“So what’s all this?” Bandero said. “What’s going on?”
“Everybody else is waiting in the living room,” Gregor said. “We were just about to go in there.”
Bandero’s eyebrows twitched. He went to the doorway to the living room and looked in. He came back to where Gregor was standing in the foyer and shook his head.
“I can’t believe this,” he said. “I really can’t believe this. You’re going to stage some kind of confrontation scene.”
“Something like that, yes,” Gregor admitted.
“You should have notified me in advance,” Tony Bandero said. He was getting red. “We could have got the people from Channel eight out here. Nobody stages confrontation scenes in real life. It could be great TV.”
Gregor devotedly hoped it wouldn’t be. “Let’s just go in and get it over with,” he said. “I’ve acquired a burning ambition to be home in Philadelphia for the holiday.”
Tony Bandero went back to the living room doors again, looked in again, and came back to Gregor in the foyer again.
“Quite a collection. I would never have suspected any of them. Not for real.”
“I thought you suspected Nick Bannerman,” Philip Byre said.
“That was just for the newspapers. You have to give the newspapers something or they turn you into hamburger.”
Gregor was hot. He shrugged his coat off his shoulders and folded it over one arm. He wasn’t wearing any buttons or signs at all. It made him feel a little out of step. Even Connie Hazelwood was wearing a message sweatshirt: “THE DEAD ARE ONLY GRATEFUL WHEN THEY DIDN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO LIVE FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE.”
“Why don’t we all go inside and get started,” he said. “Magda Hale wants everything back to normal around here as soon as possible, and I don’t blame her.”
“Nothing is going to be normal around here for hours if you’ve really got something to tell us,” Tony Bandero said. “I’ll have to make an arrest. I’ll have to call in some blues. The news will be all over the police band. Reporters are going to descend on us like locusts.” He sounded gleeful.
“We’ve already got some blues,” Philip Brye said coldly. “We’ve got two of the officers assigned to my office. Maybe you could let them make an arrest. Then the reporters wouldn’t descend on us like locusts.”
Tony Bandero’s face reconfigured itself into a mask of sadness. “Phil, Phil,” he said. “You just don’t get it. Police work is at least sixty percent public relations these days. If you don’t blow your own horn, the civilians start to think you aren’t doing anything, and the next thing you know, your appropriation has been slashed.”
Gregor couldn’t imagine that Detective Bandero’s department’s appropriation amounted to that much. New Haven wasn’t New York. He didn’t want to go on with this conversation. If it continued long enough, Tony might get the idea of calling in the press right away. Gregor was a little surprised that he hadn’t suggested it already.
“Let’s go,” Gregor said. “You can call Channel eight when it’s over if you want to. I’m just going to get this finished and go home.”
Tony Bandero sniffed. “I don’t have to go to Channel eight,” he said. “They come to me.”
2
EVERYBODY BUT TONY BANDERO had been informed that this was a confrontation scene. Gregor found them sitting in a jagged semicircle near the massive stone fireplace, artfully arranged as an audience. The patrolmen from Philip Brye’s office were standing on either side of the doors to the foyer, their hands clasped behind their backs. They looked like guards—an impression Gregor thought was unfortunate. He didn’t want anyone to think he was jailed in here. Gregor watched as Greta Bellamy scooted across the room to sit in the empty space on the couch next to Dessa Carter. Dessa looked more tired than Gregor could remember seeing her before, but also calmer. In fact, most of the people here looked calmer than Gregor could remember them being in all the short partial week he had known them. Frannie Jay and Nick Bannerman were sitting side by side in a chair that was really too small to hold both of them. They seemed to be collapsed in on each other, as if they were melting together. Christie Mulligan looked worse than tired, worse even than exhausted, with great black crescents under her eyes and deep hollows under her cheekbones. What she did not look was frantic, which was the way Gregor remembered her from the couple of times he had spoken to her. Her two friends looked as if an electric charge had drained out of her and into them. It was only Magda Hale who seemed tenser than she had been before—and that, Gregor thought, might be the result of whatever drugs she was taking. Her tenseness seemed to have infected Simon Roveter. His Graham Greene-character charm came off as being a thin film over the surface of a personality soon to be out of control.