Janice Loftus looked back. “They’ve got something,” she said. “I don’t have to compromise myself any more than I already have. You should order in fair trade coffee, that’s what you should do. You’d get a lot more business from socially responsible diners.”
“I’ll get you some water,” Debbie said.
“The bottled water industry—”
“It’s just water from the tap,” Debbie said. Then she sped off toward the back.
Bennis looked like she was about to breathe fire.
“People are much smarter about these things than they used to be,” Janice Loftus said, “but not enough of them are, and too many people don’t care. Bottled water—corporations are taking over our water supply. What are we going to do when it’s gone? And what they call soft drinks—”
“Excuse me?” Gregor said. He said it because he didn’t want Bennis to say anything. And Bennis was about to say something.
“Oh,” Janice Loftus said. “Yes. Well, I’ll save that for another time. But it’s important, especially for prominent people. Americans are obsessed with celebrity, of course, that’s why nothing can ever get done. The plutocrats make sure there are lots of circuses, even if there isn’t a lot of bread. But we can use their tactics against them if we’re smart. The more celebrities who come out for fair trade and for—”
Debbie was back with Janice Loftus’s water and Gregor’s imam bayildi. Janice stared at the imam bayildi as if it were a space alien. Debbie got out of the way fast.
“Well,” Janice said. “That’s … that’s very … you don’t see that much anymore. Real food from real cultural cuisines. Everything’s franchised and frozen and packaged these days.”
Back in the days when Bennis smoked cigarettes, this was when she would have lit up.
Janice Loftus stared at the imam bayildi a little longer, as if it could tell her something she needed to know. Then she dragged her eyes back to Gregor and said, “I’m sorry to bother you in the middle of the night”—the apology was mechanical—“but I tried to talk to the police and nobody would listen to me. Except they kept trying to imply that I must have killed Martha because she used to be my roommate, which is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. If I was going to kill Martha because she was my roommate, I’d have done it when she actually was my roommate. And I thought about it. Let me tell you. I thought about it a lot.”
“Have you thought about it since?” Bennis asked.
Janice Loftus ignored her. “The thing is, she did it twice that I know of, and one more time that I don’t know of because of course I don’t belong to those kinds of clubs. But even twice is a pattern, isn’t it? And patterns are what matter. But the police are just being the police, and they won’t listen. I thought maybe you’d listen.”
“I’ll listen,” Gregor said. “To tell the truth, you were on my list to talk to eventually anyway.”
“Well, I hope it wasn’t about that nonsense about how I must have wanted to kill her because she used to be my roommate and I hated her,” Janice said. “I don’t hate people. It uses up too much energy and we need the energy, all we can get. There’s so much work to be done.”
“Martha Handling used to be your roommate,” Gregor said.
“At Bryn Mawr College,” Janice said. “You know what kind of place that is. One of the original Seven Sisters. All those rich girls with Porsches and cashmere sweaters and parents working on Wall Street. The teachers really tried to raise everybody’s consciousness, but it was a losing battle for most of those girls. They just absolutely believed they deserved every one of their privileges.”
“And Martha Handling was one of the ones who believed that?” Gregor asked.
“Well, yes,” Janice Loftus said. “Of course she believed that. Even I believed that in the beginning. It’s very hard to separate yourself from your background. And in those days, I just idolized my father. I thought he walked on water. I didn’t realize what he was doing to me. I didn’t realize that abuse didn’t have to be physical to be abuse.”
“Wait,” Bennis said. “Loftus. Patrick Loftus? You’re Patrick Loftus’s daughter?”
This time, Janice Loftus did look at Bennis. “Don’t sound so impressed. There’s nothing to be impressed with. It’s not like my father ever did any real work. He didn’t dig ditches or grow food. He wasn’t even a change agent. He was just a greedy man who knew where to get money.”