“You can’t sleep on the floor,” Bennis warned him. “You’ll roll.”
“I won’t sleep on the floor.”
Gregor wedged the cabin door open, stuck his head out into the dark hall, and decided that the coast was clear. For the moment, at any rate, the passengers on the Pilgrimage Green seemed to be minding their own business.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” Gregor told Bennis.
And then he left.
2
Where he went was on deck below, where the crew slept in two bunk rooms that were less like cabins than old-fashioned dormitories and Charlie Shay rattled grandly around in a room of his own. He opened that room up, went inside, and locked up again behind himself. Charlie’s corpse was invisible between the slats of its bunk. The other bunk was empty. Gregor stared at it for a moment, trying to decide if he was really capable of doing what he’d come here to do. God only knew it was gruesome, sleeping in the same small room with a corpse and with the door locked besides, but it had its advantages. Gregor had noticed the bunks in this cabin when they’d first brought Charlie in. They were much larger than the ones on the deck above, maybe because on the original ship they’d been meant to sleep more than one. For whatever reason, Gregor was more likely to fit in the empty one here than he was in either of the ones in the cabin he was supposed to share with Bennis, whether Bennis was also in residence or not. Being in here, Gregor would also be able to keep his eye on the corpse. He wasn’t feeling very easy about the corpse. If everything he suspected was true, Charlie Shay’s murderer would have to get rid of Charlie Shay’s body sooner or later—and preferably sooner, because they could only wander around the coastal waters of the northeastern United States so long. Eventually, they would have to either make landfall or head out to sea, and heading out to sea might very well kill them all. Gregor didn’t think the murderer was much interested in a venture that might kill them all. This was a murderer who took risks, but only calculated risks.
Gregor got a couple of candles lit and went over to look at Charlie Shay’s body. It was completely covered with blankets and barely recognizable beneath them. Gregor lifted them up to make sure. He needn’t have worried. Charlie Shay lay there calmly, looking better than he ever had in life. Gregor covered him up again and retreated to the chair near the door. He put his bag of food on the floor and wished he hadn’t brought it. He wasn’t going to eat it here at the side of a dead man. He picked up the FBI file and rifled through its pages. Less than an hour ago, he was so tired he could have fallen asleep in his tracks. Now he didn’t think he’d ever fall asleep again. Either just talking about the murder, or being presented with its victim, had charged all his batteries again.
Gregor opened the FBI file and thumbed through it. Since it was a file presented to a confidential source—which is what he’d be considered for the purposes of satisfying the Bureau bureaucracy—it wasn’t inked over the way files released under the Freedom of Information Act were. It was simply straightforward Bureauese, which made it difficult to understand and often unintentionally funny, but at least something he was used to. He stopped for a moment at some agent’s thumbnail description of Charlie Shay—“considered to be more of a gopher than a fully trusted partner of Baird Financial, Shay’s principal function over the past year seems to have been to run errands for Jonathan Baird while Baird was serving time in the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury”—and then went on to what had bothered him back on Cavanaugh Street. Actually, it had bothered him even when it had only been the very young agent telling him about it. Gregor found it impossible to understand why it hadn’t bothered the very young agent’s superior officer, Gregor’s old friend Steve Hartigan. There was only one way it made any sense, but nobody seemed to have noticed. It was at times like these that Gregor wished he could see the real police reports. He thought an everyday working cop would be much better at this sort of thing than most Bureau agents were.
He found the first of the two pages in question and reread it.
“… some five minutes after going upstairs,” it read, “the subject was reported by doorman J. Gonzalez to have returned to the lobby to mail a letter. He passed through the lobby proper and greeted J. Gonzalez. Then he turned down a hall that leads to the mail room. In the mail room at that time was a resident of the building, one Mrs. Gail Creasey. Mrs. Creasey was not acquainted with the subject but knew him on sight. According to her statement, the subject entered the mail room and went directly to the slot into which all mail was to be posted in the building. He deposited a letter there, which Mrs. Creasey described as being a thickly packed legal-size envelope. He then turned, bumped into Mrs. Creasey as she was trying to make her way to the door from her own mailbox, and said good evening. It was at that point, according to Mrs. Creasey, that Mrs. Creasey noticed a very strange thing. The subject was a familiar sight to other residents of the building. He was usually very nattily dressed and very careful with his clothes. On this occasion, however, his tie was pulled a little off-center and one of the snaps on his suspenders, the one on the right in the front, had become undone. According to Mrs. Creasey, the subject kept pulling at the suspender snap in an absentedminded and irritated way, but without bothering to refasten it. Mrs. Creasey found this behavior so out of character that she asked the subject if he was feeling well, in spite of the fact that, according to her statement, she had never spoken to him before. He told her he was feeling ‘better than he had in years’ and passed on. Mrs. Creasey was left with the distinct feeling that the subject was behaving oddly and was possibly on the verge of some sort of psychological trouble.”