by Jane Haddam
“I have only your very best interests at heart,” he was saying. “I have only the thinking about you which is what matters. I do not fuss. I am not Hannah Krekorian. I am very scientific.”
In Gregor Demarkian’s opinion, Father Tibor Kasparian was about as scientific as a novel by Robert Heinlein, but that was neither here nor there. Gregor knew what had been going on in this group while he’d been talking to Demp and Franklin Morrison. He caught Kelley Grey’s eye and watched her raise a single eyebrow into her hairline. He knew only one other person on earth who could do that, and that was Bennis Hannaford. He thought that by this time in this night’s series of Father Tibor lectures, Bennis had to be mentally asleep.
Gregor tapped Tibor on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said. “I want to talk to Miss Grey for a while. If the two of you wouldn’t mind?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Kelley Grey said promptly.
“I have been neglecting Miss Grey, Krekor,” Tibor said, without a trace of remorse. “I have been trying to talk some sense into this other young woman’s head.”
Bennis Hannaford rolled her eyes. “He’s been giving me a lecture about vitamins. I told him we had all that in biology when I was at boarding school, but he just won’t listen to me.”
“We could go higher up the bleachers,” Kelley Grey said. “That way we could talk without interrupting them. It’s all been very interesting, really.”
“It’s all been boring me to tears,” Bennis said.
Gregor held out a hand to Kelley Grey and Kelley took it. He helped her out of her seat while her arm was stretched over Tibor’s head and then led her up the bleachers a little way, but not too far, because he had never really liked bleachers. In high school, he had always been convinced that he was about to fall through the cracks. He went up to the fourth tier and sat down again. He was far enough from Bennis and Tibor so that he couldn’t hear what they were saying, although he could see Tibor’s hands working, rising up and down, one hand smashing into the other for emphasis. He was far enough away from Franklin and Demp so that they couldn’t hear what he said to Kelley Grey, although he wouldn’t have minded if they had. He thought Kelley might have minded. She had to know she was going to have to talk to them at length, over and over again, and probably to the state police, too. A couple of hours after a dead woman’s head had fallen into her lap might not be the time to press that matter home.
Gregor waited until Kelley had sat down herself and then asked, “How are you? Holding up?”
“I’m all right,” Kelley said. “Sort of on automatic pilot.”
“That goes away.”
“I was afraid it did.”
“It doesn’t have to go away now,” Gregor told her. “I’m not interested in your emotions at the moment. Just in a few procedural and background things. Then I’m going to tell Franklin you ought to go home.”
Kelley looked across at Franklin Morrison. Franklin was bending over something Demp had handed him. His shoulders were slumped. He looked depressed enough to die.
“Is it true he’s hired you to investigate what happened to Tisha Verek and Dinah? That he’s brought you in as some kind of super private detective?”
“No one can bring me in as a private detective because I’m not a private detective. You need a license for that, and I don’t have one. I do consult on occasion, with police departments and private individuals, if the case falls within my area of expertise and there is a problem that interests me.”
“Is this a problem that interests you?”
“I think so,” Gregor said. “Yes.”
“Is it all the same problem? Were they all killed by the same person? Is it some kind of plot?”
“I don’t believe in plots,” Gregor said. “As for the rest of it, I don’t know.”
Kelley Grey grimaced. It was an ugly expression and it made her plain face plainer. “What do you think the odds are, that it’s not?” she asked him. “I read the papers. Shoulder and throat, shoulder and throat, shoulder and throat.”
“There is that, yes.”
“So what do you want to know?”
Gregor settled his hands on his knees. Kelley had a tiny pair of smiling Santa faces in her pierced ears that he had just noticed. They looked ludicrous.
“When we sat down this evening,” he said, “Gemma told me that she had never seen this play before, even though she had been here a while. Do you know how long a while?”
“It was three or four years, I think. I’ve only been here eighteen months, myself.”
“Do you know why she hadn’t seen the play?”
“I know she didn’t approve of it,” Kelley said. Then she shook her head, dissatisfied. “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t an emotional thing. Gemma had a set of principles, you see, and she didn’t approve of whatever was opposed to those principles, but there was nothing—worked up about it. It wasn’t like Jesse Helms or anything. She didn’t get all passionate about things like that.”
“What did she get all passionate about?”
“Nothing, really,” Kelley said. “Gemma was strange that way, Mr. Demarkian, if you ask me. Emotions were something she talked about all the time, but she didn’t really have any, not the way other people do. She was always in control. She’d say, ‘I’m very angry with you, Kelley.’ But she wouldn’t sound angry. She’d sound… reasonable.”
“Did you like that?”
“I hated it.”
“Was she often angry at you?”
“I was more often angry at her.” Kelley smiled slightly. “I’ve got my principles, too, but I’m not like Gemma was about them. I yell and scream and pound tables.”
Gregor smiled back. “I think I prefer it that way,” he said. He stretched his legs and considered what she’d told him. “I would have thought, that as a priest, Gemma Bury would have been overjoyed with a production like the Bethlehem Nativity play. I would have thought she would at least have been interested in seeing how it was done.”
“Gemma wasn’t that kind of priest,” Kelley said. “She wasn’t that kind of Episcopalian. I don’t think she believed that there was any truth to the story. And then there was the constitutional thing. She was very firm about the constitutional thing.”
“Firm how?”
“In thinking that having the play and making money for the town was illegal because of the separation of church and state and the town shouldn’t do it. She was really happy when we heard Tisha Verek was going to file that lawsuit. She said she’d been thinking about doing it since she got here but then she hadn’t because she was worried about the effect it would have. Her parishioners would probably have killed her—Oh.”
“Do you think one of her parishioners would have killed her just for believing what she believed?” Gregor asked gently.
Kelley was shaky. “I don’t know.”
“Do you think Tisha Verek was shot because she was going to file a lawsuit against the Celebration?”
Kelley just shrugged. “I don’t know why Tisha Verek was shot, or Dinah Ketchum either. I barely knew either of them. Tisha used to come to the rectory sometimes to visit Gemma, but she didn’t have time for me. And as for Dinah Ketchum, she might as well have been on another planet. We had virtually no contact at all. Except for the inevitable, of course. Everybody runs into everybody else in a town this size at least once in a while.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said. He decided that was likely to be true. It was difficult for him to work in small towns because he had never lived in one. He had been born in Philadelphia and stationed in New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Like the Armenian traders who were his ancestors, he was a man of the cities. It was hard for him to believe that there were places anywhere where everybody ran into everybody else at least once in a while.
That, however, was not his problem. The shooting death of Gemma Bury was, in no matter how unofficial a capacity. Franklin Morrison had every intention of sticking him with it. Gregor k
new himself too well to believe he had any intention to refuse.
“Let’s talk about tonight,” he told Kelley Grey. “Why did the two of you decide to come tonight?”
“It was because of Peter Callisher,” Kelley said. “Gemma went to talk to Peter Callisher this afternoon, and he had a pair of tickets he didn’t need, and he gave them to Gemma.”
“Surely, she could have gotten tickets before this?”
“Of course she could have, and free, too, just like the ones Peter gave her. But the impression I got was that they were just there and she just sort of said what the hell.”
“What did she go to see Peter Callisher about?”
Kelley shrugged again. “I don’t know. Peter runs the paper. Gemma goes—went—over there a lot, or sent me, you know, to put notices in and things like that, for when the church groups were going to meet or when the jumble sales were going to be or whatever. And the church ran a regular ad every week that gave our times for services and counseling hours and that sort of thing. All the churches do.”
Gregor hated explanations that amounted to “it happened for no good reason at all” and he hated them twice as fiercely as he might have because they were so often true.
“Did Gemma tell anyone she was going to attend this performance?”
“Tell anyone?”
“Was there anyone who knew?” Gregor insisted.
“I suppose a lot of people knew she had the tickets,” Kelley said, “but I don’t see why they would know she was going to be at the performance. I mean, she’d never been to one before. And I don’t think she made up her mind until she came home and talked to me.”
“You don’t think but you can’t be sure.”
“No, I can’t be sure. But Mr. Demarkian, I’ve got to say it doesn’t make much sense.”
Gregor was afraid it made entirely too much sense. If everyone in town knew Gemma Bury was going to be at the Nativity play tonight, then everyone in town had a chance to premeditate a shooting that Gregor was convinced had to be premeditated. If it hadn’t been—if it had been brought off on the spur of the moment by someone who just happened to have a rifle handy for use in auspicious circumstances—they were dealing with something worse than a nut and worse than a psychopath.
“What about once you got here?” Gregor asked. “You came in together at the beginning. Bennis and Tibor and I saw you.”
“We saw you, too,” Kelley said. “Gemma was amused. We’d been reading about you for weeks. Because of Peter liking to put your cases in the paper.”
“What about at the intermission? Did you come back first or did Gemma?”
“I never went away,” Kelley said. “Gemma got up and walked around. There were a couple of parishioners in the section just to the other side of the animal aisle from this one. She went over to talk to them, and she was gone almost the entire intermission, but I never left.”
“And she came back when? Before I did, I remember.”
“She wasn’t gone long,” Kelley agreed.
“What about the people immediately behind you and immediately in front of you?”
“The people immediately behind us didn’t come in until after the play had already started. They were a pain in the butt, let me tell you. The people immediately in front of us were back, but they weren’t sitting still. That’s the ground-level bleacher, you know. The people down there had this small child, and it kept wandering up and wandering away, and they’d go chase it. I saw one of those men questioning the parents, I think. Didn’t you?”
“No,” Gregor said, “I didn’t. Did you talk to anyone tonight? You didn’t go anywhere, you say. Did anyone come to you?”
“Amanda Ballard came up to talk before she left. She and Peter had tickets for the section directly opposite this one on the other side of the park. Peter gets tickets every year. Anyway, Amanda was feeling sick and was on her way out, and she saw me and came up to say hello.”
“She left and Peter Callisher didn’t.”
“That’s right.”
“And Peter Callisher had tickets over here to give to Gemma and tickets over there to use himself, all on the same night.”
“Oh, that. Peter had friends who were supposed to come up from Boston to see the play, and they only made up their minds about a month ago, so when he got them the tickets he couldn’t get them to go with the ones he already had. Then the friends couldn’t come up after all, so there he was.”
“Anybody else?”
Kelley thought about it, long and hard, but it only made her face go as grey as her name. She didn’t come up with much.
“I saw Candy George’s husband Reggie,” she said. “Candy’s the girl who plays Mary. And I saw Stu Ketchum wandering around. He operates a food stall during the intermissions. Oh, and I saw Timmy Hall. He works over at the paper. He’s here every year, too. Peter gets tickets for his whole staff, but not all on the same night. Timmy must have been with Peter.”
Gregor prodded one more time. “You didn’t have a chance to talk to any of them?” he asked.
Kelley shook her head.
“And you didn’t see anyone else? Were any of the people you did see on bad terms with Gemma Bury?”
“Nobody was on really bad terms with Gemma,” Kelley said, “because she was like I told you. Always reasonable. Of course, that meant that nobody was very close. At least—”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Kelley said.
Obviously, there was something. Gregor could tell. If he’d had the least suspicion that Kelley Grey could have been materially involved in Gemma Bury’s death, he would have pushed for it. However, he was sure she did not. She had been telling the truth about her activities during the intermission. He had seen her sitting in her seat when he’d come back with his calzone, and Franklin had reported at least one witness who’d come back early and seen her sitting there, too. After that, she’d been caught up in the returning crowds and the performance. If she’d gone clattering around then, somebody would have mentioned it.
Kelley’s face had gone from grey to green, from firmly young to sagging, in a blink. It was time to let her go home and get some rest. Gregor got to his feet and held out a hand to help Kelley to hers.
“Get out of here,” he said. “Go get some sleep. If we need to talk to you some more, we can do it in the morning.”
Two
1
TIMMY HALL WAS ONE of those fat men who seemed to be fat mostly through inertia. Peter Callisher couldn’t remember ever seeing him eat much, but he waddled and rocked and jiggled all the same. It was now eight o’clock on the morning of December 17th, and Peter was bleary-eyed and tired. It had been bad enough last night just after the body had been found, when Gregor Demarkian had been keeping everyone he could penned up in the park and Franklin Morrison had arrived with his notebook out, trying to look professional. Amanda had gone home by then, of course, but Peter had felt an obligation to stay once he realized what happened, and he’d felt an obligation to keep Timmy with him. Timmy was not only fat but stupid, and like all stupid people he panicked. Being part of a police investigation made him paranoid and petrified and threatened to send him out of control. Peter had been thinking about the paper, of course. The Bethlehem News and Mail couldn’t let a shooting death at the Nativity play go by without comment. It couldn’t even leave such a thing safely to next week’s issue. Peter didn’t believe in extras or special editions or sixty-four point type. He’d left all that behind him in the city—and the Times had never gone in for that kind of sensationalism anyway. This was not the city, and for just that reason Peter found he was going to have to take it much more solemnly than he wanted to. His first line of offense had run into snags. Timmy had been so agitated, Peter had had a hard time paying attention to what was going on around him. If he had had to write an eyewitness account of what had gone on during the first hours of the investigation himself, it would have been a flop. Fortunately, he had snagged old Mrs. Johnson, th
e English teacher at the high school, just as she was getting ready to leave. She was in the cast as he couldn’t remember who. The bright look in her eyes told Peter that she had seen and heard everything there was to see and hear. Memory told Peter she would be able to write it accurately, succinctly and with a certain amount of verve. It hadn’t even surprised him when she had agreed to come back to the newspaper offices with him, or that she’d been so matter-of-factly efficient writing it all down at a typewriter in the middle of the big ground-floor room. Competent. That’s what she had always been. Competent. After a couple of hours dealing with Timmy in crisis, she was a relief.
Actually, old Mrs. Johnson had been a relief from what Peter had had to deal with in Amanda, too, although he had had to admit that that might have been partially his fault. He had come storming across from the park, determined to get his first—and, he hoped, only—extra edition ever mocked up and ready for the printers before dawn, and come pounding into the building like a crew of firemen looking for the source of the blaze. He had forgotten that Amanda had not simply gone home early, but gone home sick. He had forgotten that she was very likely to be asleep. He had forgotten how crazy she got when she was abruptly woken by loud noises or a hand on her shoulder. Peter thought of Amanda as one of the better things to have happened to him since he got back to Bethlehem. She was the lover he could never have found in the city, because the women he knew in the city were all too tense. Amanda was tense, too, but not in the same way. Maybe that was because she really wasn’t all that interested in working on a newspaper. Back in the city, all the women Peter knew were reporters. In the Middle East, they had been reporters or whores. It was enough to drive any sane man to a hermitage. Then there was Amanda, who would have been perfect, except that she had one or two quirks. One of those quirks was that she jumped out of bed and screamed when she was awakened abruptly. One of the others was that she nagged him about it for hours afterward. Peter had put up with that last night because it was all so damned important. Right after he’d found Mrs. Johnson, he’d dumped Timmy on her and gotten as close to the scene as possible. He’d seen them wrapping Gemma Bury up on a stretcher and covering the place in her bright orange coat where the blood showed. That was at least one thing Peter could attest to for himself. Gemma Bury had been wearing her much-too-expensive, Boston-bought, high-fashion tangerine orange coat, and it had hidden her death for at least an hour. Peter liked the sound of that. It had overtones of divine retribution.
