Feast of Murder (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “Is that the boat, Krekor?” old George asked. “It doesn’t look like much of a boat, to spend a week on with so many people.”

  “It’s supposed to be a replica of the Mayflower,” Gregor said. He turned the photograph over and read, “Pier 36. Berth 102. Saturday, November seventeenth. Nine o’clock.”

  “That sounds right,” old George said.

  “It’s going to be ten days, not a week,” Gregor told him. Then Gregor pawed through the rest of the mail, searching until he found an identical envelope with Bennis’s name on it, feeling satisfied when he found it was there. Gregor didn’t pride himself on knowing much about people. He was a facts and logic man, not a psychologist. Still, everything he had ever heard about Jon Baird—and every impression he had gotten the one time they’d met—said that here was a man who did everything through his office. A wife would have known that Gregor and Bennis were coming together and sent only one reminder. A secretary would send reminders to everyone on her list. Unless, of course, she was a very confidential secretary—and Jon Baird hadn’t struck him as the kind of man to have one of those. Gregor pushed Bennis’s envelope back into the stack.

  “I remember reading about it five or six years ago, when it was built,” Gregor said. “Baird went to an extraordinary amount of trouble. Finding people who could duplicate the methods of construction. Having fabrics made that no one had produced for a hundred and fifty years. It was quite a project.”

  “All so that this man could sail the boat from Virginia to Massachusetts to have his Thanksgiving?”

  “I don’t think he’s ever used it for Thanksgiving before,” Gregor said. “Mostly it’s used for schoolchildren. They come on field trips and visit it. I think Baird even offers an overnight sail for parents and children. Or Baird Financial does. Jon Baird is the kind of man who makes it difficult to work out where the person ends and the company begins.”

  “How much of a replica is it?” old George asked. “Does it have plumbing? Does it have gas to cook with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does Bennis know?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Old George peered over Gregor’s shoulder at the picture and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s too much you don’t know, Krekor, and none of it sounds promising. I think you should stay home and have your dinner with Lida the way everybody expected you to.”

  “I had last Thanksgiving dinner with Lida. I had Christmas dinner with Lida. I had Easter dinner with Lida.”

  “You would be welcome to have every dinner with Lida.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  Gregor stuffed the photograph into the breast pocket of his sweater. “We’re late, that’s the point,” he said. “We promised Tibor we’d meet him at the church at ten o’clock and it’s already ten past. Get your jacket and get going.”

  Old George gave him a long, steady, and slightly reproving look—but it didn’t have any effect, and Gregor knew old George hadn’t expected it to. He watched the older man return to his apartment for his latest jacket—something new Martin had bought him, made of leather and covered with zippers and chains—and was impressed again at how quickly the old man moved. Old George’s gait was vigorous and shaky at the same time, like the progress of a car whose engine is capable of anything but whose chassis is held together with spit and chewing gum.

  “Even so, Krekor,” he said, as he came back out into the hall and pulled his door shut behind him, “I think you are being foolish. I think Bennis is also being foolish. If the two of you feel so badly that you are taking too much of our hospitality, you should make a Thanksgiving dinner and invite us yourself.”

  “You mean we should do it together?” Gregor asked.

  Old George shot him a look. “Don’t joke, Krekor. We’re all very worried about you. We’re all very worried about Bennis, too. She’s old enough to be married. You’re too old not to be married again.”

  “If we were married to each other, we’d provide Cavanaugh Street with its first known homicide. And I don’t know who would kill who first.”

  “I think I will kill you both and put the neighborhood out of its misery,” old George said. “Besides, with all the refugees we could use the apartments. Next week I will have four people staying with me. How many people will you have staying with you?”

  Actually, Gregor had no idea how many people he would have staying with him, because he had no intention of being there to meet them. He had given Lida a copy of his key so that she could use his living room as “a temporary hotel,” as she put it. He supposed she would fill his modest one-bedroom place with stranded Armenians of various shapes and sizes—and Bennis’s, too. He also supposed those stranded Armenians would be long gone before he returned. Lida and her cohorts at the newly formed Society for the Support of an Independent Armenia were supposed to have a regular real estate service going. They seemed to have better luck finding rental space than Donald Trump.

  Old George stepped through the main front door to the stoop and waited. Gregor followed him, trying not to look back at old George’s apartment door. Gregor locked his apartment religiously, as all policemen, ex-policemen, and burglars do. Bennis locked hers because she had lived so much of her life in places where it paid to be cautious. The rest of Cavanaugh Street thought it was living in the nineteenth century. Doors were for going in and out of, not for locking up. When they locked up, they just lost their keys anyway. Besides, what could possibly happen to them in a neighborhood like this?

  Gregor had tried many times to explain to them that their precious “neighborhood like this” was surrounded by neighborhoods like that, but it hadn’t done any good. Hannah Krekorian was still enamored of the theory that there are no bad boys, and Lida Arkmanian thought a crack house was one of those little metal chalets you bought from Hammacher Schlemmer to break the shells of nuts in. It was enough to make a grown man weep.

  “Krekor,” old George called from the bottom of the stairs. “Come on now. I’m halfway there and it’s you who are daydreaming.”

  Gregor wasn’t daydreaming. He never daydreamed. He fell asleep when he tried.

  He climbed down the steep concrete stairs without holding to the railing, joined old George on the pavement, and turned his head toward Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church.

  3

  Two hours and ten minutes later, long arrived at his destination for the morning and long made miserable by the stiff mid-November chill, Gregor sat on top of a pile of brown packing boxes and wondered just what it was he had allowed himself to get talked into. Then he wondered which of the various things he had allowed himself to get talked into he meant. There was the trip with Bennis and the collected luminaries of the Baird family and Baird Financial on the Pilgrimage Green, of course—but for a number of reasons, if that trip hadn’t materialized on its own, he and Bennis would have had to invent it. Then there was the project of the moment, which consisted of reading the numbers off packing boxes while old George Tekemanian and Father Tibor Kasparian fussed around the base of the pyramid, clucking at each other in Armenian. Every once in a while, one or two of the new people would come up and offer to help. Tibor and old George always turned them down, as if it wouldn’t have been just as easy for both of them to take down numbers called out in Armenian—which was, after all, their native language—as in English. Every once in a while a child came by and asked what was going on. When that happened, Tibor stopped and tried to explain it all, starting with the Crucifixion, moving through the establishment of the Armenian state church, coming to a climax with the Turkish invasion, and rounding off on a note of triumph with the expulsion of the Soviets. The tale was riveting and the children were fascinated, as they were fascinated with anything this bent little man had to tell them. They had all heard stories about Tibor’s life in the Gulags and daring escape into freedom, and most of them didn’t care that the stories were not true. O
ver the past three years, Tibor had become the closest male friend Gregor had ever had, and Gregor normally approved of anything that made the man happy, as telling the history of Armenia this way certainly made Tibor happy. The problem for Gregor was that the speech took half an hour to make, and all during that time Gregor would be sitting on his box, rubbing his hands together in a vain attempt to keep them warm. Old George Tekemanian was really only here for show, and to give Tibor someone to mutter to in Armenian. The temperature was dropping steadily if not rapidly, making Gregor less comfortable by the minute.

  Tibor moved away from the base of the pyramid, pointed at boxes as he counted them under his breath, and shook his head.

  “Two short,” he said fretfully. “Two short. Where could the two boxes be?”

  “Have you tried looking in the back room in the basement?” Gregor asked. He asked in English, because he spoke almost no Armenian. He did understand quite a bit.

  Tibor climbed carefully up a pile of boxes to where he could speak to Gregor more naturally and said, “There is nothing in the back room in the basement, Krekor, I know because I have checked. I will tell you what this is. This is Mrs. Krekorian.”

  “Hannah?”

  “Fussing,” Tibor said solemnly. “I have told her over and over again. These are packages for people who are starving, not gifts to send to your mother-in-law. They do not need to be pretty, only generous.”

  “Hannah’s certainly generous,” Gregor said.

  “Generous,” old George said from the street. “Hannah stuffs people the way she stuffs turkeys.”

  “Mrs. Krekorian,” Tibor said, “makes everything pretty with ribbons. I have seen her, Krekor. I have gone to her house and there are her boxes next to the kitchen table and in the bottom of the boxes are the blankets and each of the blankets is tied up with little bows. You understand, Krekor, there is nothing wrong with bows. I myself very much like bows. Now, however, we do not have very much time, we have people who need food and warm things because the winter is coming and they have nothing. And Mrs. Krekorian gives me bows.”

  “What he’s trying to say,” old George said, “is that she fussed so much with the bows, she didn’t get done on time.”

  “And I have people to pick up the boxes and take them to the airport at four o’clock,” Tibor said. “Bennis and Donna will drive them and then at the airport there is the plane from the Red Cross that will take these boxes and the Red Cross boxes and the vaccinations we have paid for, and if Mrs. Krekorian’s boxes are not there she might as well give them to her mother-in-law, except I think her mother-in-law is dead.”

  “Her mother-in-law is most definitely dead,” Gregor said. “Hannah’s a year older than I am. She was in Lida’s class at school.”

  “My son David was in Lida’s class at school,” old George said. “I’m not dead.”

  Gregor stretched his long legs and began to climb carefully down from the packing boxes. The packing boxes were made of wooden slats and reinforced with steel corner guards, but although Tibor climbed up and down with impunity, Gregor didn’t dare. Tibor was a small man, short and wiry and fragile of bone. Gregor was over six two and heavy in that solid, Rock of Gibraltar way some Armenian men get in middle age. Bennis always said Gregor reminded her of Harrison Ford with an extra twenty pounds on him, but the description made Gregor uncomfortable. For one thing, he didn’t like to think he was carrying an extra twenty pounds. If he was careful not to look too often into mirrors, he felt good enough to convince himself he was in near perfect shape. For another thing, he could never remember just who Harrison Ford was.

  “I take it you want me to go talk to Hannah Krekorian,” Gregor told Tibor. “You should get Lida to do it, you know. Lida would have more effect.”

  “I’ve already had Lida do it,” Tibor said. “Maybe a man will be better. For that generation, a man had authority.”

  “For Hannah Krekorian, the only human being on earth with authority is Ann Landers. That beats Sheila Kashinian, though. For Sheila Kashinian, the only human being on earth with authority is Shirley MacLaine. Why don’t you go yourself?”

  “She will try to feed me, Krekor.”

  “She will try to feed me, too. You’ve got to get down if I’m going to go any farther. You’re directly in my way.”

  Tibor hopped off his crate into the street, earning an admiring glance from old George and a look of exasperation from Gregor. Old George might not have noticed it—and nobody else might have, either—but Gregor could see that the little priest was something beyond exhausted. The rosy red of his cheeks was fever, not good health, and while Tibor had been close to Gregor on the pyramid of packing boxes Gregor had seen his hands shake. Now Tibor was standing on the pavement, but not standing still. He was hopping back and forth, doing a little shuffle-step pace. Anyone who didn’t know him well might have thought he was getting rid of nervous energy. Gregor thought he was trying to disguise the fact that his legs were shaking, too.

  “Hey,” Gregor said, as he got to the pavement himself. “Go home and rest. Get Lida to take over here. You can’t save the entire Republic of Armenia on your own.”

  “I am not trying to save the entire Republic of Armenia on my own, Krekor. I am merely trying to commit an act of corporal charity. I am all right, really. Trust me.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I know.”

  “Who do you figure that is up at our house?” old George Tekemanian said. “I had thought he was one of the men Bennis knows, but now that I look at him I don’t think so. He is too—pressed.”

  “Pressed?”

  Gregor and Tibor had been standing on the side of the box pyramid away from the brownstone where Gregor and old George had their apartments. Now they came around the corner and looked up the street at the young man old George had noticed there. He was a very young man, and also—as old George had said—much too pressed to be a friend of Bennis Hannaford’s. In fact, Gregor didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone so pressed in his life. The very young man was wearing a navy blue suit with the trousers pressed into knife-edged creases and the end of his regulation rep tie tucked into his vest. He had very blond hair cut too short and a collar that rode just a little too high on the back of his neck.

  “No, no,” Tibor said when he saw him. “Not Bennis’s. Bennis does not know nice young men like that.”

  “How do you know the young man is nice?” old George Tekemanian said. “Just because he’s wearing a suit?”

  “It is better than a torn sweatshirt and a nose ring,” Tibor said, “which is the young man she introduces me to at the Armenian festival last year. The young man who sings somewhere with a band nobody has ever heard of.”

  “Everybody’s heard of him,” old George said. “Even I’ve heard of him.”

  “I don’t care who’s heard of him,” Gregor said. “I’ve got to go.”

  The two other men turned to look at him, curious, but Gregor was already on his way. He had done his share of speculating about Bennis Hannaford’s love life—since she had moved onto Cavanaugh Street after Gregor had met her on the first of what he thought of as his “extracurricular excursions into murder,” he had speculated on that sort of thing a great deal—but old George and Tibor were right. There was no way this young man fit the general description of “one of Bennis’s friends.”

  What he did fit the description of was Rookie Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Gregor had trained too many of the damned idiots in his time to mistake the breed for something normal on the street.

  Two

  1

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER been much of a Cold Warrior. While the Cold War was still going on, he’d had other things on his mind—kidnapping detail, when he’d first joined the Bureau, and then serial murderers, and then Elizabeth dying. He wasn’t political and he wasn’t much upset by change, as long as it was someone else’s change. He hadn’t minded beatniks and he hadn’t minded hippies and when college
students took over administration buildings just to declare their solidarity with revolution in Nicaragua, he wondered why they expended the energy. Once the Cold War was over, he couldn’t make himself get any more involved. What struck him were always the confusions, not the confrontations. Father Tibor stayed up night after night, watching governments fall in Sofia and Prague. Gregor bought a paper and stared at the headline for hours, not sure what he was supposed to do with it: “COMMUNIST PARTY BANNED IN SOVIET UNION.” Lida and Donna and Bennis and Hannah hung on the television set, listening to Gorbachev and Yeltsin and gunfire in the background. Gregor sat deep in his club chair and listened to the head of the KGB get interviewed on 60 Minutes. Even the independence of Armenia hadn’t broken through to him, in spite of the fact that the whole neighborhood had been up and about for that one. There were a pair of speakers over the door to Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store. Little Donnie Ohanian managed to get them hooked into the television set in his parents’ apartment on the building’s second floor, and the speakers had blasted out regular doses of CNN all that long morning while they were waiting for the news to be confirmed. While that was going on, Gregor had been sitting in the Ararat restaurant, reading over and over again a tiny article on the back page of the front section of the Philadelphia Inquirer, about how the tiny Republic of Elekteria had replaced its capital city statue of Lenin with a picture of Ronald Reagan. The story turned out to be apocryphal—and the Republic of Elekteria to be nonexistent—but those things only made the story seem that much more important to Gregor. That was the way things had been since everything had started to go seriously nuts. Gregor had a feeling that that was the way things were going to go for a while now.

  Gregor also had a feeling that some people wouldn’t accept the change, no matter how radical. He had that feeling because the very young man from the FBI who was standing on his stoop was a throwback—but not really, because he was much too young to be thrown back to anything. The Bureau had always had a reputation for treating the citizens of its country as if they were an alien invading force. It was a reputation it had earned, even though most Bureau agents had no more tolerance for red baiting, domestic spying, and “counterrevolutionary” campaigns than anyone else. The truth of the matter was, as long as old J. Edgar Hoover was alive, the Bureau had been two organizations, not one. Even after his death, the Bureau had continued as two organizations to one degree or another, at least as long as Gregor had been a member of it. To this side was the great majority of Bureau agents, “real policemen” as they liked to think of themselves, who handled all those nasty interstate crimes the Bureau had been founded to combat in the first place. Kidnapping, interstate bank robbery and international bank fraud, mob-connected trucking and union activities, smuggling, the bribery and extortion of national political figures—as long as you stayed away from drugs, real police work in the FBI could be much more interesting and much more exciting than the real police work in Dallas or New York. It had to be much more exciting than what those people over there did, which no one on this side ever quite figured out. “Infiltrating” the Yippies hardly seemed worth the bother. The organization accepted anyone who walked through the door and left its records lying around on desks for anyone at all to read. “Monitoring” the peace movement was worse, especially after 1973. For one thing, there wasn’t much left of it. For another, it did its business at rallies in public parks. Gregor was only sure of two things about what was going on over in that part of the Bureau’s ranks. One was that the regular agents were right, and that the whole domestic spying enterprise was Looney Tunes. The other was that all the Looney Tunes agents were Looney Tunes themselves.