True Believers(160)

“I don’t,” Delmark Marquis said.

Gregor looked over at the television set, which was still on, only turned down low. It had gone back to soap operas.

“If you had to guess where Ian Holden had hidden this money,” Gregor said, “where would you guess? He isn’t married. You told us that. So there isn’t a wife. Is there a girlfriend?”

“Of course there is. Several girlfriends. The man was awash in girlfriends.”

“No girlfriend in particular?”

Delmark Marquis shrugged. “Ian liked them young. As young as he could legally get them. Eighteen, nineteen. They had more on their chests than in their heads, and he never saw any of them for longer than a few weeks. But he always had a mother on the side, if you know what I mean.”

“No,” Garry Mansfield said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“He means that Mr. Holden always had an affair running with a relatively older woman who provided him with more stability and more extensive nonsexual services,” Gregor said blandly. “And this woman, this time, was named Edith Lawton.”

Delmark Marquis blinked. “Good God. How did you know that?”

“Do you mean Edith Lawton helped kill them?” Garry Mansfield said.

“I told him he was a fool to have anything to do with her,” Delmark Marquis said. “It’s not that I’m prejudiced about atheists, mind you. Half the lawyers on the planet are atheists. But that woman is abrasive. She’s worse than abrasive. And she doesn’t know how to behave in company. He brought her to the Christmas party a couple of months ago. I thought the wives were going to die of embarrassment.”

“Damn,” Lou Emiliani said.

Gregor stood up. “I want to go out to Bernadette Kelly’s trailer,” he said. “I want to talk to Marty Kelly’s mother. Can we do that?”

Of course they could do that. They would work overtime as long as they had to. That was what they were paid to do. Gregor only wanted to get out of Delmark Marquis’s conference room and back into real life.

He had no way to tell, at this moment, whether there was going to be another murder or not.





2


The trailer park where Marty and Bernadette Kelly had lived was well out of the city, in some township whose name Gregor never was able to catch, but it didn’t matter. Garry and Lou made the arrangements with the local police, who were more than happy to have them all out questioning witnesses on their own. The real problem the surrounding townships had with the city of Philadelphia was the city’s tendency to want them to perform services without compensation: question suspects and witnesses; search for discarded weapons; verify dates and times. There might be an economic boom, but many of the townships hadn’t seen the best of it. There was too much in Pennsylvania that was still mired in rust-belt technology and rust-belt thinking. There were too many people who could not seem to move into the new century. Hell, Gregor thought, watching the landscape deteriorate around him into scrub brush and discarded vehicles, there were too many people who couldn’t seem to move out of the century before last. It was shocking, in a way, how much of a difference it made, which way you went when you left the city, and how far you traveled. On the Main Line and in Bucks County, there was money to spare—so much of it, sometimes, that it got wasted on ostentation and silliness. Out here there were seats torn out of the backs of cars, their fake leather upholstery ripped to tatters, their metal frames rusted at the edges. There were also shopping strips, which was a form of urban development Gregor had never understood. God only knew, he wasn’t green, or anything close to it. He wasn’t opposed to stores or restaurants or even malls. He just didn’t understand how shopping strips made any money, when they were so hard to get in and out of from the traffic that passed them by. He watched Burger King melt into Taco Bell and Taco Bell melt into Arby’s, and thought that Father Tibor could eat here for a week and be perfectly happy. It wasn’t true that people only liked fast food because they didn’t know anything better. Some people seemed to like fast food because they knew something better.

Garry turned in at a tube metal frame gate with an arched sign over the top of it that said: BLUE HAVEN SHORES. There was no water around that Gregor could see, and no access to water, either. Pennsylvania was not an oceanfront state. They drove far down the center drive that started at the gate and parked in between two trailers that looked like trailers, rather than like the prefab houses that were so common in trailer parks these days. Double wides, Gregor thought. That was what they called them. None of these trailers were double wides. Instead, they were narrow and seemed flimsy, as if their walls were too thin for this weather. Maybe they were. The state had regulations for trailers, Gregor was sure, but he was also sure it was one of those things. The people who lived here could not afford to be squeaky wheels. If the regulations were inadequate, they wouldn’t be the ones to report them.