Feast of Murder(70)

Over in the chair, Bennis was sucking on her fingers, a sure sign that she had just finished a honey cake. He waited until she looked up and said, “Has all that reading gotten you anywhere? Have you come to any conclusions about the death of Donald McAdam?”

“I hope I’ve come to the same conclusions you have,” Bennis said. “You have to think it’s murder, now.”

“I always did think it was murder,” Gregor said. “That wasn’t my point. My point was that it was a murder that was never going to be proved, and for which no one was ever going to go to jail.”

“Fine. Let me ask you this. Do you think Charlie Shay and Donald McAdam were killed by the same person?”

“I think it would be a very strange world if they were not.” Gregor scooped up eggplant salad with a chunk of bread and ate it. “Let’s look at it this way,” he said. “There are a great many people on this boat who would dearly have liked to see Donald McAdam dead. Donald McAdam is dead, and so is another man, who has died in a way very similar to the one in which we suppose McAdam died. It would be a one in a billion chance if these two things were not connected; therefore we must assume they were connected.”

“All right.”

“All right,” Gregor repeated. “What does that tell you?”

Bennis looked puzzled. “It doesn’t tell me anything,” she said, “except that there’s a murderer on this boat, and I already know that. It doesn’t tell me who the murderer is. Oh. It means whoever it is has to be the same person who murdered McAdam, so that lets out Jon Baird.”

“Excuse me?”

“Jon Baird was in jail at the time, so he couldn’t have murdered Donald McAdam. Or if he had, McAdam would have died before he did because strychnine works fast. Actually, if you believe this report, it lets out everybody. I’ve been paying careful attention to where everybody said they were ten minutes or so before McAdam died, and they were all halfway across town.”

Gregor looked down at his lap and saw that he was out of food. He got up, went back to the suitcase, and got some more.

“Let’s change the subject for a minute.” He gave up on taking pieces of food and simply acquired the entire brown paper bag. There were some things in there he hadn’t seen before, including a little pile of meatballs in crust. What had Donna been thinking of? He sat down on the slat again and put the bag on the bunk’s mattress. Then he began to unpack it. “Did you talk to Calvin Baird today?” he asked Bennis.

Bennis made a face. “Of course I did. Everybody’s talked to Calvin Baird today. He’s been wandering up and down the boat, behaving like the ancient mariner of certified accounting.”

“He was talking to you about a discrepancy in some numbers?”

“He certainly was.”

“Did you understand what it was about?”

“Of course I did.”

“Explain it to me.”

Bennis looked nonplussed, the way she always did when Gregor asked for financial information. After all, didn’t Gregor have a degree in accounting—a master’s degree, from the Harvard Business School? Gregor never seemed to be able to explain to her that he had taken that degree a long time ago, and only because in those days a man had to have a degree in accounting or law to get taken on at the Bureau. Once he had been taken on at the Bureau, he had volunteered for kidnapping detail and forgotten all about numbers. Bennis rearranged herself on her chair and said, “The discrepancy is in the list of figures that are supposed to be reporting the cash Baird Financial had on hand about eight months or a year ago when they made their formal offer for Europabanc. You understand what I mean by a formal offer? Baird and Europabanc had been talking to each other for years, I think. The first article I ever read about Jon Baird, I think it was in Forbes, went on at length about how he’d always wanted to found a great international banking house like Rothschild and how he’d had his eye on Europabanc and a possible method of doing that. You can have your eye on anything, though, if you know what I mean. They only made the formal offer this past year, or maybe it was last.”

“While Jon Baird was in jail.”

“I don’t know,” Bennis said slowly. “It might have been before that—I’m sorry to be so fuzzy, Gregor, you ought to ask Calvin or Jon Baird about the exact timing—but you know, if it wasn’t after Jon Baird had gone to jail, then it was probably after they knew he was going to. If you see what I mean.”

“I see what you mean. This cash on hand. How important was it?”