“No,” Gregor said. “I’ll admit I did want to leave here. I got out as soon as I could. But I understand why you wouldn’t.”
“Are you and Bennis going to leave, Gregor? I was thinking maybe not, since it’s unlikely that you’d be having children. Not that I’m saying anything about Bennis’s age, of course, but—”
“Bennis and I are not going to leave here,” Gregor said. “It’s going to take at least another decade to get that house we bought into livable shape. And that’s right down a couple of blocks and squarely on Cavanaugh Street.”
“It’s not going to take a decade to get the house finished,” Bennis said, showing up suddenly in the kitchen doorway. “It may take till next Valentine’s Day.”
“She said Thanksgiving at first,” Gregor said. “Then it was Christmas. Now it’s Valentine’s Day.”
“Societies die if they don’t have children,” Lida said.
Bennis came in and sat down at the kitchen table. “What are the two of you doing here at this time of the morning?”
2
Three hours later, Bennis was helping Gregor pack the folders into the sleek Coach briefcase she had bought him a thousand Christmases ago, and Gregor was thinking yet again that the thing didn’t look big enough to hold even a few sheets of paper.
“Briefcases used to be substantial,” Gregor said. “They looked like pieces of furniture. You could carry an entire federal budget bill in them.”
“Nobody should carry an entire federal budget bill in anything,” Bennis said, “and this will hold these folders without a problem. Although I don’t understand why you use these. You’ve got a perfectly good computer.”
Gregor knew he had a perfectly good computer. It was packed into the briefcase with everything else.
“I like to move things around,” he said. “It helps me think. I make little stacks of things here and little stacks of things there and it works better than just staring at a screen. There’s something hypnotic about staring at a screen. I start to go to sleep.”
“So did it help, spending last night moving around little stacks of paper?”
Gregor looked at the folders going into the briefcase. “It did,” he said, “at least a little. The problem is that they didn’t really start thinking about this case objectively until they came and got me, and even then they weren’t doing it. They had their preconceived little scenario, they gathered the information they needed to confirm their preconceived little scenario, and then when the monkey wrench landed in the works, they had nowhere to go and nothing to go there with. There are a million things I need that aren’t here because nobody thought to ask about them.”
“Like what?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “let’s start with the murder victim whose identity we know, Michael Platte. Everything they have seems to say that Michael Platte was having an affair with Martha Heydreich. But I looked through there evidence on this, and all they’ve really got is local gossip. Somebody saw them together. Somebody else says they were spending too much time together. It’s all that sort of thing. There’s no indication that anybody ever caught them in an actually compromising position, no proof of their having rented a hotel room somewhere, nothing. When you actually look at what they’ve got here, it could mean anything at all. It could mean nothing. Martha Heydreich wasn’t a very well liked woman. It could be spite. Michael Platte himself was something of a problem child. There’s nothing substantial here. Do you see what I mean?”
“I think so,” Bennis said.
“Then,” Gregor said, “there’s information that definitely should be here that isn’t. For instance, we know that Michael Platte was murdered. Somebody should have checked up on his life. There’s a note in the files about the incident that got him kicked out of college. He got caught selling cocaine in the dorms, apparently not for the first time. The parents were steady donors. The college didn’t go to the police about it. All right, but then what? Was he still selling drugs? Was he selling them at Waldorf Pines? Was he selling it in town, or farther afield? What kind of money did he have on him? Where did it come from?”
“You mean you think this could be some kind of drug deal murder?” Bennis said.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think this has to do with drugs,” Gregor said. “Or at least not with your regular run of drug dealer and drug buyer. It’s the wrong kind of murder. They both are. Your friendly neighborhood drug lord doesn’t usually respond to problems by hitting somebody over the head and drowning him in a pool. A fire to make it impossible to identify a body is more like it, but in that case there should have been a bullet or a casing somewhere in the stuff they picked up at the scene, and there doesn’t seem to have been either. Somebody went through a lot of trouble to erase not just all possible signs of identification of that body, but all signs of how it might have ended up dead. To pull the same thing on you that I did on them yesterday, mostly out of frustration—we couldn’t actually prove it as a matter of fact that the unidentified body was the result of a murder at all. There’s more than one reason why you might want to get rid of a body and erase all possible means of identification.”