Gregor shed his robe and his pajamas and reached into his suitcase for a clean set of underwear. Bennis thought his underwear was “determined to be unfashionable” too, but the idea of fashionable underwear appalled him.
What made him happy was this feeling he had now that, finally, he was doing the right thing. He wasn’t letting himself be pulled around by the nose by Tony Bandero. He wasn’t drowning in theatrics and irrelevant details. He shoved his dirty underwear into his laundry bag, put on the clean set, and reached for one of those white button-down shirts.
Yes, he thought, he was finally doing the right thing. No matter what etiquette demanded in most times and most places, in this time and this place, he had every right in the world to do what he was doing.
If that meant that in the long run he put Tony Bandero’s nose out of joint—so be it.
2
GREGOR’S MOOD LASTED UNTIL he got down to the lobby to wait for his Bulldog Cab. It had lasted through a long and rambling phone call from Tony Bandero, in which it became obvious that Tony had no intention of rescuing Gregor from the boondocks until well after lunch. Gregor didn’t bother to tell him about his imminent meeting with Philip Brye. Gregor’s mood lasted through the discovery that he had somehow managed to rip the tie Donna had given him, even though he had only had it on for a few minutes, and that he didn’t have another tie in good enough shape to replace it. Gregor’s mood even lasted through his trip downstairs, which was a nightmare of helium balloons and shrieking posters. Sometime in the night some kind of invisible line had been crossed. New Year’s Eve was suddenly an Event, a Matter of Urgent Importance, a Crisis. Signs were everywhere: advertising the motel sleepover party, wishing him Happy New Year, asking him what HE intended to do about his New Year’s resolutions. This last seemed to be some kind of public service announcement from a local rest home specializing in “substance abuse” problems. In small type at the bottom of the poster was a line that said, “If you won’t get help from us, get help somewhere.” Gregor wished he could. The elevator was full of red and white balloons, each of them imprinted with the number of the new year. Just enough of the helium had leaked out of them to make them float at a level with Gregor’s face. He kept smashing his nose into them whenever he turned around.
When he got to the lobby, he walked past the check-in desk to the big wall of plate glass that looked out on the front drive. He saw no sign of a Bulldog Cab, so he walked back toward the elevators and stopped at the long line of white metal newspaper vending machines. There was another notice about the motel’s New Year’s sleepover party resting on top of these. There were more helium-filled balloons, too, tied to the pull handles of one of the machines. Gregor got some change out of his pocket and bought copies of the New York Times and The New Haven Register. He didn’t think he’d have time, with everything he had to do, to get through USA Today.
The Times had a headline about the Middle East and another about Bosnia-Herzegovina. Gregor ignored this—he was tired of depressing himself with news about perennial and unresolvable wars—and maneuvered his copy of the Register to the top. Then he looked down into an enormous picture of his own face and blinked.
His own face.
On the cover of the Register.
With Tony Bandero’s face hovering around in the background behind it.
Gregor got the paper all the way open and stared at it. The headline had been set in enormous type and said:
DEMARKIAN IN NEW HAVEN.
The subhead had been set in stylized italics and read:
Famed Detective To Aid Police In Bradbury Probe
The article had been set in ordinary type and started with a quote from Tony Bandero.
“Sometimes, you have no choice but to bring in the best talent you can find,” Detective Tony Bandero said today in an exclusive interview with the Register…
Horseshit, Gregor thought angrily. Bandero hadn’t given an exclusive interview to anybody. Bandero had talked to every single human being he could find who had a notebook or a microphone in his hand. Or hers. Now Gregor realized he must have been promising exclusives all over the lot.
Gregor Demarkian did not like publicity. Any tendency he might ever have had to like it had been bred out of him at Quantico. The Bureau liked its men gray, boring, and utterly anonymous. Even so, he was not a babe in the woods. He had worked on enough high-profile cases even while he was still with the Bureau to know how the press operated. He most surely knew enough not to cross them.
Cross the press was just what Tony Bandero had done—crossed them big time and in the stupidest possible way. Gregor himself had listened to the “exclusive interview” Tony had given to WTNH last night. Now here was another “exclusive interview.” How many more were out there?