Act of Darkness(83)

“Nothing, really. I just got tired. And I was restless and a little hungry. I’m always hungry around noon because I fast in the mornings to clean out the poisons. Especially when I’m staying someplace away from home. You can never tell what they’ve put in the food.”

“You didn’t hear sounds in the hall? Nothing like that?”

“No. There were sounds off and on, of course, all day, but I didn’t pay any attention to them. Why should I have?”

“No reason.” Of course, Gregor thought, from her descriptions of her two days at Great Expectations, it seemed to him that Patchen Rawls made a habit of spying, but he wasn’t going to say so. “So you went to your door, intending to go out and instead—”

“I saw Clare in the hall, yes.”

“And she was coming from Stephen Fox’s room.”

“She was standing in the hallway with the door open,” Patchen corrected, “looking into it. Well, not exactly standing. She was sort of backing up, taking these little steps and moving all the time. You could tell she’d been inside it. It was all over her, like an aura.”

“But you didn’t see her go inside it?”

“No,” Patchen said. And sighed. “I just sat on the floor next to my door and watched her go away. She went down to her own room—it’s between here and there—and went in. She said downstairs she left her door open.”

“You didn’t notice that?”

“No. I was a little nervous, you see. I mean, I’d gone to all that trouble to make the room look right, and Stephen hadn’t even seen it yet.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

“Of course I can. If he had, he’d have come to talk to me. And even if he didn’t do that directly, he’d talk to Dan and show him, and Dan would have come to talk to me. And nobody came.”

Gregor nodded. “So,” he said, “you went down to Senator Fox’s room yourself. And you definitely went inside.”

“Definitely.”

“And you found?”

Patchen grinned, triumphant. “Pantyhose,” she said. “Pantyhose. Not one pair but three. And all my things had been moved around, messed up. The room didn’t look right at all. It took me fifteen minutes just to get it put back together again. I let them think downstairs that I saw Stephen in there, but I didn’t. I don’t think he was even upstairs, no matter what they say. The room was empty and Stephen had never been in it. But Clare Markey had, and she ruined my effect and then she left pantyhose there that didn’t belong there. I know what she was trying to do. She was afraid if Stephen left Janet he wouldn’t be a senator anymore either, and she didn’t want that to happen. She wanted him around where he could help her. So she went in there and deliberately ruined my spell.”

Gregor was about to tell her, for what would have been the fifth or sixth time, that it was the silliest motive for doing anything he had ever heard. A schizophrenic would have done better. Surely, no matter how stupid this woman was, it had to be possible to make her understand—

Perhaps fortunately, he never got the chance to try. There was a knock on the door, and both he and Patchen Rawls turned expectantly toward it. A moment later, Henry Berman came in, looking annoyed.

He looked even more annoyed when he saw that Patchen was still there. He had sat in on the first fifteen minutes of Gregor’s interview with her, and then taken himself off, muttering under his breath. To Henry Berman, Patchen Rawls was not simply a stupid woman. She was a flaming insult to the species Homo sapiens.

Berman looked her over, decided she had not been changed by her time with Gregor Demarkian, and then turned to Gregor himself.

“I think you’d better get downstairs,” the police chief said. “That Bettinger fool is in the foyer, and all he’ll say to anybody is that he has to talk to you.”





[2]


Gregor Demarkian had never been ambivalent in the ordinary way about his service in the FBI. He was not one of those people who wondered if any society ever had any right to allow its police forces to work undercover, or to investigate groups of people whose motives were obscure and might not be wholesome. He was a child of World War II. His older brother had been killed at Anjou, and he could remember, with more clarity than he could remember what he’d had for breakfast the morning before, the day when “spy rings” had meant Nazi sympathizers and been all too real. To his thinking, some very few people were morally good, most people were morally neutral, and a tiny percentage of people were actively evil. Because evil almost always operated by deceit—Gregor was also a child of the Armenian Church; the story of Adam and Eve had not been lost on him—it was not always possible to defeat it by transparency. There were times when you just had to knuckle down and play the game their way, just a little. If you didn’t, you ended up, as a colleague of his had once put it, with “your rear end hanging naked in the wind.”