Somebody Else's Music

by Jane Haddam

  Once he found the notebook—Kyle Borden; 555-2627—he put it on the rickety night table by the bed he was sleeping in and thought that it didn’t matter. This was a small town. If he’d lost the name and address, he only had to call the police department and ask a few questions to be put in touch with the officer again. For all he knew, Kyle Borden was the only officer. He looked around the small bedroom. It was the “spare bedroom” at the back of the ranch. In some places, it wouldn’t “count” as a bedroom at all, because it had no closet. For a fifties ranch, this was a fairly nice house, but it couldn’t escape being a fifties ranch. The ceilings were lowish. Gregor was used to the high ones in the turn-of-the-century town house in which he lived, or the equally high ones in new houses that specialized in tray and cathedral ceilings. The floor was wall-to-wall carpet, fortunately in a neutral navy-blue. Gregor imagined it had once been a fashionable color, like turquoise or black. That was what Gregor remembered best about fifties ranches in the fifties. There was all that turquoise, and all those bathrooms tiled in pink halfway up the wall and papered in black with metallic outlines of pink flamingoes on top of that. Just to make sure, he got his robe and went into the bathroom that was just outside his door, but it was an ordinary bathroom, tiled in white, with a tub-shower combination that you had to step into as if you were stepping over a runner’s hurdle.

  He got his clothes off and got into the shower. He ran the water as hot as he could make it without squealing and stood under the stream for a good five minutes, only wondering, a little guiltily, at the end, if this house got its water supply from a well. Sometimes, showers helped him think. If he stood under them long enough, ideas came to him that would come to him no other way. Today, nothing like that happened. He only thought more about the dog. That had been an ugly scene out there. He would have thought it was ugly even if it had been a mob operation, where he could have excused it to some extent because the issues would have been serious: the division of several million dollars earned from the sale of a couple of kilos of heroin; the control of vice and gambling on the South Side. This looked like nothing but spite. Who did something like that to an animal out of spite, and who did it so openly, in the still light of a late afternoon, when there were people in the house? Water beat down on his head, making him aware of how thick his hair was. The whole incident stank. What was worse, it had too much in common with that story of what had happened to Elizabeth Toliver on the night Michael Houseman died, except that the intensity had been ratcheted up a notch. If he’d been a younger man, he’d have beat his head against the wall.

  He got out of the shower and toweled off. He went back to his bedroom and put on clean clothes, all folded into his suitcase with the precision that only a true fanatic would employ. If Bennis had been with him the night before, she would have insisted that he unpack his suitcases and hang his clothes from the curtain rods over the windows, or she would have done it for him. The idea that he might be too tired would not have occurred to her. Bennis was a woman who had never been tired in her life. Gregor knotted his tie without checking it out in a mirror—there wasn’t one in the room; he didn’t feel up to digging out the one in the Mark Cross travel set Bennis had given him—and sat down on the edge of the rumpled bed to use the phone. Bennis would have made the bed. Gregor only noticed that the phone was a princess style, and pink.

  He dialed his own number first. The phone rang and rang but was not picked up, not even by an answering machine. He must have forgotten to turn it on. He tried Bennis’s number next. Bennis was never in her own apartment anymore except when she made those papier-mâche’ models of Zed and Zedalia she used to help her plot her fantasy novels, and it was the wrong time of year for that. He hung up again and picked up again and dialed the number for Tibor’s apartment. There was always a chance that Tibor was home, because Tibor often forgot to go to appointments. Bennis or Lida or Donna Moradanyan had to run down and pull him out of his easy chair to do whatever it was he was supposed to do. If they didn’t get him in the mornings, he forgot to go to breakfast. Once, Donna had had to rouse him out and stuff him into his robes because he’d forgotten to go to the church and celebrate a wedding.

  Tibor’s phone rang four times and was picked up, but not by Tibor. The answering machine whirred into life. Tibor’s voice said, “This is Father Kasparian at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. I am unable to come to the phone right now. If you leave your name, the time that you called, and a number where I can reach you, I will call you back as soon as possible.”

  “Tibor?” Gregor said. Tibor never called anybody back. He forgot to check the answering machine, sometimes for weeks. Of course, sometimes he forgot to pick up the phone, too, so there was no way of knowing if he was in the apartment or not. “Tibor?” Gregor said again. “It’s Gregor. Pick up.”

  Nobody picked up. The tape whirred some more.

  “Okay, Tibor,” he said. “This is Gregor, calling from Hollman. I’ll try to call you back. Or Bennis. I hope you’re at the Ararat, remembering to eat.”

  Gregor put the phone down. He took his comb off the night table and ran it through his hair, not using a mirror for that, either, which meant he had no idea how it had come out. He could look like those old newspaper drawings of Jack the Ripper on the prowl. Tibor not only forgot appointments, and his answering machine, he forgot everything, if he got into a book or involved in that Internet newsgroup he’d become addicted to. RAM.rec.arts.mystery. Gregor had no idea why he remembered it. He had no idea how a man like Tibor could forget to eat, either. You’d think that after decades of being half starved to death in Soviet prison camps, he’d be eating nonstop for the rest of his life.

  Gregor put his comb and his wallet in his pocket and went out into the hall. The house was very quiet. He walked to the edge of the hall and found the living room. He went through the living room and found another hall. “Rambling,” that’s what they would have called this house in real estate ads at the time it was built. This next hall was very short. He went through it and found the dining room.

  “Is anybody home?” he called out.

  “Back here,” Mark called back. “Go through the dining room.”

  Gregor went through the dining room. On the far side of it was a door. Through the door was the kitchen with its corner breakfast nook. Mark was sitting at the small round kitchen table, a large-sized paperback book opened and lying down in front of him, a glass of orange juice the size of a small pitcher in his hand.

  “Kafka,” Gregor said. “I’m surprised. I’d think he was a little too depressing for you.”

  “He is,” Mark said. “But if you think about it, he’s better than people like J. D. Salinger. In the depressing department, I mean. At least he’s got an imagination. Giant cockroaches. Lots of violence. With people like Salinger, everybody sits around having a nervous breakdown about you don’t know what and the world sucks.”

  “Right,” Gregor said.

  “There’s juice in the refrigerator and Mom had Ms. Vernon get those coffee bags before we came. I’ll put on some water if you want.”

  “Please.”

  “Luis took your car up the road to Andy’s to get something done to it. Gas. I don’t know. I’ve got the number. When you want him, you’re supposed to call and he’ll come and get you.”

  “Luis?”

  “Your driver. If you’re going into town, will you drop me at the library? Mom said I could meet her there if I wanted, and God knows I’m bored out here. Mom took Geoff and Grandma out to do some stuff, see the physical therapist and the doctor, like that. They’ve got that stupid woman with them, too. Ms. Vernon.”

  “Are you always this awake first thing in the morning?”

  “I’ve been up since six. It’s almost ten o’clock. You going to tell me what’s going on here or am I going to have to listen at doors when you talk to my mother?”

  Mark was on his feet and moving. Gregor sat down at the little table and let him put a tumbler full
of orange juice in front of him—hadn’t the boy ever heard of juice glasses?—and then a thick ceramic mug with a coffee bag in it. The kettle was already on the stove. Mark would have been bustling, except that he was too enormous to manage it.

  “So,” Mark said. “What about it? I know I’m only fourteen, but I’m not stupid.”

  No, Gregor thought, you’re certainly not stupid. The kettle whistled. He sat back while Mark poured water over the coffee bag. “You said yesterday that you were going to call Jimmy Card,” Gregor said when the water was safely in the cup. “Did you?”

  “Yeah. He’s coming out as soon as he can get here. Probably not before tomorrow, or else really late today. He was not happy.”

  “I can imagine.”

  Mark sat down again. “The thing is,” he said, “this is totally nuts. Mom doesn’t have to be here. Jimmy could have sent people to clear up the details and make sure Grandma ended up in a decent nursing home in Connecticut. It’s not like Grandma even likes her, because she doesn’t. And all that stuff about the publicity is crap. So what’s she doing here?”

  “Maybe she wanted to come back and see how it felt, now that she’s successful. Maybe she wanted to let her old friends see how successful she’d become.”

  “She doesn’t have any old friends. You know that book, Carrie? Maybe you saw the movie. Mom was Carrie. Except her family wasn’t poor and she was smart. But she was like that. Everybody hated her.”

  “All the more reason to come back for a few weeks and let everybody see how well she’s done.”

  “You don’t think showing up in People walking into the Oscars on Jimmy Card’s arm is enough for that?”

  “She can’t see their faces when they react.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Maybe.” Mark slumped, stretching his long legs straight out in front of him. He scratched the side of his face. It was still a smooth face, in most places, but there were patches of beard here and there. In a couple of years, the beard would be full, and he’d have that ticket to teenage popularity, a face that looked old enough not to get carded in liquor stores.

  “You met Maris Coleman yet?” he asked.

  Gregor shook his head. “That’s the woman that Mr. Card, ah—”

  “Thinks is planting the stories in the tabloids. It’s not a secret. Mom knows he thinks that. I think it, too. You met her yet?”

  “No.”

  “She was here. She came from Hollman. And Mom and Maris both went to Vassar for college, so they were together in college, and from what I can see, Maris was a bitch to Mom there, too. But that isn’t the point. The point is, it’s really weird.”

  “What’s weird?”

  “It’s like she never grew up,” Mark said carefully. “Maris, I mean. She’s, what, practically fifty. And it’s like she’s still living when she’s seventeen. She harps on it. When you go out with her, it’s all she talks about. Well, not really, you know. She’ll talk about the ballet or the mayor or whatever. But she always brings it up. She brings it into every conversation.”

  “And?”

  “And I was wondering if they were all like that. That whole group that Maris was part of. It has to do with the dog, somehow, because the dog was—it was an angry thing, you know? Whoever did it was right in the middle of a world-class piss-off. It wasn’t something someone considered and did. It was a kind of explosion. I sound like a moron. God.”

  “No,” Gregor said, pushing his chair back from the table. “You’re right. That’s what was bothering me.”

  “What was bothering you?”

  “The dog,” Gregor said. “And the snakes. And Michael Houseman. Do you know what happened to Michael Houseman?”

  “The guy the tabloids say my mother killed? Somebody slit his throat. From ear to ear, as the National Enquirer is always putting it.”

  “Exactly,” Gregor said. He stood up and looked around. There was a note tacked to the refrigerator door with a magnet. When he looked more closely at it, it had the number for “Andy’s Garage” printed across it in thick black letters.

  There was a phone on the wall next to the refrigerator.

  Like the one in his room, it was pink.

  2

  Luis the robot-driver—Gregor was beginning to think of it as a Greek epigram—came to fetch him in no time at all, and seemed to get him into town even quicker, although that might have been an illusion caused by the fact that Gregor had now traveled that road at least once. It helped that Mark talked, on and off, about everything from Kafka to Isaac Asimov. It was a relief to find a teenaged boy who cared about books the way most of the rest of his tribe cared about video games and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. On the other hand, Mark also seemed to care about Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Gregor was sorry when they came to the library and had to drop him off. Driving down Grandview Avenue, Gregor felt, as he had the night before, that there was something small-minded and suffocating about this place. Too many of the people he saw were too conventional. He never thought he’d be pining for teenaged boys in rainbow Mohawks and double nose rings, but after a few minutes of Hollman that was exactly what he needed. He could have used a little rock and roll, or whatever they called it these days, too. The few times since coming here that he had heard music coming out of a radio, it had either been “oldies”—meaning the Beatles and the Beach Boys—or Britney Spears. If there were people in Hollman who liked jazz, or classical, or Ozzy Osbourne, he hadn’t found them yet. The Hollman Police Department was in a small brick building on Grand Street, way up toward the far end of Grandview Avenue and just around the corner from a small Catholic church. The street was lined with tall old trees and meticulously kept up. The police department parking lot was free of grass and twigs. Its walls looked as if they had been hosed down sometime recently. That was when something else hit him: he hadn’t seen any black people, either. He hadn’t even seen any darkish people, of any kind, not even anybody he could pin down as definitely Italian. He didn’t think he’d ever been in such a homogeneous place in his life.

  Gregor got out of the car and walked around to the front of the building automatically. There was an entrance from the parking lot, but he wasn’t sure who was allowed to use it. The front of the building faced the side of the Catholic church. The rest of the side street seemed to be made up of small frame houses, some of them being used for doctors’ and dentists’ offices, some of them cut up into multifamily dwellings. He tried to imagine the kind of person who would live in a multifamily dwelling in Hollman, but his mind balked. He let himself in the department’s heavy front door. He found himself in a wide room with a counter across one end of it, like a registrar’s office in a very small college.

  The girl behind the counter looked up. Her name tag said “Sharon Morobito.” She was blond, blue-eyed, and as fair-skinned as a Swede. “Can I help you?” she said.

  Gregor gave his name and explained his business. Sharon Morobito nodded and bustled to a small door at the back of the room. Presumably, that was where the real police department was, if there was a real police department here at all. Gregor wondered where the criminals were. Was it really possible that, first thing on a Tuesday morning, the Hollman Police Department wouldn’t have anything at all to do?

  Sharon Morobito came back to the counter where Gregor was waiting. “Come on through,” she said. “He’s back in his office. We had a bad night last night. Three drunk driving arrests. I don’t know what’s gotten into people around here lately.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said. Philadelphia would probably be overjoyed if it could clock only three assaults with intent to commit bodily harm in any single night.

  They were at the door to the office in the back. Gregor saw Kyle Borden get quickly to his feet.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” he said.

  Gregor edged into Kyle Borden’s very small office and found a chair. The chair was very small, too, but then, Kyle Borden was also very small. Gregor doubted if he was five feet four.

  Kyle gestured to the
mess on his desk. “You’ve come to talk about the dog. Or maybe about Michael Houseman. That’s what you said you were here for, wasn’t it?”

  “Here right this minute, or here in Hollman?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Well, it’s like I told you last night. Jimmy Card asked me to come down here and find out something about the death of Michael Houseman. I think he’s really less interested in solving an old crime—”

  “It would be damned near impossible.”

  “—than in stopping the tabloid stories that keep accusing Ms. Toliver of having committed the crime. But the dog puts an interesting spin on things, don’t you think? It’s not the kind of thing you’d do just because you hated somebody in high school and now you’re really upset because she grew up to be famous. Or at least it’s not the kind of thing I would do in those circumstances. Would you?”