Fountain of Death(32)
It will go away, Christie told herself.
She didn’t say anything in answer to Tara at all.
SEVEN
1
THERE WAS ONE GOOD things about the kind of publicity that made you out to be a sage and an oracle, the man who had the answers to everything: most people wanted to believe it. Gregor Demarkian thought of that as he sat eating a hot turkey sandwich in a little restaurant on Chapel Street that faced the Green. One of Philip Brye’s clerks had dropped him off there, by request, when Gregor had finished at the medical examiner’s office. Gregor hadn’t wanted to go back to his motel. The idea of being stuck out there in the middle of nowhere, with no access to anything that was going on in town, made him shudder. On the other hand, he wasn’t ready to do anything serious. He wanted to think—and the best place for that was his apartment back on Cavanaugh Street. Barring that, he thought anonymity would be a good idea. Tony Bandero wouldn’t be able to find him sitting in this rickety chair at this rickety table next to this polished window. That is, if Tony Bandero was actually looking for him, which Gregor tended to doubt. The danger for Tony, as far as Gregor could figure out, was that now that Gregor was here, he might insist on doing something.
This restaurant still had its Christmas decorations up, such as they were. There were a few tinsel-fringed stars taped to the walls and a plastic bouquet of holly leaves and berries on every table. It had New Year’s decorations up, too, although those weren’t very much either. Gregor wondered why no one ever seemed to be able to come up with anything original as a decoration for New Year’s Eve. Babies in diapers with beauty pageant banners across their chests. Balloons. Champagne bottles with their corks popped. The tables here had little cards on them with champagne glasses emitting bubbles the way Chernobyl had emitted radiation. They said “HAPPY NEW YEAR” across the top of them and gave the times the restaurant would be open on the holiday, on the bottom. The champagne glass wasn’t a real champagne glass but the wide-brimmed martini glass most people thought of as a champagne glass. Real champagne glasses were tall and thin and narrow at the opening, to keep the carbonation in. This was the kind of thing Bennis Hannaford told him, late at night, when they went to Father Tibor’s to play cards. It was the kind of thing Bennis Hannaford both knew and found important. Gregor wondered how Bennis was and what she was doing. If she had been here, she would have had no patience for this restaurant. She would have wanted to be up at Fountain of Youth, getting on with things.
Outside, a frail snow had started. It was coming down in salt grain flakes buffeted by the wind into streamers. Gregor looked down at the gravy congealing on his plate and decided it was time to go. For a hot turkey sandwich, it had actually been rather good. The problem was that by definition hot turkey sandwiches were starchy and thick and bland. Gregor checked the bill, put two dollars down on the table as a tip, and gathered his coat to take to the cash register. Like many men who had grown up poor and gotten successful only later in life, Gregor tipped too much. It would have embarrassed him, except that he knew waitresses didn’t have any money. He put the bill down at the side of the cash register with ten dollars in cash on top of it. The old woman making change made change for him and stared right past his left shoulder while she was doing it. So much for fame. Gregor shoved the dollar forty-nine he had coming to him into the pocket of his coat and went outside. The wind had really picked up. The windows in the empty storefront next door were frosted at the edges.
Empty storefronts. Old men sitting on park benches with heavy fraying overcoats to protect them from the cold. Shreds of muddied paper lying in the gutters. Gregor crossed the New Haven Green feeling slightly depressed. It was the same everywhere, but he could never get used to it. They had cared about cities when he was young. Here there was a big stone courthouse looking out on the decay of everything. It was one of those massive gray edifices that had been built to be a Palace of Justice. It was so impressive, it demanded a better noun for itself than building could ever be. There was no way to tell if it was still in use. Near it, on the other end of the same block, a smaller, unimpressive, squat brick building was in use, but Gregor couldn’t tell for what.
He reached a streetcorner on the other side of the Green from where the restaurant had been and pushed a button for the walk light. When it flashed, he crossed to the side of the street with three tall churches on it and nothing else. One of them was Congregational. He recognized the architecture. The other two were too far away for him to read their signs. He passed the lot of them and found himself, suddenly, in the middle of Yale.