Somebody Else's Music(146)

“Well,” Kyle said, “Ms. Toliver certainly ended up embarrassed. Royally embarrassed. And Chris Inglerod ended up dead. And Emma Kenyon Bligh nearly ended up dead. And this still doesn’t make any sense. If she really wanted to kill Ms. Toliver, what was Peggy doing attacking all these other people? What was the point here?”

“The point,” Gregor said, “is what the point has always been for that woman, to protect her husband.”

“Crap,” Kyle said. “I mean, for God’s sake—”

“Fucking damn,” somebody said in the outer room. “You can’t tell me I can’t come the fuck in there if I the fuck want to, you fucking little cunt, I’ll cut you up, I really will, and then I’ll cut up the other fucking little cunt, you let me at her, you—”

All the police officers, state and local, were in Kyle Borden’s office. There was nobody outside to hold the fort but Sharon, who was looking sullen and mulish. The men who were holding Stu Kennedy back were all reporters. Some of them were middle-aged. Most of them were out of shape. Stu Kennedy was dangerous mostly because he seemed to be hopped up on speed or coke or something else that revved all your motors and blew out all your corks. He looked awful. He had vomited down the front of his shirt some time ago. The vomit was crusted against the dingy blue material like the ridges on a three-dimensional topographical map. His face was filthy. His hands were cracked with dirt. If Gregor hadn’t known who Stu Kennedy was, he’d have thought he was one of those crazy old drunks who lived on the streets in the worst back alleys in Philadelphia.

“Fucking cunt,” Stu Kennedy said, over and over again.

The two state troopers moved in to tie him down.





3


There was no place to put Stu Kennedy in the Hollman town jail. The jail was only two cells in the basement of the police department, and at the moment Peggy Smith Kennedy was in one of them. The idea of Stu and Peggy in adjacent cells, while Stu screamed and Peggy did they didn’t know what, gave pause even to the state troopers, whom Gregor had begun to think of as animatrons. They talked and moved so much like some bad movie’s idea of what state troopers should be, he had a hard time accepting them as real. Kyle Borden was just stunned. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what Stu Kennedy was like. He was the one who had taken Gregor to Stu Kennedy’s house only hours before, and he had sat through the barrage of bad language and hints of violence without looking in the least bit surprised. It was more that he hadn’t expected everything to be so outfront and unambiguous. With little or no personal knowledge of real crime and real criminals—and especially with real murders and real murderers—Kyle Borden seemed to have expected subterfuge and puzzles, the kind of thing that went on in the novels of Robert B. Parker, or maybe on the City Confidential show that aired on Court TV. Actually, Gregor himself was highly addicted to Court TV. It was the only television he watched regularly. Still, one of the reasons he liked to watch it was that outside its broadcasts of actual trials it was a repository of law enforcement exceptions. Unsolved mysteries, convoluted clues, forensics nightmares: if you wanted to know what really went on in crime investigation, you watched those actual trials, where defendants tried to explain away the fact that they had been caught standing over the body with the smoking gun in their hands.

It was in the middle of the scuffle that Gregor suddenly realized there was something he wanted to do, something he did not get to do often, but that might be possible this time. He waited until Stu Kennedy was in handcuffs and the troopers were talking about what to do with him. Take him out to the state police car seemed to be their best suggestion, and then off somewhere else to be locked up. They had never been faced with just this situation before. They weren’t sure what was legal for them to do. Stu bounced and struggled against the handcuffs. The state police debated among themselves: where to take him, what to charge him with, how to make sure he didn’t do something stupid once he was released, which he would be, because he hadn’t actually done anything except get rowdy. That meant that Kyle Borden could arrest him, but beyond that it didn’t mean squat.

Gregor went up to Kyle and made him a proposition. Kyle seemed both surprised and unconcerned.

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “She only has to tell you to take a hike. I wonder if she can hear what’s going on up here. I don’t see why she wouldn’t.”

“I don’t see why she wouldn’t, either,” Gregor said. “How do I get down there? Do I use the stairs out front?”