“I don’t think being gay is wrong.”
“I don’t either, in the sense of evil,” Alexander said. “But I think the Church has a point, Chickie. All our faculties are ordered to some purpose, and our sexual faculties are ordered to procreation. Which means that sexual conduct that does not intend or allowT for procreation is essentially disordered.”
“Only if there’s something disordered about sex between a man and a woman in their sixties,” Chickie said. “We’ve been through all this before. I’ve even been through it with Margaret, although she’s a hell of a lot less dogmatic about it than you are.”
“I’m not dogmatic about it,” Alexander said. “I’m just trying to point out the obvious. There’s nothing about homosexuality, about being attracted to men, or even about being attracted to young men, that’s fundamentally evil. It may be disordered, it may be a temptation that calls us to sin, but it’s not evil. Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and with that all human beings broke down, and this is one aspect of that break that you and I are oriented away from the true nature of sexuality. But it’s just a fact. It just is. What Dennis does is not a fact. It’s a will to destruction. A will to his own destruction, and a will to the destruction of the children he victimizes. Think of it as a one-man sack of Rome by the marauding Visigoths.”
“Was it the Visigoths who sacked Rome?”
“I don’t remember,” Alexander said. He clicked the left side of the mouse spasmotically. “I don’t think there’s anything else here. Do you think he did it? Dennis?”
“Did what?”
“Murdered those women.”
“All those women?” Chickie asked. “The Plate Glass women? I thought they had that solved by now. I thought they had somebody who confessed.”
“I don’t think they believe the confession,” Alexander said. “I think they’re looking for alternatives. That’s why they brought Gregor Demarkian in.”
Chickie looked up at the ceiling. “If you were somebody like Dennis Ledeski, would you kill middle-aged women?”
“Ah,” Alexander said.
And it was true. If he was somebody like Dennis Ledeski, his basement would be full of bodies, but they wouldn’t be the bodies of middle-aged women. As for himself, he didn’t have a basement full of anything. He didn’t have a basement. This was the true dilemma of being a gay man: it was hard to build the kind of stable family you needed as you got closer and closer to old age. It was especially hard if your own family wasn’t talking to you.
“Oh, look,” Alexander said, “here’s something. Isn’t this the oddest thing.”
THREE
1
Bennis had been asleep again when Gregor got home that night, and he hadn’t had either the heart or the stomach to wake her. At least this time she was asleep in bed and not on the couch, so he didn’t feel as if she were poised for flight. In the morning, though, she was up before he was, and as he got into the shower he could hear her in the kitchen, muttering to herself. For a moment he thought it might be possible for them to go back to where they had been before she left, without talking about it.
Of course, where they had been before she left had apparently not been such a good thing. If it had been, she wouldn’t have left. Or something. Gregor made the shower hot enough to peel the skin off his back. Murder investigations were easier than Bennis. Even this murder investigation was easier than Bennis.
He finished his shower, and got dressed, and came down the hall toward the living room and the kitchen. Bennis was still in the kitchen, humming. Gregor could not tell what she was humming because Bennis was—. It was wrong to say she was tone deaf because she wasn’t. She knew how bad she sounded; she was just bad.
He went into the kitchen and found the table heaped with stuff: computer printouts from Martha and Betty; one of Bennis’s papier-mache models of one of her character’s Zedalia houses; a foam container of something from the Ararat. Bennis was making coffee. She was using the percolator, not the coffee bags.
“I could have just gone down to the Ararat and had breakfast,” he said. “You could have come with me.”
“It’s almost ten o’clock,” Bennis said. “You seemed to need the sleep more than the time, so I let you have it.”
Gregor thought about the possible uses for that particular idiom and decided not to pursue it. He sat down at the table and pushed the printouts away from him. There were more here than he had brought back the night before.