Somebody Else's Music(33)

“What’s weird?”

“It’s like she never grew up,” Mark said carefully. “Maris, I mean. She’s, what, practically fifty. And it’s like she’s still living when she’s seventeen. She harps on it. When you go out with her, it’s all she talks about. Well, not really, you know. She’ll talk about the ballet or the mayor or whatever. But she always brings it up. She brings it into every conversation.”

“And?”

“And I was wondering if they were all like that. That whole group that Maris was part of. It has to do with the dog, somehow, because the dog was—it was an angry thing, you know? Whoever did it was right in the middle of a world-class piss-off. It wasn’t something someone considered and did. It was a kind of explosion. I sound like a moron. God.”

“No,” Gregor said, pushing his chair back from the table. “You’re right. That’s what was bothering me.”

“What was bothering you?”

“The dog,” Gregor said. “And the snakes. And Michael Houseman. Do you know what happened to Michael Houseman?”

“The guy the tabloids say my mother killed? Somebody slit his throat. From ear to ear, as the National Enquirer is always putting it.”

“Exactly,” Gregor said. He stood up and looked around. There was a note tacked to the refrigerator door with a magnet. When he looked more closely at it, it had the number for “Andy’s Garage” printed across it in thick black letters.

There was a phone on the wall next to the refrigerator.

Like the one in his room, it was pink.





2


Luis the robot-driver—Gregor was beginning to think of it as a Greek epigram—came to fetch him in no time at all, and seemed to get him into town even quicker, although that might have been an illusion caused by the fact that Gregor had now traveled that road at least once. It helped that Mark talked, on and off, about everything from Kafka to Isaac Asimov. It was a relief to find a teenaged boy who cared about books the way most of the rest of his tribe cared about video games and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. On the other hand, Mark also seemed to care about Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Gregor was sorry when they came to the library and had to drop him off. Driving down Grandview Avenue, Gregor felt, as he had the night before, that there was something small-minded and suffocating about this place. Too many of the people he saw were too conventional. He never thought he’d be pining for teenaged boys in rainbow Mohawks and double nose rings, but after a few minutes of Hollman that was exactly what he needed. He could have used a little rock and roll, or whatever they called it these days, too. The few times since coming here that he had heard music coming out of a radio, it had either been “oldies”—meaning the Beatles and the Beach Boys—or Britney Spears. If there were people in Hollman who liked jazz, or classical, or Ozzy Osbourne, he hadn’t found them yet. The Hollman Police Department was in a small brick building on Grand Street, way up toward the far end of Grandview Avenue and just around the corner from a small Catholic church. The street was lined with tall old trees and meticulously kept up. The police department parking lot was free of grass and twigs. Its walls looked as if they had been hosed down sometime recently. That was when something else hit him: he hadn’t seen any black people, either. He hadn’t even seen any darkish people, of any kind, not even anybody he could pin down as definitely Italian. He didn’t think he’d ever been in such a homogeneous place in his life.

Gregor got out of the car and walked around to the front of the building automatically. There was an entrance from the parking lot, but he wasn’t sure who was allowed to use it. The front of the building faced the side of the Catholic church. The rest of the side street seemed to be made up of small frame houses, some of them being used for doctors’ and dentists’ offices, some of them cut up into multifamily dwellings. He tried to imagine the kind of person who would live in a multifamily dwelling in Hollman, but his mind balked. He let himself in the department’s heavy front door. He found himself in a wide room with a counter across one end of it, like a registrar’s office in a very small college.

The girl behind the counter looked up. Her name tag said “Sharon Morobito.” She was blond, blue-eyed, and as fair-skinned as a Swede. “Can I help you?” she said.

Gregor gave his name and explained his business. Sharon Morobito nodded and bustled to a small door at the back of the room. Presumably, that was where the real police department was, if there was a real police department here at all. Gregor wondered where the criminals were. Was it really possible that, first thing on a Tuesday morning, the Hollman Police Department wouldn’t have anything at all to do?