Skeleton Key (11 page)

“I don't think it matters.”

“Whatever. Anyway, the thing is, the Watertown police had this stolen car case, and they were looking into it, and one of the things they had some witness saying was that
they saw this stolen car, this Jeep, and it seemed to be following the BMW.”

“Wait. The BMW is the one you found the body in. The one that was doing ninety miles an hour.”

“Right. And this was about seven o'clock or so. So the Watertown police got into it. And now they're saying that they might just bring in the state police and let them handle it, because when you have a bunch of towns like this it can be hard to sort out jurisdiction, because you don't know what happened where. Do you see what I mean?”

“Sort of. It still doesn't mean I can go barging in there throwing around advice nobody has asked me for, Bennis. Much as I'd like to. Because you're involved.”

“Oh, I know. But that's the thing. I talked to the resident trooper. And he knew who you were. And he thought—”

“He thought?”

“Well, okay. I brought it up. But they've spent money on psychics in this state, Gregor, at least you'd actually do some good. And they all know who you are. Even the town cops do. And they want you to help. It's not as if you'd gone and retired or anything.”

Gregor lay back on the bed and put his feet up. It was true. He hadn't retired. He just hadn't taken much work lately. He wasn't quite sure why that was. There had been times in his life when he had been thoroughly sick of work. He had spent twenty years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the last ten of them as head of the behavioral sciences unit, the section dedicated to the tracking of serial killers. That had gotten old so fast it had left him breathless. There had been times, with one more string of child murders lying on his desk, or the arrival of a new set of photographs meant to show what had been found in yet another series of unmarked graves, when he would gladly have chucked it all and become an accountant. There had been other times, like when he had first started consulting for police departments after he'd moved to Philadelphia, when he'd been enormously gratified to be able to do the work he could do. Lately he'd just been—distracted.

“Gregor?

“I'm here,” he said. “Are you sure you're all right, where you are? At this hotel?”

“It's a Revolutionary War-era inn. And it's beautiful. And I'm fine. Except that I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“So come on out. At least keep me company. You can talk to the state police when you get here. And you don't have to consult if you don't want to.”

“Are you going to have to be there for any length of time?”

“I don't know,” Bennis said.

“All right,” Gregor said. “Do you mind if I tell you that this sounds like a script for a Woody Allen movie?'

“No, Gregor, I don't mind. You should have been in the middle of it. I think there must be all kinds of people around here who do nothing but monitor the police band. You wouldn't believe the commotion. And Margaret Anson. I mean. Oh, hell. Margaret
Anson.”

Gregor turned over on his side. “So,” he said. “Have you worked it out? Can I get there from here? Washington Depot sounds like a train station.”

“It used to be. It isn't anymore. And I have worked it out. Do you mind?”

“Not at all. You've always been—meticulous about that sort of thing.”

“Thanks a lot”

“It wasn't an insult. Besides, I like you to act like yourself. How complicated is this going to be?”

“Not so much complicated as long, Gregor. You take the Amtrak to New York. You take the shuttle to Grand Central. You take the New Haven line to Bridgeport. You take the bud car to Waterbury. I'll pick you up in Water-bury. Tomorrow.”

“All right.”

“There's just one thing. There's only one train to Waterbury a day. So—”

“One train?”

“You've got to be at Grand Central by nine-thirty in the morning. That will get you here around twelve. You got that?”

“Bennis—”

“I'll talk to you tomorrow,” Bennis said.

“I love you,” Gregor started to say, but Bennis was already gone. The phone was humming in his ear.

He got up and put the receiver down, so that he would no longer be cut off from the world.

Twenty minutes later—suddenly tired, but still not able to sleep—Gregor went to his closet and got out his most casual pants. They were khakis, not jeans, because no matter how many times he tried jeans he felt silly in them, and he suspected he looked silly, as well. Some things did
not
change, and one of those things was that he was a very formal man. He found a shirt and put that on, too, a white one with a button-down collar. He found a sweater he'd left lying over the back of a chair. He put his loafers on without bothering with socks. This was as rakish as he got. It was also the best he could do at four o'clock in the morning.

Four o'clock.

In the apartment upstairs, Donna and Russ and Tommy were sleeping out one of their last nights before they moved to a townhouse down the street. In the apartment on the ground floor, old George Tekemanian was curled up in a bed that his grandson had bought him, a bed that did everything but sing the theme song from
The Sound of Music.
Down the street, the Ararat restaurant was closed, and wouldn't open for another three hours.

Gregor let himself out into the hall and closed the door behind him. Then he pulled at the knob to make sure it was locked. He walked down one flight of steps and stopped in front of Bennis's door. He checked to make sure
that that was locked, too, although he'd done it half a dozen times in the last day. It hadn't been locked right after she left, of course, because Bennis never bothered to lock doors. But Gregor had been ready for that.

He made his way down the rest of the stairs and through the foyer onto the stoop. The air was cold and bright under the streetlamps. The street looked naked. In any other year, Donna would have decorated by now. She would have wrapped their brownstone in black and orange crepe paper and put out jack-o'-lanterns and plastic goblins and cardboard witches riding on real broomsticks that went right across the roof. This year, Gregor supposed, she had just too much to do.

Some things change that
are
for the worse.

Gregor went down the street to Holy Trinity Church. He went around the back on the little cobblestone path and let himself through the low wrought-iron gate into the courtyard. He noticed that the vines that wound around the pillars next to Tibor's front door were out of control again. Tibor never remembered to call the yard service that was supposed to take care of things like that

Gregor knocked, got no answer, and used his key. He fumbled with the door for a good three minutes before he realized that the door hadn't been locked in the first place, and that he was only locking himself out. He got the mess turned around the right way and stepped into Tibor's foyer. Stacks of paperback books rose from the floor on both sides, leaning dangerously toward the center, ending well above his head. He took one down at random and found he was holding a copy of
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
He put it back.

“Tibor?” he called out.

There was no answer. He made his way through yet more stacks of books and into the living room. Tibor was, as usual, laid out on the couch, fully clothed, with books all over him. Gregor didn't think the man ever actually slept in his bed.

“Tibor,” Gregor said again. It wasn't a question this time. It was a command.

Tibor squirmed slightly on the couch. Gregor went over to him and took the books off his chest. He had Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique,
in hardcover; Aristotle's
Nicomachian Ethics,
in ancient Greek; and a paperback copy of John Grisham's
The Street.
Gregor was very careful not to lose Tibor's place in any of them. He left them open on the floor.

“Tibor,” Gregor said, louder this time.

Tibor stirred on the couch, turned on his side. Squinted his eyes open.

“Krekor?”

“I need to talk to you,” Gregor said.

Tibor turned side to side, and then seemed to make up his mind. He let his legs swing off the side of the couch and brought himself slowly, more or less, upright.

“I fell asleep on the couch again,” he said. “Did I sleep through my alarm clock again? Is it time for breakfast?”

“It's four o'clock in the morning.”

“Four.”

“I needed to talk to you about something.”

“You should not let Bennis go away on her own, even overnight,” Tibor said. “When you do that, nobody can sleep.”

“Tibor—”

“I know, I know,” Tibor said. “You need somebody to help you understand love.”

Gregor turned away and went looking for a chair. He had to take two piles of paperbacks off an ottoman to find a place to sit down. Maybe he was getting obsessive about this. Maybe he needed to do something—stabilizing—with his life.

Or something.

He sat down on the ottoman and stretched his feet out, trying to think of some way to begin.

One of the good things about insomnia is that it always ends in a crash. Gregor Demarkian found that out on the long trip from Philadelphia to Waterbury. It could have been a much shorter trip, if he had known how to drive. According to Donna Moradanyan Donahue, who had given him a ride to his first train, it took only a couple of hours to get from Philadelphia to that part of Connecticut if you had something in the way of a Volvo and a decent set of maps from the AAA. Gregor had been too tired to listen to her, about this or anything else, and Donna had been too wound up to be perfectly clear. Her honey blonde hair had bopped restlessly in the breeze that came through the open car windows. Her very young, still unlined face had been set in frowns and furrows.

“The thing is,” she said, getting off the subject of Gregor's inability to drive for the fifth time in thirty seconds, “I wouldn't mind if I thought he actually wanted a relationship with Tommy. I mean, he's Tommy's father. Tommy should know his father. Do you see what I mean?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. This was still in Philadelphia, at the very beginning of the day, so he was more than a little wound up himself. He couldn't have fallen asleep if he'd wanted to, then, but even the air around him looked too bright. Philadelphia looked dirty and vibrant, which is how he thought of it when he was being kind.

“And the thing is,” Donna said, “that of course I've talked this over with Russ, and for the first time, I'm just about ready to kill him. I mean, he thinks like a lawyer. Have you ever realized that?”

“He is a lawyer.”

“Well, yes. I know. But this isn't his work we're talking about. This is his life. My life. Tommy's life. Don't you
think it would be a good thing if Russ adopted Tommy?”

“Yes,” Gregor said.

Donna Moradanyan and Russ Donahue had married only a few months ago—back in June, in fact, when Gregor had been distracted, too. Donna had a small son from a previous
liaison,
as Lida Arkmanian called it, with a man named Peter Desarian. Actually, Peter wasn't really a man. He was no older than Donna, who was barely twenty-one herself, and he was, in Gregor's opinion, one of the great examples of arrested development. Some boys grew up to be men. Peter Desarian had grown up to evolve a strategy for avoiding responsibility. Whenever he got into more trouble than he could handle, he moved back into his mother's house.

“Anyway,” Donna said, “the thing is, according to Russ, if Peter wants to fight the adoption he can stop it. Because the law wants to keep families together. I mean, does this make any sense to you? Peter and I were never a family. We were never even a couple except when he wanted to, urn, I mean—”

“I think I get the point,” Gregor said.

“Well, it embarrasses me. I mean, no woman wants to admit that she lost her virginity to a jerk.”

“No woman has to worry that she's alone in that circumstance.”

“I guess not. But you see what I mean. First he wanted me to have an abortion. Then when I wouldn't have one, he refused to have anything at all to do with Tommy for years. Bennis went to the hospital with me when I was in labor. Lida Arkmanian bought him his christening gown. Father Tibor and old George Tekemanian taught him his first words. I mean, where was Peter Stupid Desarian?”

“He came back for your wedding,” Gregor said drily.

“Don't remind me. Okay. I had cold feet or something. I don't know. Something. But the fact is, he's back again now, and I'm just not going to put up with it. Tommy's very happy with Russ for a father. He really is. He's got somebody to play board games with on Sunday afternoons. He's got somebody who understands the Cartoon Network.
I mean, Father Tibor's a really wonderful man and all, but his idea of a bedtime story for Tommy was passages from the
Odyssey.”

“I think you've got to go around here or you're not going to have anywhere to park.”

Donna leaned over the steering wheel and made a pretense of paying attention. Traffic was almost nonexistent—it was quarter to six in the morning, and the yuppies were still at home in bed. If there were still yuppies. Gregor thought he might be out of date. He also thought that he had reached that point in lack of sleep when his condition was on the verge of dangerous.

“So,” he said.

Donna had made the turn. They were gliding down a short block whose tall buildings all seemed to be made out of beige stone. Donna adjusted her rearview mirror.

“So,” Donna said, “I've thought it all out, and I've decided that you've got to do something about it.”

“Excuse me?”