Stillness in Bethlehem (22 page)

“No,” Gregor said, “I didn’t. Did you talk to anyone tonight? You didn’t go anywhere, you say. Did anyone come to you?”

“Amanda Ballard came up to talk before she left. She and Peter had tickets for the section directly opposite this one on the other side of the park. Peter gets tickets every year. Anyway, Amanda was feeling sick and was on her way out, and she saw me and came up to say hello.”

“She left and Peter Callisher didn’t.”

“That’s right.”

“And Peter Callisher had tickets over here to give to Gemma and tickets over there to use himself, all on the same night.”

“Oh, that. Peter had friends who were supposed to come up from Boston to see the play, and they only made up their minds about a month ago, so when he got them the tickets he couldn’t get them to go with the ones he already had. Then the friends couldn’t come up after all, so there he was.”

“Anybody else?”

Kelley thought about it, long and hard, but it only made her face go as grey as her name. She didn’t come up with much.

“I saw Candy George’s husband Reggie,” she said. “Candy’s the girl who plays Mary. And I saw Stu Ketchum wandering around. He operates a food stall during the intermissions. Oh, and I saw Timmy Hall. He works over at the paper. He’s here every year, too. Peter gets tickets for his whole staff, but not all on the same night. Timmy must have been with Peter.”

Gregor prodded one more time. “You didn’t have a chance to talk to any of them?” he asked.

Kelley shook her head.

“And you didn’t see anyone else? Were any of the people you did see on bad terms with Gemma Bury?”

“Nobody was on really bad terms with Gemma,” Kelley said, “because she was like I told you. Always reasonable. Of course, that meant that nobody was very close. At least—”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Kelley said.

Obviously, there was something. Gregor could tell. If he’d had the least suspicion that Kelley Grey could have been materially involved in Gemma Bury’s death, he would have pushed for it. However, he was sure she did not. She had been telling the truth about her activities during the intermission. He had seen her sitting in her seat when he’d come back with his calzone, and Franklin had reported at least one witness who’d come back early and seen her sitting there, too. After that, she’d been caught up in the returning crowds and the performance. If she’d gone clattering around then, somebody would have mentioned it.

Kelley’s face had gone from grey to green, from firmly young to sagging, in a blink. It was time to let her go home and get some rest. Gregor got to his feet and held out a hand to help Kelley to hers.

“Get out of here,” he said. “Go get some sleep. If we need to talk to you some more, we can do it in the morning.”

T
IMMY HALL WAS ONE
of those fat men who seemed to be fat mostly through inertia. Peter Callisher couldn’t remember ever seeing him eat much, but he waddled and rocked and jiggled all the same. It was now eight o’clock on the morning of December 17th, and Peter was bleary-eyed and tired. It had been bad enough last night just after the body had been found, when Gregor Demarkian had been keeping everyone he could penned up in the park and Franklin Morrison had arrived with his notebook out, trying to look professional. Amanda had gone home by then, of course, but Peter had felt an obligation to stay once he realized what happened, and he’d felt an obligation to keep Timmy with him. Timmy was not only fat but stupid, and like all stupid people he panicked. Being part of a police investigation made him paranoid and petrified and threatened to send him out of control. Peter had been thinking about the paper, of course. The
Bethlehem News and Mail
couldn’t let a shooting death at the Nativity play go by without comment. It couldn’t even leave such a thing safely to next week’s issue. Peter didn’t believe in extras or special editions or sixty-four point type. He’d left all that behind him in the city—and the
Times
had never gone in for that kind of sensationalism anyway. This was not the city, and for just that reason Peter found he was going to have to take it much more solemnly than he wanted to. His first line of offense had run into snags. Timmy had been so agitated, Peter had had a hard time paying attention to what was going on around him. If he had had to write an eyewitness account of what had gone on during the first hours of the investigation himself, it would have been a flop. Fortunately, he had snagged old Mrs. Johnson, the English teacher at the high school, just as she was getting ready to leave. She was in the cast as he couldn’t remember who. The bright look in her eyes told Peter that she had seen and heard everything there was to see and hear. Memory told Peter she would be able to write it accurately, succinctly and with a certain amount of verve. It hadn’t even surprised him when she had agreed to come back to the newspaper offices with him, or that she’d been so matter-of-factly efficient writing it all down at a typewriter in the middle of the big ground-floor room. Competent. That’s what she had always been. Competent. After a couple of hours dealing with Timmy in crisis, she was a relief.

Actually, old Mrs. Johnson had been a relief from what Peter had had to deal with in Amanda, too, although he had had to admit that that might have been partially his fault. He had come storming across from the park, determined to get his first—and, he hoped, only—extra edition ever mocked up and ready for the printers before dawn, and come pounding into the building like a crew of firemen looking for the source of the blaze. He had forgotten that Amanda had not simply gone home early, but gone home sick. He had forgotten that she was very likely to be asleep. He had forgotten how crazy she got when she was abruptly woken by loud noises or a hand on her shoulder. Peter thought of Amanda as one of the better things to have happened to him since he got back to Bethlehem. She was the lover he could never have found in the city, because the women he knew in the city were all too tense. Amanda was tense, too, but not in the same way. Maybe that was because she really wasn’t all that interested in working on a newspaper. Back in the city, all the women Peter knew were reporters. In the Middle East, they had been reporters or whores. It was enough to drive any sane man to a hermitage. Then there was Amanda, who would have been perfect, except that she had one or two quirks. One of those quirks was that she jumped out of bed and screamed when she was awakened abruptly. One of the others was that she nagged him about it for hours afterward. Peter had put up with that last night because it was all so damned important. Right after he’d found Mrs. Johnson, he’d dumped Timmy on her and gotten as close to the scene as possible. He’d seen them wrapping Gemma Bury up on a stretcher and covering the place in her bright orange coat where the blood showed. That was at least one thing Peter could attest to for himself. Gemma Bury had been wearing her much-too-expensive, Boston-bought, high-fashion tangerine orange coat, and it had hidden her death for at least an hour. Peter liked the sound of that. It had overtones of divine retribution.

Divine retribution. Peter rubbed his eyes, then put his hands back down on the desk he was sitting at and looked out over the newsroom. The fluorescent lights were on above his head. Outside, the sun was straining its way through the clouds and not having much success. It looked like it was going to snow. Peter didn’t think he’d stayed up all night without sleep for years.

Peter didn’t know if Amanda ever had. She was sitting at the desk she had staked out as “hers,” playing with a pencil and looking about ready to fall over, her blonde hair pinned to the top of her head. Timmy kept moving back and forth across the room, always coming back into her orbit, never letting himself get too far out of it. Timmy had always trusted Amanda.

“The printer isn’t open until nine o’clock,” Peter called across to Amanda. “That’s what comes of taking the low bid instead of using someone used to newspapers.”

“Most of the time,” Amanda said reasonably, “we don’t need somebody used to newspapers.”

“I have to go lie down now,” Timmy said. “I’m very tired.”

Peter was sure Timmy was very tired. He was sure they all were very tired. He almost wished he’d listened to old Mrs. Johnson’s advice, delivered when she was shrugging herself into her coat to make her own way home.

“This isn’t Boston,” she’d told them. “You won’t do anybody any good staying up all night and making yourselves sick. You should all go get your rest and start again in the morning.”

Right. Timmy was waiting by Amanda’s desk, hesitating, looking miserable and a little frightened. Amanda gave him a tired smile and said, “You go and lie down any time you want to. You don’t need permission.”

“Maybe I’m supposed to work,” Timmy said.

“You’re supposed to work during normal working hours. This was special. It was a favor you did the newspaper. You get paid extra. You don’t have to do it until you die.”

“Did we call Mrs. Jeanings? Did we tell her I was here?”

“I told her,” Peter said. “I told her about Gemma Bury, too.”

“I shouldn’t make her worry,” Timmy said. Then he looked around helplessly, and Amanda got up to find him his coat. When she did, Timmy brightened, and Peter felt himself go queasy. There really was something about watching the two of them together that was unsettling. Amanda found the coat under Peter’s and her own on the rack and handed it over. Timmy touched the place where her hand had been with a thoughtful expression on his face.

“Mrs. Jeanings will keep me up,” he said with a sigh. “Mrs. Jeanings will want to know all about it.”

“Tell her we’re putting out a special edition of the paper,” Amanda told him.

“Mrs. Jeanings won’t care. Mrs. Jeanings will want to know how I feel about it. She always wants to know how I feel about everything.”

“She means well.”

“I know. She makes good eggs, too. And she gives me Marshmallow Fluff.”

Timmy went plodding to the side door, his coat open, his hands hanging motionless at his sides. Peter didn’t think he’d ever seen a fully normal person walk with his hands like that. When he got the door open, Timmy turned and looked at the two of them, grinning, and said good night. Then he plodded out and closed the door behind himself. Peter heard him go through the vestibule and out the door.

“I wish you hadn’t talked me into hiring him,” he told Amanda. “He gives me the creeps.”

“He’s just a little retarded,” Amanda said. “He does a very good job. He’s very conscientious. And he’s more responsible than half the back-to-the-land refugees we hire. Can we go back to sleep now?”

“We’ve got to make arrangements for the printing.”

“We can leave a note for Sally or Jonathan. One of them can drive the mechanicals over.”

“I don’t want to leave a note for Sally or Jonathan. I want to—I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t think I’ve had this much fun in ages.”

Amanda cocked her head, giving him the strangest look. “Is that what this is to you? Fun?”

Peter was astonished. “Why not?”

“Well,” Amanda said, “for one thing, the poor woman is dead. I didn’t like her much, but she is dead. For another thing, she probably wouldn’t have been dead if you hadn’t given her those tickets. In fact, if Franklin Morrison is right instead of the state police and Tisha Verek’s death wasn’t a hunting accident, then just maybe Gemma Bury is dead because she came to talk to you. If you see what I mean.”

“No.”

Amanda rearranged a few things on her desk. She had gone back to it after she’d found Timmy’s coat. She looked slumped, sitting in the chair. There was nothing on her desk to rearrange.

“I know what you were talking about when she was here,” she said. “You were talking about lawsuits. Like Tisha Verek’s lawsuit. And about how Gemma was going to file one.”

“So?”

“So that was what started all the trouble the last time, wasn’t it? I mean, with Dinah dead and all the rest of it, people seem to have forgotten all about it. And they gossip. They really love to gossip. So they keep talking about who was sleeping with Jan-Mark and who wasn’t—”

“Maybe that’s the connection,” Peter said. “Maybe they’re both dead because they were sleeping with Jan-Mark Verek.”

Amanda shot him another strange look and then got up again. With one thing and another she had been bopping up and down like one of those flamingo water dolls. She shoved the papers on her desk into the long center drawer and said, “I think I’m going to go back to sleep now. For at least a couple of hours. Are you going to tell Gregor Demarkian what she came here for?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to tell him she was sleeping with Jan-Mark Verek?”

“Yes again.”

“That’s good,” Amanda said.

She went to the side door without bothering to pick up her coat—she was going upstairs, not outside—and stepped just into the vestibule, where a small manila envelope lay, the one with the single copy of the paper the printer always sent over before delivering the bales. It must have been there last night when Peter came in, but he hadn’t noticed it.

“Throw that to me,” he told her, and she did. Then she gave him another of her odd looks and said, “I think you ought to tell Gregor Demarkian everything. I really think you should.”

Peter didn’t know what exactly that was supposed to mean, but he was much too tired to care.

When Jan-Mark Verek first started his affair with Reggie George, he thought no more of it than he would have thought of deciding to have a banana for breakfast instead of an apple. In the New York City art world scheme of things, where Jan-Mark had spent almost all of his adult life, that was about the level on which such a decision would have to be considered. Jan-Mark had had affairs with a lot of people, male and female, over the years. It had annoyed him no end that Tisha had refused to do the same. To Jan-Mark, sex was a wonderful game with lots of variations to keep it from getting boring. It wasn’t so much natural—the natural was always boring, like tofu and alfalfa sprouts—as naturally available. To be attractive and refuse what attractiveness offered you was like winning the lottery and refusing to pick up the money. It didn’t make any sense. It didn’t even make any sense when picking up the money was dangerous, as it was with Reggie. Jan-Mark was beginning to think Reggie was very, very dangerous. He hadn’t thought so in the beginning. There was nothing about Reggie to remind him of the few examples of rough trade he’d picked up in the Port Authority back in the days when he hadn’t been so all-fired paranoid about AIDS. At the start, Reggie had seemed to Jan-Mark like just another rustic country boy who swung both ways, not so unusual this close to the third millennium. After a while, Jan-Mark had begun to pick up little things. An attitude here. A comment there. A sudden swift kick to the side of a table that resulted in a broken table leg. They had been going at it for six months now and Jan-Mark Verek had to admit it. Reggie George was a certifiable mess.