Baptism in Blood(112)

“Right,” Clayton Hall said.

Gregor picked up the pages of the letter. They should have been more careful with it. It was sometimes possible to get fingerprints off letters. It used to be possible to match typefaces, too, but that was getting harder and harder. Everybody had daisy wheels these days. Daisy wheels were easy to destroy.

“Gregor?” Clayton Hall said.

Gregor stuffed the letter back in the envelope, and that was the end of the crime scene for him. He hung around for at least two more hours, but his mind was elsewhere, and he didn’t even listen to the questions Clayton asked the women waiting on the terrace.





2


NOW IT WAS WELL past dinnertime, and they were still stuck, sitting in the police department’s basement office, waiting for the county prosecutor to show up and let them get on with it. Jackson had gone out to get them some food. Gregor had been hoping for a timely delivery from Bet­sey’s diner, but Jackson had driven all the way out to the Interstate instead, and come back with bags and bags of McDonald’s. Big Macs. Supersize fries. Quarter Pounders with cheese. Vanilla milkshakes. Gregor thought of Cavanaugh Street, where the Ararat restaurant could be counted on to have big bowls of meatballs in a bulgur crust and stuffed cabbage and big flatbreads and things to dip the flatbreads into, made of chick-peas and eggplant and cod­fish roe. Sometimes he came home to find a bowl of yaprak sarma in his refrigerator, courtesy of Lida Arkmanian or Hannah Krekorian or one of the other women in the street who thought he was entirely incapable of taking care of himself. Somehow, he thought Jackson would not be in­trigued by any of this. Still, Tibor was intrigued by all of it, and he loved McDonald’s. At least once a week, Tibor got Bennis to drive him down to the biggest McDonald’s in Philadelphia, and they sat together in a booth, with Bennis nursing a coffee and trying not to mind that she couldn’t smoke, while Tibor ate his way through several examples of the burger of the month and three Super Size boxes of fries.

Bennis.

Gregor looked around the big room. Jackson was squirreled away in one corner, eating Big Macs with a con­centration most men couldn’t manage to bring to sex. Clay­ton Hall was sitting with his feet up on one of the desks and his eyes closed. Outside, it had finally started to get dark. Through the window well, Gregor could see the first twinkling lights of street lamps reflected on the sidewalks and the grass. Up on Cavanaugh Street, so much farther north, it would be darker.

Gregor went across the room and nudged Clayton Hall in the shoulder. “Clayton?” he said. “Are you asleep?”

Clayton Hall opened his eyes. “No, I’m not asleep. Has something happened? Have the county boys gotten here yet?”

When the county boys got there, they could wake Clayton Hall for themselves. “I’m looking for a pay phone, Clayton. Is there one anywhere in this building?”

“You don’t have to use a pay phone. You can use any of the phones in here.”

“It’s going to be a long-distance call. A very long-­distance call. And it’s going to take some time in the mak­ing.”

“Then you definitely ought to use the phones in here. What do you want to pay for something like that for?”

“It’s a personal call.”

“I don’t care what it is. Long distance can put you out of pocket for weeks. I know. I’ve got a daughter who went away to college.”

Gregor thought about making the call here, in the mid­dle of this room, with Clayton and Jackson just feet away. He thought of Bennis, hiding in her bedroom closet when she was alone in her apartment, just because she was call­ing her brother Christopher.

“Clayton,” Gregor said. “It’s a personal call. A per­sonal call.”

“Oh,” Clayton said. “You mean you want to call a woman.”

“Something like that, yes.”

“I hope you’re going to call that woman they always show you with in People magazine,” Clayton said. “That’s some good-looking woman.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Yes, she is. Where can I find—”

“You go out the door, turn right, and go up the stairs. The telephone booths are right up there through the fire door. It’s the back of the lobby. Old-fashioned booths, too. Made of wood.”

“Wonderful,” Gregor said.

“I wish I had a woman like that that I could make a phone call to.” Clayton sighed. “All I’ve got is a wife, and the woman is committed to cotton flannel and old blue jeans.”

“Bennis is committed to old blue jeans, too,” Gregor said, and then escaped before Clayton could say what men always said to a line like that: that Bennis filled hers differ­ently. Somehow, Gregor never really thought of Bennis clearly from the neck down. She was a beautiful head with great clouds of hair and impossible eyes floating around, discorporeally, in space.