Free 27 Blood in the Water by Jane Haddam

stared at the door there for a while. He listened to Grace playing above his head. He thought he ought to go to Grace’s concert tonight. It had been years since he had heard her play in person. He thought he and Bennis ought to do something unusual, like take a vacation. He would even be willing to take a vacation where there was sand. He thought he had spent too much of his life being narrowminded about vacations where there was sand.
    He looked around and told himself he was spending this time of his life acting like a four-year-old who thinks he can make the bogeyman go away if he just pretends he doesn’t really exist.
    But the bogeyman did exist, of course. He existed and lived and breathed and was never far away from anybody’s front door. It was just that, as a grown-up, he called the bogeyman “death.”
    Gregor made himself go down the last flight of stairs and into the foyer below. He looked out through the door with the glass panel that led to the vestibule with the mailboxes in the wall. Then he turned away and made himself look at the door to old George Tekemanian’s apartment.
    It was funny the way that worked, he thought. He could tell that the apartment was empty—not just empty because nobody was home, but empty because nobody lived there. He would have been able to tell that even if he’d never entered this building before, and if he’d never known old George Tekemanian.
    Gregor went back to the door and turned the knob. It opened easily. He pushed it in. Most of old George’s things were already gone. What was left was laid around in very neat stacks, most of them with white slips of paper taped to them. This stack was going to the homeless shelter. This stack was going to the yard sale. This stack was …
    Gregor saw old George’s sock baller, a machine Martin had given him once for a Christmas or a birthday. Old George and Father Tibor used to hang around old George’s apartment sometimes and ball socks and let the machine fling them around the room. For some reason, the machine was never satisfied with just balling socks. It liked to play the catapult.
    Gregor stepped back into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind him.
    He didn’t want to see the rest of the apartment. He didn’t want to tell anybody about what he had just done. He had the odd feeling that everybody knew, anyway.
    2
    “Death is a part of life,” Tibor said, when Gregor picked him up at the apartment in back of the church.
    Tibor was muffled up as if it were the middle of February. He had on a long black winter coat and a scarf and the kind of hat that made Gregor wonder if Tibor ever looked at himself in a mirror. He had gloves on his hands and his hands in his pockets. Gregor could never get over just how short he was.
    “The man was a hundred years old,” Tibor said, as they rounded the corner into the alley and headed for Cavanaugh Street. “A hundred years old. The Bible says the days of a man are three score and ten. He was in overtime. And, sincerely Krekor, he knew it.”
    “He wasn’t sick,” Gregor said. “He wasn’t ailing and in pain all that time. Not until the very end. The last week, maybe. He didn’t have dementia. His mind was as good as mine ever was. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
    “It doesn’t make sense to you that people die of old age?”
    “No,” Gregor said. “I guess it doesn’t. I mean, I understand that people’s bodies break down, and they get sick, and that sort of thing. I understand that some people have minds that break down. But it just doesn’t make any sense to me that somebody who is perfectly well, perfectly in charge of his faculties, should just die because—because of what, really? Because he’d been living too long?”
    “That’s the idea,” Tibor said.
    “Then I think there’s something wrong with the idea. It’s like cavities.”
    “Excuse me, Krekor, but you’re getting away from me.”
    “It’s like cavities,” Gregor said. “Think