Living Witness(97)
“And you can see Alice McGuffie killing a woman because that woman’s daughter is, I don’t know, responsible for the fact that it isn’t such a big deal around here to be a majorette?”
“I can see Alice killing out of spite,” Gary said. “I can see her doing just about anything about of spite, because spite is what that woman runs on.”
“And she would have tried to kill Annie-Vic out of spite? But why? At least, why now? She’s known Annie-Vic all her life. We all have.”
“I know,” Gary said. “I go around and around and around it, and I just don’t get it. The only thing Annie-Vic and this Judy Cornish had in common that I can see is that they were both involved in the lawsuit and they were both on the evolutionist side. And it just doesn’t make any sense. Because I just don’t believe that anybody would kill over something like this, and yet we’ve got a dead woman, who was in the house of another woman who is nearly dead, and I don’t know why that is, either. I don’t know the why of anything at all.”
“Does Gregor Demarkian know why?” Sarah asked.
“I hope so,” Gary said. “Because if he doesn’t, we’re going to have Dale Vardan around our necks for months, and if he doesn’t know, he’ll just make it up.”
FIVE
1
At first, waking up, Gregor Demarkian had no idea where he was. Then he did, and he found himself suddenly depressed. If there was one thing he had thought would be an advantage when he took up consulting, being able to go home at night to his own bed and his own refrigerator was it. It just never seemed to work out that way. Even with cases that were close enough to Philadelphia so that only a snail would need to commute, he found himself sleeping in strange houses, in hotels that obsessed about towels and Pay-Per-View, and even in cars. He’d thought he’d given up sleeping in cars a lot longer ago than he had given up the rest of it. He remembered being promoted off kidnap detail and into a desk job more vividly than he remembered his wedding.
His last wedding. He turned a little in the bed he was lying in and looked at the cell phone lying on the nightstand. There was nothing wrong with this room. It was small, as bedrooms go, but it was clean and well furnished and comfortable. Gregor remembered the first time he had ever seen a “raised ranch.” They called them “high ranches” back then, and they were absolutely the newest thing, out in those minor suburbs—not in the Main Line, nothing expensive like that—where some of the Armenian-American families who had started out on Cavanaugh Street had moved. His own family had not be able to afford anything that . . .well, wondrous. Wondrous was how he had thought of it back then, when he’d been ten years old.
And it had all seemed perfectly normal, he thought. It had all seemed to be just the way things were, with no point in thinking about it, and that was the way it had felt ever since then. The more things changed, the less Gregor had noticed the changing.
He reached over to the nightstand and got the cell phone. It was something called a Razr that Bennis had bought it for him. He didn’t understand why none of these companies could spell anything properly. He flipped it open and checked the time. It was just six o’clock. He had no idea if Bennis would be up by now or not. She was up by this time when he was home, but he’d spoken to her late last night. She might have been up doing wedding things. This would be his last wedding, this one. There was a bit of changing he had noticed: Elizabeth and Bennis, the two women in the world he would least have expected to find himself married to, and the world as it was when he had nobody like either of them in it.
He pressed down on the number one, which was the only speed dial he had set up. He waited while the phone rang at the other end. He was always sorry about the fact that the person calling couldn’t hear the ring tone the person receiving heard. Bennis’s ring tone for him was the theme music for Perry Mason.
The ringing stopped and Bennis’s voice said, “If you’ve found another body already, I’m going to come and get you and we can elope.”
“If we elope, we can never go back to Cavanaugh Street,” Gregor said. “They’d kill us, and you know it. I was thinking about raised ranches.”
“What?”
“When I was ten, some people from the street, the Brabanians, moved out to some little suburb somewhere. It wasn’t on the Main Line. It was one of those places, you know, a lot of houses pretty much alike on a quarter of an acre, one after the other. They bought a raised ranch, except I think we called them ‘high’ ranches then. I’d never seen one before. I thought it was the most wonderful thing that existed in the universe. You have no idea how I wanted one.”