“Well,” Bennis said, “maybe it’s like Lizzie Borden. You know, maybe everybody in town already knows who killed him, and they’ve got some kind of tacit agreement going not to do anything about it—”
“About an eighteen-year-old boy getting his throat slit from ear to ear during the summer after his high school graduation?”
“You’re the one who told me that stuff about Lizzie Borden,” Bennis said. “I don’t know. I admit, in a small town like that, you’d think this would be an enormous deal, even after all this time. Are the police who did the investigation still around?”
“One of them is, retired and living in town and more than happy to talk to me, or at least he says he is.” Gregor shrugged. “The chief of police at the time is dead. He was sixty-six in 1969 and had a heart condition even then. He died about ten years later. There was one other officer on the force that summer and he moved to California a couple of years after it happened. Nobody knows how to find him.”
“I can see it right now. He’s the real murderer, and his friends on the police force have covered up his crime and given him a chance to escape and make a new life, because the dead boy was really a vampire—”
“Bennis.”
“Well, it was a thought. You didn’t really want coffee, did you?”
“I thought I did. But all kidding aside, there’s something very nasty about the way they treat that murder. I don’t care if the kid was on crack and in a gang—”
“In 1969?”
“—he still would deserve to be taken seriously. I find myself wondering if this was the attitude they had at the time, or if it’s just what’s developed because Elizabeth Toliver got ‘famous,’ so to speak. It’s something worse than annoying. It nags at me. So, I thought I’d go help your friend out and see what the problem was at the same time, and I may be kidding myself. Maybe I’ll get there and it will turn out that there’s a perfectly good reason why nobody pays any attention to Michael Houseman and how he died.”
“I think you’re bored,” Bennis said.
“I think you’re going to Los Angeles,” Gregor said.
“I think you’ve got an hour before you leave, and we ought to go somewhere and neck.”
2
It was early evening by the time Gregor Demarkian reached Hollman, Pennsylvania, and when he did he was as rattled as he had been the one time he took a train in the Alps. He had not, this time, taken a train. There might once have been trains that stopped in Hollman or somewhere nearby, but these days the nearest station was fifty miles away and on the other side of what he could only call mountains. He spent a moment thinking how odd it was that the mountains should be covered with vegetation all the way to their tops—sometimes he caught sight of pine trees sticking up like cowlicks, far above him—and then the landscape closer to the ground started to capture him, and he began to feel uneasy. Gregor Demarkian was not a small-town boy. He had never had any part in the great American story, the one that Elizabeth Toliver now seemed to be the public expression of: you start in an obscure small town somewhere, born to unimportant people; you work very hard and get to go away to a good college on the East or West Coast; you leave college for a wretched apartment in a shabby but Bohemian section of New York or San Francisco; you Make Good. This was the part that was left out of Thomas Wolfe’s story, Gregor thought. It wasn’t that you couldn’t ever go home again, it was that you didn’t want to. Gregor had grown up in Philadelphia, on the very street on which he now lived, and he had spent all his life in cities except for his obligatory stint in the armed services. That wasn’t the kind of memory that would make anybody fond of small towns, if he wasn’t used to them—godforsaken backwaters in Mississippi and Alabama, bad weather, bad insects, bad feelings all around, the local cops just itching to get to you the first time you did anything out of line or even before, if you happened to be one of the few black soldiers in that newly integrated army. Still, it hadn’t been the hostility to all things military that had bothered him, even at the time. It had been the claustrophobia. It was incredible how airless these small places could get, when they were effectively cut off from the outside world—and they were, that was the odd thing, in spite of MTV and CNN and the Internet. It was almost as if they didn’t believe the things they saw and read, as if they thought all that was fiction and that in reality everybody on the planet lived exactly the way they did. Or ought to. Gregor was coming in by car, with a driver. It wasn’t a limousine—“you don’t want to be too conspicuous,” Jimmy Card had said, and Gregor had agreed with him. He really hated limousines—but it still had a chauffeur, and although that solved the problem of the fact that Gregor never drove except in an emergency, like maybe the end of the world, it still made him a little uncomfortable. Jimmy Card was not the most formidable man Gregor had ever met. During his years with the FBI, he had met both presidents of the United States and presidents of multinational corporations, the kind of men who got done what they needed to get done, no matter what it was. Still, Jimmy Card had the makings of men like that, even if success in entertainment would never give him the same kind of authority. If it had been up to Gregor, he would have come to town in some neutral way and then hired a car and a driver here, or hooked up with a local private detective—did they have private detectives in places like Hollman?—but Jimmy Card had insisted, and Gregor had been unable to resist. Now here he was, in a black sedan with New York plates, driven by a man who was both obviously Hispanic and entirely uncommunicative. He could have gotten more conversation out of a robot. He was also tired. It was a long way up from Philadelphia, and on the Penn Turnpike, too, which Gregor personally regarded as a state-sanctioned instrument of torture. He was also hungry. The Penn Turnpike didn’t have rest stops with fast-food places in them every thirty miles or so. It didn’t even have rest areas that he could tell. His back creaked. His stomach rumbled. The sight of Hollman beginning to spin out around him made him tense.