Precious Blood(15)

He went back to his suitcase, counted pairs of socks and pairs of pants, and decided he was packed. He was not as packed as he would have been if Elizabeth had done it for him, but there was nothing he could do about that. He was as packed as he was going to get.

“There,” he said to George. “That’s it. Now all I have to do is haul this thing over to Tibor’s, call a cab, and go.”

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t ask Tibor to come over here, Krekor. He would have come. He wouldn’t have wanted you to—haul?”

“Bennis Hannaford,” Gregor said.

George blinked, and then a smile began to spread across his face. Bennis Hannaford. Ah, yes. Most successful child of a very old, very rich founding family of the Philadelphia Main Line. Once the most likely suspect in a very bizarre murder case, Gregor’s first as an amateur. And now? Gregor was willing to bet that nobody, not even Tibor, would be able to answer that question. For a variety of reasons, Bennis had decided not to go back to her home in Boston after the murder had been cleared up. Her mother was an invalid, and Bennis spent most of her time out in Bryn Mawr looking after her. What time she had left she spent on Cavanaugh Street—usually in the company of Donna Moradanyan or Father Tibor, and usually in Gregor’s apartment.

“You know,” Gregor said, “how she gets about things. She’s absolutely convinced there’s more to this problem in Colchester than I’m telling her—”

“Is there?”

“Of course there is. What do you take me for? The woman’s obsessed. She thinks I don’t notice those books she’s always carrying around in her tote bag. Agatha Christie. Ellery Queen. She thinks she’s Jane Marple. And she has no caution, George.”

“She’s very much prettier than Miss Marple,” George pointed out, “and she writes very nice books of her own.”

“She writes sword-and-sorcery fantasies,” Gregor said, “and I wish she’d get to work on another one. Maybe that would take her mind off crime. Remember the last time, George. She nearly got herself killed.”

“Yes, yes, Krekor. I know. But she was only trying to help.”

Gregor thought about telling George that “I only wanted to help” was the most common rationalization of the second-most common (after drug idiocy) sort of murderer: the child who slips an ailing parent a little something extra to put him out of his misery. Hell, it was the most common rationalization of full-blown serial murderers, too. Gregor was of the opinion that the world would be a much less bloody place if people would only stop just trying to help.

But Gregor didn’t say any of that. He knew what George meant, and he didn’t have time to make the kind of explanations he would have to if he was going to be understood. He snapped his suitcase shut, locked it, put the key on his key ring, and dragged the suitcase onto the floor.

“Now,” he said, “if I can just get out of here without Bennis knowing I’m leaving.”

“You intend to go by the window, Krekor?”

Gregor shot George one of his nastiest looks, but he should have known. As soon as he opened the bedroom door, she was there—spatula in hand, dough on nose, flour in hair. She should have looked terrible, but she didn’t. She was, after all, Bennis Day Hannaford. And Bennis Day Hannaford was a beautiful woman.

A beautiful young woman. Gregor thought he’d heard her say once that she was thirty-five, but she looked twenty-five. God only knew she had the genes for it. Even her mother, ravaged by illness, looked younger than her age.

Unlike her mother, however, Bennis Hannaford had the force of character of an Armenian grandmother. She looked down at his suitcase, tossed her great cloud of black hair, and said,

“Honestly, Gregor. The way you go sneaking out of here, you’re like a man who’s been cheating on his wife.”





[2]


Twenty minutes later, Gregor finally managed to cover the two blocks and single street cross to Father Tibor Kasparian’s apartment. Two minutes after that, he was ringing Tibor’s doorbell and wishing the suitcase wasn’t as heavy as it was. He felt wrung dry. Bennis could do that to him, even when he managed not to tell her anything, the way he had managed not to this time. Lord, but that woman was a gypsy witch. He wondered what she’d done with herself when she was living with that young idiot in Boston, playing at being the Perfect Modern Woman. She wasn’t the Perfect Modern anything, no matter how big a career she had or how much money she made. She had a very big career and she made a great deal of money. Anyone who wandered past a newsstand in an airport knew that, with the paperback editions of her books spread out on the racks that way, with their silver-foil titles and gold-embossed covers. Well, the books weren’t modern, either, even though the past they chronicled had never existed. And Bennis, like the women of Cavanaugh Street, had mastered the ancient art of taking control of her men.