Baptism in Blood(83)
It was, by then, exactly ten o’clock. Gregor didn’t know if David Sandler was going to walk through the door at any moment, or if he customarily went out for dinner or drinks after his class and wouldn’t be in for hours. There was a black, old-fashioned-looking telephone on the end table next to the couch. It took a while for Gregor to realize that what bothered him about it was that it had a rotary dial instead of a touch-tone pad. Gregor sat down next to it and put it into his lap. He wasn’t sure how to go about this with a rotary phone. He wasn’t even sure if he could. It was incredible how dependent people got on technology, even people like him, who didn’t like technology. He had grown up with rotary telephones. He picked up the receiver and did what he would have done then. He dialed the operator.
It took a little while—the operator was young; she wasn’t used to dealing with rotary phones, either—but he finally got the call charged to his credit card and the phone ringing in Bennis’s apartment. It rang and rang. Gregor almost decided that Bennis must have gone out: up to Donna Moradanyan’s apartment, or across the street to Tibor’s. He tried to imagine what it was like, now, on Cavanaugh Street. Had Donna Moradanyan decorated for some holiday? She liked to decorate in style, wrapping whole town houses up in ribbons and bows. They were christening somebody’s baby at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church this Sunday. Maybe Donna had decorated for that. Maybe he ought to put down the phone and give it up. The operator was going to break in at any moment, to tell him this wasn’t working.
Far away in Philadelphia, the phone was picked up, and a muffled voice said muffled words that Gregor couldn’t make sense of.
“Bennis?” he tried, wondering if he had a bad connection or just a wrong number.
There was more muffled noise again and then, “Gregor? Where are you? I just got out of the shower.”
Bennis had been smoking again. Gregor could hear it in her voice. Bennis’s voice always got raspy and raw when she had been smoking, especially now, when she spent most of her time trying to quit.
“I’m in North Carolina,” Gregor said. “I’m at David Sandler’s house. He’s out giving a seminar.”
“On atheism? In North Carolina?”
“On free thought, in Chapel Hill. In case you didn’t know, free thought was a movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—”
“Deism and the French Revolution,” Bennis broke in. “Yes, Gregor, I know. I had a very expensive education. Are you all right? I haven’t been seeing you in the news.”
“I think that you’d take that as a good sign. I do.”
“Has anything been going on down there?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “there was another murder today.”
“Oh, God.” Bennis exhaled a stream of smoke. The sound was so distinctive, Gregor could almost see her do it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t watch the news today. I’ve got a copyedited manuscript to go over. I’ve been frantic. Was it another child?”
“It was a middle-aged woman with a grown daughter and a new grandchild. She lived up at this camp that Zhondra Meyer runs, the one for lesbians. Did I ever ask you if you knew Zhondra Meyer?”
“Yes, you did, Gregor. I don’t know Zhondra Meyer. I know of her. Even I couldn’t have met every debutante in the industrial northeast. Not that Zhondra and I would have run into each other on the deb circuit in our day, anyway.”
“Why not? Because you came out in Philadelphia and she came out in New York?”
“No, idiot. Because she’s Jewish and I’m not.” Bennis laughed. “I mean, for God’s sake, Gregor, what do you think debutante parties are for?”
“I’ve never had the faintest idea.”
“Well, I don’t have the faintest idea what they’re for now, but in my day the idea was to get the girl married before she had to graduate from college. All the girls I knew had dropped out of Smith by their senior year and had big weddings.”
“You didn’t drop out to get married.”
“No, I didn’t, and from what I remember Zhondra Meyer didn’t, either. I don’t think she’s ever been married. Which makes two of us. Nobody gets married anymore, Gregor.”
“Of course they do. Donna Moradanyan got married.”
“That’s not what I meant. So what about this middle-aged woman who died? Was her death connected to the death of the baby?”
“I think so.”
“Why?”
“Because the methods appear to be similar. Because some effort was made in each case to make it appear that the murders had taken place in a stand of trees behind Zhondra Meyer’s house. Listen to me call it a house. Do you know what that place is like? Bonaventura?”