Gregor was stretching his mouth into a quick perfunctory smile and getting ready to pass by—not only was that the right thing to do but he didn’t like looking at this man; it made him feel as if frostbite might be contagious—when the man stepped forward, rearranged his glasses, touched Gregor on the arm and frowned.
“Excuse me,” he said, as Gregor stopped dead in his tracks, startled. “Are you that man I saw on TV? The one the Cardinal sent out to find whoever killed Brigit?”
Gregor had made it a point never to answer questions like this directly, at least when they were put to him by people he’d never seen before who’d accosted him in the street. Today, he forgot all about that. He was that surprised.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am. I’m Gregor Demarkian.”
“Gregor Demarkian,” the man repeated. “I’m Jack O’Brien.”
For a second, Gregor thought the name Jack O’Brien was familiar only because it was so common. There had to be thousands of Jack O’Briens across the United States. There had been three in the Federal Bureau of Investigation alone during Gregor’s time there. Then he remembered: Jack O’Brien was one of the names on the Cardinal’s list. He was one of the people who had seen Brigit Ann Reilly on the day she died. In fact, he was the first. Gregor took the hand Jack O’Brien was holding out to him and shook it.
“We could go in the store,” Jack O’Brien said, “if you’ve got a minute.”
“I’ve got a minute,” Gregor said.
“Good,” O’Brien said. “It’s getting cold out here.”
[3]
The store, as Jack O’Brien called it, turned out to be an old-fashioned shoe store. The left half of it was taken up with displays of solid-looking work boots and excruciatingly stiff wing-tip formals. The right half of it held seats and supplies like laces and removable inner soles. At the back, behind a half-wall with a counter nailed to its top, was where the real money was made: the cobbler’s machine shop with its black oily equipment and uneasy air of being covered with fine leather dust. The equipment looked well used and permanently settled in. It was part of what gave the shop the air of having been here “forever.” The other part of that was the plate glass window at the front. It said O’BRIEN’S in large black letters, but nothing else. If you didn’t already know what this shop did, you weren’t going to learn it on a quick pass through town in your car.
There was an electric percolator plugged into the wall near what Gregor thought might be the lathe—he really wasn’t very good at machines—and as soon as they came in from the cold, O’Brien headed straight for it.
“You want some coffee?” he asked, while he was in the midst of pouring a cup.
Gregor said yes, even though the coffee looked black and muddy and suspiciously like Father Tibor’s. He was cold.
“I had intended to come down here and talk to you,” Gregor said. “You were one of the people on my list.”
“Because I’d seen Brigit that morning?” O’Brien brought the cups—white plastic foam cups, the kind that imparted to coffee a taste all their own—and handed one to Gregor. “There’s really not much of anything in that,” he said. “I saw Brigit every day except Sunday. That day was no different from any other.”
Gregor took a sip of his coffee. It was exactly like Father Tibor’s, and undrinkable. He sat down in one of the chairs set out for shoe-buying customers and put the cup on the floor beside his legs.
“Are you sure?” he said. “I was talking to Sister Scholastica and she mentioned something about Brigit having been—strange, most of that week.”
“Not strange,” O’Brien said. “Brigit was having one of her het-ups, that was all.”
“Het-ups?”
“Brigit got excited about people,” O’Brien explained. “Especially people who were different than she was. I guess she must have grown up in one of those suburbs where everybody is supposed to be alike. I’ve never been to a place like that myself. But I heard her talking about me to that Neila Connelly once and she said, ‘He’s so wonderful. I never knew old people could be so wonderful.’”
“It must have been nice to be called wonderful.”
“It would have been nicer not to have been called old,” O’Brien said. “Anyway, it was like that. I could tell. She had somebody new she was excited about.”
“Did she tell you who?”
“Nope. I had a feeling it might be Sam Harrigan.”