Skeleton Key (15 page)

The news reports all said strangled, and he could see her strangled. He could see the hands around her throat and the arms pressing her neck down, down, so far down that it would break. He could see her eyes bulging in their sockets and the skin of her face going red.

His anger was so broad and so deep, it welled out of him like lava.

The newspapers were lying in a stack at the foot of the bed when Gregor Demarkian woke up—lying there in the way, so that every time he turned he brushed them with his feet. He felt fuzzy, the way he often did when he was off-schedule. He liked to keep regular hours. He couldn't remember when he had last slept in this off-and-on way. Maybe it was when he had still been on kidnapping detail, sitting with a partner in an unmarked car at the side of some road somewhere, drinking bad coffee and waiting for hours for something to happen. Mostly, nothing ever did. In those days, all new agents with the Bureau started either on kidnapping detail or on tax patrol. It was either boredom in a car or boredom in a back office somewhere, trying to decide if one mobster or another might be illegally deducting hit men fees from his income taxes. Although why such a deduction would be illegal, Gregor thought now, wasn't that easy to explain. He could make a decent case in tax court that hit men were a legitimate business expense, at least if the businessman in question was a member of the Gambino family.

In those days, too, there was the ethnic thing. There were no black agents, and Gregor was one of the very few who could not claim to be at least partly Anglo-Saxon. Hoover had been strange that way, as he had been in many ways. It wasn't quite that he had been an unrelieved bigot. He didn't hate all people who were not “true Americans,” as he put it. He just picked and chose. The Bureau had a good sprinkling of Greeks, but no Italians. It had Armenians, but no Portuguese. People of color, as they would be called now, were simply out of the question—but if Hoover had been required to hire one, he would have taken an African American over a Chinese or Japanese. He was, however,
passionately committed to Irish Catholics. He always said he thought they made the best Americans. It made no sense, because Hoover himself made no sense. Even in Gregor's earliest days at the Bureau, the consensus had been that the old man was not really mentally well—and that was when the agents were being polite. A dangerous paranoid jerk, was what Gregor had thought, the third or fourth time he met the man. By now he knew perfectly well that he'd been right.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and looked around. This was Bennis's bedroom in the Mayflower Inn. She also had a sitting room. The bed was a big antique-looking sleigh, piled high with blankets and quilts and pillows. Bennis must have asked for extra. Gregor pulled the papers to him and looked at their front pages: the
Water-bury Republican,
the
Torrington Register-Citizen,
the
Litchfield County Times.
The
Litchfield County Times
was set up to look exactly like
The New York Times,
so much so that Gregor had thought it was
The New York Times
until he'd brought it closer and could read the masthead. The other two papers were standard small-town sheets. They used the cheapest possible ink. Their headlines were much too large. None of them had anything at all about Kayla Anson's murder.

Gregor got off the bed and went to his suitcase. His favorite robe was still there, folded. Bennis not only hadn't taken it, she hadn't even gone looking for it. Gregor put it on over his pajamas and tightened the belt on his waist He thought of how surprised Bennis had been when she saw he wore pajamas and then put it out of his mind. In his day, nice men didn't go to bed in the nude, or just their underwear. He was far too old to change now.

He folded the newspapers and put them under his arm. He opened the bedroom door and looked out into the sitting room. Bennis was sitting at a small writing table next to a window, working away busily on a laptop that was plugged into the wall. The window was open, letting in air that was downright cold. Bennis's hair was pinned up and coming
undone. Great black clouds seemed to surround her head, like some kind of alternative halo. Gregor suddenly felt wonderful, watching her sitting there. This was the way he wanted to think of her, the way he wanted to remember her, not the way he had been remembering her the last day while she'd been gone.

He shifted the newspapers from one arm to the other and cleared his throat. Bennis turned away from the keyboard and looked at him.

“You're up. It's after five o'clock. I thought you were going to sleep through dinner.”

“I couldn't have. I'm too hungry. What are you doing?”

“E-mail. I've got an address just for fan mail. It's on my interview at Amazon-dot-com. You want to see some of this stuff?”

“No.” Gregor dropped the newspapers on a coffee table near the small couch. Bennis wrote fantasy novels, full of knights and ladies and trolls and jousts. Her fan mail tended to consist of long missives from middle-aged women who used the word
forsooth
at least once every paragraph.

Bennis was still pecking away at her fan mail. “So,” she said. “I'm glad you're here. We're supposed to have dinner later with the resident trooper up in Caldwell. That's where he's from. Not Cornwall Bridge.”

“I was thinking about J. Edgar Hoover,” Gregor said. He sat down on the little couch, in front of the papers. There was a television across the room and a remote on the coffee table. He picked up the remote and turned the set on.

“Start with channel eight,” Bennis said. “That's WTNH. It's the one I like best. Thinking about Hoover always puts you in a bad mood.”

“My mood is fine. I was thinking about the Bureau, maybe. About who Hoover hired and who he didn't hire. About racial and ethnic discrimination, we'd call it today.”

“Ethnic?”

“In my class at Quantico, I was the only Armenian. There was one Greek. Everybody else was at least white.
And WASP or Irish Catholic. It was a strange situation.”

“Did it bother you? Did you feel—I don't know. Disrespected?”

“Not really. I was just thinking that it explained some of the things some of those people did later. Charley Constantinus going to jail for trying to cover up for Nixon. Mike Seranian going into the State Department and becoming such a bloodthirsty hawk he embarrassed Lyndon Johnson. Hyper-Americans, if you know what I mean. Going that extra mile just to prove that their loyalty was absolute.”

“And you didn't do that?”

“I think it's because I knew the type. Hoover's type. I knew what was wrong with him. Although I don't think I could have explained it at the time. We had a priest at Holy Trinity when I was growing up who was very much the same as Hoover was. I've come to think of it as a syndrome.”

“You've got to stop reading Tibor's copies of
Psychology Today.”

Gregor pumped up the sound on the television. A blonde woman—“Ann,” everybody kept calling her—was reporting a story on child abuse in a town called Manchester. She had a serious look on her face, but it was a pixie-ish face. He could imagine her laughing.

Bennis stopped doing e-mail and shut down her machine. Then she came across the room to sit in the small armchair next to the couch.

“So,” she said. “Is that what we're doing today? Thinking about J. Edgar Hoover? Have you thought about Kayla Anson at all?”

“I haven't had much to think about. Except that I've been wondering about people—about how many people seem to need to fight other people off. How many of them need to be isolated. Not that they're forced to be, but that they want to be.”

Bennis got out a cigarette. There was an ashtray on the little writing table next to the laptop. Gregor hadn't noticed it before, although he had noticed the smell of smoke in
the room. It hadn't registered as smoke, because it was the smell he'd come to recognize as part-of-Bennis, along with the lavender sachet that she put in all her underwear drawers. Now Bennis lit up and then went back across the room to get the ashtray. She dumped the small pile of butts into the wastebasket next to the table and brought it back almost clean. Gregor could see traces of ash in the bottom of it.

“I wish you'd stop doing that,” he said.

“You were telling me about people being isolated.”

Bennis was coughing. It was a sort of underground cough, held back, not full-throated, but it was there. Gregor pumped the volume on the television even higher.

“I was just thinking what I was telling you I was thinking. About how so many people seem to want to chase off anybody who might be close to them. Anybody who even tries to get close to them. I keep trying to come to some sort of understanding about why people kill each other. Not people on the street—not killings in the middle of a robbery, or drive-by shootings, or that kind of thing. I don't even mean serial killers. Do you remember Ginny Marsh?”

“Ginny Marsh who killed her baby.”

“That's right And all the others, really. The people who do it deliberately. Who do it out of some sense of connection, out of wanting to get rid of that sense of connection. I suppose I'm not making much sense of anything, myself.”

Bennis blew smoke into the air. “Did you know they'd set the date for execution?” she asked abruptly. “They sent me an invitation for it in the mail. The twenty-fourth of November. Less than a month away.”

Gregor watched the smoke of Bennis's cigarette curl into the air. He had forgotten this part, of course. He always forgot this part His relationship to murder was professional. He always had a certain amount of detachment when he approached it. Bennis's relationship to murder could never be truly detached at all.

“Her lawyers will make another appeal,” he said carefully—but Bennis's head was already shaking, and his
voice hadn't carried much conviction. It had, after all, been almost ten years.

“They're finished with the appeals. I got a letter from her lawyers, too.”

“And?”

“She's still refusing to speak to us. To any of us. She's still—herself. My brother Teddy sent her a little crate full of holiday jellies last Christmas. She sent it back without opening the package. I keep wondering if she'll change her mind when it gets closer to the day.”

“You don't have to go see it. You don't have to go see her, if you don't want to.”

“I know.” Bennis had smoked her cigarette to the filter. She stubbed it out and reached for another one. “I don't even know what I want. Except that I don't want her to be dead. That just seems wrong to me. Even though I know she's—what she is. That's she's not safe. That she would do it again. To me, if she had the chance.”

“She almost did.”

“Do you get like this? With the people you work on, the people who get arrested in the cases that you do? Do you ever just not want them to die?”

“I don't want anyone to die,” Gregor said. “I don't believe in capital punishment.”

“Oh, I know. But that's not what I mean. I'm being as idiotic about this as you were being about Hoover. Maybe it's a sign that we're both getting old.”

“I'm a lot older than you are. When is this dinner with the resident trooper?”

“Eight-thirty. We could go downstairs and get some appetizers, if you want. Bar food, really, but it's not bad. Hot nibbles. That kind of thing.”

“Hot nibbles would be fine. I don't suppose they have a television in the bar.”

“I don't know.”

Gregor leaned forward and squinted at the television set. It was a large one, really, but the focus seemed to be off. The woman named Ann had been replaced by another one,
named Diane. She was a blonde, too, but she had bigger teeth.

“All right,” Gregor said abruptly. “Let me get dressed.”

Later, standing in front of the mirror in the small bathroom and trying to make sure his tie was straight, it occurred to Gregor that he was not really suited for this—relationship—he was having with Bennis. In his day, people hadn't had relationships. They had had marriages, or friendships, or love affairs, and those were very stylized things, where everybody's roles were clearly defined. Women emoted and men stayed stoic in the face of it, that was the thing. Women had feelings and men took care of them when they got that way. Gregor knew what to do in a situation like that. It was what he had done for Elizabeth, all the long months of her painful dying. He did not know what to do now, for Bennis, who was getting dressed in the living room and smoking nonstop in the process. She expected something else from him besides stoic support. He knew that He just didn't know what. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was about to execute Bennis Hannaford's sister—for a murder Gregor himself had solved and that Bennis herself had been some help in solving. Gregor was shocked to realize that he didn't even know what method Pennsylvania used in executions. Gas chamber, electric chair, lethal injection: It would make a difference.

Christ, Gregor thought. Of course it would make a difference. He shoved the knot of his tie all the way up to his Adam's apple. It made him feel strangled, and he didn't even care. He wished he knew what he felt for Bennis
really.
He wished he could sort out and put a name to all the things that had him so confused. When he wasn't paying attention to them, there seemed to be millions, all swirling around in his head and chest and groin. When he turned his attention to them, they reduced themselves to one—this
desperation, this feeling beyond desperation, to be wherever she was, in her sight, in her hearing, every day and all the time, without ceasing. If this was love, then he had never loved Elizabeth. He had never felt this way about anybody else in his life.

He gave up on the tie and stepped out of the bathroom. Bennis was pacing through the tiny living room, still smoking. She had on one of those plain black dresses that her closet seemed to be full of, even though they looked mostly alike. This one had short sleeves and a little jacket that went with it. The jacket was lying over the back of the couch. Bennis was coughing. Sometimes she had to stop dead in the middle of the carpet and bend over double to let it happen.