Not a Creature Was Stirring(44)

For the most part, he was depressed because it had finally hit him that the Hannaford murder was a local sensation. At least. For all he knew, the news would hit the New York Post and the Boston Globe within hours, and go from there to network television. There would be no way to escape it. Leaving Engine House, he had cooled his annoyance at being told nothing about what had happened—beyond what he had been able to see for himself—by telling himself he was just going to walk away from it. He was going to go back to his apartment, involve himself in the not-so-mysterious disappearance of Donna Moradanyan’s boyfriend, and pretend the Hannafords had never existed. With the headline on the Philadelphia Star reading SOCIETY KILLER STRIKES BRYN MAWR, he had a feeling that wasn’t going to work.

He got out of the cab, overtipped the driver, let himself into his building, and climbed the stairs to his apartment. The building smelled of food. He wondered what Cordelia Hannaford had done with her day. Then he told himself he was crazy, and on his way to getting crazier. The whole damn thing bothered him. It was also none of his business. He had to let it go.

He was standing in the middle of his bedroom when the phone rang, and he picked it up, and it was Tibor. He was thinking about Robert Hannaford’s suitcase full of $100 bills and the very short list of uses it might have had.

Which was when he decided to invite Father Tibor to lunch.

There was an elegance to that solution Elizabeth would have appreciated.





2


There were at least five people in Leitmotif stoked to the gills on dope, including the headwaiter. Once, that would have upset Gregor endlessly. Now, he barely noticed it. He was much too interested in the reactions of one Father Tibor Kasparian. Tibor had lived long stretches of his life in the great capitals of Europe, but this was the first time he would ever eat in a restaurant where the bill came to more than the price of the cab fare home.

The idea of a restaurant away from Cavanaugh Street had been Tibor’s. He wanted to discuss Donna Moradanyan’s problem, and it was better to do that as far from the interested parties as possible. In this case, the interested parties included every woman over sixty in the neighborhood. They knew Donna was pregnant. They knew the father had abandoned her. They were on the warpath—against the boy. Gregor wondered how the younger woman felt. The older ones had never heard of “options,” and wouldn’t consider “just having the baby and keeping it” as a solution that made any sense. The younger ones all seemed to be in law school.

Tibor frowned at the headwaiter’s back all the way to their table, but paid no attention at all to the homosexual couple holding hands in the corner booth. He was wearing his newest, brightest, cleanest day robes for the occasion, marking himself as a priest, but when the headwaiter called him “Father” he frowned all the harder. Gregor decided not to say anything about what Tibor probably didn’t know. This was a heavily Roman Catholic city. The headwaiter thought Tibor was a monsignor.

The headwaiter seated them, made a lot of cooing noises in bad French, and disappeared. He was replaced by an ordinary waiter, who passed out a pair of oversize menus and disappeared, too. Then the wine steward came up, and Gregor ordered a bottle of chardonnay, mostly for the hell of it. He had the impression that Tibor didn’t drink much.

Leitmotif was one of those restaurants that had been meticulously coordinated. The linen tablecloths were pink. The linen napkins were pink. The mirrors that lined three of the four walls were tinted with pink. Even the Christmas tree was pink. Tibor checked this all out very carefully, then stared for a moment at the gigantic fern hanging from a ceramic planter above his head, as if he were afraid it was going to fall on him. Then he shook his head.

“That waiter,” he said. Gregor knew he meant the headwaiter. “That waiter is another one. I can’t understand it. Sometimes I think people are very, very stupid.”

“People are often very, very stupid,” Gregor said.

Tibor waved this away. “You say that like that because you’ve spent so much of your life dealing with criminals. And criminals are the stupidest people alive. Thank the good Lord God. But Gregor, I spend my life with normal people. And I’m telling you, they’re often stupider than the criminals.”

“Are you back on Donna Moradanyan already?”

“No, no,” Tibor said. “That wasn’t stupid. That was only natural.”

“Right.”

“A young girl in love and using a little bad judgment, that is an understandable thing. If the mother keeps her head, there doesn’t need to be a tragedy. But drugs, Gregor. Anybody with any sense can see what happens with drugs. What do these people think they’re doing?”