Act of Darkness(58)

He got a cup of coffee from the urn and took the place to her right, because he thought it was expected of him. He had never understood how dining arrangements of this kind were supposed to function, and he had found Bennis’s explanations of the protocol bewildering. Sitting at Victoria’s right seemed sociable, so he did it, and then immediately was sorry for it. She was wearing too much perfume. She was wearing too much makeup. Gregor could see the makeup shift and crack.

“Well,” Victoria said again, when he was settled. “Here we are. I suppose you didn’t get any sleep at all?”

“Not much,” Gregor admitted.

“I tried to get Janet to come down and stay with me, but she wouldn’t do it. She said she would lock her door. I sat up all night wondering if she really did it.”

“Is that all you were wondering?” Gregor said.

Victoria shrugged. “What else was there to wonder about? That and maybe that we’ve got some maniac on our hands, that Markey woman or somebody else, going around killing people. Maybe our dear sweet Patchen Rawls is casting spells for something besides her sex life, for once.”

Gregor took a sip of his coffee, realizing with surprise that Victoria was serious. She wasn’t simply being bitchy about Patchen Rawls, although Gregor thought she had the right.

“Funny,” Gregor said, “I never took it seriously. Patchen Rawls and all those things people say about her odd—uh—religious convictions.”

“Would you really call what she’s got religious convictions?”

Gregor wanted to tread carefully. “When we talked last night, she talked a great deal about God. She called it the Great Consciousness, I think. It sounded like religion to me.”

“Well,” Victoria said, “I’m sorry, but to me religion is the Congregational Church. Or the Catholics. Or even the Jews. I heard Janet talking to you about what Patchen did to her mother.”

“No, not exactly. Janet referred to it, but we didn’t discuss it. What she said about Patchen Rawls was that Patchen Rawls believed in magic.”

“That’s one way of putting it.” Victoria got up and went to the urn. Gregor wondered how many cups of coffee she’d had already. “I saw you were surprised about the spells. She really does do them, you know. She didn’t when I first met her, but she does now.”

“You’ve known her a long time?”

“About five years or so. She was working in the theater in New York and then she got a job on a sitcom that didn’t make it. Good for her, that was. It’s almost impossible to go from being a television star to being a movie star, and being a movie star is really a good deal more fun.”

“Did you meet her through your work?”

“No,” Victoria said. “I met her at a fund-raiser for the Democratic party. One of those rock-concerts-to-raise-money things. There was a party afterward and she was there.”

“I’m surprised you were.”

“Because I don’t look the rock music type?” Victoria smiled. “You’re right. I’m not. I am, however, the type who gives a great deal of money to political causes. Rock stars are very good at serving the bottom line.”

Considering the fact that some of them made a hundred million dollars a year, Gregor thought, they must be. He asked, “Is Miss Rawls still interested in political causes? She hasn’t talked much about them since I’ve been here.”

“She’s interested in banning fur coats,” Victoria said, “and in some of the peripheral issues. Of course, she’s very interested in euthanasia, but that figures, under the circumstances. If you’re asking if she still goes in for real politics, the answer is no.”

“She isn’t interested in this act the senator is working on?”

Victoria hooted. “Good grief,” she said. “Patchen is no more interested in retarded children than I am in—well, in rock music. There are really only two things Patchen cares about at the moment. One of them is getting my son-in-law to leave my daughter. Notice I didn’t say she was interested in my son-in-law. The other of them is Wicca.”

“What’s Wicca?”

“The fashionable name for witchcraft. They’ve got a whole movement going. Massachusetts even has an official witch. But they’re much better equipped than they were in the old days. They’ve got drugs now, and chemicals of all kinds, from what I can see. Patchen likes to get hallucinatorily high.”

“I think you’re trying to tell me Patchen is responsible for what is happening to the senator. And maybe what happened to Kevin Debrett.”