Deadly Beloved(50)

She wasn’t going to issue a press release. Of course she wasn’t. That would be silly. On the other hand, what might not be silly was a little damage control. Because Tiffany was right. You could never tell what would damage you these days.

Julianne looked out the less dirty of her windows and down to the street. She went back to her desk and picked up the invitations list for the Karla Parrish reception. She had been reading about Karla, even in the middle of all this fuss about the death of Patricia Willis. If it hadn’t been for that death, the reception would have been really big news. That, Julianne remembered, was the kind of luck Karla always had. Just when she was about to make a big splash, someone else came along and made a bigger one, and Karla’s splash was lost in the tidal wave. When they were all in college together, Julianne remembered, the bigger splash had always come from Patsy MacLaren.

Julianne ran her finger down the column of names and found the one she was looking for. She took a pencil out of the caddy on her blotter and underlined both the name and the phone number. Then she pulled the phone closer across the desk and started punching numbers into the phone pad.

The phone was picked up almost immediately. It was answered less immediately, by a husky voice that seemed to belong to someone who did not intend to be in a good mood. Julianne looked at her little digital clock and winced. It was 6:12 A.M.

Julianne sat down and took a deep breath. “Bennis?” she said.

On the other end of the line, Bennis Hannaford made a noise that could have been a death rattle.

Julianne shook out her overteased hair. “Bennis, listen to me, this is important. I want you to get in touch with that friend of yours for me, Gregor Demarkian—”





2.


As soon as the news got around that Stephen Willis had died, Molly Bracken knew she would have to find some way to use the information. It was terrible living day after day in this big Victorian house. It was so boring, Molly could hardly stand it sometimes. Joey went to the office every day, playing out this little charade they were involved in, but Molly had no place to go but to shop. She did go to pro-life rallies every once in a while, but they didn’t want her there without Joey, and she could feel it. Somebody said the Catholics were different. They were used to women doing things on their own because they were used to nuns. To Molly, the Catholic Church was just the old neighborhood in a fancy building. It meant standing there in the middle of all the old ladies from Italy and Poland, with their sachet and garlic smells, with their moaning over rosaries. Molly had joined the Episcopal Church as soon as she had moved out to Fox Run Hill, and made Joey join it with her. Someday, when she was old, she hoped to get to the point when she couldn’t even remember having been ethnic in any way at all.

The first thing Molly had done when she found out how Stephen Willis had died was to make sure she met the detectives who had come to investigate the case. There was a black man from Philadelphia (how had he ever gotten past the guard at the gate?) named John Jackman, who was incredibly good-looking, like Eddie Murphy only better. There was the policeman from the town, who was not good-looking at all. Molly hadn’t quite been able to hold on to his name, because he had seemed so negligible. Exeter, she thought. Or Exter. Whatever. What was the point of a man who didn’t look good and didn’t have any money? The detective Molly had really wanted to meet, though, was Gregor Demarkian. Ever since the rumor had first started going around that he was going to come out there to look into Stephen Willis’s murder, Molly had lain in wait for him, ready to pounce, ready to tear off a piece of something famous. That was how anybody got anything in this world, she was sure of it. You found somebody who had it and got hold of some for yourself. You—appropriated it. That was the word. It made Molly squirm when she thought of it, as if it were a word with four letters, something she wasn’t supposed to say.

Molly had not been as lucky with her waiting as she had hoped she would be. She had talked to the two policemen, and given them information she was sure would make them want to come back to question her later, but Gregor Demarkian hadn’t come up her long curving drive and rung her doorbell. Nobody had come, and Molly had spent the afternoon sitting on her window seat, watching the action and wishing she knew how to get back into it. Mostly, she wished she had spent more time with Patsy MacLaren Willis. Dowdy, dour, unimportant—Patsy had always seemed like the least interesting person having dinner at the Fox Run Hill Country Club on any particular night, and half the time Molly hadn’t even gone over to her table to say hello. She could kick herself for that now, she really could. She was going to have to be much more careful in the future. You never knew where people were going to end up.