Cheating at Solitaire (28 page)

He had demanded that Stewart Gordon take him to the Oscartown Inn and his own things, and Stewart had, without complaint. That was about an hour ago, Gregor thought, but he wasn't sure, because he had done a very odd thing. Instead of going straight up to his room after he'd checked in, he'd gone to the little pub and ordered himself a cup of coffee. The pub was almost empty, except for a well-dressed but not particularly impressive middle-aged man sitting against the long wall. The man had a copy of the newspaper, and was paying no attention to anything else. The coffee came and was good. Gregor sat staring into the distance, thinking about what it was these people wanted him to solve. It made him uncomfortable to think that none of them were really concerned with finding out who had killed this young
man. Solving the murder was a side issue. Solving the publicity problem was the real issue, and it was in nobody's control and never would be.

Gregor drank his coffee and tried to think. He thought about Stewart Gordon. He thought about Clara Walsh. He thought about what little he knew about the people involved in this. Arrow Normand and Marcey Mandret and Kendra Rhode were on tele vis ion. He'd seen them there, if not often. Annabeth Falmer was a writer Tibor talked about. It was just the murdered man, this Mark Anderman, who was a complete and utter blank.

He had just finished his coffee when a woman walked in, dressed elaborately in overbulky outerwear, and went to sit down with the middle-aged man. She started to unwind herself from her clothes, and Gregor realized that this was the infamous Kendra Rhode, right down to the thick and oddly hooded eyes that had become her trademark everywhere. If she was supposed to be incognito, she was doing it badly—but then, if reports about her were true, she never did anything incognito. The point of her life was making sure that none of it was ever lived unobserved.

Under other circumstances, with a different person, he would have gone up and introduced himself. He was probably going to have to talk to her eventually, and it was always best to talk to suspects and witnesses before they'd had time to get ready for you. In these circumstances, Gregor knew it wasn't possible. This was a woman who talked to no one when she didn't want to. She even had a plausible reason to refuse.

Gregor finished his coffee, got out of his chair, and went back to the lobby. Then he finally went up to his room and let himself in. He found his bags already in place, his big suitcase laid out open on the bed. He went across the room and sat down in a big wing chair to look inside it.

Father Tibor Kasparian was in the habit of giving Gregor a lot of books, most of which Gregor had no idea what to do with. Sometimes there were popular novels, meant to help Gregor relax, which did nothing of the kind, because Gregor
didn't understand them. There was Harry Potter, for instance, which Tibor loved, and a little collection called
A Series of Unfortunate Events. A Series of Unfortunate Events
seemed to be a detective story that never came to a defi nitive end, which Gregor found annoying, and Harry Potter seemed to spend his time riding around on broomsticks and casting spells to turn people into hot fudge sundaes. Gregor just found that stupefying. Did even children want to read about magic anymore? Did anybody care that witches had never ridden around on broomsticks, that there were no magic spells, that the whole thing was just pretend? Apparently not, because in the two weeks after Father Tibor gave Gregor
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
, some police department in rural Pennsylvania refused to provide security for the public library on the night they did a reading for children from the Harry Potter books. The police department didn't want to encourage children to engage in devilworship and witchcraft.

Sometimes, Tibor gave Gregor histories of one place or time or the other, although Gregor could never figure out just what it was Tibor wanted him to learn. There were American histories, usually of the period of the Founding, as if Gregor wouldn't have gotten enough of that in elementary school. There were histories of the Soviet Union, including a very disturbing one from France, called
The Black Book of Soviet Communism
. Gregor didn't think he needed that, either. He'd never been one of those idiots who went around talking about how the Soviet Union was a workers' paradise. There had even been one history of the House of Tudor, and what that was in aid of, Gregor would never know. He did think it was interesting that Tibor never gave him histories of Armenia. Gregor knew nothing about Armenian history, and didn't want to. He was not one of those people who needed to create a fantasy nostalgia “background,” where his immigrant ancestors were Hardworking, Good, and Honest People with Hearts of Gold. Gregor had grown up with those immigrant ancestors. He'd gotten out as fast as he could.

Sometimes, Tibor gave Gregor books that seemed to have been chosen at random. That was what had happened this time, at the last minute, when Gregor's suitcase was open on his bed and Tibor was in a hurry to drop off the book and get to a meeting.

“It's the Philadelphia Improvement Society,” Tibor had said, dropping the thick oversized paperback down onto a carefully folded stack of ties. The ties were not carefully folded, because Gregor had folded them. Gregor had never folded a tie in his life. Bennis had folded them, and then Donna had come in, decided they were done all wrong—they would have to be as Bennis had grown up in a house with staff—and done it again. Gregor was wondering if he was going to wear a tie at all, or if Margaret's Harbor was one of those places where everybody pretended to be casual in $150 polo shirts.

“They're going to regret that name,” Tibor said, looking down at the book. “It's a nineteenth-century name. It's the kind of thing people named things before the days of tele vision.”

Father Tibor was an immigrant from Armenia, but even Armenia hadn't been without tele vi sions in his lifetime. Gregor thanked him for the book, then stood back while Bennis and Donna came in and out, making sure he had things he hadn't even known he'd owned.

“This is the Web address,” Bennis had said at the very end, handing him a three-by-five card to stuff into the book, so he wouldn't lose it. “There's also the snail mail address. See if you can't actually go up there when the case is over. That would be best. You could pick up the order yourself. I've written the order on the back of the card. Call first.”

Now Gregor sat down in the big wing chair next to the bed and looked into the open suitcase at the book and the three-by-five card sticking out of it. The Oscartown Inn was a “nice” place, in the way that word was defined by women who had gone to Seven Sisters colleges. It was old, and well cared for, and impeccably clean. His bed was a four-poster and there was a fireplace on the opposite wall. The management
would probably refuse to light it even if he asked them to—there had to be fire code considerations, even here—but it was the fact of the thing that counted. Gregor turned off the ringer on his cell phone. Then he turned off the ringer on the phone next to his bed. He wanted to sit in this room for an hour without talking to anybody about anything, and certainly without talking to Stewart Gordon or Clara Walsh about the Case.

He reached into the suitcase. The book was called
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
, by somebody named Walker Percy. This was more than a little confusing. Tibor did not ordinary give him self-help books, and did not ordinary read them except to complain about them. Gregor pulled out the three-by-five card. On one side there was the Web address, written out carefully by a woman who assumed that Gregor would be absolutely clueless when it came to the computer:

www.boxhillconfections.com

On the other side was the order, sort of. It seemed to be in code. Gregor looked it over for a minute and decided that Bennis was ordering wedding favors, and that the wedding favors would be chocolates, and that the company that made these chocolates was in Maine. Did Bennis really expect him to get all the way from Margaret's Harbor to Maine, in a little side trip? Apparently, she did. At the bottom of that side of the three-by-f ve card was a little note, carefully written out in minuscule handwriting in red pen:

I need 750 of the chocolate yaprak sarma.
Janet will know what I mean
.

Yaprak sarma was an Armenian dinner dish that consisted of meatballs encased in a bulgur crust. This was going to be chocolate encased in what?

Gregor got out of the chair, got the laptop out of the suitcase, and set it up on the desk. He took off his tie and his
shoes and his socks. There was an Internet connection here someplace. He'd look for it after he had his shower. He wondered if Janet, whoever she was, would have a picture of chocolate yaprak sarma on the Web site of Box Hill Confections. He wondered if he would ever get used to the idea that he was going to have another wedding, and not another wedding of the kind he had sometimes imagined in the years since he and Bennis had met.

There, he'd admitted it to himself, the thing he'd been keeping in the back of his mind for months: over the course of all these years, even before he and Bennis became any kind of official couple, he had imagined them one day married. For some reason, though, he had seen them in a registry office someplace, or eloping to Las Vegas to get married in an Elvis chapel. He hadn't envisioned a Bennis as completely wrapped up in the preparations for a formal wedding as Donna Moradanyan Donahue would be in decorating the street for Christmas. It had thrown him off balance. It had been a good part of the reason why he had not been interested in taking a case for months, and a good part of the reason why he had taken this one.

It all seemed to come together, but he couldn't say how. He was tired. He had a headache. He needed a shower.

He would take the shower and then sleep for a while, and after that was over he would be ready to talk to Stewart Gordon and Clara Walsh again, and to finally figure out what it was he was supposed to be doing here.

2

Gregor took a long time in the shower, long enough so that his skin began to look pickled, and by the time he was done he thought he had the claims on his attention at least tentatively organized. The trick was to separate the case and Bennis, and then to let Bennis take care of Bennis. Bennis and Donna didn't really want his input on the wedding, no matter how much they said they did. They wanted to stage a spectacle, and he knew from experience that they were very good at it. His one hope was that they would be limited by
their audience. This was a wedding they expected to hold on Cavanaugh Street, with the residents of Cavanaugh Street in attendance. That meant it would have to take place in Father Tibor's church, which held only about four hundred people at capacity, and which Father Tibor would not suffer to be turned into an Egyptian pyramid or a seventeenth-century pirate ship. Then there would be the reception. They were counting on good weather so that they could hold it outside. They'd applied to the city for the permits they needed to block off the street the way you would for a block party. This meant accepting certain limitations—they would have to admit anybody who came along and wanted to attend—but these were not the kinds of limitations that bothered them. Gregor had wondered, on and off, what would happen if one of the people he had been instrumental in putting behind bars got out on parole and decided to attend for reasons having less to do with congratulations than with revenge, but when he had broached this possibility to Bennis, she had brushed it off.

“The people you put behind bars stay there,” she said. “Some of them just die. I'm not going to worry about some serial killer from your past deciding to sneak into the reception and start killing off little old ladies. You might worry about me starting to kill off little old ladies, because I've had it with some of them. If what's-her-name Vardanian says one more thing under her breath about cows and milk, I'm going to strangle her.”

“Stella Vardanian barely speaks a word of English.”

“She says it in Armenian, Gregor, but trust me. I can understand.”

The bathroom was big and elegant, but not silly. Gregor dried himself off and got on the clean boxer shorts and T-shirt he had brought in with him. Then he looked at his hair in the mirror as if there were something he could do about it. Bennis was probably right. In spite of the fact that she was a complete Anglo, the kind who could trace her ancestors back to England for four hundred years, she probably did know enough Armenian by now to get the reference to
cows and milk. Gregor just barely believed that old women still talked about cows and milk, or that virginity was still an issue, for anybody, anywhere. Especially for him. He was, after all, fifty-six. Bennis had to be close to forty. What did Stella Vardanian think they'd been doing with their lives up to the point where they'd met each other, or at least up to the point where Bennis had met him?

He went out of the bathroom into the room itself. The suitcase was still on the bed. The laptop was set up on the desk. The laptop's screen showed the home page for Box Hill Confections. Gregor didn't remember plugging the laptop into the Internet connection or bringing up Box Hill, but he'd been distracted. He still was. He sat down at the desk and looked for a minute through Box Hill's pages: chocolates, confections, wedding and event favors. There was nothing to tell him whether or not the company made chocolate yaprak sarma as a matter of course, but he did find pictures of all kinds of truffles and crèmes, and he thought Bennis and Donna had probably come close to passing out cold from ecstasy. This was just what they needed, a specialty gourmet chocolate place that treated cacao content like the Holy Grail.

He collapsed the Box Hill page and called up Google instead. Then he typed in “Arrow Normand” and waited to see what would happen.

He should have known better. The first page took forever to load, and then it announced that there were a total of 329,224,544 results. Gregor had a feeling that this was actually an understatement. He looked at the results on the first page. They were mostly about the murder of Mark Anderman, and Arrow Normand's address. That made sense. Results would be sorted by starting with the most recent, and this was the most recent thing that had happened to Arrow Normand. It was not, however, what Gregor wanted to know about right now.