Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  And yet here they were.

  Steve was the station manager, with a salary but no stake in the enterprise, with three thousand square feet in Paoli and his kids in public schools.

  Norm was the star with a piece of the action.

  Was any of this supposed to make any sense?

  Steve leaned against the doorjamb and said, “Fifteen Japanese jokes an hour. I counted them.”

  “I didn’t know I was being that predictable.”

  “I averaged them. All that crap about the fugu.”

  “Well, Steve, you have to admit it’s pretty weird. Eating a fish that can kill you if you look at it sideways and getting a kick out of putting your life in danger.”

  “That’s not why they do it.”

  “How the Hell do you know why they do anything?”

  “I know why you do things, Norm, and I’m telling you it’s got to stop. It’s really got to stop. We’re in mucho trouble with the Japanese-American community as it is. We’re going to be in trouble with the FCC before you know it.”

  “No we’re not,” Norm said. “It comes under the First Amendment. You know that.”

  “I know that these are perfectly tasteless jokes with no point to them at all. This is not Detroit Japan bashing does not go over big here. If you have to get this out of your system, do a show.”

  Do a show, Norm thought. The room was looking a little fuzzy. The room had been looking a little fuzzy all along, of course, but the quality of it had changed now, it had become tinged with red, and for a moment Norm thought he was having a vision of Hell. Hell was just the way he had always been told it, would be, full of red flames and grinning Devils. Then the Devils turned into pink-cheeked troll dolls with neon orange hair.

  “Steve?” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “You know that party I’m supposed to go to, the one for the nuns’ convention?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is anybody else from the station going to be there?”

  “Nobody else from the station, as far as I know. Henry Hare is going to be there from VTZ. It was in the press release your own people put out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can’t remember anything anymore.”

  “Yeah. listen, Steve. Are you Catholic?”

  “Nope. I think my grandparents were Lutheran. My parents weren’t anything in particular.”

  “I’m Catholic.”

  “I know.”

  “I just keep thinking about it, you know. A big room full of nuns like that. Thousands of nuns all in the same place.”

  “So what?”

  “So nuns are trouble,” Norman Kevic said. “Nuns have always been trouble. They’re bad luck if they aren’t anything else, and you can’t control them. And I keep thinking—you know who else is going to be at that party?”

  “No.”

  “Gregor Demarkian. The name mean anything to you?”

  Steve Harald hesitated. Norm waited expectantly. He had always suspected Steve of being functionally oblivious—of paying no attention to anything that didn’t relate directly to his job at the station—and now Norm was sure of it.

  “Gregor Demarkian,” Norm said, “is the guy who does murders. The one the Philadelphia Inquirer calls ‘the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot’ ”

  “Oh,” Steve said.

  “Never mind,” Norm said. “But I keep thinking about it, if you know what I mean. I keep thinking about the world’s most famous consultant on murder being right there in the middle of all those nuns, and what we could do with that I hate nuns.”

  “You’ve said that,” Steve said.

  Actually he hadn’t, but he’d probably implied it, so Norm decided to let it go. The sound of stiletto heels told him that Julia was coming back. He sat up a little on the couch and got ready to throw a hurricane of orange juice down his throat.

  “There was a murder in the Motherhouse of their convent a little while ago,” Norm said musingly. “I remember reading about it. Demarkian was in on it.”

  “On the murder?”

  “On the investigation. I wonder what we could make of it.”

  “Don’t make anything of it,” Steve said. “You’re in enough hot water with the Japanese. All you have to do is insult Henry’s wife’s alma mater or her best-remembered nun teacher or what the Hell. You may be part-owner of the station, but Henry is still chairman of the board.”

  And Henry’s wife is a little slut with an appetite for nymphomania, Norm thought but he didn’t say it, because it wouldn’t have come as news to anybody and there was no point. Besides, Julia really was there, right behind Steve, carrying a plastic tray from the cafeteria. The tray was covered with glasses of juice and cups of coffee and little bowls full of sugar and creamer. Julia hadn’t been taking any chances.

  Steve stood aside to let Julia through. Norm held out his hands for the tray.

  “I hate nuns,” Norm said. “I hate them more than I hate the Japanese. At least the Japanese don’t think they’ve got a pipeline right up through the stratosphere to God.”

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  1

  THERE WAS A HAND-LETTERED cardboard sign hanging in the display window of Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store, and every time Gregor Demarkian passed it he wondered if there was something about being Armenian that made people a little cracked. Then he thought of the most cracked person he knew—who happened to be a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant named Bennis Hannaford—and decided it wasn’t worth worrying about. It was Sunday, the eleventh of May, a bright hot day at the beginning of what promised to be a glorious spring. Gregor Demarkian had spent twenty years of his life with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, ten of them with the Department of Behavioral Sciences. The Department of Behavioral Sciences was that division of the Bureau that helped local police forces coordinate national hunts for serial killers. Gregor had founded it but not named it, the name having been visited on him and all the agents he worked with by some second assistant bureaucrat who had had friends in Congress so long he had lost the knack of speaking English. Bright spring days while he had still been with the division had not been happy. Psychopaths responded to a warming of the weather just like anybody else. When the sun started to gleam, Dagwood Bumstead took his family to the beach and the local nutcase took his victim to a wooded hillside ten miles out of town. Or somewhere. Gregor Demarkian had started his career with the Bureau swearing he was never going to retire. He had ended it at the beginning of his wife’s last painful year of battling with cancer. He had never looked back. In the midst of Elizabeth’s dying, it had been hard for him to recognize how he’d come to feel about his job—it had been hard to remember he’d ever had a job—but in the years since, he’d been unable to avoid it. By the time Gregor Demarkian had left the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he had come to hate his work with a passion.

  The sign in the display window of Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store said:

  IN FOR MOTHER’S DAY—HEART-SHAPED HONEY CAKES WITHGRANNY GLASSES.

  Underneath it was a heart-shaped honey cake that indeed had granny glasses, made of silver sugar pearls, and bright eyes with long lashes inside the glass frames, too. Next to the honey cake was a tiny vase of plastic flowers with MOTHER printed across the bulbed-out part at the end of it, and another vase with something incomprehensible printed on that Gregor supposed the incomprehensible thing must be mother spelled out in Armenian, but he couldn’t be sure. There had been times in his life when he’d been able to do a fair job of dredging Armenian words from the pit of forgetfulness a life in major cities had confined them to, but today was not one of those times. It was hard to tell exactly what today was. It was Mother’s Day, of course. No one walking down Cavanaugh Street could have mistaken it for anything else. Mother’s Day might once have been a sticky-sentimental gesture by a corrupt Congress looking to do something nobody could cause a scandal over. It might have metamorphosed into one more shtick for t
he retail sector to exploit. On Cavanaugh Street, however, it was something like a patron saint’s feast day. Gregor Demarkian had grown up on Cavanaugh Street. In those days it had been an Armenian-American immigrant ghetto, the kind of place where bricks fell off the facades of buildings and plaster crumbled from their inner walls and social workers arrived with the regularity of bowel movements to berate the population on how they were doing it all wrong. It was now Philadelphia’s jewel of urban renewal, a clean place lined by town houses and floor-through condominium apartments, trendy restaurants and import boutiques, even a bookstore and a religious supply house used by all the priests in all the Eastern rite churches in the city. That this change had come about was due entirely to the way the children of Cavanaugh Street felt about their mothers, which, in Gregory’s opinion, was right up there in both fanaticism and common sense with the way the people of Jonestown had felt about Reverend Jim. Gregor could just imagine one of the women of his own generation—Lida Arkmanian or Hannah Krekorian or Sheila Kashinian—giving the order for a mass march into the sea. First they’d give the order for a mass march into rubber boots.

  Of course, Gregor didn’t want to imply that he didn’t think well of Armenian mothers. He’d had an Armenian mother of his own, once, and an Armenian grandmother, too. They were wonderful women. Bossy, maybe. A little on the hysterical side when it came to how much their children ate or how many layers they wore on perfectly nice days when no layers at all would probably have made more sense, but still—

  He was past Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store now, almost up to the Ararat restaurant. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, nearly time for the liturgy to finish at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. Any minute now, Father Tibor Kasparian would bless the congregation and Sheila Kashinian would begin to tap her foot. All the old ladies would rustle and blush and try to hide the fact that what they really wanted to do was get out to the vestibule and the front steps as quickly as possible, where they could get some serious talking done. It was to avoid church that Gregor had gone for his walk in the first place. He had nothing against church—he certainly had nothing against Father Tibor’s sermons—but today…

  Today, today, today, Gregor thought. Today you’re just disgruntled because Cavanaugh Street is celebrating a holiday you have no way to celebrate. In a few minutes the street will be full of people, Cavanaugh Street regulars joined by the new immigrants who had come over since the Soviet Union’s fall, and you will be totally out of place.

  Bennis Hannaford often said that if Gregor Demarkian didn’t have a reason to take a despairingly existential view of life, he would invent one. Young Donna Moradanyan agreed with her. Donna Moradanyan had the apartment on the floor above Gregor’s in the four-story brownstone that faced Lida Arkmanian’s town house. Bennis had the apartment on the floor below him. Between the two of them, they did a better than fair job of running his life.

  Someday, something unambiguously wonderful is going to happen in your life, Gregor told himself, and then you won’t know how to behave.

  Linda Melajian was standing in the middle of Ararat’s front room, setting a table with restaurant flatware and frowning at the way the yellow linen napkins were folded. The napkins were yellow because they went well with Armenia’s new flag, a copy of which was displayed along the side wall in a frame of flowers that always looked so fresh, somebody must have been changing them daily. Gregor reminded himself that old Deena Melajian had fled the Communist invasion in 1946 and then wondered how Linda thought she was going to get away with having skipped church just to set up for the Mother’s Day crowd. Everyone who came in this afternoon was going to ask her why she couldn’t make time for God.

  Gregor tapped on the window. Linda looked up and waved. Gregor went on down the street. The tall front doors of Holy Trinity Church were propped open. Howard Kashinian must have come out while Gregor was watching Linda in the Ararat. Gregor speeded up his steps. It was a good thing he had someplace to go today. It would take his mind off all this hyperbolic celebration of motherhood. It would stop him from wondering what it was all these people thought he was up to—which was a question he often asked about Cavanaugh Street without getting any kind of sensible answer. Gregor didn’t even think he’d mind spending the day surrounded by nuns. In Gregor’s private cosmology, convents and Cavanaugh Street went together in ways mysterious and divine. They were both largely populated by women with a mission.

  Donna Moradanyan’s mission was to decorate as much as possible with as little excuse as possible. To that end, she had decorated the front of the brownstone where her apartment and Gregor’s were with bright yellow and blue satin ribbons, bright yellow and blue satin bows, and white chiffon hearts sewn into ruffles so enthusiastic they almost seemed alive. Just how Donna Moradanyan had managed to do this, Gregor did not know. It couldn’t have been easy getting those ribbons up close to the roof like that. It had to have been nearly impossible to plant that chiffon heart—the one the size of an overgrown twelve-year-old-boy—right in the center of the stones between the third and fourth floors. Did Donna fly? Did she care what having a house that looked like this did to the dignity of her neighbors?

  Donna Moradanyan thought Gregor Demarkian had too much dignity, and he knew it.

  Over at Holy Trinity, there were rumblings and hiccups. The congregation was beginning to emerge. Gregor hurried up his front steps, determinedly ignoring the gigantic M woven out of blue and yellow ribbons that covered the front door. Then he let himself into the foyer and looked around. Since it was Sunday, there was no mail. Since it was a holiday, there was no old George Tekemanian in the first floor apartment—old George would be spending the day with his grandson Martin and his great-grandchildren. Gregor headed on up the steps to the second floor.

  It was odd to think about it now, but back when Elizabeth died, the last thing he’d thought he would do was come back to Cavanaugh Street. He hadn’t even thought there would be a Cavanaugh Street to come back to.

  What would his life have been like without this place?

  2

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD MET Bennis Hannaford in a way he would once have refused to believe he would ever meet anyone—in the course of investigating a murder for whose solution he had no official responsibility. In fact, back in the days when he was still with the Bureau, the idea of getting involved in murder investigations—or in criminal investigations of any kind—as what amounted to an amateur would have sounded to him absurd. Like most professional policemen—and that was what a Bureau agent was, really, a professional policeman—Gregor had scant use for amateurs. Unlike so many professionals, he didn’t mind amateurs in fiction much. Bennis gave him novels by Agatha Christie and Rex Stout and he read them with a fair degree of amusement. There was something about the way in which he himself had become involved in other people’s murder cases, though, that made him uneasy. It made him uneasier that he had no hold on that part of his life. So far, he had been tangled up in seven of what he called his “extracurricular murders.” He had become the darling of the Philadelphia Inquirer and People magazine. If one more person dared to call him “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” he was going to commit a murder of his own. The problem was, if he didn’t commit a murder of his own, he had no guarantee that he would ever be involved in another case. It was worse than odd. It was like being visited by fairies, or having to rely for your Christmas presents on a very capricious Santa Claus. Of course, he didn’t think of murder cases as Christmas presents. It was just that he sometimes wished he had more stability in his life.

  “Get married again,” Father Tibor Kasparian would have told him. “Marry Bennis,” the women said—including Donna Moradanyan, Lida Arkmanian, Hannah Krekorian, Sheila Kashinian, Mary and Deborah Ohanian, Linda and Sylvia Melajian, Christie and Melissa Oumoudian…

  “Get a private detective’s license,” Bennis Hannaford said.

  Bennis’s door had a single chiffon heart on it, meaning she had come ou
t early this morning and taken off whatever else Donna had decided to put up. Gregor pressed the buzzer on the door frame and waited.

  “Come right in,” a voice called from inside. “I’ve got goddamned plaster of paris in my goddamned hair.”

  Of course she had goddamned plaster of paris in her goddamned hair, Gregor thought. She’s always got something going on that makes no sense and interferes fatally with whatever she’s supposed to do next What Bennis was supposed to do next was to accompany him to this party at St. Elizabeth’s College, where the Sisters of Divine Grace would open their first-ever nuns’ convention. When Gregor had originally been told about the nuns’ convention, he’d thought it was the first ever, but that had turned out not to be the case. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondolet had held one in St. Louis back in 1988.

  Bennis Hannaford’s foyer was taken up in large part by a plaster of pans model of Queen Zahvea’s castle from Sorcerers of Zed, Witches of Zedalia. What Bennis Hannaford did for a living was write sword and sorcery fantasy novels, of which Sorcerers of Zed, Witches of Zedalia was the seventh or eighth, Gregor couldn’t remember which. He wasn’t disturbed by the castle because it had been where it was now for quite a while. Bennis had constructed it and then stashed it in the foyer, meaning to throw it out or donate it to one of the fan organizations. That she had never gotten around to either was entirely typical. One of the scale-model knights had fallen off his horse. Gregor put him back on and called out.

  “Where are you? Why are you making plaster of paris?”