27 Blood in the Water (17 page)

“Don’t talk to me about using common sense,” Larry Farmer said, suddenly incensed. “You’re the one who wanted the case closed in fifteen minutes so that Waldorf Pines would see we were doing our jobs. I wasn’t the one who was in that kind of hurry. I’d have—”

“You’d have dithered around for a week and gotten nowhere,” Ken Bairn said. “You wouldn’t even have thought of getting Gregor Demarkian here if I hadn’t suggested it. What you think you’re doing in that job is beyond me. Hell, you don’t even want a job. You want—”

“Excuse me,” Gregor said. “There is one more thing.”

“Thank God,” Buck Monaghan said.

“The rest of the security tape,” Gregor said. “You looked at the rest of that? Was there anything on it? Anything at all.”

“You mean aside from the time between ten forty-five and twelve thirty the night before when the system went on the fritz?” Buck said. “Nope. Not a thing.”

“The system went on the fritz?” Gregor asked.

“It was shut off,” Buck Monaghan said. “Or somebody shut it off. Just turned it off. Then turned it back on again. We think. From ten forty-five to twelve thirty on the night the murders were committed.”

“Interesting,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Ken Bairn looked like he was going to lunge for Buck Monaghan’s neck. He was stopped by the sudden, flustered entrance of Delores Martin.

“Will the lot of you get out there and hold a press conference?” she demanded. “They’ve been there for ten minutes and they’re out for blood.”

PART II

ONE

1

It was the doorbell that got Gregor Demarkian out of bed the next morning, and he had to admit that the doorbell was not his favorite thing to hear even when he was fully awake and dressed. He got up to answer it because he couldn’t be sure it didn’t represent an emergency. There were cell phones these days, of course, and there was the land line, with the phone on the night table right next to his head, but he couldn’t trust the people of Cavanaugh Street to think like that. He couldn’t even trust them to call 911. There was something visceral about responding to an emergency by rushing across a cold night street in your pajamas and your robe.

He looked across the bed, at Bennis sleeping as if she’d never had anything to worry about in her life. He’d never understood how Bennis could sleep like that, considering all that she
had
had to worry about, but then, he’d never understood Bennis. She was, in her way, the anti-Elizabeth. She came from a world so remote from any he had ever known that she might as well have been a Martian.

He gave a little thought to Bennis as a Martian, and then sat up. He grabbed his robe from the chair. He stood up and put it on. Whoever was ringing the bell certainly acted as if it was an emergency. The bell rang and rang and rang in a staccato of small bursts. Then it went silent for a second. Then the ringing started again.

Gregor went out into the hall and down the hall to the foyer. He was surprised Grace from upstairs hadn’t come out to find out what was going on. He’d have come out to find out what was going on, even if only to have the chance of killing whoever was causing it.

He got to his front door and tried looking through the peephole. Peepholes were never of any use. All you saw was distortions. He pulled the door open and looked at Lida Arkmanian, fully dressed in three-inch heels and that chinchilla coat, holding a stack of three large baking pans. The three large baking pans were each covered with aluminum foil, and they each had something in them.

“You brought food,” Gregor said. “It’s, what—before five o’clock in the morning?”

“It’s four thirty,” Lida said, brushing past him with her baking pans. “I’ve been up all night. We’re all worried about you, Gregor.”

“I wish you’d worry about me dying of lack of sleep,” Gregor said.

He closed the door behind her and didn’t bother to lock up. It was too early in the morning and it wouldn’t serve much of a purpose anyway. Lida was already marching through the living room on the way to the kitchen. Gregor followed her.

In the kitchen, Lida had put the baking pans down on the kitchen table next to Gregor’s stacks of folders about the Waldorf Pines case. She opened the refrigerator and looked inside. Then she shook her head.

“It’s impossible,” she said, shaking her head. “I love Bennis very much, Gregor, you know that, and we were all very happy when you two found each other and very relieved when you actually got married, but how is it possible that a woman of her age doesn’t know how to cook? Anything? What is this supposed to be?”

Gregor peered at it. “It’s yogurt,” he said. “It’s Dannon fruit-on-the-bottom cherry yogurt. It’s her favorite kind. She eats those for lunch.”

“These and what else?”

“I don’t think there’s an anything else. I think she just eats one of those. I don’t keep track, Lida. I’m not walking around writing down everything Bennis eats every day.”

“Maybe she is? Maybe she has one of those eating disorders? I’ve read about those, Gregor. These people, they have little notebooks, and every time they eat anything they write it down in the notebook with the calories, and then they make themselves throw it up.”

“If Bennis had bulimia, I think I’d notice,” Gregor said. “She doesn’t throw anything up. What are we doing here at four thirty in the morning talking about Bennis’s eating habits? You know she doesn’t have an eating disorder. You see her eat at the Ararat all the time.”

Lida put the yogurt back in the refrigerator. Yogurt was practically all there was in the refrigerator. There was also a small carton of cream, which Gregor liked in his coffee, and the leftover takeout from some Indian restaurant they’d gone to in Wayne.

Lida started putting baking pans in among the yogurt.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I kept worrying about your refrigerator. I knew it would look like this. It always looked like this. But before you weren’t married. Now we all think you have a wife to make sure you eat, and she doesn’t even eat herself. I’ve got some manti in here. I made a hundred and six of them. More of them wouldn’t fit in the pan. Oh.” Lida got her shoulder bag and looked into it. A second later, she brought out a big plastic tub. “I’ve got some yaprak sarma, too. It’s not as much as I’d wanted to bring, but this was the biggest container I could find.”

“You got up in the middle of the night and cooked manti and yaprak sarma because you thought I wasn’t getting enough to eat?”

“There’s also imam biyaldi. I’m never happy with that. It doesn’t do as well in the microwave as some of the other things. But you need real food, Gregor. You can’t go running around on nothing but yogurt and green beans and expect to stay healthy.”

“This is insane,” Gregor said.

Lida looked at the things she had put in the refrigerator and checked that they wouldn’t fall out as soon as somebody opened the door. Then she closed up and sat down at the kitchen table.

“We’ve been worried about you,” she said. “I’ve been worried about you. Ever since old George died, you haven’t been yourself.”

Gregor sat down at the table, too. He pushed away some of the folders. “I’ve been entirely myself,” he said. “If you mean I haven’t been in a very good mood, that I could see.”

“Even Tibor is worried, Gregor. And I’m—well, we’ve known each other all our lives. I know what I’m talking about when I say you’re not yourself.”

“I’ve maybe been a little depressed.”

“No, Gregor. After Elizabeth died, you were depressed. You didn’t sleep. You didn’t eat. You didn’t respond to people when they talked to you. I was like that after Frank died. I know what that is. And that sort of thing is inevitable, I think. It is to be expected. But this is not that. It’s nothing like that.”

“No, it’s not the way I was feeling after Elizabeth died,” Gregor said.

“It makes no sense for you to be arguing with Tibor about God,” Lida said. “We know you’re not a believer. And those of us who didn’t know have guessed, I’m sure. But you seem to be arguing about—about the possibility—”

“About the logic of it,” Gregor said. “That’s all. I don’t see the logic of it. But I wasn’t trying to get Tibor to stop believing, or anything like that.”

“You couldn’t get Tibor to stop believing, or any of the rest of us. What you’re saying is entirely senseless to anybody who does believe. But I do not think it is a good sign for you.”

“I’m fine,” Gregor said. “I really am. And I can’t believe you stayed up all night to do this. Which doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it.”

“That is all right, Gregor. And part of me understands it, too. It’s all going now. The old neighborhood. It’s disappearing into dust.”

“You might say the old neighborhood went a long time ago,” Gregor said. “You remember what this street was like when we were growing up. There weren’t any town houses. There weren’t any floor-through apartments. The buildings were here, but they were run down, there wasn’t much heat, the apartments were small and everybody was crowded. And nobody had a three-quarter-length chinchilla coat.”

“The people were here,” Lida said. “Now the people are going. And I’m not saying that they’re going because they’re dying, like old George. None of us has children living on Cavanaugh Street except the Ohanians, and they won’t stay after they’ve finished college. Donna and Russ are thinking of moving out, did you hear that?”

“Bennis said something about it to me,” Gregor said. “But it’s not like they’re going next week. They’re mostly worried about what happens when Tommy gets ready for junior high school.”

“And they have to worry,” Lida said. “The schools are bad here, and the private schools are expensive. Were the schools as bad when we were in school, Gregor?”

“They were bad relative to the better neighborhoods of Philadelphia, yes,” Gregor said. “But it was a different era, with different priorities.”

“I don’t think it’s about death and dying, the things that are wrong. Going wrong. I don’t know what I’m saying. But I’m not like you. I grew up here, and I never wanted to leave here. I still don’t want to leave here. I suppose I’m being ridiculous.”

“No,” Gregor said. “I’ll admit I did want to leave here. I got out as soon as I could. But I understand why you wouldn’t.”

“Are you and Bennis going to leave, Gregor? I was thinking maybe not, since it’s unlikely that you’d be having children. Not that I’m saying anything about Bennis’s age, of course, but—”

“Bennis and I are not going to leave here,” Gregor said. “It’s going to take at least another decade to get that house we bought into livable shape. And that’s right down a couple of blocks and squarely on Cavanaugh Street.”

“It’s not going to take a decade to get the house finished,” Bennis said, showing up suddenly in the kitchen doorway. “It may take till next Valentine’s Day.”

“She said Thanksgiving at first,” Gregor said. “Then it was Christmas. Now it’s Valentine’s Day.”

“Societies die if they don’t have children,” Lida said.

Bennis came in and sat down at the kitchen table. “What are the two of you doing here at this time of the morning?”

2

Three hours later, Bennis was helping Gregor pack the folders into the sleek Coach briefcase she had bought him a thousand Christmases ago, and Gregor was thinking yet again that the thing didn’t look big enough to hold even a few sheets of paper.

“Briefcases used to be substantial,” Gregor said. “They looked like pieces of furniture. You could carry an entire federal budget bill in them.”

“Nobody should carry an entire federal budget bill in anything,” Bennis said, “and this will hold these folders without a problem. Although I don’t understand why you use these. You’ve got a perfectly good computer.”

Gregor knew he had a perfectly good computer. It was packed into the briefcase with everything else.

“I like to move things around,” he said. “It helps me think. I make little stacks of things here and little stacks of things there and it works better than just staring at a screen. There’s something hypnotic about staring at a screen. I start to go to sleep.”

“So did it help, spending last night moving around little stacks of paper?”

Gregor looked at the folders going into the briefcase. “It did,” he said, “at least a little. The problem is that they didn’t really start thinking about this case objectively until they came and got me, and even then they weren’t doing it. They had their preconceived little scenario, they gathered the information they needed to confirm their preconceived little scenario, and then when the monkey wrench landed in the works, they had nowhere to go and nothing to go there with. There are a million things I need that aren’t here because nobody thought to ask about them.”

“Like what?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “let’s start with the murder victim whose identity we know, Michael Platte. Everything they have seems to say that Michael Platte was having an affair with Martha Heydreich. But I looked through there evidence on this, and all they’ve really got is local gossip. Somebody saw them together. Somebody else says they were spending too much time together. It’s all that sort of thing. There’s no indication that anybody ever caught them in an actually compromising position, no proof of their having rented a hotel room somewhere, nothing. When you actually look at what they’ve got here, it could mean anything at all. It could mean nothing. Martha Heydreich wasn’t a very well liked woman. It could be spite. Michael Platte himself was something of a problem child. There’s nothing substantial here. Do you see what I mean?”

“I think so,” Bennis said.

“Then,” Gregor said, “there’s information that definitely should be here that isn’t. For instance, we know that Michael Platte was murdered. Somebody should have checked up on his life. There’s a note in the files about the incident that got him kicked out of college. He got caught selling cocaine in the dorms, apparently not for the first time. The parents were steady donors. The college didn’t go to the police about it. All right, but then what? Was he still selling drugs? Was he selling them at Waldorf Pines? Was he selling it in town, or farther afield? What kind of money did he have on him? Where did it come from?”