Act of Darkness(43)

“Who’s that?” he asked Bennis, pointing to the closed door, one of the two on the balcony side, that would face the front of the house instead of the sea. Bennis checked the floor plan.

“That’s Dr. Debrett’s room,” she said. “The one on the other side of the balcony is Dan Chester’s. Dan Chester doesn’t look like he’s in.”

“Maybe Dr. Debrett is. I’m going to knock.”

“While you’re at it, do you think you could stop treating me like a mental defective? What’s all this about, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

And it was the truth. He hadn’t the first idea. He went to Dr. Debrett’s door. He knocked. He waited for someone to answer and counted the seconds while no answer came. Then he turned the door’s knob, pushed the door in, and stood in the hallway, watching Dr. Kevin Debrett stretched out on his carefully made bed, sleeping.

Except that Dr. Kevin Debrett wasn’t sleeping.

This was what Gregor hadn’t wanted Bennis to see.

Dr. Kevin Debrett was dead.





PART TWO


Oyster Bay, Long Island July 1–July 2





ONE


[1]


CARL BETTINGER SHOWED UP first—even though Gregor hadn’t called him, and even though there was no reason for anybody to call him. Or maybe there was. It had taken a long time for Gregor to get into gear. So much was out of whack—the scene, which didn’t look like a scene; the body, which looked alive except for the fact that it wasn’t moving. The body looked so alive, Gregor wasn’t sure he would have been able to go on believing Debrett was dead if he hadn’t borrowed Bennis’s hand mirror and held it up in front of the corpse’s nose. He’d only done that after he’d spent half an hour wandering through the ominous open spaces of Great Expectations, gathering the scattered members of the weekend party, and putting them all together in the closest of the “living room spaces” to the foyer. Now, Victoria and Janet sat close together, holding hands, but the rest of them arranged themselves at the edges of an invisible circle, a kind of emotional magnetic field. Even Stephen Fox and Dan Chester wanted little or nothing to do with each other. They were both ashen faced.

He went back upstairs, got the hand mirror from where he remembered seeing it on Bennis’s vanity, and went in to Kevin Debrett again. Nothing. That was the problem. Nothing. The room hadn’t been disturbed. The body showed no obvious signs of violence, physical or chemical, no blue tinge to the skin or abrasions on the throat or blood. Nothing.

He put the hand mirror back where he’d found it and came out onto the balcony again. Bennis was there, leaning against the wall next to Kevin Debrett’s room with her arms folded across her shoulders and her eyes closed. She looked even worse than he had expected her to. What had he been thinking of? Nearly half her family had died by violence. One of her sisters was out on bail in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, getting ready to go on trial for murder. All that had happened only half a year ago. She wasn’t over it yet. He had to have been crazy to bring her to this place.

He went up to her, as close as he dared, and said, “Bennis?”

Bennis opened her eyes. “I couldn’t stay down there any more,” she told him. “They were driving me crazy. They were bitching at each other—except they weren’t.”

“Were any of them actually saying anything?”

“No. But—”

“Never mind,” Gregor said. “I know what you mean. Did you call the police the way I asked you to?”

Bennis nodded. “I called right away. I talked to a kind of clerk or something first, and then I got put through to a man named Henry Berman. He knew who you were.”

“Wonderful.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. He sounded nice.”

Gregor let it go. He didn’t know what it meant, that a local cop with both a murder and an ex-FBI man on his patch had sounded “nice.” Assuming that Kevin. Debrett had been murdered, of course. Gregor felt instinctively that the doctor must have been, but he couldn’t have proved it by what he had seen in the bedroom.

“We’d better go downstairs,” he said. “I don’t like the idea of them wandering around where I can’t see them. The police will be here soon. Then you can retire to your room and pretend to have a headache.”

“I do have a headache.”

“All right then.”

Bennis shot a long apprehensive look at the door of Kevin Debrett’s room, and shook her head, and pushed away from the wall. Gregor found himself growing steadily more frightened at how small she looked. She was, in truth, a small woman—only five four, and barely a hundred pounds—but she was the kind of small woman who didn’t usually look small. Her legs were long. Her face was broad and full of angles and planes, like a sculpture both modern and representational. The force of her personality was almost as strong as Victoria Harte’s. Now she seemed to be shrinking.