Festival of Deaths(72)

What happened was that there was the sound of shuffling from the foyer inside, and the door was opened just enough for Bennis to stick her head out. Her great floating storm cloud of black hair had not been brushed. It stuck out every which way from her scalp, the way the hair of cartoon characters did when they were supposed to have received an electric shock. She hadn’t gotten dressed yet. Instead, she’d buttoned an oversize flannel shirt over her pale green nightgown. The nightgown looked like silk. The flannel shirt probably belonged to one of her brothers. Looking at her, it was impossible to tell that Bennis Hannaford had once had a coming-out party that cost so much money, it occasioned an editorial in the New York Times.

“Can I come in?” Gregor asked her.

Bennis nodded and stood back. “Believe it or not, I’m awake. Believe it or not, I’ve been awake for hours.”

“I’ve been having breakfast.”

“I’ve been smoking cigarettes. Come into the kitchen. If you haven’t overdosed on coffee, you can have some more.”

Gregor had, in fact, overdosed on coffee, but he let Bennis pour him a cup anyway, just to be polite. The copy-edited manuscript she’d been talking about was laid out across the kitchen table, covered with the notes Bennis had made in bright green felt-tipped pen. Most of these notes said “STET!!!” in a frantic scrawl that seemed to indicate a writer at the end of her rope. One or two indicated a problematic situation Gregor wouldn’t have begun to know how to deal with. “Subjunctive mood,” one of these read, canceling a change from “if she were” to “if she was.” Gregor sat down and pushed a page with the words

    DESIGNATIONS OF OFFICES IN THE HIERARCHY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, LIKE CARDINAL, SHOULD ALWAYS BE CAPITALIZED



out of his way.

“Bad mess?” he asked sympathetically.

Bennis looked blank for a moment. “Oh, no,” she said, when she finally understood. “She’s wonderful, really. I mean, she’s twenty-two and her grammar is sketchy because they don’t teach grammar anymore, but she’s not a prig and she isn’t trying to make my work politically correct, which it would have a hard time being anyway since it’s set in the twelfth century or whenever, but you know what I mean. No, this one isn’t any trouble at all.”

“What do they look like when they are trouble?”

“A solid mass of red and they take me two months. Where are my cigarettes? You look all up and awake. I take it you went down to Ararat.”

“I went down to Ararat. Would you like to hear what I was listening to at Ararat?”

“Sure.”

Gregor outlined David Goldman’s story about Lotte Goldman’s story about the dreidels as quickly and succinctly as he could, which was considerably more quickly and monumentally more succinctly than David Goldman had. Bennis sat in a kitchen chair with her legs folded up under her and smoked. Bennis always smoked. It was the one bad habit she had not managed to give up since moving to Cavanaugh Street. Gregor was beginning to think nicotine was a true addiction—meaning a substance that took over for some other bodily function when you used it. Maybe when you used nicotine, your adrenal gland stopped producing enough adrenaline to keep you moving. God only knew, if social pressure could make someone quit, Bennis ought to be tobacco-free.

When Gregor finished talking about David Goldman, Bennis was halfway through with her Benson & Hedges Menthol. She blew a stream of smoke into the air and said, “That’s interesting. Do you suppose it means anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“You ought to find out how easy it is to get one of those Israeli dreidels in this country. You ought to send somebody out looking for one.”

“I’d have to do that both here and in New York,” Gregor said. “I could probably do it here. John would send someone if I told him it was important. What would I do in New York?”

Bennis had turned away a little at the mention of John Jackman’s name. Now she took another drag on her cigarette and stared at the ceiling. “Call the police in New York,” she said. “After what’s happened here, they can’t go on treating the death of Maria Gonzalez like an ordinary mugging. Maybe they’ll have somebody they can send out trying to buy dreidels.”

“It’s the kind of thing the district attorney’s office would do, not the police,” Gregor told her. “After they’ve already got their man in jail, to back up their case, if you see what I mean. And even if it turned out that it was impossible to buy one in either New York or Philadelphia, I don’t know what it would mean. The dreidels weren’t found near the scenes of the crimes. They don’t seem to have anything to do with anything.”