Feast of Murder(33)

“Everybody was surprised as hell when Jon Baird went to jail,” she had told him, “because he was the wrong Baird to have gone to jail. Tony, now, that’s his son—my sister Emma knew him when she was living in New York. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, and really strange art. You’d have expected him to go to jail.”

“What about the charges?” Gregor had asked her. “Do they sound like the sort of thing Baird would have been involved in?”

Bennis shrugged, her great black storm cloud of hair hovering in the air around her face, her wide blue eyes looking almost navy. “If you’re asking do I think Jon Baird does things that are against the law, the answer’s yes. And awful lot of things are against the law these days even I don’t think ought to be. If you’re asking do you think he did the things he was accused of doing, I’d have to say he must have. I mean, he pleaded guilty. Some of these guys plead guilty because they get threatened with RICO, but I never heard of that coming up in this case. And it was such a small case. It’s not like he doesn’t have good lawyers.”

“But you find it strange,” Gregor said.

Bennis got out a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke at the ceiling. “It was a couple, three counts on insider trading and not very serious insider trading. It was nothing, really. Why would he want to bother?”

“Some people are just naturally bent.”

“Well, Gregor, that’s fine, but naturally bent or not, Jon Baird isn’t stupid. These were straightforward insider trading charges, not the fraud charges that get called insider trading because they come under the same law. What Jon Baird went to jail for isn’t even illegal in Switzerland or France. If he wanted to do that kind of thing, why didn’t he just get on a plane and go talk to his brokers over there?”

“Maybe he was keeping his traveling down to pacify the IRS. They get very nervous about people who take too many trips outside the country.”

“If they do, they’re getting ulcers from Jon Baird. I think he owns his Concorde. I know he owns his own 747. No, if you ask me, it’s that second wife of his. All flounce and flooze and forty-thousand-dollar ball gowns from Carolina Herrera.”

Gregor decided not to make an issue of the $40,000 ball gowns from Carolina Herrera. “It’s his second wife what?” he asked Bennis. “Who put him up to insider trading? Who committed the insider trading herself?”

“Who ought to be in jail,” Bennis said. “She was at that American Heart Association thing I went to back in June—although why she bothered is beyond me, because Baird’s first wife was on the committee and she had to know she wasn’t going to get a decent table—but anyway she was there, bopping around like a high-school freshman on marijuana at a Guns and Roses concert. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I thought Jon Baird ought to have been arrested, for marrying her when he was old enough to know better.”

“How much older?”

“I don’t know. But look at it this way, Gregor. Baird has at least twenty years on me if not more, and I’m thirty-six. And I’ll bet I have at least some time on Sheila Baird. Which makes it a minimum of twenty-two or so years, and Baird’s no movie star. He doesn’t work out ten hours a week and have his face lifted in Los Angeles. He’s this grizzled old man with sags under his eyes.”

“I’m this grizzled old guy with sags under my eyes.”

“You’re not dating a representative of the Smith College Bulimia Squad. Of course, you might be a lot older than I think. I don’t know. I haven’t been able to nail down your birthday, because you won’t tell me and Lida and the rest of them don’t remember. I think you were very deprived, you know, growing up in a culture where people didn’t make a fuss over children’s birthdays.”

“They made a fuss over my name day.”

“That’s not the same. Tibor suggested I look up your baptismal certificate in the parish records, and I did, but it was a funny thing. The date of birth had been smudged right out with black gunk. It looked like ink from a typewriter ribbon.”

“Did it?”

“It’s no use not telling me, Gregor. I’ll just go on giving you presents whenever I think it might fit. Donna and I have even discussed giving you two or three surprise parties a year. Besides, we have a clue.”

“What clue?”

“You were born on Friday the thirteenth. Hannah Krekorian says she remembers your mother talking about it to the other women, saying what an unlucky day that usually is but it was lucky for her because she got you.”