Stillness in Bethlehem (13 page)

It was now seven o’clock in the evening, and not only were Stu’s guns all on the gun-room floor, but his ammunition was there, too, and his special sights and his tripods and his skeet traps and all the rest of it, all the paraphernalia of using guns for a hobby. Looking at it all piled up like this made him feel dizzy and bewildered. Thinking about himself shooting at things made him feel sick. He kept expecting the missing gun to show up, by magic or by sleight of someone’s hand, and not to notice it until it was too late. He kept expecting to find himself standing outside by the barn pumping bullets into wood and suddenly recognizing the gun he was holding as the one that killed Tisha Verek. He tried to count the number of men he had killed in Vietnam and couldn’t. It didn’t feel like the same thing.

He felt a breeze on his hands and looked up to see that his wife, Liza, had come to stand in the doorway. Behind her, the wood stove in the kitchen seemed hot enough to be glowing. Stu dropped the cartridge he’d been holding and straightened up.

“Yes?”

“What do you mean, yes?” Liza said. “Aren’t you going to come inside? Aren’t you going to eat anything?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You haven’t been hungry for weeks. That’s not the point. You have to eat.”

“I’ve been thinking it all through again, the day they died. I’ve been trying to make it make sense.”

“I don’t see why you think you can make it make any more sense than the police have. Come inside and eat.”

“Why doesn’t it bother you?” Stu asked her, but he’d been asking her that for two weeks solid now and getting no good answer. It didn’t bother her because it didn’t bother her. Dinah had been her mother-in-law. Liza hadn’t had much patience for her when she was alive. Tisha Verek had been nothing at all. Stu tried to fathom it and couldn’t. His gun. His mother. It all seemed much too connected to him.

“I don’t like you out here fooling around with those guns,” Liza said. And then she retreated, back into the kitchen, back behind her door. It had been that way between the two of them since Dinah died. Maybe it had been that way between the two of them forever.

Stu got up, picked his stainless-steel Plainfield Model Ml gas-operated semiautomatic out of the pile, found a clip for it and loaded. Then he went out into the yard and positioned the gun on his shoulder. This one was more like a machine gun than a standard semiautomatic. It looked like a machine gun, too. It made a lot of noise when it fired.

Stu sighted along the side of the barn, aiming at nothing in particular, wanting only to hit wood and cause damage. He pressed the trigger and listened to the splintering of wood in the darkness, the groaning of old boards, the moaning of the wind.

It had been two weeks now since his mother had died, and he had finally come to a decision, one of the few real decisions he had ever had to make in his life. He was going to have to go through with it no matter how Liza felt and without consulting good old Peter Callisher. He was going to have to do it on his own and that was all there was to it.

He pulled the trigger again, listened to the splintering of wood again, thought of them both out there in the snow with the small holes from .22-caliber bullets leaking blood into the ground.

He thought about himself out here shooting up the barn.

He thought he was probably going crazy.

W
HEN FRANKLIN MORRISON HAD
first come up to Gregor Demarkian in The Magick Endive, Gregor had been sure that the man was just another avid reader of the local paper, a slightly less sophisticated specimen than either of his two waitresses who wanted to shake the hand of the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. It wasn’t the kind of thing Gregor had ever imagined happening to himself back when he was still with the FBI. While he was there, he’d made the media often enough—if you head task forces chasing serial killers in a country full of crime-story fanatics and horror-movie junkies, that is inevitable—but it had been as an officer of the organization, the designated human face of a faceless institution. What had been happening to him since he first walked into Bennis Hannaford’s father’s house three years ago and found a dead body lying on the study floor was different. If it had been
just
that body in Bennis Hannaford’s father’s house, it might not have mattered. Bennis Hannaford’s family was rich and well-connected—in Philadelphia. The rest of the country had been interested mostly because the Hannaford house had forty rooms and the Hannaford girls had all “come out” in extravagant style and one of Bennis’s brothers was what old George Tekemanian back on Cavanaugh Street called “a corporated raider.” It was the second extracurricular murder that really got the ball rolling. Gregor had taken that one on for a friend of Father Tibor’s. That friend just happened to be John Cardinal O’Bannion, the most publicly flamboyant and outrageously controversial Catholic prelate in the country. Gregor wouldn’t have guessed it beforehand, but Catholics are much better than debutantes at making a man famous. There are fifty-two million of them from one end of the country to the other, and even the ones who haven’t been to Mass in twenty years are passionately interested in the Church. A lot of other people are also passionately interested in the Church, either in romantic attachment to their prettified images of pre-Vatican II ritual or from outright hostility. The Hannaford murder had gotten him a two-page spread in
People
magazine. The murder he investigated for John Cardinal O’Bannion got him on the cover, and on the covers of
Time
,
Life
,
Newsweek
,
U.S. News and World Report
, and
The Ladies’ Home Journal
. It also got him on all three networks and into two of the three best-selling supermarket tabloids. After that, it really got crazy. More extracurricular murders. More publicity. Gregor thought every once in a while about the original Hercule Poirot, who had wanted so badly to be famous and who wasn’t, really. Poirot should have lived in America in the second half of the twentieth century, where the publicity machine is all cranked up and ready to go, where “legends” have become something Directors of Market Research invented three of before breakfast. Gregor seemed to have become one of these “legends.”
Esquire
wanted to interview him. So did
Vanity Fair
. He had received three invitations to appear on Ted Koppel’s
Nightline
. God only knew what any of these people expected him to talk about. He didn’t break confidences, his life wasn’t all that interesting and he couldn’t talk with any authority about the Catholic Church. He didn’t even believe in God. What frightened him was the way it had gotten out on the street, especially in smaller towns. People stopped him. People touched him. Once a man in a plaid sports jacket and high-top Reebok shoes had grabbed him by the lapels and demanded to know his “secret.”

Standing in The Magick Endive, watching Franklin Morrison talk to Bennis and Tibor with all the deference of a B-movie butler taking directions from the lady of the manor, Gregor had wondered uneasily if what was about to happen was going to be weird. Nothing very weird had happened to him so far, except for the man in the high-top Reeboks, but he had heard of such things. Actresses gunned down by men they had never met. Talk-show hosts invaded by deranged fans who knew how to use a set of burglar’s tools. A television anchorman assaulted in a manner so bizarre it became the stuff of real legend—not hyped—within hours of the anchorman’s escape. Fame was not only instantaneous in America, it was dangerous. It was especially dangerous for anyone whose name was connected in any way with violent death. The author of a series of best-selling novels about slash-and-run murders. The star of an Oscar-nominated movie about covert operations in Vietnam. The cop who had brought in the evidence that finally convicted a famous mob boss in Miami. It was sickening what had happened to some people—and always the wrong people. The last time the violence-sickened public had gone for the throat of a killer was when Ruby killed Oswald. Since then, the killers had been perfectly safe. The television newswoman who produced a ground-breaking report on battering had to have her mailbox checked routinely by the bomb squad. No one was out to assassinate Jeffrey Dahmer.

Actually, Franklin Morrison didn’t seem to Gregor to be a prime candidate for the role of nutcase. He was too old—if there was one thing Gregor had learned in twenty years in the FBI, it was that most stranger-to-stranger violence is committed by men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. Most acquaintanceship violence is committed by men in that age group, too, but Gregor didn’t have to worry about that. Franklin Morrison wasn’t an acquaintance. He wasn’t in very good shape, either. That was another thing about stranger-to-stranger violence. Acquaintanceship violence usually had a drug or alcohol element to it. Stranger-to-stranger violence, at least of the most serious kind, usually had a workout element to it. When Gregor had first noticed that, he had thought he was losing his mind. Then another agent had made the same observation, and the connection had become impossible to ignore. Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacey—fat or thin, in shape or out, it was remarkable how many serial killers and other assorted nasties worked out. The only one Gregor could remember who definitely hadn’t had been David Berkowitz. Gregor didn’t think that counted. He had always been uncomfortable with the verdict in the Berkowitz case. He was sure enough that Berkowitz had committed the crimes he had been charged with. He was also sure that Berkowitz was no psychopath. Gregor Demarkian knew the difference between a psychopath and a lunatic.

Psychopaths, lunatics—what am I thinking about? Gregor had wondered. Here he was, presented with what he had no sane reason to expect was anything but a harmless old man—and a harmless old man in a police uniform, at that—and he’s spinning interior movies in Technicolor about the repressed blood instincts of secret serial murderers. He had been worried about that kind of thing when he was still at the Bureau. Toward the last years of Elizabeth’s life, the two of them had talked endlessly about whether Gregor was getting “hard.”

Once on his own, away from the Bureau in the everyday world, he hadn’t expected to have to fear for his humanity—but here he was. Somehow, here he always was. There had to be a way he could keep his opinions of all that part of the human race that did not live on Cavanaugh Street from sinking to the level of his opinion of Vlad the Impaler.

Franklin Morrison had shifted from one foot to the other and back again, as if he were on a boat and correcting for the roll. Bennis had sat with her chin on her hands and her huge blue eyes wide and mischievous. Tibor had sat with his back very straight and his face frozen into gravity, but without being able to hide his excitement. That was when reality had come washing over Gregor like a tidal wave. He might obsess about serial killers and rogue fans. He might prepare himself for fantasized attacks from unexpected quarters. What Gregor was really in danger of was not violence, but imposition. Franklin Morrison had a gleam in his eye that Gregor knew well. It was the gleam of a man with an illness who has finally found a specialist. Franklin Morrison had a problem, and he couldn’t think of a single person on earth better qualified to solve it than Gregor Demarkian.

“It’s not that I mind being consulted,” Gregor told Tibor the next morning, leaning over the small basin in the bathroom and trying to see his lathered face in a mirror encrusted with poinsettia leaves, holly sprigs, Santa’s elves and leaping reindeer. The Green Mountain Inn may have taken its inspiration for its lobby decorations from the Place de la Concorde, but it had taken its inspiration for its room decorations from Donna Moradanyan. “In fact, I even like being consulted. It’s nice to know I haven’t lost my touch—”

“Of course you haven’t lost your touch,” Tibor said soothingly, and absently. He was sitting on a stool just outside the bathroom door, half lost in a book. Tibor was always lost in a book. His apartment behind Holy Trinity Church on Cavanaugh Street was not much more than a repository for books—in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, modern Greek, ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew. He had furniture no one had ever seen because it was so deeply buried under books. He now had hotel furniture no one could get to because it was so deeply buried under books. It had taken him less than half an hour last night to transform his room into a replica of the ones he remembered so fondly from home. Now he tapped the page of the book he was holding with the tip of a single finger and sighed. He had been reading all morning—it was now ten o’clock on the morning of Monday, December 16th—and getting gloomier by the second.

“Krekor,” he said carefully. “I am worried. I am very worried about Bennis.”

“I’m always worried about Bennis,” Gregor said grimly, “but it doesn’t do any good. She won’t listen. If she insists on going out with brain-addled rock stars and action-movie actors who identify too strongly with their characters, there’s nothing we can do. Do you want to hear about Franklin Morrison or not?”

“Of course I want to hear about Franklin Morrison. It is a difficult problem he had, Krekor. Maybe you can solve it.”

“I can’t solve it by looking at his evidence files,” Gregor said. His razor was full of foam. He turned on the tap and ran the blade under the water. “I’m no good at physical evidence, that’s what I kept trying to tell him. Everybody specializes, Tibor. I specialized in analysis. I don’t know a rifle bullet from Little Orphan Annie.”

“I do not think it is necessary that you know the rifle bullet, Krekor. I think he already knows what he had to know about the rifle bullet. Bullets.”

“No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t know why they were fired.”

“Isn’t this analysis?”

Gregor raised his razor to his face again. “It’s analysis for anybody who knows anything about rifle bullets. Tibor, it’s as if you didn’t know anything about Western literature and you sat down to read
Finnegan’s Wake
. It can’t be done. You wouldn’t have the context. I don’t have the context here. Anyway, I tend to agree with the Vermont State Police.”