Deadly Beloved

by Jane Haddam

  “Donna can even go on decorating everything,” Lida Arkmanian had said, explaining the whole thing to Gregor one afternoon just before Christmas. “It will be like nothing has really changed at all, except that Donna will have Russell and Tommy will have a father.”

  “It’s just like Howard Kashinian to ask for a down payment from Donna of all people,” Father Tibor Kasparian had said about a week later. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about Howard. I don’t know if there’s anything to be done about Howard.”

  Gregor Demarkian had known Howard Kashinian all his life. He knew there was nothing to be done about the man—but Howard Kashinian wasn’t the problem, and thinking about him wasn’t going to solve anything. Week after week went by. Winter turned into spring. Donna wrapped the four-story brownstone they all lived in in red and silver foil for Valentine’s Day and in green and yellow ribbons for Mother’s Day. She wrapped all the streetlamp poles in bright red bolts of satin cloth and strung balloons between them for her son Tommy’s birthday. Sometimes Gregor would hear her, pacing back and forth in the apartment above his head, her step light and oddly rhythmic. Sometimes he’d see her out his big front living room window, skateboarding along the sidewalk with her hair flying while Lida or Hannah Krekorian kept Tommy sitting safely on a stoop. Once Gregor had gone downstairs to Bennis Hannaford’s place, to see if she would feed him coffee and cheer him up, but it hadn’t worked. Bennis was Donna’s best friend on Cavanaugh Street, maybe the best friend Donna had in the world, in spite of the fact that Bennis was nearly forty instead of just past twenty and nothing like Donna in background at all. Her apartment was full of bits and pieces of Donna’s wedding, strewn about like dust among the debris of her real life: big maps of make-believe places called Zed and Zedalia; papier-mâché models of dragons and trolls. There was a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf built into the wall in Bennis’s foyer, filled with editions of the books she had written herself. The Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia had a unicorn on the cover and a dragon with a curling tail. Zedalia in Winter had a lady in a conical hat and a lot of veils, riding on a horse. The latest one, Zedalia Triumphant, had a plain red background and nothing else at all. Bennis was on the New York Times best-seller list. As far as her publisher was concerned, she was now making enough money to be considered a Serious Writer, and Serious Writers did not have the covers of their books cluttered up with garish four-color pictures of rogue trolls.

  “They wanted me to go out to the Midwest and tour the week of Donna’s wedding,” Bennis had said as she let Gregor through her door. He had a key to her apartment, but he never used it. It made him feel odd—somehow—to have it. “But I told them to forget it. I mean, for God’s sake. I just got back from England. I’m going up to Canada in four days. It’s not like I’m recalcitrant about doing publicity.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor had said.

  Bennis led him into her kitchen. Her thick black hair was piled on top of her head. Her legs and feet were bare under her jeans. Her long-fingered hands looked cold. Gregor sat down at her kitchen table and cleared a place for himself. Bennis had pieces of a copyedited manuscript spread out everywhere. Every single page seemed to display a pale yellow Post-it Note with a message in navy blue ink and a plain white Post-it Note with a message in red. Don’t you think you should mention Hitler here? one of the blue-inked messages read. This is taking place in 1882, for Christ’s sake, the red-inked message shot back. Hitler hadn’t even been BORN yet. Gregor wanted to ask what Hitler had to do with Zed and Zedalia, but he didn’t. Bennis put a large cup of coffee down in front of him.

  “Donna’s mother is practically living upstairs these days,” Bennis said, turning her back to him and fussing with the pile of dirty dishes in her sink. Bennis never seemed to wash dishes, only to fuss with them—but they got done every once in a while, and put away, so she must have gotten serious or used the dishwasher or hired help when he wasn’t looking. Gregor drank coffee and wondered why he was thinking so hard about Bennis Hannaford’s dishes.

  “Donna’s mother is upstairs practically every minute of the time these days,” Bennis said, actually rinsing out a glass and putting it in the dish rack. She picked it up again, reinspected it, and put it back in the sink. “Donna’s going crazy, as you can imagine, and I’m about to go crazy too, because Donna’s mother is a nice woman, but honestly, Gregor, she keeps wanting to change things. Do you remember how I was supposed to wear this sort of claret-colored satin skirt to be maid of honor in?”

  “Mmmm,” Gregor said.

  “Donna’s mother thinks red is red and wearing red makes me look like a scarlet woman, which Donna’s mother half thinks I am anyway. Do you think that’s true, Gregor? That I’m some sort of scarlet woman?”

  “Mmmm,” Gregor said again.

  Bennis turned around and leaned back against the sink. She was wearing a turtleneck and a flannel shirt over her jeans. Her great masses of black hair were straining against their pins, showing a little gray here and there. She looked the way she always looked, Gregor thought—as if she were in costume. There was something about her face, something so Old Money Philadelphia Main Line, that didn’t go with this style she had developed and now seemed permanently addicted to. Gregor thought she would look more natural playing Elizabeth I of England in an old movie—except that Elizabeth I had never been this good-looking.

  Bennis crossed her arms over her chest. “Do you want to tell me what’s bothering you?” she demanded. “I mean, for God’s sake, Gregor, you’re beginning to remind me of Banquo’s ghost.”

  “Nothing’s bothering me,” Gregor told her. “I’ve just been a little tired lately. I’ve got the right to be a little tired.”

  “Maybe you should see a doctor. You haven’t been doing anything to be tired.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Well, I mean it. You’ve been moping around the neighborhood for weeks now. You haven’t been investigating a case—”

  “There hasn’t been a case for me to investigate.”

  “John Jackman asked you to help with something three weeks ago. I know. I read the note.”

  “Now you’re reading my mail.”

  Bennis sighed. “Gregor, seriously. Even Sheila Kashinian’s beginning to worry about you, and Sheila wouldn’t notice if an atom bomb dropped in the middle of her living room. Unless it messed up her curtains, of course, because she just got new white curtains. Don’t listen to me. I’m just trying to get across to you—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Gregor said stubbornly.

  “You’re off your food,” Bennis told him. “Lida left a plate of stuffed grape leaves for you a week ago and half of them are still in your refrigerator.”

  “You were looking in my refrigerator?”

  “I’m always looking in your refrigerator. Gregor, please—”

  “The night my wife died, she screamed,” Gregor said, wondering where the words had come from as soon as he’d said them, feeling the words like hailstones floating around his head, clogging up the air. “They wanted to give her this shot, this medicine, that didn’t really do any good but it was on their manifest, they were afraid I was going to sue them if they couldn’t prove they’d done everything possible, so you see it was my fault. That she screamed. That she was in pain. If they hadn’t been so worried about me they would have listened to her.”

  Bennis Hannaford got out a cigarette and lit up. Gregor hadn’t seen her smoke in a week. “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  “She was so thin at the end, her skin looked like paper,” Gregor said. “I think I’m going back upstairs to my own apartment. I think I’m going to pour myself a stiff drink.”

  “You can’t possibly think it was really your fault,” Bennis said, “that they gave her medication. That she was in pain. You aren’t responsible for cancer. Doctors aren’t all that easily intimidated. For God’s sake. This is crazy.”

  “I think I’m going back upstairs to my own apartment,” Gregor repea
ted, and he stood up. He spent half his life these days in Bennis Hannaford’s kitchen, but at the moment it didn’t look familiar. The thin stream of her cigarette smoke was curling like a ribbon through the latticework of the light fixture that hung from her ceiling. Gregor Demarkian was a big man—six foot four and over two hundred fifty pounds—and he felt suddenly bigger than ever, huge and awkward, poured from lead.

  “Maybe I’d better go upstairs with you,” Bennis said.

  Gregor turned away from her without answering. It was a million miles from the kitchen table to the kitchen door. It was three million miles from the kitchen door across the foyer to the door to the hall. He had a sudden vision of himself standing in the cemetery on the other side of Philadelphia, putting Elizabeth to rest in the earth next to his own mother. It was raining and a stiff cold wind was coming out of nowhere. There was a tarpaulin spread across the hole in the ground where they were going to put Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s casket was covered with white carnations. The cemetery was empty except for himself and the undertaker’s men and the Armenian priest whose name he had picked out of the phone book. He was still with the Federal Bureau of Investigation then and living in Washington. He had lost contact with the people he had known in Philadelphia years before. The cemetery that day had felt as empty as the inside of his head and the hollow of his chest. Elizabeth was gone and there was nothing left of him.

  He had no memory of leaving Bennis Hannaford’s apartment. He had no idea how he got from her kitchen to her front door, or up the stairway to his own front door, or into his apartment. He came to sitting on the floor in his own bedroom, his hands deep into the bottom drawer of his bureau. Seconds later he came out with what he was looking for: his wedding album and the two thick albums of snapshots Elizabeth had used to keep her pictures of their vacations together. The plastic felt tense and wet and hot under his fingers, like something dangerous and alive. He pressed his forehead against the front of the bureau and closed his eyes. He remembered how, when he had first moved into this apartment, he had thought he could hear Elizabeth talking to him in the kitchen. Her voice would come out to him from the neat stacks of stoneware dishes in his cupboards and the tall bottle of milk in his otherwise empty refrigerator. The sound of her would follow him into his living room and down the hall to his bedroom. When he fell asleep, he would hear her singing lullabies. He didn’t remember when she had disappeared, but she had. He had become involved in Cavanaugh Street and the people who lived on it. He had found work to do as a consultant to police departments in homicide cases and books he wanted to read and political candidates he wanted to support and movies he was willing to see on the nights Bennis Hannaford couldn’t stand looking at the walls of her living room anymore. He had found a million things to fill up his life with, and now Elizabeth was gone.

  Elizabeth died of uterine cancer four and a half years ago, he told himself. It was sticky hot outside, but he was cold. He counted to ten and took a deep breath and counted to ten again. His muscles were twitching just under the surface of his skin. I could sit here forever, he thought—and the thought scared the hell out of him.

  The phone rang. He had the ringer in the bedroom turned up loud in case somebody needed to wake him. The shrill, long sound made him jump. He leaned back and took the receiver off the base of the phone, where it lay next to the lamp on his night table. He expected to hear Bennis or someone she had called, worried about what kind of shape he was in. Instead, he got John Henry Newman Jackman, the head of homicide detectives for the Philadelphia Police Department and, according to Bennis and Donna Moradanyan, the single most beautiful male human being on earth.

  “Gregor?” John Jackman said. “Have you been watching the news tonight?”

  “What time is it?” Gregor asked him.

  “Go turn on your television set,” Jackman said. “Turn it to ABC. Right away.”

  Gregor stood up and stretched the muscles in his shoulders. The digital clock on the bedside table said 5:58.

  “Just a minute,” Gregor told Jackman. “I’m going to have to switch phones. I’m in the bedroom.”

  “Hurry up.”

  Gregor put the phone receiver on the night table next to the base and went down the hall. His living room windows looked across Cavanaugh Street to Lida Arkmanian’s town house. Lida was sitting at the desk in her bedroom, writing something. Gregor picked up the receiver of the living room phone and the remote control from the television set. He said hello to John Jackman and switched the set to ABC. The first thing he saw was what seemed to be a piece of floating black metal. The next thing he saw was an explosion, the bright flash of red followed by the eruption of thick black smoke, the second flash ripping out and rumbling like thunder. The clock in the bedroom must be slow, he thought stupidly.

  “Good God,” he said to John Jackman. “What was that?”

  “Pipe bomb.”

  “Pipe bomb?”

  “In a parking garage in West Philly late this afternoon. There was a smaller explosion first and this guy was going by with his video camera, near the university. Anyway, he’d always wanted to get something on the local news and he figured he had a chance and he rushed in and started filming and then the second explosion went off and he damn near got killed. The parking garage attendant was badly hurt. He got his shot though. The kid, I mean. What do you think of that?”

  On the screen the smoke had cleared away. There was a picture of a city street with a parking garage in the background. A tall young woman with blond hair and big teeth was talking solemnly into a microphone. Gregor remembered the days when television people tried to make their microphones as small and unobtrusive as possible, invisible, so as not to break the illusion of being part of real life.

  “I take it someone died in the explosion,” Gregor said.

  “Nope,” John Jackman told him. “Lot of cars got messed up. That was it.”

  “Then what are you doing on it?”

  “The guy who died died in bed,” Jackman said. “Out at Fox Run Hill. You know the place?”

  “One of those gated communities,” Gregor said promptly. “Bunch of people locking themselves up so that the bogeymen don’t get them. Fox Run Hill’s out in one of the suburbs, isn’t it? That shouldn’t be yours either.”

  “Man who died out there was named Stephen Willis. His wife put three or four bullets into him with a silenced automatic pistol.”

  “It’s still not yours, John.”

  “It was the wife’s car that blew up in West Philly this afternoon.”

  “Ahh,” Gregor said. “And the wife wasn’t in it?”

  “No, she wasn’t.”

  “And now you want to know where she is.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Across the street, Lida had finished writing her letter and was licking the flap of an envelope to seal it. Gregor was always telling her that he could see everything she did in there, but she only remembered to close her drapes sometimes.

  “Listen,” John Jackman said, “you’ve got to come down and see me tomorrow, okay? I can’t explain all this over the phone.”

  “About the pipe bomb and Fox Run Hill.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Even if things look strange now, John, they won’t necessarily look strange in the morning. It’s only been, what. A couple of hours?”

  “Something like that. Not even that. I’m serious, Gregor. You’ve got to come down. Will you do it?”

  Gregor thought about Elizabeth’s voice in his kitchen, about kneeling on the floor of his bedroom with his forehead pressed against the front of the bureau, about saying strange things to Bennis Hannaford and not remembering where he had been.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course I will.”

  “Good. Make it about nine o’clock. I’ve got a couple of things I have to do.”

  “You’ll probably have the whole thing solved before I ever get there.”

  “I don’t think so.”

&nb
sp; “If you do, I’m going to make you buy me lunch. I’m not going to go hauling all the way down to police headquarters for nothing.”

  “It won’t be for nothing. Do you know Julianne Corbett?”

  “The new congresswoman? I know who she is.”

  “Good. Be there at nine. I’ve got to go now.”

  “But what does Julianne Corbett have to do with it?”

  “I’ve got to go now,” John Jackman insisted. “I’m glad you’re coming down, Gregor. You’ve been acting very weird lately. I’ve been worried.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Gregor started to say—but the phone had already gone to dial tone and there was no point. Gregor hung up the phone, got off the couch, and went back into the bedroom. Then he hung up the phone there and sat down on the edge of the bed. His wedding album was lying on the carpet next to the bureau. The other photograph albums were edged back a little under his bed. He picked them all up and put them back into the bureau’s bottom drawer. He had a picture of Elizabeth in a frame on top of his bureau. He picked that up and looked at it instead.

  2.

  Half and hour later, feeling stiff and sore and half as if he were coming down with a cold, Gregor Demarkian went back downstairs to Bennis Hannaford’s apartment. When he knocked, he heard her voice call to him to come in. He tried her door and found it unlocked. No matter how many times he lectured her, she would not listen. Nobody on Cavanaugh Street would listen. This was their Magic Kingdom. At least one murder had happened there since Gregor was in residence—but it might as well not have. It had merely passed into the folklore of the street.