“She absolutely loves Russ,” Bennis said.
“I don’t see what everybody is making such a big noise about,” Donna said. “It’s just something that’s come up, that’s all. It’s just something that I have to think through.”
“When you have to think through whether or not to jump off a bridge over the Grand Canyon, you need a shrink,” Bennis said. “And you ought to call Russ and at least let him know you’re talking to him. You’re getting married in nine days and you haven’t said a word to him in the last twenty-four hours.”
Donna got to her feet. “I think I’d better go over to Lida’s and pick up Tommy. There isn’t anything talking like this is going to get us. I mean, Peter is Peter. We’ll see what happens next.”
“Get a restraining order so he can’t show up at the wedding,” Bennis said.
Donna Moradanyan sighed again. She was so tall, she looked like she could have modeled for one of those French statues of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. She stretched her arms and legs and shook out her hair.
“I’ll see you people later,” she said. “I’m going to take Tommy down to McDonald’s for dinner.”
“Let Russ go with you,” Bennis said quickly.
“Russ is working.” Donna patted Gregor on the head. “Good night, Gregor. I left a candle decoration in your living room window earlier. It’s all wired up and ready to go. All you have to do is plug it in.”
One Christmas, Donna Moradanyan had given him a Santa and reindeer for his window and when he had plugged it in it had flashed on and off, on and off, on and off, at the rate of sixty flashes per minute. He hoped this candle would not flash.
“See you later,” Donna said again, and then she was gone, first a set of footsteps in Bennis’s foyer, then the sound of Bennis’s door opening and not quite slamming shut.
Bennis sat up a little on the couch and looked out in the direction Donna had gone.
“It’s enough to make any sane person crazy,” she said. “She’s got a man who loves her to distraction and he also loves her son. He’s responsible. He’s nice. He’s got a decent job. He thinks the earth began on the day she was born. What does she want?”
Gregor picked up his plate of kefta again and cracked apart another bulgur-encrusted meatball. The only light on in the room was the light of the flex lamp hanging over the computer terminal where old George Tekemanian sat. Other than that, there was the faint pink glow flowing through the window from the street, and not much of that. It never seemed to get completely dark in Philadelphia during the summer—at least, not until three or four in the morning—but it was never really light out at night either. Gregor disliked the half-glow of summer evenings more than any other kind of weather. He found something fake in it, and something deceptive. At times like this he always found himself wishing that it would soon be fall.
“So,” he said to Bennis, “how are you? Does that arm hurt?”
“All the time,” Bennis said, “but it’s no big deal. What about you? Did you find out who murdered that poor woman yet?”
“I doubt if anybody murdered that poor woman on purpose. She was from out of town. She wasn’t anyone particularly important. There’s nothing we can find in her background to link her to Patricia MacLaren Willis. There doesn’t seem to be anybody in her life with any real interest in doing her in.”
“You know all that about her already?” Bennis asked. “How can you have that kind of information so fast?”
“We can’t,” Gregor admitted, “but we have preliminary information, and we have some threads to go with. Like the pipe bomb.”
“Which points to Mrs. Willis.”
“Well, it would seem to, wouldn’t it? Now, we do have some information on that. It was an almost identical bomb to the ones that went off in that parking garage. A length of aluminum cylinder packed with mothballs and chlorine bleach. An electric watch with leads running off it. You could have gotten the whole thing out of The Anarchist’s Cookbook.”
“Maybe it was a copycat.”
“There’s more than one recipe for a bomb in The Anarchist’s Cookbook. It would be too much of a coincidence if Mrs. Willis and a copycat picked the same recipe.”
“Do you think Mrs. Willis planted the bomb?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
“Do you think the bomb was meant to kill Julianne Corbett?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“I’m disappointed in you,” Bennis said. “Usually by this point you know practically everything. Or else you say you do. Have you heard about Karla Parrish? Is she going to be all right?”