Bleeding Hearts(39)

“There was a lot of traffic,” Gregor said.

The young woman at the reception desk put herself out at least as far as giving Gregor a smile. Gregor Demarkian, after all, was Somebody in Philadelphia. He got his name in the papers and his face on the six o’clock news. There had even been an article or two about him in People magazine. The young woman grabbed a pair of enormously large, beribboned and tasseled menus out from under the surface of her desk, stepped into the foyer, looked straight into Demarkian’s eyes, and said, “Follow me, sir. It’s right this way.”

Then she turned her back and Bob Cheswicki winked. “Think I’d do any better if I told her I was Batman in my spare time?” he whispered into Gregor’s ear.

“No,” Gregor said.

“She just gave me all kinds of grief about bringing my briefcase to the table,” Bob said. “Apparently, it isn’t done at La Vie Bohème. I wish you’d brought a briefcase.”

“It looks like I should have brought one to take away what you brought to give me. What’s in that thing?”

“Everything,” Bob said solemnly.

The young woman had stopped halfway across La Vie Bohème’s main room. She was looking back and waiting patiently, a little frown on her face. There was a hanging fern just above her head whose tendrils fell so close to her hair, they made her seem as if she were wearing a hat. Gregor got a weird image of her starring in something called Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Had there really been a movie of that name, when he was younger?

“I suppose we’d better move,” Bob said.

“I was just riding in a cab,” Gregor said, “thinking about how awful everything’s gotten and how everybody’s attitude is all wrong.”

“We had better get moving. You’ve got Februaryitis. Never mind. A nice complicated murder will clear that right up.”

The young woman with the menus was beginning to look very angry. She was working hard not to, but Gregor knew the signs. He began to move toward her between the unidentified greens and spider plants.

Bob was probably right, Gregor thought. He probably did have Februaryitis, or whatever you wanted to call it. There was probably nothing wrong with the country that couldn’t be cured by a couple of weeks’ vacation in the Caribbean.

If that wasn’t it, then he must be getting old.





2


Whether or not bringing briefcases into La Vie Bohème was de rigueur, it was certainly implicitly discouraged. La Vie Bohème’s chairs were large and wide, but its tables were anything but. Gregor was reminded of the old-fashioned soda shoppes that had littered the neighborhoods of Philadelphia just before the Second World War. They’d had tables like this. Round. Small. Made of cast iron tortured into curlicues and flourishes and painted white. The tables at La Vie Bohème had glass tops. That was the only difference. The soda shoppe tables had only more contorted cast iron. Gregor remembered never having room to put his ice cream sundae down without worrying it would fall off. Now he wondered—as he wondered every time he came here—how he was going to cut his meat without upsetting it and everything else onto the floor. This was the kind of thing that bothered Bob Cheswicki not at all. He ordered a bottle of wine to split between the two of them—“I’m taking the day off. I wanted to enjoy myself while you were paying for it”—and began to pull papers out of his briefcase and spread them around the table. The glass top of the table was covered by a pearl-gray linen tablecloth. It slipped.

“Have the boeuf américaine,” he told Gregor while he got his presentation in order. “It’s a slab of prime rib two and a half inches thick. They’ve got the hottest horseradish this side of the Atlantic Ocean. What exactly do you know about Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard?”

The waiter arrived with their bottle of wine. It was a vintage Margaux that probably listed for over a hundred dollars a bottle. Bob really did intend to make him pay. He also did not intend to let the waiter pull any nonsense. The waiter went through the ritual of the wine tasting. Bob went through it muttering under his breath about evidence protocol. Gregor ordered the boeuf américaine. So did Bob. The waiter did not so much leave as escape.

“You’ve got to call their crap around here,” Bob said to the waiter’s retreating back. “They can be unbelievably pretentious.”

Gregor felt like pointing out that pretentiousness was at least part of what the people who came here were paying for. If all you wanted was really good beef, there were half a dozen steakhouses in the city who could give you that at one-fifth these prices. Gregor poured himself a glass of wine and tasted it. It was good, but not nearly as good as it would have needed to be for Gregor to consider it worth what it cost. He put his glass down on the table and said, “Back to Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. She was a friend or acquaintance or something of Bennis Hannaford’s sister Myra, by the way, but I suppose that’s natural. That’s the real Main Line.”