“I don’t know,” Frank said.
“So, okay. Let’s see where we are. There were, in the house, Charlotte Deacon Ross herself. There were her daughters, Marianne and more—how many more?”
“Three,” Marty said. “They’re in the main living room, or whatever they call it.”
“Fine. There was David Alden. Why?”
“We don’t know yet,” Frank said.
“All right,” Gregor said. “What else? Who else? Servants?”
“About a dozen all told,” Frank said. “That’s the permanent, full-time staff. Most of them don’t work in the house, though. This place has about a hundred acres and it’s apparently mostly lawn. They keep it up.”
“But they were in the house at the time Charlotte Deacon Ross died?”
“In their rooms or in the common room in the back wing,” Frank said. “There’s a back wing. This place is insane.”
“Was there anybody else in the house?” Gregor asked. “Anybody at all? Visitors? Anybody?”
“No,” Frank said. “Not that we know about. And that’s it for the immediate family. Those are all Tony Ross’s children.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about who was in the house,” Marty said. “I’ve talked to the M.E. He can’t be sure until all the tests are run, but it looks like this was another rifle hit, somebody off in the trees somewhere. We might be able to rule out anybody who was actually inside the house at the time Charlotte Deacon Ross died.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “We might be able to do that.” Then he went around the perimeter of the morning room. He looked out the big windows. They opened on the drive and the front walk too. He looked at the small framed flower prints that lined one wall. He looked at the big Chippendale secretary that somebody—Charlotte Deacon Ross, most likely—had used as a desk.
He came to a stop in the middle of the room and looked at the carpet under his feet: not only Persian, but good Persian.
“Do you think this David Alden would talk to me if I wanted him to?” he asked.
2
He found David Alden in what the butler—there was no other word for him, he was a butler; Gregor found himself feeling like a character in Remains of the Day—called the living room. Why it was a living room when the half-dozen other rooms they had passed on the way to it that seemed to contain the same sort of furniture were not, Gregor didn’t know, but this was the part about working with rich people that he had not been comfortable with even when he was with the FBI. That was one of the reasons why he had been so pleased to become an administrator. It was all well and good to write heroic-sounding novels about the integrity and farsightedness of the dedicated investigator in the face of the bureaucratic timidity of the timid administrator. In real life, the dedicated investigator spent his time uncomfortable in one way or another. Either he was hiding in bushes while the rain fell on his head, or he was sitting in “living rooms” with people who spoke a language less comprehensible than Martian. It was not the same with public officials. The White House did not make Gregor Demarkian nervous, and neither did the houses of senators if their names weren’t Kennedy. He would have had a hard time putting words to the distinction, but he knew what it was, and he wasn’t the only one. Every agent in the Bureau had hated having to work with “those people,” and that was in spite of the fact that “those people” often took care to be relentlessly “nice.”
The “living room” was an immense space, fourteen feet high, with a fireplace along one wall big enough to cook a side of beef on a spit. The fireplace surround was marble, and well taken care of. The Caravaggio on the wall was a real Caravaggio. The man Gregor presumed was David Alden was standing at one of the windows that looked out on the front walk and the drive, holding a drink in the air in one hand as if he were James Bond. It was only the attitude that worked, though. He was the wrong physical type for a Bond, too broad in the shoulders, too tall in the wrong way. If David Alden had gone to public schools instead of private ones, the other boys would have called him “string bean.”
The butler cleared his throat. David Alden turned around. “Oh, yes,” he said. “You must be Mr. Demarkian. Wardrop can bring you some coffee if you need it. Or tea. Or a drink.”
“I don’t think so,” Gregor said. He made a mental note of it—David Alden felt enough at home here to tell the servants what to do. That could be true familiarity, or cheek. At the moment, he had no way of knowing.