Glass Houses(26)

Tibor came over and put a cup of black coffee down in front of him. Gregor looked at it dubiously.

“Do not worry, Krekor,” Tibor said. “I did not make it. It’s the coffee bags.”

Gregor took the spoon Tibor handed him and poked around until he found the coffee bag. Unlike with tea bags, it wasn’t a good idea to let coffee bags steep for minutes at a time. He took the bag out and put it on his saucer.

“So,” he said, “have you seen her? Have you talked to her? Is she about to move out on me or has she already done that? And what television program were you talking about?”

To clear a place for himself, Tibor had to take books off the table and put them on the seat of a chair. He pulled an empty chair out and sat down.

“I have seen her,” he said carefully, “but just only seen her. To say hello to. And get a hug. Beyond that, not so much.”

“She came up to you out of the blue, hugged you, and disappeared,” Gregor said.

“Almost,” Tibor said. “She had just called a taxi, and it was waiting.”

“What did she want a taxi for? She had the car. I mean, for God’s sake, the car was the first thing I saw when I came back just now. Parked at the curb. Like it had never been anywhere.”

“She was going downtown, Krekor. Don’t get agitated over the car. She doesn’t like to park downtown. You know that.”

“So you saw her, and she hugged you, and she got into the taxi.”

“She said how good it was to be back. Then she left, yes. It was only about half an hour or maybe three quarters of an hour after you left.”

“She came to the Ararat?”

“No, Krekor, she did not. I was coming back from the Ararat and I saw the car, and then I came to your building and I saw her coming out. In a hurry. It was probably because of the television program.”

“Which television program?”

“GoodMorning Philadelphia. With that woman. The one with the hair like a balloon. She did an interview. I watched it.”

“Bennis did an interview. Did she say anything illuminating?”

“I don’t know what you mean by illuminating, Krekor. She talked about her new book. She has a book she has just finished. New for her. Not with the elves.”

“Really?” Gregor’s mind calmed down just enough to process this information. “Not a Zed and Zedalia book?”

“Not a fiction book at all, Krekor. A memoir.”

“Bennis has been off someplace writing her memoirs?”

“Switzerland,” Tibor said helpfully.

Gregor took a deep breath. His lungs felt endless. He could have gone on sucking up air forever. “Let me try to get this straight,” he said. “Bennis has been gone for, what, nearly a year? She hasn’t gotten in touch with me. She hasn’t gotten in touch with you. She hasn’t gotten in touch with Donna. She could have been dead for all that any of us knew. But she wasn’t. She was in Switzerland writing her memoirs.”

“Perhaps, Krekor, you should calm down and not get excited until after you have talked to her.”

“I may not be able to talk to her. I may strangle her first.”

“Yes,” Tibor said. “I think that is understandable. It was not a good thing to do, disappearing as she did. But she’s a complicated woman, Krekor. She isn’t the girl next door. There may be reasons that neither you know about nor I do. You do not understand yet what has been happening.”

“I understand that I want to kill her,” Gregor said, staring up at Tibor’s ceiling. It was a tin ceiling. Donna Moradanyan had insisted. It was patterned with butterflies.

“Maybe we could change that coffee for brandy.”

“No.” Gregor stood up. “There are things I have to do. Phone calls I have to make. She has to come back to the apartment sometime. Her luggage is there. She got part of it in the Bahamas. She didn’t spend all her time in Switzerland.”

“Perhaps she needed a vacation.”

Gregor was beginning to feel like he needed a vacation, from this, all of it. This was why he did not like “relationships.” This was why, before he’d met Bennis, he’d either married a woman or left her alone. He had just taken on a case, and his mind was not on his work. It wasn’t even still inside his skull.

“You know,” he said, “if I don’t kill her myself, I may have to get her a bodyguard. If she’s coming out with some kind of tell-all memoir, there are going to be literally dozens of people looking to murder her, including four sitting members of the United States Senate.”





2


It would have been different if Bennis had been at the apartment when Gregor got back from Tibor’s, but she wasn’t, and she wasn’t there the whole long afternoon that Gregor stayed put and tried to concentrate on work. She wasn’t in her own apartment, either, or in Grace Fineman’s. Gregor would have heard her come in through the front door and climb the stairs. All after-noon the only person who did that was Grace herself, who ran in after one rehearsal to run out to another, or to a photo shoot, or something.