Free 27 Blood in the Water by Jane Haddam Page A

about it. Your teeth exist for what? To make it possible for you to eat. Right?”
    “Right,” Tibor said. “Also, sometimes in some circumstances, if you know the wrong kinds of people, to help out in a fight.”
    “Okay,” Gregor said. “I may even know those kinds of people, but that’s beside the point here. Your teeth exist so that you can eat. But when you eat, just by eating, just by using your teeth for what they were made for—well, by doing that, you wreck your teeth with cavities, and they hurt and crumble and then fall out.”
    “There is the toothbrush—”
    “Yes,” Gregor said, “but why should you need a toothbrush? You’re not misusing your teeth when you eat. You’re using them for what they’re supposed to be for. You’re using them in just the way you’re supposed to use them. So why are there cavities at all? If teeth were something a company made, and they did that—they broke because you used them properly—well, there’d be lawsuits, wouldn’t there? There’d be congressional investigations. We’d do something about it.”
    “You want the United States government to do something about death?”
    “I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I don’t know what I want.”
    They were out on the street itself now. People were coming out of the tall brownstone buildings and wending their way toward the lighted plate glass storefront of the Ararat. Gregor saw Lida Arkmanian in her three-quarter-length chinchilla coat, hurrying to catch up with Hannah Krekorian and Sheila Kashinian. Sheila had on a coat that was some kind of fur and was supposed to look expensive, but didn’t quite. Hannah was getting along with her usual wool, and if you’d asked her about it, she would have given you a long lesson on the stupidity of conspicuous consumption.
    Except that she wouldn’t have called it that.
    Gregor slowed down a little. Lida might be in a hurry to catch up with those two, but on most mornings, he was not.
    “Look at them,” he said, pointing ahead to the women, now walking together. “We all grew up together on this street. I remember Lida in church when she was no more than four or five years old. I’d have to have been the same. She had a new dress for Easter, and her mother had bought her a hat to match. It was like a miracle had occurred right in the middle of the block. A matching hat. Who had the money for a matching hat?”
    “Yes, well. While you were all growing up here, I was in Yekevan, and it would have been enough to have money for hats. Is that really what you’re worried about now, Krekor, people’s hats?”
    “No,” Gregor said. “No. It’s hard to explain. We all did grow up here. It’s odd to think about it sometimes. And we didn’t have any money.”
    “Most people don’t have money,” Tibor said.
    “We all have money now,” Gregor said. “Even Hannah has more than she’d ever dreamed of all those years ago. She has a matching hat.”
    “I don’t know why,” Tibor said, “but I don’t trust where this is going.”
    “Old George Tekemanian lived on this street when we were growing up,” Gregor said. “You can’t say he grew up here, because he was born in Armenia. He was from my parents’ generation, not from mine. Can you imagine that? He was from my parents’ generation. He remembered immigrating. He remembered what it was like when this was all tenements and some of them didn’t have windows. He remembered doing all his business in Armenian and reading the Armenian language newspaper instead of The Philadelphia Inquirer. He remembered World War I. Can you imagine that?”
    “I don’t have to imagine it,” Tibor said carefully. “There’s nothing to imagine. It’s just the reality of the real world. Of course he would remember all that. He had a good mind and it functioned well and he was a hundred years old.”
    “And now he’s gone,” Gregor said, “and all that is gone with him, and it makes no sense at all. It’s wasteful,