by Jane Haddam
Bennis came to sit down at the table. She reached into the purple-and-gold box and got a chocolate with a molded head of King Tut on the top of it. “Lemon cremes,” she said. “The best lemon cremes you can get anywhere. Godiva doesn’t even make lemon cremes any more. I really wasn’t checking up on you. You were gone all night. You had me worried.”
“I know.”
“You know, I don’t have to stay,” Bennis said. “If you’re that upset about it, I can move back up to my own apartment. Or take off for London, if you’d prefer. You don’t have to stop going to the Ararat for breakfast because of me.”
“I didn’t not go to the Ararat for breakfast because of you,” Gregor said, trying the coffee. It wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t lethal, the way he made it when he tried to percolate it himself. “I was just tired, I’d been out all night. I hadn’t had much sleep. I’m completely messed up, and I can’t afford to go back to sleep.”
“Why not?”
“Because John Jackman’s idea of a good time is to assign two guys who hate each other to partner each other, and then assign that partnership to the head of the most serious case in the city right in the middle of his run for mayor.”
“Did John really do that?”
“Not quite,” Gregor conceded. “There are discrimination lawsuits and court decrees involved. With the partnership anyway. The case is something else. I’m supposed to be getting a call from Rob’s office letting me know when I can go down there and start shifting through the material they’ve got. Assuming they’ve got any.”
“They’ve got a serial killer case, and you think they won’t have any material?”
“I think that the two idiots who’ve been in charge of it until now are capable of anything, including not bothering to do the paperwork because the other guy was supposed to do the paperwork, and you can’t blame either of them for the paperwork not being there because it was the other guy’s—”
“Wait.”
“Sorry. That’s the kind of thing it is. We’ve got eleven people dead who have been connected to the Plate Glass Killer case. I assume we’ve actually got some dead bodies who fit a pattern you could call the Plate Glass Killer pattern. After that, I don’t know. Here’s the thing, Bennis. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t want to talk about the Plate Glass Killer case?” Bennis looked surprised.
Gregor shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about us. I’ve been thinking about it. I was wrong before. You don’t owe me an explanation. We’ve been living in each other’s laps for years but, you know what, I don’t have a franchise. So I don’t want to talk about how you feel and how I feel. I don’t want to explore our emotions. I never want to explore anybody’s emotions. Reading Jane Austen makes me nervous. I just want to let all that go.”
“Yesterday, you wanted a complete explanation, with footnotes.”
“I know. I was wrong. I was very wrong. The whole thing was impossible. I think you were right. I think we need to get married.”
Bennis tilted her head. “There’s a catch here. I know there’s a catch here.”
“It has to do with franchises,” Gregor said.
“Franchises. What kind of franchises? McDonald’s? You haven’t been eating at McDonald’s again, have you?”
“Detectives working a case have to have a franchise, or they don’t have access to information,” Gregor said. “That’s why I never bothered to get a private detective’s license and that’s why I don’t operate as a private detective. Private detectives have no franchise. If I get called in as a consultant by the police department, I’ve got a franchise. Which doesn’t mean I don’t help people out on a private level, just—”
“Yes, okay, I get it,” Bennis said. “I just don’t get what that has to do with us.”
“You don’t owe me any explanation. We don’t have any kind of an agreement that I remember. I’ll accept your offer. We’ll get married. Tomorrow, if you want to. We can go down to Maryland. I think they still have that thing where there’s no waiting period for a marriage license.”
Bennis took another chocolate out of the purple-and-gold box and stared at him. “There’s a catch to this somewhere,” she said. “I just can’t see where.”
“There’s no catch to the marriage part. I want to marry you, Bennis. I’ve wanted to marry you for half a decade. To all intents and purposes, we’ve been married for half a decade. Except that there was no formal agreement, and there was no explicit understanding, so I didn’t have a franchise. And still don’t.”
“Wait,” Bennis said. “I think I get this. If we get married, I’m your wife, and that’s a franchise, so you have the right to demand any information you want.”
“Something like that.”
“Why won’t you believe me when I tell you that there isn’t any information to have? I really didn’t do anything but read a lot and have drinks alone on terraces and feel sorry for myself.”
“If that’s the case, Bennis, you’re even crazier than I think you are, and we’re doomed. Think about it. Maryland’s a good idea.”
“I had something more like a, you know, wedding in mind. Donna deco-rating. Tommy as ring bearer.”
The phone rang. They both turned to look at the door to the living room. It was propped back with a rubber doorstop. It usually was.
“That will be Rob Benedetti’s office,” Gregor said, getting up. “Or some-body calling at the request of Rob Benedetti’s office. I’ve got to get to work.”
“I really would rather have an actual wedding,” Bennis said.
“I really would rather have a life that didn’t come apart at the seams every time you have insufficient chocolate in the house. It’s time to do something, Bennis. It really is. So let’s do it. Oh, and one more thing.”
“What?”
“Her name is Alision Standish, and you’ve met her. You were on some panel at a Modern Language Association thing together. The Changing something—”
“The Changing Subtext of Gender.”
“That’s right,” Gregor said.
Then he got up and went into the living room to answer the phone.
2
There was, Gregor thought, getting out of the cab that had taken him downtown to Rob Benedetti’s office, one thing in life that anybody could count on: personal problems would always be the enemy of inner peace and outer success. Or something. He unkinked his legs on the sidewalk and searched through his wallet for the fare. What was it his mind had just thrown up at him? Did it make any sense? Was he making no sense because Bennis was making him crazy—not, he had to admit, an unusual occurrence—or because he’d had no sleep the night before? Or this morning. Or something. There was that “something” again. He needed to lie down for about two days and pretend he was somebody else.
He looked up at the building and wished Benedetti’s office wasn’t as far away as it was. He looked across the street and saw that Rob and John had managed to get their posters up without breaking the rules and putting them on government property. He wondered what the incumbent mayor of Philadelphia was doing now that it was more and more obvious that John Jackman was going to win this race whether he liked it or not. He wondered what it had been like when machine politics determined winners before anybody ever went to the polls, and if they didn’t a few people ended up with their feet in cement.
The term for this, he thought, was “fevered imagination.” He turned his back on the posters and went into the building. The lobby was clean and empty. There was a single police officer on duty at a little desk. He was an old man, not a serious guard. If terrorists wanted to storm this building, they wouldn’t have to work up much more than a summer shower. Gregor went up to the desk and started to take out his wallet to find his ID.
The officer waved him away. “I recognize you, Mr. Demarkian. Mr. Benedetti said you were expected. Must be one hell of a project you’re working on.”
“Why do you say that?”
&nb
sp; “Must’ve been a hundred and fifty boxes went up there this morning,” the guard said. “The boys said the whole mess was for you.”
Gregor went to the elevators, pushed the button, and got on the first one that arrived. There were boxes and there were boxes. Specifically, there were small boxes and there were large boxes. He had no idea what he would do if he was looking at 150 large boxes. Maybe Rob could assign him an assistant. Maybe he could quit and go to Hawaii. With or without Bennis.
The elevator opened at Rob Benedetti’s floor and Gregor stepped out. There were some boxes in the halls. In fact, there were several stacks of them. They weren’t small, but they weren’t the size moving companies provided either. At least one of the stacks reached almost to the top of his head.
He went to the door of Rob Benedetti’s office and stuck his head in. A young woman he didn’t recognize was sitting at the desk, typing away furiously at a word processor.
“Can I help you?” she asked him, looking up. He was about to explain who he was, when she stood. “Oh, I’m sorry. It’s you, Mr. Demarkian. Just a minute, please. Mr. Benedetti is very anxious to see you. He’s been talking about it all day.”
Gregor didn’t even want to think of a Rob Benedetti who had come to work directly from that mess in South Philadelphia last night. He looked around, but the office looked the same. Rob Benedetti was an interim appointment as district attorney. He wouldn’t have the job for real until he was elected to it, and he didn’t look as if he wanted to settle in until he knew that was going to happen. This was in distinct contrast to John Jackman, who was so sure of his election to the Mayor’s Office that he was no longer running so much as he was assuming.
Rob stuck his head out of his office and said, “I’m right here, Gregor. Come on in.”
Gregor went in. The inner office, like the outer office, was spare. Benedetti really wasn’t taking anything for granted.
“It’s interesting,” Gregor said. “You look very tentative. John doesn’t.”
“John doesn’t have to. John isn’t tentative. He’s the biggest deal to hit this city in decades, and everybody knows it. Besides, our incumbent mayor is an idiot and a fool. Although, of course, if you repeat that, I’ll deny it.”
“I’ll bet.”
“It’s true, though,” Rob said. “Mickey Mouse could win the mayoral race against Old Dumbful. Which is what the municipal workers call him, by the way. Which doesn’t answer the question about how he managed to get elected in the first place, but here you are. And here we are. I’ve got some stuff for you to look at.”
“A hundred and fifty boxes.”
“Yep, those,” Rob said. “Also some stuff on the computer. They’re still working on double-checking that the physical evidence is where they say it is; but once they’ve done that, we’ll give you somebody to walk you through those.”
“Have they found all the ones they’ve looked for so far?”
“No,” Rob looked embarrassed. “But I don’t think it’s time to panic yet, Gregor. Physical evidence gets mislaid all the time. You just have to go through what you’ve got until you find it.”
“Who’s going through it? Gayle? Or Leehan?”
“Neither. I put a couple of clerks on it, smart women, really; you’re going to like them. But no matter how good an idea that seems from where we’re sitting now, the fact is that you’re going to have to deal with Marty and Cord eventually. You really are. They’re the only ones who know the case inside and out, and the evidence inside and out—”
“Meaning their records are a mess, and they’ve broken every rule in the book about leaving an adequate paper trail so that somebody new could step in if something happened to them.”
“I think,” Rob said carefully, “that they were mostly trying to cut out the other one. I mean—”
“I know what you mean. Have you looked through any of this?”
“No,” Benedetti said. “I haven’t had time. And it’s been a little intimidating watching all this stuff come in here. I called Marsha Venecki at six this morning, as soon as I thought it was feasible. I got her out of bed, and she swore at me.”
“I can bet. Do you have a room for me to work in?”
“Yes, we do. A big one.”
“But not big enough to fit all the boxes,” Gregor said. “There are some out in the hall. There are a lot out in the hall.”
“The only room on this floor big enough to hold all the boxes is the conference room, and the mayor will not let us commandeer that for your use. I gave you the biggest office we had. Bigger than this one. There’s a first-rate computer, better than mine, and a box on the desk with computer files.”
“All of them?”
Rob Benedetti cast his eyes toward the ceiling, and Gregor sighed.
“All right,” Gregor said. “What about last night? How soon will it be before we know from the Medical Examiner’s Office just what we’ve got and what we haven’t got?”
“End of the day,” Rob said. “I talked to him, and he promised. He knows this is a big deal just as much as you do. Hell, even without everything else, he’d know it was a big deal. You don’t get a serial killer case every day.”
“How many bodies was it in the end? Seven?”
“Only one, believe it or not, plus part of a hand, skeleton only. That’s part of what the medical examiner is working with today, but we think it’s going to turn out to be an artifact. There used to be a cemetery in that part of the city, back in the Colonial Era. It was moved when construction expanded, but we think the extra hand is just something that didn’t get found at the time. We’ll work it out. Only, Gregor, listen, I know this looks bad. I know this looks awful. But nobody was trying to screw this up. And nobody was being negligent. The department is under a consent decree, we’ve got lawyers coming out of our asses—maybe not the best metaphor under the circumstances—anyway, we did what we had to do when we had to do it and nothing of what we had to do was meant to make it possible for us to run a sensible case. For anybody to.”
“And Marty Gayle and Cord Leehan weren’t even trying to.”
“Yeah, well,” Rob said. “Do you want to go down and see your office? I asked the other clerk, Betty Gelhorn, to do a summary; and there’s one there on the desk, but not the final one, because she, uh, she—”
“She didn’t have much to work with?”
“Or too much. Let’s just say she didn’t have much access to Marty and Cord because they’ve, you know, gone home to sleep.”
The words that came to Gregor’s mind were, “God, give me strength.” He decided against saying them out loud. Instead, he got up when Rob got up and let himself be led out through the outer office, into the corridor, and down the hall. Now that he had a closer look at them, the boxes looked much closer to large than small after all. He wondered what they meant. Everybody was supposed to keep things on a computer these days. It cut down on the need for storage space. You only used hard copies to back up the most important of information. The only reason why so much of the material for this case would be in boxes instead of on discs or CDs was . . . what?
“Just a minute,” Gregor said, stopping in the middle of the hall. “Don’t tell me. They weren’t putting anything on a computer. They didn’t want the other one to be able to see what they had; so instead of putting it on the computer, they made hard copies and squirreled them away somewhere.”
“Well, sort of. Sometimes. There’s a lot on the computer, too.”
“So?”
“It might be a good idea if you didn’t yell right in the middle of the corridor,” Rob said. “I mean, I know you’re not the yelling kind, but—”
“What?”
“Well,” Rob said, “the thing is, there’s a lot on the computer, but so far we haven’t been entirely successful in getting hold of all the necessary passwords so that we can access it.”
3
The assistant they had assigned to him was a young woman named Delia O’Bannion, an
d she was scared to death of him. Gregor paid less attention to this than he might have otherwise. The situation was worse than he had feared, worse even than he had allowed himself to imagine when he first saw all those boxes in the hall, and it only got even worse the longer he sat at his desk trying to sort things into some kind of order. In the beginning, he had what he thought was a very good plan. He would arrange the information by victim, starting with the earliest (Sarajean Petrazik) and making his way right down to this latest one Henry Tyder was supposed to have killed, or not. He couldn’t remember the latest one’s name, and it didn’t help to go looking through the material he had. If the name was there, he had no idea where it was.
Or, he thought after a while, what it would look like. These were the craziest records he had ever seen in his life. There were one or two standard reports, yes, but most of the rest of the paper seemed to consist of random notes, some of them apparently in code. There were restaurant napkins with scribbles on them, matchbook covers with phone numbers on them, big sheets of lined notebook paper covered with handwriting that would have shamed a fourth grader. If he’d been the kind of man who drank in the middle of the day, he’d have sent Delia O’Bannion out to get him a scotch.
Instead, he sent Delia out for coffee and a tuna fish sandwich and went down the hall to look at the building directory next to the elevators. He had no idea where things were in the maze of buildings that made up Philadelphia’s city government, but he had the idea that evidence clerks would be wherever the evidence room was, and the evidence room would be where the city needed it most—either at Police Headquarters or here with the district attorney. The building directory did not register anything called an evidence room, or anything called anything that might mean an evidence room. In a world where secretaries were personal assistants and janitors were sanitation engineers, you had to be careful.
