by Jane Haddam
Gregor opened one of the closets. It was the size of a moderately spacious bathroom, and it was absolutely empty.
“Well,” he said.
“You can look at the rest of them if you want,” John Jackman said, “but I already have. They’re all like that.”
“Empty,” Gregor said.
“That’s right,” Dan Exter said.
“She took all her clothes,” Gregor said.
John Jackman walked to the other end of the room and looked out the large plate-glass window there. “There were clothes in the parking garage,” he said, “lots of them, thrown out by the blast. And a lot of stuff burned, of course. We couldn’t prevent that.”
“What kind of a car was it?” Gregor wanted to know.
“Volvo station wagon,” Jackman said. “There’s a lot of room in those station wagons.”
“There isn’t infinite room in those station wagons,” Gregor said. “What did she do? Kill him and then pack?”
“Maybe she packed before she killed him,” Dan Exter said. “We’re running all kinds of tests. We’re trying to find out if he was drugged. We’re trying to find out if he was poisoned. God only knows what.”
“The thing is that it all had to be deliberate,” John Jackman said. “Gregor, no matter how you look at it, it had to be deliberate. It had to be planned. She must have worked it all out beforehand—”
“Assuming she’s the one who planted the pipe bombs,” Dan Exter said. “Don’t let’s jump to conclusions.”
“Who else would have planted the pipe bombs? Who would want to?” Jackman had started to pace. “There’s a record of everybody who comes into this place and out of it. Into Fox Run Hill, I mean. It’s not like dropping a little something off in the ash can outside a brownstone in the middle of the city.”
“The pipe bombs might not have been planted here,” Dan Exter argued. “They might have been planted in the garage. You can’t tell me you trust that idiot from the garage to remember who went in and out all afternoon.”
“Of course I don’t,” John Jackman said, “but I don’t believe the bombs were planted in the garage either. Somebody would have noticed something. Maybe not the garage attendant, but somebody.”
“Maybe somebody did,” Dan Exter said. “We haven’t even started talking to people yet. Someone could come forward at any moment.”
Gregor Demarkian cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. “I wonder if you’ve noticed something.”
“Noticed what?” Dan Exter sounded exasperated.
“That it wasn’t just her clothes,” Gregor said. “It isn’t just that clothes are missing from this house. It’s that everything connected to a woman is missing from this house. At least, it has been so far. No women’s shoes in the mudroom downstairs. No women’s coats in the closet in the foyer. Nothing at all in the night table next to Mrs. Willis’s side of the bed—”
“But not everybody keeps things in their night-table drawers,” Dan Exter pointed out. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“By itself, of course it doesn’t mean anything,” Gregor agreed, “but I think you’d better have this house searched from top to bottom, and see if you can find anything at all that would indicate that Patricia MacLaren Willis ever lived here, because so far I can’t. And since the impression I got was that she was supposed to have lived here for some time—”
“Round about twenty years,” Dan Exter said.
“Well,” Gregor said, “you see what I mean. If Patricia MacLaren Willis obliterated all trace of twenty years of her life from a house this size, she must have been at it for weeks.”
FIVE
1.
GREGOR DEMARKIAN COULDN’T REMEMBER feeling suffocated in Fox Run Hill—but back on Cavanaugh Street, climbing out of John Jackman’s unmarked car in front of the Ararat, he was aware of feeling suddenly able to breathe. Cavanaugh Street wasn’t even very breathable at the moment. Philadelphia is cold in the winter and hot in the summer, and now it was hot, and sticky, and heavy with humidity. It was also getting not-exactly-dark, the way summer nights did. The horizon would have been a red and purple glow if Gregor could have seen the horizon. All he could see were the tops of brownstone buildings and brick row houses, well kept on Cavanaugh Street itself, crumbling and unsteady on the streets shooting off it. Everybody lives in a gated community these days, he thought grimly. Everybody lives in a fortress surrounded by chaos. John Jackman cranked down the driver’s side window of his car and leaned out to look at Gregor’s face. Gregor thought idly that they ought to do better by the police. They ought at least to buy them cars with power windows.
“Are you all right?” John Jackman asked. “You look funny.”
“I’m fine,” Gregor said. “Are you and Bennis talking to each other these days?”
“Not exactly.” Jackman looked uncomfortable. “I mean, I am the person who was trying to get a member of her own family executed.”
“I thought that wasn’t up to you.”
“It wasn’t. But, Gregor. Seriously. If you want to screw up a love affair, I guarantee it, testifying in favor of the death penalty at the punishment phase hearing of your lover’s own sister will definitely do it. Even if it’s not a sister she especially liked.”
“It’s a sister she hated to the bone.”
“I know. I know. Even so. What are you trying to do, fix me up with Bennis again?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s good, you know, Gregor, because no matter what else is going on here, Bennis is not exactly ready to settle down.”
“I have noticed.”
“I’m not exactly ready to settle down either. Is there some point to this conversation?”
Gregor was looking down a side street called Bullock. In the hours he had been away, Donna Moradanyan had gone to work on Cavanaugh Street. White and gold satin ribbons seemed to be wrapped around everything. The streetlamps had white and gold satin ribbons twisted into spirals that reminded Gregor of old-fashioned barber poles. Gregor’s divided-up brownstone and Lida Arkmanian’s town house across the street were covered in white and gold bows, without an inch of the original masonry showing on either one. The steps of Holy Trinity Church were lined with white silk flowers in pots covered with white paper and decked out in sprightly gold bows. Next to all of this, Bullock Street looked worse than bare and spare. It looked like a black pit. In the building Gregor could see best, better than halfway down the block, caught in a stray gleam of light from a streetlamp, there was a window broken on the fourth floor.
“Gregor?” John Jackman said again.
Gregor snapped to and shook his head. “Well,” he said. “Do you have that list of things I asked you to do?”
“My sergeant has them. They’ll be done by tomorrow. Are you sure you don’t have a fax machine?”
“Positive.”
“Then I’ll bring the forensics when I come to see you tomorrow. You really ought to get a fax machine, Gregor.”
“I know. You’ll set up the interviews.”
“I said I would. I will if you tell me to. But, Christ, Gregor, appointments to interrogate witnesses—”
“It will help.”
“If you say so. But if you ask me, I think we ought to crash every one of those doors every time one of those idiots refuses to open it. Who the hell do they think they are?”
“It’s who they think we are that matters.”
“I don’t like this gated-community crap. Fortress mentality, that’s all it is. And worse. Racism pure and simple.”
“Not so pure and not so simple. They would probably be overjoyed if somebody like, say, Clarence Thomas decided to buy a house there.”
“Clarence Thomas lives in Virginia. They make me angry, Gregor.”
“They make me depressed,” Gregor said. “But the chances are good that they’re going to be able to tell us where our missing woman is.”
“They know that? And they aren’t telling us?”
&n
bsp; “They don’t know they know it. Could you find out something else for me?”
“Maybe.”
“We need to know if Mrs. Willis had friends outside Fox Run Hill. You said she didn’t have a job.”
“Not a job we could find out about, no.”
“You checked with the IRS?”
“Definitely.”
“All right, then. What about the sort of thing women in her position like to do? Volunteer work. The museums. The symphony. That kind of thing.”
“You can’t honestly believe she went back to her volunteer work after she’d blown up her own station wagon.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I’m just looking for a friend. A very good friend. The best friend she has.”
“You mean somebody who might be hiding her.”
“Not exactly. Not in the way you mean it.” He gestured at the Ararat. “You want to come in and have dinner with me, John? If Bennis still isn’t talking to you, she can sit with somebody else. Assuming she’s here at all.”
“If Bennis is here, she wouldn’t want to sit with anybody else,” John Jackman said. “She’d want to sit with me and make my life hell. Thanks a lot, Gregor, but I just can’t. I’ve got a pile of work to do back at the office.”
“The other thing I want from you is sightings reports. I take it you are getting those?”
“Dozens of them. By the hour. We ought to be glad this Mrs. Willis is just an ordinary middle-aged lady. When we have kids or, God help us, black people—”
“I know. You get dozens by the minute. You’re not going to save the world, John.”
“I know. But I keep trying. I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at eight.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“Dan Exter said you were as impressive as hell. That’s a compliment, Gregor. Only thing Dan Exter is usually impressed with is the Queen of England, and he’s not so big on her since Chuck and Di turned out to be such putzes.”
“Right,” Gregor said. “I like him too.”
John Jackman started to roll up his window. “Take care of yourself, Gregor. We need you to make us look good, even if we don’t need you for anything else.”
Gregor was about to say that they needed him for a lot more, but John Jackman already had his window rolled up and his car sliding down along the curb. Gregor felt the first heavy raindrops against his forehead like dollops of mayonnaise. Half a block up, Hannah Krekorian opened a window and leaned out of it. She looked as if she were about to take a dive headfirst onto the pavement. She pulled back at the last minute and disappeared inside her home again. Gregor noticed that the window had a big white and gold bow on it. If the neighborhood looked like this now, how would it look on the day of the actual wedding? Would there be carpets of seed pearls covering the sidewalks? Would there be tulle and lace skirts around all the fire hydrants?
Gregor decided not to tell anybody what he’d thought about the fire hydrants. Donna Moradanyan was far too likely to take him seriously.
He gave one last look around at the well-lit and overdecorated Cavanaugh Street, and one last look into the black maw of Bullock, and then went in to the Ararat.
No matter what else was going on in his life, he had to eat.
2.
Lately, Gregor Demarkian had been staying out of the Ararat as much as possible. Since he couldn’t cook and didn’t much like either delivery pizza or fast-food hamburgers, this was not as often as he would have liked—but it was enough to make it seem as if he had been avoiding the place, and as soon as he walked in he knew that people on the street had been speculating about why. Of course, people on Cavanaugh Street speculated about everything all the time. It was what they had for a hobby instead of needlepoint or crochet. Even so, it made him uncomfortable. He opened the door and stepped in out of the rain and fifty heads turned to look at him and stayed turned, as if he were a curiosity, as if it were his first week back in the neighborhood. Gregor had vague memories of the first few weeks he had been back in Philadelphia after retiring from the FBI. At the time, he had been treated like a cross between an escaped zoo animal and a pet iguana.
He brushed the wrinkles out of his suit, saw Father Tibor Kasparian seated alone in the front booth, and headed in that direction. In the light of morning the Ararat was a diner-like place with bare Formica tabletops and glass and silver sugar cylinders and a menu full of cholesterol and saturated fat encased in a cracking plastic cover. By night, however, the Ararat got exotic. That was because it had been written up in the Philadelphia Inquirer on and off as an “authentic ethnic experience”—which, in fact, was what it was in the morning. There was no telling what it ought to be called now, with the big menus with their bright red tassels laid out on every bright red tablecloth; with Linda Melajian dressed up in Gypsy skirts and dangling earrings made of bits of gold-colored tin and black plastic beads. It was a mercy nobody had thought of dressing Linda up as a belly dancer—or maybe they had, and her mother wouldn’t allow it. The whole thing gave Gregor a headache. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the people of Cavanaugh Street had been in continuous contact with the people of Armenia, and they all knew perfectly well that Armenians did not wear Gypsy skirts and beaded earrings. They wore Levi’s jeans and rayon flower-print dresses from Sears if they could get them—which, thanks to Lida Arkmanian and Father Tibor Kasparian, they usually could.
Gregor made his way over to Tibor’s booth and looked down at the books strewn across the tabletop. Tibor scattered books wherever he went, like Hansel and Gretel scattering bread crumbs. Two of the books on the table were in Greek, so that Gregor couldn’t read the titles. The third was The Client by John Grisham. Tibor was reading a little paperback called How to Have a Perfect Wedding. Gregor sat down.
“Well,” he said, pointing to the paperback’s cover when Tibor looked up. “How do you have a perfect wedding?”
Tibor made a face. “It is apparently a lot of work. I would have thought it would have been enough if the bride and the groom loved each other, but that is not true. There have to be wedding favors. There have to be three different entrees in case there are guests who are vegetarians allergic to cheese.”
“I can’t imagine anybody on Cavanaugh Street being allergic to anything edible. Has anybody actually seen Donna today?”
“We all see her, Krekor. We do not talk to her. Her mother is here.”
“I know.”
“Her mother wants to decorate the iconostasis with flowers, Krekor. It isn’t possible. The only time we decorate icons with flowers it is in honor of the Epiphany. Or something like that. I think it has been a mistake to conduct our services in Armenian now that we are in America.”
“We’ve been in America for generations. We’ve been conducting our services in Armenian for all the generations we’ve been here.”
“I know, Krekor, but not one of these new generations can speak Armenian. They don’t know what the liturgies say. They don’t know what the religion teaches. They get their ideas about weddings from magazines and their ideas about church services from Martha Stewart. I am going to shout at somebody before this all is finished.”
“Probably Donna’s mother.”
“Probably you. I wouldn’t want to offend Donna’s mother.”
“Gregor!” Linda Melajian rushed up in a jangle of beads and tin and rustly cheap fabric. She was out of breath. “What can I get for you? Did you hear about the tea service Donna’s aunt sent from Seattle? Donna’s father’s sister. It was sterling silver.”
Linda was wearing a gold and white ribbon in her hair. It didn’t go with her Gypsy outfit. Gregor looked around and realized that all the tables had little gold and white bows on them, placed at the base of the glass candle holders that were supposed to look like kerosene lamps but didn’t. Had they ever used kerosene lamps like that in Armenia? Gregor had no idea.
“Could you get me some yaprak sarma?” he asked Linda. “And a bottle of Perrier water or whatever. And a salad. Is Donn
a going to have her reception in here?”
“Donna’s going to have her reception catered from here, but we’re closing off the whole street. She got permission from the city. Like a block party.”
“She sent out three thousand invitations,” Tibor said. “Not so many people are going to fit into Holy Trinity Church.”
“Oh, they won’t all come to the church,” Linda said dismissively. “They wouldn’t even want to. I mean, these days, a third of them will probably be Buddhists and a third of them will probably be atheists, and nobody will have the time.”
“Right,” Tibor said.
“Anyway,” Linda went on, “we’re going to block off the whole street and have tables set up on the sidewalks and Lida and Hannah and Sheila and Helen are all cooking and so is Sophie Oumoudian’s great-aunt, you know the one, and somebody is bringing liquor from Armenia. My mother says we shouldn’t drink any of it because it’s probably going to be moonshine.”
“It’s probably going to be fatal,” Tibor said.
“I think it’s going to be the best,” Linda said. “Anyway, I’ll get you your yaprak sarma, Gregor, and your salad and whatever. I mean, we’re not all out of it at the moment. Bennis was in here earlier. She had pictures of her dress.”
“Dress?” Gregor asked.
“Her maiden of honor dress,” Tibor said helpfully. “Under the circumstances, I think for Bennis to be a maiden of honor is possibly incorrect.”
“I don’t think they take it that literally anymore,” Gregor said. “At least, not in the United States.”
“Of course they don’t,” Linda Melajian said. “Really, Gregor, it’s going to be wonderful. Donna’s picked out the most wonderful bridesmaids’ dresses and there’s going to be a daisy chain flown in from California—two, I think, actually, one for each side of the aisle—and I don’t know. I can hardly wait, can you?”
Gregor was about to say that he most certainly could wait, he could wait forever. He wanted to see Donna married, but the wedding was doing something worse than getting to him. Then there was the sound of thunder all around them, the rumble of something ominous and immediate, and Gregor looked up. It would have been all right, except that the thunder didn’t sound as if it was coming from the outside. It sounded as if it had exploded in the middle of the Ararat’s dining room, and now it was sending aftershocks around to all of the glass-and-candlelit tables. Ass, Gregor told himself. Thunder doesn’t have aftershocks.
