“Want to leave?” Anne Marie asked him.
“Very much,” he told her.
“Why don’t you?”
“Because your sister Bennis wants very much to talk to you before you die. And I am trying to make that happen for her.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“Yes.”
“How convenient. But then, Bennis always had half a dozen men in love with her. She was that kind of woman. Does she see only you or does she still sleep around?”
“Your brother Christopher,” Gregor said carefully, “is coming up to be with Bennis during the day you are to be executed. He won’t watch the execution, either. But he will come to keep Bennis company.”
“I think you ought to be very sure what your arrangement is, because she does sleep around. She always did. And she always had such interesting people to sleep around with. Writers. Artists. Rock stars. Did you know about the rock star?”
“I know that I don’t intend to engage in a conversation about Bennis’s sex life with you.”
“Well, that’s typical, too, isn’t it?” Anne Marie laughed. “When we were growing up, we were taught that bad girls do and good girls don’t, but it was a lie, like all the rest of it was a lie. Some girls are good even when they do and some are bad even when they don’t and you’re born with that. It’s all luck. Bennis got lucky, and I did not.”
“Do you really think that your decision to kill three people was a matter of luck?”
“I think you ought to tell Bennis, for me, that she’s not wanted here. Christopher isn’t wanted here. Even Teddy and Bobby aren’t wanted here, and I have a lot less to hold against them. Tell Bennis I don’t want her here to gloat.”
“Bennis doesn’t want to gloat. You know she doesn’t want to gloat.”
Anne Marie stood up. “Tell her from me that I’m glad I did it. I’m glad about Myra. I’m glad about Emma. I’m glad about our father. I’m only sorry I couldn’t finish the job. If they had ever let me out of here, I would have tried. Now call them back. If I go to the door, they’ll panic.”
“Are you sure this is it? Once I leave, I won’t come back. If you want to see her, tell me now.”
“I don’t want to see her. And if I change my mind, they’ll bend over backwards to make it happen. You know they will. They don’t want to get charged with brutality or cruelty or any of those other things the protesters are always screaming at them. Are there going to be protesters at my execution?”
“Protesters and cheerleaders, from what I gather. The protesters are from something called the Seamless Garment Network.”
“Excellent. Nuns. When I was growing up on the Main Line, nobody would admit to being Catholic. Being Catholic was being Irish. It was being—low-rent. Are you going to get me out of here?”
Gregor stood up and went to the door. It had a window in it, and he knocked on that until the guard outside understood what he wanted. Then he stepped back, and the guard came in. Anne Marie stood up.
“It was pleasant to have spoken to you, Mr. Demarkian. Give Bennis my message. Give her all of it. I don’t want to have to hear from her again.”
Out in the hall, Ed Nagelman came up behind the two guards who were coming to get Anne Marie. He stood back politely, because the guards’ work would always come first. It was the most dangerous. Anne Marie, though, was not dangerous in that way, and she went out without a protest, her head held up and back as if she were entering a ballroom.
Ed hurried into the conference room. “That was lucky. I was afraid I’d have to interrupt your talk. There’s a call for you at the security desk.”
“A call for me here? From whom?”
“A Mr. John Henry Newman Jackman, who identified himself as the deputy commissioner of police for the city of Philadelphia. I looked him up. There is such a person, and his caller ID matched the phone number we’ve got for him. He says it’s serious. And urgent. He sounded”—Ed Nagelman spread his hand—“highly agitated.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “I wonder what could be urgent.”
“I did, too, but all he told me was to tell you that it had happened again, and this time all bets were off, because it was Father Healy. I don’t like to make guesses about things like this, but I assumed it had something to do with the murder you were looking into. Wasn’t there a Father Healy involved in that murder you were looking into?”
Gregor didn’t answer him. He was half running down the hall in the direction of the security desk, and he thought he was having a heart attack.