Living Witness (37 page)

Gregor Demarkian was taller than Alice had expected him to be. He had one of those names that usually belonged to small dark people, not black but
dark
, square little men with hair that looked oiled. Gregor Demarkian's hair didn't look oiled, and he was taller than anybody Alice had ever seen except Nick Frapp. She wiped the palms of her hands on her apron. She ought to go home today and rest and look after Barbie. She wasn't feeling well. If it wasn't for the fact that that Connie Sutpen hadn't shown up again, she would just tell Lyman and leave.

Gregor Demarkian sat down at the counter. Alice took a deep breath. Of course he would sit down at the counter. He belonged in a booth, that man did. He wasn't a trucker, and he wasn't trying to pretend to be a trucker like these television people. It was the truckers who sat at the counter, or the regulars. Or at least it had been, until all this fuss had started.

Gregor Demarkian was talking to the man next to him. This was one of the television people, not anybody Alice knew, although she'd seen him in here half a dozen times in the past week. She put her hand in her apron pocket and fiddled with the anonymous note. It was odd how things went. You'd think you know everything, absolutely everything, about everyone in town, you'd think you know what their handwriting is like, but she couldn't make this out at all. Maybe it was one of the television people who had sent it. Maybe it was one of the people from the development. The trouble with that was that they would have no way of knowing that she had a cubby back there, with her name on it. People from outside would have put it in an envelope in her mailbox or something like that.

Alice got the coffee pot and headed over to where Demarkian was sitting.

“My reporter would wet her pants if you let her have an interview,” the television man was saying. “Especially now. Even with a murder, we've just been hanging out around here spinning our wheels.”

“No signs of violence by the forces of the religious right?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

“If you ask me, the forces of the religious right mostly want to get on camera and fulminate,” the television man said. “But nobody listens to me. The network wants coverage of the trial; it thinks we have to be here before anything happens, so here we are. We interviewed that Reverend Frapp the other day. It fell absolutely flat. No snake handling, no drinking poison, and a guy who can quote Seneca in Latin.”

The coffee pot was full. All the coffee pots were kept as full as possible at this time of the morning. Alice put her free hand around the side of it. It was hot, but not so hot she was in danger of being burned. She walked over to the two men and reached for Gregor Demarkian's still-overturned coffee cup. The counter was set with coffee cups turned upside down on saucers, and paper placemats with a picture of the American flag on them, and paper napkins with forks and spoons and knives holding them down.

“Can I get you anything?” Alice said.

Gregor Demarkian looked up at her. She hated his eyes. He had eyes like black marbles.

“Are you Mrs. McGuffie?” he asked.

“Yes, of course I'm Mrs. McGuffie,” she said. She knew she sounded rude, but she really didn't care. She really didn't. Who were these people, anyway? They didn't belong here. They'd be gone as soon as this trial was over. The only difference between Gregor Demarkian and the television people was that he'd probably try to pin that murder on a good Christian just to make the Christians in town look bad.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked again.

“Some scrambled eggs and toast,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Alice made a show of taking out her pad and writing it down. In those fancy restaurants out at the mall, nobody wrote anything down. It was just another way of telling people how much smarter you were than they were. Not writing anything down, as if you had a perfect memory. She bet they made plenty of mistakes, and then pretended they hadn't, so they could all go on pretending together. That was
what it was all about with those people. Pretending. They pretended to understand things you didn't, and they pretended that the silly things they said meant something real, and then they pretended that they were nothing like you at all.

She put her book into her pocket and brushed her fingers against the note again. Then she blushed.

“Are you all right?” Gregor Demarkian said.

Alice started. Gregor Demarkian looked like he was
peering
at her. The television man looked like he was doing the same thing. She tried to straighten her back and succeeded only in creating a little spasm.

“I don't have to talk to you,” she said, the words coming out when she had only meant to think them. “I don't care what Gary Albright says. You're not the police, and you're not on our side. I don't have to talk to you, and nobody else does, either. Your eggs will be out in a minute.
Good-bye
.”

She turned her back to both the men and walked away, to the little window that led to the kitchen, to hand in her slip. The note was still in there, in her pocket. It made her cold, just to think about it.

I saw what you did up at Annie Vic's
.

Well, Alice thought. What of it? What had she done up at Annie Vic's that should be anybody's business but her own?

 

It was cold in the room now. Sometimes it got that way. Annie-Vic thought about the window, and about how easy it ought to be to close it, but she couldn't close it, and she knew she couldn't. It was odd to be here like this—to float, to be able to hear everything anybody said without their knowing you could hear it. It was a revelation, really. If she came out of this—and she thought she would, if only because she wasn't panicking—she would recommend a stint of it to everybody. It was amazing, the kind of things people said when they thought you couldn't hear them.

This man, this person called Gregor Demarkian, didn't say much
of anything. Annie-Vic had been interested as soon as she'd heard Dr. Willard use his name. She'd heard of him, of course. She could barely help it. When she was home and on her own, she was practically addicted to Court TV, or Tru TV, as it had started calling itself. It was a silly change, and the mangled spelling of “true” offended her. She hated to sound like an old person, but she thought the standards of everything had declined badly since World War II. Even in the early days of television, when there was practically nothing on the box but the criminally stupid, nobody would have put up with a spelling like “tru.” Ed Sullivan had classical musicians on his variety show: pianists and violinists playing Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms. People were ashamed to admit that they were ignorant of the important monuments of the Great Tradition, never mind grammar, punctuation, and spelling. And tattoos—nobody had tattoos except the members of motorcycle gangs, and women never had them at all. The whole world seemed to have devolved into ugliness and squalor. It was as if one day she had gotten out of bed, and the hillbillies had won.

At the moment, she wasn't getting out of bed, or even turning over. Annie-Vic wanted to turn over, because her back hurt. She couldn't lift her arms. She couldn't open her eyes, not on purpose. They sometimes opened on their own, she didn't know why. They were open now, so that she could see something of what was happening in the room. Being flat on her back, she couldn't see much. The Demarkian person was very tall, and broad, like somebody who played professional football. He was probably too old. Annie-Vic had no idea how old you had to be to play professional football. That nice black man, that Michael Jordan, had gone in and out of being retired for years, and she didn't think he was much more than forty. But that was professional basketball, so maybe that was different.

There were things that Annie-Vic believed to be necessary. One of those things was a commitment to curing your own ignorance. There was something intrinsically wrong about being proud of what you didn't know. So many of these people these days were proud of just that. They took it as a badge of honor that they never listened to Bach
and couldn't tell a Renoir from a Picasso. Franklin Hale, for instance, seemed to be making a career out of boasting about his own ignorance, and Alice McGuffie—

Annie-Vic made her mind stop. Alice McGuffie. There was something about Alice McGuffie. On the day that this had happened, she had been thinking about it. Now it was gone, lost because of the condition she was in or lost for no other reason than old age. It didn't matter why. Alice McGuffie was not just proud of being ignorant, she was also furious at people who weren't. She wasn't stupid, that wasn't the point. She was willfully stupid. Annie-Vic wouldn't have believed, back all those years ago when she had set off for Poughkeepsie and college, that anybody on earth could be willfully stupid.

The other thing Annie-Vic believed was that too much money wasn't good for people. She knew that these things were cyclical. There was a short, intense period of wealth-building followed by a longer, less intense period of wealth consolidation. She had learned that in economics in 1936, and she'd brushed up on it since. Periods of wealth building were all about money. New people replaced the old families and all the new people had to distinguish themselves was money, so they spent it. They threw it around. They wore the labels on the outside of their clothes. It was only natural. But it wasn't good for people, Annie-Vic thought. It really wasn't. Money was like a drug, if you had to much of it. You couldn't really say it was a religion. Religions provided explanations, and consolation, and hope. When the world got into those times when money was the only thing that mattered, that was ugly, too, almost as ugly as ignorance.

Gregor Demarkian was walking around the room, looking at her things, looking at the equipment the hospital staff had left. There seemed to be a lot of equipment in the room. Annie-Vic had no idea what it was for, or who had put it here. She had an IV in her arm, which was giving her food and water, in a clear stream of glucose or something. She knew what that was for. As for the rest of it, she didn't seem to need it. She wasn't on a breathing machine. She wasn't on a machine to make her heart beat.

Somebody else came into the room. It took Annie-Vic awhile to realize who it was. It was Lisa. This made her feel immediately better. Annie Vic always liked it best when Lisa was in to visit, although it had to be a mortal bore for the poor girl. Annie-Vic tried to remember what Lisa did with her life, but the information wouldn't come. She was in college, maybe. That sounded about right. The last thing Annie-Vic wanted was to wake up from this thing and go immediately senile.

Mr. Demarkian and Lisa were talking. There was something about papers and something about the dining room.

“I didn't look through any of it to begin with,” Lisa was saying. “I'm sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I really do want to help. You have no idea how much I want to help. I don't understand people like the people who did this. I really don't.”

Mr. Demarkian said something Annie-Vic couldn't catch. It was so damned frustrating. Her hearing had been going for years, of course, but she could do well enough if she could just look people in the face.

“I went through every piece of paper that was there,” Lisa said. “I looked at all of them. There was a lot of stuff about a new contract for the teachers. Stuff about the teachers' union, and about teacher pensions. There was a lot about textbook requisitions. Not just this new one about Intelligent Design—”

Intelligent Design, Annie Vic thought indignantly. More like moronic idiocy.

“But I don't know what was there to begin with, if you see what I mean.” Lisa sounded close to tears. “It was all such a mess when I got home after that, after that thing. And I can't stay there now, of course. Cameron can't, either. It was never just because it was a crime scene, you know, we just can't stand the idea of it. But it never occurred to me to look through those papers when I first got there, and I never did. So I just don't know what's missing.”

More vague, fuzzy noises from Gregor Demarkian. Annie-Vic wanted to hit something. Here she had a Great Detective right in the room with her, right in Snow Hill, and she'd bet the only person in town getting any use out of him was Nick Frapp.

Here was something else Annie-Vic believed. You had to treat human beings like human beings. You couldn't rope off one whole segment of humanity and declare that they were too addled to know their own minds or too malevolent to be let loose with a printing press. That was what Franklin Hale did to people, and it was what Henry Wackford did to people, too. They were practically Siamese twins, those two. They just had different vocabularies to describe what they were doing. Annie-Vic had lived through the age of totalitarianism. She knew what a totalitarian looked like when she saw one.

Something in her head stopped, again, and she tried to focus. She found it impossible. She did focus sometimes, but it was always involuntary. Since she'd been like this, she hadn't been able to make herself sit still and zero in on any particular thing, on purpose. And yet there was something. Something about the dining room table. Something about Gregor Demarkian in this room.

“I suppose you're right,” Lisa was saying. “All the papers I looked at were financial. I don't think there was much of anything about evolution and Intelligent Design. Or maybe I'm wrong. I'm sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I'm being fairly useless here. Maybe you can ask Cameron. He might have noticed more.”

The dining room table, Annie-Vic thought, but it was useless.

She was drifting off to sleep.

 

 

 

Gregor Demarkian did not like to think he was avoiding Dale Vardan, but he was avoiding Dale Vardan, and as he stepped out of Eddie Block's police car in front of the Snow Hill Public School Complex. He looked around for a moment, not knowing what in particular he expected to see. It was a school complex like hundreds of others across the United States. There hadn't been one like it in Philadelphia when Gregor was growing up, and there wasn't one there now, but that was only because Philadelphia was a city and its students rode public transportation. In suburbs and small towns there was the question of what to do about school busses, and also how to make sure there was enough land for athletic fields. The athletic fields here seemed to be off to the back, covered with snow, marked only by their goal posts and score boards. Beyond even those, all the way at the back, the semi-stalled construction of the new school building rose up out of the hills, a skeleton of ice and steel.