True Believers(171)

SEVEN





1


Gregor would have gone home, if he could have. The next several hours were inevitably ones of excruciating boredom, at least for the police and for the people like him, who had seen men arrested and booked too many times to find the process interesting. Maybe Dan Burdock found the process interesting, but it was difficult to tell. From the first, when Gregor’s hand had come down on his wrist to prevent him from giving Roy Phipps one of his doctored soft mints, he had been carefully and meticulously blank. It was as if he had read far too many of those books where the master criminal manages to escape punishment for the almost-perfect crime by simply keeping his mouth shut. What Dan Burdock expected to do about the fact that he had been caught holding the doctored soft mint in his hand, Gregor didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t realize that that, in itself, was a punishable crime—or rather that trying to hand it to Roy Phipps was. Gregor was sure, though, that the cases brought against him would be more solid than that. There might be no way to charge and convict him for the death of Harriet Garrity, but there would be no problem at all in the death of Scott Boardman, and they only needed one. He really ought to go home, Gregor told himself. He had nothing to do here, and if Garry and Lou wanted the particulars, they could always get them over the phone at a decent hour of the morning. In all the fuss and nonsense, the day was already sliding into night again. There was something about this case that seemed to cause the hour always to be close to dark. If he could go home, he could lie on his couch and plug away at the laptop Bennis let him use when he wanted to get on the Internet without sitting at a desk. Gregor really hated the Internet, but he wanted to hit the newsgroups and see who Tibor was arguing with now.

Unfortunately, Garry and Lou had no intention of allowing him to go home. They had arrested Dan Burdock on his sayso, and they expected him to stick around long enough to let them know they hadn’t done the wrong thing.

“All we need is to make a wrong arrest on a priest,” Lou Emiliani said. “Even an Episcopalian priest. And a gay-rights priest. We’d get crucified.”

Gregor had been able to see his point. He had taken up residence in a small conference room on the precinct’s first floor, doing crossword puzzles, until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Then he had found a phone and tried to call Bennis, who wasn’t home.

“Her brother is here and they have gone out to a restaurant for dinner,” Tibor said, when Gregor finally got hold of him. Gregor could hear the clicking in the background that said Tibor was on the computer again. Sometimes he wondered if Tibor thought God was on-line. “They have not gone to the Ararat,” Tibor said, “because Bennis wanted to be private. I do not know how she expects to be private, Krekor. Everybody here knows everything. Even Howard Kashinian knows everything, and he is so stupid he has to be told by his wife.”

Gregor had hung up and gone back to the conference room to wait. At one point he had wandered down the hall to see Dan Burdock booked, but there had been nothing to see, really. A man with a stone face being fingerprinted—surely somebody would come to see him, hire a lawyer for him, give him a shoulder to cry on? Gregor had always had the impression that the parishioners of St. Stephen’s were very tightly knit. Maybe they didn’t know.

He had gone through both the Philadelphia Inquirer and USA Today, as well as three cups of coffee, when Lou and Garry finally came in to see him. They looked even more exhausted than they had right after the arrest, but they also looked a little calmer, and that made Gregor feel a little better.

“Not as bad as you expected?” he asked them, as they came in.

“If you’re talking about the media, it’s worse,” Garry said. “There’s a circus out there. The only good thing is that they can’t get back here.”

“We’re going to be on the news at eleven,” Lou said. “I don’t think the portrait is going to be flattering.”

“But,” Gregor said.

“But the lab got back with a preliminary,” Garry said. “There’s arsenic in three of the mints Burdock tried to give to Roy Phipps. Which is really good to hear, because I didn’t know how we were going to justify this if there wasn’t. I mean, do you actually have any idea what went on here, or were you just guessing?”

“Mostly, I was being an idiot,” Gregor said. “I was thinking like Agatha Christie. I kept looking for things like chocolates left in a box, or pastries left on a table, and not finding them. Which makes sense, if you think about it, because that would be a ridiculous way to commit a murder. You could never know if the person you wanted dead would be the person who ate the tainted food. You could never be sure that nine other people wouldn’t eat it instead. I used to read those books when Tibor gave them to me and wonder what the woman was thinking. Agatha Christie, I mean. The one scenario was so unrealistic.”