That night, however, there was no two-by-four, and it was well after two when he was repeating the same message over and over again.
“There’s a sort of protocol to these things,” he kept saying. “You go out to wherever it is that has a problem and you look into it, and there’s usually something so complicated that it takes a week or ten days to figure it out. You feel like you’ve earned your fee. They feel like you’ve earned your fee. The Philadelphia Inquirer starts getting ridiculous with its commentary. There it is.”
“You keep saying ‘you,’” Bennis said. “You mean ‘I.’”
“The whole thing is perfectly ridiculous,” Gregor said. “I knew what was going on within hours of looking into it—well, no, I didn’t exactly. But I knew who the murderer was. And then yesterday. Well, yesterday.”
“If you mean earlier today, you should say that,” Bennis said.
“Earlier today then. A garden hose. I mean, for God’s sake. Who would use a garden hose?”
“Who would use a garden hose for what?”
“And the guy was perfect,” Gregor said. “They could have gotten him out of central casting. You should have seen him. It was like that comedian’s dummy come to life. I don’t remember the comedian’s name. Don’t ask me. He uses dummies. And then—do you know what it is? It’s television. And crime novels. That’s what it is.”
“That’s what what is?”
“This idea everybody has that it’s perfectly rational that a murderer will do all sorts of weird things just to disguise the murder, or for fun, or something or the other. He’ll put the corpse in a Santa Claus suit to make a statement. Or she hated the victim so much, she dressed him up in garlic to show that he was an emotional vampire. Or something. And do you know why murderers don’t really do things like that? Do you know why?”
“They don’t have the time?” Bennis suggested.
“They don’t do that kind of thing,” Gregor said, “because when they do that kind of thing, they’re likely to get caught. And they know it. Assuming that you’re an intelligent murderer, you know, and not the kind of person who thinks it makes sense to slam a baby against a wall until its skull breaks just because it won’t stop crying—”
“Gregor.”
“You know what I’m talking about. Assuming you’re an intelligent murderer and not one of the tribe of congenital idiots, you don’t do anything out of the ordinary unless you absolutely have to. And that’s why, when you find something out of the ordinary, you have to pay attention to it. Do you see what I mean?”
“I might see it a little better if I was awake,” Bennis said. “What time is it? What are we doing up?”
“I’ll talk to you in the morning,” Gregor said. “I want to leave early.”
It was true that Gregor wanted to leave early, but not true that he was getting up to get ready. It was much too early for that.
He just couldn’t stop pacing.
2
He did call ahead, to Pineville Station, just to make sure he didn’t arrive to find the town and its officials all asleep. Then he sat back in his hired car and worked out the logistics of it on a legal pad. There were logistics here that had nothing to do with what the murderer had and hadn’t done. There were things that had to do with what Waldorf Pines was and what it wasn’t, and those kinds of things always interfered with an investigation. Who was sleeping with whom. Who was not sleeping with whom. Who had a drug problem. Who was stealing small sums of money from the company till. It was always necessary to contend with that kind of thing. It took a while to sort it out and know what was irrelevant.
The car passed out of the solid core of Philadelphia suburbs and began to move through territory that was more rural. It was easy, living in Philadelphia, to forget just how rural most of Pennsylvania was. There were the Amish, of course, but there were always hundreds of small family farms, truck farms and dairy farms and even some horse farms. There were dozens of small townships just like Pineville Station, and all of them had one thing in common: all of them were dying.
Gregor had never understood how, if the country as a whole had nearly twice as many people now as when he was born, so much of that country seemed to be emptying out of people. There had been thriving towns in these places for generations, towns that hadn’t needed a big-box store or a massive corporate employer to survive. Now it was as if all the people in them had forgotten whatever it was they were supposed to do to keep a town going without help from outside. There was something fundamentally illogical about all that that Gregor’s brain couldn’t process this early in the morning.