Unfortunately, he also had a problem. He could see a way to make the killings of Robert and Emma Hannaford make sense. He could devise an internally consistent scenario for what had been going on at Engine House with no trouble at all. But if that scenario was right, then the framing of Bobby Hannaford could not be happening.
“So maybe it isn’t,” he said to the wind and the rain.
Then the cab Flanagan had called for him drew up at the curb, and he got in. He leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and started to worry. He worried all the way home, through a Philadelphia still locked in an orgy of Christmas celebration and a wariness about the weather.
He only stopped worrying after he’d gotten out of the cab on Cavanaugh Street, tipped and paid the driver, and started walking up the steep stone steps to his vestibule. That was when he saw Bennis Hannaford, leaning out old George Tekamanian’s front window.
She looked very Christmasy, in a bright red sweater with a large shiny tin bell brooch spread across the shoulder.
SIX
1
BENNIS OPENED THE FRONT DOOR for him. George was enthroned in his very best easy chair, wedged between a drinks cart and a pile of hardcover books, wearing an emerald green sweater someone must have given him for Christmas and a pair of reindeer socks. The socks were noticeable because George wasn’t wearing shoes. A pair of tasseled Gucci loafers had been abandoned unceremoniously in the middle of his carpet. Gregor could hardly believe his eyes. George looked deliriously happy. Bennis looked bemused.
She ought to look bemused, Gregor thought. She had drunk her way through half of one of George’s Yerevan Specials, a time bomb that consisted of vodka and just enough lime soda to make you think you had nothing but a nonalcoholic punch. Gregor had been ambushed by one of those himself, the first week he knew George. He recognized the glass.
He shut the door behind him, shrugged off his coat, and hung it up on George’s coatrack. Bennis wasn’t wearing any shoes either. Hers, a pair of L. L. Bean’s Maine Hunting Shoes just like Donna Moradanyan’s, were lying on the fireplace hearth.
At least she wasn’t wearing reindeer socks.
She went to sit on the floor at George’s feet and took a book off the hardcover stack.
“Look, Krekor,” George said, “Martin brings me all the books in real hard covers for Christmas, and now Bennis, she signs them for me.”
“All nine of them,” Bennis said.
“Are either one of you sober?” Gregor said.
Bennis made a face at him and bent over the book in her lap, writing. She wrote for a long time. Gregor wondered what she could be finding to say.
He took a chair from the edge of the room and dragged it to the center. They looked comfortable together, these two—and he was surprised to find he was not surprised at that. He didn’t put much credence in the evidence of novels. Elizabeth had told him, over and over again, that a great many men who had written wonderful things had been terrible people in their private lives. It was the Bennis Hannaford of the stairs at Engine House whom Gregor had known would do so well on Cavanaugh Street. Now she finished with the book in her lap, put it aside, and picked up another one. All the books looked impossibly long.
“Would you like me to get you a drink, Krekor?” George said. “I’m so tired, I keep forgetting myself.”
“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “I don’t need a drink right now. Miss Hannaford here has offered to buy me one.”
Bennis stopped writing. “Was everybody terribly angry at me for bugging out? I mean, I know I should have hung around for the police—”
“It is customary in a murder investigation,” Gregor said.
“—but everybody was getting crazy, and I knew it was just going to get crazier when Bobby got home, so I got out. I just did some shopping and then came over here as fast as I could. I wasn’t trying to avoid you.”
“No,” Gregor said, “you were just trying to avoid John Jackman.”
“I make it a policy to avoid men who are prettier than I am,” Bennis said. “If you were a woman, you would too.”
“She was just standing out there in the cold,” old George said. “And I recognized her from her pictures.”
“He’s been very nice,” Bennis said.
Old George sighed. “We called Tibor, Krekor, but he was not home. He was not at the church, either. Somebody must be feeding him dinner.”
“Did you try Lida’s?” Gregor said.
“Is that Mrs. Arkmanian?” Bennis asked. “We did try her. She wasn’t home either.”
Old George sighed again. “He will be very disappointed, Krekor. And I will be disappointed, too. I try and try, I can’t make her tell me what happens to Rogan le Bourne. Tibor, he could make her.”