Usually, it was Bennis who fell asleep on the couch, and Gregor who went looking for her when he didn't find her in bed. This morning, Gregor woke to find himself staring at his own living-room window and, across the street, at the lit window of Lida Arkmanian's second-story reception room. Something was going on down there that involved red crepe paper and silver balls, but he wasn't sure what. Since the room was lit up but completely uninhabited, he didn't think he was going to find out anytime soon. He sat up and looked around him. He was still wearing the clothes he had had on the night before, including his jacket and tie, and his tie had a note pinned to it. “Didn't want to disturb you. Going off to read,” the note said. Gregor unpinned itâBennis had to be crazy, pinning something to him with a straight pinâand put it down on the coffee table on top of the notes he had been making about the death of Sister Harriet Garrity. He hated to admit it, but he was much happier to be looking into a murder that had just happened, almost right in front of his nose, than he had been at the thought of looking into two like the deaths of Scott Boardman and Bernadette Kelly. Cold trails were always bad news, of course, but it was worse than that. Over time, people edited their own memories. They took out what shamed them and put in what they wished they had done. Cold trails almost always involved hot lies and even hotter self-delusions, and there was no reasonable way to untangle them. Even if you solved the case, and built enough into the foundation so that a decent prosecutor could get a conviction, you always ended
up with a picture of what had happened that was more than a little false.
He went down the hall to his bedroom and looked inside. Bennis was asleep under both his blankets and all three of his quilts. The blankets were Hudson Bay Point king-size at three hundred and fifty dollars a pop. The quilts were down-filled from L. L. Bean and cost more than Gregor wanted to think about. Bennis had bought them all when she'd realized that he liked to sleep under nothing but a top sheet, “as if,” as she put it, “you didn't have anything on yourself at all.” Then she'd gone out and bought eight thick, hard foam pillows to go with them.
At the moment, Bennis was not only sleeping under his blankets and his quilts, she was sleeping in his pajama tops as well. His pajama bottoms were draped over the back of the chair in front of the computer. Gregor got a clean set of clothes out of the wardrobe, considered putting on his robe, and decided against it. If Bennis woke up, she would want the robe. He had never met another woman who so disliked wearing her own clothes, and so much insisted on wearing his. Of course, his experience with women was somewhat restricted. There had been a few girls in college and the Army, and then he had married Elizabeth and stayed married to her for almost thirty years. Maybe it was a generational thing. Maybe women of Bennis's generation always wore their lovers' clothes. He rolled the word around in his mouth a couple of timesâlover, lovers, loveâand wished it didn't feel so out of place. Then he decided that it might have been worse. He was so big and Bennis was so small, there was only so much she could get away with borrowing. If she'd been a larger woman, he might not have had any clothes left at all.
He took a shower, came out, and shaved. In the mirror he looked tired, but he always looked tired. He had one of those Armenian faces that looked as if it had seen everything on earth, twice. It was Tibor who ought to look like that. He got into slacks and a shirt and a sweater, but he was very careful not to put on a tie. Bennis's nagging was finally getting to him. He had become embarrassed about wearing a suit when he was only going down the street to have breakfast at the Ararat. He came out of the bathroom and walked back down the hall to his bedroom. Bennis was still asleep, and now that
he gave the room more attention he could see that she would probably stay that way for some time. There was a stack of new paper next to the computer. Either she was working on a book, or she had some other project that required her to work late into the night. Bennis being Bennis, even if she had nothing to do, she would find something that required her to stay up most of the night. Gregor put on socks and shoes and thought about leaving her a note. He walked out of the bedroom without doing it because he couldn't think of a thing to say. It was too bad he hadn't been willing to let Bennis buy him that leather jacket she saw at Brooks Brothers. His long coat felt much too formal. The leather jacket, though, had cost almost as much as a small car. He had no idea how people could buy things like that without feeling guilty.
Going downstairs, he stopped on the first floor at old George Tekemanian's apartment and knocked, but there was no answer. Old George was probably already down at the Ararat. Gregor went out onto the stoop and looked around. His own building was just about decorated, but Donna's town house was wrapped solidly in red and white crepe paper and hearts. The lights were on in front of the church. Tibor wouldn't turn them off until he got back from breakfast. If Tibor wasn't back from breakfast, Gregor couldn't be too late.
Gregor went down the block to the Ararat. There was a newspaper dispenser on the street next to Ohanian's Middle Eastern Foods. He stopped there and got a copy of the
Inquirer
, which had managed to get a picture of last night's riot into print, although not the one of the man burning up. He winced a little and folded the paper under his arm. Ohanian's was open, to the extent that Mary Ohanian was running the cash register in case anybody needed to pick up gum or lottery tickets on the way to work. Gregor sometimes thought Armenians were bigger gamblers than anybody in the world except the Hong Kong Chinese, but that might just have been his skewed perception from living on the street. He went past Ohanian's to the Ararat and inside. Old George Tekemanian and Tibor were sitting together in the long booth built into the wall next to the window, doing something with sock balls.
Gregor waved to Linda Melajian and went to sit down. “What's that?” he asked them. “Is that new? You had another machine for making sock balls, didn't you?”
“This is new, yes,” old George Tekemanian said. “From my nephew Martin. I had another one he gave me, but this one is digital.”
“A digital machine for making sock balls?”
“You can decide which direction to ball them in,” Tibor said, “and you can do more than one kind of ball. And you can secure them with a plastic thing.”
“Why would you want to?” Gregor asked.
Old George Tekemanian shook his head. “Krekor, Krekor. If the people who made these things asked themselves that question, they would never make anything. I like this one because when you make the sock ball you can shoot it out. Like this.”
Old George Tekemanian flicked a switch. A sock ball came roaring out of the end of the little machine and hit Linda Melajian in the leg, making her jump. Coffee flew up out of the coffeepot and landed on her shoes.
“You do that again, I'm going to pour coffee on your head,” she said when she got to the table. “That's the third time he's got me today. You want some actual breakfast, Gregor, or do you just want to stick with coffee?”
“Two eggs sunny-side up. Side of sausage. Side of hash browns. Toast.”
“You sure you don't want the fruit plate?” Linda said.
“Yes,” Gregor told her, “I'm sure. And I'm equally sure I don't want you writing Bennis a note with the calorie and cholesterol counts for my breakfast. What's with the two of you, anyway? I'm not going to change my mind.”
“We're just trying to stop you from having a heart attack before your time.” Linda turned one of the coffee cups over and poured it full. “Never mind us,” she said. “You know what women are like. We were put here by God to spoil every man's fun.”
“I take it you broke up with what's-his-name,” Gregor said.
Linda made a face. “I don't break up with men anymore. I just spend the first date figuring out how they're going to screw me up. I'll be back in a minute.”
She marched off. Tibor shook his head. “I don't like it when they get that way,” he said. “You know, with the men thing. They're never in a very good mood.”
Gregor pushed a little pile of sock balls down the table to
old George and opened his paper. He should have turned on the news or logged on to the Internet. Their information would be much more recent, and probably much more complete. It was all well and good to say that we should do everything we can to preserve our daily newspapers, but the fact remained that “news” was what was new, and the faster you could get it to the public, the more successful you would be. The television stations were faster, that was all. In a few years, the Internet would be faster still. Gregor looked through the first four paragraphs of the story, decided that there was nothing egregiously wrong in any of them, and pushed the paper away.
Tibor picked it up. “I saw it on the television last night, Krekor,” he said. “They interrupted the
Rosie O'Donnell Show
to have the bulletin. It was a disgraceful thing, don't you think? And you were there.”
“I was there to see a dead body that had nothing to do with the riot,” Gregor said, “except that it did, except that I could never figure out what. Do you know this man, this Roy Phipps?”
“I've met him,” Tibor said cautiously.
“And?”
Tibor shrugged. “He's not popular with the clergy in Philadelphia, Krekor. They see him as an interloper, coming here from out of state withâwhat's the word?âwith attitudes that do not fit here. But he's not what the papers and the television stations make him out to be. He's not stupid.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I'd heard he wasn't.”
“But he's a very bad thing,” Tibor said. “He gives all of religion a bad name. He gives all of Christianity a bad name. There are people out there who know nothing but what they see on television. What are they going to think when they see a man like that?”
Gregor took a long sip of coffee. It was so hot it nearly scalded his throat. “According to John Jackman, Phipps and his people decided to demonstrate last night after word got out that there had been another murder by arsenic in the neighborhood. The woman who was murdered was Sister Harriet Garrity. Was that on the news last night, too?”
“Yes,” Tibor and old George Tekemanian said at once.
Old George Tekemanian's nephew Martin had a wife who had made it a rule that old George was not allowed to watch
anything on television that was too “exciting.” Old George was not paying any attention to her unless she was in the room with him and able to get hold of the remote. Gregor let it pass.
“Let me try to explain this as well as I can,” Gregor said, “because I'm having a very hard time making it make sense. Sister Harriet Garrity was found dead in Sister Scholastica's office at St. Anselm's Parish complex by Sister Scholastica herself around six o'clockâ”
“Our Sister Scholastica?” Tibor asked.
Gregor nodded. “Our Sister Scholastica. She's been assigned as principal to St. Anselm's Parochial School. Yesterday evening, she had dinner with friends, and when she got back to St. Anselm's she decided to stop in to her office and see if she had any messages. The door to her office was locked. She unlocked it and found Sister Harriet, blue and just beginning to stiffen with rigor. She had a fit. She found Father Healy. Father Healy called the police. So far so good?”
“Perfectly sensible,” Tibor said. “Sister Scholastica is a very sensible woman.”
“Things get less sensible very fast,” Gregor said. “When Father Healy called the police, the call went out on the police band, which Roy Phipps's people were monitoring.”
“Why?” old George Tekemanian said.
“I don't have any idea,” Gregor said. “But they were, and they heard it. They sent somebody up the street to see if they could find out anything more, and they managed to get hold of the information that it looked very much like Sister Harriet had been poisonedâ”
“Had she been poisoned?” Tibor asked.
“I would guess so, considering what she looked like,” Gregor said, “but we'll have to wait for the autopsy. Back to the point here. They found out that Sister Harriet was assumed to have been murdered by poison. They then put two and two together and got forty-six. They decided that since both Scott Boardman and Bernadette Kelly had been poisoned, and Scott Boardman had been poisoned at St. Stephen's, then all the poisonings were being caused by the people at St. Stephen'sâ”
“Why?” Old George Tekemanian looked confused.
“âand,” Gregor said, “that there was therefore some kind of police plot to protect the gay members of St. Stephen's
parish from the adverse publicity that would result if the public knew that one of them was the prime suspect in a series of murders. Soâ”
“Pfaw,” Tibor said, slapping his hand against the booth table. “This is ridiculous. It is not even coherent.”
“I agree,” Gregor said. “But that's the story Phipps gave to the police.'
“Listen,” Tibor said. “I have met this man. He is a fanatic. He is a demagogue. He is not stupid. He is especially not this kind of stupid. This is the cover story of a mentally retarded sociopath.”