Act of Darkness by Jane Haddam

that looked wet. There were heart-shaped pillows made of heavy Turkish damask and a heart-shaped ottoman covered in striped, piece-dyed satin. On closer inspection, the stripes turned out to be thousands of linked tiny hearts. If it hadn’t been for the photographs of Janet that littered every available surface—photographs placed, of course, in heart-shaped silver frames—Gregor would have thought of Victoria as the ultimate egoist: a woman incapable of imagining the universe without herself in it.
    Fortunately, the heart motif didn’t extend to the second-floor guest wing. Unfortunately, the wing bore an uncomfortable resemblance to certain mass-produced, overpriced hotels, and Gregor’s room was positively schizophrenic. As he put his suitcases on the floor—the maid had wanted to carry them, but he hadn’t let her; she was a small Spanish girl weighing no more than ninety pounds—he thought about the architect, a famous man, who, until his death at the age of forty-one from cirrhosis of the liver, had widely been hailed as the “greatest original sensibility in architecture since the death of Sir Christopher Wren.” Gregor didn’t know anything about sensibility in architecture, but he did know awfulness when he saw it, and this room was truly awful. There was a skylight directly over the head of the bed, ensuring sleeplessness early every bright morning and all night during any good rainstorm. There was a wall of windows looking out on Long Island Sound, but not rectangular windows. The panes were cut into everything from hexagons to wickedly razor-pointed stars. Then there was the mirrored wall that faced the bed, a single expanse of polished glass, an invitation to neurotic narcissism. He could just see himself standing in front of it every morning, trying to get his trousers on and contemplating his paunch.
    On the other wall, where the head of the bed was, there were two doors. He tried the closest and found a bathroom, small but adequate. He tried the other and found it locked. He closed his eyes and mentally recreated their progress along the balcony, the maid bringing Bennis to her room, him to his. Then he knocked.
    “Bennis?” he said.
    There were sounds of movement on the other side of the door, then the click of the bolt being thrown. The door opened and Bennis stuck her head through, but nothing else.
    “I’m getting changed,” she said, “into something more appropriate. There’s a beach out there, Gregor. I can’t go in a Chanel suit.”
    “I’d just as soon you never wore a Chanel suit. What’s your room like?”
    “Alice in Wonderland on lysergic acid. Did you look at your folder yet?”
    “What folder?”
    “It’s on your night table. The green thing with gold lettering on it.”
    “Gregor looked at his night table, but all that was there was the square envelope that he hadn’t opened yet, even though he knew he should. He turned his back on it with determination and said, “I don’t have a folder. What’s in yours?”
    “Just a minute,” Bennis said. She closed the door and padded away behind it, humming “You’re So Vain,” off-key.
    Left on his own, he went to the bed, sat down, and took the envelope from its place at the base of a lamp that looked a little like a souvenir statue of the Empire State Building and a little like Jabba the Hut. He listened for Bennis, coming back to him, but got nothing. No reprieve. He slid his fingers under the corner of the flap and ripped the envelope open across the top.
    Inside, there was only a single sheet of paper, thick and stiff and smooth as cloth, that had been folded once. Written across the top half of it, in the same calligraphic hand, was this:
Mr. Demarkian:
    Could you meet me in the study at 11:00? We have some important things to discuss.
    Dan Chester
    Gregor folded it up again, stuck it back into its envelope, and put the whole thing in the inside pocket of his suit jacket.
    Now he was hearing Bennis, and the last