And One to Die On(68)
Gregor thought he would start looking for Carlton Ji—on his own; he never liked asking Bennis’s help in a situation like this, and he didn’t trust any of the rest of them, not even the ones he knew perfectly well hadn’t committed this murder—by finding the back stairs Geraldine Dart had been talking about. But at the last minute he decided to make a detour. It was now two o’clock in the afternoon. Most of the guests in this house were undoubtedly either taking naps, as Gregor had been, or trying to. Gregor thought he would try the person he wanted anyway. If he woke her up, he could always apologize and go back to his original plan. He walked down the hall to Lydia Acken’s door and tapped gently—too gently, he thought, to wake her out of a sound sleep. He had nothing to worry about. As soon as he tapped, he heard movement behind the door. Then the door opened and Lydia’s head popped out, an anxious look spread across her face like makeup.
“Oh,” she said, “Mr. Demarkian. Oh, come right in. I tried to take a nap, but I couldn’t fall asleep, so then I was trying to get some work done, but I wasn’t managing that, either. I’ve never been involved in a murder case before. Is it always this—worrying—to the participants?”
“It is to some of them,” Gregor said, coming inside. Lydia’s room was just like all the other bedrooms in this wing, with the same furniture and the same curtains and the same rugs. It was as if somebody had gone through with the interior decoration equivalent of a tract house plan, doling out accoutrements like parts from an assembly line. Gregor sat down on the stool that went with the vanity table and picked up an amateurishly printed brochure emblazoned with the words EAST VILLAGE LEGAL SERVICES. “What’s this?” he asked her.
“That,” Lydia said, taking the brochure out of his hand, “is my present escapist fantasy. East Village Legal Services is a group down around St. Mark’s Place that does free legal work with indigent people who need help negotiating the city bureaucracy or that kind of thing.”
“It sounds interesting.”
“I know it does. It sounds a great deal more interesting than trusts and estates and the annual partners’ dinner and one more bonus for my pension plan.”
“Is it something you do now, in your free time?”
Lydia Acken laughed. “Mr. Demarkian, in a law firm like mine, there is no such thing as free time. Oh, they’d give me a little space to do pro bono work if I asked for it. It’s good public relations. But someplace like EVLS needs more than that.”
“Like what?”
“Like lawyers who have other means of support and who can work full time. Like lawyers who can really concentrate on the cases, because the cases are very complicated. It’s not like Legal Aid. It’s not criminal things usually. It’s more—oh, you know. Child Protective Services took away some woman’s child because it was only four months old and she was feeding it taro root and good social work practice says that no child is supposed to have solid food until it’s at least nine months old, but back in the Virgin Islands or wherever this woman is from all children get solid food almost immediately because not to do it is supposed to be bad for the child. So then you have a big mess, and the woman wants her child back, and the social worker is some twenty-one-year-old graduate of City College who thinks she knows abuse and neglect when she sees it, and—” Lydia Acken shrugged.
“You sound excited when you talk about it.”
“I am excited when I talk about it,” Lydia said. “I’m excited when I think about it. I’ve even worked out how I could quit the firm and live more simply and all the rest of it. I suppose what it comes down to is that I just don’t have the courage. White-shoe Wall Street law firms are very womblike, cocoon sorts of places.”
Gregor smiled. “I think your courage is fine. I think if you want to do it you will. Maybe you just need to get yourself used to the idea.”
“Sometimes I think all I want is to spend the rest of my life dealing with real things that really matter. Not whether putting all the bonds into some multimillionaire’s second wife’s name will raise estate tax estimates if the estate tax is due and payable the year after next. You have no idea what old rich men are like. They can natter away about this nonsense for months on end.”
Actually, Gregor knew very well what old rich men were like. He had met quite a few of them in his time, in person or over the phone, including Bennis Hannaford’s father, who had been one of the oldest, one of the richest, and one of the most eccentric. Bennis refused to dignify her father’s personality by calling it “eccentric,” however. She just came right out and called the old man “the nastiest piece of business I’ve ever met.”