Wanting Sheila Dead(17)

“Weren’t you making some kind of point?” she asked.

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Yes, I was. I was making a point about Agatha Christie. Her books are not unrealistic. They’re just metaphors.”

“Metaphors for social order,” Bennis said. She was being half solemn.

Gregor sat up. He hated sitting up. It hurt his back.

“Metaphors for the need for social order,” he said. “Because the kinds of murders she deals with are rare in the real world—”

“They weren’t rare in her fictional world,” Bennis said.

“—but they do happen.” Gregor was going on as if Bennis wasn’t talking. This was sometimes necessary. “They do sometimes happen. And they have to be dealt with immediately when they do, because they’re the most dangerous kind of crime. Much more dangerous than some thug idiot who starts staging home invasions and beating and killing the crap out of everybody. We know how to deal with him. We need to know how to deal with them, and we don’t.”

“Them?”

“The middle-class criminals. The ‘nice’ ones who do plotted murders, and other things. What we do now is look at the thug idiot and shove him in jail pretty much indefinitely. We look at the polite criminal and we make all kinds of excuses. We offer services. We offer reduced sentences and mitigated sentences—house arrest, probation, parole, whatever. And we’re dead wrong. We should lock these people up for as long or longer than we lock up the thugs. Because these people are more dangerous than the thugs.”

“Is that what you want to do with the Bernie Madoffs of the world?” Bennis asked. “Lock them up?”

“Well, we did lock Madoff up,” Gregor said, “but in that kind of case, the only thing that would really do would be for us to take all their money. And I mean all of it. They should become acquainted with soup kitchens and homeless shelters.”

“Get up and get dressed,” Bennis said. “Tibor is probably already waiting for us at the Ararat.”

“You don’t want to get me started on Bernie Madoff,” Gregor said.

Bennis got out of the way so that he could move, and Gregor went into the bathroom to take a shower. She was right. Tibor would be waiting for them.

And maybe, just maybe, Tibor would have more of these books for him to read.





2


In the beginning—well, Gregor thought, no. The beginning was his childhood, when this small neighborhood in Philadelphia had been long blocks of tenements filled with people who barely spoke English.

In the second beginning then, in the time since Gregor had come back to Cavanaugh Street from the District of Columbia, from the time when he had retired from the FBI and come back home to do whatever it was he thought he could do here—from then, he and Father Tibor Kasparian had had a nearly invariable routine. Every morning at six, Gregor would get up, shower, shave, and get into clean clothes. Then he would go down to the street and walk toward the Ararat Restaurant. Halfway there, he would find Fr. Tibor Kasparian coming out from behind the church, where his apartment was. Then they would go on to breakfast.

This had been their routine even after it had become apparent to anybody who was watching that in spite of the fact that Gregor and Bennis had separate apartments in the same brownstone, the apartments were separate in fact but not in spirit. Bennis usually took more time, or less, than Gregor to dress. She usually had things on her mind, even if it was only something she was doing with Donna Moradanyan Donahue. Donna didn’t eat breakfast in the Ararat these days: she had one small boy and an infant at home. Still, Donna did manage to be there at some point every morning, and Donna and Bennis always seemed to have something they needed to do.

This morning, Tibor was not waiting in front of the church. Gregor knew that he would be in the Ararat in the window booth, where they always sat. It was not a rejection. It seemed, instead, to be a kind of acknowledgment of Gregor’s marriage. Now that Gregor was married to Bennis, Tibor did not wait for him to come by for breakfast. This made absolutely no sense.

“Are you all right?” Bennis asked him.

They were walking past the church, which was on the other side of the street. The Ararat was on this side of the street. Gregor sighed.

“I was thinking about Tibor,” he said.

“Is there something wrong with Tibor? Look, he’s in the window. He looks all right to me. Is there something I should know?”

“Why doesn’t he wait for me in the mornings anymore? Because we’re married? Does that change breakfast? And why do we come down to the Ararat together? We never did before. You never even wanted to.”