A Stillness in Bethlehem(73)

“Fine. Miss Everman?”

“No thank you, Shirley.”

“Fine.” Shirley put the coffee in front of Gregor and the teacup and pot of water in front of Susan Everman and picked up the tray. She seemed to want to say something but not to know what. Finally she just backed away and disappeared.

“I’ve been waiting for you for hours,” Susan Everman said. “I came here yesterday, but you’d already gone. So I came here today early.”

“You must have been very conspicuous.”

“I don’t mind being conspicuous. I’m conspicuous in any event, aren’t I?”

“You do have a point.”

“Well, then. I just didn’t want to call up to your room or do something else where I might get stuck talking with Franklin Morrison in attendance. I definitely did not want to explain all this to Franklin Morrison.”

“What makes you think I won’t explain it to him myself?” Gregor asked her.

Susan Everman poured hot water over her tea bag. “I think,” she said, “that I can trust you to keep what I am going to tell you in confidence unless you need it, and I think I can trust you not to need it. I suppose what I mean by that is that I can trust you to find the person who actually murdered Gemma Bury and Tisha Verek, without needing to involve me. That’s what you’re good at, right? Finding murderers?”

“Sometimes,” Gregor said.

“Well, I hope you’re good at it this time,” Susan Everman said, “because I’m beginning to get a little nervous. You wouldn’t think there would be anything in a place like this that could get me nervous, would you? Not after Charlie. Not after what Charlie pulled me out of, for God’s sake.”

“Pulled you out of?”

“Let me be blunt, Mr. Demarkian. You were investigating some serial murder case when you ran into Charlie, so you probably don’t know much about me because you probably didn’t bother to find out, but before I met Charlie Giambelli, I was a whore. I wasn’t a high-class whore, either. I was a straightforward piece of street trash and I was addicted to more shit than I could name. About a year after you came sniffing around Charlie, the other Feds got on to him and he went to jail and so did I, because I wouldn’t tell them anything. They sent me to this women’s place upstate and this smarmy little woman social worker kept trying to convince me I had a self-esteem problem because I was protecting this pig. Well, Charlie is a pig all right. Most of them are. But he was never a pig to me. My mother was a junkie from way back. She put my ass out on the street when I was eleven years old—and she sold it in her bedroom when I was younger than that. Charlie got me up, and off drugs, and into art school. When I came out of jail, one of his people picked me up at the door, found me a room, got me started and kept me supplied with money until I started getting jobs for myself. Then Sharon came along and Charlie was a prince—”

“Sharon?”

“Sharon Morrissey,” Susan said. “You’ve met her. In Maria’s place yesterday.”

“Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “The one who made me think she might have played field hockey.”

Susan Everman grinned. “She quite definitely played field hockey. She went to the Olympics with the American women’s team when she was twenty-two. She’s what I think of as a natural lesbian. She came by it honestly, instead of the way I did.”

“Meaning by being battered out of any possible attraction you could have had to men.”

“Well, maybe not,” Susan said. “I don’t know how these things come about. Most of the girls I knew in the life were gay in their spare time, but that might just have been an unwillingness to take busmen’s holidays. Sharon thinks about this stuff, you know, and gets into the politics and all that. I’m just glad to have her.”

“Does she know about you?”

“Oh, yes,” Susan said. “In fact, she’s met Charlie. We went up to Attica to visit him before we moved up here. He gave her a lecture on how she had to be very careful to make me eat because otherwise I’d let myself starve.”

“Is that true?”

“Not anymore. I was anorexic as hell for years. Here’s your breakfast. Don’t you even pretend to worry about your cholesterol?”

“I worry that I’m not getting enough of it,” Gregor said.

He moved back a little from the table and Shirley put down plates, one after the other, separate ones for each of the items he had ordered. His breakfast had come that way yesterday, too, so he wasn’t surprised. Shirley bustled away and then bustled back again, immediately, to refill his coffee cup. He let her do it and waited until she had gone again before resuming his conversation.