Stillness in Bethlehem (14 page)

“You mean you think these two deaths were accidents?”

Gregor peered at his nearly naked face, decided it would have to do and reached for the towel. “I don’t see any reason not to think they were accidents—or at least I don’t see any reason but one, and that’s more than a little weak.”

“What is it?”

“Position of the wounds. I’ll have to check the papers, of course, but from what Morrison said yesterday, it sounds as if both bodies had two wounds, one of them in the shoulder and one of them in the neck. I’d like to know if those are common places for hunting-accident wounds. If they’re not, the coincidence is interesting.”

“There now, Krekor.”

“But not interesting enough,” Gregor insisted. “Two different guns. Two different places. Two very different people—and what could the motive be? Nobody seems to have liked this Tricia Verek—”

“Tisha, Krekor.”

“Whatever. Nobody seems to have liked her, and this legal action she wanted to file had everybody mad as hell—even if we give Franklin Morrison both those things, they don’t add up to a motive for murder—”

“Not even the legal action?” Tibor looked surprised. “Mr. Morrison was saying that this Celebration is everything to the town, Krekor. To shut it down would be to make the people here poor.”

“To shut it down would be to make the town operate like all the other towns in Vermont and most other states. If it wanted a new pool for the school gymnasium, it would have to collect taxes to get it. Granted, the way they do it now seems to be both less painful and more effective, but putting the town in the position of having to operate more conventionally does not add up to a motive for murder. Only psychopaths kill in cold blood, Tibor. Everybody else—and that includes wives who murder their husbands for the insurance and plan it all out for six months—everybody else kills under extreme emotional stress. That includes soldiers in war. That’s what all that training is about; it’s like a crash course in autohypnosis to psych the men up for battle. If the men didn’t get psyched, there wouldn’t be a battle. I can’t imagine a situation where somebody would get psyched enough to kill Tisha Verek over something as esoteric as a lawsuit that hadn’t been filed yet and wouldn’t have any effect until a year after it had been filed. And what about the old lady?”

“Mmm,” Tibor said, absent again. “What about the old lady?”

Gregor reached to the hook on the back of the bathroom door, where he had hung his shirt. He pulled the shirt on, buttoned the sleeves, and then went hunting for his belt.

“The old lady,” Gregor repeated deliberately, “was someone named Dinah Ketchum, and she wasn’t the enemy of anybody as far as Franklin Morrison told us, and she wasn’t out to sue the town over anything, either. She was just an old lady. Tibor?”

Tibor was back in the middle of his book again. Because of the way he was holding it, it was impossible for Gregor to see the cover. It was one of those large-format paperbacks, though, which meant it wasn’t a novel by Dick Francis or Judith Krantz or Mickey Spillane, which was what Tibor liked to read for relaxation. Gregor put his hand on the top of the book and forced it down into Tibor’s lap.

“Tibor?”

“I am very worried about Bennis, Krekor.”

Gregor read the book’s title upside down on the top of the left-hand page:
Get Thin, Stay Thin, Be Thin Forever!
He blinked.

“Thin?” he asked dubiously.

Tibor flushed. “It is not the first I have read, Krekor. In my room, I have others.”

“Diet books?”

“Yes, of course diet books.
The Pritikin Program
.
Fit for Life
.
The Woman’s Advantage Diet
. I must have two dozen of them, Krekor, and I don’t have half of what I found in the bookstore. There are millions of these books.”

“You don’t need to lose weight.”

“I know. Bennis, she also does not need to lose weight.”

“Bennis is trying to lose weight?”

“She has bought a diet book, Krekor.
The Raise Your Metabolism Diet
. I have read it.”

“Why?” Gregor asked him.

“Because I am worried, Krekor. And I have a right to be worried. This is a book for crazy people.”

“What is? The book you’re reading or the book Bennis was reading?”

“Both. I am telling you, Krekor, it is a conspiracy.”

“What’s a conspiracy?”

“Diets,” Tibor said seriously. “It is a conspiracy against the women of America.”

“By whom?”

“Male chauvinist pigs,” Tibor said.

Male chauvinist pigs. Gregor’s belt had gotten itself wound around the bamboo pole that held the utility shelves together. Gregor got it unwound and began to thread it through his belt loops. The utility shelves had been pasted over with sprightly red-and-green holiday shelf paper. Gregor’s head felt heavy, as if he had smashed it into something harder than itself. His head often felt this way after long-term discussions with Father Tibor Kasparian on any subject that related directly to modern American life. It wasn’t that Tibor was unintelligent or unsophisticated in the ordinary sense. Nobody who could read that many languages was unintelligent. Nobody who had spent so much time in the great capitals of Europe—and in the gulags—was unsophisticated. The problem was more like a matter of tone, a shift in emphasis. Tibor didn’t think like other people, and he had no sense of time. Did he realize that nobody said “male chauvinist pig” anymore? Did he care?

“Tibor,” Gregor said cautiously, “I don’t think—”

But Tibor had jumped up from his seat and begun to pace. He was patrolling the hall Gregor needed to get through to get back to his room. “I am telling you, Krekor, it is right. Think about it. We have now many women in this country like Bennis, they have very good educations, they have the chance to build empires and write books and make world peace—although the way the world is, I am not sure there is ever going to be peace. Never mind. They have this chance, and what do they do instead? They diet.”

“Tibor—”

“It is not right for women to be as thin as they try to be in America, Krekor. The good God did not make women thin. He made them round. When they try to be thin, they do not eat enough, they make themselves starve—and let me tell you, Krekor, I know about starving. I have starved. In the last days before I was able to leave the Soviet Union, I had nothing to eat for four days, and then when I got to Israel, I had no money and so not much to eat for the next two weeks, and let me tell you what I thought of, Krekor, I thought of food. All the time food. It was only after I had started to teach at the university and I had money to eat all the time that I could concentrate again. You see.”

“Not exactly.”

“Bennis will begin with this diet and then she will not write her books, Krekor, instead she will think only about food. Like the other women, they do not build big business empires, they do not get together to elect a woman president, they do not write philosophy as much as they could because so many of them are thinking only about food. It is a plot, Krekor. I know plots. I have spent my life in the midst of plots.”

Gregor was beginning to think he was condemned to spend his life in the middle of another one—Tibor’s against the male chauvinists, maybe. He caught Tibor at the start of a new lap in pacing and darted through the window of opportunity, relieved once he stopped to find himself in the middle of the hall. Tibor had not quit his pacing. He had simply created a new route, around Gregor, past the bathroom door and around Gregor again. He had his hands clasped behind his back and a frown on his face as furious as any he could ever have directed at the people who had persecuted him.

“I am worried about Bennis,” he repeated, “and if you have any sense, Krekor, you will be worried about Bennis, too. You will help me stop this thing.”

“I have to go see Franklin Morrison,” Gregor said. “I promised.”

“You have to take responsibility for the people you love,” Tibor said. “She will not listen to me.”

“She won’t listen to me, either,” Gregor told him. “At least, she hasn’t until now.”

There was no longer any reason why Gregor shouldn’t go to his room. His door was standing open on the other side of the hall. Tibor was no longer walking back and forth in front of him. There was no point in continuing this conversation. Tibor’s eyes were fierce. He was ready to go into phase two—practical attack plans. Franklin Morrison was waiting.

“I’ve got to go,” Gregor said, and then, at the first sign of a possible response from Father Tibor Kasparian, he went.

From the very beginning of this second career in extracurricular murder, Gregor Demarkian had discussed his involvements with Tibor. That was what he had been trying to do by telling Tibor how he felt about Franklin Morrison’s request to “just look over” the evidence file. That was what he’d expected to do when he’d asked Tibor to talk to him while he shaved. That all this had been sidetracked by Tibor’s new obsession with diets was more than unsettling. It put Gregor in a distinctly bad mood.

He was still in a bad mood ten minutes later, when he emerged from his room in his best camel’s-hair topcoat, carrying his best leather gloves and feeling more than a little ridiculous to be going out in such a formal way. Wanting to look professional, he hadn’t had any other choice. He had brought casual clothes and this formal suit, but nothing in between. If Elizabeth had still been alive, she would never have allowed it. She’d have packed his suitcase herself and made sure he had everything he might possibly need.

He stopped at the door to Tibor’s bedroom, unable to get over feeling guilty for ducking out on a conversation that had been important to Tibor even if it hadn’t been important to him. Tibor was propped up in a green wingbacked chair with his feet on a matching green ottoman, deep in a volume called
The Super Fat Loss Diet and Maintenance Plan: The Revolutionary New Program That Takes the Weight Off and Keeps It Off Forever!
Towers of books rose from the floor around Tibor’s feet, including
The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet
,
The Beverly Hills Diet
,
The Mayo Clinic Diet Manual
,
The Crystal Healing Diet
,
The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet
,
The New American Diet
, and
The Last Diet You’ll Ever Need
. There was also something called
Fat Is a Feminist Issue
, but it seemed to have been stabbed. Gregor decided not to go in and disturb the man. He not only had diets on the brain, he had them everywhere else, too. Any interruption of the reading process would only bring on another tirade. At least for today.

Just as Gregor was turning toward the stairs, he had a second thought. Maybe Tibor was right. Maybe he ought to be worried about Bennis Hannaford. God knew, Bennis gave every one of her friends cause enough to worry. She had a far too well-developed spirit of adventure and absolutely no sense of self-preservation. She’d never been particularly sensible about food, but her lack of sense hadn’t run to diets. It had run to eating like a horse. Maybe Tibor knew something he didn’t know, though. It wasn’t a subject Gregor had paid much attention to—his rather substantial bulk was evidence of that—but he had heard some things in passing, and those things were very disturbing. Weren’t there women out there who thought they were fat when they weren’t, and then went on starvation diets until they died? Weren’t there others who ate enormous amounts of food and then made themselves throw up? None of that really sounded like Bennis. None of that was really her style. Still, you never knew.

Gregor went across the hall to Bennis’s room and knocked. He heard a muffled “come in,” turned the doorknob and stuck his head through. Bennis had a single, not a suite, with no living room. She was sitting on her already made-up bed in a pair of jeans and a turtleneck, the phone in one hand and a large jelly doughnut in the other. She certainly didn’t seem to be dieting. When she saw him she said “just a second” to whomever was on the phone and took the receiver away from her ear.

“It’s Donna Moradanyan,” she said. “She thinks she may have found a place for the Kaldikians. Sheila Kashinian’s brother’s daughter’s husband owns a small apartment building in Paoli. You want to talk to Donna?”

“I just came in to see how you were doing.”

“I’m doing fine. You going to see Chief Morrison?”

“I am.”

“I’ll expect a full report when you get back. Just a minute.” Bennis put the phone back up to her ear. “Donna? Gregor is here. I was telling him about Sheila’s—”

It didn’t matter what Bennis had been telling Donna about Sheila Kashinian or anybody else. Gregor backed out of the room and closed the door, feeling a little easier in his mind. Surely nobody who was dieting would have been eating the sort of thing Bennis had been eating. And surely nobody who was making herself vomit after every time she ate could be so concerned with hapless refugees like the Kaldikians, who were now sleeping in Father Tibor’s apartment and defying the best efforts of the Support for an Independent Armenia Society to resettle them in America.

Gregor made his way to the stairs, then down to the lobby, then out onto Main Street, feeling better with every step he took. Franklin Morrison might not have a problem worth bothering with, but discussing forensic impossibilities with a small-town policeman had to beat holding Tibor’s hand when he was in the grip of one of his fanaticisms.

Gregor thought he’d let Bennis do that this time. After all, she was the one who had started it.

T
O GET TO THE
police station, Gregor had to go down Main Street to Carrow and then down Carrow to Williams. Williams was easy to miss, because it was just a finger-dart to the left of the road. The major intersection on Carrow was with Delaford. Gregor walked through town slowly, his hands in the pockets of his coat, his scarf pulled up over his skin. It was very cold, but he seemed to be the only one who noticed. Main Street was full of activity. It probably wasn’t, usually. Gregor imagined it on an ordinary day as half-deserted, inundated irregularly by children getting out of school or choirs being released from practice at the Congregational Church. Even with the out-of-town tourists clotting up the sidewalks, Bethlehem looked like the inspiration for all the usual subjects: Currier and Ives, Norman Rockwell, Pissaro’s painting
Winter
. That was why the usual subjects were usual. It helped that the tourists all seemed to be either wearing a uniform or costumed for the next production of a science fiction circus. Half of them were identically attired in Baxter State parkas, baggy blue jeans and neon orange- and lemon-striped snow boots. The other half were like fruit salad. Gregor saw a woman in leopard-print Lycra stretch pants so tight they looked like skin. She was wearing a bright blue feathered jacket with silver spangles that jingled when she walked. Then there was the woman in the spike-heeled boots and the Victorian riding costume, right down to the little velvet hat. Gregor had a vision of the older women on Cavanaugh Street—Lida and Hannah and Sheila and the rest of them—sitting around an outdoor table the way they would have sat on the church steps in a village in the old country, watching these oddly dressed women go by. Gregor did not speak Armenian, but sometimes he thought he could hear it in his head, and this was one of those times. His mother’s voice came to him out of nowhere and he got the word for
menopause
, intact.