Stillness in Bethlehem (25 page)

This morning, Gregor stopped at the desk to buy a copy of the new
Bethlehem News and Mail
, unfolded it to find his face splashed across the front page under the headline,
THE GREAT DETECTIVE COMES TO TOWN
, and gave serious consideration to going right back to bed. Then he looked at the subhead—
Reports On the Sighting of Gregor Demarkian in Bethlehem
—and decided that what he should have done was strangle Peter Callisher in the park last night, when he’d had the chance. With Peter Callisher’s attitude and this new shooting, Gregor knew there was going to be no way to avoid being turned into a local wonder. He folded the paper up and put it under his arm. The young girl at the checkout desk was staring at him. When he looked straight at her she snapped her spine rigid and gave him a great big smile. He sighed and headed for the breakfast room. If this was the way things had started, it was going to be a very long day.

Actually, things were even worse than he’d feared. Gregor had eaten breakfast early on Monday morning, well before seven. Then the breakfast room had been deserted, and he had taken his seat without the help of a hostess or the need to consider how full the waitresses’ stations were. This morning, he couldn’t do that. There were a lot more people around at nine. The tables were full and the waitresses looked harried. He stood patiently in the doorway and mentally hoped to be led to the table near the window, where he could look out on Main Street. At least that would give him something to do besides reading about himself in the local paper.

As it turned out, he could have been led anywhere he wanted to go, to the Pitti Palace, even, or to a moon made out of green cheese, because the hostess seemed to have decided he was at least as much of a celebrity as the Pope. She rushed up at him, gushing, the oversized menus clutched in her arms like two-dimensional children.

“Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “It’s just so wonderful to see you here. I’m sure we’re going to try to give you a wonderful breakfast!”

“You gave me a wonderful breakfast yesterday,” Gregor said, “and you weren’t trying. Can I have that table by the window?”

“Of course you can have the table by the window. You can have any table you want.”

“Fine,” Gregor said.

“Just follow me,” the girl said.

Gregor did just that, reminding himself as he went that the child couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen years old. It did some good but not as much as it might have, because Gregor didn’t like girls who gushed. He didn’t like boys who were too aggressive, either, and for the same reason. There was something about people who were too much of what they were stereotypically supposed to be that made him suspicious. The girl put a menu down in front of the chair Gregor didn’t want. Gregor sat down in the other one. The girl blushed and moved the menu. Gregor made an heroic effort not to sigh.

“Could I get you some coffee?”

“Please.”

“Oh, it will be a pleasure, Mr. Demarkian, it really will be. Will you be joined by anybody this morning?”

“No.”

“Yes, he will,” a woman’s voice said. “I’m going to sit right down.”

Gregor looked up and caught his breath. In front of him stood one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, and beautiful in that impossible way, small, delicate, fine-boned to the point of looking as if she were made out of spun glass. Her blonde hair was tied loosely at the back of her head with a scarf. The fingers on her hands were so long they looked surreal. Her eyes were a deep blue, wide-set and large, under eyebrows that arched perfectly but didn’t look as if they’d been made to. Gregor didn’t know what the woman was wearing. It wasn’t anything special. The effect was breathtaking nonetheless.

The effect was breathtaking on the hostess, too. She had gone from gushing to mute. She was standing at the side of the table in paralyzed awe. The blonde woman looked up at her and said, “It’s all right, Melissa. Mr. Demarkian and I are old friends from Away. Why don’t you find Shirley and have her get the man his coffee and me another pot of tea.”

“Oh!” Melissa said. “Oh! Miss Everman! Of course I will!”

“Miss Everman?” Gregor said.

“Tell Shirley the man eats big breakfasts,” Miss Everman said. Then, as Melissa scurried away, she turned back to Gregor. “Susan Everman,” she told him. “And we have met. About nineteen years ago. In New York.”

“Why don’t I remember this?”

“Maybe because I looked very different at the time.” Susan Everman smiled. “I’ve given up make-up in my old age. And dyeing my hair. And getting my eyebrows plucked. I like this effect much better.”

“I like this effect period,” Gregor told her sincerely. “But you can’t be that old.”

“I’m thirty-nine,” Susan Everman said. “I was twenty when we met. It was about four days after my twentieth birthday. You were questioning my—business partner. Charlie Giambelli.”

Gregor choked. He choked just as a middle-aged woman in a standard waitress’s uniform came gliding up with a tray of coffee and tea, and immediately began to look alarmed. She looked about ready to drop the tray and Susan Everman caught it and put it gently down on the table. Gregor stopped choking. The waitress looked at them both and then said, “Well. If you’re all right, Mr. Demarkian. Miss Everman. Can I get you two anything?”

“You can get me two scrambled eggs with toast, sausage and hash browns.”

“Fine. Miss Everman?”

“No thank you, Shirley.”

“Fine.” Shirley put the coffee in front of Gregor and the teacup and pot of water in front of Susan Everman and picked up the tray. She seemed to want to say something but not to know what. Finally she just backed away and disappeared.

“I’ve been waiting for you for hours,” Susan Everman said. “I came here yesterday, but you’d already gone. So I came here today early.”

“You must have been very conspicuous.”

“I don’t mind being conspicuous. I’m conspicuous in any event, aren’t I?”

“You do have a point.”

“Well, then. I just didn’t want to call up to your room or do something else where I might get stuck talking with Franklin Morrison in attendance. I definitely did not want to explain all this to Franklin Morrison.”

“What makes you think I won’t explain it to him myself?” Gregor asked her.

Susan Everman poured hot water over her tea bag. “I think,” she said, “that I can trust you to keep what I am going to tell you in confidence unless you need it, and I think I can trust you not to need it. I suppose what I mean by that is that I can trust you to find the person who actually murdered Gemma Bury and Tisha Verek, without needing to involve me. That’s what you’re good at, right? Finding murderers?”

“Sometimes,” Gregor said.

“Well, I hope you’re good at it this time,” Susan Everman said, “because I’m beginning to get a little nervous. You wouldn’t think there would be anything in a place like this that could get me nervous, would you? Not after Charlie. Not after what Charlie pulled me out of, for God’s sake.”

“Pulled you out of?”

“Let me be blunt, Mr. Demarkian. You were investigating some serial murder case when you ran into Charlie, so you probably don’t know much about me because you probably didn’t bother to find out, but before I met Charlie Giambelli, I was a whore. I wasn’t a high-class whore, either. I was a straightforward piece of street trash and I was addicted to more shit than I could name. About a year after you came sniffing around Charlie, the other Feds got on to him and he went to jail and so did I, because I wouldn’t tell them anything. They sent me to this women’s place upstate and this smarmy little woman social worker kept trying to convince me I had a self-esteem problem because I was protecting this pig. Well, Charlie is a pig all right. Most of them are. But he was never a pig to me. My mother was a junkie from way back. She put my ass out on the street when I was eleven years old—and she sold it in her bedroom when I was younger than that. Charlie got me up, and off drugs, and into art school. When I came out of jail, one of his people picked me up at the door, found me a room, got me started and kept me supplied with money until I started getting jobs for myself. Then Sharon came along and Charlie was a prince—”

“Sharon?”

“Sharon Morrissey,” Susan said. “You’ve met her. In Maria’s place yesterday.”

“Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “The one who made me think she might have played field hockey.”

Susan Everman grinned. “She quite definitely played field hockey. She went to the Olympics with the American women’s team when she was twenty-two. She’s what I think of as a natural lesbian. She came by it honestly, instead of the way I did.”

“Meaning by being battered out of any possible attraction you could have had to men.”

“Well, maybe not,” Susan said. “I don’t know how these things come about. Most of the girls I knew in the life were gay in their spare time, but that might just have been an unwillingness to take busmen’s holidays. Sharon thinks about this stuff, you know, and gets into the politics and all that. I’m just glad to have her.”

“Does she know about you?”

“Oh, yes,” Susan said. “In fact, she’s met Charlie. We went up to Attica to visit him before we moved up here. He gave her a lecture on how she had to be very careful to make me eat because otherwise I’d let myself starve.”

“Is that true?”

“Not anymore. I was anorexic as hell for years. Here’s your breakfast. Don’t you even pretend to worry about your cholesterol?”

“I worry that I’m not getting enough of it,” Gregor said.

He moved back a little from the table and Shirley put down plates, one after the other, separate ones for each of the items he had ordered. His breakfast had come that way yesterday, too, so he wasn’t surprised. Shirley bustled away and then bustled back again, immediately, to refill his coffee cup. He let her do it and waited until she had gone again before resuming his conversation.

“If you don’t mind my saying so,” he told her, “I’m surprised at how completely you’ve changed.”

“You mean because people aren’t supposed to be able to?” Susan sighed. “Well, I’m out of temptation’s way up here, of course. I really couldn’t get very far out of line without getting clobbered. And I suppose you can buy drugs up here the same as you can anywhere, but the logistics would be more complicated. I was in therapy for a good long time in New York, individual and group, at the same time. Screaming at people. Driving Sharon out of her mind. Maybe I haven’t changed much at all.”

“But you don’t sell yourself.”

“No.”

“And you don’t do dope.”

“Definitely not.”

“What do you do?”

“I illustrate children’s books,” Susan said. “It’s not very lucrative, but it’s all right for what we need to live on up here. And I have some money in the bank. From before.”

“From Charlie?”

“Of course.”

Gregor cut his sausage patty into quarters and speared a piece. “So what’s the problem?” he asked her. “It sounds to me like the perfect bedtime story. You have Sharon. You have work you like to do. You have a life that has to be better than what you had before. You’re even on good terms with Charlie. What could you possibly want with me?”

Susan Everman cocked her head. “Is it true Gemma Bury and Tisha Verek were shot with the same gun?”

“I’m never going to get over the way news travels in small towns,” Gregor said. “The answer is yes, as far as we know. The lab tests may turn up something different.”

“Did you know that Tisha Verek and Gemma Bury were friends? That Gemma was the closest friend—really the only friend of any kind—Tisha had in this town?”

“No,” Gregor said, “but it’s useful information. I take it you don’t believe the theory that Tisha Verek was killed because she wanted to file a lawsuit against the Celebration.”

“No,” Susan Everman said, “and I don’t believe Jan-Mark killed her, either, although Jan-Mark was having an affair with Gemma, if you didn’t know that already. God, this sounds awful. What a mess they were running up there. Anyway, Mr. Demarkian, I don’t buy either of those theories because I’ve got a better one. Tisha Verek was trying to blackmail me. And I’ll bet if she was trying to blackmail me, she was trying to blackmail someone else.”

L
ATER, WAITING FOR IT
to be time for Franklin Morrison to take him out to Stuart Ketchum’s farm, Gregor Demarkian sat in the lounge at the Green Mountain Inn with a yellow legal pad on his lap, making notes about how strange it all was. It was worse than strange. It was absurd. The yellow legal pad came from the stationery store down the block. It was narrow-ruled, which made that stationery store one of only two places Gregor knew of in the Northeast where he could get narrow-ruled legal pads. For some reason, the distinction seemed to make sense. Everything else about Bethlehem, Vermont, was patently bizarre. Why shouldn’t it be a material depot for rare, unpopular and nonstandard office supplies? Why shouldn’t it be anything? The pen he was using was a standard Bic, which should have ruined his theory, but didn’t, because it was the kind of theory nothing ruined. Gregor had no trouble recognizing in himself what he’d often criticized in his subordinates. He had had one surprise too many. Now he was starting to run with them. The list on his legal pad was instructive. Were these things really that odd? Was their convergence here, in a small Vermont town, any odder? Susan Everman had been first a street whore and then the call-girl centerpiece of a small-time hoodlum’s stable. She had given it up and decided she was lesbian and moved to Vermont with her woman friend. Gregor had known a lot of whores and ex-whores and junkies and reformed junkies and small-time hoodlums with the bad luck to land in Attica, too. Jan-Mark Verek was a man who had brought all his lack of discipline from New York City. The man would apparently go to bed with anything that moved, including his wife’s best friend, assuming Gemma Bury had been Tisha Verek’s best friend. Since he had only Susan’s word for it, Gregor drew a circle around that line and a star next to it. What looked like “best friends” to outsiders may have been mutual emotional distaste overcome for reasons of emotional isolation. Neither Tisha Verek nor Gemma Bury could have found many other women like themselves in this place. Or could they have? That was what was so maddening. Gregor was not an unsophisticated man. He had spent a good part of his adult life processing the debris left behind by some of the worst people on earth. He had looked into shallow graves in the countryside as often as he had walked through the rooms where bodies had been left in the cities. He knew there was no such thing anymore as a Norman Rockwell town in a Norman Rockwell America, if there had ever been either one. It bothered him that he seemed to have internalized a Norman Rockwell vision of New England nonetheless. It bothered him that it bothered him that there was so much sexual corruption going on in Bethlehem, Vermont.