Skeleton Key(126)

It was about quarter to five when he decided that he couldn’t wait any longer. He had already tried to call Cavanaugh Street four times, and on the two occasions when he’d found somebody to talk to, their answers had been vague and unsatisfactory. He was worried as hell, and the more he tried to concentrate on the case, the more worried he got. Bennis had gone to the doctor’s. That was last night sometime. After she’d gone to the doctor’s, though, he had no idea what had happened to her. She hadn’t gone home. He’d called her apartment more times than he could count. He’d called his own apartment half a dozen times, in case she’d decided to use it instead. She liked some of the games she had given him for his computer, that she did not have for her own. He’d called Donna Moradanyan Donahue, too, but that had elicited nothing but the information that she still didn’t know what to do about Tommy’s natural father. He had called Father Tibor Kasparian, but Tibor just kept lapsing into Armenian and Latin. He knew without a doubt that they were all keeping something from him. He didn’t for a moment like the ideas he’d had for what it might be.

“The problem,” Mark Cashman said, when Gregor had made his suggestion, “is that we’re not really clear on location. It’s going into Friday night—”

“I know,” Gregor said. “Try that country club. The Swamp Tree. That seems like a good bet for Friday night. Under the circumstances.”

“Right,” Stacey Spratz says.

“And if I’m right, make sure you do something to hold the situation steady. Enlist the aid of the club manager, what’s his name, Mortimer—”

“It’s the weekend. It would be the assistant club manager, Ruth Grandmere,” Mark Cashman said.

“Even better. But we’ve got to do something.”

Stacey and Mark looked at each other. They thought they ought to do something, too, but Gregor knew that this was not the sort of thing they thought they ought to be doing. They wanted to go into someplace or the other with their guns drawn and a SWAT team at their backs, although Gregor doubted there was a SWAT team in all of the Northwest Hills. In Waterbury, maybe, although Waterbury didn’t look like it would be able to afford one. Why was he thinking about SWAT teams?

All the explanations he could imagine for Bennis’s sudden disappearance were bad. She had had an accident and was lying in the hospital somewhere—although Tibor and Donna had both been adamant that there had been no accident. She had decided that the relationship wasn’t working out and had gone off somewhere to think. She had met up with an old lover and not been able to resist a nostalgic fling. On second thought, that last one didn’t make much sense. Bennis was never on good terms with the lovers she left, and she was always the one who left. Bennis’s forte for the last four or five years, before they’d started this up together, had been a form of emotional hit-and-run.

Mark Cashman came back and gave him the thumbs-up. “At the country club,” he said. “You want us to drive you out there?”

“You want us to wire you?” Stacey asked helpfully. “Then we’d be able to hear everything the two of you said and maybe—”

“Get the case thrown out of court over illegal evidence,” Mark Cashman finished.

Gregor got up. The conference table was littered with Styrofoam coffee cups and the wrappers from dozens of packages of junk food. Hostess cupcakes. Twinkies. Doritos chips. Potato chips. Slim Jims. Gregor had actually eaten a Slim Jim. It had been as tough and unyielding as one of the plastic dog chew toys Sheila Kashinian kept for her Pekingese. He was going to have to get back to Cavanaugh Street just to make sure he didn’t starve to death.

He dug his notes out from underneath the debris, and headed out to the car with Stacey and Mark.





2


The Swamp Tree Country Club looked much better at night than it did in the day. It looked bigger, for one thing, because the lights that came from inside it seemed to stretch in two endless lines from the brightly lit entry in the center. They all stopped in the foyer and got permission to go on through. It wasn’t difficult, because this time they were expected. Gregor half expected Ruth Grandmere to come out to greet them, as Mortimer had, but she stayed out of sight. The foyer was decorated in silver and white, as if for a wedding, but no wedding seemed to be going on or to have gone on. Gregor found the explanation on the events board, an elaborate affair of wood cut into slots and square wooden blocks with letters on them that had to be threaded through. It was the kind of thing nobody would ever own unless he had an employee who was available to go to the trouble, HARVEST MASKS DANCE, the events board said. DINNER, 8 P.M. DANCE 10 P.M. Debutantes.