Deadly Beloved(38)
“Then maybe we ought to worry about it. Maybe we ought to be a little careful over the next few weeks. Just in case.”
Down in the Willises’ driveway, Gregor Demarkian was huddled in a clutch with a lot of men in suits. Sarah Lockwood bit her lip.
“I think it’s exciting,” she said softly. “I think it makes everything we’re doing much more fun.”
“You’re nuts.”
Sarah turned around and put her hand on the bulge in Stephen’s pants. It pulsed under her fingers and made her smile.
“Of course I’m nuts,” she said. “That’s the point.”
FOUR
1.
THE FIRST GATED COMMUNITY Gregor Demarkian had ever heard of had been in Florida, on the Atlantic coast, exactly one year after Ted Bundy had been arrested for the murder of Kimberly Ann Leach. Logically, Gregor was sure that those two facts did not go together in any meaningful way. The gated community had probably existed long before anyone in Florida had ever heard of Ted Bundy. Still, in his mind the juxtaposition was significant. He had known enough really rich people who lived behind walls and gates and guards and security systems. There was a positive fashion for that sort of thing in the early seventies in Beverly Hills. Gated communities, however, were not for the really rich. They were for the people Gregor had learned in college to call the “upper middle class,” meaning really successful doctors and lawyers and businessmen, the top management of the larger corporations, the ruling elites of America’s better small towns. Of course, Gregor thought as he got out of John Jackman’s commandeered police car, these days the top managements of the larger corporations were counted among the really rich. They had salaries in seven figures and bonus packages that would be the envy of most rock stars. Their job seemed to be to move as much production work as possible out of Pittsburgh and into Southeast Asia. And as for the really successful doctors and lawyers—
Standing in the driveway, Gregor looked around. This was a good neighborhood. There were rubberneckers, but the rubberneckers were discreet. They looked like joggers who weren’t much interested in what the police were doing. The lawns were beautifully kept too—but Gregor saw that they had been badly planned. They were all the same size and shape, like the lawns in a tract house development, and when you looked at them long enough, you noticed. The architecture had been badly planned too. Each of the houses was carefully unlike any of the others, but too much unlike. Gregor looked over the Willises’ Tudor, and then around at a French Provincial, a brick Federalist, and an elaborately gabled and turreted Victorian. Out on the Main Line, where the really rich people lived, the houses were much more alike, and much larger. These looked oddly like stage sets, studied and self-conscious, uncomfortable.
John Jackman touched his elbow. “So,” he said, “what do you think?”
“Expensive,” Gregor said.
Jackman nodded. “Oh, it is that. Houses go for about five hundred thousand apiece.”
“That was the other thing I was thinking,” Gregor said. “That isn’t expensive enough.”
“I know what you mean. The first thing I thought of the first time I walked in here was Bryn Mawr and that place Bennis Hannaford’s family had—do they still have it?”
“It was willed to Yale University after Bennis’s mother died,” Gregor said.
“Right. But that was really a place, wasn’t it? At least forty rooms. All those servants’ quarters. The stables. You couldn’t have fit it on one of these lots.”
“Is this the first of these gated communities you’ve ever been in?”
“Live and in the flesh, yes,” Jackman said. “We don’t have a lot of them in Philadelphia proper, as you can imagine. And they’re not the kind of places the police tend to get called in.”
Gregor shook his head impatiently. “Why do they do it?” he demanded. “What’s the point of the gates and the guards and all the rest of it? They can’t possibly believe it turns them into successors to the robber barons.”
“Of course they don’t,” Jackman said. “They do it to keep the black people out.”
Gregor shot Jackman a look and started to say something, but he didn’t have time. They were being approached by a large white man in a leather jacket. If the man hadn’t been obviously white-haired and old, he would have been menacing. Gregor caught the patch on the sleeve of his jacket and realized it was some kind of police insignia.
“Dan,” Jackman said, holding out his hand. “Good morning. This is Mr. Gregor Demarkian—”