Somebody Else's Music(19)

He got off the bed and went out into the hall himself. He could hear Bennis in the kitchen, banging around, as if she were doing much more than making coffee. Sometimes she washed a few of the dishes, but not often. One of the first changes she’d made in his life when they’d finally begun to be together was to hire the kind of cleaning lady who came in every weekday and did the dishes and laundry as a matter of course. Some changes, he conceded, were good ones. He had found that he truly loved having his things taken care of so thoroughly that he never had to think of them. His wife had done that for him once, but in the years since her death he had gotten used to always missing things. Suit jackets disappeared and then reappeared under the bed. Clean white shirts became balls of sweat and dust in the bathroom hamper. He went through the living room and stopped long enough to look at the street from the wide picture window there. Then he turned around and looked through the pass-through to the kitchen at Bennis doing something unnecessary at the stove.

“Hey,” he said. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m not all that happy about our spending a month apart, that’s all. If not longer.”

“It won’t be longer.”

Bennis cocked her head. “Why do you think that? You’re going off to solve a murder that’s thirty years old or more. Why do you think you can get it done in four weeks? I mean, for God’s sake, they had an investigation once, didn’t they? And they didn’t come up with anything. Why do you think you will?’

Gregor went all the way into the kitchen and sat down at the kitchen table. “I don’t think I will. Nobody wants me to solve that murder. I told you that. They only want me—”

“To prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Maris Coleman is planting those stories in the tabloid newspapers. I thought you said that wasn’t even a question. I mean, that it was obvious.”

“It’s obvious if you’re looking, yes, but according to Mr. Card, Ms. Toliver refuses to believe it.”

“Well, people get like that, don’t they, about friends?” Bennis said. “And about family. Look at the way I was about Anne Marie, right up to the end. The way I still am about Anne Marie, really. What good does Jimmy think this is going to do?”

Gregor shrugged. “I’d be the same way, if I thought somebody was exploiting you. I was the same way with what’s-her-name—”

“Edith.”

“Edith. Except that in that case you realized it perfectly well and I couldn’t get you to do anything about it. But Mr. Card’s emotions are completely natural. I don’t know if Ms. Toliver will actually believe anything I manage to find, but I can at least find it. She sounded like a nice woman, when I talked to her on the phone. From what I’ve heard of her, she’s the kind of nice woman it’s fairly easy to take advantage of, and Maris Coleman has been taking a lot of advantage. Let’s call it a moral imperative.”

“You’re going to go spend a month in some godforsaken town in north central Pennsylvania because of a moral imperative?”

“Well,” Gregor said judiciously, “there’s always the obvious.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is that it bugs the hell out of me that nobody seems to give a damn that this boy was murdered. And I do mean nobody. Jimmy Card wouldn’t. That doesn’t matter. But even the police officer I talked to in Hollman seemed to think that the dead body was secondary to the question of who locked Elizabeth Toliver into an outhouse stall with a bunch of black snakes, and the tabloids—”

“You’ve been reading the tabloids?”

“I do, every once in a while.” Gregor looked around. Surely, he had heard Bennis doing something about coffee, but nothing actually seemed to have been done. There was no kettle boiling on the stove. There were no coffee cups set out on the counter next to the sink. “Well, the tabloids give the details—found in a clearing near a small river, his throat cut straight across; weapon never discovered; motive never discovered—but they treat him like a cartoon—”

“They treat everybody like a cartoon, Gregor. I’ve been in them.”

“I know. My point is that they don’t report the story as if it were the story of a murder. The murder is secondary to Elizabeth Toliver. Or maybe I should say secondary to Jimmy Card’s girlfriend. It’s the oddest thing. It’s not that it’s hard to get information. I can get all the information I want. It’s that nobody can seem to understand why I’d want it.”