Wanting Sheila Dead (7 page)

“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.

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.”

“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—”

“Me, too,” Tibor said. “I prefer
America's Next Top Model.
I don't like the woman on
America's Next Superstar
so much. She's, she's—”

“A dyed in-the-wool bitch,” Bennis said. “Yes, I know. I actually met her once, before she was reduced to doing reality shows. She used to interview for the
Today
show. Then she asked Katie Couric—on the air, I'm not making this up—she asked Katie Couric if the stress of being married to her was the reason her husband died of cancer. And that was that.”

“I think I heard about that,” Tibor said.

“Everybody heard about it,” Bennis said.

“So there has been another murder in your house in Bryn Mawr?” Tibor said.

“It's not my house,” Bennis said. “It's the family house, and Bobby got it in my father's will. No, there hasn't been a murder, or anything else in the house. It was before that, when they were doing the final auditions. They held them in this place in Merion, and somebody shot at Sheila Dunham.”

“Just shot at her?” Tibor asked.

“Well, in front of a crowd of people,” Bennis said. “Just stood up and shot at her. One of the girls who hadn't been eliminated, I think. Oh, I don't know. I really don't. They arrested the girl, and she's sitting in jail somewhere. She's just been sitting there. She doesn't ever talk, apparently. And she didn't have any ID on her, so they don't know who she is, and she isn't saying. And that's where it stands, I think. So the show asked Bobby to ask me to ask Gregor—”

“To do God only knows what,” Gregor said, “since there's no murder here, and I'm not the kind of detective who tracks down missing identities. The police will figure out who this young woman is, eventually. They're good at that kind of thing. And they have resources I don't. There's absolutely no point in my going around doing nothing particularly sensible—”

It was the tip of old Mrs. Vardanian's walking stick that Gregor noticed first. All the Very Old Ladies used walking sticks, although most of them didn't seem to need them to walk.

Gregor sat back and away from his food, feeling a little breathless.

“Mrs. Vardanian,” he said. “Good morning. Ladies.”

The Very Old Ladies nodded in unison. They were like a Greek chorus, those women, a Greek chorus made up of Furies, or Harpies, or something else equally intimidating.

Mrs. Vardanian picked up her walking stick and pounded it on the floor.

“There's something going on down at Sophie Mgrdchian's place,” she said. “And I think you ought to go down there and look into it.”

It had been late fall when Gregor Demarkian first moved back to Cavanaugh Street. He had a tendency, when he was indoors, to imagine it always that way: dark and cold, and with that wet sting in the air that promises snow.

It was now late spring, though, and the air was thick and warm, and the landscape was bright. The fronts of the town houses that lined both sides of the street looked washed. The windows of the stores looked as if they'd been polished. Back down the street a bit, back toward his and Bennis's own apartment, the new Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church glittered in the way that could only happen if women had come out to wash the sidewalk in front of it.

“Probably hired someone,” Gregor said to himself.

“What?” Bennis said.

The Very Old Ladies had led them out onto the sidewalk, and were now marching them down the block in the other direction from the church. The air smelled like something in the country. Gregor wasn't sure he liked it.

“They probably hired someone,” he told Bennis. “The sidewalk in
front of the church has been washed down, and I know the city didn't do it. When I was growing up, the women did it, the married women, but I can't imagine them doing it now. Can you see Lida Arkmanian out here with a tin pail on her hands and knees, scrubbing the sidewalk?”