Gregor got out of his chair and held out his hand. “Excuse me,” he said. “At my age, I have a hard time leaping to my feet. I’m Gregor Demarkian.”
Stelle Cary took Gregor’s hand and shook it, looking amused. “You don’t have to leap to your feet. It doesn’t look like you could leap much of anywhere.”
Gregor let this pass. “At the moment, I can hardly stand up. Do you mind if I sit while we talk?”
“Not unless you mind if I sit.”
“Go right ahead.”
Stelle perched on a corner of the big polished desk. Zhondra Meyer frowned at her back and then said, “Mr. Demarkian is a private detective of sorts—”
“I’m not a private detective at all,” Gregor interrupted.
“I know who Gregor Demarkian is,” Stelle Cary said. “He’s all over People all the time. I heard they were going to make a TV movie out of his life, but I didn’t see anything come of it.”
“They couldn’t get my permission,” Gregor said grimly, “and they never will. You look—calmer than I expected you to look. After what happened this morning, I mean.”
“You mean Carol,” Stelle Cary said. She hopped off the corner of the desk and went to the open the French doors. “I don’t see any reason not to be calm,” she said after a while. “A couple of the women are getting hysterical, but it doesn’t make sense to me. Carol and that poor little baby. Do you think there’s some psychopathic killer stalking the camp, intent on wiping out any lesbian he can get his hands on?”
“No,” Gregor said.
“I don’t either,” Stelle told him. “So you see, there’s no reason not to be calm. That doesn’t mean that I’m not sorry that what happened to Carol happened to Carol.”
“So Carol Littleton was a friend of yours.”
“Of mine and Dinah’s, yeah. That is, as far as people make friendships here. This is an odd sort of place, Mr. Demarkian. In some ways, it isn’t a real place at all. Zhondra is the only one who is committed to it. The rest of us are all on our way from someplace to someplace else.”
“I know. Would you mind telling me what you’re on your way away from?”
Stelle smiled faintly. “Well, for one thing, Mr. Demarkian, I’m on my way from jail. I just did three years in Illinois for possession with intent to sell. Not, by the way, that they ever actually caught me selling anything. There are these federal sentencing guidelines set up by how much is found in your possession, and I had quite a bit in my possession. It was one of the few times in my life I ever felt like I had enough.”
“I take it there weren’t any complications to this charge? No weapons violations? No violence?”
“I’ve had a man or two who was interested in having guns around, but I could never see the point. You have a gun around, you’re likely to get mad and use it and then wish you hadn’t.”
“There are other weapons besides guns.”
“I don’t deal in weapons, Mr. Demarkian. I just deal in dope, and I don’t sell it to other people. I take it when I can get it”
“I thought we’d decided that was all over,” Zhondra Meyer said.
Stelle shot Zhondra a cynical little smile. “Zhondra thinks it’s like giving up chocolate,” she told Gregor. “She thinks you do it and that’s it. I keep trying to tell her, it’s all a matter of time.”
“I don’t see how you can want to do that to yourself anymore,” Zhondra said. “You were destroying your body. You were destroying your mind. You were in jail. You were as helpless as the patriarchy wants us to be. What good was that doing you?”
“Zhondra doesn’t understand how good it feels to be high. I love to be high.”
“But you’re not high now. You’re not using drugs now.”
“I’m not using drugs in the ordinary sense now, no,” Stelle told him, “but I don’t have to be. I’ve got religion at the moment.”
“What?”
Stelle came back from the French doors and sat down on the corner of the desk again, grinning. “I’ve got religion,” she repeated. “I’ve had religion before, other times and other places and other ways. You know anything about drug rehab?”
“No,” Gregor said.
“Well, the dirty little secret about drug rehab is that the religious-based programs are about twice as effective as the psychologically based ones. Not that either of them are very effective, you understand. The figure I heard was a ninety-eight-percent failure rate. But the religions do better than the shrinks, and you know why?”