Skeleton Key(125)

“Good. Because Chris and I hardly talk at all, and I lost his new address after he moved last spring, and now I want to get in touch with him. Do you think you could get in touch with him for me? Do you think you could tell him I want to talk to him?”

“Of course I can, Bennis. I can do that tonight Do you want him to fly out here? Do you want him to be with you?”

“No, that’s not necessary, really. I just want to talk to him. I can’t tell Gregor everything, after all. Sometimes I try, and he just doesn’t get it.”

“None of them get it, Bennis. At your age, you ought to know that. Some of them are very sweet, of course, but none of them get it.”

“No, I guess they don’t. But I want to talk to Chris anyway. Okay?”

“Of course.”

“Now, do you think you could do me a bigger favor and tell the assembled horde out there that I’m not up to seeing any more visitors? Just tell Hannah I fell asleep or something, will you? I’ll make it up to her later.”

“She’ll be very upset.”

“I know she will. But I just—can’t, if you know what I mean. I just can’t”

“It will be all right, Bennis. We’ll work something out. And maybe you should sleep.”

“I will sleep. They’ll come in here in about half an hour and fill me full of Demerol. I won’t be able to help but sleep.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“I know.”

“I will be going now,” Lida said. “Do you want to keep the coat?”

“Somebody would steal it.”

“Yes.”

Lida picked up the coat and put it around her shoulders. Then she leaned over and kissed Bennis on the forehead, too. Bennis couldn’t remember a time in her adulthood when so many people had kissed her on the forehead.

As soon as Lida was out of the room, Bennis put the bed back down flat and turned over on her side.

If it really was cancer, she had no idea of what she was going to do.





Seven



1


They impounded the car.

That, and picking up Faye Dallmer’s Jeep, was all they could think of to do. The financial records would be on their way as soon as all the authorizations were in and the bankers felt protected from any possible future lawsuits. Gregor Demarkian did not think there was much chance that what he believed would be there would not be there. After all, nobody takes a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in cash and just leaves it lying around the house. Something has to be done with money of that kind. Someplace has to be found to put it. Even in the event of the nearly unthinkable—that the check had been cashed and the cash put into a safety deposit box, say—there would be some record of the check being cashed. No bank would ever have handed over the money without it.

The question was—was it going to be enough? That was the difficulty with well-heeled, well-educated perpetrators. If they kept their heads, they could get away with almost anything. Evidence was such a tricky thing. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” was even trickier. And then there was the obvious, well known to every law enforcement officer and every district attorney: juries hated to convict personable, successful, well-mannered white people. Gregor had seen it a hundred times, in cases he had been personally involved in and in cases he had only followed in the newspapers. Rapes so egregious they left the victims scarred for life. Assaults so violent the victim required decades of plastic surgery before he would be whole again. Even murders, done carefully, so that the evidence was obvious only to those people who had to deal with evidence all the time. Sometimes, Gregor thought that juries these days were made up of people who had watched entirely too many episodes of The Fugitive.

In the long late afternoon, sitting in the conference room at the Washington Police Department, Gregor watched what evidence they had piling up. There was, he knew, also the status differential. In general, juries tended to find the lives of men more important than the lives of women—where they might convict a woman of murdering a man, the same evidence would be deemed insufficient to convict a man of murdering a woman. This was also the case for blacks and whites, and for rich people and poor people. It was as if crime were being judged on a discount scale, or maybe as if the days of aristocracy had never ended. On the other hand, it didn’t really do to be too rich, or too young, or too arrogant. Juries were not made up of members of the Swamp Tree Country Club. The question in this case was how a jury would gauge the life of Kayla Anson. Zara Anne Moss would be too kooky. Margaret Anson would be too old and too easily portrayed as a bitch. It was Kayla Anson whose death a jury might be willing to avenge, and then mostly because they would see her as assailed on every side, a victim of forces that saw her less as a person than as a fountain of money. Poor little rich girl. Cinderella in a golden tower. Gregor didn’t understand why people couldn’t see things clearly, and understand that murder was always wrong, even if the person who had been murdered was better off dead.