by Jane Haddam
Tibor’s coffee was even worse than Gregor’s, but he followed the other man through the wide living room anyway. Tibor looked older than Gregor and moved as if he were nearly ancient, but he was actually almost ten years younger. His living room was even more crowded with books than his foyer was. There were books stacked against the walls, books on chairs, books on tables, books in piles on the floor. Gregor saw Mickey Spillane and Judith Krantz, Aristotle in the original Greek and the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, novels by Hemingway and histories by Toynbee and something called The Semiotic of Toilet Tissue by nobody he’d ever heard of. The books made up for the fact that there was not a decoration of any kind in the apartment. Tibor had crosses that he hung on his walls here and there, mostly given to him by other people, but he seemed never to have heard of the idea of putting up pictures to make your rooms look brighter.
The kitchen was just as full of books as the living room and the foyer. Gregor took a stack of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky off a chair and sat down. Then he moved a stack of Stephen Donaldson fantasy novels to give himself a little room at the table. Tibor came over and put a cup of coffee down in front of him. Gregor wondered for the millionth time how Tibor managed to get instant coffee to come out like that.
“So,” Tibor said, clearing a chair off for himself too. “What is this about? Do you want to go to the Ararat?”
“I did,” Gregor said, “but I’ve been talking to old George. Does all this business with the wedding sound a little—excessive—to you?”
“No.”
“Well,” Gregor said dryly, “that answers my question.”
Tibor waved his hands dismissively. “You don’t understand about weddings,” he said. “I’m a priest. I’ve officiated at hundreds of weddings. It’s always like this.”
“We’ve had weddings on Cavanaugh Street before. They never made me afraid to have my breakfast in the Ararat.”
“That’s because they were the weddings of people you didn’t know well,” Tibor said. “It’s not weddings you’re so upset about, it’s Donna’s wedding. Something finally changes in your life here. Things will never be the same.”
“Thank you, Dr. Freud.”
“Krekor, please. You should give me more credit than to compare me with Freud. But what I’m telling you is true. It is true for Bennis too. She gets through it by interesting herself in the details, but when she comes up for air she is all upset.”
“I’m not upset,” Gregor said. “I like Donna. I like Russ. I think they ought to get married.”
“I do too,” Tibor said. “Everybody thinks they ought to get married.”
“And old George is right,” Gregor went on, “it’s going to be good for Tommy. I don’t think Donna could go through another round of him waking up in the middle of the night, crying and hysterical and wanting to know why his father doesn’t love him. Did you know about that?”
“I had heard about it, Krekor, yes.”
“Tommy’s bedroom is right over my head. The first time it happened, I was ready to go up to Boston and open Peter Desarian’s head with a meat cleaver. But that wouldn’t do any good, would it? He’d still be Peter Desarian. Tommy needs a father, but he sure as hell doesn’t need Peter Desarian.”
“Donna doesn’t need Peter Desarian either,” Tibor said. “Yes, yes, Gregor, I know all the arguments. I agree with all the arguments. This marriage is a wonderful thing. It is good for everyone involved. Donna and Russ should definitely go through with it. But I worry.”
“About it changing things.”
“Of course.”
“Do you think we’re being illogical here?” Gregor asked. “It all seems so complicated and confused and I don’t see why it should. It wasn’t this ambiguous when I got married to Elizabeth.”
“When you got married to Elizabeth you were twenty-five.”
“What about you and Anna?”
Tibor shrugged. “Me and Anna were a long time ago under very different circumstances. We were introduced by the bishop, you know. That was how it was done in that time and place. It was hard for a young man in the seminary to find someone suitable to marry.”
“But even if the bishop found Anna, you loved her.”
“Oh, yes,” Tibor said. “I definitely loved her.”
“Well, then.” Gregor moved some more books. Tibor had a copy of How to Have a Perfect Wedding and also a copy of The Five Essential Steps to Divorce. Gregor picked them both up and put them on the seat of the chair behind him, nearly toppling a stack of Harlequin romances.
“That’s funny,” he told Tibor. “I was thinking about divorce this morning. About how easy it is these days.”
“Too easy,” Tibor said solemnly.
“Probably,” Gregor agreed, “but I was thinking about how it’s changed things for homicide. Easy divorce, I mean. Men still kill their wives, of course, and wives still kill their husbands, but the kind of spousal murder you get these days is different than it used to be. I’m putting that badly. You always had all kinds of spousal murder, the drunken-rage kind and the sudden-snap kind and logical-conclusion-to-twenty-years-of-beatings kind, but in the old days almost every big city police department had at least one escape-hatch spousal murder every three years or so. You know what I mean?”
“You mean the men and the women couldn’t get a divorce and so they murdered the person they were married to.”
“Right,” Gregor said. “When you had laws that let one spouse refuse a divorce, you had a certain incidence of people who really did work at committing a murder they were trying to get away with. A murder that they’d planned. There isn’t much of that in spousal murder anymore. There was that lawyer up in Boston who shot himself in his stomach after he killed his wife so that he could claim they had been attacked by muggers. That’s the kind of thing I used to read in those mystery novels Bennis is always giving me and I’d refuse to believe it. Who would shoot himself in his own stomach? That kind of thing hurts.”
“I’m sure it does, Krekor.”
“Anyway, there isn’t much of that kind of thing anymore. People file for no-fault and they don’t even need their spouse’s permission.”
“That’s not a good thing either, Krekor.”
“No, I don’t think it is. But it makes the situation I’ve just been drawn into very interesting. Did you know John Jackman called me last night? He has something he wants me to work on.”
“How would I know that, Krekor? I haven’t talked to you.”
“I’ve talked to Bennis,” Gregor said, “and you know how it is around here. Never mind. Did you watch the news last night?”
“Of course.”
“There was a pipe bomb that went off in a parking garage in West Philadelphia yesterday—”
“Oh, that one,” Tibor said, sounding suddenly animated. “It was really two pipe bombs, I think, Krekor. They made a big mess.”
“Yes, they did. And the woman who was supposed to have set them is missing, and she’s also supposed to have murdered her husband earlier in the day in this place called Fox Run Hill down in Bucks County.”
Tibor looked confused. “The murder took place in Bucks County? Why is John Jackman investigating it?”
“He’s investigating this end, with the pipe bombs.”
“And he wants you to come in on it.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Gregor said. “The local police are likely to be not pleased. If they really hate the idea, I’ll withdraw.”
Tibor looked skeptical. “You never withdraw,” he said. “You always have some excuse to keep going. So what is it with this case that you are supposed to do for John Jackman?”
“I don’t know yet,” Gregor admitted. “He just told me he wanted me to work on it, and then he made me promise to meet him at headquarters this morning at nine. Which I’m going to do. It’s just that, in the wake of that phone call, I’ve been reading and watching everything I can about the case.”
“And?”
“And,” Gregor said, “as I was saying before, it occurred to me that you can’t, with something like this, make the kind of assumptions you would have thirty or forty years ago. Patsy MacLaren Willis didn’t kill her husband just because she didn’t want to stay married to him anymore. There were easier ways to get that done.”
“You can be sure that this was not one of those spur-of-the-moment things you were talking about?”
“I can’t be sure about anything until I talk to John,” Gregor said, “but from what I’ve read in the newspaper and seen on television so far, I’d say it wasn’t likely. For one thing, there was the silencer.”
“Silencer?”
“According to the eleven o’clock news, a gun and a silencer were found in Stephen Willis’s bedroom along with Stephen Willis’s body. No fingerprints yet, of course, and no lab reports. It might not even be the murder weapon. But I don’t believe that.”
“I wouldn’t believe that either.”
“So, there’s the silencer. And there’s the fact that it’s not legal for a gun shop in this state to sell silencers. Which means the silencer must have been acquired especially. And what do you acquire a silencer for except to be able to shoot without being heard?”
“True,” Tibor said, “but it might not be this woman who bought the gun and the silencer. The gun and the silencer might have been bought by the husband. Maybe he was intending to kill her.”
“Maybe. That’s not bad for a psychological explanation. Because the next thing you have to account for is the pipe bombs.”
“Bombs do not take long to make,” Tibor said reprovingly. “I have made bombs in my life, Krekor.”
“Fine, but these bombs were on timers. The newspapers didn’t say that, but I have to assume it, because it’s the only thing that makes sense. Patsy MacLaren Willis parked her car, walked away, and hours later the bombs blew up. Timers.”
“All right.”
“The question is, did Patsy MacLaren Willis place the bombs and the timers, or did somebody else, and what for? And where is Patsy MacLaren Willis?”
“She could be out of the country by now,” Tibor pointed out.
“I suppose she could be. I suppose John is checking up on it. And the Bucks County people too.”
“But you don’t think she did these things,” Tibor said.
“No,” Gregor admitted, “I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “think about those pipe bombs. Big pipe bombs that made lots of mess and lots of noise and lots of publicity. Why bother?”
“I don’t understand, Krekor.”
“Why bother?” Gregor insisted. “Why cause an explosion like that if you’ve just murdered your husband and you want to make a getaway. Why not just get away?”
“Murderers do strange things,” Tibor said.
“Murderers,” Gregor said firmly, “are always absolutely logical.”
THREE
1.
THE NEWS ABOUT STEPHEN and Patsy MacLaren Willis was all over the neighborhood as soon as it hit the news and, as far as Evelyn Adder could tell, it had been all over the neighborhood ever since, jumping from one house to another like a flu bug in January. The husbands were all worried about Stephen, or about Patsy-and-Stephen, however you wanted to put it. It seemed impossible to them that a woman like Patsy, so bland, so cordial, so nice, should want to kill anyone, especially with a silencer, especially when he was asleep in his own bed. The women were just excited. They had discovered it first, of course. It was Molly Bracken who had found Stephen’s body, at 5:01, when she went running over to the Tudor from the Victorian and found the garage door unlocked. She had gone inside, called Patsy’s name, and then looked carefully around Patsy’s big, empty house. Sarah Lockwood, who told Evelyn this story, seemed to think it was completely natural. Maybe, Evelyn had thought at the time, Sarah goes running around to people’s houses on a regular basis, and just drops in whenever a door is open, whether she’s been invited or not. Evelyn didn’t know anything about Molly Bracken, but the whole thing seemed strange to her. She would never have done anything like it, especially if it involved Patsy MacLaren Willis. Patsy was—strange, or that was the word for it, and too quiet, and remote. She had made Evelyn half-crazy for years. Evelyn hated not knowing whether people liked her or not. She was always expecting an ambush, especially from women, especially from women like Patsy, who were sensible about everything from food to clothes. For some reason Evelyn found people like Molly Bracken less intimidating, as if she could see the insecurities that propped up all that makeup, the self-doubt that provided the fuel for all that anxious talk. It was people who thought well of themselves whom Evelyn couldn’t stand.
Henry couldn’t stand the reports about Patsy and Stephen, but he watched them, right through dinner, with the television blasting in the family room while he ate his steak filets and baked potato at a folding tray set up in front of the set. Evelyn had a tossed green salad with balsamic vinegar and a nonfat banana yogurt with wheat germ sprinkled along the top. She had a folding tray too, which was usually an absolute no-no. According to Henry, she was supposed to be “retraining,” and while she was “retraining” she was not allowed to do anything else while she ate her food. She was supposed to sit at the kitchen table and concentrate on her plate, with no distractions. She wasn’t allowed to read or watch television or listen to the radio. She wasn’t allowed even to think about anything except her food, and what it felt like in her mouth, and what it tasted like, and whether this was what she really wanted or not. She almost never had to ask that last question. She already knew the answer. Of course salad with balsamic vinegar wasn’t what she wanted, and neither was non-fat yogurt with wheat germ. She wanted a pair of little steaks just like Henry’s and a baked potato with butter and sour cream and chives in it. Henry’s baked potato had all those things. Now that he was thin, he was allowed to eat.
“I think it was damned stupid of Molly Bracken to go into that house just because she found the door open,” Henry said when Molly was interviewed on the CBS affiliate. “That door could have been left open for any reason. There could have been a burglar.”
“How could there have been a burglar?” Evelyn asked reasonably. “There’s the gate. We have security guards.”
“France had the Maginot Line,” Henry said—cryptically, as far as Evelyn was concerned. “Think about the Gordian knot. Security can be breached.”
“I still don’t see that Molly should have worried about a burglar. I wouldn’t have.”
“Would you go into that house just because you found a door open?”
“Of course not.”
“There, then.”
“But it wouldn’t have had anything to do with there being a burglar,” Evelyn went on patiently. “It’s just that I never really knew Patsy all that well. I wouldn’t have wanted to intrude.”
“It seems like none of us knew Patsy very well. It seems like the woman was crazy.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
“Well, what else would you call it? When a woman kills her husband and then blows up her own car?”
“Maybe she was just angry with him,” Evelyn said, pushing a piece of lettuce around the small round bowl that contained it. “Maybe he wasn’t nice to her and she just lost it.”
“Women don’t kill their husbands just because their husbands aren’t nice to them. Christ, Evelyn, if women did that, there wouldn’t be a husband left alive in America.”
Maybe there wouldn’t, Evelyn had thought at the time—and now, only hours later, she was thinking it again. It was a quarter to eight in the morning and Henry was up and sitting in front of the television set again. He had woken half an hour early and nearly caught Evelyn at her ritual morning window-seat binge. Then he had gotten Evelyn her half grapefruit without sugar and her four-ounce glass of juice from the locked refrigerator, and sat down to watch the news again.
Evelyn was watching him
. Feeling huge. Feeling bulky. Feeling fat enough to explode into fragments everywhere in the room, and maybe choke him with them. She wanted his pancakes so badly, she nearly snatched them out from under his nose. On the television screen, a young blond reporter was going over and over what it was the police knew now, which wasn’t much different from what they had known the night before. The television reporter was as thin as a rail and arrogant with it.
“I’ve been thinking about things,” Henry said. “About today, I mean. We may have to change the schedule a bit.”
“We can’t change the schedule,” Evelyn said. “We have to go shopping. We’re nearly out of everything.”
“I know. But I can’t go shopping today. I have some work I have to get done.”
“I have to go shopping.” Evelyn tried to keep the panic out of her voice. “We’re low on everything. We hardly have a thing in the house.”
“This is not a good psychological sign,” Henry said. “It shouldn’t make you crazy just because we have to postpone shopping for a few days. We’re not going to starve. Food shouldn’t be that important to you.”
Evelyn took a deep breath. The window seat was nearly empty. Something about the Patsy and Stephen thing must have gotten to her. She had eaten practically her whole stash of Hostess cupcakes. She hadn’t been able to make herself stop. She had told herself it didn’t matter, because they would go shopping, she would be able to replace them, she would find a way to get away from Henry in the store and eat and eat and eat. Now she rubbed the palms of her hands against her face and tried to breathe normally. She needed something to make the fear go away.
“We’re almost out of everything,” she said, sounding rational even to herself. “It’s not the food I eat that we’re out of. It’s the food you eat that we’re out of.”
“Well, yes. I know that.”
“We can’t just go without food, Henry. And there are things. Dishwashing detergent. Laundry soap. We run out.”
“I know that.” Henry sounded patient, the way he used to when really stupid students wanted his attention, or when girl students who were plain and stocky instead of slim and pretty tried to ask him a question. “I know there are things we legitimately need, Evelyn. That’s not my point.”
