by Jane Haddam
“The trouble with you,” John Jackman said when he dropped Gregor off on Cavanaugh Street after their trip out to Fox Run Hill, “is that you won’t admit that for all intents and purposes, you’ve married again.”
“I haven’t married again,” Gregor said. His voice sounded very fast, made up of rush. “Bennis and I don’t—I mean, we’ve never even contemplated—”
“I know what you don’t do,” John Jackman said, “but if you think Bennis hasn’t at least contemplated it, then you don’t know Bennis.”
“John, for God’s sake.”
“You’re in each other’s laps all the time. She worries about your cholesterol. You worry about her driving. She fusses with your ties. You complain about the way she spends money. People who see you together think that you’re married. Or at least living together.”
“Living together,” Gregor repeated. Today, not only were all of Donna Moradanyan’s wedding decorations still up, there were new ones. The entire front of the duplex town house Hannah Krekorian shared with Howard Kashinian’s old aunt had been wrapped up in white satin ribbons and decked out in gold satin bows. The town house looked like a gift box of chocolates with radiation poisoning.
“I couldn’t imagine just living with someone,” Gregor told Jackman. “Especially here. Especially on Cavanaugh Street.”
“That kind of thing goes on everywhere these days, Gregor. Even on Cavanaugh Street.”
“Maybe it goes on with teenagers, but it doesn’t go on with middle-aged men like me.”
“Whatever. You’ve been looking green ever since Bennis got hurt. I’m just saying that if you made this official in some way, people would understand better why it is you’re concerned. They’d cut you more slack—”
“I don’t need any more slack,” Gregor said quickly. “I’m fine.”
“Sure you are.”
“And it’s you she had the affair with,” Gregor pointed out. “You said at the time she knew better what she wanted than any woman you’d ever known. I’d think that if Bennis actually wanted the kind of thing with me you’re talking about, I’d have heard about it by now.”
John Jackman looked disgusted. “Get real,” he said. “Women who look like Bennis Hannaford do not make the first move. They don’t have to. Women’s lib or no women’s lib. And besides, she’s come close to making the first move with you a dozen times—”
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
John Jackman had the window next to his elbow rolled all the way down. He was beginning to sweat in the heat and humidity of the evening air. On the corner there was one of those newspaper sales boxes with a copy of the Philadelphia Star in its window. The Star was running a picture of the woman who had died in the explosion, a posed studio portrait, without the button with its fake fur message.
“Listen,” John Jackman said. “I want you to think about what you want to do next. We have to do something next. We can’t just sit around waiting for this Karla Parrish person to wake up and tell us what we want to know.
“Not that she’s likely to really know anything anyway,” Jackman went on when Gregor said nothing. “She was in Somalia or someplace when Mrs. Willis decided to off Mr. Willis.”
“Rwanda.”
“Wherever. Dan Exter thinks we’re all just spinning our wheels.”
“We are.”
“Well, we have to stop. I’d tell you to say hello to Bennis for me, but she doesn’t want to hear it. Does she curse me out when I’m not around?”
“She doesn’t talk about you at all.”
“It figures,” John Jackman said. “I’ve been thinking lately about getting married, Gregor. I’ve been thinking it wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Even with all the responsibilities.”
“Do you have somebody in particular in mind?” Gregor was honestly interested. Bennis was the only woman he had ever seen John Jackman with for longer than a week and a half.
John started to roll up his window. Gregor could hear the car’s air-conditioning system grinding away. The engine was rumbling and shuddering under the hood. “I always have somebody in particular in mind,” John said. “The problem is, I have a couple of somebodies in mind every month. I’ll be down here for breakfast tomorrow at seven, okay?”
“No. I’ll meet you uptown. You’re sure we have an appointment?”
“As sure as I can be.”
“She’s put us off twice already.”
“I’ve threatened to give an interview to the Inquirer saying she’s put us off if she does it again,” John said. “Worse, I threatened that you’d do it.”
“Good.”
“You have to be tough with these political people. If you’re not, they’ll run right over you. Say hello to Bennis for me anyway, Gregor. What the hell.”
“Okay.”
“It’s too bad about breakfast. I like that restaurant you go to.” John rolled his window all the way up and pulled out onto the street. There was no traffic coming in either direction and no traffic visible in the distance. It was odd, Gregor thought, the way Philadelphia seemed to be almost deserted at some hours these days. When he was growing up, it had always seemed busy and crowded and funny-dangerous, like a roller coaster whose seats were all crammed full.
On an impulse, Gregor walked to the corner and looked down into the side street. For the first block or so it was all right, marked by some minor examples of Donna Moradanyan’s wedding decorations, but after that everything went to hell. It was dark. It was dingy. It was falling to pieces. Gregor couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something about all this, about the way Cavanaugh Street was in the middle of the sea of decaying city around it, that reminded him unpleasantly of Fox Run Hill.
2.
Bennis Hannaford was not alone. Her arm was in a cast that reached from her shoulder to her wrist. It had been broken in two places, both above and below the elbow, and she wasn’t expected to be able to use it normally again for almost six months. When Gregor came in, she had old George Tekemanian sitting in front of her computer, tapping things out on her keyboard. Donna Moradanyan was sitting on the low embroidered ottoman that Bennis had brought back with her from her trip to Morocco. Gregor didn’t suppose that Bennis would be taking any of her infamous trips for the next six months or so either. No waking up on Tuesday to find a note taped to his door saying that Bennis had taken a five A.M. flight to Kathmandu. No getting back from dinner at the Ararat to find a note propped up on the coffeepot in his kitchen saying that Bennis had decided she was going to lose her mind unless she immediately spent a good six days in Marrakech. The cast was stiff and unyielding. It jutted out from her body like a surgically implanted sword.
“So I listened to you and I didn’t call off the wedding,” Donna said, “but I’m going to have to decide what to do about things and it’s just not as easy as you think it is. I mean, he is Tommy’s father.”
Gregor drew up Bennis’s wing chair and peered over old George Tekemanian’s shoulder at the computer screen. There was a computer graphics picture on it of a nasty-looking little troll, jumping up and down, hopping mad.
“What’s all that about?” Gregor asked old George.
“That’s my mock-up for the treasure hunt for Zedalia Triumphant,” Bennis said. “Gregor, listen to this. Peter is back.”
“He’s not back,” Donna said. “He just called me.”
“He’s coming back,” Bennis said.
Donna Moradanyan sighed. Gregor Demarkian had once told someone that she was the least Armenian-looking woman he had ever known, and it was true. Donna was tall and athletic and blond, like some midwestern university’s field hockey princess. The Peter involved was Peter Desarian, the boy who had made Donna pregnant with Tommy all those years and years ago and then decided he was much too young to be a father.
“I’m just saying that you have to give it some consideration,” Donna said. “The fact that he’s Tommy’s father, I mean. He is Tommy’s father. And Russ isn’t anything to Tomm
y. If you know what I mean.”
“Russ has been more of a father to Tommy than Peter ever was,” Bennis said. “For God’s sake, Donna. What are you trying to do to yourself?”
“I’m trying to do the right thing. That’s all. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
“I think you still feel guilty about sleeping with Peter,” Bennis said, “so you’re trying to punish yourself for it by giving up Russ, and not because you think Peter’s going to marry you, because you know as well as I do that as soon as Russ is out of the picture, Peter will be out of the picture too, like a shot—”
“Wait,” Gregor said. “What’s this? Now Peter wants to marry her?”
“He says he does,” Donna said. “He says that if I have to be married, if it’s so important to me to have a wedding ring, then he’d rather marry me himself than have Tommy brought up by a stranger.”
“Russ isn’t a stranger to Tommy,” Bennis said firmly. “Peter is a stranger to Tommy.”
“This troll is going to have flat feet if this goes on much longer,” old George Tekemanian said. “Bennis, you really must come here and do something.”
Bennis got up off the couch and went to lean over old George’s shoulder. Her encased arm seemed to operate like a ship’s boom. Donna got up off the ottoman and started pacing.
“It’s what’s best for Tommy,” she told Gregor. “No matter what it is I’d rather do, I have to do what’s best for Tommy.”
“Do you really think giving up Russ for Peter would be what was best for Tommy?” Gregor asked. “Even assuming that Peter would keep his word and marry you in the end?”
“Especially if Peter kept his word to marry you in the end,” Bennis said, and then, to old George, “Key in G487-2T and let it run for a couple of minutes.”
“Run where?” old George Tekemanian said.
Bennis escorted her arm carefully back to the couch and sat down again. “There’s food in the refrigerator, Gregor. Lida came over and brought me a whole bowl of those bulgur-encrusted meatballs you like so much. Donna just needs a shrink.”
“I’ll get the meatballs,” Donna said. “I’ll even heat them up in the microwave.”
She bolted from the room. Bennis levered her legs up onto the couch, stretched out, and rolled her eyes. She really looked quite well, Gregor decided, although she was a little pale. He wondered what kind of painkillers the doctor had given her and whether she was actually taking them. Bennis didn’t like painkillers. She was famous at a hospital in Boston for having been the first person in its 165-year history to have gone off Demerol less than twenty-four hours after having her gallbladder removed. She claimed Demerol made her head fuzzy.
“Anyway,” Bennis said, throwing her head back onto the soft arm of the black leather couch, “as you can tell, we’re having a crisis. We’re going to have a bigger crisis if Russ finds out about Peter, which he hasn’t yet.”
“I would have thought Donna would have told him first,” Gregor said.
Bennis waved a languid hand in the air. “That’s part of the reason I know she doesn’t really mean it, about Peter. I mean, the real problem here is not that Donna thinks that Peter Desarian’s sperm is so important that it ought to override everything the man is—if you can call him a man, I’ve known twelve-year-olds who were more responsible—”
Donna came back from the kitchen carrying a plate of kefta and a fork. She gave the plate and the fork to Gregor and sat down on the ottoman again.
“Whether she wants to believe it or not, I am worried about the sperm problem,” Donna said. Then she blushed. “I don’t mean the sperm, exactly. It’s just that you read all these things in the magazines, you know, where it’s so much worse for the child with a stepparent, especially for boys, they don’t relate as well and the stepparent doesn’t ever love them the same way a real parent would—”
“How does Peter love Tommy?” Bennis demanded. “Peter never sees Tommy.”
“He must love Tommy somewhat, Bennis. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter to him so much that Tommy might have a stepfather.”
“He’s just acting like an adolescent again,” Bennis insisted, “and a mean-spirited bastard of an adolescent in the bargain. He doesn’t want you and he doesn’t want Tommy but life is not all right if the two of you don’t want him.”
Donna said, “I just don’t see how that argument applies here. I mean, this is not a joke, offering to come back to Philadelphia and marry me and give Tommy a real family. I mean, you don’t do that kind of thing out of pique.”
“Peter would. Or he’d at least promise to do it. And not out of pique. Out of spite.”
Gregor finished one of the oversized meatballs and put the fork on the plate and the plate on the floor.
“Just a minute here. Let’s see if I have this straight. Peter has found out that you’re marrying Russ, but he doesn’t like the idea, so he wants you not to marry Russ and to marry him instead.”
“What he actually said,” Bennis put in, “was that if Donna was so neurotic about her need to be married that she had to go bring some stranger into Tommy’s life, Peter would just as soon marry her himself, since that was what she really wanted anyway and it would be better for Tommy. Of course, it isn’t what she really wants anyway—”
“Of course it isn’t,” Donna said. “I even hate talking to him on the phone.”
“If you hate talking to him on the phone, you will not like being married to him,” old George Tekemanian said. “This goes without saying.”
“It doesn’t matter because he won’t marry her anyway,” Bennis said. “Peter isn’t trying to marry her. He’s just trying to keep her from marrying Russ.”
“I don’t believe that,” Donna said. “I don’t believe that even Peter could be such a—such a—”
“Bastard,” old George put in helpfully.
“Let me ask you this,” Gregor said. “Have you told your mother about all of this?”
Donna Moradanyan looked at her hands. They were sturdy, bluntfingered hands, with the nails cut short and square. They looked like the hands of someone who had played field hockey too.
“Ah,” Gregor said.
Donna Moradanyan blushed. “It’s not that I don’t get along with my mother. It’s just that she—fusses so much all the time. It’s hard to think in peace when she fusses like that.”
“I’m just pointing out that if this was something you really wanted to do, you probably would have said something to her by now,” Gregor said. “And if this isn’t something you really want to do—”
“She wouldn’t approve of it if I did it,” Donna said quickly. “She hates Peter with a passion.”
“She absolutely loves Russ,” Bennis said.
“I don’t see what everybody is making such a big noise about,” Donna said. “It’s just something that’s come up, that’s all. It’s just something that I have to think through.”
“When you have to think through whether or not to jump off a bridge over the Grand Canyon, you need a shrink,” Bennis said. “And you ought to call Russ and at least let him know you’re talking to him. You’re getting married in nine days and you haven’t said a word to him in the last twenty-four hours.”
Donna got to her feet. “I think I’d better go over to Lida’s and pick up Tommy. There isn’t anything talking like this is going to get us. I mean, Peter is Peter. We’ll see what happens next.”
“Get a restraining order so he can’t show up at the wedding,” Bennis said.
Donna Moradanyan sighed again. She was so tall, she looked like she could have modeled for one of those French statues of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. She stretched her arms and legs and shook out her hair.
“I’ll see you people later,” she said. “I’m going to take Tommy down to McDonald’s for dinner.”
“Let Russ go with you,” Bennis said quickly.
“Russ is working.” Donna patted Gregor on the head. “Good night, Gregor. I left a candle dec
oration in your living room window earlier. It’s all wired up and ready to go. All you have to do is plug it in.”
One Christmas, Donna Moradanyan had given him a Santa and reindeer for his window and when he had plugged it in it had flashed on and off, on and off, on and off, at the rate of sixty flashes per minute. He hoped this candle would not flash.
“See you later,” Donna said again, and then she was gone, first a set of footsteps in Bennis’s foyer, then the sound of Bennis’s door opening and not quite slamming shut.
Bennis sat up a little on the couch and looked out in the direction Donna had gone.
“It’s enough to make any sane person crazy,” she said. “She’s got a man who loves her to distraction and he also loves her son. He’s responsible. He’s nice. He’s got a decent job. He thinks the earth began on the day she was born. What does she want?”
Gregor picked up his plate of kefta again and cracked apart another bulgur-encrusted meatball. The only light on in the room was the light of the flex lamp hanging over the computer terminal where old George Tekemanian sat. Other than that, there was the faint pink glow flowing through the window from the street, and not much of that. It never seemed to get completely dark in Philadelphia during the summer—at least, not until three or four in the morning—but it was never really light out at night either. Gregor disliked the half-glow of summer evenings more than any other kind of weather. He found something fake in it, and something deceptive. At times like this he always found himself wishing that it would soon be fall.
“So,” he said to Bennis, “how are you? Does that arm hurt?”
“All the time,” Bennis said, “but it’s no big deal. What about you? Did you find out who murdered that poor woman yet?”
