Hearts of Sand(23)

“Are they going to walk in someday next week and shut us down?”

“No,” Tim said. “They’re not going to shut us down at all. They’re going to give us a time frame, and when we don’t comply, they’re going to start levying fines. Once the fines get high enough, they’ll put a lien on the clinic. This could take years.”

“Oh,” Marcie said. “Years. But a lot could happen in years.”

“One of the things that could happen is that they could bleed us dry.”

“I hate lawyers,” Marcie said. She looked down at the papers and ledgers spread out over the desk. Then she picked up the paperback about the Waring case—The Secret Files of Chapin Waring!—and turned it over in her hands.

“I suppose it is going to be a silly book,” she said, “but I get curious. Did it upset you very much, when Chapin Waring died?”

“I think it mostly disoriented me,” Tim said. “I think I unconsciously assumed she’d been dead for years. If there are things you really want to know, I could probably tell you more about that case than anything you can get out of a book. Especially a book like that.”

“I didn’t like to ask. I didn’t know if it was—something, you know. A painful something,” Marcie said.

Tim got up out of the chair. “I don’t know if ‘painful’ is the word I’d use,” he said. “That case made me a Catholic, although it took about a decade.”

“Maybe this Gregor Demarkian will find all the answers,” Marcie said. “Maybe having him here and having all this fuss will take everybody’s minds off of us, and this whole Health Care Access thing will fall into the sea without a trace.”

Tim thought that was as likely to happen as fig trees sprouting green cheese.





SIX

1

Gregor Demarkian got his first glimpse of Alwych, Connecticut, from the windows of the Metro-North train. Alwych was much as Gregor had expected it to be: high-end suburban, complete with dozens of little shops with highly erudite names, all their facades framed with very real wood. Going out from the center of town there would be houses, most of them on streets with sidewalks and set well back from the road, but there would be no subdivisions. Towns like Alwych had serious zoning.

Gregor had spent the trip out from Manhattan going through Patrick’s diary and Fitzgerald’s presentation and even the picture book he’d bought in Greenwich Village. He had no more insight into the robberies than he’d had before he started.

The robbery case looked, on the surface, like nothing particularly complicated. Except for the difficulty the police and the FBI had had in pinpointing the perpetrators, and possibly the intelligence with which the perpetrators had demanded and taken their money, it was like a thousand other bank robberies over the years.

Even the two things that seemed like anomalies weren’t really. In the ordinary course of events, police didn’t go looking for upmarket teenagers to solve their bank crimes. All Chapin Waring and Martin Veer needed to do was to get around a corner somewhere and ditch the black clothes, and they would have looked like hundreds of other innocent citizens of those suburbs. Nobody would have looked at them twice.

As for the intelligence—it was a fantasy to think of robbers as really smart guys with lots of skill who were doing this instead of attending Harvard because they’d had bad breaks in their lives. Most criminals were bone stupid, and most were outright thugs. Gregor had met intelligent criminals in his life, but they were nearly all sociopaths.

The train did a little jerking bounce and stopped moving. Gregor put his papers and the big book away. At the last minute he looked at the big picture in the middle of the book cover. It was a security camera shot of the robbery in Fairfield. He could recognize the slim figure as belonging to Chapin Waring right away. The other figure still looked odd. Gregor wished he had a better picture of Martin Veer in civilian clothes. There was something wrong about that second figure in black.

Other passengers were up and moving down the aisle. Gregor got his suitcase from the rack above his head, and went down the aisle and to the claustrophobic little vestibule where he could get out onto the platform. He looked around. The station had a little waiting room, heavily done in dark wood.

Gregor was about to go into the waiting room when a man approached him, wearing the livery of a limousine company. He had his hat in his hand and a note folded up in one fist. He was small and square and thick around the neck.

“Señor,” he said, thrusting the note at Gregor.

Gregor took it and had a moment of panic that the police department of Alwych, having been asked to get him a car and a driver, had misinterpreted that to mean a limousine and a chauffeur. There was no possibility in the world that he could work on a case while being driven around like Jackie O on a night out.