Not a Creature Was Stirring(102)

“Yesss.”

“Why? Why did you want them?”

“An-swer,” Cordelia said stubbornly.

“The answer to what?” Gregor asked her.

But it was useless to ask Cordelia anything. In the space of seconds, she had melted away. Her eyes were closed. Her arms were limp. Her skin seemed to have gone slack. He couldn’t have brought her back to consciousness from that even if he’d wanted to. He didn’t want to.

Gregor got the file and the folder both and tucked them under his arm. He’d go down and give these things to Jackman. Maybe the Greatest American Policeman could make more of them than he could.

He just wished Cordelia Day Hannaford didn’t look so dead, when she was only asleep.





THREE


1


THIS WAS THE THIRD time Bennis Hannaford had seen the police take a body out of Engine House, and she wasn’t used to it yet. She was beginning to wonder if anyone ever got used to it, even ambulance men or soldiers in a war, who got to see body bags as a matter of course. She shifted the telephone receiver from her left ear to her right, pulled at the cord—it was snaking back across the hall, into the telephone stall—and wiped fog off the narrow utility window with the flat of her hand. Outside, it was snowing harder than ever. The police cars already looked buried. The ambulance van looked marooned. On the terrace, the bag with Myra’s body in it was strapped to a stretcher, and four men instead of two were trying to get it down the steps. Poor, stupid, complicated Myra. Four decades of plots and machinations, and it all came down to this. She got out a cigarette, lit up, and tapped imaginary ash into the ashtray she’d left on the window sill. Then she said, “Richard, I know seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot of money. I can count, for God’s sake. I don’t want you to lecture me about it. I want you to wire—”

Richard interrupted—again—and the door at the far end of the hall opened. Bennis tuned Richard out and watched Gregor Demarkian coming toward her. He looked tired, which didn’t surprise her. Talking to mother always left her exhausted, no matter how little time she spent doing it. If he’d come straight here from there, he’d been in Mother’s room for over an hour. He made hand motions asking if she wanted him to leave her in privacy. She shook her head, and motioned for him to wait.

On the other end of the line, Richard seemed to have run out of breath. Temporarily. Bennis gave it another try.

“What I want you to do,” she said, “is wire seventy-five thousand dollars to my account here, from my money market account there. It’s not that difficult. You wire me money all the time. When I was out in Texas last year—”

“That was only five thousand dollars,” Richard said.

“What does the amount have to do with it? I can’t believe your fax machine won’t take a five figure transfer—”

“We don’t use fax machines, Miss Hannaford. We—”

“I don’t care if you use carrier pigeons,” Bennis said. “Will you stop all this nonsense and wire that money to me?”

“I just need to ask a few questions.”

“Why?”

“It’s my responsibility to protect you—”

“Richard.” Bennis took a long drag on her cigarette, counted to ten and waited. “Richard,” she started again, “I’m not a fuzzy geriatric widow who doesn’t know her checkbook from her laundry list. If I need your advice, I’ll ask for it.”

“An investment that requires a cash delivery of this size—”

“I’m not making an investment, Richard.”

“Oh.” Pause. “If you’re in some kind of trouble—”

“I’m not in any kind of trouble. I’m not being blackmailed and I haven’t become secretly addicted to cocaine. I simply want to take available funds from my money market account, where they’re supposed to be deposited on a demand basis, and have them transferred to Philadelphia, where I can get at them. I do have seventy-five thousand dollars?”

“Yes,” Richard said. “In fact—”

“In fact,” Bennis rolled over him, “I have something in excess of three hundred thousand dollars in that account—”

“It’s a very irresponsible use of money, Miss Hannaford,” Richard said. “If you had reinvested it as I advised you to do last month—”

“Let’s not bring last month into it,” Bennis said. “Just wire the money, Richard. Wire it now. Because if it isn’t in my Philadelphia bank tomorrow morning, I’m going to cause you a hell of a lot of trouble.” She started to hang up, realized she was still in the hall, and stalked back to the telephone stall. There, she did hang up, hard.