Feast of Murder(86)

“Get somebody fired,” Bennis repeated. “Gregor, for God’s sake, doesn’t it bother you? Doesn’t it bother you that somebody had this? Don’t you wonder how it got here?”

“No to both questions,” Gregor said. “In the first place, I know who had it. Jon Baird had it. He’s the only one who could have gotten hold of it and getting hold of it fits his personality. In the second place, I know who put it here, and that’s Sheila Baird. Tony, Jon, and Calvin wouldn’t have put it here at all. Julie, Mark, and Fritzie would have knocked on my door and handed it over in person. What else would you like to know?”

Bennis sat down in the chair. “I’d like to know what’s going on around here,” she demanded. “I mean, this thing shows up in our cabin, all marked over with yellow highlighter—”

“Is it?” Gregor took the file back again and flipped through it. It was definitely marked over with yellow highlighter. He read, “‘Demarkian’s strengths are in determining complex series of transactions over short periods of time’—that’s Bureauese for I’m good at figuring out what happened when and in what order when the times are tight. That’s true enough. Here we go again. ‘He has particular expertise in the uses and effects of common poisons.’ Well, I can do what I do with a lot more than common poisons. This is a second-tier evaluation report. I had no idea I was so well thought of in the Bureau. Would you like this back?”

“What’s a second-tier evaluation report?”

“It’s what you get when you ask the Bureau what one of its agents is best capable of doing. You get it for former agents, too, if you have a good reason for asking. One of the police forces I’ve been of aid to over the last two years must have put in a request and got this. Or an excerpt from this. The Bureau wouldn’t have handed over the whole file. Jon Baird must have very good connections. I wonder if he knows someone in the White House.”

“Your birthday isn’t in it,” Bennis said. She took the report back, turned it over in her hands, and put it down on the floor. “You look different somehow. Calmer. I’ve been driving myself crazy with all this business of being becalmed.”

“I was driving myself crazy yesterday,” Gregor said, “but I finally got it worked out this morning. Remember how I told you last night that I knew who had killed Charlie Shay?”

“I remember.”

“Well, now I know I can prove it—or if I can’t prove it in the case of Charlie Shay, I can at least prove it in the case of Donald McAdam, which will do just as well.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course.”

“The same person who killed Charlie Shay killed Donald McAdam?”

Gregor was impatient. “What did you expect?” he demanded. “That the New York financial community is awash in homicidal maniacs? Of course the same person killed both those men. It was even done in the same way.”

“With strychnine.”

“With sleight of hand,” Gregor told her. “Think about what happened to Charlie Shay. He must have been fed that strychnine at dinner last night, in the salad and not the salad dressing—”

“But—”

“But I said he must have been fed ipecac, too. And he was. Also in the salad, not the salad dressing, because the salad dressing was being passed back and forth across the table in no particular order. On the other hand, there were at least three people capable of doctoring the salad—Julie Anderwahl, who was sitting beside him, Jon Baird, who was sitting across from him, and me.”

“Julie Anderwahl saw Donald McAdam on the day he died,” Bennis said slowly. “He was in her office. It’s in that report we were reading. But that was earlier in the day. The times don’t make sense.”

“They make even less sense for Jon Baird,” Gregor said. “After all, the man not only saw McAdam in the morning, he saw him in jail—and I don’t care how lax Danbury is, they wouldn’t have allowed a vial of strychnine to get into a prisoner’s cell if they’d known anything at all about it.”

“You mean neither of the people who could have killed Charlie Shay could have killed Donald McAdam?”

“No,” Gregor said, “I mean you shouldn’t give up on the obvious so easily. What has Baird Financial just done?”

“Made a deal with Europabanc,” Bennis said dutifully.

“No. That’s what it’s about to do. What has it just done?”

“Oh. Well, I guess the last big thing was selling off those junk bonds that belonged to McAdam’s investment company.”