“Vaguely,” Gregor said. “Is that what the Rosses did? They’ve got four daughters.”
“Are you thinking that one of the Ross girls killed her parents? Well, I suppose the oldest one could do it, but the other three have IQs like miracle golf scores. I couldn’t see them doing the planning.”
“But they can all shoot, can’t they?” Gregor said. “You told me that—or somebody did. They weren’t talking about the girls, but what I remember was that all these people belong to some gun club—”
“I’m sure they all shoot,” Bennis said patiently. “I’m sure they’re all good at it too. They’d make a point of it. They probably all ride, as well, and they’re probably good at that too. Have you ever paid attention to who competes in the equestrian events at the Olympics? But that still doesn’t mean that they’re capable of planning a rifle murder in the middle of a charity ball. I should think that took an enormous amount of planning and forethought.”
“Maybe.”
“Only maybe?”
“I think we’ve been putting too much stress on the planning and forethought. There are other explanations. It might have been a matter of opportunity. Somebody happened to be there and saw his chance—”
“And where did he get the gun?” Bennis sounded impatient. “That place was crawling with security that night, and not just the firm Charlotte hired. And it’s a good firm. It had to be, given Tony’s position. But the secret service was there, for God’s sake.”
“I know. But something tells me there had to be a way. There were guns in the house, weren’t there?”
“I’m sure there were, but I’m also willing to bet almost anything that they were locked away in gun cabinets. They were at Engine House when I was growing up, and even after we all grew up. It’s just common sense.”
“Still,” Gregor said. “It keeps bothering me. That there’s something obvious, or close to obvious, and I’m just not getting it. What about the sister? Would she be likely to inherit money when her brother died?”
“Her brother, yes, but not Charlotte,” Bennis said. “Not unless something very dramatic has taken place in that family without anybody telling me about it. Charlotte and Annie hated each other practically as a matter of principle. Charlotte thought Annie was ostentatious. Annie thought Charlotte was a twit.”
“I’ve met Mrs. Wyler. She didn’t look ostentatious to me.”
“When you buy your clothes at Price Heaven and wear them to places where everybody else has Chanel, you might be accused of being ostentatious. I don’t see why you’re so off the original theory. I thought it made a lot of sense that they’d been killed by some conspiracy group who thought Tony was bringing on a one-world satanic government, or whatever it is this week.”
“And killed Mrs. Ross—why?”
“I don’t know,” Bennis said.
“I don’t know either,” Gregor said. “And that’s my problem. Never mind. I’d better go find out if John has arrived, or if I’m going to be left drinking Per-rier at the table until almost dinnertime. There is something about all this, though. Some organizing idea. I must be asking the wrong questions. I wish I knew what the right ones were.”
“Just don’t order everything with cream sauce,” Bennis said. “Are you all right? You sound depressed.”
“I’m not depressed, I’m annoyed. I’ll talk to you later. If you think of anything, write it down. Maybe this place serves that crème brûlée stuff you got for me a few weeks ago.”
“I’m never in my life going to feed you anything again but steamed vegetables,” Bennis said.
Gregor switched the phone off. The men’s room was still empty. No one had come in in all the time he’d been talking to Bennis. He put the phone away in his pocket and then—for no reason he could have put in his words—washed his hands. Remember who actually died, he thought, and then, me me me.
There was something there, right at the edge of his mind, and he couldn’t get hold of it.
2
Always, in the detective novels Father Tibor Kasparian insisted on pressing on him when he had a cold, the detective—usually a professional private investigator, but sometimes a little old lady living on her own in a village or a haute cuisine caterer active in the gay rights movement or a cat—would sit down halfway through the book, outline the details of the case, and know, immediately, not only who had done it and why, but how to catch the murderer in the way most likely to result in either an arrest or a suicide. Gregor did not remember a book in which the detective had arrived at the halfway point without actually knowing what the crime was. He had no idea if he was now at what would be the halfway point if this were a book, but he did know that the only thing he was sure of was that he wasn’t sure. Tony Ross was dead. Charlotte Ross was dead. Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church had been half destroyed and rendered completely unusable. All those things might go together or not, might say something about each other or not, might help find a solution or not—but he had no way of knowing, because he had no way of organizing all the elements into a coherent whole. It would have been much easier if he could have assigned the Ross murders to a straightforward money motive. The daughters wanted the money. The sister wanted the money. Then he could have put the bombing of Holy Trinity definitively aside, separate and not in need of being included in anybody else’s mosaic. As it was, he was going around in circles. If he’d been asked to explain the case to someone coming into it new, he would have had to say: Which of several possible cases are you referring to?