3
It was only later, when he was in the car with the robot-driver on his way back to Elizabeth Toliver’s house, that Gregor Demarkian thought how odd it was that Daisy Houseman had called that incident at the outhouse an “operation.” Of course, television had changed the world, and so had paperback fiction. Lots of people talked like private eyes these days. Even cultivated people—the kind of people who contributed every year to their local affiliate of PBS—thought of Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie as “classics,” as if they were Jane Austen and Henry James. There was also the fact that Mrs. Houseman had ended up calling the girls “bitches,” but Gregor put that down to simple honesty. Daisy Houseman had said it, but lots of other people should have. Most of the people Gregor had gone to school with had either been sinking into juvenile delinquency or working their asses off to get the hell out, as Gregor himself had, in the end, with a four-year all-tuition-paid scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. The Armenian kids tended to stick together. It was safer that way, and they had their own events, on Cavanaugh Street, to compensate for the lack of events at school. Gregor could remember going to dozens of “youth” dances in the basement of Holy Trinity Church, carefully watched over by the Very Old Ladies who had been Very Old even then. Once, he’d kissed Lida—Lida Kazanjian as she was then—right on the mouth in the little niche behind the boiler in the basement’s back room. She’d been shocked, and before either of them had had a chance to say a word, Mrs. Varmesian had leaped out of the dark and whacked Gregor in the leg with an umbrella, screeching all the time in Armenian, which by then Gregor no longer understood. Mrs. Varmesian had died the next year, of some “female complaint” Gregor’s mother would never specify. Like everybody else on the street, he had gone to her funeral and then followed her casket out of the church and down a long three blocks to the waiting hearse. In Armenia, they would have followed the casket all the way to the cemetery, but Mrs. Varmesian was being taken to an Armenian-American cemetery in Sewickley. That was the same year he had graduated from high school, and his parents had come to the ceremony in their best clothes that even he knew, by then, made them look as if they were just off the boat. That didn’t matter too much, because most of the other parents looked as if they were just off the boat, too. Gregor had graduated second in his class—the boy who had graduated first had picked up a Nobel Prize in medicine in 1987—and his mother had carried his diploma around for weeks, showing its gold summa cum laude star to strangers on the street, and discussing Gregor’s plans and scholarships with everyone from the men who came around on the garbage truck to the driver of the bus she rode to get to her doctor’s appointment. Bennis said she didn’t know any more about places like Hollman than Gregor did himself, but it wasn’t true. She at least didn’t find discussions of things like proms and homecoming queens completely alien. She’d seen all the movies and read all the books, even if she had spent her adolescence at subdebutante dances and champagne teas. Now that he’d spent a day in Hollman, he felt as if he’d landed on another planet.
Gregor looked down at the attache’ case he’d put on the seat beside him and wondered if he should be looking through the reports Kyle Borden had given him—but he’d looked those over once, and in spite of the fact that they were filled with the kind of details that were fundamentally necessary to any murder investigation, he already knew he was going to find them unsatisfactory. The more he knew about Michael Houseman, the more the boy bothered him, not because there was something wrong with him, but because there wasn’t. In Gregor’s experience, there were exactly two kinds of murders: the ones committed by psychopaths, for their own reasons, and the ones committed on the sort of people who had more enemies than hair follicles. Michael Houseman hadn’t had any enemies. He’d been a nice, upright, conscientiously honest boy with a few bad adolescent tendencies to get high on the weekends, a little too much of a straight arrow, a little too much of an Eagle Scout, but not so much of either that he had been perceived by his classmates as a prig. It was so trivial. There was a boy dead, and all the reasons Gregor could think of that somebody might have had to kill him were on the level of the motives in a Hardy Boys’ book. No wonder the police had written off the incident as the work of a stray tramp. At least that would make a certain kind of sense. The problem was, the solution didn’t quite fit the facts as he had read them so far, and especially the fact that those girls had been so close to that body so soon after Michael Houseman had died, or maybe even before he was all the way dead. Even tramps have to be somewhere, and come from somewhere. Why would one be wandering around a small park in the middle of nowhere instead of hanging around the train station? How would he have found the park to begin with? Gregor had spent ten years of his life tracking serial killers. He knew how they worked, and unless you wanted to say that the one who killed Michael Houseman had been an old resident of Hollman come back to haunt, it made no sense that he would be in that park, prowling around for what he couldn’t know would be there. Of course, an old resident wasn’t impossible. Hollman must have produced its share of drifters. Every small town did. Gregor was beginning to make himself dizzy. If he followed his instincts and rejected the idea of a tramp or a drifter or a serial killer, he was left with—what? Nothing. Not even something ridiculous, like an argument over who got to be voted Most Popular Boy or who got to date the captain of the cheerleading team.