Festival of Deaths (9 page)

“There is perhaps such a section at the Bureau now?”

“No perhaps about it. Of course there is.”

“Well then,” Tibor said. “Krekor. You go today to have lunch with an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is a friend of yours. He may have friends of his own in this special section. He may be able to… help us out.”

Gregor picked up the crumpled paper again, stared at the name printed on it in such precise letters, and put it down again. “How long ago did all of this happen?” he asked Tibor.

“A little over two weeks.”

“Two weeks. Do you know if the police got any physical evidence at the scene? Anything to link the act to any specific person?”

“I told you—”

“I know they don’t know the names,” Gregor insisted, “but they might have blind evidence that could eventually be definitive. Hair. Fingerprints. Even singed or torn skin.”

“Ah,” Tibor said, impressed. “I don’t know.”

Gregor tapped his fingers against his knee. “Well,” he said, “I suppose we can ask. It’s always possible they’re sounding more pessimistic than they have to. In cases like this, though, the police tend to want to deliver hope if they possibly can. You do realize, if the police don’t have anything of the kind I’m talking about, even if we do find out who was responsible, the police aren’t going to be able to arrest them?”

“Not enough evidence?” Tibor asked dejectedly.

“Not enough evidence and too far from the commission of the crime. If this had come up within, oh, twenty-four hours or so—if you’d talked to me and I’d talked to the Bureau and the Bureau had come up with a couple of names that fit, all in the first twenty-four hours, then there might have been a chance to dig up a witness or find some new evidence, but now—”

“You make it sound so hopeless,” Tibor said.

“It is hopeless,” Gregor told him.

“Does that mean you will not ask your friend at the FBI for us?”

“Of course I’ll ask my friend at the FBI. But you and your friend Rabbi Goldman have got to understand that what I’ll be delivering, if I deliver anything, is a chance to catch these idiots the
next
time they do anything.”

“The next time,” Tibor said, shocked.

“This still doesn’t explain to me why Cavanaugh Street is celebrating Hanukkah,” Gregor said. “Donna came downstairs this morning and planted a neon menorah in my living room window.”

“The menorah,” Tibor said, leaping to his feet. “I forgot. Donna brought me one this morning and I have not yet put it up.”

“Tibor—”

“I will only be a minute, Krekor. It is important. It is a gesture of solidarity.”

“Right,” Gregor said, but he supposed he understood. Tibor was always whipping the residents of Cavanaugh Street into a frenzy of solidarity for somebody or the other: starving children in Ethiopia; oppressed students in China; the homeless who filled the shelter run by a consortium of volunteers from Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church, Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church, St. Thomas Episcopal Church, and the Becker Street African Methodist Church. Tibor was a devotee of good causes. Gregor could hardly fault him for that. As for this latest enthusiasm—why
shouldn’t
Tibor show his solidarity with the Jewish community of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Main Line? Why shouldn’t he? The only thing that worried Gregor Demarkian was what form this solidarity would take. The neon menorahs were interesting enough, but Gregor knew Cavanaugh Street. It would never in a million years end there.

Tibor came back from the front hall and tripped over a few books again, the hem of his cassock flapping, the sparse hair on his head bouncing as he flailed.

“There it is. All done. Now I have only to work on my voice. You will be home next Saturday, Krekor?”

“Far as I know.”

“Good. You will come to our block party. I want everybody in this neighborhood at our block party. Lida Arkmanian is even now learning to cook kosher food.”

“What?” Gregor said.

Tibor wasn’t listening. He had finished his coffee and wanted to get more. He had come to that point in the conversation where he did not want to discuss anything more with Gregor Demarkian. That was why Gregor was suspicious. Gregor got suspicious when anybody on Cavanaugh Street told him that something they were about to make him do would be—well, not a complicated mess.

Block party.

Kosher food.

Right.

On any other day of the year, Gregor would have stopped and insisted on being told exactly what was going on. On this day, he was in danger of being late for a very important lunch. He got out of his chair and made his way back across the obstacle course of books, wondering when Tibor got the time to read like this when he spent so much time making Gregor Demarkian’s life resemble one of the wilder plays of Ionesco. Gregor stopped at the door to the entry and called out,

“Tibor? I’m leaving.”

“Have a good lunch,” Tibor called back.

“Tibor?”

No answer.

Gregor went into the entry, got his coat from the closet and headed out the door.

When Tibor refused to talk to him at all, God only knew what kind of insanity was going on.

L
ATER, GREGOR DEMARKIAN WOULD
tell Bennis Hannaford—his immediate downstairs neighbor; the woman half the magazines in America insisted on calling his “constant companion” and that half the people in America thought was his lover (Gregor had once told Tibor he’d as soon take the Tasmanian devil for a lover, it would be calmer)—that the hardest thing about his talk with Tibor that morning was not telling Tibor why he was having lunch with his “friend from the FBI.” Tibor Kasparian was probably the man Gregor had been closest to in his life. Gregor’s father and older brother had both died when Gregor was very young, and he had no distinct memories of either. Then there had been college and graduate school, the army and the Bureau. Men made close friends in places like that, but Gregor hadn’t. Gregor had made a close friend in his wife. She had been enough for him as long as she was alive. It was after she died that Gregor had come back to Cavanaugh Street and found himself at loose ends. It was in coming back to Cavanaugh Street that he had met Tibor. It all got very complicated. Gregor Demarkian had grown up on Cavanaugh Street in the days when it had been an Armenian-American ghetto, the kind of place all its residents wanted to escape for the greener grass of the Philadelphia Main Line. He had come back to a Cavanaugh Street transformed, but not quite. The buildings had been spruced up and gutted and remodeled and rearranged. The tenements had been changed into townhouses and floor-through condominiums with twelve-foot-high ceilings and marble fireplaces and Anderson windows in brownstone frames. The people on Cavanaugh Street, however, had not changed at all. Lida Arkmanian bought her clothes at Saks these days and covered them over with a chinchilla coat, but she still went at cooking as if she could bring about world peace with it and worried about everybody’s grandchildren. Hannah Krekorian took her vacations in the Bahamas these days, but she still talked a blue streak and lusted over love and romance the way a cat lusted after fresh fish. People were so much the same, Gregor sometimes found himself stopped dead in confusion, as if he had wandered into a costume party that refused to come to an end. Surely any minute now Lida would trade in that chinchilla coat for a cloth one from Sears, and Sheila Kashinian would confess that all those diamond rings were just paste. Surely any minute now Gregor’s own mother would come trundling up from Ohanian’s with a soft reed basket under her arm, carrying a plucked chicken and two cups of bulgur to make for tonight’s dinner. Of course, Gregor’s mother was dead now and Ohanian’s had become Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store. Gregor put flowers on his mother’s grave every Christmas Day and Ohanian’s sold prepackaged filo leaves to tourists from Radnor for twelve ninety-nine a pound. It should have been enough to cause a case of terminal disorientation in anyone, but it wasn’t, and that was the problem. Gregor Demarkian’s loyalties were here. For the rest of his life, they would be. What Gregor had had a hard time not telling Tibor that morning was what he was having lunch with his “friend from the FBI” for. Gregor kept putting the phrase—“friend from the FBI”—in quotes, because it belonged in quotes. Don Elkham was not strictly a friend of his, although Gregor described him that way, for want of another term to use for him. Gregor and Don had known each other since their first day of training at Quantico, and followed each other through the ranks at the Bureau ever since. The difference was, while Gregor had ended up chief and originator of the Department of Behavioral Sciences, Don had gotten stalled along the way. Of course, Gregor was retired now, with no standing at all. There was no reason for a man like Don Elkham to be jealous of a Gregor Demarkian who had demoted himself into nothing but an amateur. Even so, the jealousy was there. Gregor had felt it coming over the phone when Don had called.

What Don had called about was what he insisted on referring to as “a little criminal anomaly in New York.” What he meant was that one of the staff members on Rabbi David Goldman’s sister’s television show had been murdered in Manhattan last month and there was enough strangeness around the case to get all the law enforcement people a little nervous. Gregor had wondered out loud what that had to do with the FBI, but the explanation had turned out to be less than sinister. Don Elkham was a station agent in Philadelphia. His best buddy from the army was the police lieutenant handling the case in New York. Everybody knew about the connection between Lotte Goldman’s brother David and Father Tibor Kasparian, and between Father Tibor Kasparian and Gregor Demarkian.

“It’s all over the place that you’ve been asked to be on
The Lotte Goldman Show
,” Don had said on the phone, “and it’s like Chickie said. Put two and two together, and it sure as hell is hot, the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot is going to be all over this case as soon as
The Lotte Goldman Show
hits Philadelphia.”

“If you call me the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot one more time,” Gregor said, “I’ll hang up this phone.”

“Chickie said I should call you up and ask you to lunch and talk it over with you,” Don said. “Just to see what you’re up to.”

“I’m not up to anything. This is the first I’ve heard of any murder.”

“It won’t be the last. Chickie will see to that. I’ll meet you at Café Blasé at noon on the first.”

Chickie was the name of the police lieutenant in New York.

Café Blasé was one of those vaguely French restaurants that decorated all its food with flower petals, so that a perfectly respectable piece of fried chicken breast arrived at the table looking as if it had been drowned with Ophelia. Gregor had been there once or twice and he didn’t like it. With another agent, he would have suggested another restaurant. With Don Elkham, he decided to let it slide.

He nearly slid himself, getting out of the cab in front of Café Blasé. December was never a good weather month in Philadelphia, but this December had been especially cold and wet. There were patches of slick brown mud at every curb. Gregor steadied himself against a mailbox and headed into the restaurant, going through the door just behind two young women in their twenties in thigh-high skirts and geometric hair. Sometimes these days, he felt as if he were in a time warp.

Don Elkham was sitting at a table in the bay window closest to the hostess’s stand. Gregor gestured to the hostess and she let him through with a nod. The two young women looked bored.

Gregor went over to the table where Don was sitting and sat down himself. Don did not rise. Don had never had his manners too firmly glued on.

“Sorry I’m late,” Gregor said. “I got here as soon as I could.”

“Held up by the lovely Miss Hannaford,” Don said. “Gregor Demarkian finds his debutante.”

“Miss Hannaford likes to be called Ms.”

“Well, that’s a surprise. I can’t imagine you falling for a women’s libber.”

Exactly what Don Elkham was supposed to know about who Gregor Demarkian was or was not likely to “fall for” was a mystery to Gregor Demarkian, since the only woman Don had ever seen him with was his Elizabeth, and she had hardly been a case in point against Gregor’s falling for “women’s libbers.” The waitress came up and Gregor ordered himself a glass of Burgundy. He didn’t much like wine, but he had to do something.

Don ordered himself a martini, which had to mean this was his day off. If it wasn’t, he was asking for trouble.

“So,” Don said. “What do you think? About the murder on
The Lotte Goldman Show
?”

“I don’t think anything about it,” Gregor said. “I told you on the phone. All I’ve heard about it, I’ve heard from you.”

“Your friend Father Kasparian hasn’t told you anything about it?”

“Father Tibor. And no, he hasn’t.”

“How about Father—uh—Tibor’s friend. Rabbi Goldman?”

“I’ve met Rabbi Goldman exactly once. It was at a food fair in central Philadelphia. I complimented him on his wife’s latkes. In spite of what you might think, I have not been spending every waking moment of every day of the last month consorting with people who are related to people who are involved in your friend’s murder case. I am a little surprised that I hadn’t heard about it at all. With television people involved, there’s usually a bit more publicity.”

Don Elkham was chewing on a breadstick. “The publicity was squashed,” he said through a mouthful of crumbs. “The official line is that it was an ordinary mugging.”

“I thought you said the circumstances were strange.”

“They were. The woman—her name was Maria Gonzalez—the woman’s apartment was ransacked, gone over real good, and by somebody in a hurry. Place was trashed. Body wasn’t there, though.”

“Where was it?”

“In a storeroom at the studio where they tape
The Lotte Goldman Show
in New York.”

“Dead, I take it.”

“Bashed on the side of the head hard enough to cave the skull in. But there’s more. She wasn’t there all the time.”

“She wasn’t in the storeroom,” Gregor said.