Act of Darkness(51)

“That’s right. Or almost with him. Gregor went into the room, but I didn’t.”

“You didn’t see what was inside?”

“Oh, I saw what was inside, all right. But I stood at the door, in the hallway. It’s a balcony thing. You’ll see. Only Gregor went inside.”

“What happened then?”

“Well,” Bennis said, “I went to call you, and Gregor went to find the others. Then Gregor came back to look at the body again, and I came up to find Gregor. Then we came downstairs.”

“You didn’t see anything unusual?”

“No. And it’s a good thing, too. Nobody ever listens to me.”

Berman let this pass. Gregor didn’t blame him. He’d heard the same complaint himself a hundred times, from Bennis and every other woman he knew. He even supposed the women had a point. That didn’t make their complaint a proper subject of criminal investigation.

“Now,” Berman said, “let’s try to think about times. The time the body was discovered, to begin with. Mr. Demarkian, do you know when that was?”

“Approximately. There was a clock somewhere in the house striking what must have been five thirty—”

“Must have been?”

“A half-hour strike is only a chime, Mr. Berman. It could have been any half hour if that was all we had to go on. It had to be five thirty because I actually saw a clock a little while later, when I came downstairs to knock on Mrs. Harte’s door. At that point it was five minutes before six.”

“Very good. So the body was discovered between five thirty and six. Miss Hannaford’s call came into my office at five forty-seven. You said you came downstairs to make the call. Isn’t there a phone in your room?”

“There’s a phone in my room,” Bennis said. “There’s a phone in every bedroom upstairs as far as I know. But Gregor didn’t want me to phone from there, because he said the whole upstairs would have to be searched. And fingerprinted.”

“The whole upstairs?” Patchen Rawls choked.

“Search Ms. Rawls’s room first,” Victoria Harte said. “It’s so interesting.”

“Right,” Berman said. “Now, the victim. If he is a victim. You said on the phone his name was Dr. Kevin Debrett.”

“That’s right,” Bennis said.

Victoria Harte stirred, majestic and restless. “He was a specialist in the treatment of retarded children. The psychiatric treatment of retarded children. Kevin never did like blood.”

“He liked blood well enough once,” her daughter said. “He used to be an obstetrician. He was mine, the one time I needed one.”

“That was years ago,” Dan Chester said.

“I want to go back to California,” Patchen Rawls said. “I hate it in the East. Everything is so old here. Everything has so much baggage.”

“Miss Rawls,” Victoria Harte said, “is barely out of her cradle. This particular incarnation, at any rate.”

Henry Berman wasn’t interested in incarnations. As far as Gregor could tell, he wasn’t interested in Patchen Rawls. Berman was looking from one end of the open house to the other, at the ceilings, at the floors, at the lack of walls. He was looking at the decor, too, all those mirror-image pictures of Janet and Victoria. There was a puzzled expression on his face that grew more marked the longer and more carefully he looked around him. Gregor sympathized. Great Expectations did that to him, too.

Abruptly, Berman’s tolerance for architectural confusion and mother-daughter solidarity reached its threshold. He snapped his head back so that he was facing the assembled company again, passed his gaze over Carl Bettinger as if Bettinger were a hole in the atmosphere, and said, “You all stay down here. I’m going to take Mr. Demarkian upstairs. When the techies come in, somebody send them up after us.”





[3]


Because Bennis and everybody else had been ordered to stay downstairs, the balcony hall was empty when Gregor and Berman got to it. Its doors were still either open or shut, as they had been when Gregor and Bennis had first found Kevin Debrett’s body. The carpeting, now lit only by the unkind glow of track lights that had gone on automatically at the coming of darkness, looked like something that belonged in a Holiday Inn. Gregor found himself telling Berman what it had been like when he and Bennis had arrived: which doors were open, which doors were closed, the strange pair of pantyhose in Bennis’s wastebasket. Berman started out only half-listening, and ended up gaping at Gregor in astonishment.

“That was it?” he said. “A pair of pantyhose half out of a wastebasket? Good Lord. I mean, I’d heard you were good, but—”