Deadly Beloved(93)

“There’s an end in sight,” Gregor said. “I don’t think anybody’s going to end up dead again anytime soon. Unless Karla Parrish dies in the hospital, God forbid, and that isn’t what you’re talking about.”

“How can you possibly know that nobody’s going to end up dead?” Phil Borley was curious. “I don’t like the MO here, Mr. Demarkian. It’s nuts.”

“No, it’s not,” Gregor said. “Really, you know, it’s all absolutely simple. The only thing that got complicated, like I said, was the timing, because the timing meant that there was a great deal more publicity about it all than there would have been. Or maybe that was a miscalculation on her part. Maybe, what with Fox Run Hill in the picture, there would always have been a fair amount of publicity. I think it might have been much different if the city was in the middle of a gang war or if there was a crisis going on in Korea. As I said, maybe not.”

“If the timing was so important to her, why didn’t she just wait?” John Jackman asked. “Crises in Korea don’t happen every day, but gang wars are frequent enough. She could have found any number of excuses in no time at all.”

“She didn’t have the time,” Gregor said. “She was very close to being found out. If she hadn’t already been found out.”

“You mean by her husband,” Phil Borley said. “Hadn’t they been married for years? What was there new about her that he could possibly have found out?”

Gregor walked over to the wall next to the hallway and looked carefully at the paint and paper. There were no telltale signs of bright and dark, no indications that pictures had hung there for a long time that were now gone. He sighed.

“Everybody always talks about how wonderful the sixties were,” he said, “but have you ever noticed? Nobody ever keeps pictures of it. Nobody has his coffee table full of snapshots of long-haired boys dancing in mud or people with signs marching on the Pentagon. They have posters of that kind of thing, but they don’t have pictures of themselves.”

“You’re looking for pictures of long-haired guys in mud?” John Jackman asked.

“I’m looking for a picture of Patsy MacLaren. The Patsy MacLaren who died in India. Do you think we could get hold of a Vassar College yearbook?”

“Probably,” John Jackman answered. “This doesn’t answer the question of why she didn’t wait. Why kill her husband right when she did? Why blow up her car instead of just leaving it in the airport parking lot with all the other missing cars?”

“Steve Willis was being reassigned to work in his head office,” Gregor said. “Remember? That was practically the first thing you told me about this case. Usually he traveled a great deal, but he was home on the night he was killed because he was being taken off traveling. He was going to be living at home full-time and working in an office just like anybody else. And of course, under the circumstances, that had to be intolerable.”

“To his wife,” John Jackman said.

“Exactly,” Gregor said. “Do me a favor, check a few other things, all right? You’re looking into this degree Patsy MacLaren was supposed to have earned at the University of Pennsylvania—”

“We’re checking into everything,” John Jackman said. “Like I said, that trust officer is off in the Caribbean someplace, but we’ll find him. And we’ll check everything. You don’t have to tell us that.”

“I know I don’t.” Gregor looked into Liza Verity’s bedroom. There was a photograph in there in a shiny aluminum frame, but it was only of Liza Verity herself in a nurse’s cap, holding what looked like a diploma. Gregor went over to her closet and looked into that, but Liza Verity had not been heavily addicted to clothes. She had a couple of the kind of dresses Bennis Hannaford would call “nice,” meaning suitable for semi-ceremonial occasions. Gregor got the impression that they were of a cheaper make than Bennis would have worn herself. She had a couple of pairs of jeans, pressed and draped over hangers. She had several cotton sweaters folded on the shelf over the hanger rod.

John Jackman and Phil Borley and Dr. Halloran were waiting for him in the hall, looking curious.

“So,” John Jackman said. “Have you got it all figured out?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I need pictures.”

“I need Patsy MacLaren. Assuming that Patsy MacLaren exists,” John Jackman said glumly. “Does Patsy MacLaren exist?”

“Yes,” Gregor said.

“Then Julianne Corbett was lying,” John Jackman said. “Patsy MacLaren didn’t die in India.”