by Jane Haddam
Sometimes, Tibor gave Gregor histories of one place or time or the other, although Gregor could never figure out just what it was Tibor wanted him to learn. There were American histories, usually of the period of the Founding, as if Gregor wouldn’t have gotten enough of that in elementary school. There were histories of the Soviet Union, including a very disturbing one from France, called The Black Book of Soviet Communism. Gregor didn’t think he needed that, either. He’d never been one of those idiots who went around talking about how the Soviet Union was a workers’ paradise. There had even been one history of the House of Tudor, and what that was in aid of, Gregor would never know. He did think it was interesting that Tibor never gave him histories of Armenia. Gregor knew nothing about Armenian history, and didn’t want to. He was not one of those people who needed to create a fantasy nostalgia “background,” where his immigrant ancestors were Hardworking, Good, and Honest People with Hearts of Gold. Gregor had grown up with those immigrant ancestors. He’d gotten out as fast as he could.
Sometimes, Tibor gave Gregor books that seemed to have been chosen at random. That was what had happened this time, at the last minute, when Gregor’s suitcase was open on his bed and Tibor was in a hurry to drop off the book and get to a meeting.
“It’s the Philadelphia Improvement Society,” Tibor had said, dropping the thick oversized paperback down onto a carefully folded stack of ties. The ties were not carefully folded, because Gregor had folded them. Gregor had never folded a tie in his life. Bennis had folded them, and then Donna had come in, decided they were done all wrong—they would have to be as Bennis had grown up in a house with staff—and done it again. Gregor was wondering if he was going to wear a tie at all, or if Margaret’s Harbor was one of those places where everybody pretended to be casual in $150 polo shirts.
“They’re going to regret that name,” Tibor said, looking down at the book. “It’s a nineteenth-century name. It’s the kind of thing people named things before the days of tele vision.”
Father Tibor was an immigrant from Armenia, but even Armenia hadn’t been without tele vi sions in his lifetime. Gregor thanked him for the book, then stood back while Bennis and Donna came in and out, making sure he had things he hadn’t even known he’d owned.
“This is the Web address,” Bennis had said at the very end, handing him a three-by-five card to stuff into the book, so he wouldn’t lose it. “There’s also the snail mail address. See if you can’t actually go up there when the case is over. That would be best. You could pick up the order yourself. I’ve written the order on the back of the card. Call first.”
Now Gregor sat down in the big wing chair next to the bed and looked into the open suitcase at the book and the three-by-five card sticking out of it. The Oscartown Inn was a “nice” place, in the way that word was defined by women who had gone to Seven Sisters colleges. It was old, and well cared for, and impeccably clean. His bed was a four-poster and there was a fireplace on the opposite wall. The management would probably refuse to light it even if he asked them to—there had to be fire code considerations, even here—but it was the fact of the thing that counted. Gregor turned off the ringer on his cell phone. Then he turned off the ringer on the phone next to his bed. He wanted to sit in this room for an hour without talking to anybody about anything, and certainly without talking to Stewart Gordon or Clara Walsh about the Case.
He reached into the suitcase. The book was called Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, by somebody named Walker Percy. This was more than a little confusing. Tibor did not ordinary give him self-help books, and did not ordinary read them except to complain about them. Gregor pulled out the three-by-five card. On one side there was the Web address, written out carefully by a woman who assumed that Gregor would be absolutely clueless when it came to the computer:
www.boxhillconfections.com
On the other side was the order, sort of. It seemed to be in code. Gregor looked it over for a minute and decided that Bennis was ordering wedding favors, and that the wedding favors would be chocolates, and that the company that made these chocolates was in Maine. Did Bennis really expect him to get all the way from Margaret’s Harbor to Maine, in a little side trip? Apparently, she did. At the bottom of that side of the three-by-f ve card was a little note, carefully written out in minuscule handwriting in red pen:
I need 750 of the chocolate yaprak sarma.
Janet will know what I mean.
Yaprak sarma was an Armenian dinner dish that consisted of meatballs encased in a bulgur crust. This was going to be chocolate encased in what?
Gregor got out of the chair, got the laptop out of the suitcase, and set it up on the desk. He took off his tie and his shoes and his socks. There was an Internet connection here someplace. He’d look for it after he had his shower. He wondered if Janet, whoever she was, would have a picture of chocolate yaprak sarma on the Web site of Box Hill Confections. He wondered if he would ever get used to the idea that he was going to have another wedding, and not another wedding of the kind he had sometimes imagined in the years since he and Bennis had met.
There, he’d admitted it to himself, the thing he’d been keeping in the back of his mind for months: over the course of all these years, even before he and Bennis became any kind of official couple, he had imagined them one day married. For some reason, though, he had seen them in a registry office someplace, or eloping to Las Vegas to get married in an Elvis chapel. He hadn’t envisioned a Bennis as completely wrapped up in the preparations for a formal wedding as Donna Moradanyan Donahue would be in decorating the street for Christmas. It had thrown him off balance. It had been a good part of the reason why he had not been interested in taking a case for months, and a good part of the reason why he had taken this one.
It all seemed to come together, but he couldn’t say how. He was tired. He had a headache. He needed a shower.
He would take the shower and then sleep for a while, and after that was over he would be ready to talk to Stewart Gordon and Clara Walsh again, and to finally figure out what it was he was supposed to be doing here.
2
Gregor took a long time in the shower, long enough so that his skin began to look pickled, and by the time he was done he thought he had the claims on his attention at least tentatively organized. The trick was to separate the case and Bennis, and then to let Bennis take care of Bennis. Bennis and Donna didn’t really want his input on the wedding, no matter how much they said they did. They wanted to stage a spectacle, and he knew from experience that they were very good at it. His one hope was that they would be limited by their audience. This was a wedding they expected to hold on Cavanaugh Street, with the residents of Cavanaugh Street in attendance. That meant it would have to take place in Father Tibor’s church, which held only about four hundred people at capacity, and which Father Tibor would not suffer to be turned into an Egyptian pyramid or a seventeenth-century pirate ship. Then there would be the reception. They were counting on good weather so that they could hold it outside. They’d applied to the city for the permits they needed to block off the street the way you would for a block party. This meant accepting certain limitations—they would have to admit anybody who came along and wanted to attend—but these were not the kinds of limitations that bothered them. Gregor had wondered, on and off, what would happen if one of the people he had been instrumental in putting behind bars got out on parole and decided to attend for reasons having less to do with congratulations than with revenge, but when he had broached this possibility to Bennis, she had brushed it off.
“The people you put behind bars stay there,” she said. “Some of them just die. I’m not going to worry about some serial killer from your past deciding to sneak into the reception and start killing off little old ladies. You might worry about me starting to kill off little old ladies, because I’ve had it with some of them. If what’s-her-name Vardanian says one more thing under her breath about cows and milk, I’m going to strangle her.”
“Ste
lla Vardanian barely speaks a word of English.”
“She says it in Armenian, Gregor, but trust me. I can understand.”
The bathroom was big and elegant, but not silly. Gregor dried himself off and got on the clean boxer shorts and T-shirt he had brought in with him. Then he looked at his hair in the mirror as if there were something he could do about it. Bennis was probably right. In spite of the fact that she was a complete Anglo, the kind who could trace her ancestors back to England for four hundred years, she probably did know enough Armenian by now to get the reference to cows and milk. Gregor just barely believed that old women still talked about cows and milk, or that virginity was still an issue, for anybody, anywhere. Especially for him. He was, after all, fifty-six. Bennis had to be close to forty. What did Stella Vardanian think they’d been doing with their lives up to the point where they’d met each other, or at least up to the point where Bennis had met him?
He went out of the bathroom into the room itself. The suitcase was still on the bed. The laptop was set up on the desk. The laptop’s screen showed the home page for Box Hill Confections. Gregor didn’t remember plugging the laptop into the Internet connection or bringing up Box Hill, but he’d been distracted. He still was. He sat down at the desk and looked for a minute through Box Hill’s pages: chocolates, confections, wedding and event favors. There was nothing to tell him whether or not the company made chocolate yaprak sarma as a matter of course, but he did find pictures of all kinds of truffles and crèmes, and he thought Bennis and Donna had probably come close to passing out cold from ecstasy. This was just what they needed, a specialty gourmet chocolate place that treated cacao content like the Holy Grail.
He collapsed the Box Hill page and called up Google instead. Then he typed in “Arrow Normand” and waited to see what would happen.
He should have known better. The first page took forever to load, and then it announced that there were a total of 329,224,544 results. Gregor had a feeling that this was actually an understatement. He looked at the results on the first page. They were mostly about the murder of Mark Anderman, and Arrow Normand’s address. That made sense. Results would be sorted by starting with the most recent, and this was the most recent thing that had happened to Arrow Normand. It was not, however, what Gregor wanted to know about right now.
He thought about it for a minute, and tried “Arrow Nor-mand” and “Hugh Hefner Suite.” This was better. The page that came up declared that there were only 12,224,488 results. He looked through the ones on the first page and decided to try CNN first. He got five short paragraphs announcing that “it had been reported” that Arrow Normand and her friends had spent a “wild weekend” in the “very expensive Hugh Hefner Suite” at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, along with five or six photographs of Arrow Normand with various people, or in the vicinity of various people. He recognized Marcey Mandret from the hospital, and both of the people he had just seen in the restaurant downstairs, although the man was in the background and fuzzy. This was not helping. Gregor hit the Back button and looked through the rest of the results on the page.
The one he wanted was almost at the end. It was from something called SarahSurveysSociety, which seemed to be some kind of blog. The headline was: “Has Arrow Normand Lost Her Mind?”
For half a minute, but no longer, Gregor wished he’d already met Arrow Normand. Stewart could give all the lectures he wanted about how incredibly stupid the woman was, but Stewart thought everybody was stupid. Gregor dismissed the qualm and concentrated on the blog entry, which was immensely long for that kind of thing, and illustrated. He saw pictures of Arrow Normand at parties, and the beach. He saw pictures of Arrow Normand in shorts and halter tops, in bikinis, in ball gowns. He saw pictures of Arrow Normand happy, and sad, and wasted, and crying, and angry. He even saw one picture of Arrow Normand trying to fill her own gas tank.
In the beginning, the pictures bothered him, and he couldn’t put his finger on why. Then it hit him. Arrow Normand was not beautiful. She wasn’t even especially pretty. She didn’t have that thing that some actresses and models have, where their looks are not conventionally attractive but are at least compelling. Arrow Normand looked like every high school cheerleader from the small towns of the Midwest, “cute” in that way high school girls are because they’re very young, but also “cute” in that way that disappears as soon as they get older. And Arrow Normand’s “cute” was definitely disappearing. He could see it in the progression of the pictures. The older she got, the pudgier she got. She never got pudgy enough to be fat, but she no longer had clear physical definition, and her face had gone almost completely slack. There was no significant bone structure to hold it together. Even her hair got flatter and more colorless the closer to the present the pictures were taken. What was worse, she looked out of place. When she appeared in pictures next to other “celebrities”—and next to Kendra Rhode especially—she looked like that very same small-town ex-cheerleader, getting her picture taken with her favorite star. She did not look like a star herself, or like anybody who could ever be a star.
Gregor scrolled to the beginning of the blog’s entry, which took a while.
“Everybody knows that celebrities are about excess,” the blog began,
and everybody knows that Arrow Normand is dumb, but this latest trip to Las Vegas really takes the cake. It’s not just the fact that we’ve got one more piece of evidence that the woman can’t count. The Hugh Hefner Suite is rumored to cost $40,000 a night, which is more than a lot of people make in a year, and Normand is rich, but not that rich, and she won’t be rich for long if she goes on spending it like water. We’ve been through things like this with Arrow before, though, and you can’t make people wise up. What with having her favorite latte flown in every morning from L.A. while she’s location filming in Milan, by private jet yet, to the tune of $20,000 a flight, never mind the waste of fossil fuels, and the nearly daily shopping trips to Chez Guitarra at $6,000 a pop, we figure Arrow is going to end up flipping burgers in Cincinnati by the time she’s thirty anyway. God only knows nobody is buying her records anymore, and her label is set to drop her, and money doesn’t last forever.
But people can be stupid about money without being stupid about everything else, and Arrow Normand’s problem is that she’s stupid about everything else, and especially about her image. Kendra Rhode and Marcey Mandret can afford to get drunk as skunks in public every night, but Arrow is supposed to be America’s Little Girl, and when America’s Little Girl goes to bed in an expensive hotel suite with one guy and wakes up with another, people start to wonder if she’s worth the attention she’s getting. And the men. For God’s sake. Can’t the woman find a decently employed guy to take her out once in a while? The one she checked in with was Steve Becker, who gets some minor pickup crew work on movies, and the one she checked out with was Mark Anderman, who does the same. Neither one of them is bringing home enough to afford the coffee at the Palms, never mind the suite, and you gotta know that when they go out to dinner, it’s Arrow who’s picking up the checks. Arrow flew back to her New England movie set with Anderman, but Sarah’s ready to predict it won’t last long. Sarah’s ready to predict that Arrow won’t either, either on that movie or in the universe of celebrities.
Arrow Normand hasn’t lost her mind. She never had one.
Gregor sat back. That was something. He went back to the Google results page, then on to the second page. Arrow Normand seemed to inspire a lot of blogs. He wondered if she read these things. It couldn’t be easy to read about yourself over and over again in entries like Sarah’s. It was hard enough to read about yourself in ordinary news reports, which almost never got things entirely right. He went back to Sarah’s page and bookmarked it. He would rather have had a printer and a hard copy. He hated reading things on a computer screen. At the moment, this was the best he could do.
He was just thinking he ought to get the dates worked out in his head when there was a thunderous pounding on his door, and the even more
thunderous voice of Stewart Gordon said, “Gregor? Are you in there? Are you dead?”
3
If Gregor Demarkian had not met Stewart Gordon before Stewart Gordon was famous, he would have thought that the man was a prime ass. As it was, he had, from the beginning, thought that the man was crazy. Sometimes it was as if they were in some odd World War II movie, with their roles reversed: Gregor was the shy reserved one; Stewart was the confident energetic one; the Yanks and the Brits had changed personalities when nobody was looking. Gregor couldn’t even blame it on Stewart’s size. The man was tall, and broad, and not likely to fade into the background in any room, but neither was Gregor. It was more a matter of attitude, and Gregor had never been able to figure out how it worked.
When Gregor opened the door to the corridor, Stewart was not there alone. He had yet another small, neat middle-aged woman with him, so that Gregor found himself wondering if this had become a hobby. This woman was retiring rather than brisk, and not inclined to makeup, but she had that indefinable something that Gregor recognized in Clara Walsh and Bennis, that something you got from living all your life among the WASP establishment.
