Skeleton Key (10 page)

He had a digital clock on the table next to his bed, one of the kind with numbers that glowed red. When he woke up, it said 2:37:09. He turned over onto his back and stared up into the dark. When he had first bought this apartment—when he was still newly retired from the FBI, and newly a widower—there had been times when he had thought he could hear his dead wife's voice in the hallway, or her movements in the kitchen. That was true even though she had never been in these rooms. She had never even been on Cavanaugh Street when these rooms were in existence. Her memory of this neighborhood had been like his, then: a marginal ethnic enclave, marked by decaying buildings and elderly people who just didn't have the resources to move. He still thought of the street that way sometimes,
the way it had been on the day he and Elizabeth had come to Philadelphia to bury his mother. Sometimes he thought of it even further back, when he was growing up, when it was full of tenements and ambition. This was something he had never been able to work out. How much of a person's childhood stayed with him forever? How much could he just walk away from, as if it had never been? Sometimes, sitting with Bennis in a restaurant or listening to her complain about work or parking tickets, it seemed to Gregor that the gulf between them was unbridgeable. Bennis, after all, had been born in a mansion on the Philadelphia Main Line.

When the clock said 2:45:00, Gregor sat up and got one of his robes. When Bennis was here, she always took one. It felt wrong, somehow, to actually be able to lay hands on his favorite and use it, for himself. He went down the hall and through the living room into the kitchen. He opened his refrigerator and took out a big plate of stuffed grape leaves. Lida Arkmanian had brought them over to him, as she did even when Bennis was here. Bennis couldn't cook. Gregor and Lida had gone to school together right here on Cavanaugh Street, in the days when children got new shoes only for Easter and getting them was an event.

“Stuffed
grape
leaves,” Lida had told him, when they first began having coffee together, that Christmas after Gregor had moved back to Philadelphia. “Not stuffed
vine
leaves. For goodness sake, Krekor, you sound like a yuppie.”

Stuffed grape leaves didn't have to be heated up. Coffee did, but that meant only putting the kettle on the stove and getting out the Folgers crystals. Gregor took a large white mug and a small white plate out of the cabinet and put diem on the kitchen table. He took stuffed grape leaves out of the bowl and put them on the plate. He made a mountain of grape leaves, high enough to be unsteady. He wished somebody was awake, somewhere on the street, or that Bennis was staying in an ordinary hotel where he could call her at any hour of the night Instead, Bennis was staying
in some rich woman's spare bedroom, and even Father Tibor Kasparian would be passed out on his couch with a book on his chest.

Was it even possible, to find someone to love when you were nearly sixty? And what was it supposed to mean? With Elizabeth, he had had all the usual things. They had started out together young. They had built a life, and would have built a family, if they had ever been able to have children. That kind of marriage was made of little things—a tiny apartment made the scene of many small sacrifices, endured to save the money for the down payment on a house; a period of trial and error over cookbooks; the choice of lights and decorations for a Christmas tree. Gregor understood that kind of marriage. He understood what it was for and why he had gone into it. He even understood, finally, that it had not all been ruined because Elizabeth had died badly. It was terrible what cancer did to people, and not just to the people who had it.

The problem with this—situation—with Bennis was that he didn't have a name for it. It wasn't a marriage. They weren't married, and Gregor wasn't even sure that Bennis would marry him if he asked. They had other things together, things Gregor had never had with anyone else—they had gone off alone together, to Spain, for an entire month, just a little while ago, and the memories of it could still make Gregor turn bright red—but he was sure you couldn't base a life on that kind of thing. It wore off eventually, or the woman got tired, or you did. Besides, he and Bennis had been together for years before they had been together like
that.
Bennis had bought her apartment, on the floor just below this one, just to be near to where he lived. They had to have something going with each other, something deeper and more complicated, maybe even something simply more mundane, than—

—sex.

The water was boiling. Gregor took the kettle off the stove. He dumped a heaping teaspoon of Folgers crystals into the bottom of his mug. Then, thinking better of it, he
added another. He took the water off the stove and poured it over the instant coffee. He watched the water turn a darker brown than he should have allowed himself to make it.

Maybe this was the problem, the thing he hadn't been able to get past. Maybe it was the
sex
that was bothering him. Because the more he thought about it, the more he realized that sex had been filling his life, taking it over, ever since they had gone to Spain. It wasn't that they spent all their time actually having sex. If it had been that, it would have been over very quickly. Gregor wasn't twenty anymore, and he had no intention of getting addicted to Viagra. It was that he seemed to spend all his time thinking about sex, or about things related to sex. Before Spain, when he had called up an image of Bennis in his mind, it had been Bennis in her working uniform: jeans, knee socks, turtleneck, cotton crew-neck sweater. Now, when he called up such an image, he saw her in the gray silk nightgown she had bought especially to be with him in Spain, or in one of his shirts, buttoned only halfway up, and asleep next to him in bed.

“Sex gets in the way of friendship,” he said aloud, trying it out He felt instantaneously foolish. That was the kind of thing boys said to girls in high school, or girls said to boys—the kind of thing that, before you knew any better, you thought was kinder than coming right out and telling someone you found her unattractive.

Gregor considered putting milk in his coffee and rejected it. He didn't want to cut the strength of the caffeine. The caffeine was the point He picked the mug up in one hand and the plate of stuffed grape leaves in the other and went into the living room. He put the mug and the plate down on the coffee table and went over to the window.

Cavanaugh Street, these days, was not a marginal place. The tenements were gone. The brownstone row houses had been converted into single-family townhouses or, like this one, refurbished into three or four floor-through cooperative apartments. The cramped little rooms Gregor remembered
from his childhood had been knocked together. His own apartment had a living room large enough to play table tennis in and a big fireplace with a grey marble surround and a mantel made of polished walnut. Across the street, one floor down, Lida Arkmanian's townhouse had a living room that took up two-thirds of the entire second floor. The last third had been made into a dining room.

Things change, that was what he had to remember. Things change, and not all the changes are for the worse. Elizabeth had died, yes, but Cavanaugh Street had gotten rich. Bennis had given up her restlessness to settle with him. The local school district had given up on corporal punishment and rote learning to dedicate itself to critical thinking. Richard Nixon had resigned.

Gregor thought he might be losing his mind.

Instead of sitting down on the couch, he picked up his coffee and grape leaves and took them into the bedroom. He put them down on the table in the corner and sat at the chair there to boot up the computer. The computer had been a gift from Bennis, as had a year's subscription to America Online. Gregor still hadn't been able to get the hang of the Internet. It still seemed to him like a waste of time.

Gregor waited for the desktop icons to settle on the screen—there was cat wallpaper, engineered for him by Donna Moradanyan Donahue, who hadn't been able to stand the gray ugliness of the default background that had been built into the machine—then clicked the mouse in all the right places and brought up the Free Cell board. He had never in his life heard of Free Cell before he got this computer, and now he seemed to be addicted to it.

The real problem with the—situation—with Bennis, Gregor decided, as he moved cards around the board, was that they'd both spent so long deciding to create it that they didn't know what to do with it now that they had it. If they were honest with each other, they would have to say that they had both wanted to be lovers from the moment they first saw each other, in Bennis's father's Main Line house. Even though Gregor had not been over the death of his
wife. Even though Bennis had been living with a man in Boston. They had wanted to be lovers and resisted their desire, and now all they really knew how to do was to go on resisting each other.

This was beginning to sound like a college bull session going on inside his head—except that Gregor had never been part of a college bull session. He had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, but he had been a commuter student, living right here in a tenement on Cavanaugh Street, taking the bus across town.

If I'm going to go on thinking like this, Gregor told himself, I'd better start drinking. At least then I could blame it on the alcohol.

Then he bent toward the screen and concentrated on the cards, red queen to black king, three of hearts to the stack pile at the top.

He was still bent over the screen an hour later, when the phone rang.

It wasn't until he heard the sound of her voice, going rapid-fire through all the details, that Gregor realized that he really had been worried about it—worried, on some level, that Bennis was just going to disappear. Now he knew he should be concerned about this mess she had gotten herself in, about the body she had found in the car, about the way she had had to, or felt she had to, pack up and move in the middle of the night. Instead, all he could feel was calm, and a certain light happiness at the sound of her voice. Even the cough didn't bother him, although it had in the weeks before she left for Connecticut. That cough had been going on much too long. It seemed to have become harsher and more insistent in the less than a day she had been gone.

“So,” Bennis was saying. “That's where we are. I'm at the Mayflower Inn. Which is beautiful, really, but it's about two hundred and fifty years old.”

“You like old.”

“Not after Margaret Anson's house, I don't. God, that woman is unbelievable. And I'm not going to be able to get rid of her for weeks now. Not until this is over. If this is ever over. I keep reminding myself that the police fail to solve crimes all the time. Are you going to come out here and help?”

“I'll come out and help you.” Gregor stood up and pushed himself away from the computer table. He couldn't concentrate on the cards anymore, and he'd been losing so badly it was embarrassing anyway. Bennis sometimes said he had a learning disability that applied only to games of solitaire. He didn't tell her how miserably he lost at poker. Now he sat down on the bed and switched the phone from one ear to the other.

“I can't just go rushing in and disrupting a police investigation,” he said. “It's not my investigation.”

“Well, it can be if you want. The thing is, they've got this police department, it's maybe got two people in it. And then they've got the state police.”

“I think it's the local police departments that investigate murders, Bennis. Not the state police.”

“Well, actually, that's not exactly clear. You see, the thing is, there's more than one town involved. There's Washington Depot, but then there's also Watertown, and maybe Morris.”

“Are these towns all close together?”

“Yes. Exactly. They all bump into each other. And about the first thing that happened, after we called the police, is that the call was picked up by the state police, because one of the towns has something called a resident trooper—”

“Resident trooper?”

“Right. That's where, if a town is too small to be able to afford its own police force, the state pays to have a state trooper live in town and do the police stuff. And there isn't usually a lot of it, because these are really small places and nothing much happens in them.”

“All right.”

“Anyway, one of these towns has a resident trooper, and he picked up the police call and checked on it, because it turned out that he'd seen the car.”

“The car?” Gregor was beginning to feel a little dizzy.

“Kayla Anson's car,” Bennis told him. “It's this little BMW. And according to this guy—the resident trooper—it went through the center of Morris about ten minutes after eight this evening, doing maybe ninety, ninety-five miles an hour on this road that's narrow and all hills and twists and turns and—”

“Are you sure this woman didn't die in an automobile accident?”

“Yes, Gregor, of course I'm sure. The point is, the resident trooper isn't a resident trooper for the town of Morris, because Morris has its own police department. He works in—Cornwall Bridge, I think. I'm not sure. He just happened to be in Morris at the time. And he saw the car. And he was in his cruiser, but he couldn't really chase it because he didn't have jurisdiction, and also I don't think he wanted to. I mean, that kind of behavior on the roads out here is suicidal.”

“This is the car she died in,” Gregor said.

“Well, it's the car I found her dead in, Gregor. I don't think there's any way we can know right now if she actually—”

“Okay. Yes. Now—”

“Oh, well. So what the resident trooper did was call ahead to Washington Depot and warn them about what she was doing. Anyway, when the police call came about her being dead there was one of those technical descriptions of the car going back and forth, you know, and so the resident trooper picked up the message and got in contact, and then some guy on the Watertown police department—no, wait, that's not right, some woman—”