Blood in the Water(25)
It wasn’t that he didn’t like his life as it now existed. He liked it wonderfully well, and he found himself surprised more often than not at how much more there was to life than he had ever expected.
As for Elizabeth, well, Gregor Demarkian had known Elizabeth Seroulian since they were both very small children. They had grown up together on Cavanaugh Street when to grow up on Cavanaugh Street was to be poor. They had gone to the same elementary schools and the same high school. They had “walked out” together when he was at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the sad little army of commuting students in an Ivy League school that had very little use for them.
In a way, Elizabeth had been, to Gregor, what old George Tekemanian had been: a repository of memories; a living, walking, breathing history. Gregor was getting to the point in his life when he needed people like that. When he looked around Cavanaugh Street, when he thought back to the days living in Maryland and Virginia and hauling out to Quantico every morning, he couldn’t believe how much he had forgotten.
The little man with the bald head didn’t look as if he had ever forgotten anything, but that was because he looked as if he had never known anything. Everything about him shone. Everything about him oozed.
Gregor looked to the side and saw that Bennis was staring at him with fascination. There was another thing he forgot, even though he was confronted by it every day. Bennis was endlessly fascinated with things he himself found perfectly ordinary.
It was what made Gregor realize that saying that two people came “from different worlds” was not just a cliché. He and Bennis Hannaford Demarkian had grown up less than ten miles from each other, and they might as well have been on different planets.
There was a cliché, he thought.
The little man with the bald head was standing next to their table, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. He had a hat, a plain little watch cap thing, the kind of hat Tibor wore to keep out the cold. The little man was twisting it in his hands.
Gregor took a deep breath and said, “Yes? You are?”
The little bald man bounced around on the balls of his feet some more. “I thought of you right away,” he said. “Right at the beginning, right when it happened. But I didn’t know how to go about it, you see, and then, at that point, there was nothing in it that looked really odd. But of course, I did know there was going to be trouble. There’s always trouble when you have a case like this, and a place like Waldorf Pines. But I didn’t think it was going to be big trouble. I didn’t think we were really going to have something to worry about until today.”
Gregor picked up his cup of coffee and took a very long drink of it. “Don’t you think you ought to tell me who you are?” he said.
“Oh,” the little man said, “oh, of course, you wouldn’t know me to look at. But I didn’t know how it worked, you see. I mean, I know you’re a consultant, and I know there are police departments who hire you, and I knew right from the beginning that you’d be the perfect one, but I didn’t know how to get in touch with you, did I? You’re not in the yellow pages, are you? How is anybody supposed to know how to get in touch with you if you’re not in the yellow pages?”
“You’re in touch with him now,” Bennis pointed out from her place over by the window.
The little bald man sighed. “Yes, Mrs. Demarkian, I am in touch with him now, but this is hardly the way to do it, is it? And it’s the very last minute, which doesn’t make me feel very good at all. And then, you know, what did I do? I saw that story about you in the style section last Sunday, and it said you always ate breakfast here at six o’clock in the morning, and so I came on out to find you. And if this isn’t the way it’s done—well, I’m sure it isn’t the way it’s done—if I’ve done absolutely everything wrong and you won’t work for us, I think I’m just going to go jump off a roof. Because we’re in a lot of trouble. And sometime today, it’s going to get worse.”
“Why is it going to get worse sometime today?”
“Because the lab results came back last night,” the little bald man said. “And I know that lab results are supposed to be confidential, but we don’t have our own lab. We have to send our stuff away. And it’s all been such a big thing, so much publicity, that when it becomes obvious that we got it all backwards—well, I don’t care how confidential it’s all supposed to be. Somebody will leak it. They will. And if we don’t have you to back us up, well, we’re going to look like complete idiots, or something worse. And we won’t hear the end of it, either. Not when it’s about Waldorf Pines.”