Blood in the Water(45)

Ken’s office was in the only other substantial building in the middle of town, and the only other one made of brick. Unlike the Pineville Station Police Department building, it was not in any way new. Gregor thought it had probably gone up just after the Civil War. It had that odd architectural confusion that was part of the second Greek Revival. The generation of the founders had known the Greeks and Romans the way they knew the small and struggling states from which they had come. Many of them were “learned” only to the extent that they’d been able to piece out such learning on their own. Most of the others had had the kind of old-fashioned formal education that ignored the practicalities of everyday life for drilling in Greek and Latin. The generation that came up out of the Civil War was different. They acquired their learning self-consciously, as the badge of a kind of person they wanted the world to think them to be. They were unsure of what it meant. They wore it like a suit of clothes that didn’t fit. That was how you got buildings like this one, stolid red brick with immense three-story white marble columned façades that imitated the façade of the Parthenon but looked like … Gregor wasn’t sure what.

The building with the mayor’s office in it also held what few municipal offices there were—the local tax collector; the probate judge; the land records office. Gregor walked across the street to it with both Buck Monaghan and Larry Farmer in attendance. They went up the wide front steps—more white marble, faring badly in the Pennsylvania weather—and through the tall doors into a foyer that was actually cramped and small and that led to a corridor that was even more cramped and smaller. Gregor could see the tax collector’s office, which was closest to him in the corridor. It had a window and a well where you could slide your payments through. The window had bulletproof glass.

“Interesting,” Gregor said, looking at that.

Then he saw a young woman dragging some kind of equipment down toward them. It looked like a lectern taller than she was.

“That’s for you,” Buck Monaghan said. “We’re going to hold a press conference after we meet with the mayor. It’s set for ten thirty, I think. I hope you don’t mind speaking at it.”

“You’re not opposed to press conferences,” Larry Farmer asked. “Are you?”

Gregor promised that he was not opposed to press conferences, and left off any mention of just how much he disliked them. He understood their usefulness for the towns he worked for, even if he thought they were counterproductive to the investigations themselves. There was a small, narrow staircase to the side of the foyer. They went up that.

“Sorry about the lack of an elevator,” Buck Monaghan said. “It’s an old building.”

“I don’t mind the stairs,” Gregor said. “I was just thinking, though, that Pineville Station is in reality what the town who called me in last only pretended to be.”

“And that’s what, exactly?” Buck Monaghan said.

“Small,” Gregor said.

Larry Farmer was huffing and puffing and wheezing behind them. “I read all about that case,” he said. “You’ve got to wonder at some people, don’t you think? They think they can get away with anything.”

Gregor didn’t respond to that one, mostly because he had no idea how to do that. It seemed to be just one of those things Larry Farmer said without really intending it to mean anything. Or maybe he intended it to mean everything. It was hard to judge.

The corridor at the top of the stairs was filthy, as if nobody had bothered to wash down the floors in a decade and a half. The walls were painted two-toned yellow and green, but it was a dull mustard yellow and a washed-out olive green, so that the whole space looked as if somebody had poured a thin film of mud over it and then let the mud dry. It was an unpleasant space to walk through. Gregor couldn’t imagine people working here.

They went to the end of that corridor to a tall wooden door, and then through that door into the outer office of the mayor. It wasn’t much of an outer office, but at least it was clean, and very brightly lit. The middle-aged woman at the desk was clean and neat, too, and just plain enough to remind Gregor of the secretaries in Forties movies where the businessman was having his staff chosen by his wife.

The middle-aged woman had a little laminated nameplate on her desk. It said DELORES MARTIN. She looked up as the three of them walked in and then looked over her shoulder to a door at the back. That door had a nameplate screwed into it that said OFFICE OF THE MAYOR.

“I’m sure there isn’t going to be any problem with your going right in,” Delores Martin said. “I’ll buzz just to make sure. But it isn’t as if he doesn’t have anything on his mind this morning. Horace Wingard called.”