Not a Creature Was Stirring(50)

“I kept trying not to. I didn’t want to interfere. No,” Gregor amended, “that’s not true. I wanted very badly to interfere. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.”

“It got to you, did it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“It got to me, too. I stood around in that house thinking I could have taken my vacation this week. Last week. Whatever. I could have taken my vacation and been in the Bahamas when this call came, and instead there I was, stuck with it.”

“Stuck?”

Jackman laughed. “Look at me. I should have stayed in Philadelphia. I went out there because they offered me a lot of money. I have a good rep and I’m the right color—and don’t think it doesn’t matter. Everybody on earth is trying to make their quotas. Don’t ask me what I think of it, because I don’t know. I do have a good rep.”

“I’d think you would,” Gregor said. “You were only a rookie when I met you. You did exceptionally well.”

“For a rookie? For a black man?”

“For a cop.”

“Fine.” Jackman sighed. “So here I am,” he said, “or there I am, in Bryn Mawr, investigating one of the founding families of the Philadelphia Main Line. Did you know that’s what they were?”

“I’d have suspected it. I knew they were railroad money.”

“Railroad money. Oil money. Banking money. Do you know how much Hannaford was worth? Four hundred million dollars.”

“Four hundred?”

“That’s what I said.”

“You are in a lot of trouble,” Gregor said.

Jackman stood up. Gregor was beginning to think it was just as well he hadn’t noticed the coffee. Jackman’s restlessness was almost a mania. And it seemed to be getting worse by the second.

“Look,” Jackman said, “Myra Hannaford told me you were some kind of private detective, but I checked into that. You aren’t, are you?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“Do you want to be?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Jackman draped himself over the fireplace mantel.

“What it means, depends,” he said. “Mostly, it depends on what you were doing in Hannaford’s house the night he was murdered.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

“If you were a good friend of his, it wouldn’t work out.”

“I wasn’t a good friend of his,” Gregor said. “Believe it or not, I was doing a favor for my priest.”

“Your priest?”

Gregor poured himself a cup of coffee. It was as thick and black as that awful Turkish stuff no one was ever allowed to mention in an Armenian neighborhood, but he didn’t care.

This was going to be good.





3


The story of how Gregor Demarkian had ended up at Robert Hannaford’s house on Christmas Eve was not a long one, but it was an impossible one, and because of that it took an interminable time to tell. Jackman had comments, especially about that briefcase full of money. Jackman had questions. He had the same questions Gregor had. He kept going back to them, over and over again, as if if he asked them one more time he’d get the answers. Gregor didn’t have the answers. As far as he knew, only one person had ever had those. And he was dead.

Even so, the conversation had its uses. By the time Gregor had gone over the few facts he had half a dozen times, Jackman was on the floor of the living room—shoes off, legs crossed, hands behind his head—at ease, if not relaxed. His face had taken on a faraway quality. This was insane. This was absurd. This was the kind of thing he saw in the movies that made him think nobody in the whole city of Los Angeles, California had ever met a crime in his life.

Gregor knew that feeling. He’d had it once or twice himself.

Gregor poured himself another cup of coffee and waited in silence for Jackman to do something.

What Jackman did was throw himself down on his stomach and say, “Shit. These people are crazy. These people are nuts.”

“I did get that impression,” Gregor said. “Will you answer a question for me?”

“Maybe.”

“In all logic, we know that, no matter how crazy it seems, there must be internal consistency—”

“Oh, no,” Jackman said.

“But internal consistency is important,” Gregor insisted. “You realize that with psychopaths. A psychopath starts with an irrational premise—that he’s the Archangel Michael, say, or that all the women in the world have come together in a great conspiracy to destroy him. It makes no sense, but everything that follows from it does make sense. Once you know his premise, everything he does is strictly logical, entirely consistent. You just—”