He made it to the restaurant ten minutes ahead of time. He had to wait in the little front foyer for his table to be ready, and then he felt as if he were going to explode. The Ascorda Mariscos was not one of the restaurants he had shared with Bennis. Alison had brought him here the third or fourth time they’d gone out to eat together.
“It’s sort of the same only different,” Alison had said. “It’s Portuguese food. It’s a lot like Middle Eastern food. The Mediterranean is a lake.”
That had made a lot of sense at the time, although Gregor hadn’t been able to figure out why. He was tired, even though he didn’t think he’d done much of anything during the day. The seating hostess came up to him and beckoned him inside. The restaurant wasn’t particularly expensive, or particularly hip, or particularly anything. It was the kind of place academics went when they made enough money to eat out on a regular basis but not enough to eat out in the kind of places Bennis went to when Bennis bothered about eating in a restaurant away from Cavanaugh Street. He had started thinking about Bennis again. He sat down and ordered himself a large scotch on the rocks.
When Alison came—on time, because Alison was always on time—Gregor was on his second scotch, and he had begun to fiddle with the cell phone to see if he could figure out how he could use it to access the Internet. He knew it was possible to get on the Internet with this phone; he’d just never tried it before. Alison sat down and looked at his drink.
“Lionel will be here in a moment,” she said.
Gregor put down the phone. “Did you tell him what this was about?”
“Oh, yes. He’s very interested. In fact, he’s interested no matter what way it turns out, if Henry Tyder is the Plate Glass Killer or if he isn’t. There’s apparently something called voluntary homelessness, which is something new in research. Not in fact, I suppose. Anyway, he says Henry Tyder is voluntarily homeless.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “I can see that.”
“Did you see Bennis?” Alison asked. “Is that what the scotch is about?”
“No,” Gregor said, “I didn’t see Bennis. That’s what the scotch is about.”
“Well, it had to go one way or the other,” Alison said. “There’s Lionel now. Let me go get him.”
Lionel turned out to be an enormously tall man with a nose that looked like a parrot’s beak. Gregor had never seen something so outsized or so out of proportion. He stood up when the man came to the table. He sat down when the man sat down. He was vaguely aware of Alison introducing them and of Lionel Redstone ordering some kind of wine. Gregor didn’t understand wine. Wine was fruit juice. He didn’t like fruit juice, even when it wasn’t alcoholic. And when it was alcoholic, it gave him a headache.
The waitress came to take their orders and he ordered something. He thought it had shrimp in it. Lionel Redstone ordered an “ascorda mariscos,” which was the fish-and-bread soup they’d named the restaurant after. He was going on and on about something.
“So,” he said, finally breaking through Gregor’s fog, “you’ve got to see that Henry Tyder is an interesting man just on the grounds of the voluntary homelessness. If he’s also a serial killer, it will be a bonus. If he’s just been wrongly accused because the police thought he was homeless, and he gets let off now that they realize he’s not, that would be a plus, too. Not a plus for Henry Tyder, you understand. A plus for the research.”
The waitress was already bringing salads. Gregor wondered how long he’d been fuzzed out. He forced himself to focus. “They’re not going to release him any time soon,” he said. “The police seem pretty convinced that they have the man they’re looking for.”
“Only pretty convinced?” Lionel Redstone asked.
Gregor shrugged. “Serial killer investigations are tricky things. There are a lot of false hopes. I’d say that they’re as convinced as they’re ever likely to be in any serial killer case.”
“And this is because Mr. Tyder is homeless?”
“No,” Gregor said. “This is because Mr. Tyder confessed. Granted, now, he confessed to police officers without benefit of counsel, and there’s every likelihood that the confession will not be admissible as evidence in court, but he did confess. Police officers and district attorneys tend to take confessions seriously.”
“And do you?” Lionel Redstone asked. “Do you take the confession seriously? Do you think Henry Tyder is the Plate Glass Killer.”
“No,” Gregor said.