Feast of Murder(25)

“So,” Gregor said. “How is Steve? Is he still doing fugitive work?”

“Oh, no.” Jeremy Bayles sounded shocked. “I didn’t even know he’d ever done that. He’s with the banking and fraud division now. He’s been heading up our investigation of the savings and loan mess and possible criminal fraud involved in that. It’s very important work.”

“I’m sure it is. He used to like more excitement than that, though, when I knew him.”

“But it is exciting work. It’s fascinating.”

“It doesn’t have any high-speed car chases in it.” They had reached the third floor and the landing outside Gregor’s door. When Gregor had left that morning, his door had had a nice, polite spray of Indian corn hanging under the bell. Now it had another of those enormous cardboard turkeys. This one had a pair of wirerim glasses on its nose and a copy of Criminal Procedures and Practices in its beak. Gregor tried his door, found it was unlocked—neither Bennis nor Donna ever remembered to lock up again after they’d been inside—and ushered Jeremy Bayles into his apartment. There was a life-size rag doll in Pilgrim good-wife clothes standing in his foyer, but he ignored that.

“So,” he said. “What could Steve possibly want me for? The only thing I know about the savings and loan mess is that my own went bankrupt and got merged with something I can barely pronounce.”

“It isn’t about the mess,” Jeremy Bayles explained. “It’s about a man. Or two men, actually. One of them’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“Donald McAdam. He’s dead. Then there’s the other one, and Steve said you’d know, because it was in the paper you were going to see him. It was in W, I mean.”

“What was in W?”

Jeremy Bayles blinked his pale, lashless eyes ingenuously. The worst of that ingenuousness was that it was undoubtedly sincere.

“It was in W that you were going to spend Thanksgiving with this guy Steve is so worked up about,” he said. “You know. Jonathan Edgewick Baird.”





2


There are men who retire to desert islands and Caribbean beaches and ski chalets in Vermont, glad to abandon the work they’ve spent their lives doing and dedicate the rest of their days on earth to wasting time. There are others who are haunted forever by their titles and their offices and their commercial selves, doomed to wander for eternity among the forever lost. For Gregor Demarkian, retirement had been more like trading paid employment for unpaid and forced assignments with chosen ones. Less than two years after he had left the Bureau for good, he had accidently become involved in the Main Line murder of Bennis Hannaford’s father. That was how he had met Bennis, and how he had acquired the title the Inquirer and all its sister publications had become so enamored of: the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. The title might have stuck in any case, but it was reinforced by what came next—Gregor’s involvement in one of the most sensational cases of the decade, backed by the Archdiocese of Colchester, New York, and served up to the media like a flaming desert. Other cases had followed, if you could call them cases—Gregor resisted—and by now his dogged insistence that since he didn’t have a private detective’s license he couldn’t be a private detective felt weak even to him. For one thing, it was an easy distinction to get around. John Cardinal O’Bannion had merely called him a “consultant” and gone right on treating him like a detective. For another, it was obvious that Gregor wasn’t going to stop involving himself in extracurricular murder and didn’t even want to. The kinds of murders he dealt with these days were far more interesting than the ones he’d dealt with at BSD, and far more soothing to the soul, too. It was comforting to realize that the world still operated on logic, even if it pretended not to. Under other circumstances, Gregor would have been almost pleased to hear about a suspicious death that someone wanted him to look into. It had been a long dry stretch since the last one, and he’d been getting bored. Under these circumstances, he wasn’t so happy. The death of Donald McAdam had made all the papers and all the magazines, but it had seemed fairly cut and dried to him. Donald McAdam had been a damned fool and died the way damned fools often do, by pushing his luck once too often. Then there was the question of Jonathan Edgewick Baird, whom he knew as Jon Baird, a friend of Bennis Hannaford and her brother Bobby. Gregor had nothing at all against investigating Bennis Hannaford’s friends, but if he was going to do it he wanted Bennis Hannaford’s permission. He at least didn’t want to accept an invitation she had given him in good faith and then use it to spy on people she might care about.