A Great Day for the Deadly(63)

“I miss you, too,” Gregor said.

“I wish everybody would come back from vacation and liven the place up a little. It’s spooky. I’m the only one of us in this building in residence, and I go look out my front window and Lida’s house is all closed up. Can you imagine that? Lida’s house all closed up. I keep expecting Zeus to fall from the Heavens.”

“He won’t,” Gregor said. “Lida has all the windows open in her house down in Florida and by now she knows who in the neighborhood’s having a baby and who’s having an affair and she’s taught Donna’s Tommy at least fifteen new words, half of them in Armenian and—”

“Don’t,” Bennis said. “Just come back soon. I think I’m going to call the rest of them up and tell them to come back soon, too. I’m getting lonely.”

“You can’t ask them to come back and keep you company when you’re still refusing to leave your apartment,” Gregor said reasonably.

“Yes, I can,” Bennis told him. “Stop it with this. Finish up up there and come home. I’ll talk to you later.”

There was a click in his ear, and the phone went to dial tone. Gregor replaced the receiver in the cradle and looked at his bedspread, really an antiquey-looking quilt that was probably made of polyester and sprayed with Scotchgard to prevent stains. It was pretty anyway, but not as pretty as his quilt back home, which Elizabeth had made herself in the year before the year in which she died.

Gregor got up, went to the bathroom, and looked into the stall shower at all the knobs and hoses. He tried a couple of the knobs and found the one that operated the plain shower with no trouble at all. He took off his robe and threw it over the edge of the sink.

Maybe, he thought, he should have told Bennis about the locked-room problem, even though he didn’t think it was going to turn out to be a locked-room problem, in the long run. Bennis was good at things like that. He often picked her brains when he was having trouble with his cases, in spite of the fact that he worked overtime to keep her physically out of the cases themselves. As Father Tibor Kasparian was always saying, nobody with any brains wanted to put Bennis near any real danger. She’d open her arms and embrace it. She had no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. On the other hand—

He was just taking off his watch and laying it on the little glass shelf above the toilet when the phone rang again. He grabbed for his robe—he was of a generation that had been taught to be modest even in private—and headed back for the main room, where the Princess phone sat looking ridiculous on an oversize mahogany bedside table. He picked up and said, “Yes?”—causing himself to be immediately subjected to a high excited voice delivering a monologue that was half message and half stream-of-consciousness narrative. He knew that voice and that monologue very well, even though he had heard it for the first time less than half an hour ago. They belonged to Mrs. Edith—Gregor couldn’t remember Mrs. Edith what. He didn’t know if he’d ever known it. He only knew that for the next few days, she was his landlady. He’d never had a better reason to finish a case and finish it fast.

“Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” Edith was screeching. “I’m so glad I found you, you have no idea, I get so nervous being handed these important responsibilities but, of course, that doesn’t matter, I want to do the best I can for the Cardinal, the Cardinal only has to ask and now there’s a visitor for you down in the lobby and I need to know if you’re supposed to see him at all although, of course, I’d think you are, since it’s Father Doherty and Father Doherty—”

Gregor didn’t wait to find out if Father Doherty was a saint or a sinner, the Cardinal’s right-hand man or the local leader of the forces of the Antichrist. It would have taken too much time. He interrupted Edith, told her to ask Father Doherty to wait downstairs for ten or fifteen minutes, and hung up. Then he headed back for the shower.





[2]


For some reason, Gregor had not expected Father Michael Doherty—it was Michael; Edith had managed to get that in at the end—to be a serious man. Maybe he had heard too much the last couple of days about false reports and Brigit sightings, about the localized panic and hysteria that ripples through any small town in the wake of a violent death. Maybe he was still too much a creature of Washington and cities like it, caught in the (false) assumption that real heavyweights do not “bury” themselves in the backwaters. As soon as he saw Michael Doherty, Gregor knew he had a heavyweight. It was all over the man’s face, and especially his eyes. Here was a man who had not only “seen something of the world”—any damn fool could do that for the price of a plane ticket—but who had seen into it. Here was a man Father Tibor Kasparian would like.