Baptism in Blood(113)
The hall was dark. When Gregor got to the end of the part of it he had been walking down, he stopped and felt for a light switch that wasn’t there. Then his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw a pair of fire doors with a stairwell behind them. He opened these and searched around for a light switch again. This time he was luckier. There was a whole bank of switches along one wall. He turned them all on at once, and a second later the fluorescent panels in the ceiling over the stairway began to flicker. Suddenly, Gregor knew what this building reminded him of. It was the elementary school he had gone to in Philadelphia, just a few blocks off Cavanaugh Street, all the years he had been growing up. That had been a brick building, too, with very high ceilings and the smell of disinfectant and wood polish in the air. They had torn that school down years ago and built one that wasn’t much better. The new one was old itself and half destroyed. Nobody sent their children there if they didn’t have to.
I’m doing it again, Gregor told himself as he climbed the stairs. It’s as if I got caught in a time warp, and I’m finding it harder and harder to climb out. But it had been better now for a while—Gregor couldn’t quite pinpoint how long a while. It had been much better.
At the top of the stairs, he went through another set of fire doors and found himself, as Clayton had said he would, at the back of the lobby. The booths were right there, made of heavy blond wood that had been polished so often they looked slick. Gregor went into the first of these and sat down on the little cushioned seat. The booth might be old fashioned, but the phone wasn’t. The phone company had replaced the rotary instrument that must have occupied the booth in the beginning with a brand new touch-tone model. Gregor fed a quarter into it and dialed first AT&T and then his calling card number. It was incredible how many numbers you had to hold in your head these days, and how little time you spent talking to actual people. Bennis sometimes complained to him about what she called the “virtual universe.”
The phone was ringing on Cavanaugh Street. Gregor wondered suddenly if Bennis would be out, off at the Ararat, up in Donna Moradanyan’s apartment, taking care of Donna’s son Tommy while Donna and Russ found some time for themselves. Sometimes, when Bennis was working, she just didn’t answer the phone.
Bennis answered the phone. “Hello?” she said, sounding distracted. Then she turned away from the receiver and coughed. Gregor knew she had turned away, because the cough sounded like a hiccup instead of an explosion. “Hello?”
“I’m surprised to find you home,” Gregor said. “I thought you’d be down at the Ararat, at least.”
“That’s what you said the last time you called. I am going to the Ararat in a few minutes. I’m meeting Tibor there. You sound better.”
“I feel better.”
“Is it because of all this stuff with Zhondra Meyer? I saw it on the news, you know, it’s been all over everything. They said she left a note and confessed to all the murders.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “there’s a note confessing to the murders of Tiffany Marsh and Carol Littleton, that’s true enough.”
“I take it it wasn’t Zhondra Meyer’s note.”
“It’s a complicated situation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before. I’ve read about things like this, but I haven’t seen them.”
“But is the case over?” Bennis asked. “Will you be able to catch whoever did it? What’s going on down there?”
“I know who did it,” Gregor said, “in every possible sense in which I can use that phrase. I’m sorry if I’m obscure, Bennis: It really is a very complicated situation. I can’t explain it in the terms I usually use to explain these things in.”
“You’re not saying anything about being able to catch the murderer,” Bennis said. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s like that thing with the Hazzards: You know who but you’re not sure if you can do anything about it:”
“It’s not that simple, Bennis. It really isn’t. And it’s not what I called to talk to you about. I called to talk to you about you.”
“Me?”
Gregor had forgotten how uncomfortable these old phone booths were. Everybody complained about the new little stalls where there was no place to sit. They forgot how confining the old phone booths were and how hard the seats were that you had to sit on—even the seats like this, that had cushions. Gregor readjusted himself in the booth, putting one foot on the wall under the phone to keep himself propped up, and felt ridiculous. Teenagers sat like this, when they were trying to get up the courage to do something they were afraid of.