Living Witness(90)
Gregor thought he got the picture perfectly well, but what bothered him was that Dale Vardan was a distraction, and would probably stick around to be a distraction.
“I’m sorry,” Gregor said to Gary Albright, almost whispering in his ear. “I should have listened.”
Gary Albright shrugged. “It’s going to be late by the time we finish up here. You might want to think about staying over instead of going back to Philadelphia tonight. Unless it’s impossible, you know, what with the wedding coming up, and that kind of thing.”
“It’s not impossible,” Gregor said. “I was thinking myself that it might make sense, if I’m going to wait around to hear some of the tech people give preliminaries. Where’s the nearest motel?”
“Fifty miles away out on Route 10,” Gary Albright said. “The best thing would be for me and Sarah to put you up. She won’t mind, the food is half decent, and we’ve got a perfectly good spare room.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“Oh, don’t start,” Gary Albright said. “I’m about ready to explode. Come home with me and eat meatloaf and you don’t have to talk about the case if you don’t want to. Lord only knows I don’t want to.”
FOUR
1
Sometimes, Franklin Hale thought the world was full of women who thought they knew everything. Annie-Vic Hadley was that kind of woman, and this one who had just died, this Judy Cornish, she was one, too. Right now there was another one on the television set, and it wasn’t even Hillary Clinton. As far as Franklin was concerned, Hillary Clinton was the ultimate in women who thought they knew everything. She was your mother and your bossy fourth-grade teacher and that nurse in that movie all rolled into one. The woman on the television was not that bad, exactly, but Franklin knew the type. They’d all gone to fancy-ass colleges in New England and talked like they were in the middle of writing a textbook. Franklin hated New England. It was as if the place existed only to breed more of these women, and the women it couldn’t breed it transformed, like people being turned into zombies in an old black-and-white horror movie. Franklin did like black-and-white horror movies. He could remember going to them on Saturday afternoons at the Palace Theater in town, before that closed because of the competition from the multiplex out in Dunweedin. Sometimes he could almost understand these evolution people. All life is change. All life is competition. Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed. He remembered the guy who had owned the Palace Theater, too. He was one of those guys always whining about how they were getting killed by the “big fellas.” Franklin hated assholes who talked about the “big fellas.” It was like juvenile delinquents who talked about how they only did what they did because their daddies weren’t around.
The woman on the television was named Eugenie Scott, and she was head of something called the National Center for Science Education. Franklin watched her head bob up and down and she explained something or the other to Larry King. National Center for Science Education, my foot, Franklin thought. None of these people cared a damn for science education. If they did, they’d actually listen to the science. By now it was no secret. Even the scientists didn’t believe in evolution anymore. They just thought they could go on fooling the American public forever. Pastor Jack down at the Baptist Church said that they did that because they wanted to win souls away from God and for the devil, but Franklin thought that was a crock, too. What they wanted was to prance around preening themselves on how smart they all were, smarter than anybody else, so smart they didn’t even have to talk to all those ordinary stupid people. It was what that kind of person always wanted, and there were lots of that kind of person out there running around. There was Larry King, for one. There was any news anchor on MSNBC. Franklin had to thank God for Bill O’Reilly, because as far as Franklin was concerned, Bill O’Reilly was the only honest news reporter in the history of television.
Somewhere, off on the other side of the house, he could hear somebody knocking at their front door. He looked down into his coffee cup and frowned. The cup was only half full of coffee. As soon as he’d come in tonight, he’d taken out his private stash of Johnny Walker to stiffen it up with something serious. It had been one Hell of a day, what with Marcey acting up the way she had, and right down at the store, too. Not that anybody in town didn’t know about Marcey by now, but even so. You had to keep your work life and your home life separate. That was the way it had been for Franklin’s parents, and he was sure that that was the way it should be for him. But Marcey had come down, and then there was the problem of getting her back here, and then there was the problem of getting himself back to the store. And in the middle of all that, somebody had killed this Cornish woman.