A Stillness in Bethlehem(75)

Tibor would have said that there was so much sexual corruption going on everywhere, that that was one of the things Christianity had been trying for two thousand years to mitigate and explain. Then he would have gone on to show why explanations would be thick on the ground but mitigation nearly nonexistent, and then he would have started down a path that would have led him inevitably to the Greek Schism, which was where all philosophical discussion led Tibor sooner or later. For Tibor, the split between the Eastern and Western churches in the twelfth century—or whenever; Tibor would know, Gregor didn’t—was the determinative factor in every disastrous thing that had happened since, from the decline of Latin as a universal language to the Holocaust, from the corruptions of Baroque architecture to Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols. Tibor had a surprisingly wide range of general knowledge.

Gregor pulled his legal pad close to him and wrote

    What Tisha Verek and Gemma Bury had in common



at the top of a page. Underneath it he wrote

    Jan-Mark Verek



and then blew a raspberry. Certainly they had other things in common. He tried

    not from town

    contemplated First Amendment suit against Celebration

    lived next-door to each other on the Delaford Road



and considered it. That third one had possibilities. In all the fuss about Tisha Verek and Gemma Bury and who Jan-Mark Verek was sleeping with now, Dinah Ketchum got lost. Dinah Ketchum was part of the equation, even if only as a curiosity. She had either to be incorporated in any theory that attempted to unravel the intricacies involved in the other two deaths, or explained away. Dinah Ketchum had also lived next door to Gemma Bury, although not on the Delaford Road. From what Gregor remembered of the map he had made with Franklin Morrison yesterday, the Ketchum property also bordered the Vereks’, back to back. He tried

    Tisha Verek was blackmailing Gemma Bury



and didn’t like it. Gregor had no doubt that Susan Everman had been telling the truth. He had no doubt that Tisha Verek had tried to take advantage of what she knew in just the way Susan had said she had. The more Gregor learned about Tisha, the less he liked her. The problem with blackmail, though, was that it took not only two people, but two distinct prerequisites. It made sense for Tisha Verek to try to blackmail Susan Everman. Susan had had mob connections—otherwise known as a guilty secret—and it was possible that those connections had made her flush with money. That was what was needed. A guilty secret. And the possession of money by the man or woman who harbored the secret. Gemma Bury may very well have been spending her overnight excursions to Boston worshiping Satan in the back room of a homophobic gin mill. Tisha Verek may very well have found out about it. That didn’t give Gemma Bury the kind of money she would need to make it worth Tisha’s while not to tell. As for the rest of the actors in this drama—Gregor was ready to throw up his hands. Nuts they all most definitely were. Impecunious they also all most definitely were. Something might come up to change the situation later—something often did—but from the way it looked at the moment, he thought he could rule the blackmail out. He tried

    Tisha Verek threatened to blackmail people



and liked that better. The threat of blackmail, especially to someone who could not pay, might have caused Tisha Verek’s murder. The problem with that as a solution, though, was that it did nothing to explain the motive for Gemma Bury’s death, never mind for Dinah Ketchum’s. Gregor was almost beginning to believe in Bennis’s atypical psychopath, the homicidal maniac.

Out on the other side of town, the church clocks began to chime the noon hour, beginning with the traditional bongs and segueing into carillon carols without a hitch. The production must have been coordinated. There were no clashes between songs and no false notes. Gregor hummed “The First Noel” to himself and packed the legal pad away inside the folds of his newspaper. He didn’t want Bennis to see it and get silly ideas. Bennis was always getting silly ideas. Her silliest and most persistent one was that his life was just like the lives of her favorite fictional detectives—Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe—and if she could just catch him living in it she could share the excitement of it. Gregor didn’t think his life was exciting at all. His feet hurt.

He had put the legal pad away just in time. He had been sitting with his back to the lounge’s door, which had kept him from seeing into the lobby without keeping the people in the lobby from seeing him. Bennis must have seen him on her way out to the sidewalk with Father Tibor and his friend. Now she came striding back in, dodging the trailing stems of holly leaves that hung from the curved frame of the doorway, and tapped him on the shoulder with an air of pure relief.