Somebody Else's Music(34)

Sharon Morobito came back to the counter where Gregor was waiting. “Come on through,” she said. “He’s back in his office. We had a bad night last night. Three drunk driving arrests. I don’t know what’s gotten into people around here lately.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said. Philadelphia would probably be overjoyed if it could clock only three assaults with intent to commit bodily harm in any single night.

They were at the door to the office in the back. Gregor saw Kyle Borden get quickly to his feet.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said.

Gregor edged into Kyle Borden’s very small office and found a chair. The chair was very small, too, but then, Kyle Borden was also very small. Gregor doubted if he was five feet four.

Kyle gestured to the mess on his desk. “You’ve come to talk about the dog. Or maybe about Michael Houseman. That’s what you said you were here for, wasn’t it?”

“Here right this minute, or here in Hollman?”

“Whatever.”

“Well, it’s like I told you last night. Jimmy Card asked me to come down here and find out something about the death of Michael Houseman. I think he’s really less interested in solving an old crime—”

“It would be damned near impossible.”

“—than in stopping the tabloid stories that keep accusing Ms. Toliver of having committed the crime. But the dog puts an interesting spin on things, don’t you think? It’s not the kind of thing you’d do just because you hated somebody in high school and now you’re really upset because she grew up to be famous. Or at least it’s not the kind of thing I would do in those circumstances. Would you?”

If Gregor had expected a quick denial, he didn’t get it. Instead, Kyle Borden looked at him long and hard, and then turned away to shuffle through the mess of papers on his desk again.

“Look,” he said finally. “This may be a little hard to explain. How long have you lived in Philadelphia?”

“This time?”

“In your life. How long have you lived in cities? Philadelphia. Wherever.”

“I’ve always lived in cities, except for when I was in the army. I grew up in Philadelphia.”

“Okay.” Kyle sighed. “This is going to be very hard to explain. This is not a city. It’s not even close. Maybe about half of all the people who grow up here stay here. It was more than that for my high school graduating class—did I tell you I graduated in the same class as Betsy Toliver?”

“Liz,” Gregor said automatically. “No, you didn’t.”

“Liz, right. I’ll try to be careful. I had a nickname I didn’t like much myself. I didn’t get rid of it until I had a gun to threaten people with. Guns. Shit. I was thinking last night after I left the Toliver place that these days she wouldn’t have gone to Vassar and gotten to thumb her nose at all of them. She’d have just gotten a handgun out of her daddy’s bedside table and laid ’em all to rest. A couple of them deserved it.”

“She doesn’t seem like the violent type. I think she’s on some committee that works to ban handguns.”

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “The thing is, what you’ve got to understand, is that for people in a place like this, high school is a big deal. Most of them think it was the best time of their lives. Most of them never did anything afterward but work, except go to the junior college down the road or maybe, if they were really bright, to UP-Johnstown. There were one hundred and twelve people in my graduating class and only six of them went away to any college more impressive than that, and two of them went to Penn State. High school is the be all and end all of everything in a place like this. High school football games attract hundreds of people. Homecoming saturates the whole town. All the businesses on Grandview Avenue decorate. There’s a big parade. The Homecoming Queen and her court get their pictures on the front page of the town paper. And forever afterward, if they stay in town, they keep nurturing it. Does that make any sense to you? Go into Emma and George Bligh’s place sometime and look on the walls. Emma was captain of the varsity cheerleaders our senior year. She’s got a picture of herself in her uniform, blown up to eight and a half by eleven, right behind the cash register. Sheila Sedding over at JayMar’s can tell you who was Homecoming Queen every year back to 1948.”

“Liz Toliver’s son Mark said that what bothered him about Maris Coleman here was that it was like the years between then and now had never happened.”

“Yeah, well. Mark DeAvecca spent the first seven years of his life in London and he’s got a mother who’s on TV all the time. He’s probably going to have Jimmy Card as a stepfather. He can afford to think high school is stupid.”