but—”

“But nothing is easy to find? Oh, yes, I know. This is a very deceptive house.”

It was, of course, the perfect description. He just wished he’d thought of it himself.

“There’s a lot more to it than I realized,” he said. “And less, if you know what I mean.”

“You mean there are so few walls. Of course. There aren’t nearly enough. It makes almost everyone crazy except my mother, and my mother is a very unusual woman.” Janet Fox thought about it. “In her wing of the house, though, there are walls. Were you looking for the Mondrian study or the Pollock one?”

“I don’t know.”

“The Mondrian has walls, and the Pollock doesn’t. I’d look for the Mondrian if I were you. I saw Dan Chester going into it a few minutes ago. That’s probably who you’re looking for.”

Gregor wanted to get a look at his watch, to see if he’d spent an unconscionable amount of time daydreaming or if Dan Chester had been more determined to be first at their meeting than he had. He was too fascinated by Janet’s obsessive pulling at those ornamental hair pins to manage it.

“Does the Mondrian study have Mondrian paintings in it? Your mother doesn’t seem to go in for paintings much.”

“She has some. The Pollock study has frescoes. In fact, it is a fresco: walls, ceiling, and floor. And she has portraits, too, in her own room.”

“Portraits of you?”

“And of herself, yes. And of my daughter—my daughter who died. That one was done from a photograph taken in the hospital. Stephen didn’t want it taken, but I did, and I’m glad I did. She never left the hospital alive.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I’d heard you had a child that died. I’m very sorry.”

“It was a long time ago. Much too long ago for you to be sorry.
I’m
sorry. I’m prattling along like a Beverly Hills twit, aren’t I?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Well, I would. That’s what Beverly Hills is like, you know. Lots of parties full of people you’ve never seen before and are never going to see again, coming up to you and telling you all about how they have problems with premature ejaculation or why they left psychoanalysis for EST. If I was going to run true to type, I’d start telling you how sorry I am that I decided not to have any more children—which is true—and how enthusiastic I am about Stephen’s act, which I’m not.

“You’re not in favor of federal aid to retarded children?”

“Oh, I’m in favor of that, all right. Stephen’s act is federal aid for campaign contributors. You must know that. Are you going to find out what’s been going on with Stephen?”

“Well,” Gregor said cautiously, “it depends on what you mean—”

“Oh, stop it,” Janet said. “The first time he keeled over, he did it practically in my lap, at a cocktail party in Washington. The second time he keeled over, I was only two or three feet away. Everybody knows what’s going on with Stephen.”

“Everyone knows he’s keeling over, as you put it.”

“Dan Chester thinks there’s something sinister about it,” Janet said, “but Dan thinks there’s something sinister about everything. I still think it’s something neurological—”

“If it is something neurological, Mrs. Fox, I’d think that would be serious enough. Anything organic that could cause the symptoms Mr. Chester described to me would be—let’s just say ‘sinister’ would be an understatement.”

“I know. I know. But don’t you think that makes more sense, as an explanation, than some kind of weird political plot? Dan Chester did the oddest thing after Stephen got out of the hospital after those tests. Do you know what?”

“No.”

“Stephen was challenged in his last election by a real right-wing nut, the kind of person who wants to ban all abortions and castrate all rapists and murder all murderers and then nuke Moscow for good measure. Nobody took him seriously at the time, not even Dan, not even after we realized the man had five million dollars to spend. But after those tests came back, Dan had him followed.”

“By a private detective, do you mean?”

Janet’s smile turned cynical. “I mean by one of your former colleagues in the FBI. Dan must have been frantic. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard of. Stephen can crash around all he wants to. That’s no long-term problem for Dan. People will just say Stephen self-destructed. But if anybody ever found out about Dan putting the arm on the FBI—”

“‘Putting the arm?’”

“My mother’s been in a lot of Mafia movies. But you see what I mean. Putting the arm on the FBI and having one of Stephen’s opponents investigated. Political suicide.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I do see.” He did, too. It was the stuff of which serious political scandals were made, the perfect fodder for righteous news stories and the perfect rock on which to wreck a career. It was also an unlikely project for the Bureau to agree to, especially these days. Gregor wondered if Carl Bettinger was the “former colleague” Janet was talking about, and felt immediately uneasy. “It doesn’t sound like the Dan Chester I’ve had described to me,” he told Janet. “It doesn’t sound anything like him at all.”

“It doesn’t sound anything like him to me, and I’ve known him for twenty years. At least. And I’m worried about Stephen, Mr. Demarkian. While Dan’s chasing right-wing terrorist fantasies, Stephen is very probably ill. Maybe terminally ill.”

“You said he’d had tests. They didn’t turn up anything?”

“He had four days of tests and they came back clean. That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything physically wrong.”

“No,” Gregor agreed. “But it’s a good start.”

“Stephen needs to go back into the hospital and I need to get him there. Will you try to talk some sense into Dan Chester?”

“I think he intends to try to talk some sense into me.”

Janet turned around, in the direction of the room that wrapped toward the back of the house. “The Mondrian study is down there,” she said. “You go all the way to the end, turn the corner, and keep going until you’re in a big room with glass doors. That’s the beach room. Off to the left of it there’s a hall with doors on both sides. Dan is behind the third door on the left. Just like the five hundred cans of cat food in the showcase round on
Let’s Make a Deal.
”

Dan Chester was not actually “behind” the third door on the left in the small hall that led off the wraparound room. He was in the middle of it, leaning against the doorjamb with a cup of coffee in his hands and an abstracted look on his face, like a small dark muscular Cerberus dreaming about heaven. It took a while for Gregor to realize what Chester was looking at. There was a television placed between the two windows that looked out on the beach. On it was a videotape machine with its red power light glowing. Chester was watching a tape of Stephen and Janet crossing a wide room. Janet was wearing a neat little politician’s-wife black knit dress, disfigured by a large red heart-shaped brooch placed high on the left shoulder. The brooch looked like Victoria’s own—expensive and real—but too heavy, so that it pulled against the dress and made it sag.

“Damned brooch,” Dan Chester muttered to himself. “Damn thing looks like a whorehouse light.” He saw Gregor, but didn’t seem to register who Gregor was. “It was because of the idiot surgery,” he said. “I couldn’t talk her out of it. Mama gave it to her for her twenty-first birthday. Mama was having surgery. Girlie had to wear the brooch. For luck.”