Somebody Else's Music(147)

“Nah. That goes to the basement basement. We wouldn’t put anybody underground like that. The jail is in the walkout. You take that door over there.” Kyle pointed to a door in the wall on the opposite side from the one that led to his office. Gregor had seen it before, but always assumed it was a closet. “And you go right on down. You won’t get lost. There’s only the two cells. Christ. What does Stu think he’s doing?”

Gregor thought that “think” was not high on Stu Kennedy’s to-do list, but he didn’t say that. He just walked across the big inner room to the door on the other side, opened up, and found that he had no need to switch on a light. There were already lights on in the stairwell, and lights on at the bottom of the stairs, too. He slipped through the door and closed it behind him. He went down the short flight of stairs and discovered what Kyle Borden had meant by “the walkout.” This was not, technically, a basement. The police department building was built into the side of a hill, and this part of the lower level was entirely above grade. When he got to the bottom of the staircase, he found the two cells to his right, and a row of windows looking out at the side yard to his left. It was, he saw, raining yet again.

Peggy Smith Kennedy was in the second cell, the one farthest away from the stairs. Gregor thought she must have heard him come down, because it was possible to hear nearly everything down here. Gregor could even catch the murmur of voices from the floor above, although he couldn’t distinguish words, and he wouldn’t have trusted himself to distinguish persons. Stu Kennedy has been screaming, though. Gregor thought he would probably have been able to distinguish the who and what of that.

He walked down the corridor to the second of the cells. Peggy Smith Kennedy was sitting on the lower of two bunk cots, doing nothing. Her feet were flat on the floor. Her hands were clasped loosely on her lap. Her eyes were on her shoes. She did not look up or greet him, even though Gregor knew she had to know he was there.

“Well,” he said, after a while, clearing his throat as if that would somehow make a difference. “I came to see how you were.”

She turned her head to him and blinked. “They won’t be able to hold him,” she said. “He hasn’t done anything they can arrest him for. They treat him like an animal, but he always gets the best of them in the end.”

Gregor cocked his head. It was hard to read her mood. “He did something he could get arrested for once,” he said. “He committed a murder, back in 1969. And you saw it.”

“Nobody ever understood him but me,” she said. “None of them. Not even people like Maris and Belinda. Nobody saw the inside of him the way I did. Do you believe that there are people on this earth who are different from the rest of us?”

“There are a lot of people who are different,” Gregor said, very careful. “Different in different ways. Every society has people who do not fit in.”

“No.” Peggy stood up abruptly, and turned to him. “Not that kind of different. Different in another way. In a holy way. Different because they’re made of something the rest of us don’t have. It’s like the angels in that television program. They look like us, but they aren’t us. They’re angels. They’re part of God.”

“And you think your husband is part of God?”

“I never really thought of him as my husband. You can’t really marry somebody like Stu. You can go through the ceremony, the way we did, but it doesn’t mean what it usually means. You can’t put someone like Stu into a harness and expect him to work his life away. You can’t expect him to waste himself.”

“What can you expect him to do?”

“I don’t know.” She turned away from him and started pacing. There was no place to pace. The cell was very small, maybe twice the size of Kyle Borden’s office upstairs, and that office was claustrophobic. Peggy went to the interior wall and then turned around and came back toward the bars again. Gregor was struck by how old she looked—no, he thought, not old, but captured by that ugly lumpiness of unopposed middle age. If she hadn’t been the center of a murder investigation, Gregor would have thought of her as one more of the supermarket women, the ones who pushed carts piled high with Pop-Tarts and Cheetos through aisles crammed with carbonated sodas and frozen dinners, in dresses that neither fit nor didn’t fit, with hair that stuck out at odd angles because it had been permed and bleached and teased over the years until it couldn’t relax at all. She moved differently, though. There was no hint of defeat in her posture, and no suggestion that she would even consider the option of allowing her shoulders to slump.