Act of Darkness(44)

“Bennis?” he said.

She had reached the top of the stairs. As she stood there, hesitating, Gregor realized what else it was about her that was bothering him: her clothes. She was still wearing her red terry cloth beach dress. There was no reason she should have changed out of it—there were a great many reasons why she shouldn’t have—but it looked wrong somehow, as if she had been carefully costumed for the wrong play. The terry cloth beach dress was not just red, but very, very red. It made her skin look as white as talc.

“The only thing I can say,” she told him, “is that if somebody’s dead, he ought to look dead. Not like—that.”

Then she turned away from him and ran down the stairs, the leather-lined heels of her sandals slapping a rhythmically against the stair carpet and the soles of her feet.





[2]


“What I think,” Victoria Harte was saying, as Gregor made his way down the last of the stairs and reached the foyer, “is that all this is a lot of nonsense. The man must have had a heart attack. You know what doctors are. Not one of them takes care of his own health. And the only symptoms they believe in are yours.”

Gregor turned from the foyer to face the living room space and found that Victoria was sitting with her legs curled under her in a great blue modernized club chair, wearing a violently jade green caftan, too much jewelry, and an expression of almost unbearable tension. He looked around the circle and saw that they were all unbearably tense, except Janet. Janet was sitting on the arm of Victoria’s chair with her feet planted side by side on the floor and her hands in her lap, like a nun at a tea party. She was the only one who did not begin to stare at him as soon as he appeared.

Being stared at was not one of Gregor’s favorite things. The modest amount of fame his work had brought him—it was getting less modest all the time, but he refused to think about that—only made him uncomfortable. Being the center of attention always made him want to retire to Borneo, or someplace else where very few people spoke English and no one was interested in true crime. Sometimes, though, there was no help for it. This was one of those times. He felt his hand reach automatically for his tie, checking and straightening. He had a tendency to do things to ties, to make them unravel, by osmosis. The fact that he might be standing in front of a group of people with nothing more than a tassel of threads hanging around his neck always made him feel insecure.

His tie was fine. What he was really trying to do was give himself an excuse not to look at Bennis. He made himself look—she had found a corner of a love seat and stuffed herself into it, as far away from Patchen Rawls on the other end as she could get—and then he turned his attention back to the assembled company. They now looked not only tense, but hostile, as if he had caused this whole thing and they had every right to lynch him.

“Well,” Victoria Harte said, “here you are. And you’re going to explain things, of course, because that’s what Dan’s paying you to do. One thing about Daniel Robert Chester. He always gets his money’s worth.”

Gregor sighed. There was a single empty chair in the circle, a chrome-plated monstrosity nobody had wanted, probably for good reason. He went and sat down in it anyway.

“Miss Harte,” he said.

“Ms.”

“Ms. Harte. I think we have to get one thing clear right now, because if we don’t, this situation is going to be even more unpleasant than it has to be. Mr. Chester is not paying me to do anything.”

“Nonsense,” Victoria Harte said. “You’re a private detective.”

“I’m nothing of the kind. I don’t have a license. I have no intention of getting a license. I do not run a business. I was once an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I retired over two and a half years ago. Since that time, I have never—and I mean never—accepted money for—”

“Meddling in crime?” Victoria Harte said.

“I don’t see why we’re calling this a crime,” Patchen Rawls said. “I haven’t heard anything that would make me think it’s a crime. It sounds like he just died peacefully in his sleep.”

“At the age of forty-three?” Janet Harte asked curiously.

Patchen shrugged. “He was caught in the cycle,” she said. “He’ll be back again in a year or two. Probably as a bug.”

“Probably on Mars,” Dan Chester said. “For Christ’s sake.”

Gregor cleared his throat. He hated scenes like this.

“I have to say,” he told them slowly, “that I tend to the same opinion as Mrs. Fox. Dr. Debrett was a young man. Is forty-three right?”