“Good. Be there at nine. I’ve got to go now.”
“But what does Julianne Corbett have to do with it?”
“I’ve got to go now,” John Jackman insisted. “I’m glad you’re coming down, Gregor. You’ve been acting very weird lately. I’ve been worried.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gregor started to say—but the phone had already gone to dial tone and there was no point. Gregor hung up the phone, got off the couch, and went back into the bedroom. Then he hung up the phone there and sat down on the edge of the bed. His wedding album was lying on the carpet next to the bureau. The other photograph albums were edged back a little under his bed. He picked them all up and put them back into the bureau’s bottom drawer. He had a picture of Elizabeth in a frame on top of his bureau. He picked that up and looked at it instead.
2.
Half and hour later, feeling stiff and sore and half as if he were coming down with a cold, Gregor Demarkian went back downstairs to Bennis Hannaford’s apartment. When he knocked, he heard her voice call to him to come in. He tried her door and found it unlocked. No matter how many times he lectured her, she would not listen. Nobody on Cavanaugh Street would listen. This was their Magic Kingdom. At least one murder had happened there since Gregor was in residence—but it might as well not have. It had merely passed into the folklore of the street.
Gregor found Bennis lying on her back on the living room floor, a cigarette in her hand, a rose crystal ashtray planted firmly in the middle of her admirably flat stomach. She was staring at the moldings on her ceiling and humming something by the Eagles under her breath.
“I thought it was you,” she said. “Are you feeling better now?”
“I kept expecting you to show up at my front door. Or to send Tibor or Donna or somebody.”
Bennis took a deep drag and blew out a stream of smoke. “We discussed it, Donna and me. We decided we were doing you more harm than good by fussing over you the way we were. I would have come up after a while though. Maybe about an hour. Just to make sure you weren’t, you know. Suicidal.”
“Is that the way I appear to you? Suicidal?”
Bennis took the ashtray off her stomach and put it down next to her on the floor. She held her cigarette high in the air and turned over on her stomach.
“You seem—odd to me,” she said, “and to Donna too. Not like yourself. Not even like the way you usually are when you’re sad.”
“I miss my wife.”
“I know.”
“I think I miss her all the time. I just don’t notice it usually. I—push it away from me.”
“Good old testosterone stoicism.”
“More like good old Bureau training. And the army too, during the period I was in the army. Even the Bureau may have changed by now, I suppose.”
“I can’t imagine being married,” Bennis said, tapping ash into the ashtray. “I think about it when I’m with Donna sometimes, and I run right into a wall. Did I ever tell you that my mother loved my father?”
“You’ve mentioned it.”
“She did too,” Bennis said. “She loved him more than she ever loved any of us and she always knew what he was. I think I grew up thinking it was a kind of disease. Love, I mean. And marriage was just a place where people tried to kill each other off.”
“It can be a place where people are safe,” Gregor said. “Where you can be exactly who you are and not have to worry about it.”
“My father was always exactly who he was. He didn’t need my mother for that.”
“Your father was a psychopath.”
Bennis put her cigarette out and sat up. Then she reached into her pocket for another cigarette and lit up again. The flame from her lighter made her face look made of shadows and light.
“Sometimes, when I’m upstairs with Donna,” she said, “I think about them making it permanent, Donna and Russ, you know, and then, even though I know them both, I get sick to my stomach, you know, I just start getting crazy. Does that make sense?”
“In a way.”
“If I didn’t have to stick around for the wedding, I think I’d go off to France for a couple of weeks and get into trouble. Maybe you could come with me.”
“I’d put a damper on your party. I’d want to do nothing but sleep and eat cassoulet.”
“Gregor, listen. About what you said before. I mean, aren’t you safe with me? Can’t you be yourself with me?”
“Most of the time.”
“Only most of the time? I can always be myself with you.”
“No, you can’t.”