Stillness in Bethlehem (31 page)

Maybe it was fear of vulnerability and exposure that had made Jan-Mark Verek install his alarm. Whatever it had been must have been a powerful emotion. The alarm had been awful enough heard from the safety of Stuart Ketchum’s barnyard. Right here at the source, it was devastating. The warning of a nuclear attack would sound like this, Gregor told himself, if you weren’t listening to it on television. Gregor promised himself to watch more television in the future, just in case there was a nuclear attack. After hearing this thing, he much preferred spending his last moments with the Emergency Broadcast System.

Behind the wheel, Bennis Hannaford braked, put the car into park and then sat back, looking at the wall of glass and wincing.

“How long does that thing go on?” she demanded. “I mean, what’s he calling, the National Guard?”

“That isn’t his alarm,” Franklin Morrison explained. “He’s got one of those goes off automatically if somebody tries to break in, and he’s got another one that rings a fire alarm in the volunteer fire department building in town. This is his panic-button alarm.”

“That means he has to stand there and pull the damn thing himself,” Stuart Ketchum said.

“Does he do this often?” Bennis climbed out from behind the wheel and stood in the driveway, still looking up at the house.

Stuart Ketchum sighed into the back of Gregor Demarkian’s head and said, “Once every two or three months. That’s all. Just once every two or three months.”

“Once there was even an emergency,” Franklin Morrison said. “Bear sat down outside the door and wouldn’t move. Poor man didn’t have any way to get out of his house.”

“Man built a sensible house, he’d have a back door to get out of,” Stuart Ketchum said.

Gregor Demarkian got his door open and climbed out onto the gravel driveway. As he did, the noise suddenly and abruptly stopped, mid-bellow, and Bennis Hannaford raised her eyes to heaven.

“Hallelujah,” she cried. “I have been saved. Why did it go off?”

“Because Jan-Mark turned it off, of course,” Franklin Morrison said. He’d gotten out of the car, too, with Stuart Ketchum just behind him. He looked resigned and as tired as Gregor Demarkian ever wanted to see any man. “If Stuart here and Peter Callisher hadn’t been coming up the drive just after Tisha Verek got killed, Jan-Mark would probably have set that thing off then, but there you were, the cavalry had already arrived—”

“—like we were the cavalry, for God’s sake—”

“—and Jan-Mark doesn’t like to waste electricity. The only thing Jan-Mark likes to waste is breath, which he wastes a lot of, especially if he’s drinking. Maybe we ought to go up and knock on the door. Although what we’d knock on it for is beyond me. He’s got to know we’re here. All he’s got is windows.”

He also had to have a reason to shut off the alarm, but Gregor didn’t want to bring that up. Franklin had just said it and forgotten he’d said it, but everybody else had forgotten it, too, and maybe it didn’t matter. They were all tired. Gregor moved to the front of the house and the only thing that might conceivably be a door and looked around for a bell. There wasn’t one. He tried for an intercom. There wasn’t one of those, either. Finally, he knocked.

Gregor had expected a wait, some frustration, a few more futile volleys against the door: That’s what door systems like this one were designed to induce. Instead, he got an instantaneous creak and rattle, and the door pulled back in front of his face in no time at all.

On the other side of the door was a man who looked more like Stuart Ketchum’s description of him than seemed fair. Jan-Mark Verek was indeed a bull, complete with overdeveloped shoulders and short, thickly muscled legs. Jan-Mark Verek looked like Franklin Morrison’s description of him, too—meaning like Brooklyn. Gregor thought the man was more than a little crazy, possibly a borderline sociopath. He had that kind of light in his eyes, that kind of intensity in his every small movement. Jan-Mark Verek was an arresting presence no matter what he was doing, and what he was doing right this moment was just standing there.

A moment later he had backed up and bent over, bowing comically, to let them all in. “It’s you,” he said, sounding pleased. “The Great Detective. And all I was expecting was Stuart in a pissed-off mood.”

“You got Stuart in a pissed-off mood,” Stuart Ketchum said. “Why don’t you just pick up the phone and call me?”

“You’re always out in the yard shooting at cans. You’d never hear me.”

“You could call
me
,” Franklin Morrison said.

Jan-Mark Verek ignored him, choosing to concentrate on Bennis instead. Bennis had come in last, behind the rest of them, and in the beginning Jan-Mark had not noticed her. Now he had, and his scrutiny was detailed and unmistakable. Gregor was used to men being attracted to Bennis. Men were constantly attracted to Bennis. They weren’t usually as nasty about it as Jan-Mark Verek. Gregor started to growl. Bennis shot him a look that said she knew perfectly well how to take care of herself. Which was probably true.

“Oh, you’re nice,” Jan-Mark told her.

“Only when I want to be,” Bennis said. Then she brushed past him and headed for the stairs, as quickly and unselfconsciously as if she’d been invited. The stairs were open-risered and open-railed and open to the windows. Gregor thought climbing them was going to make him dizzy.

“Come in,” Jan-Mark said, watching Bennis’s retreating back. “Come in, come in. We might as well all go upstairs and review the damage.”

“Damage?” Franklin Morrison asked.

“I’ve been robbed.”

Jan-Mark turned his back on them all and went off in the direction Bennis had taken. After a moment, Gregor and Franklin and Stuart followed. Everything was so open, it would have been impossible to get lost. Jan-Mark went up a single set of risers and then waited, near the kitchen, where Bennis had installed herself on a delicate chair. All the furniture Gregor could see was delicate and quasi-abstract. The art was big and bold and brightly colored and not of Jan-Mark’s making. Jan-Mark went in for trash collages and found objects. The paintings were all standard abstracts of the kind popular in the twenties. They suited the house.

Jan-Mark waited until they were all assembled just outside the tiled floor that marked off the kitchen and said again, “I’ve been robbed. It was the most amazing thing. I must have been robbed in my sleep.”

“You mean you think you were robbed while you were here?” Franklin Morrison sounded incredulous.

Jan-Mark didn’t take offense. “I was taking a nap. I’d had a long night and a long morning, and I was exhausted.”

“You must have been wired,” Stuart Ketchum said.

Jan-Mark threw him a look of contempt. “When I’m wired, I can’t sleep at all. No, that wasn’t it. I was just totally done in. I lay down just around eleven o’clock, and somewhere between then and when I set the alarm off, I was robbed.”

Gregor Demarkian checked his watch. “It’s about half past one,” he said. “Let’s say we first heard your alarm ten minutes ago. That gives your thief about an hour and twenty minutes to get in and out, assuming you fell asleep immediately and went straight past REM time into a coma—”

“Are you trying to tell me I couldn’t have been robbed?”

“I’m trying to tell you your story has some problems in it.” Gregor looked around the kitchen again. Everything was clean. Everything was white. Jan-Mark must pay a cleaning lady. “How did you find out you were robbed?”

“I went up to my studio. And there it all was. A mess and a half.”

“Your studio?”

“My late wife’s office. The studio and the office are two three-sided rooms in the loft.”

“This is above your bedroom,” Gregor said.

“Exactly.”

“And if I wanted to get there, I’d go how?”

“Up these stairs.” Jan-Mark patted the rail of the staircase they had all so recently ascended. “It goes all up and down the four levels, or maybe it’s five, I don’t remember. It’s like a dollhouse here. All the rooms are open to the window wall. All of them are reached by one staircase.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “that means that this thief of yours not only robbed you while you were sleeping, but robbed you while you were sleeping in a room open to the room he was stealing from, and then he had to go tromping up and down a lot of wooden stairs to get there and get out—I take it there isn’t an alternative route?”

“None.”

“That must have made the fire marshal have orgasms,” Franklin Morrison said.

“The fire marshal notwithstanding,” Gregor said, “Mr. Verek may have been robbed, but he wasn’t robbed the way he said he was. Which leaves us with three possible alternatives.”

“Tell me.” Jan-Mark was looking more amused by the second.

“The first one is that you weren’t robbed at all,” Gregor said.

“But I was.” Jan-Mark nodded vigorously. “At least, I ought to say that my late wife was. It’s her things that were taken.”

“All right. The second possibility is that you were out when it happened, but for some reason you don’t want us to know you were out. That would be particularly good if you were trying to establish an alibi for something that has recently happened back in town, while Mr. Morrison and Ms. Hannaford and I have been at Mr. Ketchum’s farm. That’s what I will go on to assume if there turns out to be another dead body there when we go back.”

“If there was a dead body back there, we would have heard about it,” Franklin Morrison said. “That’s my personal car we’re using, but it’s got a two-way radio in it. And I carry a beeper.”

“The body might not have been discovered yet,” Bennis said blandly.

“There isn’t any body.” Jan-Mark Verek was impatient. “At least, there isn’t one I put there. I will admit I might have taken a tranquilizer or two before I went to sleep.”

“Right,” Franklin Morrison said.

“Phenobarbital,” Stuart Ketchum said. “Without a prescription. And no brand-name packaging, either.”

“I keep telling him I won’t arrest him unless I catch him selling it to the local population, but he doesn’t believe me,” Franklin Morrison said.

Gregor paid no attention. He knew Jan-Mark Verek had been on some kind of drug and that that drug had probably been a depressant. He knew that that would account for Jan-Mark’s not having heard an intruder, if there had been an intruder to hear. With anybody else, he wouldn’t have bothered to go through this song and dance. He hadn’t been that kind of agent in the Bureau, either. His attitude had always been that people ought to be allowed to keep their shameful but not case-related secrets to themselves. He just didn’t like Jan-Mark Verek.

Still, there was a robbery to be investigated, or something to be investigated. That was why Jan-Mark Verek had set off his alarm. Gregor put his hand on the stair rail and gestured up the stairs with his head.

“That way?”

“That way.” Jan-Mark sprang into action. “All the way up. In the loft, like I said. And I’m going to tell you right now that I think my wife was right.”

“About what?” Gregor asked him.

“About a certain person who happens to work for Peter Callisher named Timmy Hall. Come on. Let’s go up. I’ve got a lot to show you.”

There was a reason for Franklin Morrison to investigate Tisha Verek’s office. He was the local lawman and Tisha Verek’s husband had just claimed that the office had been robbed. There was a reason for Gregor Demarkian to investigate Tisha Verek’s office, too. Jan-Mark Verek wanted him to. There was no reason at all for Stuart Ketchum or Bennis Hannaford to be investigating Tisha Verek’s office, or wandering around in it, or observing the actions of the three people who belonged in it, but they came all the same. It was part and parcel of the fact that nothing in this case had been very “official,” just as nothing in Bethlehem, Vermont, was very “official.” It all seemed to get done somehow here. Gregor didn’t mind. Since he was going to talk it all over with Bennis later, he thought it would save time if she saw it for herself.

Tisha Verek’s office was indeed in a loft, a very high loft, higher even than the one that served as the bedroom. The house was a series of lofts. They made Gregor, who had never been easy with heights, feel unsteady. He climbed the stairs doggedly, behind Jan-Mark but ahead of all the others. Bennis came up right behind him, muttering all the way. He didn’t like Jan-Mark Verek. Bennis didn’t like Jan-Mark or his house, either, on general principles, and now she seemed to be talking against his carpets. Gregor reached the loft, turned his back on the open rail and looked around.

What the loft reminded Gregor Demarkian of was not so much a dollhouse as a stage set, the kind of stage set where two rooms can be seen at once and two scenes go on almost simultaneously. On one side there was the bare, unadorned studio space that belonged to Jan-Mark himself. Because of the way the staircase was placed, they had to cross in front of it to get to Tisha’s office. Gregor saw canvases stacked against the walls and paints in tubes and jars and bottles on every available surface. There weren’t many available surfaces. To Gregor’s eyes, it was not a happy jumble, but an angry one. Things seemed to have been flung about in continually erupting fits of pique, and left to lie out of spite. Maybe that was a form of projection on his part, because of the way he read Jan-Mark Verek’s character. Gregor had never had a chance to read Tisha Verek’s character, and seeing her office he decided he was glad he hadn’t. This room was neat, but it was no more a cheerful neatness than Jan-Mark’s studio was a cheerful clutter. Gregor’s first thought on seeing the precise stacks of paper and the even-rowed photographs on the corkboard was: what a constipated, nasty woman she must have been.

Constipated or not, nasty or not, those weren’t his problems. He looked around the office one more time and said, “How do you know anything was stolen? Are you trying to tell me the room was usually neater than this?”

Jan-Mark Verek made a face. “Awful, isn’t it? She was the most anal woman. It’s neat enough, even now, I’ll give it to you, but you’ve got to see things are missing.”

“He’s right,” Bennis Hannaford said.

She was standing at the back, near one of the cork-boards, looking up at it and squinting. Gregor walked to where she was and tried to see what she saw. He saw row after row of small, blurry, black-and-white pictures, each one labeled with a name. In the bottom row, there were two missing—or at least two empty spaces.