Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  Later, Gregor would think that everything would have been all right if he had only been faster—faster in picking up what Bennis was saying; faster in doing something about it; faster in getting himself out the door. Instead, he stood for a long moment in the doorway to the kitchen watching the light on Bennis’s hair. Bennis had truly remarkable hair, as thick as Gregor could ever remember seeing on anybody, and black, and oddly floaty, as if it were a cloud around her head. He’d never paid all that much attention to Bennis’s appearance, except when they’d first met, and in that case she’d been a suspect in something, so he had to. But once he had gotten to know her, he had come to think of what she looked like as what she looked like, just that—not particularly attractive or unattractive, not particularly common or unusual. She was Bennis, and the things that were most important about her were on the inside. That included the things he had come to love, and the things he considered sufficient grounds for a plea of justifiable homicide.

  This morning, all the things on the inside were being washed away by the way the sunlight backlit her hair from the kitchen window, and the way her green eyes shined. Ridiculously high intelligence, killer education, rich-girl Main Line upbringing, mass of neuroses from all of the above—all of these things were less striking to Gregor Demarkian than those green eyes. It was the sort of thing he wouldn’t have said out loud to anybody, even Tibor. He knew better.

  Bennis was sitting with her legs folded under her on a kitchen chair. Her head was tilted. She had a very odd look on her face. “Are you all right?” she said. “Didn’t you get enough sleep? I deliberately didn’t wake you.”

  “I’m fine,” Gregor said.

  “Well, I don’t know if you heard me, but John called. He sounded very worked up about something. He said he’d left word with what’s-her-name that you’re to be shown right in any time you show up. It’s about the monkey trial.”

  “What?”

  Bennis sighed. “The monkey trial,” she said, moving papers around on the table. All the papers had to do with planning the wedding. Gregor knew that. There was a part of him that was deeply and truly frightened of the plans for the wedding. “Even I know about the monkey trial, Gregor. Place a little north of here called Snow Hill got themselves one of those stealth school boards—”

  “What?”

  “Stealth school boards,” Bennis said patiently. “You know, they run on one issue but what they’re really interested in is getting creationism into the science curriculum. This place got one of those, and they put a policy in place last summer that—I’m not sure what it did, exactly. Put ‘intelligent design’ in the curriculum, or something like that. I haven’t been following it all that much, except in the last couple of weeks, because of Annie-Vic. I told you about Annie-Vic, Gregor. I told you about her right in this kitchen. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  There was coffee on the stove. This would be Bennis’s coffee, not Tibor’s, so it would be drinkable. Bennis always made coffee for him, even if she was drinking tea. Gregor headed for the stove and got a coffee mug out of the cabinet on his way.

  “Maybe I’m not awake,” he said. “Who’s Annie-Vic?”

  “Ann-Victoria Hadley, Vassar class of ’thirty-seven. I did tell you about her, Gregor. She’s a kind of force of nature. She’s over ninety, but she still delivers meals on wheels. Probably to people who are younger than she is. She sued the AAVC about a year and a half ago—”

  “The AAVC?”

  “The college alumnae association,” Bennis said. Now she sounded more than patient. She sounded as if she were talking to a child. “They run trips, you know, for alumnae. They were running one to Mongolia to see a total eclipse of the sun, and they refused to let her sign on to it, because they said she wasn’t in good enough physical shape. Anyway, she said her physical shape was fine and they were just indulging in age discrimination, and she sued them. She won, too. Wrote a big picture article about it for the Vassar Quarterly. There was one picture with her arms around a couple of yaks.”

  The coffee was good, and it was having the kind of effect it was supposed to have. Gregor did remember something of a conversation about an old lady with yaks. Bennis’s face was still as close to perfect as he had ever seen a woman’s face be, and she still didn’t have crow’s feet. That had to be genetic. She was forty-something.

  “Gregor?”

  “I’m waking up,” Gregor said. “I do remember this a little. Something happened to her. She got mugged, or something. She ended up in a coma. Did she die? What does that have to do with a monkey trial in Snog’s Bush—”

  “Snow Hill,” Bennis said. “And no, she didn’t die, not as far as I know. But that’s the thing, you see. She was the odd man out on the school board, the one who wasn’t a Creationist.”

  “On that school board?” Gregor asked. Now he did remember. The odd thing that had been going on in his mind about Bennis began to recede. He’d start panicking about getting married later. He topped up his coffee and leaned against the edge of the sink. “I thought that was odd at the time,” he said. “I remember that.”

  “You did think it was odd,” Bennis said. “Anyway, I don’t really know if Annie-Vic has anything to do with it, but John said he needed a favor and it was about the monkey trial, and this is the only monkey trial I know of, so I figure it all has to fit in. You know, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if you skipped the Ararat today and went down to talk to the newly minted Mayor of Philadelphia. It would save you, me, and Tibor a lot of trouble, and maybe there’ll even be a case you can work on to keep you out of my hair.”

  “I thought you needed me in your hair,” Gregor said.

  “I did when I was making decisions, but the decisions are made,” Bennis said, “and now you’re mostly either getting in the way or reminding me that we’re a bomb ready to explode. And it is going to explode, Gregor, and you know it. I’ve been ducking Leda and Hannah for a week. I even offered to send Tibor on a vacation to Jamaica for the duration.”

  “Is that where we’re going, Jamaica?” Gregor said. “I don’t understand how you can wait until the last minute to finalize plans for a honeymoon.”

  “It doesn’t matter where we go, Gregor, you’ll show up on the beach in a suit, a tie, and wing tips. I really did mean it. It would make a lot of sense for you to get out of here. The closer we get to the actual wedding, the more of this kind of trouble there’s going to be.”

  “I don’t understand why there’s any trouble at all,” Gregor said. “You’re okay with it. I’m okay with it. Tibor hasn’t said he won’t come, he’s just said we can’t have the ceremony in the church, which makes perfect sense since you don’t belong to the church and I don’t believe in God. If it’s all right for all of us, why isn’t it all right with the Cavanaugh Street Ladies Improvement and Meddling Society, or whatever they think they are?”

  “If I knew that, I could solve all the problems in the Middle East,” Bennis said. “Never mind. Finish your coffee and go down and see John. Snow Hill isn’t that far from here. Maybe he has something he wants you to investigate, and you’ll have a case, and you’ll only be home really late at night and you’ll avoid them altogether.”

  “I wonder if it’s even plausible,” Gregor said. “Do you think that a bunch of Creationists would mug an old lady because she didn’t like Creationism? It doesn’t sound sensible, does it?”

  “I can’t imagine why anybody would want to mug Annie-Vic at all,” Bennis said. “Oh, maybe I’m just talking nonsense. Maybe she was walking around with a purse stuffed with money, although that doesn’t sound like any of the things I’ve heard about her. Go and see John. Tibor and I will try to hold the fort.”

  “We should have just run off to Jamaica in the first place and gotten married on the plane,” Gregor said. “Ship’s captains can perform weddings. Why can’t airplane pilots? An airplane is a ship, isn’t it? An airship.”

  “Go,” Bennis said.

  Gregor started to
go, but he wasn’t fast enough. If he’d been paying any attention, he would have known they were about to be invaded. He would have heard the sound of the women on the stairs. They were doing nothing to keep their approach under the radar. And he should have known that his door wouldn’t stop them, either. He was not like most of the people on Cavanaugh Street. He had no illusions that this was a special place, hermetically sealed off from the problems of the rest of Philadelphia. He did not leave his door unlocked. It didn’t matter. By now, everybody had keys to everything anyway. They might as well all have been living in one big Armenian-American commune, complete with flowers in their hair and substandard plumbing.

  There was a knock on the door, and both Gregor and Bennis looked up. There was a rattling of the knob. Hannah Krekorian’s voice floated down the foyer toward them.

  “For God’s sake, Leda, how can you get to your age without knowing how to unlock a door?”

  Then they heard the front door pop open, and a moment and a half later the women were there, short but magnificent, both of them carrying armloads of tote bags containing God-only-knew-what.

  It was at that moment that Gregor remembered what he’d heard earlier, about the swans and the buffet.

  Then Leda planted herself in the middle of the kitchen and said, “We’ve talked to Tibor, and we aren’t going to let him get away with it.”

  TWO

  1

  Gregor had taken a cab, and it began to rain as he got out. The day was no longer just cold, it was dismal. The rain felt as if it had hard edges, which didn’t bode well. It wasn’t unheard of for there to be a snowstorm this late in March, although Philadelphia was less bothered by snow than the rest of the state. Gregor understood the impulse of so many older people to move south, where they never had to worry about snow at all. The last time he had been stuck in the snow it had been in Massachusetts, and there had been nothing like a winter wonderland about it.

  He went into the building and the lobby was empty and clear. The floor was so highly polished he could see his face in it. John Jackman liked a clean office, but good old what’s-her-name was a cleanliness Nazi. Maybe she came down and followed the janitorial staff around at night. Gregor stopped at the desk and gave his name. Then he admitted to himself that he was not going to remember what’s-her-name’s name before he was face to face with her.

  This was not going to go well.

  The guard waved him to the elevators and got on the phone, probably calling old what’s-her-name to tell him Gregor was coming. The elevator doors closed and Gregor felt himself moving upward. He kept pounding at his memory. It wasn’t a hard name. It was a simple one. That was the trouble. If it had been a hard name, it would have been easy to remember.

  The doors opened at the floor that held John Jackman’s office, and Gregor was faced not with old what’s-her-name, but with a small, dirty-blond woman in a twin set. She looked very nervous.

  “Mr. Demarkian?”

  “Ah,” Gregor said. “I’m sorry. We haven’t met. I was expecting—”

  “Ms. Hall,” the little woman said.

  Hall. Gregor tried to force it into his mind in a way that would make it impossible for him to forget again, but he knew it wasn’t going to work. Not only was “Hall” not a difficult name, but there was something about just how angry Ms. Hall could get that made him forget everything about her except the fire in her eyes.

  “Ms. Hall is in conference,” the little woman said. “I’m Linda Brandowski. I hope you don’t mind. The Mayor said you wouldn’t mind, but the Mayor is an optimist, isn’t he? I do like an optimist. I’ve always been an optimist myself, but it gets harder and harder the older I get. I don’t know what’s happening to the world. I really don’t.”

  They were moving down hallways. Every once in a while, they would come to a slightly more open space with desks in it. Gregor didn’t know if they were supposed to be reception areas or something else. It suddenly occurred to him that the last time he had seen these offices had been the day after John had been inaugurated, and they’d only been partially up and running then. At least, they hadn’t been this full of people.

  Ms. Brandowski stopped at a door that said OFFICE OF THE MAYOR and knocked on it. Something muffled came from inside, and she opened it. What she opened on was not John’s office per se, but the front room of what appeared to be a large suite. There were half a dozen desks in the front room, all but one staffed by young women at computers. The odd one out was staffed by a young man at a computer, and Gregor thought that he recognized the young man.

  “Right through here,” Ms. Brandowski said, but as soon as she said it the door at the very back of the suite opened, and John Jackman stuck his head out. It was then that Gregor noticed the glass-paneled door to the side, with the words CYNTHIA HALL stenciled into the midlevel crossbar. Hell, even John didn’t get his own name on his door. His door just said OFFICE OF THE MAYOR.

  John pushed the door back farther and gestured strenuously for Gregor to come in. “Come on, come on,” he said. “I want you to meet this guy. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I was expecting, uh,” Gregor’s mind went blank, “you know.”

  “Cynthia,” John said sympathetically. “She’s in conference.”

  “How can she be in conference?”

  “Obviously, you don’t know Cynthia,” John said.

  Gregor knew her as well as he wanted to know her. The woman scared the pants off him. He looked over again at the young man at the computer. “Why does he look familiar?” he asked.

  “Because,” John said, now nearly pushing Gregor into the office, “he’s one of Tyrell Moss’s boys. Father Tibor introduced me to Tyrell Moss. Tyrell Moss introduced me to this kid, and the next thing we know, we’re rehabilitating him.”

  “He’s got a sheet?”

  “He’s got several. About the size of War and Peace. Including one armed robbery and six years in juvie for a gang fight. Don’t worry about it. We look good giving troubled kids a second chance, and Cynthia makes sure he doesn’t get out of line. She made him get his tattoos removed. And there were a lot of them.”

  “I always thought it must hurt to get tattoos,” Gregor said.

  “It hurts worse to get them off,” John Jackman said. “Come inside. Sit down. Let us talk to you. Get rid of that awful coat. You’re not going to get married in that coat, are you?”

  Gregor considered telling John that if he really wanted to run for President one day, it might be a good idea to go a little lighter on the Armani everything, but it was the kind of comment there was really no point in making.

  He allowed himself to be shoved into the middle of John’s very large office. The door shut behind him. He looked around and saw that a young man—not so young as the one in the outer office, and white instead of black—had gotten to his feet and was waiting politely. The young man had been sitting on a big wing chair at one side of what was probably called a “conversational grouping.” John Jackman had a desk, but it was over on the other side of the large room, near the windows that looked out on the city. The “conversational grouping” was in the middle of the room. It consisted of two wing chairs and two small couches around a glass-topped coffee table. The coffee table had a tray on it, with a cups and saucers and spoons and everything else needed to actually have coffee.

  The young man was so still, Gregor didn’t notice it until the last minute: a prosthetic leg. The young man did not seem to pay attention to it.

  “Ah,” John said. “Let’s get the introductions done. Gregor Demarkian, this is Gary Albright. He’s the chief of police of Snow Hill, Pennsylvania, which is a little town—”

  “About an hour’s drive north,” Gregor said. “I know.” He had his attention on the young man. “Army?” he asked, pointing to the leg.

  “Marines,” Gary Albright said. “But that’s not what happened to the leg. The only time I got wounded in the Marines, some idiot got drunk and threw his boots at me. Gave me a
black eye that lasted for a week.”

  “Yes,” John Jackman said. “Well. Sit down, won’t you? Both of you? Gary here has a problem, and he thought you might be able to help. It’s a case of attempted murder.”

  “It may be murder any time at all,” Gary said. “She’s an old woman, the woman who was attacked. I can’t believe she’s lasted this long, under the circumstances. She was pretty badly beaten up.”

  “If you need help with a homicide investigation, wouldn’t you normally just go to the state police?” Gregor asked. “Haven’t you had a homicide investigation before in Snow Hill?

  “We’ve had several,” Gary Albright said. “There’s drugs up where we are just the same as anywhere else. And domestics. We get a lot of those. But these circumstances are different, and I don’t like the statie I’ve got to deal with on this kind of thing.”

  “What makes the circumstances so different?” Gregor asked.

  Gary Albright was sitting down by then. The prosthetic nature of his leg was more obvious when he was sitting, because it settled at an awkward angle. Gary Albright smiled.

  “Well,” he said, “there the little problem of me. I’m one of the chief suspects.”

  2

  There was something about this man that went farther than the obvious military experience. There was something calm and centered and straightforward about him that was also, in an odd way, innocent. Gregor’s mind rebelled at the word. Most people used “innocent” when they meant naive, and he was willing to bet almost anything that Gary Albright was not naive. No, what he had was not a lack of experience or sophistication. What he had was . . .

  There was no word for it. Gary Albright was sitting across the glass-topped coffee table, waiting, quiet, still. That waiting stillness was part of the thing that Gregor couldn’t put a name to. The man was not fidgety. He was not nervous. He was just waiting.

  “So,” Gregor said, trying hard not to sound like he was clearing his throat. “That’s a little unusual, I’ll admit. How do you even know you’re a suspect, if you’re the one who’s investigating the case? Or do I have that wrong?”