Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  “People in town say her husband beats her,” Gemma Bury broke in pleasantly. “It’s terrible what goes on in places like this. It’s the ultimate American disease.”

  Tibor glared at her and began to tromp off across the bleachers in search of a bathroom or some peace and quiet. Losing him in the crowd, Gregor followed Bennis onto Main Street and picked up a sausage-and-cheese calzone from a truck that said “Gus Petrakis’s Mother’s Greek-Italian Cooking.” There was another truck across the street that said “Eat the Healthful Chinese Way.” Both trucks had plastic Christmas bells and drummer boys and colored packages strung up around their open serving windows. Gregor wondered where they came from. Biting into the calzone, Gregor sent up a prayer that Gus Petrakis’s mother delivered to the Green Mountain Inn, or was at least close enough to walk to from there. It was the first decent food he’d had since getting to Vermont.

  Back at their seats, Gregor rearranged things so that Tibor was farther away from Gemma Bury than he had been, mixing things up so that Gregor ended up next to Gemma himself. Gemma smiled at him and gestured toward the park, where a thin blonde woman was walking away, tugging at her hair as she went. Gregor thought she would have looked like Alice in Wonderland if it hadn’t been for the odd stunting of her right ear.

  “Amanda Ballard,” Gemma said pleasantly. “Peter Callisher’s lady friend. Do you know Peter Callisher?”

  Gregor only knew of Peter Callisher, so he made a strangled noise and looked apprehensively at Tibor, who was glaring at them. Tibor had come back to the bleachers with a hand full of knishes, and as the lights began to dim again, he shoved them into Bennis’s lap.

  “These are kosher, Bennis, you should try them. When He was alive in Palestine, in Israel, I don’t know what to call it, when He was alive the Christ Himself would have eaten food that was kosher.”

  “The Christ Himself would have been hungry,” Bennis told him.

  “Shh,” Gregor said.

  And, remarkably, they did shush, both of them, for the time being, so that Gregor was able to lose himself once again in Mary and the story of her pregnancy. Before this, he wouldn’t have said a pregnancy could have been so interesting, unless it was being undergone by his own wife carrying his own child, and Elizabeth had been dead now for over four years. Even if she had been alive, she would have been in her fifties. Did they have the technology to produce pregnancies in fifty-year-old women these days? Did fifty-year-old women want to have pregnancies produced in themselves? Sometimes Gregor got thoroughly tired of the twentieth century. It was so damned confusing.

  He did not get thoroughly tired of the play, which took the story only to the wedding of Mary and Joseph, long before they knew they would have to go to Bethlehem for the census. It ought to have been interminable, but it was not, because whoever had written the script had turned the story into one about the hiding of an untimely pregnancy in a harsh and unforgiving world. The wedding came as a relief in the way that the cavalry came as a relief at the end of John Wayne movies. For a while, you almost thought it wasn’t going to work out.

  When the lights went up again, Gregor stood and stretched and grinned and decided this had not been such a bad idea after all. Then, thinking that he could have been more gracious, and besides it was Christmas, he turned to say something nice to Gemma Bury, in spite of how Tibor was inevitably going to feel about it. He leaned over, tapped her on the shoulder of her tangerine orange coat and said, “It’s a magnificent production, isn’t it? Entirely remarkable.”

  That was when Gemma Bury slid sideways, into Kelley Grey’s uninviting lap, and her head fell back across Kelley’s knees and onto the bench on the other side. At that moment it was all clearly visible.

  The wound in the shoulder, half-hidden by the thickness and the color of the coat.

  The wound in the throat.

  Gemma Bury was dead.

  Part Two

  But in the dark night shineth

  The everlasting light…

  One

  1

  LATER, THEY WORKED OUT how it could have happened—how she could have sat there for nearly an hour, with nobody knowing she was dead. That it had been almost an hour was something Gregor was sure of from the moment he had discovered the death. Each act of the Bethlehem Nativity play took exactly fifty minutes, with that long twenty-minute break in between. Gregor knew Gemma Bury had been alive for at least part of the intermission. He had spoken to her and she had spoken back when he and Bennis returned to their seats after he’d bought his calzone. Gregor also knew Gemma could not have been killed during the second act of the play. The play had been absorbing, but nothing could be that absorbing, not to him, not after twenty years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If he had been sitting in his bleacher seat, staring straight ahead at the performance going on in the gazebo, in relative quiet, with nothing going on to distract him, he would at least have felt the impact. Bodies hit by bullets shudder and jump, even if death is so close to instantaneous that the dying makes no noise. Gregor had felt that shudder and jump three times in his life—once when he was in the army, twice when he was on kidnapping detail for the Bureau. There was nothing on earth like it. He would have recognized the feeling in his sleep.

  As for the sound of the gun, that was an easier thing. Gregor suspected they would find the remains of a homemade silencer somewhere, meaning a raw potato that had been stuck at the open end of the barrel of the gun—or maybe rifle, in this case. A raw potato was a dangerous silencer to use, because guns as often blew up as had their noise muffled by the method, but if you were in a hurry or didn’t want to call attention to yourself, it was the kind of thing you might decide was worth the making do. If the killing had occurred when Gregor thought it had, that would have made it easier, too. The park was anything but quiet during intermissions. Even a minute or two after the lights were dimmed, there was noise: talking, giggling, rustling, shushing. Before the lights were dimmed, Christmas carols played loudly and enthusiastically from the loudspeakers. The sound made by a small-caliber gun—or a small-caliber rifle—would have been negligible. Gregor gave a long thoughtful look to the tall stand of evergreen bushes near the animal corridor and then returned his attention to Gemma Bury.

  The reason Gemma hadn’t fallen over was that she had been propped up by her large canvas tote bag, occupying the stretch of bench directly between Gregor and herself. Her back had been resting against the edge of the bleacher behind her, forcing the two women back there to do their best not to smash their knees into her head. At least, that was what the two women said when Franklin Morrison questioned them, as he questioned everybody in the immediate vicinity, as soon as he arrived at the scene. Gregor was impressed. The Bethlehem Nativity Celebration was important to the town. Everybody had been telling him that since he got here, and before. Gregor thought any other small-town cop would have done his best to cover up and tone down—to hustle the tourists out, to hide the fact that a murder had been committed, to do everything possible not to upset the paying customers. Instead, Franklin had gotten his Mobile Crime Unit and his regular deputy and his three special deputies and the Dempsey boy from MIT and had gone to work.

  The Dempsey boy from MIT was, in fact, Asian. His name had originally been something Franklin couldn’t remember, but his parents had changed it as soon as they’d come to the United States from Cambodia. The Dempsey boy was sixteen years old, more American than Mickey Mouse, and the single most intelligent human being Gregor had ever met. Gregor Demarkian was not subject to many cultural stereotypes, except about Armenians, which, because he was an Armenian-American, didn’t count. He had known dozens of Asian men and women in his career, and he knew they were not all cookie-cutter academic achievement clones. Quite a few of them had been gangsters in the old-fashioned use of the term. Quite a few others had been drug lords. A fair number of prostitutes. This one might have been the prototype from which the myth of Asian intelligence had been manufactured. He liked to be c
alled Demp. That was because his real name was Jack.

  “My father did it on purpose,” he had told Gregor this afternoon, soon after they had been introduced. “My father said Jack Dempsey was a great fighter and if I had his name I would be a great fighter, too. He said I was going to need it. I love the old man, but if you want to know the truth, I think all that refugeeing made him cracked.”

  Now he moved carefully through the snow-encrusted grass under the bleachers, looking for spent bullets and calling up to Gregor as he went. Franklin was in the middle of the park, talking to more people. Bennis and Tibor were sitting with Kelley Grey only a few feet away. In the sky, the stars looked bright and hard and hostile. Eternity looked black.

  “I’m looking for twenty-twos,” Demp called up, “because anything much bigger than that would have caused a lot of damage to the body and probably done some damage to the bleachers or the ground or the tent as well. That’s the thing about bullets. You don’t need a big caliber to kill a man—or woman either, of course—but it’s a lot harder to do any kind of serious physical damage. I mean—”

  “I know what you mean,” Gregor said. “Tell me about trajectory. Can you figure out where the bullets came from, once you find them?”

  “I can try. Wait. No. That’s a marble. There must have been some kid in about the fifth row spilling marbles out of his pocket. Anyway, yeah, I can probably work that out for you if I get a little help—and when the staties get here, they’ll try it, too—but I think what you were saying before was right. I think it had to be sometime in the intermission before the seats were all filled up again. Either that, or whoever’s doing the shooting is really nuts.”

  “Of course whoever’s doing the shooting is really nuts,” Franklin Morrison said, coming up out of nowhere. “What the hell else could he be?”

  “Nuts and lucky,” Gregor told him, moving aside to give the chief room to sit down. “Whoever it was could have fired into the crowd meaning to get Gemma Bury or somebody else and gotten only Gemma Bury—could have just by accident not managed to hit any innocent bystanders.”

  “Nobody is that lucky,” Franklin Morrison objected. “And nobody is that good, either. You never know what a bullet is going to do once it gets inside a body. I don’t care what kind of killing-machine dream hit men show up in the latest spy-for-hire movies. There isn’t a man on earth who could put a bullet into someone and know for a certainty it wasn’t going to hit a stray bone or not hit anything and come out the other end and kill a passing dog.”

  “Have you talked to everybody?” Gregor asked him.

  Franklin nodded glumly and looked back out into the middle of the park, still surrounded by tented bleachers. Out on Main Street, the church clocks were ticking toward midnight. Gregor didn’t think there was far to go.

  “Nobody heard anything,” Franklin told him, “and nobody saw anything, either, and nobody is going to, if you ask me. I suppose they’re all telling the truth to an extent. I can’t believe anybody would have seen somebody aiming a firearm across the park and not done anything about it or said anything about it or anything else. I can’t believe she sat there dead for so long and you didn’t notice, but there it is. You’re sure that’s how it happened?”

  “It has to be how it happened,” Gregor repeated, “both because of what I told you before—I really would have noticed, during the play—and because of what we’ve just been talking about. Nobody is that good or that lucky. If the bullet didn’t exit from the body and hit something or somebody else, especially somebody else, the chances are there wasn’t anybody to hit. Bennis and Tibor and I were talking about knishes just before the lights went down. It had to have happened then.”

  “There weren’t people on the bleachers behind you then?”

  “Not many,” Gregor said, “and not those two women. People wander back late. You know how it is.”

  “I know how it is. The actors hate it.”

  “I can just imagine.”

  “Got one,” Demp said from underneath them. His hand snaked up through the slats and he felt around for his black leather instrument case. It looked like a doctor’s bag, but not quite, so that it gave Gregor the uneasy feeling that it had been designed for a quack. He picked it up and put it in Demp’s hand.

  “Thanks,” Demp said.

  Franklin Morrison looked glum. “Whoever it was took an awful chance, even so. It’s like he didn’t care. You know it’s got to be somebody in town. You know it does—”

  Gregor frowned. “The first two happened on the first day of the Celebration. I don’t know if you can rule out a stranger yet.”

  “I can rule out a stranger,” Franklin said grimly. “This is the third one looks just the same and everybody dead has been somebody in town—”

  “Tisha Verek wasn’t from town,” Gregor said.

  “No,” Franklin admitted, “and Gemma wasn’t, either, but she was an Episcopal priest. I mean, no matter how nuts the Episcopalians have gotten lately, a priest is still a priest. Although I got to say, I like your priest a lot better than I liked Gemma. Anyway. Dinah Ketchum was from town. Never in her life been out of it except to go shopping downstate or to have her gallbladder removed over to Mary Hitchcock in New Hampshire. Nobody would have wanted Dinah Ketchum dead if they weren’t from town.”

  “Maybe nobody did,” Gregor said. “Maybe that much of the local speculation is right. Maybe Tisha Verek was deliberately killed—and now Gemma Bury, too—but Dinah Ketchum’s death was the result of an accident.”

  “Tisha Verek was killed with Stuart Ketchum’s gun,” Franklin said.

  “Stuart Ketchum’s guns are in the back of his farmhouse in a room open to anyone who wants to walk in,” Gregor told him.

  Franklin gave Gregor a fishy look. “Do you really believe all this horse manure?”

  Gregor sighed. “No, of course I don’t,” he said. “And I’m talking through my hat, anyway, because all I know is what you’ve told me and what I read in the paper, which isn’t much. I haven’t really seen anything for myself except for what Demp showed me this afternoon, and I’ve already told you how bad I am with forensic evidence. I’m just trying to work it out logically. You’re going to have to call the state police in eventually—”

  “Maybe I’ll skip it.”

  “—and I want you to have your arguments ready. Actually, what I really want to do is go over and talk to Kelley Grey. Tibor’s been trying to stuff her full of food for more than an hour now and she’s probably ready to scream. Besides, there are a few things I’d like to talk to her about.”

  “I’ve already talked to her,” Franklin said.

  “I know. Now I want to talk to her myself.”

  Franklin gave Gregor a long and suspicious look—unjustifiably, Gregor thought, since it had been Franklin’s idea to bring Gregor into this mess to begin with—but when Gregor stood up Franklin didn’t try to stop him. Gregor had lost his gloves, he didn’t know where. He was always losing his gloves. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down the bleachers at Bennis and Tibor and Kelley Grey.

  “I think,” he said, very slowly and very calmly, because he didn’t want to drop a bomb on Franklin Morrison’s head just moments before he walked away, “that what we’d better do right now is concentrate on motive. I mean, we had better hope there is a motive. Because if there isn’t a motive, by which I mean a motive in the ordinary sense—”

  “Oh, hell,” Franklin Morrison said.

  “I’m bringing it up,” Demp said. “Hey, Franklin. Guess what. It’s a .22-caliber bullet for a Browning.”

  “A Browning,” Franklin marvelled. “Oh, double shit.”

  2

  From the moment they had first met, Gregor Demarkian had had trouble focusing on Kelley Grey. There was something about the young woman that slipped away from him, something inside her that seemed to will itself into invisibility. It wasn’t her plainness. One of the most arresting women Gregor had ever met had cheerfully called
herself “plain as sin” and been accurate in her assessment, but she’d been one of those women you couldn’t take your eyes off nevertheless, and she had never walked into a room and sunk into the woodwork. Kelley Grey was a woodwork inhabitant, an occupant of the fringes, and with the attitude she seemed to be taking to everything, Gregor thought she’d be living on the outside for a long time. He reminded himself that he knew nothing about her attitude in general, on a day-to-day basis. This might have been a night when she was angry at Gemma Bury or upset about something personal he couldn’t begin to guess. He watched her with Bennis and Tibor as he came down the bleachers and couldn’t make up his mind. Kelley Grey wasn’t behaving like one thing or another. She wasn’t behaving at all. She was just sitting there, watching, while Bennis and Tibor talked to each other.

  Out across the park at the gazebo, the movements had changed, the flow of traffic had switched directions. Franklin Morrison’s deputies were bringing their investigations to a close, at least temporarily. Someone—Gregor hoped it was Franklin—had given the stage hands permission to strike the set. The three donkeys that had served for verisimilitude were already gone. Gregor supposed permission for them to leave had been given early, on the assumption that there was no point in subjecting a lot of innocent animals to cold and wind to no good purpose.

  Gregor picked up the brown paper bag Tibor had brought back to the second act full of knishes and carried it down the bleachers to where the three of them were sitting, not far away but huddled together, in spite of the fact that the bleachers were still more than warm. Nobody had turned off the space heaters in this section. Nobody looked likely to any time soon. Gregor didn’t even know where his coat was.

  Gregor reached Bennis and Tibor and Kelley Grey by coming up behind Tibor’s back. He could see the side of Bennis’s face but not the look in her eyes. He could hear Tibor talking in that low, oddly cadenced voice of his, so altered by so many different accents it now sounded all-purpose “foreign,” rather than of any particular ethnic variation.