Feast of Murder(42)

“Damn,” he said, as he proceeded to go over.

“Damn yourself,” Jon Baird laughed after him. “Watch your head. We don’t want you to drown.”

“He is going to drown,” Fritzie Baird said, almost squealing. “He is, he is. Do something about it.”

“For God’s sake, Fritzie,” Calvin Baird said, “the boy swims better than Mark Spitz.”

Then there was a secondary splash, caused by only God knew what, and Fritzie Baird started screaming.





3


Ten minutes later, it was all over except for Fritzie’s hysterics. Since no one was paying attention to Fritzie, Gregor assumed that hysterics were something she engaged in often. Swimming was something Tony Baird obviously engaged in often. Gregor didn’t think he was really better than Mark Spitz, but he was good, and he kept his head. When he got back on board they could see he’d chucked the heavy boots he’d been wearing so he wouldn’t be dragged down. Gregor had no doubt he would have chucked his sweater and his turtleneck if he’d been stuck in the water long enough to make it necessary. This was definitely a young man who could think.

“Damn boots cost me three hundred dollars,” Tony said to his father, holding up his sock feet. “Eddie Bauer. I hope you’re ready to replace them.”

“Of course I’m ready to replace them,” Jon Baird said. “Go get out of those clothes. You’re going to get hypothermia.”

“Go calm down your mother,” Sheila Baird said. “Now I know what people mean when they talk about a high-pitched whine.”

“Don’t get started,” Calvin Baird said. “That’s all we need on this trip, the wives quarreling.”

In Gregor Demarkian’s opinion, the only way Calvin could have escaped the wives quarreling was to be on some other boat—but this was so obvious, it hardly needed expressing. Instead, he bent even closer to Bennis’s ear and began to whisper again.

“Did you notice anything funny?” he asked her.

Bennis shot him a look that clearly said she’d noticed a host of things funny. Everything on this boat was funny. Then she went back to watching Tony Baird, who was methodically stripping to the waist and throwing his water-sogged clothes in a heap at his feet. Gregor felt himself wince slightly and then shook it off. Tony Baird was definitely a very good-looking young man and right up Bennis’s alley in the psychological department. Bennis had always liked men who could have conceivably starred in a movie version of “Leader of the Pack.” Tony Baird was also at least ten years younger than Bennis, and Bennis had never had any use for younger men. At least, Gregor didn’t think she had. Gregor put it all firmly out of his mind and said, “Were you watching him when he went over?”

“I was watching that woman you were talking to with the blond hair,” Bennis told him. “How much you want to bet that she’s pregnant.”

“She’s seasick.”

“That explains the green. It doesn’t explain the waist.”

“I was looking straight at Tony Baird,” Gregor said. “Do you know what I saw?”

“No.”

“He was leaning forward, not backward. He was leaning in toward the table, not out toward the sea.”

Bennis looked at him curiously. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Are you saying he should have fallen forward instead of back?”

“If he had fallen, he would have fallen forward instead of back.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Gregor sighed. “That’s supposed to mean,” he said, “that I not only saw him fall, I also saw Jon Baird push him. Good Lord, Bennis, it wasn’t even subtle. He might as well have picked the boy up at the knees and pitched him overboard.”





Six


1


FRITZIE DERWENT BAIRD HAD been brought up to preside at parties with organization. Her own coming-out party had featured not only a receiving line but three different bands playing three different kinds of music in three different places on her parents’ broad property in Radnor, a fully equipped diner serving hot dogs and hamburgers and cotton candy to anyone who asked, and a session of water games held at midnight in the indoor pool. It was the kind of coming-out party that had been popular at the time, meaning before Jackie Kennedy had brought coming-out parties to national attention and made everybody too embarrassed to spend so much money. It was also one of the reasons why Fritzie had been left nearly destitute when her parents died—except, of course, for what she had as Jon Baird’s wife. Fritzie had never made the connection, any more than she had made the connection between Ronald Reagan and the rise of the religious right or Gorbachev and perestroika. All that sort of thing took place on a different planet, or in another time warp, and had nothing to do with her. Besides, she felt so drowsy and fuzzy and weak, it was hard to think in an orderly way about anything at all. When she did try to think, what she thought about was Sheila, and it came down to this: if that young woman had had any kind of upbringing at all, she would have been up and around and leading the guests in deck games. She would at least have done what Fritzie herself had done, which was to bring something special and important for the holiday, to make her guests feel special and important themselves. Fritzie had brought thirty jars of her Thanksgiving pumpkin rind marmalade, made over the course of two days she could have used for packing or going to the theater or seeing friends. The mason jars were capped with harvest-pattern cotton and sitting patiently in rows at the bottom of her footlocker, waiting to be handed out. Sheila seemed not to have thought about her guests at all, at least not as far as the holiday was concerned.