So far, Franklin’s problems on this cold morning had been mostly procedural. Henry Furnald wanted two dollars for every car parked on his lawn instead of the one the town allowed him to charge while calling himself an official parking area. Henry was therefore threatening to take his lawn out of the car-parking business and had to be cooled down. God only knew what would happen if people started streaming in from Burlington and Keene and there was no place for them to put their cars. Then there were the camels, which had broken free of their tethers and come to rest in the middle of the intersection of Main and Carrow. They had to be moved to allow the truck bringing sausages from Montpelier to get to the food arcade. Then there was the food arcade itself, which seemed to be falling down. The damned thing was put together with plywood and penny nails, and the wind had been strong all week. Franklin kept getting calls from people who had passed by and been convinced it was about to collapse on their heads.
All in all, the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration was just as much of a pain this year as it had ever been. Franklin would have been for abolishing it, except for two things. In the first place, it paid his salary. In the second, it kept him from thinking. Of these two, the keeping-him-from-thinking part was the more important. As long as camels were poking their noses into Beder’s Dry Goods Store, Franklin would not be visited by any middle-of-the-day paralyses. As long as the local juvenile delinquents kept trying to paint the Star of Bethlehem green, Franklin would not find himself coming to in the middle of empty rooms while his brain tried furiously to figure out What It All Meant—or if it meant anything at all. Franklin didn’t know what It was—maybe, at seventy-two, he was finally getting old—but he was sick and tired of It. It would have made more sense to him if he’d developed a sudden passion for pissing up.
Now he came back to the squad room from the john and looked around, sighing a little. The squad room wasn’t really a squad room—the Bethlehem, Vermont, Police Department didn’t have a squad—but it was closer to it than anything anywhere in Vermont outside Montpelier. In fact, in spite of the fact that it was just a room in the basement of the town hall with two cells down the corridor next to the boiler room, it was better equipped than any squad room north of Boston. Back in the thirties, the town’s proceeds from the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration had gone to pay for necessities, like cleaning the streets and keeping the elementary school in business. Now, after decades of post-War prosperity only intermittently disrupted by recessions—and the steadily rising popularity of the Celebration itself—those proceeds went to pay for the spectacular. The elementary school had a computer room with fifty-four top-of-the-line IBM PCs, a gymnasium with two swimming pools and enough exercise equipment to qualify for a Jack LaLanne franchise and a music program that provided any child who wanted to learn to play an instrument with an instrument to use to learn on, for free. The volunteer fire department had a fully mechanized hook-and-ladder truck with a ladder that could stretch to 120 feet. Since the tallest building in Bethlehem was Jan-Mark Verek’s four-story log contemporary, the 120 feet weren’t likely to be needed anytime soon. The police department had what police departments get, when money is no object. Franklin had computer hookups, patrol cars, a mobile crime unit out of a Columbo fantasy, a full fingerprint classification and retrieval system with access linkage to the FBI, even a crime lab capable of microscopic blood, earth and fiber analysis. What he didn’t have was any crime worth speaking of, which he often thought was too bad.
He let himself through the swinging gate in the low wooden rail and walked up behind his one deputy, Lee Greenwood, who was sitting with his feet on his desk and The Boston Globe opened in front of his nose, doing what he was always doing: reading the paper with enough fierce concentration to memorize the punctuation. At the moment, he was reading the latest in the Globe’s series of articles on what everybody had been calling The Thanksgiving Murder for a week or so now, in spite of the fact that it hadn’t taken place on Thanksgiving at all. Franklin saw fuzzy pictures of “billionaire Jonathan Edgewick Baird” and “mysterious arbitrageur Donald McAdam.” He passed over these to the even fuzzier picture of Gregor Demarkian, looking tall and broad and Middle Eastern and nothing at all like an “Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” Going to a law-enforcement convention last year, Franklin had not been surprised to find that every smalltown cop in America seemed to know all there was to know about Mr. Gregor Demarkian. In places like this, where nothing much ever happened, it was intriguing to think that you might one day land in the middle of a mess interesting enough to call on the services of “the most skilled expert on the investigation of murder in America.”