Blood in the Water(20)

Gregor picked the jacket up and put it down again. It was the jacket Bennis had bought him a couple of years ago, when she had gone on one of her periodic campaigns to “update” him.

“Somehow or the other, you just don’t seem to get the spirit of the times,” she’d said.

He’d been at a loss to know what she was talking about. Maybe he was too stodgy for the business casual atmosphere of the twenty-first century? Maybe he was too rational for all the television shows about mediums and psychic children?

It had turned out that he didn’t own any kind of outerwear that was not utterly formal, as if human beings would not be able to survive in the world of the Obama administration if they didn’t own something called a “barn jacket.”

The shower was on down the hall in the bathroom. Bennis was singing something that required her to hit the C above high C, which she couldn’t do. This would be something by Joni Mitchell, who was the singer Bennis loved most in the world. All of that meant something, Gregor was sure. He just didn’t know what.

He went down to the end of the hall where the bathroom was and knocked on the door. The apartment felt small and cramped these days, because it was filled with too much “stuff.” The worst of the stuff had disappeared over the past few weeks. He didn’t have to go on tripping over stacks of bathroom tile samples and books of dining room wallpaper samples. Bennis had made enough of the decisions about what would happen to this house they had bought to renovate that it wasn’t necessary to live any longer with her indecision. Still, there suddenly seemed to be too much of everything in the apartment, as if she never put anything away anymore, on the assumption that they’d have to take it out and move it later anyway.

He knocked on the door again. The sound of the water got fainter. Bennis must have turned it down.

“What is it?” she called out.

“I’m going to go get Tibor,” Gregor said. “I’m feeling too restless to stand around here. Do you mind?”

“Of course I don’t mind. You ought to take another case.”

“Yes, I know, I ought to take another case.”

“I left the paperwork from the last case out on the kitchen table. You’ve got to give it to Martin as soon as you can. It’s getting to be the end of the year. You can’t just leave your paperwork in a mess. The IRS gets cranky.”

“I’ll get to the paperwork this afternoon,” Gregor said.

He meant it, too. At least, he thought he did. He didn’t remember that he’d always had such a hard time taking the paperwork seriously. There it was, though. If you got paid money for doing anything at all, you had paperwork to do, and the state of Pennsylvania and the government of the United States to answer to.

He went down the hall and into the living room. He went through the living room and into the kitchen. Bennis had not just left the paperwork from the Mattatuck case out on the table. She had spaced it out in neat stacks that, Gregor was sure, would turn out to be organized. Bennis had been “self-employed” for a lot longer than he had. She understood these things.

Of course, he’d been self-employed himself now for over a decade. He ought to understand these things.

He left all the paperwork where it was and went out into the hallway. The apartment door snicked shut behind him. He tried to hear the lock click into place, but it was difficult. Grace was upstairs with her door open again, practicing on a harpsichord. Either that, or she was practicing on something called “mother and child virginals.” A lot of keyboard instruments were lifted up through the windows of Grace’s apartment.

“Grace?” Gregor said.

The playing stopped. There was a slight pounding of feet and a head appeared at the stair rail above him.

“Hello, Gregor,” Grace said. “Are you all right? Where’s Bennis? Did I wake you up with my playing?”

“I’ve been up for an hour, and you never wake me up.”

“I’ve got a concert tonight at the museum,” Grace said. “It’s too bad, don’t you think? They call it early music and nobody comes, so we have to play in museums. A lot of people would like harpsichord music if they could hear it, don’t you think?”

“I’m sure they would,” Gregor said. “I like it when I hear you play it. Bennis wanted to know if we should make some special arrangements when you move downstairs. For the instruments, I think she means. I know it won’t be for months now. She seems to think she needs to know everything at once.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Grace said, “she just wants to be prepared. I understand that. I don’t think there’s going to be a problem. They pack up, you know, and it’s not like we’re trying to get them through the front door. Do you have any idea why they made that front door so narrow? I mean, I know most people aren’t trying to get instruments in here, but still. It’s like squeezing through a toothpaste tube.”