“Is it anybody’s?” Bennis said.
“Well,” Julianne Corbett said. “You two go inside and look. I’ve got to do my duty around here for a while. But don’t leave without talking to me again. I have something very important I want to ask Mr. Demarkian.”
Gregor knew better than to say there was something very important he wanted to ask her. There was no need to alert her to what could be a potential embarrassment. He took Bennis’s arm and propelled her toward the inner doors. Through them, he could see a tall woman with flat brown hair, looking uncomfortable in a dress that didn’t seem to fit right. Bennis would know why it didn’t. Gregor decided that he liked this woman’s face.
“Is that Karla Parrish?” he asked Bennis.
Bennis looked in the direction he was pointing and nodded. “Oh, yes, it is. But she needs some advice on wardrobe if she intends to show up at things like this. Although it’s very sweet, isn’t it? She’s like a lamb among the wolves.”
“Culture vultures,” Gregor agreed solemnly.
He felt a tug on his sleeve and turned around to find the young man in the high starched collar and the dinner jacket at his elbow. The young man was even younger than he had seemed to be at a distance. His face looked as smooth and round as the face of a boy who is just starting to shave.
“Mr. Demarkian?” he said. “You don’t know me, but my name is Evan Walsh. I’m Karla Parrish’s assistant.”
Evan Walsh was wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Gregor thought idly of the sixties, when wire-rims had been the mark of hippies. Now they seemed to be the distinguishing element in the wardrobes of young men in dinner jackets.
“Mr. Demarkian?” Evan Walsh repeated uncertainly.
“I’m sorry,” Gregor said. “These parties tend to make me drift off. How do you do?”
“I’m going to go over and introduce myself to Karla Parrish,” Bennis said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
Gregor watched Bennis begin to wend her way through the sparser knots of people inside to get to the table where Karla Parrish stood. He saw Karla Parrish straighten when she realized that somebody was actually going to talk to her. He smiled to himself and said, “She’s not used to this kind of thing, is she? It’s very attractive, in a way. Very affecting.”
“Yeah,” Evan said. “Well, I’ll feel a lot better when she is used to this kind of thing. She’s too easy to get to, the way things are now. It worries me.”
“What do you mean, that she’s too easy to get to? Do you think somebody has designs on her money? Were you just talking in general?”
“Well,” Evan said. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s about this news story that’s in all the papers, this case you’re involved in, the one about Patsy MacLaren. Karla wants to talk to you about it. You see—”
Gregor never found out what Evan saw. What happened next happened in slow motion, but it happened in an instant just the same, and there was no time for anything. Gregor had been watching Karla Parrish and Bennis Hannaford all the time he was talking to Evan. He had seen Karla get herself a glass of punch from the bowl and Bennis eat at least three stuffed celery spears. Bennis ate like a horse and kept it off with nervous energy. Then Karla and Bennis walked away from the table and up to one of the walls, where Karla started pointing things out. Gregor wondered what it was they were looking at a photograph of. They seemed very intent.
The next thing Gregor noticed was that the table with the punch bowl on it seemed to rock, which was impossible. An older woman who had been leaning against it jumped and turned around. A young man who had been reaching for the ladle in the punch bowl stepped back in confusion. There was a nervous little titter of laughter, and then it happened.
The explosion was so loud, it made Gregor’s ears ring. The flash was so bright, it blinded him. The next thing he saw was fire and smoke. The next thing he heard was screaming.
“Oh, God,” somebody was shouting. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.”
Gregor should have headed for the nearest phone. He knew he should have. He shouldn’t have headed through the double doors into the living room. He had no way of knowing if something else in there was getting ready to explode. He had to go. Bennis was in there. That was all he could think of. Bennis was in there.
And now that the smoke was clearing, he could see the table that had once held the punch bowl.
It had been ripped in half and hacked into splinters by the blast.
PART TWO
Bondage in Holy Matrimony and Otherwise