Feast of Murder(45)

“Know the boat?” Fritzie was blank for a minute. Then she brightened up. “Oh, I don’t know the boat,” she said. “It was never a family thing with Jon, not until this time, anyway. It was more like his private hobby. I’ve been on it before, of course.”

“Of course,” Gregor said. “Can I help you with anything?”

“I don’t have anything I need help with. I should have worn a heavier coat. There’s that. I was looking for Jon, that’s all.”

“Mr. Baird is in his cabin,” Gregor said solemnly. “With the other Mr. Baird. I left them there not more than five minutes ago.”

“Oh, dear.”

“You had something private you wanted to discuss?”

What Gregor Demarkian had just said was an impertinence. Fritzie knew that. She also knew that in the old days, she would have frozen him out or left him standing where he was. Now all that seemed like much too much effort.

“It hasn’t been a very cozy divorce,” she said suddenly. “I don’t go to dinner with Jon and Sheila. There’s been nothing like that.”

“I hope not.” Demarkian sounded faintly shocked.

“It has been an amicable divorce, though. I think that woman tricked him, if you want to know the truth. I really think she did. Jon didn’t want to leave me. He hasn’t completely and absolutely left me yet.”

“Oh?”

“He pretends he needs my help,” Fritzie said. “You know how that is. You’re a man. An ordinary man would have lost a button and needed me to sew it on or shown me his refrigerator when it had nothing in it but moldy Chinese food, but of course Jon has a valet for his buttons and a cook. Jon did the most obvious thing he could do, just to let me know.”

“What was that?”

“He came to me and borrowed money,” Fritzie said triumphantly. “Just this past August. Can you imagine that? Jon Baird needing money?”

“This past August,” Demarkian said slowly, “Jon Baird was in the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury.”

“I know where he was, Mr. Demarkian. I went there to see him. He called me up and asked me to come.”

“And then he asked to borrow money?”

“Three million dollars from the trust he set up for me. He’s got control of it anyway. He didn’t have to ask my permission. He was just trying to let me know, if you see what I mean.”

“Not exactly,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“I’ve got to go,” Fritzie said, suddenly feeling confused.

And she was confused. In fact, she was more than a little horrified. She tried to remember what she had said over the last minute or so of conversation, but all she could retrieve was a vague feeling of: this will get him. She had no doubt whatsoever who the “him” was, it was who the “him” always was except that she would have said, not ten minutes ago, that she didn’t feel that way about Jon at all. And yet, she was not surprised. It was as if the emotion had been there all along, and this man Demarkian had only brought it to the surface. She backed away from him and swallowed, hard.

“You’re nothing at all like a great detective,” she said. “I don’t even like you.”

“Mrs. Baird?” Gregor Demarkian said.

But by now she was almost all the way back to the staircase, ladder, whatever you called it, almost all the way back to her escape route. She’d decided to throw that woman out of Tony’s room and make him talk to her. She’d decided to do something definite, at any rate. It wasn’t true that she felt about Tony just the way she felt about Jon. It wasn’t true that she wanted to kill both of them.

What she really wanted was a Roquefort cheeseburger from Hamburger Heaven and a plate of deep-fried onion rings in batter.





2


“Damn,” Jon Baird was saying, almost two hours later. “There goes another one.”

“Another bridge?” Charlie Shay called back. “The same one?”

“I only have one,” Jon Baird said. Then he stuck his head into the main room of his two-room suite and smiled so that Charlie could see the gap in his gums, a long line of unrelieved pink that ran along the bottom on the right side. Then Jon stuck his hand out and showed off the broken bridge, lying cut in half across his palm. Charlie shook his head, and on the other side of the cabin Calvin Baird wagged a finger in the air.

“That dentist of yours ought to be sued for the work he does,” Calvin said. “Nobody should get away with producing shoddy workmanship of that kind.”

Jon Baird shot Charlie Shay a look, and Charlie found himself smiling, just slightly enough to go undetected by Calvin. Charlie wouldn’t have liked to have had to admit it, but that look had made him feel good, almost physically warm. In the old days, he and Jon had been that way together often, sharing secrets, knowing what each other thought. Theirs had been a college friendship, and like all college friendships it had had elements of small-boyishness in it. They hadn’t cut their fingers and sworn to be blood brothers, but if they had it wouldn’t have been out of place. Then the years had gone by and all Charlie’s inadequacies had been put on display. Charlie didn’t even bother to deny that they were his own inadequacies. There were men who were geniuses at business and men who could get along in it without too much trouble. Charlie would have done himself better service if he’d gone into teaching or art. Jon, being a genius, hadn’t had much patience with that. Charlie didn’t see why he should have. Now, however, Calvin’s prissiness had drawn them together again, temporary though that might be, and Charlie was glad.