The Headmaster's Wife

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor had been made head of the new Behavioral Sciences Unit because the new director was at sea, because the Bureau had just moved to a new building, and because he’d had so much publicity that appointing him looked like a good piece of PR. It had been a grace to all concerned that he had also been competent. That’s why not being able to engage in office politics was not a virtue. If competent people didn’t engage in office politics, incompetent ones would, or worse, competent ones with ulterior motives, with agendas both personal and ideological, with their eye on the prize. Gregor only wished that most people who lusted after power did so because they wanted fame, money, and luxury. People who wanted fame and money could be bought off. Even people who wanted power for power’s sake could be bought off, at least up to a point. The real killers were the ones who wanted to change the world. Gregor Demarkian was not a conservative and couldn’t be. He was a child of an immigrant tenement neighborhood, and his own mother had kept a picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in an icon frame right next to her icon of the Black Madonna. He did share one idea with the conservatives though, and he thought it was a sensible one. He did not think it was ever possible to make human beings perfect, to rid them forever of greed andlust and avarice and pride. He distrusted the hell out of people who thought they could.

  He was able to do the Machiavellian thing in this case because he was truly convinced that somebody had tried to murder Mark DeAvecca and because he had cleared the whole thing with Brian Sheehy beforehand. There was nothing like getting the cooperation of the person you wanted to manipulate to make manipulation feel like high morality. He had no idea if Brian took him seriously or was merely indulging him, but the result was the same in either case, and the result was all that Gregor cared about. Brian, in the meantime, cared mostly about embarrassing the school. Gregor would be happy to oblige him.

  The call from the hospital came less than half an hour after he’d left Dee Feyre at the inn’s front door. She had a room there, too—there wasn’t anywhere else to get a room in Windsor unless you went out to the Interstate, to Concord or Lexington—but she wanted to get “some things done,” as she put it, and Gregor hadn’t wanted to ask her what. He’d gone back up to his room to think, and to think about calling Bennis, when the phone rang and he was put through to a pleasant female voice speaking against a background of conversation and random noise. He wondered where she was calling from. It wasn’t an office. Was it that distractingly loud at a nurses’ station?

  “Mr. Demarkian?” she said. “This is Carol Alberani at Windsor Hospital. I’m the head nurse on Two West. Dr. Copeland asked me to call you.”

  “Thank you,” Gregor said, wondering if he’d been completely off the wall. Her voice did sound pleasant and unconcerned. Would it be unconcerned if what he’d suspected was true?

  “Dr. Copeland said to tell you that what you suggested turned out to be true and to thank you for suggesting it. He wouldn’t have thought of it on his own. He’d like to talk to you in person, along with Mark’s parents, later on this afternoon. Say about two o’clock? He said he knows this is short notice, but under the circumstances—”

  “No, no,” Gregor said. “It’s fine. I’m grateful he can see me that quickly.”

  “From what I know of Dr. Copeland’s schedule, that’s the end of his rounds for the day. He’d like you to meet him on the floor at the nurses’ station at two, if you could.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I’ll tell him. Thank you very much, Mr. Demarkian.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  She hung up in his ear. Gregor stared at the receiver for a moment and then put it down. It was already well after noon, and it wasn’t all that easy to get out to the hospital. He’d have to arrange for a cab ahead of time. He put in a call to the front desk and asked them to do that for him. He hung up and stared at his hands. He needed Bennis, that was the truth. He always needed Bennis, but he needed her especially in cases like this one, when something about the case itself, or the place it happened in, or the people involved in it, started tripping all his wires. He couldn’t seem to make his mind stop drifting into his own past, his childhood, his career, his memories. Maybe “drift” was the wrong word. Drifting implied randomness. There was nothing random about the way his mind was working. He knew, by now, just what it was about Windsor that drove him so completely up the wall—that hermetically sealed, pristinely smug self-righteous bubble that adopted “liberalism,” not because of liberal convictions, but because of the sense that only stupid, vulgar, ignorant people were anything else. It was not the liberalism his mother had embraced when she became an American, and it was not the liberalism of somebody like Bennis, whose support for government health insurance and rejection of the death penalty had nothing to do with morality and everything to do with what she thought of as practical necessity. Hell, he thought, it wasn’t even the liberalism of initiatives and programs. He suddenly realized what it was all these people reminded him of. They were the liberals of conservative caricature, born into the flesh and made real on a stage of their own choosing. This was a place where care would be taken to choose only those foods that could beimported from workers’ collectives in the third world by the same people who had only contempt for the everyday, middle-class kids who made up the population at the local public high school.

  It was, Gregor thought, a symptom of something, of the same something that had resulted in the destruction of Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Christian Church, of something that was neither liberal nor conservative except superficially. No wonder so many people were turned off to politics these days. It wasn’t politics anymore. It wasn’t about how best to fill the potholes or how best to make sure that everybody could see a doctor if he needed to or how best to build a system of defense that would neither leave the country vulnerable to attack nor bankrupt it This was politics as total lifestyle choice, a kind of armor people put on to proclaim their superiority to every other person, and Tom DeLay did it just as surely as Barbara Boxer did. This wasn’t even politics about candidates. He had no idea who the people of Windsor, Massachusetts, had voted for in the last election, and he didn’t think it mattered. This was the politicization of everything. It was no longer possible to decide you liked beer instead of wine without that choice becoming a declaration of just which side you were on.

  Personally Gregor thought he was on the side of sanity, but he could see how at least some people might argue that point. He dragged the phone as close to him as he could without putting it on his lap and stared at it. If he called and got the answering machine, he would not be able to leave a message. He knew that already. The sound of Bennis’s voice on the answering machine tape would make him mute. If he called and she was still cold to him, he didn’t know if he’d be able to talk then either. What he really wanted was for her to show up in Windsor on her own, the way she had in Hollman, Pennsylvania, when he had been involved in the mess that had first introduced him to Liz Toliver, Jimmy Card, and Mark. The chances of her doing that now were slim to nonexistent. If he was honest about it, he knew they were only nonexistent. He knew he was going to have to call.

  He took a deep breath. He dialed for a long-distance line. He dialed his own number on Cavanaugh Street. He had Bennis’s cell phone number, just as she had his, but for some reason he didn’t want to talk to her on her cell phone. He had no idea why that was. Maybe he just wanted to be sure she was sitting down somewhere and able to pay attention to whatever it was he might have to say. He didn’t want to try to talk to her while she was driving or with a lot of people or in the lobby of an art movie house getting ready to go in to see one of those films he always begged off because they were so damned bizarre. Here was something about Bennis he didn’t understand. She liked movies, preferably in foreign languages, where really odd things happened. There was a Fellini movie with a fashion show of religious garments that included, toward the end, skeletons in veils and lace. There was a German film where people fad
ed in and out of reality for no good reason he could see. First they were standing there, solid, and then they were dissolving like ghosts, but there didn’t seem to be any actual ghosts in the film. Fortunately, she would also go to “real” movies with Tibor, but Gregor had to admit he didn’t like most of Tibor’s movies either. Tibor’s movies ran heavily to space aliens, wizards in beards longer than most bridal veils, and desperate races to save the world. Whatever happened to movie movies, where ordinary people had love affairs or tried to save the family business or learned the real meaning of Christmas? On that last one, Tibor had had an entry, and Gregor had gone along for the afternoon. It was called The Grinch, and everybody in it was made up to look like—Gregor didn’t know what.

  Bennis would understand what he meant about politics that wasn’t really politics, Gregor thought. At least, she would have understood as of a few weeks ago because she was both very active politically and mostly driven to distraction by what she had to put up with in order to be that way. She would know what he meant by the unreality of places like this, too. Bennis had been in a lot of unreal places in her life, and she’d been to a school like this one. Or had it been like this one? Maybe it had been a conservative enclave instead of a liberal one. His palms were sweating. So was his neck. His stomach was one enormous knot, as hard as a bowling ball and as comfortable as if he had swallowed one. He hadn’t been this afraid of Bennis when they’d first started seeing each other.

  The phone rang and rang. After a while Gregor was sure she was out, and that he ought to hang up and try again another time. Instead he just sat there, listening to the ring. There were three phones in his apartment. One was in the bedroom, on the night table on the left side of the bed. One was in the living room, on the wicker side table to the right of the couch that faced the big window looking onto Cavanaugh Street. The last was on the wall in the kitchen, next to the refrigerator. There was no place in the apartment, anywhere, where it took more than a few seconds to get to a phone.

  He was just about to put the receiver back into the cradle when he heard her pick up on the other end, and then the sound of her voice, not talking to him but to somebody with her in the apartment.

  “I got flour. It’s in that bag with Tibor’s Pizza Rolls in it,” she said.

  Suddenly everything Gregor had wanted to say disappeared from his head. There was something about politics, but he couldn’t remember what. There was all the news about Mark DeAvecca. He could remember that, but he couldn’t think of the words he needed to explain it.

  “Hello,” she said, in that flat, unconsciously upper-class voice he’d found so off-putting when they’d first met and hardly ever noticed anymore.

  He took a deep breath, trying to give himself time to think, but he couldn’t think. He was frozen solid. He had a terrible intuition that his breath was very heavy though, that he sounded like one of those men who call phone numbers at random until they get a female voice they can talk dirty to.

  “Hello?” she said again.

  He tried to cough. He couldn’t do it. He tried to speak. He couldn’t do that either. Everything was wrong. He couldn’timagine his life without her. He couldn’t imagine what he was supposed to say to make it all right between them. He couldn’t imagine what he’d done that had been so damned awful that it had led to this, so that she hadn’t called him even once since he’d been out of town and hadn’t seen him off when he left Philadelphia.

  “Christ,” she said, her voice turned away from the receiver again, “I’ve got a breather.”

  “Wait,” Gregor started to say, remembering at the last moment the whistle he’d given her for just such occasions as she thought this was.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, she didn’t use it. She just hung up.

  Gregor sat staring at the phone in his hand, wondering what the hell was the matter with him. He’d never been this awkward with a girl, not even in high school. He’d never been this scared in his life.

  2

  By the time Gregor got to the nurses’ station on Two West at ten minutes before two, he was thoroughly disgusted with himself and in no mood to put up with anybody else’s nonsense. He came out of the elevator with his mind still on Bennis, and for the first few moments as he walked ahead toward the big curved wooden desk, he didn’t realize that he knew at least half the people standing in front of it, arguing. The other half were doctors, a tall, angular young man with too much hair and a nose that could have served as a hood ornament, and a slight, middle-aged woman who exuded tension the way the Cookie Monster ate cookies. She was, Gregor thought, the single most defensively hostile person he had ever seen in his life. Then he realized that she was standing next to Liz Toliver, and that he was about to have to deal with her.

  It wasn’t the most promising situation he had ever walked into in his life. The small woman might be angry and aggressive, but Liz was in that unnatural calm that Gregor had learned to associate with the prelude to one of her nuke attacks. Both Jimmy Card and the male doctor were standing just a little away from the two women, as if both of them knew that something was about to blow.

  “It is my professional opinion that this course of action is very inadvisable,” the small woman was saying. “Very inadvisable. I haven’t even had a chance to go over these results. I don’t know how accurate they are—”

  “I don’t see why you should go over these results at all,” Liz said. Very calm, Gregor thought. She was very calm. He winced. “You are not Mark’s doctor, and you are not Mark’s mother. I’m that.”

  “I’m the doctor for the school,” the small woman said, “and you signed an agreement when Mark came to Windsor that he would be treated by me—”

  “In the event that he got sick up here and the school had to make arrangements for his care,” Liz said. “Yes. But the school doesn’t have to make arrangements for his care now. I’m here.”

  “You’re risking his health and his recovery by delivering information to him that is very disturbing and that, as far as we know, is completely inaccurate. I’m sure Dr. Copeland is very talented, but he’s still a resident and he does not have the experience—”

  “Excuse me,” the young male doctor said.

  “This entire idea is ludicrous,” the small woman said. “I must be concerned first and foremost with Mark’s well-being. He’s still a child, and he’s not able to interpret—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Liz said.

  “Adults often have to insist that children do what is best for them because they will not always know what is best for them themselves,” the woman plowed on.

  Gregor pulled up into the little group and coughed. They all turned to look at him, Jimmy Card with relief so pronounced it was comical. “Hello,” he said. “Hello, Liz. Hello, Jimmy.”

  “This is Gregor Demarkian,” Jimmy said.

  The young male doctor stuck out his hand. “Mr. Demarkian. I’m Lloyd Copeland. It’s good to meet you.”

  “It’s all your fault,” the small woman said, rounding on Gregor. “You’re the one who gave them this ridiculous idea. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but if you’re getting a lot of publicity for yourself by jeopardizing that child’s health and sanity—”

  “That child,” Liz said, “is six feet tall and built like a tank. I’d be surprised as hell if he was a virgin, considering the fact that he spent half his life backstage at rock concerts last summer. He’s got an IQ in the one hundred and sixties, and he hasn’t exactly been living in a nursery school for the last sixteen years. I resent your attempts to treat him like a mental defective, and I resent even more your attempts to get me to manipulate him. I have never been anything but honest and honorable with Mark, and I don’t intend to start being less than either now.”

  “I haven’t asked you not to be honest,” the small woman said. “I’ve merely pointed out that children need to be given information in doses they can handle, not dumped into a cold bath of bad and frightening news as if they were miniat
ure adults.”

  “Mark isn’t a miniature anything,” Liz said. She turned to Gregor and said, “This woman is Brenda Elliot. She’s the doctor attached to the school. She’s also an idiot. I’m going to go talk to Mark.”

  She walked off down the hall in the direction of Mark’s room, and Gregor looked at Jimmy Card.

  “Don’t ask,” Jimmy said. “It’s been a very long day.”

  Brenda Elliot straightened the jacket of her good wool suit. “I suppose I’ll have to come along. Somebody has to look after that child’s interests. He’s already been fed food he shouldn’t have been and thrown it all up. It took the hospital staff half an hour to get that room back into shape.”

  “He was throwing up again?” Gregor asked.

  Dr. Copeland smiled. “Understandably. It seems he woke up this afternoon and he was hungry, and he prevailed upon Mr. Card here to make a run out to McDonald’s—”

  “Three crispy chicken extra value meals supersized with vanilla milkshakes,” Jimmy said. “And he ate it all, too, but then—”

  “Irresponsible,” Brenda Elliot sniffed.

  She was, Gregor thought, exactly the sort of woman who would sniff. He turned away from her and gestured down the hall in the direction of Mark’s room.

  “Right,” Jimmy said. “This ought to be interesting.”

  Gregor led the way. It wasn’t a long walk. When they got to the room, Liz was standing by herself at the windows, and Mark was sitting up in bed talking away on a cell phone. He did not look as if he had recently been sick. He did look a million times better than he had the day before.