Stillness in Bethlehem (3 page)

So far, Franklin’s problems on this cold morning had been mostly procedural. Henry Furnald wanted two dollars for every car parked on his lawn instead of the one the town allowed him to charge while calling himself an official parking area. Henry was therefore threatening to take his lawn out of the car-parking business and had to be cooled down. God only knew what would happen if people started streaming in from Burlington and Keene and there was no place for them to put their cars. Then there were the camels, which had broken free of their tethers and come to rest in the middle of the intersection of Main and Carrow. They had to be moved to allow the truck bringing sausages from Montpelier to get to the food arcade. Then there was the food arcade itself, which seemed to be falling down. The damned thing was put together with plywood and penny nails, and the wind had been strong all week. Franklin kept getting calls from people who had passed by and been convinced it was about to collapse on their heads.

All in all, the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration was just as much of a pain this year as it had ever been. Franklin would have been for abolishing it, except for two things. In the first place, it paid his salary. In the second, it kept him from thinking. Of these two, the keeping-him-from-thinking part was the more important. As long as camels were poking their noses into Beder’s Dry Goods Store, Franklin would not be visited by any middle-of-the-day paralyses. As long as the local juvenile delinquents kept trying to paint the Star of Bethlehem green, Franklin would not find himself coming to in the middle of empty rooms while his brain tried furiously to figure out What It All Meant—or if it meant anything at all. Franklin didn’t know what It was—maybe, at seventy-two, he was finally getting old—but he was sick and tired of It. It would have made more sense to him if he’d developed a sudden passion for pissing up.

Now he came back to the squad room from the john and looked around, sighing a little. The squad room wasn’t really a squad room—the Bethlehem, Vermont, Police Department didn’t have a squad—but it was closer to it than anything anywhere in Vermont outside Montpelier. In fact, in spite of the fact that it was just a room in the basement of the town hall with two cells down the corridor next to the boiler room, it was better equipped than any squad room north of Boston. Back in the thirties, the town’s proceeds from the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration had gone to pay for necessities, like cleaning the streets and keeping the elementary school in business. Now, after decades of post-War prosperity only intermittently disrupted by recessions—and the steadily rising popularity of the Celebration itself—those proceeds went to pay for the spectacular. The elementary school had a computer room with fifty-four top-of-the-line IBM PCs, a gymnasium with two swimming pools and enough exercise equipment to qualify for a Jack LaLanne franchise and a music program that provided any child who wanted to learn to play an instrument with an instrument to use to learn on, for free. The volunteer fire department had a fully mechanized hook-and-ladder truck with a ladder that could stretch to 120 feet. Since the tallest building in Bethlehem was Jan-Mark Verek’s four-story log contemporary, the 120 feet weren’t likely to be needed anytime soon. The police department had what police departments get, when money is no object. Franklin had computer hookups, patrol cars, a mobile crime unit out of a Columbo fantasy, a full fingerprint classification and retrieval system with access linkage to the FBI, even a crime lab capable of microscopic blood, earth and fiber analysis. What he didn’t have was any crime worth speaking of, which he often thought was too bad.

He let himself through the swinging gate in the low wooden rail and walked up behind his one deputy, Lee Greenwood, who was sitting with his feet on his desk and
The Boston Globe
opened in front of his nose, doing what he was always doing: reading the paper with enough fierce concentration to memorize the punctuation. At the moment, he was reading the latest in the
Globe
’s series of articles on what everybody had been calling The Thanksgiving Murder for a week or so now, in spite of the fact that it hadn’t taken place on Thanksgiving at all. Franklin saw fuzzy pictures of “billionaire Jonathan Edgewick Baird” and “mysterious arbitrageur Donald McAdam.” He passed over these to the even fuzzier picture of Gregor Demarkian, looking tall and broad and Middle Eastern and nothing at all like an “Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” Going to a law-enforcement convention last year, Franklin had not been surprised to find that every smalltown cop in America seemed to know all there was to know about Mr. Gregor Demarkian. In places like this, where nothing much ever happened, it was intriguing to think that you might one day land in the middle of a mess interesting enough to call on the services of “the most skilled expert on the investigation of murder in America.”

It was also intriguing to think that you might one day abscond with the town treasury and go to live in Borneo, but it wasn’t likely to happen. Franklin brushed it all out of his mind and tugged at the top of the paper to get Lee’s attention. Lee was as young and hairy as Franklin was old and bald. When Lee put his paper down, his hair seemed to bristle and crackle with static electricity, and maybe to throw off sparks.

“Listen,” Franklin said, when he could finally see Lee’s face. “Don’t you think you should be out there doing something? Don’t you think you should at least be seeing to those camels?”

Lee smoothed the paper out against his desk. “I don’t like this one as much as I liked the last one,” he said, tapping his finger right on Gregor Demarkian’s oversized nose. “This one has too many rich people. The last one, that happened in a town just like this.”

“A town full of nuns and Catholics isn’t a town just like this,” Franklin said irritably. “And what about the camels? We can’t just leave them sitting in the middle of Main Street, causing a traffic hazard.”

“They’re not causing a traffic hazard,” Lee said reasonably. “Betty Heath called in and said they’d moved on to that open lot at the end of Carrow Street, and the only thing that’s causing a hazard now is what they left behind, and I don’t do that kind of work. I called Don Francis over to Clean-up and he said he’d send somebody out. You got a call from Benjy Warren.”

“Benjy Warren,” Franklin repeated. “Benjy” Warren preferred to be known as “Ben” Warren, now that he’d been all the way to Harvard Law School and back again, but he was fighting a losing battle and he knew it. He’d been Benjy in grammar school and Benjy in high school and Benjy when he’d come home for vacations from Bowdoin College, and he would go on being Benjy as long as he stayed in town. It didn’t help that he worked for a friend of his father’s, who had been calling him Benjy all his life and didn’t intend to stop. Franklin sometimes wondered about that. This friend of Benjy’s father’s was Camber Hartnell, until Benjy’s return the town’s only attorney and still the town’s most prominent son of a bitch. He wouldn’t have been Franklin’s first choice for a boss if Franklin had been the one with the degree from Harvard Law School.

Franklin leaned over Lee’s paper again. There was a second picture of Demarkian there, a smaller one, walking next to a small woman with a face as close to perfect as Elizabeth Taylor’s at twenty-five. Franklin knew that face—it popped up in stories about Demarkian all the time, and sometimes even in accounts of Demarkian’s cases—but he couldn’t remember the name. He wondered if Demarkian was sleeping with her. He supposed Demarkian had to be. All those people from Away hopped in and out of bed with each other all the time.

Franklin backed up a little and cleared his throat. “The thing is,” he said, “even if there isn’t anything to do, we ought to look like we’ve got something to do. For the papers.”

“Papers?”

“The Away papers,” Franklin said patiently. “I told you about this last year. The Away papers always send reporters, so do the television stations in Boston; they get people up here the first day and talk about the gala opening that isn’t so gala if you ask me. I was a tourist, I’d come in the second or third week when I could count on people knowing their lines. Never mind. The papers are going to be here, and we ought to look like we’ve got something to do.”

“Like what?”

“How the hell should I know like what? Like anything. Like fighting crime. That’s what we’re paid for. Fighting crime.”

“There isn’t any crime to fight,” Lee pointed out. “We’ll get some pickpockets later tonight when the crowds get thick. We catch a couple every year.”

“I know.”

“We’ll get some fifteen-year-old jerk trying to steal some Boston lady’s Ferrari,” Lee said, “and then he won’t be able to figure out how to get it out of the lots, and we’ll haul him in and yell at him for twenty minutes and send him home. If I’m guessing right that ought to be Hal Bonnard this year.”

“Hal Bonnard.” Franklin nodded. “Him or Joey Fay.”

“We’ll get six anonymous calls saying people are going at it in the bushes in the park, and the calls will all come from Dodie Fenner, and there won’t be a pair of squirrels necking by the time we get there. We’ll get Bill Varley calling in to say he’s seen a spaceship. We’ll get a lot of petty vandalism. This is Vermont, for Christ’s sake. You’ve been here long enough. You ought to know.”

And, of course, Franklin did know. He knew better than Lee Greenwood. Lee was only thirty-two and had been on the job only thirty months. Franklin looked down at the newspaper one more time. There was Mr. Gregor Demarkian, looking a little like a diplomat and a little like a czar, looking important and busy and oversupplied with interesting things to think about, walking along beside a beautiful woman who looked like she did aerobics and who had hold of his arm. There was Franklin’s own desk, not six steps away on the other side of the room against the wall, piled high with message slips demanding immediate attention to falling Christmas lights, muddied angels’ costumes and straying animals that would only stray again as soon as they were brought back to where they were supposed to be. Franklin didn’t even have a wife at home to keep him warm or make his life miserable. It hardly seemed fair.

Franklin looked up at the clock, saw it said only 8:15, and frowned.

“Lee,” he asked, “when Benjy called, was he calling from the office?”

“He was home,” Lee mumbled, deep in his forty-second perusal of this installment of the Adventures of Gregor Demarkian. “It wasn’t even eight o’clock, for Christ’s sake. He said you should call him right back.”

“At home,” Franklin insisted.

“That’s right, at home.”

“Fine,” Franklin said.

He walked over to his desk, sat down in his swivel chair and picked up his receiver. Then he punched himself into the first of his six lines and tapped out Benjy’s home number on the pad. Benjy’s father had been one of Franklin’s less-astute drinking buddies before he died, but Franklin would have known the number without looking it up in any case. He knew the numbers of everyone in town who had anything to do with the government, officially or unofficially. In small towns like this, anyone with a law degree automatically becomes part of the unofficial government, and a man whose number it’s good to know.

“Going to be nothing,” Franklin said to himself, as the phone rang once and started to ring again.

Then the ringing was cut off in mid-squeal, and Benjy Warren’s breathless voice said, “Yes? Who is it?”

“It’s me,” Franklin said, surprised. “Are you all right, Benjy? What’s your hurry?”

“Hurry,” Benjy Warren said. Then he laughed, long and hard enough to start himself coughing. “Oh, God,” he said. “You’re the one who better hurry. Guess who I just talked to. Tish.”

“Tisha Verek? So what?”

“So you got to know why she called. She wasn’t looking for me. She was looking for Cam.”

“That makes sense.”

“Cam’s in New Hampshire, skiing for the day. Left at six this morning. She wanted to get in touch with him.”

“You could do that for her,” Franklin said.

“I could, but I haven’t yet. I wanted to give everybody a little time.”

“A little time for what?”

“A little time to head her off at the pass,” Benjy said. “God, Franklin, I’m sorry. If I’d known this was brewing, I’d have warned you all long ago. I’ve been trying to figure out the paperwork ever since I heard.”

“Figure out the paperwork for
what
?” Franklin demanded, exasperated. “What could Tisha Verek possibly do that would—”

“I’ll tell you what she could possibly do,” Benjy said. “She could take the ACLU up on their standing offer and file an injunction.”

The core rooms of Stuart Ketchum’s house had been built in 1687 by the very first Ketchum to come to Vermont—far enough back, in fact, that the flatlanders who ran the Historical Society thought it might be the oldest house in town. Whether it was or not, Stuart Ketchum didn’t know and didn’t care. The core wasn’t much to speak of anyway—just a big room with a fireplace that now served as the kitchen and two smaller rooms upstairs Stu used as spares—and it wasn’t really
in town
anyway. Until 1947, it hadn’t even been in the town limits, which had caused a few interesting situations with the land-tax people. It had also caused a few interesting situations with the state government in Montpelier. Montpelier always wanted to know what was going on and why it was going on and what they were supposed to do about it. Like governments everywhere—at least in Stu’s opinion—Montpelier took to busybodiness as a holy cause. Stu Ketchum didn’t have much use for governments, in Montpelier or anywhere else. It was the principal bone of contention he had with his best friend, Peter Callisher, since forever, when they managed to get together to drink a few beers in peace. It was getting harder and harder to drink a few beers in peace, because there were the drunk-driving people and the save-your-heart people and the if-you-really-n
eed
-that-one-beer-after-dinner-you-must-be-an-alcoholic people. Stu never listened to the alcoholic people, because his father had been an alcoholic and Stu knew one when he saw one. Stu’s father had frozen to death one night in 1956, after falling down dead drunk in the back pasture after a six-hour visit with Johnny Walker Black. Stu had been ten years old at the time.