I followed the Mercedes south out of Portland and on to U.S. 1. At Oak Hill, we turned east and I stayed behind it at a steady thirty all the way to the tip of the Neck. At the Black Point Inn, guests sat at the picture windows, staring out with drinks in their hands at Grand Beach and Pine Point. A Scarborough PD cruiser inched along the road, making sure that everybody stayed under thirty and nobody unwanted hung around long enough to spoil the view.
Jack Mercier had his home on Winslow Homer Road, within sight of the painter’s former house. As we approached, an electronically operated barrier opened and a second Mercedes swept toward us from the house, headed for Black Point Road. In the backseat sat a small man with a dark beard and a skullcap on his head. We exchanged a look as the two cars passed each other, and he nodded at me. His face was familiar, I thought, but I couldn’t place it. Then the road was clear and we continued on our way.
Mercier’s home was a huge white place with landscaped gardens and so many rooms that a search party would have to be organized if anybody got lost on the way to the bathroom. The man with the mustache parked the Mercedes while I followed Harrold through the large double front doors, down the hallway, and into a room to the left of the main stairs. It was a library, furnished with antique couches and chairs. Books stretched to the ceiling on three walls; on the east-facing wall, a window looked out on the grounds and the sea beyond, a desk and chair beside it and a small bar to the right.
Harrold closed the door behind me and left me to examine the spines on the books and the photographs on the wall. The books ranged from political biographies to historical works, mainly examinations of the Civil War, Korea, and Vietnam. There was no fiction. In one corner was a small, locked cabinet with a glass front. The books it contained were different from those on the open shelves. They had titles like Myth and History in the Book of Revelation; Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry; The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire; and The Apocalyptic Sublime. It was cheerful stuff: bedtime reading for the end of the world. There were also critical biographies of the artists William Blake, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Jean Duvet, in addition to facsimile editions of what appeared to be medieval texts. Finally, on the top shelf were twelve almost identical slim volumes, each bound in black leather with six gold bands inset on the spine in three equidistant sets of two. At the base of each spine was the last letter of the Greek alphabet: Ω, for omega. There was no key in the lock, and the doors stayed closed when I gave them an experimental tug.
I turned my attention to the photographs on the walls. There were pictures of Jack Mercier with various Kennedys, Clintons, and even a superannuated Jimmy Carter. Others showed Mercier in an assortment of athletic poses from his youth: winning races, pretending to toss footballs, and being carried aloft on the shoulders of his adoring teammates. There were also testimonials from grateful universities, framed awards from charitable organizations headed by movie stars, and even some medals presented by poor but proud nations. It was like an underachiever’s worst nightmare.
One, more recent, photograph caught my eye. It showed Mercier sitting at a table, flanked on one side by a woman in her sixties wearing a smartly tailored black jacket and a string of pearls around her neck. To Mercier’s right was the bearded man who had passed me in the Mercedes, and beside him was a figure I recognized from his appearances on prime-time news shows, usually looking triumphant at the top of some courthouse steps: Warren Ober, of Ober, Thayer & Moss, one of Boston’s top law firms. Ober was Mercier’s attorney, and even the mention of his name was enough to send most opposition running for the hills. When Ober, Thayer & Moss took a case they brought so many lawyers with them to court that there was barely enough room for the jury. Even judges got nervous around them.
Looking at the photograph, it struck me that nobody in it seemed particularly happy. There was an air of tension about the poses, a sense that some darker business was being conducted and the photographer was an unnecessary distraction. There were thick files on the table before them, and white coffee cups lay discarded like yesterday’s roses.
Behind me the door opened and Jack Mercier entered, laying aside on the table a sheaf of papers speckled with bar charts and figures. He was tall, six-two or six-three, with shoulders that spoke of his athletic past and an expensive gold Rolex that indicated his present status as a very wealthy man. His hair was white and thick, swept back from a perma-tanned forehead over large blue eyes, a Roman nose, and a thin, smiling mouth, the teeth white and even. I guessed that he was sixty-five by now, maybe a little older. He wore a blue polo shirt, tan chinos, and brown Sebagos. There was white hair on his arms, and tufts of it peeked out over the collar of his shirt. For a moment the smile on his face faltered as he saw my attention focused on the photograph, but it quickly brightened again as I moved away from it. Meanwhile, Harrold stood at the door like a nervous matchmaker.
‘Mr. Parker,’ said Mercier, shaking my hand with enough force to dislodge my fillings. ‘I appreciate you taking the time to see me.’ He waved me to a chair. From the hallway, an olive-skinned man in a white tunic appeared with a silver tray and set it down. Two china cups, a silver coffeepot, and a matching silver creamer and sugar bowl jangled softly as the tray hit the table. The tray looked heavy, and the servant seemed kind of relieved to be rid of it.
‘Thank you,’ said Mercier. We watched as he left, Harrold behind him. Harrold gently closed the door, giving me one last pained look before he departed, then Mercier and I were alone.
‘I know a lot about you, Mr. Parker,’ he began, as he poured the coffee and offered me cream and sugar. He had an easy, unaffected manner, designed to put even the most fleeting of acquaintances at ease. It was so unaffected that he must have spent years perfecting it.
‘Likewise,’ I replied.
He frowned good-naturedly. ‘I don’t imagine you’re old enough to have ever voted for me.’
‘No, you retired before it became an issue.’
‘Did your grandfather vote for me?’
My grandfather Bob Warren had been a Cumberland County sheriffs deputy and had lived in Scarborough all his life. My mother and I had come to stay with him after my father died. In the end, he outlived his own wife and daughter, and I had buried him one autumn day after his great heart failed him at last.
‘I don’t believe he ever voted for anyone, Mr. Mercier,’ I said. ‘My grandfather had a natural distrust of politicians.’ The only politician for whom my grandfather ever had any regard was President Zachary Taylor, who never voted in an election and didn’t even vote for himself.
Jack Mercier grinned his big white grin again. ‘He might have been right. Most of them have sold their souls ten times over before they’re even elected. Once it’s sold, you can never buy it back. You just have to hope that you got the best price for it.’
‘And are you in the business of buying souls, Mr. Mercier, or selling them?’
The grin stayed fixed, but the eyes narrowed. ‘I take care of my own soul, Mr. Parker, and let other people do as they wish with theirs.’
Our special moment was broken by the entrance of a woman into the room. She wore a deceptively casual outfit of black pants and a black cashmere sweater, and a thin gold necklace gleamed dully against the dark wool. She was about forty-five, and wore it well. Her hair was blond, fading to gray in places, but there was a hardness to her features that made her seem less beautiful than she probably thought she was.
This was Mercier’s wife, Deborah, who had some kind of permanent residency in the local society pages. She was a Southern belle, from what I could recall, a graduate of the Madeira School for Girls in Virginia. The Madeira’s principal claim to fame, apart from producing eligible young women who always used the correct spoon and never spat on the sidewalk, was that its former headmistress Jean Harris had shot dead her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, in 1980, after he left her for a younger woman. Dr. Tarnower was best known as the author of The Scarsdale Die
t, so his death seemed to provide conclusive evidence that diets could be bad for your health. Jack Mercier had met his future wife at the Swan Ball in Nashville, the most lavish social occasion in the South, and had introduced himself to her by buying her a ’55 Coupe de Ville with his AmEx card at the postdinner auction. It was, as someone later commented, love at first swipe.
Mrs. Mercier held a magazine in her hand and assumed a look of surprise, but the expression didn’t reach her eyes.
‘I’m sorry, Jack. I didn’t know you had company.’ She was lying, and I could see in Mercier’s face that he knew she was lying, that we both knew. He tried to hide his annoyance behind the trademark smile but I could hear his teeth gritting. He rose, and I rose with him.
‘Mr. Parker, this is my wife, Deborah.’
Mrs. Mercier took one step toward me, then waited for me to cross the rest of the floor before extending her hand. It hung limply in my palm as I gripped it, and her eyes bored holes in my face while her teeth gnawed at my skull. Her hostility was so blatant it was almost funny.
‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ she spat, before turning her glare on her husband. ‘I’ll talk to you later, Jack,’ she said, and made it sound like a threat. She didn’t look back as she closed the door.
The temperature in the room immediately rose a few degrees, and Mercier regained his composure. ‘My apologies, Mr. Parker. Tensions in the house are a little high. My daughter Samantha is to be married early next month.’
‘Really. Who’s the lucky man?’ It seemed polite to ask.
‘Robert Ober. He’s the son of my attorney.’
‘At least your wife will get to buy a new hat.’
‘She’s buying a great deal more than a hat, Mr. Parker, and she is currently occupied by the arrangements for our guests. Warren and I may have to take to my yacht to escape the demands of our respective wives, although they are such excellent sailors themselves that I imagine they will insist upon keeping us company. Do you sail, Mr. Parker?’
‘With difficulty. I don’t have a yacht.’
‘Everybody should have a yacht,’ remarked Mercier, his good humor returning in earnest.
‘Why, you’re practically a socialist, Mr. Mercier.’
He laughed softly, then put his coffee cup down and arranged his features into a sincere expression. ‘I hope you’ll forgive me for prying into your background, but I wanted to find out about you before I requested your help,’ he continued.
I acknowledged his comments with a nod. ‘In your position, I’d probably do the same,’ I said.
He leaned forward and said gently: ‘I’m sorry about your family. It was a terrible thing that happened to them, and to you.’
My wife, Susan, and my daughter, Jennifer, had been taken from me by a killer known as the Traveling Man while I was still a policeman in New York. He had killed a lot of other people too, until he was stopped. When I killed him, a part of me had died with him.
Over two years had passed since then, and for much of that time the deaths of Susan and Jennifer had defined me. I had allowed that to be so until I realized that pain and hurt, guilt and regret, were tearing me apart. Now, slowly, I was getting my life back together in Maine, back in the place where I had spent my teens and part of my twenties, back in the house I had shared with my mother and my grandfather, and in which I now lived alone. I had a woman who cared for me, who made me feel that it was worth trying to rebuild my life with her beside me and that maybe the time to begin the process had now arrived.
‘I can’t imagine what such a thing must be like,’ continued Mercier. ‘But I know someone who probably can, which is why I’ve asked you here today.’
Outside, the rain had stopped and the clouds had parted. Behind Mercier’s head, the sun shone brightly through the window, bathing the desk and chair in its glow and replicating the shape of the glasswork on the carpet below. I watched as a bug crawled across the patch of bright light, its tiny feelers testing the air as it went.
‘His name is Curtis Peltier, Mr. Parker,’ said Mercier. ‘He used to be my business partner, a long time ago, until he asked me to buy him out and followed his own path. Things didn’t work out so well for him; he made some bad investments, I’m afraid. Ten days ago his daughter was found dead in her car. Her name was Grace Peltier. You may have read about her. In fact, I understand you may have known her once upon a time.’
I nodded. Yes, I thought, I knew Grace once upon a time, when we were both much younger and thought that we might, for an instant, even be in love. It was a fleeting thing, lasting no more than a couple of months after my high school graduation, one of any number of similar summer romances that curled up and died like a leaf as soon as autumn came. Grace was pretty and dark, with very blue eyes, a tiny mouth, and skin the color of honey. She was strong a medal-winning swimmer and formidably intelligent, which meant that despite her looks, a great many young men shied away from her. I wasn’t as smart as Grace but I was smart enough to appreciate something beautiful when it appeared before me. At least I thought I was. In the end, I didn’t appreciate it, or her, at all.
I remembered Grace mostly because of one morning spent at Higgins Beach, not far from where I now sat with Jack Mercier. We stood beneath the shadow of the old guest house known as the Breakers, the wind tossing Grace’s hair and the sea crashing before us. She had missed her period, she told me over the phone: five days late, and she was never late. As I drove down to Higgins Beach to meet her, my stomach felt like it was slowly being crushed in a vise. When a fleet of trucks passed by at the Oak Hill intersection, I briefly considered flooring the accelerator and ending it all. I knew then that whatever I felt for Grace Peltier, it wasn’t love. She must have seen it in my face that morning as we sat in silence listening to the sound of the sea. When her period arrived two days later, after an agonizing wait for both of us, she told me that she didn’t think we should see each other anymore, and I was happy to let her go. It wasn’t one of my finer moments, I thought, not by a long shot. Since then, we hadn’t stayed in touch. I had seen her once or twice, nodding to her in bars or restaurants, but we had never really spoken. Each time I saw her I was reminded of that meeting at Higgins Beach and of my own callow youth.
I tried to recall what I had heard about her death. Grace, now a graduate student at Northeastern in Boston, had died from a single gunshot wound in a side road off U.S. 1, up by Ellsworth. Her body had been discovered slumped in the driver’s seat of her car, the gun still in her hand. Suicide: the ultimate form of self-defense. She had been Curtis Peltier’s only child. The story had merited more coverage than usual only because of Peltier’s former connections to Jack Mercier. I hadn’t attended the funeral.
‘According to the newspaper reports, the police aren’t looking for anyone in connection with her death, Mr. Mercier,’ I said. ‘They seem to think Grace committed suicide.’
He shook his head. ‘Curtis doesn’t believe that Grace’s wound was self-inflicted.’
‘It’s a common enough reaction,’ I replied. ‘Nobody wants to accept that someone close might have taken his or her own life. Too much blame accrues to those left behind for it to be accommodated so easily.’
Mercier stood, and his large frame blocked out the sunlight. I couldn’t see the bug anymore. I wondered how it had reacted when the light disappeared. I guessed that it had probably taken it in stride, which is one of the burdens of being a bug: you pretty much have to take everything in stride, until something bigger stamps on you or eats you and the matter becomes immaterial.
‘Grace was a strong, smart girl with her whole life ahead of her. She didn’t own a gun of any kind and the police don’t seem to have any idea where she might have acquired the one found in her hand.’
‘Assuming that she killed herself,’ I added.
‘Assuming that, yes.’
‘Which you, in common with Mr. Peltier, don’t.’
He sighed. ‘I agree with Curtis. Despite the views of the police,
I think somebody killed Grace. I’d like you to look into this matter on his behalf.’
‘Did Curtis Peltier approach you about this, Mr. Mercier?’
Jack Mercier’s gaze shifted. When he looked at me again, something had cloaked itself in the darkness of his pupils.
‘He came to visit me a few days ago. We discussed it, and he told me what he believed. He doesn’t have enough money to pay for a private investigator, Mr. Parker, but thankfully, I do. I don’t think Curtis will have any difficulty in talking this over with you, or allowing you to look into it further. I will be paying your bill, but officially you will be working for Curtis. I would ask you to keep my name out of this affair.’
I finished my coffee and laid the cup down on the saucer. I didn’t speak until I had marshaled my thoughts a little.
‘Mr. Mercier, I didn’t mind coming out here but I don’t do that kind of work anymore.’
Mercier’s brow furrowed. ‘But you are a private investigator?’
‘Yes sir, I am, but I’ve made a decision to deal only with certain matters: white-collar crime, corporate intelligence. I don’t take on cases involving death or violence.’
‘Do you carry a gun?’
‘No. Loud noises scare me.’
‘But you used to carry a gun?’
‘That’s right, I used to. Now, if I want to disarm a white-collar criminal, I just take away his pen.’
‘As I told you, Mr. Parker, I know a great deal about you. Investigating fraud and petty theft doesn’t appear to be your style. In the past you have involved yourself in more . . . colorful matters.’
‘Those kinds of investigations cost me too much.’
‘I’ll cover any costs you may incur, and more than adequately.’
‘I don’t mean financial cost, Mr. Mercier.’