by Jane Haddam
Actually, somebody was moving onto Cavanaugh Street this morning. That was why the building was nearly deserted, and why Gregor felt completely easy about looking in on the urn for the first time in weeks. Bennis, like the rest of them, was out in the street, watching the moving men bring what looked like a small, oddly shaped piano up to the fourth floor of their own brownstone, into the apartment that had been Donna Moradanyan’s before she married Russ and moved into a town house on the other side of the Ararat. It was a rental, at least for the moment, that was all that anybody knew. Bennis had been out the door before the Ararat opened this morning, to hear what Donna had to say about the new tenant one more time—although, Gregor thought, she couldn’t really believe that Donna, or Russ, would turn the apartment over to somebody who wouldn’t be good for Cavanaugh Street. It was just that this was the first time an apartment here had been advertised in the classifieds, the way apartments were when they were anywhere else. Usually, apartments on Cavanaugh Street were passed from tenant to tenant by way of family connections, church connections, and a tenuous network of refugee contacts that Tibor kept up as part of his attempt to make it possible for every single Armenian who wanted to be resettled in Philadelphia. This time, Russ had insisted—there were antidiscrimination laws, after all, and he was not only a lawyer with a reputation to maintain, but he approved of the laws to begin with.
“It’s a woman, that’s all I know,” Donna had said, a couple of weeks ago, in Gregor’s kitchen, as she stacked her books for her Literature of the English Renaissance course into a pile. The books were huge, and the pile was not little. Bennis sat drinking coffee and reading the titles on the spine: Imagery and Iconography in Tudor Poetry; The Figure of the Virgin in the Work of Edmund Spenser. Gregor thought it looked like one of the piles in Tibor’s apartment, except that there was nothing out of place in it. Donna needed a copy of I, the Jury or Passionate Remembrance , or both.
“Anyway, that’s all he’ll tell me,” Donna said, “except that she’s some kind of a musician. A classical musician. She plays in some orchestra—”
“The Philadelphia Philharmonic?” Bennis suggested.
“No,” Donna said. “It had an odd name, and then when I asked him to tell me again, he wouldn’t. He says we all worry too much about stuff like this, and I suppose he’s right, but it’s Cavanaugh Street, for God’s sake. What does he expect us to do? Anyway, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Russ likes her a lot, whoever she is, and he says she’s met Gregor sometime or the other, although I don’t suppose that’s much of a recommendation. A lot of mass murderers have met Gregor at some time or the other.”
“Thank you very much,” Gregor said.
“Well, it’s true. She’s moving in on Wednesday, for whatever that’s worth, and we can all find out then. Lida is threatening to throw a reception for her. Wouldn’t that be something? One poor defenseless woman and those Medusas on the warpath. Mrs. Valerian grilling her about birth control.”
“They might like her just as much as Russ does,” Bennis said, reasonably.
“Ha! That would be worse. Then they’d try to marry her off, if she isn’t married already, and if she is they’ll try to find out why she isn’t with her husband and if he hasn’t been beating her into a pulp on a regular basis for years, they’ll try to get them back together. And they’ll bring food day and night until she’s gained at least twenty extra pounds, and then she’ll probably be too fat to play in that orchestra she’s in and she’ll get fired, and she won’t pay her rent, but Russ won’t be able to evict her, either, because they’ll kill him if he tries, and then she’ll get a job at the Armenian Christian school because Father Tibor will feel sorry for her, and that won’t be enough to cover the rent either, but that won’t matter because we won’t be charging her any by then, because how could we do that with a woman who’d lost her job just because her employers thought it was okay to discriminate against fat people?”
The urn was still on the dresser, sitting on top of a copy of Janson’s History of Art, exactly where Gregor had seen it yesterday. There was still a thick coat of dust on the top of it, so thick that if he ran his finger through it he would make a deep-sided groove, gritty and jagged. Bennis was telling at least this much of the truth. She was not tending this urn, the way she might tend the grave of somebody she had cared deeply about, or somebody she felt so guilty about that she was forced to make reparations and atonement on a daily basis. It was just here, as neglected as Janson’s book and the scattered pages of old newspapers that covered the rest of the dresser’s surface. Gregor would have felt better if the old newspapers hadn’t all contained stories announcing the execution of Bennis Hannaford’s oldest sister.
“It would be a lot easier to handle this,” Bennis said at the time, “if I hadn’t always disliked her so much.”
Gregor went over to the urn and put his finger on the dust. He took his finger off and wiped it on the white handkerchief he still kept in the front vest pocket of his good suit jacket, as if, even in this small way, he was stuck in the time warp Bennis always accused him of inhabiting whenever she was angry with him. Then he went out of the bedroom and down the hall to Bennis’s living room, which no longer had much in the way of furniture in it. He went over to the worktable and looked out over the computer, through the window, and the moving men still struggling with whatever it was. They were trying to hoist it up to the fourth floor and bring it through the living-room window. There was probably no other way to get it upstairs at all. Bennis and Donna and Lida and Hannah and Sheila were all sitting across the street on the steps to Lida’s town house. The very old ladies were not in evidence at all, but they would be somewhere, at one of their windows, taking notes in Armenian. Tibor would be in his own apartment, posting messages to rec.arts.mystery, having forgotten the time. Old George Tekemanian would be sitting on the sidewalk under the umbrella at the outdoor table-and-chair set his nephew Martin had ordered for him at L. L. Bean. Gregor checked his hip pocket—it wouldn’t be the first time he’d forgotten his wallet—and then left Bennis’s apartment and headed down the stairs to the street. There had never been a chance that he would be able to leave today without passing through crowds like a movie star on her way in to the Oscars. Except, Gregor thought, that the movie star would probably be pleased with the crowds, and she’d never have to see anybody in them again.
When he left the building, the whatever-it-was was in the air, just about level with Bennis’s living-room window, where he had been standing only moments before. He crossed the street to Lida’s and stopped in front of Bennis.
“How do I look? Is my tie on straight?”
“When have you ever cared about your ties?” Bennis asked, straightening anyway, because she always did. “You look very nice. You went to more trouble than you needed to. Jimmy never notices what he wears.”
“When you do business, it’s good to be businesslike. Are you sure you won’t come with me? I doubt if he’d mind, no matter what you say. After all, he called you. And I could use the support.”
“You don’t need any support,” Bennis said. “You’re a lot alike, actually. Big ethnic guys with unwavering moral compasses. The same unwavering moral compass. If anything, I’d say he was far less sophisticated than you, even now. But no, I would not like to come along. His lady friend might object.”
“She’s not going to be there.”
“This meeting is going to be in the National Enquirer, and don’t you think it won’t. There’s no real way for people like Jimmy to keep things secret. I should know. I was once one of his not very well kept secrets.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Agreed. It was. But it’s not like she doesn’t know. The lady friend, I mean. And I don’t care how intellectual she is, she wouldn’t like it. Just go and listen to what he has to say. You’ll be fine.”
Gregor looked around. The whatever-it-was was now level with his own living-room window, which did have furniture in it, mo
stly Bennis’s. She had put the stuff he’d had when she moved in into storage, and would have done worse than that (this stuff deserves to be ritually burned) if he’d let her.
“What is that thing?” he asked. “It’s not a piano.”
“It’s a Peter Redstone harpsichord. That’s what the moving men said. Donna asked. She’s got Peter Redstone virginals, too. Mother and child virginals. They’re still in the van. It’s all musical instruments, everything that’s been moved in so far this morning. I don’t think there’s even been a bed.”
“Why isn’t she coming with him?” Gregor asked. “The lady friend, I mean. This is supposed to concern her, isn’t it?”
Bennis sighed. “Go ask him,” she said. “I don’t know anything but what I told you and that stuff I showed you from the Enquirer and the Star, and I wouldn’t have known that if he hadn’t brought it up. Just be glad it’s Elizabeth Toliver who’s got the problem and not that idiot he was married to before. The supermodel, you know. She’s congenitally brain dead. I don’t understand why men like that always do that sort of thing. I mean, can’t they count? Those women reach forty like the rest of us, and then what do you have? Nothing at all in the head and not much left in the body. You’d think—”
“That’s a cab,” Gregor said.
He leaned over and pecked her on the cheek, eliciting a loud “bravo!” from Donna Moradanyan. There was indeed a cab turning onto Cavanaugh Street, and not just going through but pulling up to the curb right in front of where he was. He hurried down Lida’s steps to the sidewalk and got there just as a small, dark-haired, painfully thin young woman got out, fumbling with a purse almost half her size.
“Oh,” she said, seeing him come toward her. “It’s Mr. Demarkian. Good morning.”
“Good morning,” Gregor said, and then the next thing he knew he was in the cab and the cab was moving, and he still couldn’t remember who that young woman was or where he had seen her before. That he did know who she was and that he had met her before was not in doubt, but when he turned around to get another look at her from the cab’s rear window, she had disappeared into a huddle of Cavanaugh Street women. He turned back around again. They’d know her shoe size, her favorite dessert, and her blood type by the time he got home, and they’d either be for her or against her.
Then he wished, for the fortieth time since Thursday, that he had not let Bennis talk him into meeting with Jimmy Card and listening to his problem.
2
It wasn’t true, as Bennis liked to claim, that Gregor Demarkian had a prejudice against celebrities. For almost twenty years of his life, he had worked with them more often than not, although they had been the high-government-official type of celebrity rather than the been-seen-on-TV-a-lot kind. There was less of a difference than he had expected there to be. All of the ones he could remember, including the presidents of the United States, had been vain, in that anxious, uncertain, panicky way that indicated that, deep down, they didn’t much like what they really looked like. They were people who had placed their trust in the illusions they were able to create. If they were really good at it, like Bill Clinton, they could do anything they wanted to do and get away with it. If they were really bad at it, like Richard Nixon, they might as well never have gotten out of bed. Gregor had been a fairly senior agent in the FBI during Richard Nixon’s last year in office. He could remember watching the man on TV, the jerky movements, the paranoia so palpable it glistened on his skin like sweat. Gregor had never been able to understand it. Usually, a man that badly fitted for celebrity never got near to public office, except maybe on the most local level, where it was possible for personal loyalties to outweigh appearances. The miracle of Richard Nixon was that he’d managed to last as long as he had in national office. Gregor didn’t think it could be done anymore, when everything was television, and the only people who got their news from newspapers were fussy academics in the more progressive colleges who thought even PBS was dangerous to the mental health of our nation’s youth. Except, Gregor thought vaguely, as he got out of the cab in front of Le Cirque Blanc, they wouldn’t say “our nation’s youth” these days. They’d say “young people” or “the young” or maybe even “teenagers.” It was like Hillary Clinton’s vast right-wing conspiracy. It was everywhere, and it changed the words on you, just when you thought you knew what to say.
Le Cirque Blanc was the closest thing Philadelphia had to a “celebrity” restaurant, and Gregor had not been surprised when Jimmy Card had asked to meet him there. It was not Philadelphia’s best restaurant, or the one most famous for its food, but like certain places in New York it had a couple of curtained-off back rooms that could be reached by a side entrance and a staff that understood what privacy did—and did not—mean. In New York, such a place would be full of people like Madonna and Harrison Ford, people so famous that they really had had enough of having their privacy invaded every time they went out for a drink or a little light dinner. In Philadelphia, Gregor got the impression that the place was full of members of the city government who didn’t want their dinner meetings to show up on the six o’clock news and Main Line society women who wanted to have flings that wouldn’t do them credit with their friends. Most of the time, both these groups of people tried to be as public as possible, on the theory that well-known people were more important than the less well-known kind. Some of the Main Line society women must have known this wasn’t true, since they were probably married to men so important that their entire lives revolved around staying strictly out of sight.
Le Cirque Blanc had an awning that reminded Gregor of the ones on Manhattan apartment buildings, and a doorman who reminded him of Manhattan apartment buildings, too. The doorman wore a uniform and a cap, like a chauffeur. What really bothered Gregor about “celebrities” was that they reminded him, so much, of the serial killers he had spent the last half of his career chasing. The Ted Bundys, the Jeffrey Dahmers, the John Wayne Gacys, all had that hard streak of vanity and that desperation, as if in some way they weren’t really alive unless other people said they were. When the Bureau had first been putting together the composite psychological profile that later became the basis for the entire Behavioral Sciences Unit, Gregor had wanted to put that in, but none of them could think of a way to phrase it so that somebody who had never encountered it could understand it. Gregor had always thought that the most obvious case of it had been—still was—Charles Manson, a man who lived entirely by the effect he had on other people, so much so that he hadn’t even had to do his own serial killing. It was an open question as to whether or not that quirk of personality, and the charisma that went with it, had survived all the years in prison. Gregor made it a point to watch Manson’s parole hearings when they were shown on Court TV, but it was hard to tell. He was cleaned up now, and subdued, but that could be for the benefit of the parole board, which wasn’t going to release him in any case. It was too bad that monsters didn’t stay monsters in real life, that growing old meant growing weak for even the most dedicated of them. For some reason, watching a Charles Manson turn into an old man made Gregor far more aware of his own mortality than the death of someone like Princess Diana did. Maybe that was because he had never been able to think of Princess Diana as really being real.
“Mr. Demarkian,” the man on the front desk said. He was dressed in a white tie and tails, in spite of the fact that it was barely noon. The restaurant lobby and the restaurant behind him were both dark, as if nobody could eat unless it was the middle of the night. The man himself was just slightly overweight, in that smug, self-satisfied way that some people equated with high social status, even though these days, everybody who really did have high social status was bone thin. Gregor decided he must have been hired for effect, like a stock actor hired to play a stock character, the point being that nothing mattered except keeping the ambiance unbroken, whatever the ambiance was supposed to be.
“If you follow me, I’ll take you back myself,” the man said.
Gregor no
dded toward him, half afraid to speak. That would break the ambiance soon enough. Part of him wanted to jump up and down or shout or do something equally ridiculous, because this place was so false, so uncomfortable, so strained, that even the air felt oddly synthetic. He looked from left to right as they walked through the large main dining room, empty except for two elderly women in a booth along the west wall, drinking cocktails with paper umbrellas in them. You could buy those little paper umbrellas in party stores for $6.95 a hundred.
At the back of the main dining room, the man in the tails paused and felt along the wall. The door that opened there had been papered to look as if it wasn’t a door at all, and it didn’t, unless you knew what to look for. Then the outline was painfully obvious and—like so much about this place—completely unnecessary.
“Normally, I’d take you around to the back,” the man in the tails said, “but under the circumstances …” He nodded toward the two elderly women, who were paying no attention to them at all. “They wouldn’t notice if a train went through here, once they’d had their third round. If we begin to fill up while you’re at lunch, I’ll take you out the other way. We do try to accommodate our patrons’ need for discretion.”
