Feast of Murder(35)
Their driver was sitting impassively behind the steering wheel, making no move to get out to open the doors for them or see to their luggage. Bennis shot an exasperated look at the back of his head and opened her door herself.
“I’m sure we can’t actually sail in weather like this,” she said. “I wonder what we’re going to do if it doesn’t let up.”
“Fog like this always lets up,” Gregor told her.
Bennis climbed out of the car and made her way around its nose to the boardwalk. In her jeans and turtleneck and flannel shirt, she looked like a college student who had streaked her dark hair with random polka dot spots of grey. Then she took a step into the fog and disappeared altogether.
“Don’t do that,” Gregor called after her. “If you get lost, we’ll never find you.”
“I’m not lost,” Bennis called back, “I’m holding onto some kind of post. I was going to go look for the boat but I’ve changed my mind. I’d end up falling into the water.”
“You can’t fall into the water,” a voice said. “There are guard ropes all up and down the pier. Give me a minute and I’ll get this light on.”
If there was one thing Gregor didn’t want to hear coming out of a thick fog, it was a voice he wasn’t ready for coming from a place he couldn’t determine attached to no visible body at all. When the sound reached him, he almost jumped out of his skin. Then he opened the car door next to him, stepped carefully out onto the curb, and said, “Who is that?”
“Where is everybody?” Bennis called back. “I feel like I’m floating in mutagen ooze.”
“Just a minute,” the voice said. There was the sound of something metallic being scraped back and forth and then of something plastic hitting the boardwalk. The voice said “Damn” much too loudly and made the fog near Gregor’s ears seem to quiver. The sound of something metallic being scraped back and forth resumed in staccato. “Damn, damn,” the voice said again, and then a light came on, strong and round and well-defined, cutting through the fog. “There we go,” the voice said again, except that this time it was attached to a young man with high cheekbones and long lines and a shock of straight dark hair. He was leaning over to pick up something from the boardwalk. It looked to Gregor like one half of a child’s walkie-talkie toy. The young man got it into the palm of his hand, shoved it into his pocket, and straightened up. Then he turned slowly until he caught Bennis hanging onto her post and smiled. “You must be Bennis Hannaford,” he said. “I’m Tony Baird.”
“I know,” Bennis said. “I think we’ve met.”
“You think we ought to have met,” Tony corrected her. He turned to Gregor and held out his hand. “If this is Bennis Hannaford, you must be Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “I’m very glad to see you. My father’s never hired himself his own private expert on murder before.”
2
If Gregor had wanted to, he could have spent an hour correcting all the misimpressions Tony Baird had gotten about his stay on the Pilgrimage Green. For one thing, Gregor had never once allowed himself to be “hired” by anybody to be an expert in murder, or in anything else. For twenty long years, he had been an employee of the U.S. government as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Since that time, he had been an employee of no one and nothing at all, and he intended to keep it that way. It was true that Jon Baird had offered him money to sail on the Pilgrimage Green. People did offer him money when they wanted him to do something for them. Gregor never took it. He wasn’t rich, but he had more than enough to live on as long as he didn’t develop Bennis Hannaford’s tastes in personal amusement. He liked his independence more than he wanted to buy anything he couldn’t already afford. The furthest he would go, at the end of a successful investigation, was to suggest that Father Tibor’s Armenian Relief Fund was running a little low—which it always was, because Tibor could spend money even faster than Bennis could. Such a suggestion had prompted John Cardinal O’Bannion and the Archdiocese of Colchester, New York, to find an official way of providing the fund with two healthy infusions of cash, for which Tibor and Gregor had both been suitably grateful. It was not the same thing as “hiring” Gregor Demarkian.
The other place Tony Baird had got it wrong, of course, was in the assumption that what his father wanted was an expert on murder. Gregor could have corrected this impression very easily, but he decided not to. There were sometimes advantages to being considered an expert on murder in a situation where no such expert seemed to be required. It put people off balance. It even attracted a few of them, so that they came and told him things he had no right to hear. This was a tactic he had heretofore confined to much more serious investigations, investigations that really were investigations. In spite of the strange visit he had had from Steve Hartigan’s young man from the FBI, Gregor had no reason to think that Jon Baird’s little problem would be anything but inconsequential. He let the misimpression stand because, for some reason he couldn’t pin down, he didn’t like this young man. He didn’t like him at all. As soon as he’d gotten a good look at his face, all the hairs on the back of his head had stood on end.