Somebody Else's Music(49)

“I’m supposed to eat a sausage and pepperoni pizza the size of a cow,” Gregor said. “You know that’s bad for me. You could come and make sure I ate right.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Bennis said. “If you don’t have this whole thing cleared up by the end of next week, I’ll find a hotel someplace within screaming distance and come out and take you to lunch. If we keep this up, Tibor is going to start in again with all that talk about us getting married, probably coupled with how I ought to enter the church. Of course, why he’s worrying about me joining the church, I don’t know. You’re the one who never goes. Are you going to be all right?”

“I’ll be fine. We’ve got an appointment to see Michael Houseman’s mother in about an hour and a half. That ought to be some help.”

“At least you’ll be talking about a murder,” Bennis said.

“Right.” Gregor thought of saying other things—“I love you,” for instance—but he had one of those temporary interior clutches that made him incapable of saying anything, and the next thing he knew the receiver was buzzing in his ear. He hung up and stared at the phone for a moment. They were together so often these days, it no longer seemed natural to him when she was gone.

Kyle Borden waved at him again. Gregor left the phone and went to the table with the pizza spread out across it. It looked even bigger than the large pizzas they sometimes ordered on Cavanaugh Street when they were all playing Monopoly at Tibor’s and nobody wanted to deal with the state of Tibor’s kitchen.

“Spectacular, isn’t it?” Kyle Borden said happily. “Largest pizzas you can buy in the county. They’re famous for them.”

“Right,” Gregor said. He looked Kyle up and down. The man was thin almost to the point of emaciation. So much for the stereotype of the potbellied small-town cop.

The waitress came back to the table with a tray of drinks, both very large on the same scale as the pizza, both dark.

“I ordered you a Coke,” Kyle said. “I figured that was safe. Everybody loves Coke. They even love it in China.”

Gregor took a single slice of pizza and put it on the plate that had been provided for just that purpose. Except for the size of their largest offerings, this could have been any of hundreds of pizza places from one end to the other of the country, although not in any of the big cities, where real Italians lived. The waitress looked like one more Hollman mayonnaise-and-American-cheese-on-white-bread type, and the woman behind the counter cooking pizza did not look any different.

“You’re drifting off again,” Kyle Borden said. “If you’re tired, we could probably make this appointment for another day. Daisy hasn’t got that much to do with her time. She won’t be unavailable.”

“No, that’s all right. I’m not tired. I’ m just thinking. Do you always eat this much pizza when you get pizza?”

“Of course not,” Kyle said. “I figured you’d have half.”





2


Gregor Demarkian wasn’t sure what he had expected Daisy Houseman’s life to be like, but he knew it wasn’t what he got: a neat little brick house on a leafy corner lot on a residential street near the center of town. At first glance, the house seemed to be a story and a half, but as Gregor and Kyle moved up the walk Gregor realized it was an illusion. The roof was steeply pitched, but the house itself was a ranch, probably of the same vintage as the Tolivers’, but much smaller. The lot was smaller still. It would be the work of less than a minute to walk out Daisy Houseman’s front door and into the front door of the house next door. It would take all of three minutes to make it to the front door of the house on the other side, around the corner. Still, there was nothing crowded about this neighborhood. The lawns were well kept and adequate at the back. The houses were just far enough apart to allow for privacy and fresh air. The trees and grass were lush, and some of the yards already had sprinklers working to keep them watered.

Kyle went up to the front door and started to ring the bell, but his hand was still in the air when the door opened and a neat, trim, well-kept elderly woman came out. Gregor thought she was about seventy or seventy-five, which would make sense, if she had married and had her children young. Kyle said something to her that Gregor couldn’t hear, and the woman turned to look him over as if he were a new representative from the gas company.

“I’ve been telling her all about you,” Kyle called, his voice echoing down the quiet, deserted street.

Gregor came up to the little stoop in front of the front door and took the hand Daisy Houseman was holding out to him. “Gregor Demarkian,” he said.