“That’s definitely better.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“You know, Bennis, I never knew much about women before we got together. I met my wife, I married my wife, we got along, she died, that was it. We understood each other. But there’s one thing I’ve learned from you. Everything is complicated. Everything. And I don’t understand why it has to be.”
“Nobody understands why it has to be,” Bennis said. “It’s one of the great mysteries of life. It just is.”
“Why?” Gregor demanded. “Look, I’m standing out on this freezing hillside. I’m watching this guy, this young police officer, trying to get under a stand of evergreens that grow so low to the ground they’re practically one with it, I’ve got two people dead and one who nearly ended up that way.”
“From arsenic poisoning,” Bennis put in quickly. “Liz told me.”
“Good. Liz told you. Also caffeine poisoning. But the thing is, with all that, this isn’t complicated. It’s perfectly simple. Sex and money. That’s what makes murder. Even most serial killers kill for sex. And don’t give me that nonsense about how rape is an expression of power and rape-murder more so. I know. I understand that. But it’s still about sex. And the rest of the time we’ve got money. That’s it. When everything is said and done here and Brian Sheehy has his perpetrator and I come back to Cavanaugh Street, it’s going to come down to sex and money. Nothing complicated. I don’t understand why this has to be complicated. Do you hate the idea of me even thinking about marrying you? Fine. I’ll stop thinking about it. Do you love the idea of me thinking about marrying you? Fine, too. I’ll think about it. Hell, I’ll go looking for a ring.”
“I can’t believe this,” Bennis said.
“Believe what? All I said was—”
“No, Gregor, don’t you get it? You didn’t say. You don’t ever say. You didn’t say the last time either. Excuse me if I find it unpleasant to be considered a pain in the ass you have to placate by making sure I get the menu item I want.”
“That didn’t make any sense at all.”
“It should have made sense,” Bennis said. “The issue of marriage is not about what I want, or what is going to make me the least mad at you—”
“Of course it is. What else could it be about?”
“Jesus,” Bennis said. “This is ridiculous. Any minute now, a white rabbit is going to show up at the door, checking his watch.”
“I’ve read Alice in Wonderland, too. You don’t need to patronize me. All I’m trying to do is to make you happy. And it’s beyond me why that’s suddenly become a capital crime.”
“You’re on television. You’ve got work to do. I’m going to get off this phone.”
“I don’t have anything to do but wait here until somebody gets all the way under those evergreens,” Gregor said. “Don’t you dare just walk out on me again, figuratively or literally. I’ll break your neck.”
“You’ve got work to do,” Bennis said again, and a second later Gregor heard nothing in his ear but dead air.
Gregor was suddenly incensed, not at Bennis, not at himself, but at the idiots who had invented cell phones. They should have made them so that they gave off dial tones. They should have made them so that they gave off some kind of noise, music, even Muzak, something to buzz when the phone had been hung up in the ear of a caller who had done nothing, absolutely nothing, to deserve it.
This whole situation was beyond belief, Gregor thought. Whatever had made her call in the middle of the day like this, not when she was just hoping to catch him at a good time, but when she knew, because she was watching it on television, that he was neck deep in work? And what had she wanted when she called? What had she ever wanted? Had he ever understood that? He wasn’t a complicated man. They got along. He would even have said they were in love. When you got along with a woman, when you felt close enough to her to feel you were in love, you stayed with her. You made arrangements. You made commitments. There was nothing sacred about a marriage license and a ceremony at City Hall, or even in Holy Trinity Church. It was just a formality, and one he thought no more about one way than the other. Maybe it would have been different if he was a religious man, but he wasn’t, and Bennis wasn’t religious either. What did she want? What was she getting at? He felt as if his entire life was about to fall apart, and he didn’t have the first idea as to why.
He was belaboring the obvious for yet another time—she’d called him, not only when he was working, but when she’d known he was working; it was completely insane to have a conversation of the kind they’d just had while standing on a hillside surrounded by people half of whom were paying more attention to him than they were to anything else—when he felt a tap on his shoulder.