Feast of Murder(73)

Some sort of psychological trouble. Gregor sighed. He had met witnesses like Gail Creasey. They drove him to distraction. They could make a Freudian epic out of a man’s preference for coffee over tea. He had met report writers like the one who had put this together, too. He thought they all ought to be sent back to school. He flipped to the back of the report and found the lists. At least, with the lists, he didn’t have to suffer through anyone’s awful prose.

As in any FBI report, there were lists of many things, some of them so arbitrary you had to wonder why the list maker had bothered. Gregor always imagined them being put together by a little man with an eyeshade who lived in a vault deep in Bureau headquarters, and who wrote lists for secular sources, like The Book of Lists, in his spare time. The list that Gregor wanted now, though, could have been put together by any decent detective, federal, state, or local. It was the list of things that had been found on Donald McAdam’s foyer table after Donald McAdam had died.

“Crystal paperweight in the shape of a swan, Steuben glass,” the list began and then:

    copy of book, Collecting Antique Brass, by Devonbarr. Paperback

    sterling silver cocaine spoon, unused

    roll of stamps, 29 cent

    sterling silver letter opener

    manila envelope, used, addressed to Donald McAdam, letterhead Baird Financial Services

    copy of contract, agreement Donald McAdam and Baird Financial Services, dated day of death, signed Donald McAdam and Jonathan Edgewick Baird

    three brass suspender clips

    mason jar, preserves marked “Melon Rind Marmalade”

    one silk rep tie

    one gold tie tack, shape of musical note

    three number 2 pencils

    one gold Mark Cross pen

    one paging device, made by Sony



Gregor shook his head. A “paging device” would be a beeper, but other than that the list was simple enough. Taken together with the testimony of the doorman and Mrs. Creasey, it could mean only one thing. Gregor thought that had to be significant. In fact, it had to be more than significant. It struck out at him like a snake. He just couldn’t figure out what it meant.

He tossed the FBI file into the bag with the food Donna Moradanyan had sent and stood up. He could hear people moving above his head, shuffling steps that reminded him of the dead walking in a terrible movie Donna and Bennis had made him take them to because they wanted to see it and it was playing in an uncertain part of town. He wondered what it really was, members of the crew or passengers. He had a sudden vision of the passengers getting up to go into each others’ cabins in the dead of night, engaging in hanky-panky of every possible description—and then the hanky-panky he was imagining was between Bennis Hannaford and Tony Baird, and he knew he had to give it up.

What he did instead was to blow out the candles, climb into the empty bunk, say good night to Charlie Shay in a loud voice, and fall asleep.

When the door was opened two hours later and a head stuck through, listened to his snoring, and withdrew again, Gregor Demarkian knew nothing about it.





Five


1


FOR GREGOR, THE WORST thing about being a passenger on a boat like the Pilgrimage Green was the utter unending sameness of it all. If he had been crewing on a smaller boat—God forbid—he would at least have had work to do. If he had been a passenger on a large modern liner, he would have been forced into voluntary paralysis by some social director with a whistle around her neck. On this boat, he had nothing to distract him but the weather, and that had calmed significantly while he slept. Gregor Demarkian didn’t count murder as a distraction. That was something he had to think about. He wanted something to do.

He came awake in the spare bunk in Charlie Shay’s cabin tomb with no idea what time it was, or even if it was morning. There were no portholes in the cabins down here, because these cabins were at the waterline or below it. Gregor unwound himself and climbed out onto the center of the room. It had taken a great deal of winding to fit himself into that small high-sided bunk, so much that the very idea of trying to wind himself into one of the smaller ones on the deck above appalled him. His back ached and his muscles were throbbing. His head felt like a helium balloon. He looked into Charlie Shay’s bunk, found the body lying there undisturbed, and felt around in his clothes for the cabin key. It was a heavy iron old-fashioned thing and hard to lose. He put his hand right on it, because it was sitting in his hip pocket and making a dent in the top of his thigh. His only problem was to get it untangled from the cotton there. He got the FBI file on the death of Donald McAdam and tucked it under his belt. Then he let himself out, locked the door behind him, and headed for the decks above.