She is, his brain whispered—but that could be stupidity, too, his own, that eternal human tendency to absolve oneself and blame whatever problems might exist on anybody and anything else in the world. Gregor thought there must have been a lot of comfort in primitive religion, where there were gods for even small things like kitchen spills. “Ibdru made me drop the soup all over the floor” had a much better ring to it than, “I was eavesdropping on Lili and Marti and not looking where I was going and tripped over the doorjamb.”
With Mark, impulse was not a consideration. The preliminary tests on his hair had come back from the lab, and it was quite clear that the boy had been given poison for weeks, and maybe longer.
“I understand your concern about the Christmas holidays,” the lab investigator had told him, in one of those infinitely patient voices that meant she found Gregor both importunate and overwrought, “but all I can tell you is what I can tell you. We’ve got a lot of arsenic here. Best guess at the moment, a minimum of eight weeks.”
Gregor had put it out of his mind to get back to later. If the poisoning had begun before the Christmas break, then either he had been sent home with something that was contaminated, or he should have appeared better over the course of the three weeks at home. Liz and Jimmy kept saying that Mark had not been well over Christmas, but it was impossible to tell if their “not well” was the same as “just like he’s been lately,” since they hadn’t seen him lately. He had been here in Windsor at boarding school, and they had been back in Connecticut and New York. Gregor had a feeling that was about to change. Liz was making the kind of noises that mothers make when they are willing to brook no arguments.
It might be the custom among the people they knew to send their children to boarding schools, but there were perfectly good private schools in New York and he could live at home.
The final issue was to establish some kind of official connection to an official investigation. Gregor really hated those detective novels where the intrepid private eye rushes about the city digging into a murder the police don’t want him to touch. In real life that private eye would be arrested for obstruction of justice and stripped of his license. Gregor didn’t have a license—his refusal to get one, or to call himself a “private detective,” had brought a note of curiosity to half the articles ever written about him in the press; the other half simply ignored the inconvenient fact of it and called him a private detective—but the rule remained. He needed an official connection. It was fortunate that in this case there would be no difficulty in getting it.
“We’ve got to get the permission of the mayor,” Brian Sheehy said, “but it’s not going to be any problem. Especially not for a dollar. Isn’t that what you usually charge?”
Gregor routinely charged ten thousand dollars or more, if he was charging at all. In this case he would have preferred not to charge at all, but he understood the legal problems. Many states and municipalities, like the federal government, had rules against using people on an unpaid volunteer basis. That was why so many of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s men had had to take that dollar a year in order to serve in the Brain Trust. They might have wanted to give their time and talent freely to the country during the Depression, but the law wouldn’t allow it. The law wouldn’t allow it in Windsor either. Gregor agreed to take his dollar and suppressed the thought that it was going to cost Windsor more than that to process the paperwork and write the check. There were things it made sense to argue about when it came to government, and things it didn’t.
“The mayor’s a guy named Frank Petrelli,” Brian Sheehy said. “I’ve been filling him in on and off since you got here. There’s nothing he’d like better than to give that place a black eye.”
“Do the people at the school realize just how much they’re hated in this town?” Gregor asked. “It seems to me that they couldn’t avoid knowing, but if they know I don’t understand why they don’t do something about it.”
“There’s town and there’s town,” Brian said. “They’re not hated by the people who live here to commute into Boston to work in advertising and publishing and that kind of thing. And I don’t think they care much for the rest of us. They probably think we vote Republican.”
“Do you?”
“My name is Sheehy, and I live in Massachusetts,” Brian said. “What do you think? I vote for Kennedys.”
Gregor didn’t know if it was being Irish or being Catholic that made that decision for Brian, but he didn’t like to ask. Instead he waited at the long table in the Windsor Police Service conference room for the call to come from the mayor’s office, and while he did he made notes about what he knew so far. So much of it was hazy. He had done no investigating. Aside from wandering around the campus of Windsor Academy on the night Mark had gone into convulsions, he had had nothing to do with the people who might have reason to want Mark dead. He had interrogated no one. He had viewed no crime scenes or even event scenes. He could hardly call his role in getting Mark to the hospital last night “viewing” anything, since he hadn’t been paying attention to what was where or how Hayes House was set up. He’d been trying to get that fool woman to call 911.