THREE
1
The most important thing to understand, in situations like this, was why it was that the people who had hired you didn’t want you to do the job they had supposedly hired you to do. Gregor Demarkian knew, from experience, that there was more than one possible answer to this. There was even more than one possible answer when the local police called in the FBI. If anything, being a consultant had reduced the amount of friction between himself and local law enforcement agencies. A local law enforcement agency could be pressured by public opinion or the state government to ask in Feds it wanted no part of, but it didn’t usually ask in a consultant unless it had come to its own decision to do it. Of course, it didn’t always come to its own decision willingly.
One of the reasons a local police department might ask in a consultant when it didn’t want to was that it might otherwise be required to ask in the FBI, which it really didn’t want to.
Gregor considered all of this sitting in the backseat of his hired car, feeling like something of an idiot being driven around like a debutante in the wilds of western New York state. He looked at the back of Tony Bolero’s head and wondered if the man shaved it. He thought about calling Bennis, or Tibor, or even the hospital. Then he got out his notebook and looked at the notes he had made about the billboard.
They’d gone a meandering half a mile when he couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Could you pull over?” he asked Tony Bolero.
Tony Bolero looked curious, but he pulled over. “Is there something you need to see, Mr. Demarkian? I’ve got to admit, I didn’t notice a thing, but if there’s something you think is important, you just tell me where you want me to stop.”
“Stop as soon as it’s safe,” Gregor said. “Stop anywhere at all.”
Tony Bolero pulled the car over to the soft shoulder of the road and cut the engine. Gregor got out and came around to the front. Then he got into the front passenger seat and slammed the door. Then he grabbed the seat belt.
“That feels better.”
Tony Bolero frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to—”
“Look,” Gregor said. “My wife grew up on the Philadelphia Main Line in a house that could be turned into a boarding school if her brother ever felt like it. I grew up in a tenement slum area that’s gotten a little better over the years.”
“Oh, Cavanaugh Street is more than a little better, Mr. Demarkian. I’d say it’s one of the nicest streets actually in the city. As nice as anything on the Main Line, if you ask me.”
“Yes, well. It wasn’t when I was growing up. The thing is, I feel like an idiot sitting back there like that, as if I’m some sort of—I don’t know what. And then there’s talking to you. I do have to talk to you. I have to talk to somebody, and right now I can’t talk to Howard Androcoelho. And I don’t want to be shouting things from the backseat and having to explain them three times before you understand them.”
Tony Bolero considered this. “All right,” he said. “Mrs. Demarkian did say I should give you any assistance you needed.”
“That’ll do it,” Gregor said. “And we don’t have to tell her anything about me sitting up front if it would make you feel better. Right now, I think I want to go to the police department. I’m not sure. So, in the meantime, do you think you could drive me around the long way, give me about half an hour to think?”
“You mean take the scenic route? Sure.”
“Good,” Gregor said.
Tony pulled the car back onto the road, and Gregor began flipping through page after page of his notebook, the same kind of spiral stenographer’s notebook he’d been using since his first days as a Federal agent. He didn’t even know if there were stenographers anymore. Certainly, fewer people had secretaries. Everybody had cubicles now, with their own computers in them.
Computers.
He had a computer with him. He had one that could connect to the Internet, if he found something called a “Wi-Fi” connection.
He put the notebook down on his lap.
“Something wrong, Mr. Demarkian?”
Gregor looked up. “You have to keep all the questions separate, that’s the problem,” he said. “The natural inclination is to see them all as connected. That’s the way the human brain is built to run. That’s why there are so many conspiracy theorists. But you have to keep the questions separate, or you could end up making an idiot out of yourself.”
“What questions, Mr. Demarkian?”
“Didn’t I do this for you before? I might have been doing it for Howard Androcoelho. It doesn’t matter. The more I go over it, the better off I am. Well, first, there’s why Chester Morton left. Because we know now, of course, that he did leave. He wasn’t murdered twelve years ago. And I have two pieces of information I didn’t have yesterday. The first is that there were fights between Chester Morton and his family, and especially his mother, which led to his moving out of the family home and into the trailer park.”