The Headmaster's Wife (51 page)

“Aren't you?”

“Well, you know, Bennis, maybe I am, but I haven't had time to notice. There's a lot going on here. I miss you. You could have come with me. You'd have gotten a chance to see Mark again. The way this thing has worked out, you'd havegotten a chance to see Liz again, too. And Jimmy, if that's what you'd wanted.”

“If Liz is there with Jimmy, it would be inevitable.”

“Probably. This doesn't make any difference. I didn't do anything, for God's sake.”

“You were very flippant about something I can't be flippant about.”

“Then act like a sane human being and scream at me,” Gregor said. “Don't just shut up for days and expect me to guess what you're angry about. I still don't know if you love the idea of marriage or hate it. And I wasn't being flippant. I was just talking.”

“Being unserious, then.”

“Well, I'm not likely to get serious on that subject after this reaction. I'd have had an easier time if I'd told you you were getting fat.”

“You wouldn't have survived breakfast.”

“Exactly,” Gregor said. “You'd have lit into me and that would have been that. But this is crazy, Bennis. This really is. I've spent half my time up here worrying about it, and I don't even know what I'm worrying about. About you. I'm worrying about you. I do know that. Most of the time I'm worrying that you've just got tired of this arrangement and I hadn't noticed it.”

“I don't think I can have this conversation on this phone at this time,” Bennis said.

“What?”

Down near the pond, one of the uniformed officers, the youngest-looking one Gregor had seen yet, was trying to wedge his way under the evergreens. He was lying flat on his back, inching sideways very carefully, brushing the twigs and needles out of his face. Gregor didn't think he was going to make it.

“That doesn't sound good,” he said to Bennis. “That doesn't sound good at all.”

“No, I haven't got tired of this arrangement,” Bennis said. “Does that sound better? At least, I'm not tired of being with you. How's that?”

“That's definitely better.”

“It's more complicated than that.”

“You know, Bennis, I never knew much about women before we got together. I met my wife, I married my wife, we got along, she died, that was it. We understood each other. But there's one thing I've learned from you. Everything is complicated. Everything. And I don't understand why it has to be.”

“Nobody understands why it has to be,” Bennis said. “It's one of the great mysteries of life. It just is.”

“Why?” Gregor demanded. “Look, I'm standing out on this freezing hillside. I'm watching this guy, this young police officer, trying to get under a stand of evergreens that grow so low to the ground they're practically one with it, I've got two people dead and one who nearly ended up that way.”

“From arsenic poisoning,” Bennis put in quickly. “Liz told me.”

“Good. Liz told you. Also caffeine poisoning. But the thing is, with all that, this isn't complicated. It's perfectly simple. Sex and money. That's what makes murder. Even most serial killers kill for sex. And don't give me that nonsense about how rape is an expression of power and rape-murder more so. I know. I understand that. But it's still about sex. And the rest of the time we've got money. That's it. When everything is said and done here and Brian Sheehy has his perpetrator and I come back to Cavanaugh Street, it's going to come down to sex and money. Nothing complicated. I don't understand why this has to be complicated. Do you hate the idea of me even thinking about marrying you? Fine. I'll stop thinking about it. Do you love the idea of me thinking about marrying you? Fine, too. I'll think about it. Hell, I'll go looking for a ring.”

“I can't believe this,” Bennis said.

“Believe what? All I said was—”

“No, Gregor, don't you get it? You didn't say. You don't ever say. You didn't say the last time either. Excuse me if I find it unpleasant to be considered a pain in the ass you have to placate by making sure I get the menu item I want.”

“That didn't make any sense at all.”

“It should have made sense,” Bennis said. “The issue of marriage is not about what I want, or what is going to make me the least mad at you—”

“Of course it is. What else could it be about?”

“Jesus,” Bennis said. “This is ridiculous. Any minute now, a white rabbit is going to show up at the door, checking his watch.”

“I've read
Alice in Wonderland,
too. You don't need to patronize me. All I'm trying to do is to make you happy. And it's beyond me why that's suddenly become a capital crime.”

“You're on television. You've got work to do. I'm going to get off this phone.”

“I don't have anything to do but wait here until somebody gets all the way under those evergreens,” Gregor said. “Don't you dare just walk out on me again, figuratively or literally. I'll break your neck.”

“You've got work to do,” Bennis said again, and a second later Gregor heard nothing in his ear but dead air.

Gregor was suddenly incensed, not at Bennis, not at himself, but at the idiots who had invented cell phones. They should have made them so that they gave off dial tones. They should have made them so that they gave off some kind of noise, music, even Muzak, something to buzz when the phone had been hung up in the ear of a caller who had done nothing, absolutely nothing, to deserve it.

This whole situation was beyond belief, Gregor thought. Whatever had made her call in the middle of the day like this, not when she was just hoping to catch him at a good time, but when she knew, because she was watching it on television, that he was neck deep in work? And what had she wanted when she called? What had she ever wanted? Had he ever understood that? He wasn't a complicated man. They got along. He would even have said they were in love. When you got along with a woman, when you felt close enough to her to feel you were in love, you stayed with her. You made arrangements. You made commitments. There was nothing sacred about a marriage license and a ceremony at City Hall, or even in Holy Trinity Church. It was just a formality, and one he thought no more about one way than the other. Maybe it would have been different if he was a religious man, but he wasn't, and Bennis wasn't religious either. What did she want? What was she getting at? He felt as if his entire life was about to fall apart, and he didn't have the first idea as to why.

He was belaboring the obvious for yet another time—she'd called him, not only when he was working, but when she'd known he was working; it was completely insane to have a conversation of the kind they'd just had while standing on a hillside surrounded by people half of whom were paying more attention to him than they were to anything else—when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

He turned to find Mark DeAvecca looming over him, made to seem much taller than he was by the fact that he was farther up the hillside.

“Don't kill me,” Mark said. “I just couldn't stand it anymore. I mean, there I was, sitting in that stupid hospital, watching my life go by on CNN. I just couldn't take it anymore.”

Gregor Demarkian wasn't in the mood to murder Mark DeAvecca at the moment, although he was in the mood to murder somebody and he thought he could probably be talked into taking a surrogate for Bennis if Mark wanted to push hard enough. He got it out of his mind by marveling at the impenetrability of a sixteen-year-old's brain. They really did think they were immortal, all of them. They didn't need to be psychopaths for that. He wondered where Mark had gotten the clothes he was wearing and decided that Liz must have brought them from the dorm yesterday when she'd gone to see Peter Makepeace. She obviously hadn't brought him a jacket because he wasn't wearing one. Gregor didn't think even Mark would go wandering around in chinos, turtleneck, and a cotton crewneck sweater in this weather ifhe'd had the option of something shiny stuffed with down. Belatedly, Gregor realized just how much Mark's clothes looked like the kind of thing Bennis would wear. Maybe it was a boarding school thing. Bennis had been to boarding school.

Mark cleared his throat. “Mr. Demarkian? I'd sort of appreciate it if you didn't tell my mother that I'd come straight here, you know, from the hospital. I mean, she's going to know I left and all, but it would probably be better if she thought I went back to the dorm.”

“She's going to know you came here no matter what I say,” Gregor told him patiently. “Look around.”

“She's here?”

“No, Mark. How did you know to come here?”

“Oh, I was watching this story about it on CNN, there's this breaking news thing—oh. Ah. We're being filmed.”

“Exactly. It's a testimony to the professional competence of Brian Sheehy's men that you managed to get all the way here without getting nailed by a reporter with a microphone. How did you get here, by the way? Everything is supposed to be blocked off.”

“I came in through Hayes House. You can't really block off this campus. You'd need an army. Then I came through the library and out the faculty wing. They've got the main reading room closed, but you can get to the wing through the foyer.”

Gregor turned around. “There's a guard by the wing door,” he said.

Mark shrugged. “I sort of went through Marta Coelho's office and out the window.”

“Sort of?”

“Well, for God's sake, Mr. Demarkian. I mean, the only reason you're here to begin with, and the police aren't just dicking around pretending like nothing's wrong, is me. Right? I was the first one to get it. And I brought you here. I'm not going to sit in a room two miles away and watch everybody else get on TV.”

“I thought you didn't want to be on TV because your mother would see you.”

“Nah, I don't mind being on TV. And don't tell me I should still be in the hospital. If we had an HMO like everybody else, I'd have been out yesterday. I'm fine. I feel like I've taken my life back. You have no idea what a relief it is.”

“For your information,” Gregor said, “Michael's mother knew there was something wrong. She talked to me, too.”

“Before you got here?”

“No,” Gregor said, “since.”

“There,” Mark said, satisfied. “What are they doing down there anyway? That guy's going to kill himself if he keeps that up.”

“They're trying to get under that stand of evergreens to see if something's been left there,” Gregor said. “We think—I think, might be more accurate—that the figure you thought was passed out in the snow, or dead, the night your roommate died was trying to get something your roommate had put there. Deliberately put there. Let me ask you something. Were you ever aware of Michael using the room you shared with him for, ah, assignations?”

“You mean for sex?” Mark looked amused. “Yeah, he did. Not much, you know, because he and Alice went to her place most of the time. Peter isn't much in evidence in the middle of the day. But she came up to the room sometimes.”

“Did you ever walk in on them?”

“No. I can hear through the door, if I put my ear against it and listen. And they'd go up there during the time when the dorms are supposed to be locked and off-limits. She could get keys. But they went up there other times, too.”

“Did he ever have anybody in there besides Alice Makepeace?”

“Well,” Mark said, “if you listened to Michael, he'd done every female on campus with the exception of a couple he thought were too ugly. Those, he said, he got to blow him off. It was the way he talked. You could believe it or not, depending on what you wanted. I just tried to stay out of his way. You know, that guy is going about it all wrong. He's going to end up dead and you're not going to find what you want to find. What do you want to find?”

“I'm not a hundred percent sure. A wallet, I think.”

“Michael put his wallet under there? Why?”

“Not
his
wallet, no,” Gregor said.

They had both turned to look at the operation at the evergreens. It was not going well. The first police officer had retired from the fray, and a new one, smaller, slighter, and more wiry, was making the attempt. Like the first man, he was starting by trying to slide in on his back. The alternative would have required him to press his face into the new snow and then down to the icy crust beneath it. He got less than half his body under the branches before he had to stop.

“That's really crazy,” Mark said. “He can't do it that way. Why don't you just let me go in and get it?”

“That's all I'd need,” Gregor said. “Your mother having a fit at me because you'd ended up in the hospital again, cut to ribbons by evergreen needles.”

“I wouldn't be cut to ribbons,” Mark said. “It's just a matter of doing it right. Come on. I'll find whatever it is. I'll do it for Alice.”

“What?”

“Alice,” Mark said. “She's just over there. She's inspired me. The most beautiful woman on campus.”

Gregor turned to look at Alice Makepeace, standing with the crowd at the edge of the library. Her red hair gleamed in the sun. Her black cape floated in the wind. She was the most noticeable person on the scene.

He turned back and saw that Mark had already left him, skidding down the hill on what he now realized were scuffed, brown penny loafers. Snow was flying everywhere. If Liz didn't kill him for letting Mark be here at all, she was going to kill Mark for going out into ankle-deep snow in penny loafers and what appeared to be no socks. Gregor hurried down the hill after him. His own footwear was not exactly ideal. He consoled himself with the thought that wingtips, unlike penny loafers, had shoelaces. Why that should matter, he didn't know.

He got to the bottom of the hill just as Mark was saying, “Think of it like you were retrieving a baseball. You've gotto get baseballs out of all sorts of places, right. Would you do that on your back? Would you do that humping your body up and down like you were a horny squirrel who needed glasses?”