Wanting Sheila Dead Read online

  “Social order is a good,” Gregor said. “It’s what makes everything else possible. If you’re running around all day worrying about getting murdered, or if you can’t open your store in the morning without worrying about getting robbed, then you don’t get very much done. You expend all your energy on self-protection. If you want art and music and railroads, even, then you have to have social order. And it can’t just come from the police.”

  Bennis had let the robe slip to the floor, which was . . . interesting. She had her back to him, but still. He hadn’t moved off his back. Now he did, rolling over to his side as she started to get dressed. He wanted a better look. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe marriage didn’t change the conversation, not the little unspoken one that ran through people’s heads.

  “Real murders,” he said finally, “aren’t like the murders in this book—except, actually, sometimes they are. I’ll get to that later.”

  “You’ve been thinking of this in your sleep?” Bennis asked.

  “Partially,” Gregor admitted. “I think of lots of things in my sleep. I sometimes have really rude dreams about you in my sleep.”

  “You weren’t sleeping.”

  “Murders,” Gregor said. “Your ordinary run of murder in the real world is not like the murder in this book. Your ordinary run of murder in the real world is monumentally stupid. It’s the product of a combination of drugs, alcohol, and IQs that would look good as golf scores. Or it’s the casual brutality of organized crime, which, Mario Puzo and Marlon Brando notwithstanding, doesn’t do much better on the IQ scale.”

  “You’d have to say James Gandolfini now,” Bennis said. “Or Tony Soprano. Tibor says his students don’t know who Marlon Brando was.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gregor said. “The thing is, we’ve already made provision for that kind of crime. It’s built into the structure of society. I don’t care what kind of policing you have, there’s going to be that kind of crime. I don’t care how perfect you make your society, either. You can raise and lower the incidence of that kind of thing, the street mugging, the home invasion, usually by arresting people and putting them away for a long time. Did I tell you that I hold to the retribution and punishment side of what we should do about criminals debate?”

  “Several times,” Bennis said. “Almost every night when we watch the news.”

  “It’s not that I think it’s impossible to rehabilitate a criminal. Every once in a while you get one who should be rehabilitated—”

  “Tibor’s students.”

  “Some of them. However. Lots of them can’t be rehabilitated because they don’t particularly want to be. So there’s that. I don’t understand why it is that reformers can’t see that. And they really can’t. They think you’re a monster when you suggest that some people will only leave the rest of us alone when they’re locked up.”

  “Well,” Bennis said, coming to sit down on his side of the bed. She was nearly dressed, now. She had on jeans and a long sleeved T-shirt under a short-sleeved one. She was not wearing socks or shoes. “It’s depressing, if you think about it,” she said. “It’s depressing to think that there will always be evil and violence in the world. People would like to think, even I would like to think, that there are ways to get rid of it forever.”

  “There are no ways to get rid of it forever,” Gregor said. “That’s Tibor’s department. God gets rid of it on the last day, if I remember the Sunday school lessons of my childhood.”

  “You don’t believe in God,” Bennis said.

  “I don’t think I do,” Gregor said, “but that’s beside the point. Reality is what it is. We will never get rid of all the evil and violence in the world. There will always be murder. There will always be cruelty. There will always be robbery. We can make those things happen less often by catching the people who do them and putting them in jail and keeping them in jail. And making sure there isn’t an upside—that jail isn’t something . . . Did I tell you that when I was first in the FBI, I had a job in this one small town in Wisconsin—kidnapping detail, something. And I met this guy who deliberately committed a rape—deliberately, mind you—every spring he was out of jail. And do you know why? Because he wanted to be in jail. For the winter. It was the only way he could be sure of being out of the cold for the winter. It was the craziest thing I ever saw. With the three-strikes laws these days, they’d put him away for good now.”

  “Maybe that was what he wanted,” Bennis said. “Maybe he was one of those people who only feel entirely comfortable when they’re locked up. Didn’t you tell me about that once?”

  “Yes, I did. Where was I?”

  “You were depressing me.” Bennis got up and started walking around the bedroom. “You were telling me that there would always be evil and violence in the world.”

  “Ah. I know. Yes. There will always be evil and violence in the world, but we’re not really all that worried about that. We know what that is. We expect it. But we also expect everybody else, the people who aren’t these sorts of low-life thugs, we expect those people to behave themselves. We don’t police them the way we police the others. Hell, we can’t. There are too many people in any society to police them all effectively, unless you’re North Korea, and that’s no society any of us want to live in. So we let the rest of the population go about its business, sort of on the honor system.”

  “You really think of all this in your sleep, do you?” Bennis said. “Didn’t I buy new socks? From L. L. Bean? I keep thinking I remember putting them away, but I’m not sure.”

  “They’re in the top center drawer of the highboy,” Gregor said. “They’re in little plastic wrappings. It’s when the ordinary people, the people we expect to be on their good behavior, it’s when they start doing things they shouldn’t that we have to worry. Because if we can’t count on the ordinary people, the good people, to do good even if they’re not being watched . . . well, that way lies chaos. That way lies a society that can’t be governed at all. Can you see that?”

  Bennis had found her socks and sat down on his side of the bed again to put them on. Bennis was forty-eight, but she still dressed like a college girl, and she oddly still looked like one. The enormous cloud of black hair was as thick as it had been when Gregor first met her. He expected it was dyed, but he didn’t ask. Her body was as slim as it had been, too, though, and that he couldn’t help wondering about. The woman ate like a horse, and she ate all the things his Armenian mother and aunts had eaten and gotten fat on. The really odd thing was the sides of her eyes. Bennis had no crow’s feet. Gregor knew she had never had plastic surgery. It would have been a kind of miracle, except that he wouldn’t have cared about crow’s feet.

  “Weren’t you making some kind of point?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “Yes, I was. I was making a point about Agatha Christie. Her books are not unrealistic. They’re just metaphors.”

  “Metaphors for social order,” Bennis said. She was being half solemn.

  Gregor sat up. He hated sitting up. It hurt his back.

  “Metaphors for the need for social order,” he said. “Because the kinds of murders she deals with are rare in the real world—”

  “They weren’t rare in her fictional world,” Bennis said.

  “—but they do happen.” Gregor was going on as if Bennis wasn’t talking. This was sometimes necessary. “They do sometimes happen. And they have to be dealt with immediately when they do, because they’re the most dangerous kind of crime. Much more dangerous than some thug idiot who starts staging home invasions and beating and killing the crap out of everybody. We know how to deal with him. We need to know how to deal with them, and we don’t.”

  “Them?”

  “The middle-class criminals. The ‘nice’ ones who do plotted murders, and other things. What we do now is look at the thug idiot and shove him in jail pretty much indefinitely. We look at the polite criminal and we make all kinds of excuses. We offer services. We offer reduced sentences and mitigated sen
tences—house arrest, probation, parole, whatever. And we’re dead wrong. We should lock these people up for as long or longer than we lock up the thugs. Because these people are more dangerous than the thugs.”

  “Is that what you want to do with the Bernie Madoffs of the world?” Bennis asked. “Lock them up?”

  “Well, we did lock Madoff up,” Gregor said, “but in that kind of case, the only thing that would really do would be for us to take all their money. And I mean all of it. They should become acquainted with soup kitchens and homeless shelters.”

  “Get up and get dressed,” Bennis said. “Tibor is probably already waiting for us at the Ararat.”

  “You don’t want to get me started on Bernie Madoff,” Gregor said.

  Bennis got out of the way so that he could move, and Gregor went into the bathroom to take a shower. She was right. Tibor would be waiting for them.

  And maybe, just maybe, Tibor would have more of these books for him to read.

  2

  In the beginning—well, Gregor thought, no. The beginning was his childhood, when this small neighborhood in Philadelphia had been long blocks of tenements filled with people who barely spoke English.

  In the second beginning then, in the time since Gregor had come back to Cavanaugh Street from the District of Columbia, from the time when he had retired from the FBI and come back home to do whatever it was he thought he could do here—from then, he and Father Tibor Kasparian had had a nearly invariable routine. Every morning at six, Gregor would get up, shower, shave, and get into clean clothes. Then he would go down to the street and walk toward the Ararat Restaurant. Halfway there, he would find Fr. Tibor Kasparian coming out from behind the church, where his apartment was. Then they would go on to breakfast.

  This had been their routine even after it had become apparent to anybody who was watching that in spite of the fact that Gregor and Bennis had separate apartments in the same brownstone, the apartments were separate in fact but not in spirit. Bennis usually took more time, or less, than Gregor to dress. She usually had things on her mind, even if it was only something she was doing with Donna Moradanyan Donahue. Donna didn’t eat breakfast in the Ararat these days: she had one small boy and an infant at home. Still, Donna did manage to be there at some point every morning, and Donna and Bennis always seemed to have something they needed to do.

  This morning, Tibor was not waiting in front of the church. Gregor knew that he would be in the Ararat in the window booth, where they always sat. It was not a rejection. It seemed, instead, to be a kind of acknowledgment of Gregor’s marriage. Now that Gregor was married to Bennis, Tibor did not wait for him to come by for breakfast. This made absolutely no sense.

  “Are you all right?” Bennis asked him.

  They were walking past the church, which was on the other side of the street. The Ararat was on this side of the street. Gregor sighed.

  “I was thinking about Tibor,” he said.

  “Is there something wrong with Tibor? Look, he’s in the window. He looks all right to me. Is there something I should know?”

  “Why doesn’t he wait for me in the mornings anymore? Because we’re married? Does that change breakfast? And why do we come down to the Ararat together? We never did before. You never even wanted to.”

  “That’s what this is about? You’re having a delayed reaction to our getting married?”

  Gregor sighed again.

  They were at the Ararat now. Tibor really was sitting in the window booth. The Ararat still looked the way it always did, in spite of the fact that it had picked up a good deal of dinner traffic over the years. It was still a fairly basic diner, just one that served a lot of Armenian food.

  Gregor pushed open the big plate glass door and held it for Bennis to go in. Then he came in himself and nodded to Linda Melajian. The Melajians owned the Ararat, and Gregor knew that old Mikhail Melajian had been sick on and off now for a year. He couldn’t imagine that the Ararat would close. Maybe Linda would take it over, or her brothers.

  Gregor went to the booth and slid in next to Bennis. The booth was half a joke between the lot of them. It was low to the floor, the way booths were in the Old Country. The older they all got, the harder they found it to get in and out of the thing.

  “What do you figure people do back in Armenia?” Gregor said. “I mean, the old women, and people like that? Do they get down on the floor and just get stuck there?”

  “They are more used to it than we are, Krekor,” Tibor said.

  Linda came to the table with the coffeepot and started pouring. “Good morning,” she said. “I thought I’d better warn you. The Very Old Ladies were here when I first opened up this morning, and I mean first. They were here when I unlocked for myself, never mind opening up the restaurant itself. And they’ve been waiting ever since. And now they’re staring at you.”

  “They’re staring at Gregor,” Bennis said confidently. “They don’t mind me anymore because I’m married to him.”

  “They’re always going to mind you,” Gregor said. “You were practically living with me first. Never mind, you know, the thing with not belonging to the church.”

  “They really are staring at you,” Tibor said.

  The three of them managed to look at the Very Old Ladies all at once, and to look away again all at once. The problem with the Very Old Ladies was that they always looked ready to pronounce doom on the world around them. The head-to-toe black they wore was not a help. Bennis and Tibor and Gregor all looked down at their hands and then up at each other.

  “Well,” Bennis said. “I still don’t think they’re going to come over here and lecture me about living in sin. If they were going to do that, they’d have done it years ago.”

  Linda came back with a rack of toast. Gregor found himself enormously grateful to have that to concentrate on.

  “So,” he said, taking toast and a couple of little packets of honey to put on it, “I was telling Bennis this morning. Agatha Christie wrote metaphors.”

  “Oh, very good, Krekor,” Tibor said. “That’s it exactly. She writes very important metaphors, too. She writes—”

  Bennis tapped on the table. “You two are not going to do this this morning,” she said. “My point is perfectly valid. If it isn’t valid, then you should say so. And if you can’t say so, then I say it’s time for Gregor here to get off his ass and do something.”

  Gregor had put enough honey on his bread to reconstitute a beehive. He put it all down on the little round side plate that was part of the standard Ararat table setting.

  “I have been doing something,” he said. “First, I got married. Then, I spent nearly a month in Jamaica—”

  “You went on your honeymoon and complained the whole time,” Bennis said. “That’s not doing something. You need to go back to work.”

  “Why?” Gregor asked. “I don’t need the money. Even without you I don’t need the money. I’ve been working a lot the last couple of years. I’m tired of it.”

  “You’re not tired of it,” Bennis said. “You’re just annoyed with it, it’s not the same thing. And you need to do it because you’re driving me crazy going on the way you are now. You are not a person who does nothing comfortably.”

  “I’m perfectly comfortable,” Gregor said.

  “I’m not,” Bennis said.

  “And besides . . .” Gregor said, watching Linda come across the room with their breakfasts. Linda Melajian was infallible. She knew what all the regulars ate, and even knew when they were going to vary the usual. In Gregor’s case, she knew what he ate when he was alone with Tibor, and what he ate when Bennis was at the table. When Bennis was at the table, there was a lot of fruit.

  Gregor looked down at the fruit and cheese and thought about breakfast sausages. Then he said, “I can’t just jump out of bed in the morning and go to work. Somebody has to hire me. Nobody is interested in hiring me at the moment.”

  “That’s not true,” Bennis said. “And you know it.”

&nbs
p; “Nobody suitable is interested in hiring me at the moment,” Gregor said. “I consult for police departments. There’s a reason I consult for police departments.”

  “You don’t always insist on police departments,” Bennis said. “And I think this would be good for you. Good for you in every way. And it would get you out of your shell.”

  “I’m not in a shell, and you just want a chance to go snooping around that television show.”

  “What television show?” Tibor asked.

  “I never snoop around,” Bennis said, “and if that’s all I wanted, I could get my brother Christopher to do my snooping for me. It would be good for you. And they asked.”

  Tibor had a three-egg double-cheese omelet, two sausage patties, hash browns, and bacon. Gregor would have killed for any of it.

  Linda Melajian came back one more time and leaned over to whisper. “They just asked me to warn them when it looked like you were about to leave. So you’re warned, if you get my drift.”

  “At least it isn’t a reality show,” Gregor said.

  “What reality show?” Tibor asked.

  Bennis leaned across the table. “America’s Next Superstar has rented Engine House from my brother Bobby—”

  “But I thought he’d lost the house,” Tibor said. “There was some settlement about securities law—”

  “Well, yes, there was,” Bennis said. “But you know about Bobby. He’s—”

  “A world-class con man,” Gregor put in.

  “That, too,” Bennis said, “but he’s especially good at conning the government. Anyway, he’s had Engine House back for at least a year and a half now but he doesn’t live in it because, really, who could? It’s thirty thousand square feet and it was built before anybody knew anything about insulation.”

  “Robber barons didn’t need to know about insulation,” Gregor said.

  “Yes, I know,” Bennis said. “My great-grandfather was a robber baron. Whoopee. This is not news. Anyway, it’s sitting out there in Bryn Mawr, empty, and it’s huge and just the kind of thing for reality shows—you know, a ‘palatial estate’ as they put it—and so America’s Next Superstar rented the house. You know, to be the house where the girls all live and there are eliminations. I don’t know. I’ve only watched the thing once or twice—”