“A digital machine for making sock balls?”
“You can decide which direction to ball them in,” Tibor said, “and you can do more than one kind of ball. And you can secure them with a plastic thing.”
“Why would you want to?” Gregor asked.
Old George Tekemanian shook his head. “Krekor, Krekor. If the people who made these things asked themselves that question, they would never make anything. I like this one because when you make the sock ball you can shoot it out. Like this.”
Old George Tekemanian flicked a switch. A sock ball came roaring out of the end of the little machine and hit Linda Melajian in the leg, making her jump. Coffee flew up out of the coffeepot and landed on her shoes.
“You do that again, I’m going to pour coffee on your head,” she said when she got to the table. “That’s the third time he’s got me today. You want some actual breakfast, Gregor, or do you just want to stick with coffee?”
“Two eggs sunny-side up. Side of sausage. Side of hash browns. Toast.”
“You sure you don’t want the fruit plate?” Linda said.
“Yes,” Gregor told her, “I’m sure. And I’m equally sure I don’t want you writing Bennis a note with the calorie and cholesterol counts for my breakfast. What’s with the two of you, anyway? I’m not going to change my mind.”
“We’re just trying to stop you from having a heart attack before your time.” Linda turned one of the coffee cups over and poured it full. “Never mind us,” she said. “You know what women are like. We were put here by God to spoil every man’s fun.”
“I take it you broke up with what’s-his-name,” Gregor said.
Linda made a face. “I don’t break up with men anymore. I just spend the first date figuring out how they’re going to screw me up. I’ll be back in a minute.”
She marched off. Tibor shook his head. “I don’t like it when they get that way,” he said. “You know, with the men thing. They’re never in a very good mood.”
Gregor pushed a little pile of sock balls down the table to old George and opened his paper. He should have turned on the news or logged on to the Internet. Their information would be much more recent, and probably much more complete. It was all well and good to say that we should do everything we can to preserve our daily newspapers, but the fact remained that “news” was what was new, and the faster you could get it to the public, the more successful you would be. The television stations were faster, that was all. In a few years, the Internet would be faster still. Gregor looked through the first four paragraphs of the story, decided that there was nothing egregiously wrong in any of them, and pushed the paper away.
Tibor picked it up. “I saw it on the television last night, Krekor,” he said. “They interrupted the Rosie O’Donnell Show to have the bulletin. It was a disgraceful thing, don’t you think? And you were there.”
“I was there to see a dead body that had nothing to do with the riot,” Gregor said, “except that it did, except that I could never figure out what. Do you know this man, this Roy Phipps?”
“I’ve met him,” Tibor said cautiously.
“And?”
Tibor shrugged. “He’s not popular with the clergy in Philadelphia, Krekor. They see him as an interloper, coming here from out of state with—what’s the word?—with attitudes that do not fit here. But he’s not what the papers and the television stations make him out to be. He’s not stupid.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I’d heard he wasn’t.”
“But he’s a very bad thing,” Tibor said. “He gives all of religion a bad name. He gives all of Christianity a bad name. There are people out there who know nothing but what they see on television. What are they going to think when they see a man like that?”
Gregor took a long sip of coffee. It was so hot it nearly scalded his throat. “According to John Jackman, Phipps and his people decided to demonstrate last night after word got out that there had been another murder by arsenic in the neighborhood. The woman who was murdered was Sister Harriet Garrity. Was that on the news last night, too?”
“Yes,” Tibor and old George Tekemanian said at once.
Old George Tekemanian’s nephew Martin had a wife who had made it a rule that old George was not allowed to watch anything on television that was too “exciting.” Old George was not paying any attention to her unless she was in the room with him and able to get hold of the remote. Gregor let it pass.
“Let me try to explain this as well as I can,” Gregor said, “because I’m having a very hard time making it make sense. Sister Harriet Garrity was found dead in Sister Scholastica’s office at St. Anselm’s Parish complex by Sister Scholastica herself around six o’clock—”