Feast of Murder(96)

“Now we come to a difficulty. We are back a couple of years ago still, and we have a situation where Jon Baird wants Donald McAdam dead, but where of course he wants him safely dead. Safely for Jon Baird himself, that is. The problem here is the obvious one. The first thing any police department asks in a case of suspicious death is, who benefits? The facts in this case were going to be somewhat arcane, but the police would have picked up on them eventually. Who benefits most is most definitely Baird Financial. The auction from the sale of those junk bonds went off a little while ago, and I’ve heard it was the biggest in history. It was, therefore, a very good idea, in the first place, to make it look as if Baird Financial didn’t benefit, and then that the man most likely to have the nerve and imagination to commit such a murder was definitely out of the possible run of murderers. That, I think, was vanity on the part of Jon Baird. He liked to think of himself as the only true genius of Baird Financial, and in a financial sense that might be true. In the business of day-to-day life, however, I think he has a few employees who can rival him, even ones on this boat. Never mind. The important point here is that he wanted to make sure he could not be suspected of this murder.”

Jon Baird was no longer leaning against the spool. He was sitting down, with his arms still crossed on his chest and his legs stretched out in front of him. He looked awkwardly like someone not used to relaxing, but trying to.

“All this is very interesting,” he said, “but I still don’t see how you’re going to prove it. And if you can’t prove it, I still don’t see why anybody ought to listen to it.”

“I can’t prove this part of it,” Gregor admitted, “but it wouldn’t be necessary to in a court of law. It’s just good to get the background in, don’t you think? The important point here is that you set out to commit a murder you could not be charged with—or that you thought you could not be charged with—and how you went about it was this. You got yourself arrested.”

“What?” Sheila Baird said.

“He got himself arrested,” Gregor repeated. “The more I heard about the case that sent Jon Baird to Danbury for fourteen months, the phonier it seemed. In the first place, it was the wrong kind of charge. The kind of insider trading Jon Baird was accused of participating in is unnecessary for anyone like Jon Baird. He can go to Paris and trade that way perfectly legally if he wants to. In the second place, it’s very hard to detect and almost impossible to prove. Well, the authorities didn’t detect it. They were tipped off to it, anonymously. And they didn’t have to prove it, either. Jon Baird pleaded guilty with no fuss at all. The more I looked at it, the more I had to conclude that the only reason Jon Baird went to jail was because Jon Baird wanted to go to jail.

“I also noted something else. Men who go into jail do a hundred things in preparation—or at least, they do if they’re middle-class, white-collar criminals with responsibilities they can’t ignore even if they have just got their hands caught in the cookie jar. Jon Baird had a business to run, a wife, a son, an ex-wife, partners—and yet, in the middle of all that, what did he do? He made advance preparations in case his dental bridge should break, going so far as to have a spare made and put aside should he need to call for it. And in spite of everything else he had on his mind, when he got to jail he went to work on a very elaborate ship model in a bottle, one that took him most of his term to complete.”

“But Dad’s bridge does break,” Tony Baird said, “and he’s always made ship models. They cool him out.”

“I know,” Gregor agreed. “But now look at this. Jon Baird is sitting in jail with only two months to go before his release. He suddenly—and a dozen people have told me it was suddenly—decides to buy off Donald McAdam’s employment contract, right now, right this minute, won’t wait. Of course, he did have the Europabanc deal in the offing. He needed the cash for that. He faked his records for the preliminaries, but when the sale came he was going to have to have the cash. But look what happened with that. The auction didn’t go off until well after Jon Baird had been released from prison. There was no reason on earth why the McAdam signing shouldn’t have waited until Jon was back in his office. Except, of course, that he didn’t want it to wait. He didn’t want to be in a position to be suspected of hastening McAdam’s death. After all, we were going to have to have death by strychnine here. McAdam was notorious for putting strychnine in cocaine to give himself an extra kick—courting suicide in the process—and although that was likely to be what the police believe in this case, there was no way to be sure. And as it turned out, the police didn’t believe, although when they were talking for public consumption they said they did. As a matter of fact, there was no strychnine in the cocaine McAdam used the night after he saw Jon Baird in Danbury, and there wasn’t any in the apartment, either.”