Deadly Beloved (28 page)

“Yes,” Julianne said.

Suddenly, however, all Julianne wanted to do was to leave. Karla wouldn’t be able to recognize her. Even if everything Teresa Alvarez said was true and Karla was conscious in there under all the blankness, there would still be nothing for Julianne to see but blankness. And then what? It was as if this were some kind of official visit, the kind Julianne hated most, like when the president of the United States took
Air Force One
out to some disaster area and stood among the wreckage looking concerned.

“Miss Corbett?” Dr. Alvarez asked, polite.

Evan Walsh was shuffling along like an old man. His clothes looked wrong somehow, like the clothes Ozzie Nelson used to wear on that old television program, which Evan Walsh was probably too young ever to have seen. Julianne suddenly wished she had a good stiff drink.

Evan Walsh held out his hand. “Miss Corbett,” he said. “Miss—?”

“Shattuck,” Tiffany said.

“She’s talking,” Evan Walsh said. “She talks nearly all the time now. I wish I understood what she said.”

“She mumbles in her sleep,” Dr. Alvarez explained. “This isn’t unusual in relatively mild cases of this kind.”

“Relatively mild cases of this kind can go on for months,” Evan Walsh said. “There was one a couple of years ago in England. Girl in a car accident. Didn’t even know she was pregnant. And by the time she woke up, she’d had the baby. They say she was happy about the baby.”

“That kind of case is
very
unusual,” Teresa Alvarez said firmly. “Miss Corbett would like to see Miss Parrish, Mr. Walsh. She’ll be only a minute.”

“Oh, I know. I know. It’s all right. Maybe she’ll be able to understand what Karla is trying to say.”

“I doubt it,” Dr. Alvarez said.

“I think she’s singing,” Evan Walsh said. “Do any of you know a song about Marrakech?”

“No,” Tiffany Shattuck said. “What’s Marrakech?”

“Karla was in Marrakech once,” Evan Walsh said.

Then he turned and walked away from them. Julianne watched him go, feeling sick to her stomach. It was just the hospital, really, the smells and the tension. She didn’t usually get sick in the middle of tragedy. She was used to dealing with trouble. Evan Walsh’s back was bent over so far, he looked like he had a dowager’s hump.

“Well,” Teresa Alvarez said. “Shall we go?”

Halfway across town, Liza Verity, having gotten home from work, put her groceries down on her kitchen table and then sat down herself, as if getting off her feet for a moment would mean more to her than just relieving the pain in her feet. She had been thinking and thinking about things for days now. She had been reading the newspaper accounts of the explosion at Julianne Corbett’s reception. She had been reading and rereading all the articles about the murder at Fox Run Hill and the explosion in the parking garage. She had been looking and looking and looking at the pictures they kept printing of the woman they kept calling Patsy MacLaren Willis. She didn’t know what she was waiting for, or what she wanted or from whom, or what she thought was supposed to happen next to make it possible for her to move.

“I’m just being ridiculous,” she said to herself now, out loud, so that her voice bounced off the walls of her apartment and the soft pile of her carpet. Everything in this apartment sounded muffled. It was that kind of place.

“I’ll bet he isn’t even in the phone book,” Liza said.

The phone book was on a little stand with the phone next to the couch in the living room. The living room and the dining room and the kitchen were really just one big room arranged in a U. Liza got the phone book out and looked up Demarkian, Gregor. There was a phone number there, but no address. She wondered why he had bothered to have his address left out. Everybody knew what his address was. It was in the papers all the time that he lived on Cavanaugh Street.

“I’m just being ridiculous,” Liza said out loud again. “He probably wouldn’t pay any attention to me. He probably has hundreds of people trying to give him information every day.”

She should stop talking to herself, Liza decided. She should have called Gregor Demarkian the other day, after she talked to Shirley at the hospital. It was just that she got to a phone, and then the whole thing seemed ridiculous, and then—

“Jerk,” Liza said.

She picked up the phone, punched in the number next to Gregor Demarkian’s name in the book, and listened to the ring. The next thing she knew, a tape machine was bleeding its message into her ear. She hated tape machines. She hung up on tape machines. She almost hung up on this one, but then she decided she shouldn’t.

“My name is Liza Verity,” Liza said into the phone after she heard the beep. Then she heard another beep and realized she was going to have to start again. She hated answering machines. She hated everything to do with answering machines. She even hated her own answering machine.

“My name is Liza Verity,” she said, starting again.

And then she crossed her fingers and told herself she wasn’t going to give up this time, no matter what, because this whole thing was beginning to get bizarre beyond belief.

G
REGOR FOUND THE MESSAGE
on his answering machine when he came in after having dinner with Tibor, but it was so garbled, he couldn’t make out what it said. Gregor didn’t work well with answering machines, or machines of any kind. He could make the VCR go on the blink just by looking at it. In the Behavioral Science Department at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, everything had depended on computers, but he’d never used one. He’d found someone who was good with machines to do all that and bring him the raw data on long folding sheets of paper so that he could read it overnight and be ready for briefings in the morning. The man who had taken over from him when he retired was supposed to be very good with computers. It was one of the requirements the Bureau had made for any new person seeking the job. Gregor was sitting in his old neighborhood in Philadelphia, doing terrible things to a phone answering machine.

The one thing that did come through loud and clear was the name and address. Gregor wrote those down, listened to the tape again, and decided that the message had something to do with the case of Patsy MacLaren Willis. Everything in his life these days had something to do with the case of Patsy MacLaren Willis. Even Tibor had been talking about it, although that might have been a ploy to stay off the subject of Donna Moradanyan. Tibor was all ready to have a wedding, and this new business with Donna’s old friend Peter had thrown him off. Tibor certainly didn’t want to have a wedding for Donna and Peter. Tibor hadn’t liked Peter even in the days when Peter was living in Philadelphia and seeing Donna on a regular basis.

“In the old days, a priest would have hoped for the normalization of relations,” Tibor had said at dinner. “Donna and Peter have had a child together. Donna and Peter should recognize their responsibilities before God together. Donna and Peter should end up married. Now I think I would cut my own throat before I could officiate at the ceremony. Do you think he will come to Philadelphia himself to bother us?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

“You’ll have to do something about it if he does. We really can’t have him here, Krekor. It just isn’t right. Russell is such a very nice man.”

“I know Russell is a nice man.”

“And a lawyer, Krekor. It will be good for Donna. And for Tommy. What does Peter do for a living?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said again.

“I will bet anything that he is still in school. That boy is the kind to be in school forever. One degree here. One degree there. Never getting anywhere.”

“I thought you approved of education for education’s sake.”

“We are not talking here about education for education’s sake, Krekor. We are talking about a boy who does not want to grow up. We are talking here about a boy who does not know how to live outside a fraternity house, where nobody ever cleans.”

Gregor had no idea where Tibor had gotten the idea that nobody ever cleaned fraternity houses. From
Animal House
, maybe. Bennis and Donna were always renting movies to watch in Tibor’s living room, although most of those were big-bug horror films from the fifties. Gregor picked up his plate and Tibor’s and took them into the kitchen to put them in the sink. They had been eating on folding tables in Tibor’s living room, a quieter place than the Ararat restaurant’s dining room and an easier place to talk without being overheard. All the furniture in Tibor’s apartment was stacked with books. Tibor read at least seven languages, including Latin and ancient Greek. He had copies of Plato and Aristotle in the original, copies of Erasmus and Clausewitz in translation, copies of Harlequin romances in Hebrew. He even had the latest modern Greek edition of
Cosmopolitan
magazine, which seemed to have something on the cover about rating your marriage for its “satisfaction factor.” The words “satisfaction factor” were printed in the Roman alphabet, as if there were no Greek equivalent, as if there were no translation. Considering what “satisfaction factor” probably meant, there probably wasn’t.

Tibor’s kitchen was full of books too, but the table there was covered over with samples of wedding favors. There were little knots of Jordan almonds wrapped in white net and tied with white ribbons. There were silver and white matchbooks that spelled out
DONNA AND RUSS
in overelaborate script, in spite of the fact that neither Donna nor Russ smoked. Bennis smoked, Gregor thought, and Lida and Hannah and Helen and Sheila could use the matches to light the gas burners that went out after things boiled over on the stove. There was a stack of small white napkins with silver script on them too, that ubiquitous
DONNA AND RUSS
.

“She’s going to have to marry Russ,” Gregor said, making sure Lida Arkmanian’s best blue serving platter didn’t get chipped in the mess in Tibor’s sink. All the food they had eaten tonight had come from Lida or Hannah or one of the others. Tibor couldn’t cook anything that would not be responsible for food poisoning, and Gregor made only steaks in the summers on an outdoor grill. Gregor pushed Hannah Krekorian’s rose china soup bowl to the side—what had Tibor had for lunch?—and made sure that Lida’s serving platter was lying flat along the bottom of the sink. Then he picked up one of the matchbooks and tossed it in the air.

“If they don’t get married, they’re going to feel pretty silly,” he said. “They’re going to be tripping over this stuff for the rest of their lives.”

“If they don’t get married, they’re both going to feel miserable,” Tibor said. “And what is worse, Tommy is going to feel miserable too. Bennis is making excuses to Russell.”

“About Donna? Shouldn’t Donna make her own excuses?”

“Donna would tell the truth. This is not a girl with a wonderful sense of self-preservation, Krekor. I should say ‘woman,’ except I shouldn’t, because a full-grown woman would have more sense.”

“Donna is over twenty-one,” Gregor pointed out. “And she has a child.”

“I wouldn’t care if she had thirty children,” Tibor said. “She is a child. She is especially a child about men. How is it that American girls can grow up with men all over the place, boys in their school classes, dates by the time they’re fourteen, and know so little about men?”

“Maybe if they knew a lot about men, they’d give up the dates and demand to have duennas,” Gregor said.

Tibor waved this away. “Don’t be ridiculous, Krekor. When you are in the teenage, the whole world is about sex. You don’t want to have anything to do with a duenna. But Donna should know better about Peter. He is not an unknown quantity. Even in the biblical sense.”

“Well, she got Tommy out of that, Tibor. Good things come out of messes sometimes.”

“No good thing is going to come out of this mess,” Tibor said. “I have a plan.”

“What kind of plan? A plan about what?”

“About Peter. About what we do just in case he shows up to spoil the wedding. Bennis and I have talked about it.”

“Peter isn’t going to show up to spoil the wedding. Don’t be silly. Peter’s irresponsible, Tibor, but he’s not a complete fool.”

“Even you don’t know very much about men.” Tibor said this disapprovingly. “He is a spoiler, that one. He does not like to see other people happy.”

“You’re making him sound like a psychopath.”

“If he comes here to stop the wedding, I want you to arrest him,” Tibor said.

Gregor nearly dropped the silver soup spoon he was holding. It was engraved in curving script
HVK
. Gregor was careful not to let it go where it might fall down the garbage disposal.

“I can’t arrest anybody,” he told Tibor. “I’m not even with the Bureau anymore. I’m a private citizen. And what would I arrest Peter for? Being a prime bastard? It isn’t a crime.”

“You could think of something to arrest him for. It wouldn’t have to stick. It would be only to get him out of the way.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Bennis says that if it is necessary, she could possibly find some marijuana and put that on him and then he could be arrested for that. She says her brother Christopher—”

“You’re worse than insane,” Gregor interrupted. “Tibor, this is the United States of America. There’s something called the Bill of Rights here. There are also dozens of laws against the kind of thing you’re talking about. Entrapment. False witness. I don’t know. There are laws that apply though, trust me. You’re going to get yourselves into a lot more trouble than you’re going to get Peter into.”

“I don’t want to get Peter into trouble,” Tibor said patiently. “I just want to get him out of the way.”

“The next thing I know, you’re going to be talking about cement overcoats,” Gregor said. “You can’t do this.”

“We can do something,” Tibor said stubbornly. “Listen, Krekor, it is a matter of only one week. At the end of the week Donna and Russ will be married, they will take Tommy off to Disneyland, everything will be all right.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“The important thing is to get through the wedding.” Tibor was adamant. “You do not believe me, Krekor, but it is true. He will come here. I will bet you anything you want.”