Baptism in Blood (38 page)

Bennis.

Gregor looked around the big room. Jackson was squirreled away in one corner, eating Big Macs with a con­centration most men couldn’t manage to bring to sex. Clay­ton Hall was sitting with his feet up on one of the desks and his eyes closed. Outside, it had finally started to get dark. Through the window well, Gregor could see the first twinkling lights of street lamps reflected on the sidewalks and the grass. Up on Cavanaugh Street, so much farther north, it would be darker.

Gregor went across the room and nudged Clayton Hall in the shoulder. “Clayton?” he said. “Are you asleep?”

Clayton Hall opened his eyes. “No, I’m not asleep. Has something happened? Have the county boys gotten here yet?”

When the county boys got there, they could wake Clayton Hall for themselves. “I’m looking for a pay phone, Clayton. Is there one anywhere in this building?”

“You don’t have to use a pay phone. You can use any of the phones in here.”

“It’s going to be a long-distance call. A very long-­distance call. And it’s going to take some time in the mak­ing.”

“Then you definitely ought to use the phones in here. What do you want to pay for something like that for?”

“It’s a personal call.”

“I don’t care what it is. Long distance can put you out of pocket for weeks. I know. I’ve got a daughter who went away to college.”

Gregor thought about making the call here, in the mid­dle of this room, with Clayton and Jackson just feet away. He thought of Bennis, hiding in her bedroom closet when she was alone in her apartment, just because she was call­ing her brother Christopher.

“Clayton,” Gregor said. “It’s a personal call. A
per­sonal
call.”

“Oh,” Clayton said. “You mean you want to call a woman.”

“Something like that, yes.”

“I hope you’re going to call that woman they always show you with in
People
magazine,” Clayton said. “That’s some good-looking woman.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Yes, she is. Where can I find—”

“You go out the door, turn right, and go up the stairs. The telephone booths are right up there through the fire door. It’s the back of the lobby. Old-fashioned booths, too. Made of wood.”

“Wonderful,” Gregor said.

“I wish I had a woman like that that I could make a phone call to.” Clayton sighed. “All I’ve got is a wife, and the woman is committed to cotton flannel and old blue jeans.”

“Bennis is committed to old blue jeans, too,” Gregor said, and then escaped before Clayton could say what men always said to a line like that: that Bennis filled hers differ­ently. Somehow, Gregor never really thought of Bennis clearly from the neck down. She was a beautiful head with great clouds of hair and impossible eyes floating around, discorporeally, in space.

The hall was dark. When Gregor got to the end of the part of it he had been walking down, he stopped and felt for a light switch that wasn’t there. Then his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw a pair of fire doors with a stairwell behind them. He opened these and searched around for a light switch again. This time he was luckier. There was a whole bank of switches along one wall. He turned them all on at once, and a second later the fluorescent panels in the ceiling over the stairway began to flicker. Suddenly, Gregor knew what this building reminded him of. It was the ele­mentary school he had gone to in Philadelphia, just a few blocks off Cavanaugh Street, all the years he had been growing up. That had been a brick building, too, with very high ceilings and the smell of disinfectant and wood polish in the air. They had torn that school down years ago and built one that wasn’t much better. The new one was old itself and half destroyed. Nobody sent their children there if they didn’t have to.

I’m doing it again, Gregor told himself as he climbed the stairs. It’s as if I got caught in a time warp, and I’m finding it harder and harder to climb out. But it had been better now for a while—Gregor couldn’t quite pinpoint how long a while. It had been much better.

At the top of the stairs, he went through another set of fire doors and found himself, as Clayton had said he would, at the back of the lobby. The booths were right there, made of heavy blond wood that had been polished so often they looked slick. Gregor went into the first of these and sat down on the little cushioned seat. The booth might be old fashioned, but the phone wasn’t. The phone company had replaced the rotary instrument that must have occupied the booth in the beginning with a brand new touch-tone model. Gregor fed a quarter into it and dialed first AT&T and then his calling card number. It was incredible how many num­bers you had to hold in your head these days, and how little time you spent talking to actual people. Bennis sometimes complained to him about what she called the “virtual uni­verse.”

The phone was ringing on Cavanaugh Street. Gregor wondered suddenly if Bennis would be out, off at the Ara­rat, up in Donna Moradanyan’s apartment, taking care of Donna’s son Tommy while Donna and Russ found some time for themselves. Sometimes, when Bennis was work­ing, she just didn’t answer the phone.

Bennis answered the phone. “Hello?” she said, sounding distracted. Then she turned away from the re­ceiver and coughed. Gregor knew she had turned away, because the cough sounded like a hiccup instead of an ex­plosion. “Hello?”

“I’m surprised to find you home,” Gregor said. “I thought you’d be down at the Ararat, at least.”

“That’s what you said the last time you called. I am going to the Ararat in a few minutes. I’m meeting Tibor there. You sound better.”

“I feel better.”

“Is it because of all this stuff with Zhondra Meyer? I saw it on the news, you know, it’s been all over everything. They said she left a note and confessed to all the murders.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “there’s a note confessing to the murders of Tiffany Marsh and Carol Littleton, that’s true enough.”

“I take it it wasn’t Zhondra Meyer’s note.”

“It’s a complicated situation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before. I’ve read about things like this, but I haven’t seen them.”

“But is the case over?” Bennis asked. “Will you be able to catch whoever did it? What’s going on down there?”

“I know who did it,” Gregor said, “in every possible sense in which I can use that phrase. I’m sorry if I’m ob­scure, Bennis: It really is a very complicated situation. I can’t explain it in the terms I usually use to explain these things in.”

“You’re not saying anything about being able to catch the murderer,” Bennis said. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s like that thing with the Hazzards: You know who but you’re not sure if you can do anything about it:”

“It’s not that simple, Bennis. It really isn’t. And it’s not what I called to talk to you about. I called to talk to you about you.”

“Me?”

Gregor had forgotten how uncomfortable these old phone booths were. Everybody complained about the new little stalls where there was no place to sit. They forgot how confining the old phone booths were and how hard the seats were that you had to sit on—even the seats like this, that had cushions. Gregor readjusted himself in the booth, put­ting one foot on the wall under the phone to keep himself propped up, and felt ridiculous. Teenagers sat like this, when they were trying to get up the courage to do some­thing they were afraid of.

“I’ve been thinking about that musician or whatever he was,” Gregor said, “the one in California.”

“That was months ago,” Bennis said quickly.

“It lasted a matter of days. Do you know you do that a lot?”

On the other end of the line, there was the sound of Bennis striking a match, then the sound of Bennis exhaling. “Gregor, if you want to give me some kind of lecture on the way I run my social life, you don’t have to because Tibor already—”

“Do you know that the only long-term commitment you’ve ever made to a man was before I knew you?”

“You must have been drinking.”

“You were living with that man Michael What’s-his-name, the Greek, in Boston, before your father died and you moved back to Philadelphia. That was the year we met. Do you remember?”

“I remember how we met, Gregor. I’m never likely to forget it.”

“Between that time and this, you haven’t had a single long-term relationship. Not one.”

“I haven’t met anybody I wanted to have a long-term relationship with.”

“You haven’t met anybody you wanted to go on see­ing for longer than two weeks.”

“Two weeks is as long as it makes sense to give most of the men I’ve known in my life,” Bennis said, “and that includes the Michael I was living with in Boston, who turned out to be a world-class Greek-American son of a bitch. Gregor, what the hell is this all about?”

“I think you do it on purpose.”

“What?”

“I think you go out with these—nuts—that you find, these—crazy people—because it’s your way of making sure that you don’t end up committed to something or somebody because you don’t really want to be committed to something or somebody.”

“Wonderful,” Bennis said. “When did you take up pop psychology, Gregor? What comes next? An explora­tion of the ramification of the position of Saturn in my astrological sign?”

“What I do,” Gregor continued, “is keep myself mar­ried to Elizabeth. It’s been—I don’t know how many years anymore, it’s been so long—but I’m still married to Eliza­beth.”

There was quiet now on the other end of the line, and smoking, the deliberate inhaling and exhaling of breath. Gregor was surprised to realize that he was having a hard time breathing himself. He felt like Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, ready to go over a cliff.

Bennis inhaled again. Then she exhaled again. Then she said, “You know, Gregor, this is all very interesting, but do you really think you know what you’re doing?”

“Yes,” Gregor answered. “I really think I do.”

“
I
think it would be a very bad idea to get started in this direction and then screw it up.”

“I agree. I’ll try not to screw it up. You should try not to screw it up, either.”

“What are you going to do now?”

Gregor wedged the door of the telephone booth open so that he had some air. The foyer around him was dark. He wondered if Clayton and Jackson were still alone downstairs, or if the county boys had finally shown up, ready to roll.

“There are some things I still have to do down here,” he said. “It’s like I told you. This is a very complicated situation. It’s going to be difficult to work out.”

“How difficult?”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to get back to Philadelphia until the day after tomorrow. And that’s the best I can do. At the very least, I’m going to have to give a deposition. At the worst, I’m going to have to give six. It’s that kind of thing.”

“What happens after you give all these depositions?”

“I’ll come home.”

“And then what?”

“Then,” Gregor said, “I think you and I ought to go out to dinner somewhere, not the Ararat. Somewhere we can talk.”

“Will you tell me about the case?”

“If you want to hear about it.”

“I always want to hear about it.”

“I’ve got to go back downstairs,” Gregor said. “There’s some administrative system here I don’t exactly understand, all about counties and God knows what. We’re waiting for the county prosecutor. I’ll get back as soon as I can.”

“You do that. In the meantime, I think I’m going to sit down and drink some serious liquor.”

“You ought to quit smoking,” Gregor said. “You’re going to kill yourself before we have a chance to work all this out.”

Bennis might have said good-bye, or she might not have, Gregor didn’t know. It could have been nothing but another outflow of smoke. What he did know was that the line was cut, and there was the buzz of a dial tone in his ear.

He hung up the receiver on his end and climbed out of the booth. The foyer was still dark. The building was still quiet. Stephen Harrow was probably still sitting in the rec­tory of the Methodist Church, thinking he had actually got­ten away with it.

It was amazing, Gregor thought, how hard it was for people to change the way they did their thinking.

O
NE OF THE COUNTY
boys turned out to be a county girl—the county prosecutor, in fact, who was a short, shelf-breasted woman in her forties, pit bullish and extreme. Gregor didn’t think he was going to like her much, in the beginning. She wasn’t there when he first got back from his phone call to Bennis. Only Clayton and Jackson were. It wasn’t long, though, before headlights could be seen through the window well and cars pulled to a stop in the parking lot in back. Car doors opened and closed. High country voices talked about the weather. There was a sepa­rate entrance to the police department at the back. The county boys and the county girl came through there, their shoes clattering on the metal-tipped stairs.

Minna Dorfman didn’t like to waste time on triviali­ties. Whatever gene it was that other southern women had that made them want to talk for hours about the state of their gardens and their neighbors’ morals, Minna didn’t have it. As soon as she came in, she opened her briefcase and spread out its contents on the one decently large and uncluttered desk in the room. Then she pulled a wooden chair into the middle of the room, sat down in it, and crossed her legs at the knee. Minna had sharp blue eyes that were much too small for her face. They looked like bullet holes that had been drilled into a large white pillow.

Minna Dorfman also folded her hands in her lap. It was this gesture that Gregor found so foreboding. She looked like a psychopathological schoolteacher, getting ready to do her class in.

“Well?” she said.

Clayton Hall handed over the “suicide note” they had been meant to believe had been written by Zhondra. The prosecutor read through it more quickly than Gregor would have believed anyone could read through anything, then repeated: “Well?”

“We feel,” Clayton told her, “that that note is basi­cally accurate, but that the names have been changed to put us off the scent.”

“Why?” Minna demanded.

“It wasn’t really meant to be a confession,” Gregor explained. “He—I’m fairly sure it was Stephen Harrow—needed to confess psychologically, I think, but didn’t want to in practical reality.”