Festival of Deaths(68)

That was the kind of thing he thought about, early in the morning, when he was not thinking about cases or the excruciating things the Inquirer was saying about him or the problems that had to be cleaned up on Cavanaugh Street. That was why he didn’t like to take time off for these little relaxations. Besides, once he was on a case he liked to get on with it, and this case especially struck him as urgent. Sometimes the feel he got for the thing was that the main murder had been committed and any violence that followed would essentially be panic. That had to be taken into consideration, but in cases like that it was sometimes possible to calm the murderer’s mind, so that nothing new would happen while you were nailing the evidence to put him away for the old. Sometimes the feel was more electric. That was the feeling he had here. He couldn’t shake the conviction that he was in the middle of an ongoing endeavor, and that if he didn’t do something quickly it would be no time at all when he would find another corpse in his lap.

Tibor and David were discussing soup kitchens. They both participated in the running of one in the center of Philadelphia. Actually, Temple B’nai Shalom and Holy Trinity Church participated, along with half a dozen other churches in the area. It was one of those nondenominational, interfaith efforts that made the six o’clock news every once in a while on a slow day when the anchors wanted to look compassionate.

“It’s the schizophrenics who worry me,” David Goldman was saying. “Your idea is working very well with the temporarily displaced, but there’s just nothing you can do about the schizophrenics. They get disoriented.”

“What are they talking about?” Gregor asked George.

“Homeless people.” George tucked into his second order of hash browns. “There are homeless people and then there are homeless people.”

“There are the hard-core alcoholics,” Tibor said, “and you have to watch them, Krekor, because they will take the food and hide it in their clothes and go out on the street and sell it to get money for bad wine.”

“There are also people who are just down on their luck,” David Goldman said. “That includes some of the bag ladies. Tibor here put a process into place—”

“I had an idea,” Tibor objected. “‘Put a process into place.’ What kind of talk is that?”

“Tibor set up a housing bank,” David Goldman said. “The churches and Temple B’nai Shalom each adopt between one and six of these people at a time—”

“We do six,” Tibor said, “because if we really need money I talk to Howard Kashinian and to Bennis. With Bennis, I ask. With Howard, I threaten.”

“We do six, too,” David Goldman said. “We find them an apartment, sometimes two of them together, give them the security deposit and a month’s rent, help them get a job or deal with the government agencies—”

“But we can’t do it with the schizophrenics,” Tibor said, “because they get confused and then they wander off. These people are not integrated, Krekor. It is a terrible thing. And the insane asylums will not have them.”

“We don’t have insane asylums in America,” David Goldman said. “We call them psychiatric hospitals. Or mental institutions.”

“Insane asylums,” Tibor said.

Gregor poured his cup full of coffee again. “I think,” he said, “that it’s time to get back to business. It’s not that I want to rush you or anything—”

“Of course you want to rush us,” David Goldman said. “You’re a busy man.”

“Krekor is not busy today,” Tibor protested. “He has only to go with me for lunch to see Helena Oumoudian.”

Gregor could have said something about having a life that stretched beyond the confines of Cavanaugh Street, but he didn’t, because he didn’t know if it would be true. Instead, he drank half the coffee in his cup and put the cup back into the saucer with inordinate care. He’d seen serial killers use delaying tactics like this as soon as they were brought in for questioning. It bothered him to think he might have picked up something from them besides a lot of professional pain.

“When you called last night,” he said, “you said that your sister, Lotte, had figured out—”

“Not figured out,” David Goldman said quickly. “It was something she’d found. Actually, she found one of them and Shelley Feldstein found the other. And it was strange.”

“They found these things around the body of Maximillian Dey?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, no,” David Goldman said. “They’d have mentioned it. It was nothing like that.”