Not a Creature Was Stirring(103)

She came back into the hall to find Gregor Demarkian waiting for her, looking amused. “I thought your friend in Boston was named Michael,” he said.

Bennis sighed. “Richard is what’s called my ‘personal banker.’ It’s code for ‘interfering old snoop.’”

“He’s trying to protect you from yourself,” Gregor said. “He probably has a dozen women coming into his bank every day, trying to invest in bogus gold mines.”

“Just women?”

“Men invest in bogus oil wells,” Gregor said.

“All I want to do is lend some money to Chris.” Bennis looked out the window again. “There goes the ambulance now. There goes Myra.”

They stood together, trying to see through the narrow pane of glass. The ambulance bumped along until it got to the stand of trees, and then disappeared. The rest of the cars stayed where they were, big white lumps, like snow-dusted dinosaur bones. Bennis turned away and leaned against the wall. She didn’t want to watch that. It made her flesh creep.

She looked down, saw the cigarette still burning in her hand, picked up the ashtray and put it out. “Were you up with Mother all this time?” she asked. “It must have been difficult.”

But Gregor was shaking his head. “I was with your mother about ten minutes. I’ve been talking to Detective Jackman. And to your brother with the brace. Teddy?”

“Teddy,” Bennis confirmed. “Theodore, of course. That must have been almost as difficult as talking to Mother.”

“You said you didn’t like your brother.”

Bennis thought about it. “I don’t dislike him,” she said, “the way I dislike Anne Marie, say, or Bobby. I don’t think he’s a bad man. He just—lies.”

“Does he?”

“Don’t go all detectivey on me,” Bennis said. “Of course he lies. You must know that. He’s the kind of person who lies about silly things. He says he went to Woodstock, when he didn’t. He says he’s a full professor when he’s only an associate. He tells people we’re very close—which I wouldn’t mind being, if he didn’t resent me so much. He aggrandizes himself.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, sounding thoughtful. “I got that impression. Did you know he was in danger of being fired from his job?”

“Fired? But how could he be? He has tenure.”

“Some things can get you fired even if you have tenure. Plagiarizing from your students, for instance.”

“Oh, dear.” Bennis winced. “Poor Teddy.”

“Poor Teddy?”

Bennis looked into Gregor’s flat, impassive face. She’d never realized just how flat and just how impassive it was.

“Of course, poor Teddy,” she said. “He’s just so—he wants it so badly. Wants to be important. Wants to be someone. If Daddy hadn’t done all that with the money—”

“But Teddy got money,” Gregor protested.

“Teddy got about twenty-five thousand a year. Maybe less. He should have been a rich man. He’d always expected to be. And being a rich man would have been enough, you know. He’d have joined a lot of committees and made a lot of pompous speeches about the social responsibility of the rich and he’d have been fine. A naming bore, but fine.”

“I think you have a very strange way of looking at things.”

Bennis turned away again. “Maybe. I don’t like to see people’s lives ruined for no good reason whatsoever. And that was Daddy’s stock in trade.”

“Always,” Gregor said, “we come back to your father.”

Bennis said “Mmm,” and stared at the walls and ceiling of the hall. This was not one of her good days with Gregor. He was making her uncomfortable.

She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and turned back to him just in time to see him taking a thick accordion file out of his jacket.

“What’s that?” she said.

Gregor handed it to her. “Your mother gave it to me. She says it was in your father’s study when he died. She had Emma go down and get it out after the police were gone. Open it up and look inside.”

Bennis opened it. She pulled out the Vogue spread and smiled at her twelve-year-old self. She remembered sitting for that spread. The photographer kept telling them to sit still, and she kept pinching Anne Marie on the ass.

She tried to hand the folder back, but Gregor wouldn’t take it. “I know what’s in here,” she said. “Mother’s pictures. Or copies of the pictures, anyway. When we were children, we used to be photographed together a lot.”

“It was your mother’s idea?”