Not a Creature Was Stirring(33)

“Hannaford was confined to a wheelchair. You can see it in the way his legs have atrophied. He couldn’t have walked across the room himself—”

“Why couldn’t he have been sitting in the chair?”

The chair was an antique wing back, standing against the hearth about a foot from where the head now rested—but not where the head had rested when it had been smashed. Gregor was sure of that. The raw facts of the case were easy to see, even at a superficial glance. There was the body with its shattered skull. There was the wheelchair in the far corner of the room. There was a large black bust of Aristotle, made of marble and smeared with blood along the base. A great deal of blood.

“The chair,” Gregor said, “is what he stood on.”

“What?”

“The chair is what he stood on,” Gregor insisted. “Or she. You can see it. It was in that corner before, where the indentations are. The bust was what killed him?”

“There has to be an autopsy, Demarkian. You know that.”

“Of course I know that. But there’s a lot of blood—a lot of blood. His heart must have been beating when his head was smashed. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be nearly so much. And look at what you can see of the wound. It’s nearly flat.”

“So?”

“So, if someone had picked it up and hit him in the normal way, they would have hit with the edge. There’d be an edge line. There isn’t one. Try picking up that thing and aiming it at something. See what it makes you do. It must weigh fifty pounds.”

“Forty,” Jackman said.

“It had to have been dropped right on top of him, John. That’s the only way the wound would be flat. Why was he moved?”

Jackman stirred uneasily. “We don’t know. The daughter found him—Bennis. She found them both.”

“Both?”

“Mrs. Hannaford was in here when Bennis Hannaford came in. She’d picked up her husband’s head and was cradling it in her lap. At least, that’s what Bennis Hannaford says.”

“What does Mrs. Hannaford say?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Gregor raised his eyebrows, but Jackman was turning away, looking back into the room and at the scene. There was so much blood soaked into the rug at the edge of the hearth that even from a distance that spot looked wet. Robert Hannaford didn’t bear looking at. Gregor put his hand on John Jackman’s arm and said, “He’d have been drugged. He’d have had to have been.”

“Drugged,” John Jackman repeated.

“As I said, I’d never met him. But I’ve talked to people who knew him, and I’ve talked to him. He was a vigorous old man. He wasn’t senile and he had a temper. Nobody could have dragged him out of that wheelchair and across the room if he wasn’t drugged.”

“Nobody around here looks like they’re on drugs,” Jackman said. “One of them looks like he has AIDS, but that’s not the same thing.”

“This is a house full of rich people, John.”

“Meaning they all go to psychiatrists and get Valium? Maybe.”

“And there are two invalids,” Gregor pointed out, “or were. There may be painkillers around. I don’t know the nature of Mr. Hannaford’s disability.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Jackman said, “you know entirely too much. Is there anything else, Mr. Demarkian? Mrs. Peacock in the conservatory with the candlestick? Anything?”

“Did you find a briefcase?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Jackman said.

Gregor almost hated to do it. He could only remember one case like it, in Yellowstone Park in 1971. It shamed him a little to remember how excited it had made him: not potential spies or low-rent drug dealers or even homicidal maniacs, but real people pushed to the edge and over. Pushing themselves over, to be honest. That was how it happened.

In this case, Robert Hannaford himself may have done the pushing. He sounded to Gregor like a man who played dangerous games on a regular basis. But whoever had done the pushing, here they were.

He pointed across the room toward the body and said, “Do you see that thing on the floor? That flat metal thing?”

“What thing?”

“It’s buried in the carpet to our side of the patch of blood.”

Jackman gave Gregor an odd look, but he put on a pair of white cotton gloves, crossed the room, and knelt where Gregor was pointing. A moment later, he stood up again, holding a piece of tin about the size of his palm. It was a very flimsy piece of tin, and old. It had begun to crumble around the edges.

“What is this?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I know what it looks like. There are Christmas decorations on the walls outside. Old-fashioned bells and angels. They’re made of that kind of tin. But they’re the wrong shape.”