Feast of Murder(84)

Since he had retired from the Bureau and moved to Cavanaugh Street, Gregor had been a player in five murder investigations. In each one of these he had had the confidence of the local police and the kind of help only police could provide. Crime labs, blood tests, fingerprint identification—all that was very nice, but what you really needed a police force for was to keep the suspects in line. Stuck out here in the middle of the ocean like this, wherever the hell they were, there was no incentive for any of these people to cooperate.

Gregor came out of the dining hall, pounding along almost as steadily as if he were on land. He was still not moving as quickly, but that had more to do with the low ceiling of the passage than it did with the motion of the sea. He passed the door to his own cabin without giving it a glance, noted that the door to Tony Baird’s was open and that the cabin beyond was empty, and stopped in front of Jon Baird’s door. He really was exasperated beyond all measure. What he wanted to do was kick the door in and shout, “This is a raid!” at the top of his lungs. He’d never in his life done anything even remotely like that. He’d never sprung into firing position and shouted “Freeze!” either. He thought it would be good for his soul. He thought there had to be some way of getting around the fact that if he kicked at Jon Baird’s door, all he’d get for it was a broken foot.

He took a deep breath, counted to ten, and waited for himself to calm down. It took less time than he’d expected, and he raised his hand to knock at the door. Just as he did, the door opened from inside and Calvin Baird came tumbling into him, looking annoyed.

“What are you doing here?” Calvin demanded, stepping back a little. “I’d have thought you’d be off investigating something.”

“I am investigating something,” Gregor said.

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

Calvin dodged around Gregor and into the passage, leaving Gregor staring through the open door at a perfectly composed Jon Baird sitting in a wood chair. He had a robe on over what looked like silk pajamas and a towel around his neck. Gregor stepped into the cabin and shut the door behind him.

“I want to talk to you,” he said.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Jon Baird said pleasantly. “Why don’t you give it up?”

“I’m not going to give it up. I may have to ask somebody else—your present wife, for instance—but I’m not going to give it up. I want to see your bridge.”

“My bridge?”

There was a ship in a bottle fastened to a small occasional table at Jon Baird’s side. Gregor stared at it for a moment—the things were all over the boat, it was true—and then looked away. “I want to see your bridge,” he said again. “The one you’re always breaking.”

“Do you want to see a broken one or an intact one?”

“Do you have both?”

“Of course.” Jon Baird got up and went into the inner room. When he came back he was holding what looked like a wad of tissue in his hand. He held the wad out to Gregor and smiled.

“Take a look for yourself. I broke that the first day we were aboard. I had a spare, of course.”

“Do you always have a spare?”

“I make a point of it.”

“Who provides you with the spares?”

“If you mean who makes them up for me—well then, my dentist, of course. If you mean who brings them to me when I need them—” Jon Baird shrugged. “I think everybody in the family has brought me one at one point or the other. It’s a very fragile bridge. Too many teeth in too strange an arrangement to fit the peculiarities of my jaw.”

Gregor unwrapped the tissue paper and looked at the bridge. It did look as if it would be fragile—Jon Baird must be very vain to put up with this instead of putting up with a set of false teeth—but other than that it was a perfectly ordinary bridge. There was a plastic and metal understructure. There was the small row over very white teeth that looked perfectly real. There was the small tooth that had broken in half when the bridge had broken, looking like the hollow shell of a fake pearl. Gregor passed the bridge back.

“Is that always where it breaks?” he asked. “Right in the middle of that tooth?”

“No. Sometimes it breaks in the tooth to the back of that one. Do you really think this makes a difference?”

Gregor put his hands in his pockets. “When Donald McAdam came to see you at Danbury on the day he died, did you see him alone?”

“No. Calvin was there every minute, at least, and the lawyers. I wouldn’t have been allowed to see him alone in any case. Danbury is a cakewalk, but it’s not that much of a cakewalk.”