Feast of Murder(68)

He got himself a huge, heaping plate of pork and a half loaf of hard brown bread that came from Zabar’s and that he had always liked very much. He said a prayer of thanksgiving that his father’s peripatetic passion for authenticity didn’t extend to salt pork and hard cod. Then he climbed back up the stairs and down the passage to his own cabin with the plate in his hand, moving as easily in the darkness as he did in the light. The crew might forget about the bell for hours at a time, but they didn’t forget about the candles. The candles were authentic. They were also dangerous. One forgetful hour and the whole ship could burn itself straight into the sea. The crew came down every half hour or so and checked them out, and at eleven when everybody was supposed to be asleep they put the candles out.

Tony went to his cabin door, balanced the plate in one hand, and unlocked to let himself in. Here, as back in New York, he was always careful to lock up behind him. He didn’t like the idea of someone being able to get in and look at his things. Especially not now. Especially not with that man Demarkian on board. Tony propped open the door with his foot and felt along the wall just inside for the empty space of table. He found it and put his plate down there. Then he got his matches out of his pocket and lit the candle in the holder next to the door.

Farther along the passage, another door opened and a head stuck out into the hall.

“Tony?” Sheila said. “Is that you?”

“It’s me.”

“I came down looking for you before, but you were out.”

There was a doorstop made out of a polished rock on the table where he had put his food. Tony dropped it to the floor and kicked it across to hold the door open, letting the dim light of the single candle glow into the passage. Sheila came out into the passage with no light of her own and closed the door to her cabin behind her.

“For a while there I thought you were with that Hannaford woman,” she said. “You’ve been with her all day.”

“She’s an interesting woman. She’s led an interesting life.”

“I stopped worrying when I remembered she had a cabin together with Mr. Demarkian.”

Sheila came up to Tony’s door, looked at the plate of food on the table and made a face.

“I couldn’t face food if you paid me,” she said. “Not after all that terrible stuff about Charlie Shay. I think you’re very callous to be able to eat.”

“I think you’re a dyed-in-the-wool bitch to be pulling this now. I am hungry, you know, Sheila.”

“Mmm.”

“What about my father?”

“Your father took a sleeping pill.”

“Dad never takes sleeping pills.”

“He does when I want him to.”

“Are you trying to tell me you drugged him?”

Sheila walked around the table, poking at the food as she went. Tony watched her move with fascination. He’d always thought of Sheila as something not exactly human, almost as something feline. The more he saw of her the more convinced he was that that description was true.

Tony bent over, picked up the doorstop, and stood while the door swung shut on its own. It had an old-fashioned hasp and wouldn’t close by itself. He leaned over and closed it and then threw the bolt.

“Good,” Sheila told him. “No sensible person would want to eat anything right now.”

Actually, Tony wanted to eat everything right now, what he had on the plate and what he had left back in the kitchen. He was ravenous and obsessed. He was also very conscious of the rules of the game here. He knew what he had to do as long as he wanted to go on having an affair with his father’s wife.

Sheila came around to the front of him and wrapped her arms around his neck. He put his hand on her back and pulled her toward him. He still felt more hunger than he did anything else, but he knew the moves of this dance as well as he knew how to chew.

He could have done it in his sleep.





Four


1


GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD BROUGHT along the FBI report on the death of Donald McAdam because the very young man from the Bureau had asked him to read it. He had even intended to read it, in spite of the fact that he thought the exercise was silly. It didn’t matter if the death of Donald McAdam was murder or suicide or accident or the will of an angry God. Nobody was going to prove it one way or the other now. If it was murder, nobody was going to jail the murderer. Gregor had never been the sort of investigator who gave up on his cases forty-eight hours after they had started. He’d known agents and cops like that and never had much use for them. Still, there was a point at which you had to accept the inevitable. To bring a case to court you needed either one or two pieces of hard physical evidence, or the very best kind of story. Gregor had seen story-cases brought and won. The Woodchipper Murderer had been jailed on a story. So had Frances Schreuder, who had manipulated her teenage sons into killing her father. To make it stick, you had to have a veritable epic, a large-scale morality tale with background music. There was nothing like that in Donald McAdam’s fall. Gregor had listened to the very young man from the Bureau and then thought the problem through himself. The lack of strychnine in the apartment was suggestive—it might even be definitive—but it couldn’t quite dispel the dispirited limpness of it all. Donald McAdam had been a fool. Donald McAdam had behaved foolishly. Donald McAdam was dead. A marginally intelligent public defender just two days out of the South Podunk Community College Law School could establish reasonable doubt with the likes of that.