by Jane Haddam
“All that still bothers me.”
“It shouldn’t. On any other night—on any night when there was going to be a serious use of animals—it would have been impossible, but on that first night it was easy. We did it out there together. It’s simple to disappear behind that stand.”
“But how did she get out of there?” Bennis protested. “Kelley Grey saw her at intermission, that’s fine, but then she must have gone into the bushes and waited for Gemma Bury and then pressed the trigger, but if she came right out she might have been seen—”
“She didn’t come right out. She waited until the play was over.”
“What?”
“If Gemma’s death had been discovered immediately, or if the silencer hadn’t worked, she probably would have come right out, because it would have been best to mingle with the crowd. But when nothing happened at all, she waited until the play was over. That was why Kelley Grey saw her at intermission, and Peter Callisher said she’d gone home sick in the middle of it all, but Stuart Ketchum saw her just outside the bleachers after the performance was over. Do you mean to tell me you didn’t pick that up?”
“Don’t do this to me, Gregor.”
“I’m not doing anything to you. I’m just telling you what happened. I will say something else, though.”
“What?”
“This is why I get so nervous about the expansion of the right to self-defense. I’m not totally against it, mind you. I have read some cases where I think it made perfect sense. There was that woman in Michigan with the husband who beat her. She divorced him. She moved out of town. She contacted police departments and got court orders. He followed her around, showed up on her doorstep and beat her bloody whenever he wanted to, and the police were very negligent in giving that woman protection. So the fact that she waited for him to pass out from vodka before she blew his head off doesn’t bother me at all. I am in full agreement with the acquittal. But.”
“But?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “the problem with instituting such a principle in law is that you don’t know what you’re unleashing. You may have a woman like that woman in Michigan, who is protecting herself in the only way she can. You may, however, have someone like Amy Jo Bickerel.”
“Maybe Amy Jo Bickerel was Amy Jo Bickerel because of what her uncle did to her.”
“Maybe,” Gregor agreed, “but there are two arguments from that premise. In the first place, you have to be careful with it, because in most cases adolescent girls who have been abused do not become violent to other people. They tear at themselves. The other thing has been known to happen, however, so we’ll let that slide. Then you have to look at this: No matter how Amy Jo Bickerel got to be Amy Jo Bickerel, she’s still dangerous. She won’t go to jail even now. She’ll be sent straight back to a mental institution, with any luck one with more stringent security procedures. Whether you’re going to blame her for what she did is not the point.”
“Abuse,” Bennis said pensively.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I got a call from Kelley Grey right before I left for church this morning. I think she was trying to find you and you were out somewhere—”
“I was at Ararat having breakfast in peace.”
“Whatever. She said something about you’d want to know, she got Gandy George a place in a program in Boston, and if Candy sticks with it she never has to let Reggie beat her up again, although who all these people are—”
“Candy is the girl who played Mary in the Nativity play. Reggie is her husband that Gemma Bury said beat her—beat Candy—and also Reggie is one of the people with the guns Stuart Ketchum was talking about—”
“Does any of this make actual sense to you?”
“No, Bennis, none of this makes actual sense to me, but I’m used to that. I live on Cavanaugh Street.”
“Right,” Bennis said.
Over at the windows, Lida Arkmanian was standing in front of the grilled shrimp, clapping her hands and dodging Tommy Moradanyan, who seemed to want something that was right behind her.
“The food is all out,” she called. “It is time for all of you to eat. There are tables set up downstairs if you want to sit at tables. There is punch in the punch bowl. Green punch is for children and old people. Red punch is for adults.”
“Green punch, red punch,” old George Tekemanian said, coming up to Gregor and Bennis. “I have brought my rum just in case they try to make me listen to the doctor, who is somebody I don’t need because if I’ve survived this long I have to know more than some boy about how to stay alive. Hello, Krekor, Merry Christmas.”
“Where’s Martin?” Gregor asked.
Old George gestured vaguely into the crowd. “Out there somewhere. With my granddaughter-in-law, who is a very sweet girl but terrible about this health business. It’s all right. I’ve brought my own alcohol. I can get my own cholesterol. I will see you later, Krekor.”
“Just remember not to stuff butter in your pockets this time,” Gregor said. “It melts.”
“You think she’d give up,” Bennis said, meaning old George’s granddaughter-in-law. “She never wins an argument and he’s already eighty-something. And he seems healthy as a horse.”
“He probably is healthy as a horse,” Gregor said. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you healthy as a horse?”
“I’m going to quit smoking for New Year’s,” Bennis said. “I know I do it every New Year’s, but at least—”
“That’s not what I meant,” Gregor told her. “I meant the diet.”
“What diet?”
“The diet you keep trying to go on. What I mean to say is, if you have to go on a diet, do you think you could save me a lot of headaches and go on it in such a way that Tibor couldn’t tell?”
“Gregor, what are you talking about? I’m not on a diet. I couldn’t go on a diet. They wouldn’t let me go on a diet. I’d have to secede from Cavanaugh Street.”
“What about those diet books you were reading in Vermont?”
“Oh,” Bennis said, “those.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “those.”
“I have to go talk to Donna Moradanyan about some thing,” Bennis said. “I’ll be right back.”
4
A FEW MINUTES LATER, Father Tibor Kasparian sidled up to Gregor’s side and pulled on the sleeve of his sweater. Gregor stopped in the middle of eating a piece of yaprak sarma Hannah Krekorian had gotten for him and looked down at the small priest’s head. He still looked tired, but he also looked healthy, which was an improvement from the days before they went to Vermont. That he also looked old was something that Gregor had long ago given up worrying about, in spite of the fact that Tibor was four years younger than he was himself.
“Krekor,” Tibor said in a hiss. “Have you asked her? Do you know now why she is on a diet?”
“She says she isn’t on a diet,” Gregor said.
“If she isn’t on a diet, why is she reading these books about how to be on a diet?”
“She didn’t say.”
“This will not do, Krekor, it will not do. This is an emergency. We have to take action.”
“No we don’t,” Gregor said reasonably. “She’s over at the food table, eating through everything in sight.”
“Did you ask her if she was on a diet?”
“Of course I did. You told me to.”
“I told you to find out if she was on a diet, Krekor, not to come right out and ask. You have probably now committed a disaster. You have probably now made her think you think she ought to go on a diet.”
“I think she ought to gain twenty pounds and she knows it. And I’m hungry. I’m going to go back and get something to eat.”
“Always you think about food, Krekor. This is life and death.”
Actually, on Cavanaugh Street, as far as Gregor could tell, everything was life and death—but at least the life part had yaprak sarma in it, and flatbread
you could dip into thick yogurt sauces, and lots of fresh dill. If Tibor hadn’t looked so worried, Gregor would have left him to stew where he was and done some serious immediate damage to the food supply. Instead, he felt called upon to offer reassurance.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m taking Bennis out for dinner on New Year’s Eve. I’ve got that sweater I bought that I showed you, with the reindeer on it. I’m going to give it to her. It’ll soften her up. Maybe I’ll get her to talk.”
“You are taking Bennis to a restaurant on New Year’s Eve?” Tibor looked interested. “Just the two of you? Alone?”
Gregor Demarkian nearly choked. “Now Tibor,” he warned. “Behave yourself.”
“I do not know what you are talking about, Krekor. I am a priest. I always behave myself.”
“Tibor—”
“I think this is a very good thing,” Tibor said. “You and Bennis, alone in a restaurant, on New Year’s Eve. If you are intelligent, Krekor, you will pick one with not much light and a great many candles.”
“Tibor.”
But it was too late. Tibor had disappeared in the direction of the food, and in the direction of the gossip, too, if Gregor was any judge. Tibor was grabbing Lida Arkmanian’s arm and whispering excitedly into her ear.
Oh, well, Gregor thought.
Sweater or no sweater, when Bennis Hannaford heard about this, she was going to kill him.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries
Prologue
1
IT WAS SIX O’CLOCK on the morning of Monday, May 5, and Norman Kevic was on the air—and in the air, too, in a way, since he’d been flying higher than a stratocumulus cloud ever since he’d snorted four lines of pure Peruvian crystal in the men’s room of the Philadelphia Baroque Rococo Club at five minutes before closing just a few hours ago. Of course, those four lines weren’t the last lines Norm had snorted, just as the Baroque Rococo wasn’t the last club he’d visited. The Baroque Rococo was a gay bar Norm liked to go to just to see if he could get thrown out of it—which he couldn’t anymore, because they knew him. He’d spent the rest of the night in a place called Bertha’s Box, about which the less remembered the better. It didn’t matter, because Norm never could remember what he’d done in Bertha’s, except for more lines. There were always more lines. It was six o’clock in the morning and Norm had to go to work—in spite of the fact that he owned a piece of the station and wasn’t about to fire himself. Long before he’d owned a piece of the station he’d been The Voice of WXVE, the King of Philadelphia Talk Radio, the Man of the Morning. He’d taken three days off with the flu back in 1984 and nearly been lynched. There were heads out there who stoked themselves up all night just to be cruising fast enough to take him in between six and ten. More to the point, there were heads out there who weren’t very stable. Norm’s mail was a steady stream of unidentified flying objects. A dead mouse with a bright purple satin ribbon tied in a crisp bow around its neck. A lifetime subscription to the neo-Nazi rag called Black Storm Rising: The Truth About the Second World War. An absolutely awful homemade carrot cake with a flic knife buried inside. The fans would send him anything. They were out there. And they had teeth.
The chair in front of the mike Norm was supposed to use had arms, and that was a no-no, because Norm was much too fat to fit into a chair with arms. He’d been fat all his life, to an extent, but lately it had gotten worse. Who said cocaine made you thin? There was a pile of books on the pull-out shelf next to the microphone and a note: steve says don’t say asshole on the air again it’s going to get us in trouble. Norm stared at the punctuation in “it’s” for a good half minute, then crumpled the note. It was Sherri who was the asshole as far as he was concerned. It was Sherri who ought to have been fired, except that he couldn’t fire her, because she was Steve’s assistant. In the old days, girls like Sherri didn’t punctuate words like “it’s” even if they knew how, because they knew better. They didn’t wear jeans to the office, either, unless the jeans were tight. They certainly didn’t stand in the open glass door to the broadcast booth in L.L. Bean baggies and overflowing flannel shirts, wearing no makeup and wire-rimmed glasses, looking at him as if he were a slug. It’s. God. What had he been thinking of? Why? He had to stop doing those lines.
Sherri had taken her glasses off and was tapping them on her chest. The red light over the microphone was lit. Somewhere out there, a boy named Dig Watter, whose sole job was to make sure there was no dead air on WXVE for any reason short of the Rapture, was probably getting an ulcer.
“Listen,” Sherri said. “Just one second before you start. Steve wanted me to tell you—”
“Not to say asshole,” Norm said.
“That, too. To lay off the dead Jap jokes. That’s what. There’s a big Japanese-American community in the suburbs around Philadelphia. You’re getting a lot of people pissed off.”
“That’s what I do for a living. I get people pissed off.”
“Just pay attention,” Sherri said.
“You ought to lose some weight,” Norm said. “You really should. You’d be a very attractive woman if you only lost a little weight.”
“You’d be a very attractive man if you just grew a bigger dick,” Sherri said.
Then she stepped into the hall and let the door swing shut behind her.
Norm stared after her, furious, the red light blinking, nothing to be done about the goddamned chair right away, furious. What had gotten into these women anyway? It was all that crap with Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. Sexual harassment. They were the 1990s version of those old maids who used to see rapists under their beds. Christ.
Red light.
Pile of books.
Big hand-lettered sign on his bulletin board:
THE NUNS ARE HAVING A CONVENTION.
He grabbed the mike, snapped it open with his thumb and said, “Good morning Philadelphia, this is Cultural Norm, the free-form house worm coming to you from the studios of WXVE radio—any minute now I’m going to turn into the voice of radio past—the living dead—no, I can’t be the living dead, I’m not a Republican—I’m not a Democrat, either—if politics gets any sillier I’m going to have to vote for Yeltsin—I wish I could vote for Yeltsin—this is the wrong chair I have in this studio, Sherri sweetie, go get me another one—and I’ve got news for the lot of you out there, yes I do, before we get down to business. Business today is a good long discussion of that ancient question: can masturbation be good for you? And how? We’ve got a number of guests coming in, including the Right Reverend Thomas Willard, pastor of the Paoli Pentecostal Church. I think the good reverend’s answer to our first question is going to be no—but you can’t tell, ladies and gentlemen, you really can’t tell. I mean, look at Jimmy Swaggart Anyway, before we get into all that, we’ve got more religious news.”
He could see Sherri through the glass door, down the hall in the small office where she sat typing letters with a radio on, monitoring the broadcast. When he said that about the chair, her hair snapped up and she leaned over to speak into her intercom. Now a young boy Norm had never seen before was scurrying in from the wings, dragging an armless side chair that was almost as tall as he was and twice as heavy. Norm kicked open the glass booth door and motioned him inside.
“Just a minute ladies and gentlemen, this is my chair, let me sit down in it. Sherri sweetie didn’t bring it, though. She sent a boy. What she thinks I want with a boy is beyond me. He doesn’t have anywhere near as nice a chest as she does. His is flat What’s your name, kid?”
The kid blushed. “Mike,” he said. “Mike Donnelly.”
“Right. I want Mike off my mike and out of my booth right now or I’ll ask him what he thinks of masturbation and whether he ever commits it. There he goes. Into the hall. Into the sunset. What the hey. Now for that religious news I promised you. The Sisters of Divine Grace—you know, the ones that have that big college and academic conference center out in Radnor—well, the goo
d Sisters have decided to have a convention of their own. That’s what I said. A nun’s convention. The Sisters of Divine Grace is the largest active Order—that’s a Church term for you pagans out there, an active Order goes out and teaches or nurses or whatever instead of staying in a cloister and praying all the time—anyway, they’re the largest active Order in the United States, with three thousand nuns in the contiguous forty-eight and another fifteen hundred between Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. They also have a number of houses—religious houses now, convents to you bozos—in foreign countries, including what’s probably an obligatory one in Rome. Don’t quote me on that. I haven’t been to church since I peeked up Sister Bonaventure’s dress and found out she ran on wheels. Anyway, this convention is going to take place in our own fair ADI, right there in Radnor, for a week beginning the Friday before Mother’s Day and running through the Sunday afterward. The Sisters run Catholic schools for the most part, and this year they’ve coordinated their school schedules to get their vacations all at the same time. And here they’ll be. Little skirts. Little veils. Little prayer books. Thousands of them. Maybe I should have saved the masturbation program for them. What I’m trying to say here is that this is a major invasion, major, so major all the patent leather shoes in Philadelphia may disappear before our eyes in the next two weeks. We’ve got to be prepared. We’ve got to have a war plan. I don’t have one yet, but I’m working on it. Stay tuned. Or take on protective coloration. Anyone wearing a Miraculous Medal with a blue glass bead in it is probably safe. And now, just one more thing before we bring in our first guest.”
Down the hall, Sherri’s head rose slowly and swiveled in his direction. Norman Kevic smiled.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Norm said, “do you know how to save a Japanese from fugu poisoning? No? Well, gooooood.”
Down the hall, Sherri picked up a big glass paperweight and threw it on the floor.
