Gregor picked up the brown paper bag Tibor had brought back to the second act full of knishes and carried it down the bleachers to where the three of them were sitting, not far away but huddled together, in spite of the fact that the bleachers were still more than warm. Nobody had turned off the space heaters in this section. Nobody looked likely to any time soon. Gregor didn’t even know where his coat was.
Gregor reached Bennis and Tibor and Kelley Grey by coming up behind Tibor’s back. He could see the side of Bennis’s face but not the look in her eyes. He could hear Tibor talking in that low, oddly cadenced voice of his, so altered by so many different accents it now sounded all-purpose “foreign,” rather than of any particular ethnic variation.
“I have only your very best interests at heart,” he was saying. “I have only the thinking about you which is what matters. I do not fuss. I am not Hannah Krekorian. I am very scientific.”
In Gregor Demarkian’s opinion, Father Tibor Kasparian was about as scientific as a novel by Robert Heinlein, but that was neither here nor there. Gregor knew what had been going on in this group while he’d been talking to Demp and Franklin Morrison. He caught Kelley Grey’s eye and watched her raise a single eyebrow into her hairline. He knew only one other person on earth who could do that, and that was Bennis Hannaford. He thought that by this time in this night’s series of Father Tibor lectures, Bennis had to be mentally asleep.
Gregor tapped Tibor on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said. “I want to talk to Miss Grey for a while. If the two of you wouldn’t mind?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Kelley Grey said promptly.
“I have been neglecting Miss Grey, Krekor,” Tibor said, without a trace of remorse. “I have been trying to talk some sense into this other young woman’s head.”
Bennis Hannaford rolled her eyes. “He’s been giving me a lecture about vitamins. I told him we had all that in biology when I was at boarding school, but he just won’t listen to me.”
“We could go higher up the bleachers,” Kelley Grey said. “That way we could talk without interrupting them. It’s all been very interesting, really.”
“It’s all been boring me to tears,” Bennis said.
Gregor held out a hand to Kelley Grey and Kelley took it. He helped her out of her seat while her arm was stretched over Tibor’s head and then led her up the bleachers a little way, but not too far, because he had never really liked bleachers. In high school, he had always been convinced that he was about to fall through the cracks. He went up to the fourth tier and sat down again. He was far enough from Bennis and Tibor so that he couldn’t hear what they were saying, although he could see Tibor’s hands working, rising up and down, one hand smashing into the other for emphasis. He was far enough away from Franklin and Demp so that they couldn’t hear what he said to Kelley Grey, although he wouldn’t have minded if they had. He thought Kelley might have minded. She had to know she was going to have to talk to them at length, over and over again, and probably to the state police, too. A couple of hours after a dead woman’s head had fallen into her lap might not be the time to press that matter home.
Gregor waited until Kelley had sat down herself and then asked, “How are you? Holding up?”
“I’m all right,” Kelley said. “Sort of on automatic pilot.”
“That goes away.”
“I was afraid it did.”
“It doesn’t have to go away now,” Gregor told her. “I’m not interested in your emotions at the moment. Just in a few procedural and background things. Then I’m going to tell Franklin you ought to go home.”
Kelley looked across at Franklin Morrison. Franklin was bending over something Demp had handed him. His shoulders were slumped. He looked depressed enough to die.
“Is it true he’s hired you to investigate what happened to Tisha Verek and Dinah? That he’s brought you in as some kind of super private detective?”
“No one can bring me in as a private detective because I’m not a private detective. You need a license for that, and I don’t have one. I do consult on occasion, with police departments and private individuals, if the case falls within my area of expertise and there is a problem that interests me.”
“Is this a problem that interests you?”
“I think so,” Gregor said. “Yes.”
“Is it all the same problem? Were they all killed by the same person? Is it some kind of plot?”
“I don’t believe in plots,” Gregor said. “As for the rest of it, I don’t know.”