Not a Creature Was Stirring(95)

“I’m going to see the body. Where are the Hannafords?”

“Cordelia Day Hannaford is in her room. Anne Marie Hannaford is with her. Bennis and Christopher are in what they like to call the ‘living room.’ It’s got a tree worthy of Rockefeller Center in the middle of it. Teddy was asleep, last I heard. I don’t know where Bobby is. Bennis told me he’d left for work early this morning.”

Jackman frowned. “I don’t think we should leave them wandering around the house like this. On their own. Where’s the body?”

“In a room called the television room. It’s at the back of the house, down a little hall. It’s not on a main thoroughfare.”

“Still,” Jackman said.

Gregor smiled. “They could be running in and out of the scene, messing up everything, is that it? I say let them.”

“What?”

“Let them,” Gregor said. “Come on, Mr. Jackman. There are a few things I’d like to show you.”

Jackman started to look mutinous. Gregor turned his back on him and walked away.

He must, he thought, be feeling better. A week ago, Jackman’s attitude would have made him depressed. Now, it made him want to break the idiot’s neck.





2


Gregor could have worked up a police seal for the television room. A tape, some string—there were a hundred ways to do it. He hadn’t used any of them. It was like he’d told Jackman when they’d found the seals broken on Robert Hannaford’s study. In a situation like this, you had two choices. You could post a man outside the door. Or you could accept the fact that the seals were going to be broken eventually. That was it. Because Gregor hadn’t wanted to spend his morning standing outside the writing room door—and because he didn’t see any point to sealing the scene anyway—he’d let it go. The only thing the Hannafords could do to really ruin things was take the body away and dispose of it. Anybody who tried that would get caught at it.

He led the whole crowd of them through the three back halls that were the only route he knew of, feeling all the time like a character in that Shirley Jackson novel about Hill House. You needed a map to find your way to the bathroom in this place, or maybe bread crumbs. Every time he moved around by himself he worried about getting lost. He was a little proud of himself for not, this time. He’d only been back here once before.

He found the door of the writing room, and opened up to look inside.

She was still there, exactly where he had left her, stretched out across the floor like a damaged carpet. Gregor went in and held the door open for John Jackman. Jackman stepped in, looked at Myra Van Damm’s face, and winced.

“Ouch,” he said.

“Not as much of an ouch as it could have been,” Gregor pointed out. “Look at her.”

Jackman looked. It was his job to look. He just didn’t like it.

“The face got worked over after she was dead,” he said finally. “There’s not enough blood.”

“Not enough blood and not the right kind of blood,” Gregor said. “It’s all flecks, no wash. Look at the candlestick.”

“Is that what was used to work her over?”

Gregor shook his head. “There’s not enough blood on that, either. It looks gory, but then you realize it’s too dry. If that had been used on her face, even after she was dead, there would be blood and flesh all over it. All it’s got is that little stain on the felt at the base and some clotted matter in one of the crevices. It was used later, after the real work had been done. Just rolled around in the muck to get it dirty.”

“Ouch,” Jackman said again. He crossed the room and knelt down next to Myra Van Damm’s body, getting much closer than Gregor had allowed himself to. Gregor hadn’t wanted to disturb anything. Jackman leaned forward as far as he could and searched Myra’s face. Gregor could see Jackman liked this even less than he’d liked looking at the body from a distance. He was going a little green around the jawbone.

Jackman stood up, wiped the palms of his hands against his pants as if he’d gotten something on them—which he hadn’t—and took a deep breath.

“Poker,” he said. “I’d almost bet my career on it.”

“I was thinking poker myself,” Gregor admitted. “The problem is, the pokers are over there,” he pointed to a cast-iron stand beside the fireplace, “and they’re all clean.”

“Someone could have used a poker and taken it away,” Jack-man said.

“I’m sure they could have. How would we know?”

“What do you mean, how would we know?”