Act of Darkness(84)

The problem, as Gregor saw it, was not with playing the game their way, just a little. The problem was with agents and administrators who got so caught up in the process that they forgot about the “just a little.” Gregor had never been entirely comfortable in the Bureau as long as old J. Edgar was alive. It had become much too obvious to him much too early that the Boss wasn’t playing with a full deck, and that what he was playing with was marked. Or worse. There had been rumors from one end of the Bureau to the other about the kind of nonsense the Boss was pulling. Gregor had found those rumors all too believable. It had been a terrible relief to him when the old man had died.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t been a relief for long. While he’d been concentrating first on kidnappings and then on the serial killer liaisons that would eventually give birth to the Department of Behavioral Sciences, a new breed of men had been coming into the Bureau. Brought up and educated in ways Gregor couldn’t begin to fathom, a small minority of them seemed to have no points of moral reference at all. They were not evil in the way Gregor was accustomed to think about evil, but they weren’t good, either. They didn’t think in those terms. If there was anything they were unquestionably committed to, it was Career. If they had any fixed idea of a natural and inalienable value, it was Results. None of them were plotters. All of them were potential loose cannons. And loose cannons, to Gregor’s mind, were very dangerous indeed.

It was in this way—as a potential loose cannon, but not necessarily an actual one—that Gregor had always thought of Carl Bettinger. Bettinger was a fine agent. Gregor had worked with him often enough to know he had a great capacity for work, a first-class talent for analysis, and the mind of a true policeman. Whether he also had the soul of a true policeman was another question. There was something about Carl Bettinger that Gregor had always found a little—slippery.

Standing in the foyer at Great Expectations, Bettinger looked less slippery than worried, and with that Gregor could sympathize. Dan Chester was standing in the foyer, too, and he looked angry. Bettinger had obviously been getting the benefit of Dan Chester’s tongue. Gregor thought it must have been like a public scolding, in school, in the days before child-centered education. The living room space was still full of people, lacking only Patchen Rawls (Gregor wondered where she had gotten to) and Dan himself, who could hardly be said to be absent. There were also two uniformed policemen—the one who had been here with Pulaski at the beginning, and a new one—and the arriving hordes from the medical examiner’s office. Bettinger had to be feeling like a ten year old caught putting his frog in the teacher’s desk.

He was, Gregor saw, destined to go on feeling like that. Dan Chester was for the moment silent, but there were rustlings from the living room space. Coming down the last of the stairs, Gregor looked across at the group there and saw that Victoria Harte had risen and begun walking toward the foyer. Her hair flowed. Her caftan flowed. Her face had an expression on it that reminded Gregor of Judith Anderson playing Medea.

Gregor looked reflexively at Victoria’s feet and saw that Patchen Rawls had been telling the truth about at least one thing. Victoria did wear very high heels, the skinny kind that came almost to a point at the end. On the hardwood floor of the living room space they sounded like pegs being pounded into the holes of a carpenter’s board. On the marble tiles of the foyer, they sounded like bullets.

Gregor stepped off the last of the stairs into the foyer itself just as Victoria reached Carl Bettinger’s side. He caught Bettinger’s eye over Victoria’s head and shrugged a little.

“You,” Victoria said, pushing a finger into Bettinger’s chest, “should have been here an hour ago.”

Carl Bettinger stiffened, and Gregor remembered he had never been good at dealing with women. He was younger than Gregor, but not really young. He was still from the generation before the generation who took mixed sex activity as natural in all things. He looked down at Victoria’s finger, and blanched, and began to straighten his tie.

“Mrs. Harte,” he said.

“I’m not Mrs. Harte,” Victoria told him. “Mrs. Harte is somebody married to somebody named Mr. Harte, and I’ve never been married to somebody named Mr. Harte. At the moment, I’m not married to anybody. And I wasn’t even born with Harte. Where have you been?”

“As I told Mr. Chester,” Bettinger started.

Victoria waved that away. “Don’t try to feed me the kind of crap I just heard you feeding Dan, because I won’t listen to it. You’re the one who came to my bedroom—my bedroom, if you remember—and demanded to know everything there was to know about my son-in-law, and about Dan Chester—”