Henry came back up on the porch.
“You ever think about dying?” Martin asked him.
“No,” Henry said.
“You want to tell me why you told that Demarkian man we were sitting in the front room when the Jeep crashed, when you know as well as I that you were out in back and I was on the porch?”
Seven
1
Later, Gregor Demarkian would wonder if he had gone about it wrong—if there was something he should have done that he didn’t do, if there was something he did do that he should have left undone. At the time, he hardly thought of himself as making a decision. There was so much going on in the case, so much that he didn’t understand. He was captive to Stacey Spratz and his state police car, too. Gregor didn’t think he had ever been in a place where what he needed to see so was spread out, or separated by so much dead space. He supposed Donna Moradanyan Donahue would not be happy about his calling good forest land and open meadows “dead.” In spite of the fact that she was staying on Cavanaugh Street, she declared great affection for nature and the outdoors. Gregor had never understood it, himself. He was an urban animal, born and raised in the middle of Philadelphia, forever afterward more comfortable with asphalt than mulch. He also tended to assume the existence of public transportation, which was not a safe assumption. Out here, he could die of exposure waiting for a bus.
“I have an appointment for us with Greer at his house,” Stacey Spratz said. “You won’t believe this place. Cedar modern, post and beam, millions of windows. Hangs off the side of a hill, you think it’s just going to collapse one day in the rain. But it’s been up there for five years.”
“Only five years? I thought Greer had been in business for longer than that.”
“I don’t know how long he’s been in business, I only know when he built the house. I do remember when the business went big, though. It was about two-and-a-half years ago. All of a sudden, there were ads everywhere. He must have spent a mint.”
“Or the company did.”
“I never get how that works. My brother-in-law, he’s got a body shop business out in Manchester. If the company spends money, he spends money. It’s all his money one way or another, you know? But some of these guys, the company gets big enough and it’s not all their money anymore.”
Gregor tried to think of a way to explain the principle of legal incorporation to Stacey Spratz, and failed at the attempt. He had known officers like Spratz often in his years in the FBI, especially after the founding of the behavior sciences unit, where liaisons with local forces were a matter of almost daily routine. Stacey Spratz would spend his career in a uniform. He would be honest and efficient. He might even be promoted to sergeant. Beyond that, he would not be able to go, no matter how often he pushed all the right buttons, crossed all the right Ts, dotted all the right Is. He lacked both imagination and sophistication. Out here, most of the time, that didn’t matter. In a major city, like Hartford or Bridgeport, it would be fatal. That was the trouble with the state police. It covered a lot of territory. Any serious promotion would require Stacey Spratz to go into places he was not familiar with and deal with people who were far more cynical, and unrelenting, than any people he had so far known.
They had gone for miles without seeing any other indications of civilization than speed limit signs—didn’t they name the roads out here? Gregor wondered. Didn’t they feel the need to post the route numbers?—when they came to a clearing on the side of the road. The clearing had a sign out in front of it that said LINDA’S PARTY STORE, and beyond the sign a low clapboard building that looked like it might once have been a house. It also looked about ready to fall down. Gregor didn’t think it could have been painted in a year.
“Pull in here,” Gregor told Stacey. “I want to make a phone call.”
“Phone call?”
“There are two pay phones right over there.”
The pay phones were standing side by side on black metal posts just outside Linda’s Party Store’s front door. Gregor had no idea why Southern New England Telephone had thought it worth their while to install two of them. Gregor wondered if Linda managed to make any money. Maybe the local people thought it was worth their while to drive all the way out here for liquor. Maybe they weren’t really “all the way out here” at all, but had traveled another one of their pretzel routes and ended up almost back to where they had started.
Stacey pulled into the parking lot next to the phone. Gregor got out of the car and rummaged around in the pockets of his trousers for change. Linda’s Party Store had made a halfhearted attempt to decorate for Halloween. There was a jack-o’-lantern next to the front door. There was an orange banner on the side of the building with a picture of a black cat on it. Gregor was suddenly homesick for Cavanaugh Street and Donna Moradanyan’s lunatic decorating, even though he knew that she hadn’t done it this time. He didn’t know what he was going to do when she moved and started decorating a different building. Maybe he and old George Tekemanian would be able to convince her to come back and decorate theirs, as well.