Gregor prodded one more time. “You didn’t have a chance to talk to any of them?” he asked.
Kelley shook her head.
“And you didn’t see anyone else? Were any of the people you did see on bad terms with Gemma Bury?”
“Nobody was on really bad terms with Gemma,” Kelley said, “because she was like I told you. Always reasonable. Of course, that meant that nobody was very close. At least—”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Kelley said.
Obviously, there was something. Gregor could tell. If he’d had the least suspicion that Kelley Grey could have been materially involved in Gemma Bury’s death, he would have pushed for it. However, he was sure she did not. She had been telling the truth about her activities during the intermission. He had seen her sitting in her seat when he’d come back with his calzone, and Franklin had reported at least one witness who’d come back early and seen her sitting there, too. After that, she’d been caught up in the returning crowds and the performance. If she’d gone clattering around then, somebody would have mentioned it.
Kelley’s face had gone from grey to green, from firmly young to sagging, in a blink. It was time to let her go home and get some rest. Gregor got to his feet and held out a hand to help Kelley to hers.
“Get out of here,” he said. “Go get some sleep. If we need to talk to you some more, we can do it in the morning.”
Two
1
TIMMY HALL WAS ONE of those fat men who seemed to be fat mostly through inertia. Peter Callisher couldn’t remember ever seeing him eat much, but he waddled and rocked and jiggled all the same. It was now eight o’clock on the morning of December 17th, and Peter was bleary-eyed and tired. It had been bad enough last night just after the body had been found, when Gregor Demarkian had been keeping everyone he could penned up in the park and Franklin Morrison had arrived with his notebook out, trying to look professional. Amanda had gone home by then, of course, but Peter had felt an obligation to stay once he realized what happened, and he’d felt an obligation to keep Timmy with him. Timmy was not only fat but stupid, and like all stupid people he panicked. Being part of a police investigation made him paranoid and petrified and threatened to send him out of control. Peter had been thinking about the paper, of course. The Bethlehem News and Mail couldn’t let a shooting death at the Nativity play go by without comment. It couldn’t even leave such a thing safely to next week’s issue. Peter didn’t believe in extras or special editions or sixty-four point type. He’d left all that behind him in the city—and the Times had never gone in for that kind of sensationalism anyway. This was not the city, and for just that reason Peter found he was going to have to take it much more solemnly than he wanted to. His first line of offense had run into snags. Timmy had been so agitated, Peter had had a hard time paying attention to what was going on around him. If he had had to write an eyewitness account of what had gone on during the first hours of the investigation himself, it would have been a flop. Fortunately, he had snagged old Mrs. Johnson, the English teacher at the high school, just as she was getting ready to leave. She was in the cast as he couldn’t remember who. The bright look in her eyes told Peter that she had seen and heard everything there was to see and hear. Memory told Peter she would be able to write it accurately, succinctly and with a certain amount of verve. It hadn’t even surprised him when she had agreed to come back to the newspaper offices with him, or that she’d been so matter-of-factly efficient writing it all down at a typewriter in the middle of the big ground-floor room. Competent. That’s what she had always been. Competent. After a couple of hours dealing with Timmy in crisis, she was a relief.
Actually, old Mrs. Johnson had been a relief from what Peter had had to deal with in Amanda, too, although he had had to admit that that might have been partially his fault. He had come storming across from the park, determined to get his first—and, he hoped, only—extra edition ever mocked up and ready for the printers before dawn, and come pounding into the building like a crew of firemen looking for the source of the blaze. He had forgotten that Amanda had not simply gone home early, but gone home sick. He had forgotten that she was very likely to be asleep. He had forgotten how crazy she got when she was abruptly woken by loud noises or a hand on her shoulder. Peter thought of Amanda as one of the better things to have happened to him since he got back to Bethlehem. She was the lover he could never have found in the city, because the women he knew in the city were all too tense. Amanda was tense, too, but not in the same way. Maybe that was because she really wasn’t all that interested in working on a newspaper. Back in the city, all the women Peter knew were reporters. In the Middle East, they had been reporters or whores. It was enough to drive any sane man to a hermitage. Then there was Amanda, who would have been perfect, except that she had one or two quirks. One of those quirks was that she jumped out of bed and screamed when she was awakened abruptly. One of the others was that she nagged him about it for hours afterward. Peter had put up with that last night because it was all so damned important. Right after he’d found Mrs. Johnson, he’d dumped Timmy on her and gotten as close to the scene as possible. He’d seen them wrapping Gemma Bury up on a stretcher and covering the place in her bright orange coat where the blood showed. That was at least one thing Peter could attest to for himself. Gemma Bury had been wearing her much-too-expensive, Boston-bought, high-fashion tangerine orange coat, and it had hidden her death for at least an hour. Peter liked the sound of that. It had overtones of divine retribution.