“Why not?”
“Because to do something like that and make it work—first drug him and then smother him while he was drugged—you’d literally have to smother him while he was drugged. Once he was dead, whatever drug it was would stop working its way out of his body.”
“Are you trying to tell me you can tell?” Berman said. “By looking? Nobody can do that.”
Gregor wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. He was sweating in spite of the air-conditioning, and he was beginning to feel frustrated and angry—not at Berman, but at himself. He hated knowing and not being able to explain why he knew. It flew in the face of reason, and Gregor was devoted to reason. And yet—
And then it hit him.
“The bedspread,” he said.
“What?”
“The bedspread. Look at the bedspread. It’s absolutely smooth.”
“So?”
“Berman, for God’s sake. Even if he’d been drugged and then poisoned, he would have moved. He would have wiggled at least. He couldn’t have helped himself. But he didn’t move. He didn’t so much as twitch. Just look at that bedspread.”
“Mr. Demarkian,” Berman said patiently, “I am looking at that bedspread and I do see what you mean, but what I have to say is that I just can’t see—are you all right?”
Gregor Demarkian was definitely not all right. He was back in the Mondrian study, reading the words spelled out by a dot matrix printer on a perforated computer sheet, the words that had made no sense to an entire team of doctors from the UConn medical center but had made a kind of crazy sense to him: one minute everything’s fine except that I’m a little nervous and the next minute everything just stops. It just stops. My heart stops. My breathing stops. One minute I’m going and the next I’m not.
Gregor began to feel sick. “Crib death,” he said.
“What?” Berman asked him.
“Listen. Do something for me. Have the body checked for curare.”
“Curare?” Berman looked on the verge of a stroke. “You think Kevin Debrett was killed with curare?”
“Of course not.” Gregor sighed. “If that had been the case, he would be blue.”
THREE
[1]
IT WAS THE TELEPHONE that woke Clare Markey up the next morning, and it was the telephone that sent her into a spiral slide of despair, a kind of kiddieland amusement park of the stranger emotions. Except, of course, that she couldn’t really blame the telephone. When Alexander Graham Bell had invented the thing, he hadn’t forseen its use by the likes of Harvey Gort. He probably hadn’t even forseen the existence of men like Harvey Gort. Clare had only the sketchiest ideas of history—she had gone through both high school and college during the great days of relevance, so she had only the sketchiest ideas of anything unconnected to her work—but she was convinced that people in the nineteenth century had been nobler than people in the twentieth. At the very least, they’d had the good manners to cloak their shallowness in erudition. Or piety. Or something. She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to Harvey’s voice bouncing down the wires to her from the District of Columbia, thinking about Abraham Lincoln. She would have thought about Henry Clay and Sir Thomas More, but she wasn’t exactly sure when either of them had lived. Along with only the sketchiest ideas of history, Clare Markey had no idea at all of dates.
Sometime during the night, it had started to rain. Now, at six o’clock, the wet was coming down steadily, blown in spatters against her windows by winds that rose and fell erratically from second to second. If Kevin Debrett hadn’t died, Clare would have been getting ready to go downstairs, to eat breakfast and then retire to the beach room to listen to Stephen Whistler Fox natter on about the needs of the mentally retarded. She hadn’t been looking forward to it—funny, but even the thought of it brought back that crazy need to drink that had driven her out of New York City; it was as if the need to drink and the “needs of the mentally retarded,” as defined by Stephen Whistler Fox, were connected—but it would have been better than this. Anything would have been better than this.
“What I think,” Harvey Gort was saying, “is that you ought to demand our money back. All of it. Right away. Then you pack up your things and get out of there.”
Clare decided to sit up. Lying down, she felt like an Aztec virgin on a sacrificial altar. She molded her pillows into a pile against the headboard and propped herself up on them, then thought about the rain coming down over her head. With flat roofs like this, it sounded louder than it should have, and harder, like ball bearings pumped out of a shotgun.