Feast of Murder(85)

“Did you give him the contracts yourself?”

“No. The lawyers gave them to each of us. Then when it was over we passed them all down to McAdam and he took them home.”

“They were signed?”

“Oh, yes. By me, of course.”

“But not by McAdam.”

“No. I decided to go in for a little insurance. It’s almost impossible to sue on the basis of undue influence if you’ve been allowed to take a set of contracts home to look them over. That’s what I made him do.”

“But you’d had the contracts yourself, on your own, for at least overnight?”

“Oh, yes. I’d had the whole package. Charlie Shay brought it to me.”

“And what was in that package?”

Jon Baird cocked his head. “Why bother to ask me? Why not ask Mark or Julie or one of the secretaries—one of the secretaries especially. It’s the kind of thing they know. And it’s hardly a secret. The package consisted of three copies of the contract, a stamped envelope addressed to Baird Financial, the descriptive sheets outlining the exact nature and extent of the McAdam corporation holdings as of the previous Friday, a standard set of currency conversion tables, also valid as of the previous Friday, for anyone who had to work through the foreign holdings and didn’t know how to do that, a set of legal waivers for everything on earth, and a check for twelve million five hundred thousand dollars, as per agreement.”

“You gave Donald McAdam the check before he had even signed the contracts?”

“Of course we didn’t give him the check. It went into the file. For exactly the same reason and in exactly the same way that your binder check goes into a file when you make an offer for some real estate.”

Gregor considered. “What happened to that check after Donald McAdam died?”

“Absolutely nothing. It stayed in the file. It’s still in the file. If we ever come across an heir, we’ll hand it over. If we don’t and the time limit runs out, we’ll hand it over to the state of New York.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

“This is idiotic,” Jon Baird told him. “You must know these questions make no sense. If you weren’t so insistent on turning poor Charlie’s death into something it isn’t, you wouldn’t get caught up in this sort of foolishness.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t,” Gregor said pleasantly.

Jon Baird looked at him suspiciously, but Gregor wasn’t worried about that. He knew there was nothing to see. He backed toward the door again, opened it up, and stepped into the passage. The passage was still narrow and the ceiling was still low, but all of a sudden he felt much less claustrophobic than he had been feeling. The boat, in fact, no longer felt like a prison at all. It was just a very small place.

Jon Baird looked like he was about to say something, and then changed his mind. He came to the door and shut it firmly in Gregor’s face. Gregor looked at the polished wood and then turned away, heading for the staircase and the deck above. Claustrophobic or not, he did feel like a badminton birdie on the Pilgrimage Green. First bounce this way. Then bounce that way. Never a third way to bounce. It was maddening.

Halfway down the hall, right in Gregor’s path, a cabin door opened. If Gregor had been paying attention, he would have noticed that it was his own cabin. Instead, the first thing he noticed was a hand on his wrist and Bennis’s voice hissing loudly into the silent air. “Gregor, quick, get in here. I have something to show you.”

If Bennis Hannaford’s life ever depended on her calling not even the slightest bit of attention to herself, she would be dead.





2


The FBI report was lying on the seat of the chair where Gregor had found Bennis when he came in the night before. When he first saw it, Gregor made the same mistake Bennis had made when she first saw it lying on the bunk. He thought it was the FBI file on the death of Donald McAdam. His eyes went over it without pausing and then surveyed the rest of the room. He noticed that Bennis had made up the bunk and neatly folded their clothes into piles. Then Bennis tugged at his wrist again, and waved the file in his face.

“Will you look at this?” she demanded. “I found it in here when I came back from my shower. It isn’t what you think it is.”

“What is it?”

“Here.”

Gregor took the file, read the title—“AGENT REPORT: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, BACKGROUND. GREGOR DEMARKIAN”—and flushed. Then he turned quickly to the second page, found what he’d been hoping for, and relaxed. He handed the file back to Bennis.

“Don’t lose that,” he said. “There’s a little string of numbers on the back of the title page that tell anyone who can read them where that came from. When we finally get off this boat, we can get somebody fired.”