Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  “Who?”

  “Tibor.”

  “I see Tibor,” Gregor said.

  Tibor was sitting in a wingback chair, his legs planted firmly apart, his nose stuck in a magazine. Gregor thought it was Soldier of Fortune, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Bennis tugged at Gregor’s sleeve. “Look at the floor,” she hissed. “Bags. Big brown paper bags. He’s got food with him again.”

  “I thought you were hungry.”

  “I am hungry. I can’t stand this, Gregor. I can’t go through this one more minute.”

  “You can’t go through Father Tibor thinking you ought to have something to eat? You’re going to have to move off Cavanaugh Street. You’re going to have to move to Mars.”

  “Never mind,” Bennis told him. “I’m getting out of here. And if he asks, you haven’t seen me.”

  “We are all attending the performance of the play tonight.”

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

  She whirled away and started hurrying in the direction of the back stairs, a very inefficient way to go, but the only one that did not require her to pass so close to the fireplace that she might be seen. Gregor watched her retreat with a certain amount of resignation. Relationships among the people who lived on Cavanaugh Street got so damned complicated. Gregor crossed the rest of the lobby and went up to Tibor’s chair.

  “I’m back,” he said. “Are you sitting there waiting for me?”

  Tibor looked up from his reading. It was most certainly Soldier of Fortune. Tibor was reading an article on mercenary operations in Central America. He closed the magazine and put it down on his lap.

  “Hello, Krekor,” he said. “If I was waiting for you only, I would have waited in the room. I am here now keeping this young lady company while we both wait for you.”

  “Which young lady?” Gregor asked.

  “Me.”

  The voice came from the other side of the fireplace, from what was Gregor’s back. He turned and saw a young woman putting down a magazine of her own, and not one he would have guessed she’d have much interest in.

  The magazine was Good Housekeeping, and the young woman was Kelley Grey.

  Four

  1

  LATE LAST NIGHT, WHEN they had all come in half frozen from the park and been wandering back and forth across the corridor that divided Gregor and Tibor’s suite from Bennis’s room, Bennis had said a very odd thing. “Kelley Grey,” she had said, “is the kind of woman some other women want to mother.” It had been a throwaway line, nothing to do with the case, and Gregor hadn’t pursued the topic. Bennis had had a copy of something called The Medical Miracle Metabolism Diet in the pocket of her robe. Tibor had been staring at it. It was all Gregor had been able to do to get Tibor to bed and Bennis safely behind her own door before Tibor had an outburst. Or a lecture. Or whatever it was, Tibor was eager to have at Bennis and get it over with. Bennis could have said anything she wanted to about anybody at all. She could have claimed that Queen Elizabeth I was a Rastafarian. Gregor wouldn’t have listened to her. Now he was sorry he hadn’t paid at least a little attention. Bennis often made him exasperated—and she could be a royal pain in the rear in more ways than one—but she was an intelligent judge of the characters of women. What she said usually had some truth in it. Meeting Kelley Grey in the park, Gregor wouldn’t have said she was capable of eliciting maternal feelings from anyone. She seemed to be a thoroughly cold, sullen and hostile person. Now… now…

  Gregor didn’t know what it was about now. Kelley Grey was changed. He just couldn’t explain it. For one thing, she didn’t look sullen, but determined, if a little nervous. For another, she had a bright red silk scarf draped around her neck. She was still plain—she would always be plain—but at least she didn’t look dull at the same time. To be honest, though, he had to go back to attitude. Kelley Grey seemed to have undergone a sea change in the hours since he had last seen her. Underneath the nervousness and the diffidence and the trace of fear, Gregor thought he could smell exhilaration.

  Tibor had come up behind him and interposed himself in the open space right in front of the fireplace. He looked small and determined and out-of-time in his plain black cassock, but also very benevolent. He nodded at Kelley Grey and said, “I had come downstairs to wait, Krekor, and they were turning her away at the desk. I couldn’t let them turn her away at the desk.”

  “Of course not,” Gregor said.

  “I couldn’t have stayed much longer,” Kelley said. “I’ve got to be over at the play before it starts. I’m riding shotgun.”

  “What?” Gregor said.

  “I’m going upstairs,” Tibor said. “I have been in Bennis’s room, Krekor, to leave her a box of cupcakes I bought at the bakery, chocolate with chocolate icing, her favorite. And I have found another one, Krekor.”

  “Found another one what?” Kelley Grey asked.

  “Diet book,” Tibor said ominously. “This is The Sugar Addict’s No Willpower Weight Loss Plan. It will ruin her teeth on top of everything else, Krekor.”

  “I’ve tried that one,” Kelley Grey said. “It’s a good one. You don’t lose much weight, but you get to eat buttercream frosting three times a day.”

  “Buttercream frosting?” Gregor was bewildered.

  Tibor backed away. “I am going up now, Krekor,” he said. “I am bringing her a ham sandwich from the Village Restaurant and a bag of potato chips. I am going to put a stop to this.”

  “He’s been talking about putting a stop to it the whole time I’ve been here,” Kelley said, watching Tibor as he hurried away. “I wonder why.”

  “Our friend doesn’t need to lose any weight,” Gregor explained.

  Kelley looked blank. “What does that have to do with it? I mean, everybody’s on a diet all the time now, aren’t they? It’s a kind of entertainment. Like miniature golf or something.”

  “Right,” Gregor said.

  Kelley turned around, looked back at her chair, frowned and then brightened. “I thought I’d lost it,” she said, leaning over and extracting something from the space between the cushions and the chair’s arm, “but I didn’t. Here it is. I came to bring you this.”

  She handed over a manila envelope and stepped back, waiting politely. Gregor opened the envelope and pulled out a thick sheaf of manuscript. It had the impeccable printed look of something typed by a first-class computer printer. “BORN IN BLOOD,” the title page said. “A Book About Children Who Kill. By Patricia Feld Verek.” Gregor said “mmm,” softly to himself, and pushed the manuscript back into the envelope.

  Kelley was looking at him anxiously. “It isn’t one of a kind,” she explained. “I wasn’t paying much attention at the time, you know, but from what I understood, there were several of these things wandering around. And Tisha had a contract, so there’s an editor in New York with a copy of this, and Tisha’s agent had a copy of it, too.”

  Gregor considered this. “Tisha Verek gave this to you?”

  “Oh, no,” Kelley said. “Of course not. She gave it to Gemma.”

  “And Gemma kept it,” Gregor said.

  Kelley Grey shrugged. “She kept it in the wall safe in her office at the rectory. It was silly to do it, you know, because like I said, it’s not the only copy. Although it may be the only copy in town. I’m not sure. Anyway, Gemma said keeping it in the safe was symbolic. That the material in it was so explosive, it had to be locked up.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said again. “Did she tell you what was in it that would be so explosive?”

  “No.” Kelley hesitated. “The thing is, I don’t think whatever it was had something directly to do with anybody in town. I’m putting that badly. It might have had something to do with somebody in town, but that wasn’t the point of it, that wasn’t what would cause the trouble. Gemma said that the people people are connected to are just as important as the people themselves and that this would really blow the town apart, considering who it would upset. I’m really not doing
this very well at all.”

  Gregor was about to say “mmm” for the third time and decided against it. Instead, he motioned Kelley to sit down again and waited politely until she was seated, then drew up the chair Tibor had been sitting in until he could sit close enough to Kelley so they wouldn’t have to raise their voices to talk. “Do you have any idea what’s in this thing?” he asked. “Have you read it?”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve read it,” Kelley told him. “I made a point of it this morning. It’s awful stuff, really.”

  “Do you mean the contents are awful or that it’s badly written?”

  “I mean the contents are awful,” Kelley said. “All these children and not many of them really sane. I mean, every once in a while there would be one of them who killed in simple self-defense, but mostly they were so calculating. And so deliberate.”

  “Did you read anything you thought might refer to anyone you know in town?”

  “Well,” Kelley said, “I did pay attention to all that stuff about Tommy Hare. There’s been a rumor around—a rumor Tisha started, by the way—that Timmy Hall who works at the News and Mail is really Tommy Hare who killed all those people in the swimming pool. But I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think the dates are right, for one thing. And Timmy—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, for one thing, it just doesn’t seem like his kind of thing. He wouldn’t go sneaking around with a cattle prod or whatever. He’d just pull back his fist and punch. He’s not a planner, if you see what I mean.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “I see what you mean. I’ve met him. And I agree with you.”

  “The other thing is that I don’t think it would matter if it was true,” Kelley said. “To the town, I mean. Gemma kept saying there was something in here that would ‘blow the lid off everything,’ by which she explained that she meant that someone important in town would be so upset by the revelation that he or she would do something drastic if it ever came out. Well, nobody would do anything drastic if something damaging came out about Timmy Hall. At least, nobody important would. Amanda Ballard treats him like he’s her own child—and no, I don’t think he is; he’s too old and she’s too young—but she isn’t anybody important. She’s just Peter Callisher’s mistress.”

  “Is Peter Callisher important?”

  “Yes,” Kelley said slowly. “But if something happened to Timmy, he’d be sorry to see Amanda hurt but he wouldn’t be sorry for Timmy. I don’t think he likes Timmy.”

  “Not much of anybody seems to like Timmy,” Gregor said.

  Kelley Grey sighed. “We can’t all be saints like Amanda. I mean, not that I know her that well, but she must have something I don’t, to be able to deal with retarded people the way she does. She used to work with them, you know.”

  “Did she?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard. Before she came here and got involved with Peter Callisher. She used to know Timmy before.”

  “Then I take it you wouldn’t consider Amanda herself a candidate for being one of Tisha Verek’s child murderers?”

  “Oh, no.” Kelley was shocked. “She’s so gentle and—and calm. If I had to pick someone in town to have been a killer as a child, it would definitely be someone like Sharon Morrissey. She’s gentle and calm on the outside, but she has a temper on her, I’ve seen it.”

  “Often?”

  “No, no. Not often.”

  “Do you really think Sharon Morrissey is—who? Kathleen Butterworth?”

  “The baby killer?” Kelley made a face. “I’m being ridiculous, aren’t I? It was just talk. Gemma and Tisha, making themselves important.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said, caught himself and then cursed himself for it. If he kept this up, he was going to sound like one of Bennis’s favorite fictional detectives. “Let me ask you a few more questions,” he said. “I would like to untangle a few relationships that seem very strange to me. Like the relationship between Gemma Bury and Tisha Verek.”

  “Well, that one’s tangled enough, all right.”

  “They were friends?”

  “Not really friends. In fact, I think they mutually despised each other. But they spent a certain amount of time together.”

  “Why? If they mutually despised each other?”

  “Because neither one of them had anybody else to talk to. I mean, they couldn’t talk to the locals, could they? Not sophisticated enough for them. And most of the other flatlanders in town are like me, college or graduate school age. We all go back to the land until someone offers us a decent position, then we heave a sigh of relief and go off to Boston or New York and tell all the people we leave behind that we just have to, in this economic climate there’s nothing to do but sell out.”

  “So there was Gemma Bury and Tisha Verek, thrown together out of necessity when they would have preferred to have been apart.”

  “Right,” Kelly said. “Sharon Morrissey and Susan Everman were more or less of the same generation, but they kept to themselves and for all Gemma’s talk about goddesses and feminism and I don’t know what else, she was very uncomfortable around lesbians. Which was maybe just as well, if you know what I mean, because Sharon and Susan are very nice and I don’t think they had much use for Gemma. Anyway, then there’s Amanda, who’s thirty-six, but she’s like a nun or something. I don’t mean physically. I mean she’s sort of ethereal. And who else was there? Nobody, I think.”

  “I can see that,” Gregor said. “Now, I have heard a rumor, a rumor you might possibly find embarrassing—”

  “You mean that Gemma and Jan-Mark Verek were having an affair.”

  “I’m beginning to think that people of your age find nothing at all embarrassing,” Gregor said.

  Kelley gave him a wry look. “I find it funny, if you want to know the truth. Not funny that Gemma and Jan-Mark were having the affair, that was pathetic. I mean funny that it was a rumor. I thought I was the only one who knew.”

  “You’re just not on the town grapevine,” Gregor said.

  “Obviously not. Well, they were definitely having one, and if you ask me, Gemma wasn’t the only extracurricular project in Jan-Mark’s life. Don’t ask me who the other one was, because I’m not sure. But you can see, you know.”

  “See what?”

  “Into the Vereks’ driveway from the third floor of the rectory,” Kelley said. “It’s the highest place in at least a six-mile radius. You can see all kinds of things. Especially from the offices on that floor.”

  “Is Gemma Bury’s office on that floor?”

  “No, it’s downstairs. My office is on that floor.”

  “Did you see anything on the day Tisha Verek was killed?”

  “I didn’t, no,” Kelley said, “but Gemma saw Tisha Verek die. I went to the bathroom for a minute, and when I came back she was leaning against the office windows, looking positively green.”

  “You went to the bathroom for a minute,” Gregor said slowly.

  Kelley looked at him curiously. “It was the middle of the morning,” she said. “There wasn’t any reason not to go. You make it sound as if I did a terrible thing.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “I don’t think you did a terrible thing.”

  The fire in the fireplace was burning down, retreating from flames into embers. He stared at it a minute, thinking, and then pushed his chair back. He was still holding the manila envelope Kelley had given him, with its thick weight of manuscript inside. He stuck it absentmindedly under his arm.

  “Well,” he said. “I have to thank you. For the package and the information.”

  “And I have to go across to the park.” Kelley stood up. “Do you think any of this will be of any use to you?”

  “I think it will be of a great deal of use.”

  “I’m glad. I didn’t like Gemma very much. Gemma was a hard woman to like. But I didn’t want her dead.”

  Gregor was going to make all the right soothing noises, to tell Kelley that she was brave and fine and wonderful, to cluck and mutter th
e way Tibor did when he got worried about one of the refugee children who had come to live on Cavanaugh Street. He never got a chance.

  He had just opened his mouth to say the first words when a clatter and crash came from the street outside, and a woman started screaming.

  2

  Gregor Demarkian did not like cases with a lot of alarms in them. He didn’t like having to jump and twist and chase. He didn’t like having to march into the middle of dangerous and unstable situations. He had done all those things in his first years with the Bureau, but the timing in that fact was important. There were Bureau agents who spent their entire careers playing cops and robbers. In the old days, they had chased bank robbers and kidnappers. In the more recent ones, they had chased drug lords. On the day after tomorrow, they would probably be chasing aliens from outer space. Gregor didn’t care. He had found his niche behind a desk. He had loved the sheer mental work required to run an investigation on a series of related murders—the sheer mental work that did not require following serial killers down dark alleys with a gun in his hand. Since taking up the investigation of murder as a hobby rather than as a profession, Gregor seemed to have lost his protection from violence. It was infuriating. In all those books Bennis was forever giving him, the police did the chasing and the fighting and the getting shot at, and the Great Detective got to sit home in a chair and cogitate. Definitely cogitate. Not think. That was the way things were.

  If Gregor had been a different man from a different generation, he might have insisted on this prerogative. He might have refused to go chasing screams when he heard them or murderers when he found them and there didn’t seem to be any other way to bring them down. He was of a generation that had been brought up to take responsibility—any responsibility, all responsibility, even when taking that responsibility made no sense of any kind whatsoever. In fact, that was what he had been given to understand was the real difference between men and women, back there in the days when people thought there were real differences between men and women. Women, Gregor Demarkian had been brought up to believe, could take responsibility or give it to their men as they chose, with no loss in status or respect. Men never could.