Fighting Chance(61)

Real as the McBain stories were, though, they were nothing at all like real police work, or real murders. Real murders were, almost invariably, mind-numbingly stupid. All the studies said that less intelligent people were more likely to commit violent crimes than more intelligent people. Gregor thought that might be hiding something more sinister. Maybe more intelligent people were less likely to get caught committing violent crimes than less intelligent people. Maybe there were, out there somewhere, dozens of bodies buried on the assumption that they’d died of natural causes, or accidents, or simple old age, when they’d actually been cleverly done in by family and friends.

Maybe, but Gregor didn’t think so. The kinds of crimes that made for interesting books and television shows were probably in reality very rare. Most intelligent criminals turned out not to be as intelligent as they thought they were. Most murders consisted of sudden and irrevocable losses of control: two guys who got liquored up and infuriated in a bar when one or both of them had a weapon; the nineteen-year-old boyfriend who promised to babysit and found out he couldn’t stand the sound of the baby crying; the mental defectives who thought a gun meant nobody could say no to them and ended up being resisted by the owner of the convenience store they’d set out to rob.

There was a reality show out there called World’s Dumbest Criminals. Gregor did not like reality shows as a rule, but he thought that one had a point. Stupid, he’d once heard somebody say, is an unlimited resource. He liked the line from Isaac Asimov better: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

In this thing with Tibor, it was less the violence he was concerned about than the events that followed the violence. There were all those people in the corridor. There was the picture sent out by the woman who had eventually found the body. There was Tibor’s behavior, which was not only strange but strange in a particular way.

He walked the street for a while until it got dark. He found himself getting annoyed over the fact that it was still daylight saving time. Not that any daylight was being saved at the moment. It was late, and it was September.

He was very tired and very hungry. He found a streetlight bright enough to read his watch by and saw that it was close to eight. He’d have missed dinner at the Ararat while everybody else was there. Bennis would make him something if he asked, but Gregor had learned that it was better not to ask. Bennis seemed to approach cooking as an adversary competition. She was competing with the food, which wanted to be edible, but would not win.

He got his phone out and called her. She sounded enormously relieved when she heard his voice. That surprised him.

“How am I supposed to know what’s going on out there?” she asked. “You could be walking around the streets of Philadelphia in a fog. And some parts of Philadelphia, you shouldn’t do that in.”

“I’m getting a cab. You’ve probably had dinner. Could you meet me at the Ararat anyway? Maybe you could call ahead in case the place is busy tonight? Linda will find a place for us if she knows we’re coming.”

“Yes, of course I can,” Bennis said. “You haven’t eaten? That means you really were wandering around the streets of Philadelphia thinking.”

“I shouldn’t be long,” Gregor said.

He closed up and stepped out into the street to hail a cab. This was not something worth arguing about, because Bennis was right.

The cab was just turning into Cavanaugh Street when Gregor realized what it was that had been bothering him, and then he wasn’t sure it made any difference. He made the driver stop just outside the Ararat’s front door, gave him a decent-enough tip, and got out onto the sidewalk. Bennis was right where he could see her, sitting in the booth that bordered the big plate glass window. Gregor wasn’t sure how he felt about that. That was the same booth where he and Tibor had had breakfast together for years.

He dragged the briefcase with the papers and the laptop in it into the Ararat. He should have stopped at home and dropped it off. He waved to Debbie Melajian when she waved to him. Her sister Linda opened the restaurant in the morning and worked through lunch. Debbie came on just after lunch and closed up after dinner.

Gregor went over to the booth and slipped in across from Bennis.

“What do you have in that thing?” Bennis asked. “It looks like you’re carrying rocks.”

“It feels like I’m carrying rocks,” Gregor said. “It’s my laptop plus enough paperwork to denude the forests, and none of it is going to make any difference that I can see. I have, however, had what you and Donna like to call an Aha Moment.”