Fountain of Death(90)

Montana, Frannie thought. Vermont. Oklahoma. She went over and sat down on the bed.

“I’m surprised you came,” she said. “I thought you’d taken off for somewhere.”

“I’m not the one who wants to take off. I was out walking around. I was thinking.”

“About what I told you?”

“Yeah. About what I told you.”

“I don’t think there’s much to think about,” Frannie said.

“Yeah. Well. One of the things I was thinking about was what the issue was. I mean, what is it exactly you were trying to tell me?”

“I was trying to tell you what happened,” Frannie said.

There were a chair and a desk next to the window Frannie had looked out of that first night. Nick took the chair and straddled it, backward.

“So you told me. But what was it all supposed to mean, Frannie? What did you want me to get out of it?”

Frannie was confused. “I wanted you to know what kind of person I am.”

“If that were the point, you left a few things out. Like everything that’s happened since.”

“Nothing has happened since.”

“A lot has happened since. You’ve gotten off drugs. You’ve been to jail. You’ve gotten a job. Entire universes have been born and died since.”

“Nothing important has happened since.”

Nick closed his eyes and put his head down on his arms. “Nothing important from your point of view, maybe. Did you every think of going into therapy?”

“I had therapy coming out of my ears when I was in jail. They were real big on it.”

Nick opened his eyes. “Do you know why I came here?”

“No.”

“I thought that since both of us were supposed to be at that meeting tomorrow morning, and since neither of us is leading any classes tomorrow, you might, you just might, want to go out for a drink.”

“I don’t—”

“Drink,” Nick interrupted. “I should have guessed. You can have a cup of tea. I can have a drink. I’m beginning to think I need one.”

“Do you really think Gregor Demarkian is going to unmask the killer tomorrow morning?” Frannie asked. “Do you think it’s going to be just like Hercule Poirot where the killer leaps up out of the crowd and tells the whole story?”

“I doubt it. That son-of-a-bitch is going to be there, you know. Detective Bandero. He’s probably going to give a little lecture on why it is that African-Americans are more likely to commit murder than white people are. Then he’s going to arrest me on the spot.”

“Oh,” Frannie said.

Nick reached across the space between them and touched her lightly on the knee. “Frannie? Do you want to go out?”

“Yes,” Frannie said softly. “I think I do.”

“Good. Go get your coat and we’ll get out of here.”

“All right.”

“It will be just like the last time, you know. Three guys will ask you why you’re wasting your time on the homeboy. Never mind the fact that I wouldn’t know a homeboy from a hero sandwich?”

“I didn’t mind that. They were just stupid.”

Nick got off of his chair.

“We’ll talk about the other stuff later,” he said, “when I’ve got a glass of Scotch in front of me. Maybe once we both calm down, we can figure out where to go from here.”

Frannie hadn’t known there was anywhere to go from here, except out, or further on, or gone.

She got her coat.





FIVE


1


GREGOR DEMARKIAN DIDN’T REALLY believe in confrontation scenes. He liked them—in the books Bennis gave him to read, the confrontation scenes always seemed to be the least confusing part—but his thinking ran along the lines Philip Brye’s did: it was a wonder one of these fictional “detectives” hadn’t been shot. Especially Nero Wolfe. Gregor’s personal favorite among fictional detectives was Nero Wolfe, who sat in his favorite chair all day and ate perfect food and solved impossibly complicated crimes without ever leaving his house. If Gregor had been able to choose a method of detection for himself, that would have been it. The problem with it was the problem with all the other methods of detection in all the other books Bennis gave him. Eventually, it required the Great Detective to meet the murderer face to face and make an accusation. Philip Brye was right. In real life, the Great Detective would have been shot, time and again, and stabbed, too, and pushed out of high windows. Murderers in real life didn’t kill people just because they “knew too much”—or, at least, amateur murderers didn’t. Murdering somebody was messy and dangerous. Still, having someone jump up in front of your face and declare that he had the evidence to convict you of murder was something else. Your first impulse could easily be to take care of the problem in the next split second. Your next impulse might be to laugh. Gregor had had that happen to him a couple of times. Everybody watched the cop and court shows on television these days. Everybody knew it had become almost impossible to convict anybody of anything in the United States of America.