by Jane Haddam
“No.”
“It’s what’s said to happen to unbaptized people who die in defense of the faith. It’s the baptism of the early Christian martyrs, to be exact. It’s also an attempt to get around the Bible and the tradition, both of which are very sticky on one particular point.”
“What point is that?”
“The point that no one can enter the kingdom of heaven without having been baptized in water and the spirit. There wasn’t any New Testament as we know it at the time of the great Roman persecutions. The Catholic Bible didn’t get put together until after the Emperor Constantine made Christianity a state religion in 300-something. When it did get put together, there was that inescapable little problem of baptism, and the equally inescapable little problem of the fact that, historically, so many of the early Catholic saints hadn’t been baptized at the time they were martyred. And we’re talking about horrible martyrdoms here, people who suffered gross atrocities and refused to recant from the faith.”
“Fanatics,” Clayton said.
“Fanatics,” Gregor agreed, “but you can see what the problem is here. The Church didn’t want to say that these people must be damned. How could God possibly be just if he would condemn a man to hell who had just let his eyes be burned out of their sockets rather than declare that Christ had not risen and that the Christian religion was not true?”
“I sometimes wonder about the justice of God on a day-to-day basis. Did people really do things like that? Good Christ.”
“The historical record is difficult to verify,” Gregor said. “Remember, the winners write history, and Christians wrote what we now know about the early Church and the way the Roman Empire responded to it. By the time we get around to the age of the Church fathers, however, it doesn’t matter, because everybody believed it had happened that way, and that left the theological problem to be solved. That’s how we got the baptism of blood. Dying in defense of the faith confers baptism on the martyr whether he thought he wanted baptism or not. It doesn’t matter if he’s a believer or an unbeliever. It doesn’t matter if—”
“—if she’s a child,” Clayton said.
“Actually,” Gregor sighed, “it does matter. In cases of children below the age of reason, it’s really very complicated. We’re getting past what little I know about the subject.”
“I’m amazed at how much you know about the subject.”
“Yes, well, I have a friend who’s a priest. An Armenian priest, not a Catholic priest, although I know a few Catholic priests, too. Anyway, my friend the Armenian priest—lectures me sometimes. On the things he’s working on. He writes theology quite often.”
“And he’s lectured you on the baptism in blood.”
“It was years ago,” Gregor said, “but it stuck in my mind. Anyway, we’re talking about a fairly sophisticated concept here, and it occurs to me, just in passing, that when you go by the board in front of the Methodist Church, under the hours for services there’s a line that reads ‘Stephen Harrow, A.B., A.M., Th.D.’”
“You’re right,” Clayton Hall said. “It does.”
“I think it’s fairly common these days in a number of the mainline denominations. Getting a doctorate in theology, I mean.”
“But you can’t say that it had to be Stephen Harrow who wrote this letter,” Clayton said, “not just because he’s had a lot of schooling in theology. Henry Holborn has had a lot of schooling in theology. I may not like him, but he did go off and go to Bible college.”
“It’s not the same thing. As far as I know, baptism in blood is not a concept accepted in fundamentalist Protestantism. From what I’ve been able to see, Bible colleges of the type you’re talking about mostly teach biblical interpretation.”
“Yes, yes, they do.”
“And from what I hear,” Gregor said, “listening to the radio and the television programs, the fundamentalist churches aren’t much interested in finding excuses for why people can be saved without being baptized.”
“I think they make an exception for infants these days,” Clayton said, “but not all of them do.”
“Whatever. So far, Stephen Harrow is the only person in town connected to Bonaventura who would have known of the concept and who would have been able or likely to use it casually. And there’s one other thing to take Henry Holborn out of the picture.”
“What?”
“He was sitting in his own church at the time that Tiffany Marsh died. He was there all day. Dozens of people saw him. Unless you’re going to tell me that Henry Holborn has learned to fly through the air like Peter Pan, I think we’re both going to have to concede that he was sitting in that church on the Hartford Road the whole time the first murder was going on.”
Clayton picked up the photograph of Stephen Harrow and turned it around and around in his hands. “Christ preserve me from ever showing up in a picture like this,” he said. “Everybody on earth looks ridiculous in pictures like this.”
“Look at the background,” Gregor told him. “It’s fuzzy, but you can make it out if you try. Trees and leaves and pine needles.”
“The trees behind Bonaventura House?”
“I think so, yes.”
“They did their screwing up by the circle of stones?”
“Probably a little way off. They look like they’re actually lying under some branches, instead of directly in a clearing. I hate pictures taken with telephoto lenses, unless the lenses are the really expensive kind, and nobody goes in for those except a couple of private eyes I know and the government. Zhondra must have bought this one at her local camera shop and decided it would do.”
“It did do,” Clayton said. “It did very well. If you’re right, it managed to get her killed.”
“Oh, I don’t think it was this photograph that got her killed. I don’t think Stephen Harrow knows we have it. I don’t think he knows it even exists. No, my guess is that Zhondra got fed up with everything that was happening to her plan, and decided to try to put two and two together.”
“Right,” Clayton Hall said.
Gregor picked up the pages of the letter. They should have been more careful with it. It was sometimes possible to get fingerprints off letters. It used to be possible to match typefaces, too, but that was getting harder and harder. Everybody had daisy wheels these days. Daisy wheels were easy to destroy.
“Gregor?” Clayton Hall said.
Gregor stuffed the letter back in the envelope, and that was the end of the crime scene for him. He hung around for at least two more hours, but his mind was elsewhere, and he didn’t even listen to the questions Clayton asked the women waiting on the terrace.
2
NOW IT WAS WELL past dinnertime, and they were still stuck, sitting in the police department’s basement office, waiting for the county prosecutor to show up and let them get on with it. Jackson had gone out to get them some food. Gregor had been hoping for a timely delivery from Betsey’s diner, but Jackson had driven all the way out to the Interstate instead, and come back with bags and bags of McDonald’s. Big Macs. Supersize fries. Quarter Pounders with cheese. Vanilla milkshakes. Gregor thought of Cavanaugh Street, where the Ararat restaurant could be counted on to have big bowls of meatballs in a bulgur crust and stuffed cabbage and big flatbreads and things to dip the flatbreads into, made of chick-peas and eggplant and codfish roe. Sometimes he came home to find a bowl of yaprak sarma in his refrigerator, courtesy of Lida Arkmanian or Hannah Krekorian or one of the other women in the street who thought he was entirely incapable of taking care of himself. Somehow, he thought Jackson would not be intrigued by any of this. Still, Tibor was intrigued by all of it, and he loved McDonald’s. At least once a week, Tibor got Bennis to drive him down to the biggest McDonald’s in Philadelphia, and they sat together in a booth, with Bennis nursing a coffee and trying not to mind that she couldn’t smoke, while Tibor ate his way through several examples of the burger of the month and three Super Size boxes of fries.
Bennis.
Gregor looked around the big room. Jackson was squirreled away in one corner, eating Big Macs with a concentration most men couldn’t manage to bring to sex. Clayton Hall was sitting with his feet up on one of the desks and his eyes closed. Outside, it had finally started to get dark. Through the window well, Gregor could see the first twinkling lights of street lamps reflected on the sidewalks and the grass. Up on Cavanaugh Street, so much farther north, it would be darker.
Gregor went across the room and nudged Clayton Hall in the shoulder. “Clayton?” he said. “Are you asleep?”
Clayton Hall opened his eyes. “No, I’m not asleep. Has something happened? Have the county boys gotten here yet?”
When the county boys got there, they could wake Clayton Hall for themselves. “I’m looking for a pay phone, Clayton. Is there one anywhere in this building?”
“You don’t have to use a pay phone. You can use any of the phones in here.”
“It’s going to be a long-distance call. A very long-distance call. And it’s going to take some time in the making.”
“Then you definitely ought to use the phones in here. What do you want to pay for something like that for?”
“It’s a personal call.”
“I don’t care what it is. Long distance can put you out of pocket for weeks. I know. I’ve got a daughter who went away to college.”
Gregor thought about making the call here, in the middle of this room, with Clayton and Jackson just feet away. He thought of Bennis, hiding in her bedroom closet when she was alone in her apartment, just because she was calling her brother Christopher.
“Clayton,” Gregor said. “It’s a personal call. A personal call.”
“Oh,” Clayton said. “You mean you want to call a woman.”
“Something like that, yes.”
“I hope you’re going to call that woman they always show you with in People magazine,” Clayton said. “That’s some good-looking woman.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “Yes, she is. Where can I find—”
“You go out the door, turn right, and go up the stairs. The telephone booths are right up there through the fire door. It’s the back of the lobby. Old-fashioned booths, too. Made of wood.”
“Wonderful,” Gregor said.
“I wish I had a woman like that that I could make a phone call to.” Clayton sighed. “All I’ve got is a wife, and the woman is committed to cotton flannel and old blue jeans.”
“Bennis is committed to old blue jeans, too,” Gregor said, and then escaped before Clayton could say what men always said to a line like that: that Bennis filled hers differently. Somehow, Gregor never really thought of Bennis clearly from the neck down. She was a beautiful head with great clouds of hair and impossible eyes floating around, discorporeally, in space.
The hall was dark. When Gregor got to the end of the part of it he had been walking down, he stopped and felt for a light switch that wasn’t there. Then his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw a pair of fire doors with a stairwell behind them. He opened these and searched around for a light switch again. This time he was luckier. There was a whole bank of switches along one wall. He turned them all on at once, and a second later the fluorescent panels in the ceiling over the stairway began to flicker. Suddenly, Gregor knew what this building reminded him of. It was the elementary school he had gone to in Philadelphia, just a few blocks off Cavanaugh Street, all the years he had been growing up. That had been a brick building, too, with very high ceilings and the smell of disinfectant and wood polish in the air. They had torn that school down years ago and built one that wasn’t much better. The new one was old itself and half destroyed. Nobody sent their children there if they didn’t have to.
I’m doing it again, Gregor told himself as he climbed the stairs. It’s as if I got caught in a time warp, and I’m finding it harder and harder to climb out. But it had been better now for a while—Gregor couldn’t quite pinpoint how long a while. It had been much better.
At the top of the stairs, he went through another set of fire doors and found himself, as Clayton had said he would, at the back of the lobby. The booths were right there, made of heavy blond wood that had been polished so often they looked slick. Gregor went into the first of these and sat down on the little cushioned seat. The booth might be old fashioned, but the phone wasn’t. The phone company had replaced the rotary instrument that must have occupied the booth in the beginning with a brand new touch-tone model. Gregor fed a quarter into it and dialed first AT&T and then his calling card number. It was incredible how many numbers you had to hold in your head these days, and how little time you spent talking to actual people. Bennis sometimes complained to him about what she called the “virtual universe.”
The phone was ringing on Cavanaugh Street. Gregor wondered suddenly if Bennis would be out, off at the Ararat, up in Donna Moradanyan’s apartment, taking care of Donna’s son Tommy while Donna and Russ found some time for themselves. Sometimes, when Bennis was working, she just didn’t answer the phone.
Bennis answered the phone. “Hello?” she said, sounding distracted. Then she turned away from the receiver and coughed. Gregor knew she had turned away, because the cough sounded like a hiccup instead of an explosion. “Hello?”
“I’m surprised to find you home,” Gregor said. “I thought you’d be down at the Ararat, at least.”
“That’s what you said the last time you called. I am going to the Ararat in a few minutes. I’m meeting Tibor there. You sound better.”
“I feel better.”
“Is it because of all this stuff with Zhondra Meyer? I saw it on the news, you know, it’s been all over everything. They said she left a note and confessed to all the murders.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “there’s a note confessing to the murders of Tiffany Marsh and Carol Littleton, that’s true enough.”
“I take it it wasn’t Zhondra Meyer’s note.”
“It’s a complicated situation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before. I’ve read about things like this, but I haven’t seen them.”
“But is the case over?” Bennis asked. “Will you be able to catch whoever did it? What’s going on down there?”
“I know who did it,” Gregor said, “in every possible sense in which I can use that phrase. I’m sorry if I’m obscure, Bennis: It really is a very complicated situation. I can’t explain it in the terms I usually use to explain these things in.”
“You’re not saying anything about being able to catch the murderer,” Bennis said. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s like that thing with the Hazzards: You know who but you’re not sure if you can do anything about it:”
“It’s not that simple, Bennis. It really isn’t. And it’s not what I called to talk to you about. I called to talk to you about you.”
“Me?”
Gregor had forgotten how uncomfortable these old phone booths were. Everybody complained about the new little stalls where there was no place to sit. They forgot how confining the old phone booths were and how hard the seats were that you had to sit on—even the seats like this, that had cushions. Gregor readjusted himself in the booth, putting one foot on the wall under the phone to keep himself propped up, and felt ridiculous. Teenagers sat like this, when they were trying to get up the courage to do something they were afraid of.
“I’ve been thinking about that musician or whatever he was,” Gregor said, “the one in California.”
“That was months ago,” Bennis said quickly.
“It lasted a matter of days. Do you know you do that a lot?”
On the other end of the line, there was the sound of Bennis striking a match, then the sound of Bennis exhaling. “Gregor, if you want to give me some kind of lecture on the way I run my social life, you don’t have to because Tibor already—”
“Do you know that the only long-term commitment you’ve ever made to a man was before I knew you?”
; “You must have been drinking.”
“You were living with that man Michael What’s-his-name, the Greek, in Boston, before your father died and you moved back to Philadelphia. That was the year we met. Do you remember?”
“I remember how we met, Gregor. I’m never likely to forget it.”
“Between that time and this, you haven’t had a single long-term relationship. Not one.”
“I haven’t met anybody I wanted to have a long-term relationship with.”
“You haven’t met anybody you wanted to go on seeing for longer than two weeks.”
“Two weeks is as long as it makes sense to give most of the men I’ve known in my life,” Bennis said, “and that includes the Michael I was living with in Boston, who turned out to be a world-class Greek-American son of a bitch. Gregor, what the hell is this all about?”
“I think you do it on purpose.”
“What?”
“I think you go out with these—nuts—that you find, these—crazy people—because it’s your way of making sure that you don’t end up committed to something or somebody because you don’t really want to be committed to something or somebody.”
“Wonderful,” Bennis said. “When did you take up pop psychology, Gregor? What comes next? An exploration of the ramification of the position of Saturn in my astrological sign?”
“What I do,” Gregor continued, “is keep myself married to Elizabeth. It’s been—I don’t know how many years anymore, it’s been so long—but I’m still married to Elizabeth.”
There was quiet now on the other end of the line, and smoking, the deliberate inhaling and exhaling of breath. Gregor was surprised to realize that he was having a hard time breathing himself. He felt like Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, ready to go over a cliff.
Bennis inhaled again. Then she exhaled again. Then she said, “You know, Gregor, this is all very interesting, but do you really think you know what you’re doing?”
“Yes,” Gregor answered. “I really think I do.”
