Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  He reached the street with his briefcase and looked up and down it, but there was no sign of Gary Albright. There was no sign of anybody. It was early morning, but not early enough for people to be out and around on their way to work. The day was clear and cold. Even Bennis had disappeared into the mist, running off to Donna’s to discuss chocolate sculptures. Gregor had no idea what a chocolate sculpture was. It always made him feel very odd to look at Cavanaugh Street, since what it had been was so firmly etched into his memory. When he was growing up, all the buildings had been tenements. People lived in small, cramped apartments with very few windows and only barely adequate heat. The streets were dirty, but the tenement hallways were clean, because the women had come out every morning and scrubbed them down. It was hard to credit the way they had all lived: the clothes that were patched and handed down; the school books that were carefully covered so that the school could not say they had wrecked them and demand to be paid: the old priest from Armenia who smelled of camphor and breath mints and desperately needed a bath. All Gregor had wanted in those days was for his parents to make enough money to move out to the suburbs. It wouldn’t have had to have been the Main Line. He’d thought the best thing in the world would be a house and a yard and a car that his father could polish, the way people did on television.

  He looked up and down the street again, but the person he saw was not Gary Albright but Leda Kazanjian Arkmanian, crawling down the pavement at a lordly ten miles an hour. Leda always crawled in that car of hers. Gregor thought she only owned it because her children insisted on giving it to her, and he had to admit it was a very impressive car.

  “Swedish,” she’d said, when she’d first gotten it, and everybody was asking her about it in the Ararat. “They started out saying they were going to give me a Mercedes, but I couldn’t have that. It’s a German car. I mean, German.”

  Gregor had wanted to say, at the time, that it could have been worse. It could have been a Turkish car. He said nothing, because he knew better than to interfere when people started fighting World War II all over again. Now he watched while Leda pulled up to the curb just across the street from him, making the vehicle make funny noises as she parked. If Gregor had had someplace to go that wouldn’t inconvenience Gary Albright when he finally got here, he would have gone there.

  Leda got out of the car and looked up and down the street. There was no traffic. There rarely was at this time of day on Cavanaugh Street. She did something that beeped with her key ring. Gregor thought it was a device that automatically locked or unlocked all the doors of the car. He wasn’t up on cars. He didn’t understand them. Leda waved to him and began to cross the street. She didn’t look happy. Gregor wished he didn’t already know what she was going to say.

  “Gregor,” she said, when he reached him.

  Gregor looked up and down the street again. Surely, Gary Albright couldn’t be hopelessly lost. If he had been, he would have called. That was what Gregor had a cell phone for. “I’m waiting for the police officer from Snow Hill,” he said, as if Leda was going to listen.

  Leda was looking impressive as only Leda could look these days. She might be an old lady, but she was a magnificent old lady. She was wearing three-and-a-half-inch stiletto heels and a three-quarter-length chinchilla coat. Here was the great payoff of raising your children to work hard and study and get as much education as they could. Leda’s children had done very well.

  “Gregor,” she said again, as if she hadn’t said it the first time, “I came to apologize.”

  “There’s nothing to apologize for,” Gregor said. “We’ve got it all worked out. We really do.”

  “And you’re getting married in the church?”

  Gregor sighed. This would be an easier conversation if Leda had been concerned that Gregor and Bennis get married in the Church, with a capital C. That would mean she wanted them to have the blessing of the Armenian religion, and Gregor would have had an answer to that that would have been easy for anyone to understand. Unfortunately, Leda was only concerned that the ceremony for Gregor and Bennis’s wedding take place inside the physical building of Holy Trinity Church, and she wasn’t the only one who was concerned about it.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said. “I do need to apologize. To apologize for Father Tibor. To apologize for the whole neighborhood. I never dreamed that he’d be this stubborn, and about what? About a technicality.”

  “It’s not exactly just a technicality,” Gregor said.

  “Of course it is,” Leda said. “And it’s un-American, too. Tibor’s always so proud of being an American. My niece Alison got married to a Jewish boy not three months ago, and they had the ceremony right in her Catholic church with a rabbi present to give his side of it. And that’s the Catholics. The Armenians were never as unreasonable as the Catholics.”

  Gregor thought that he could possibly dispute this, but he let it go. “Bennis and I don’t want to get married in Holy Trinity Church,” he said, thinking that this was closest to the right thing to say. It was out of the question that he could explain to Leda what the issue really was. He knew that because he had tried, on several occasions. “We really aren’t looking to have a religious ceremony.”

  “It’s not a matter of a religious ceremony,” Leda said. “It has nothing to do with religion. It’s a matter of community. You’re one of the family here on Cavanaugh Street, and he’s treating you as if you were an outsider.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “Really. He’s not. He’s even agreed to perform the actual ceremony, the civil version, you know, just not in the church.”

  “Hannah and Sheila and I have come up with a plan,” Leda said. “We’re going to make him change his mind. Don’t you worry. We know how to make Father Tibor see reason. And if not, well, what of it? I don’t want to belong to a church that wants to keep people out more than it wants to bring them in. That isn’t what Christ came to teach us. Why should I go to a church that’s more snobbish than one of those Main Line country clubs?”

  “Really,” Gregor said desperately, “you have this all wrong. You’re not thinking about it clearly. If freedom of religion is going to mean anything—”

  He cringed as soon as he said it. That was the tack he had tried before, the one that had not worked. Then, at the same moment, he saw it: a big white pickup truck, the kind almost nobody had in the city. It looked oddly outsized next to all the regular cars. Gregor was sure it was the salvation he was looking for.

  “I think that’s my ride,” he said, waving at the truck even though he didn’t know for sure who was inside it.

  Leda wasn’t listening. “I think the old ways of religion were bad for everybody,” she was saying. “They were all about keeping people out, and what happened? We all hated each other. We all treated each other as if we were aliens. It can’t be like that anymore, Gregor, and I won’t put up with it in my own neighborhood.”

  The white pickup truck stopped in the street. It didn’t bother to even try for a place at the curb. There wasn’t enough room, anyway. The driver’s-side door popped open and Gary Albright popped out.

  “Mr. Demarkian?” he said.

  “I’ve got to go,” Gregor said, grabbing for his briefcase. For a split second he thought he’d lost it. He couldn’t remember putting it on the ground. He got a firm grip on it and mouthed a kiss in Leda’s direction. He hated that whole custom, whether the kiss actually landed on a cheek or not. “I’ve got to go,” he said again.

  Then he rushed off to the passenger side of Gary Albright’s truck. He didn’t like climbing into trucks any more than he liked kissing cheeks, but at least this promised relief from the endless machinations of the women of Cavanaugh Street.

  “I’ll be home tonight,” he said, because he felt he had to say something. “Tell Bennis I got off all right.”

  Leda Arkmanian made a face. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “We’ll fix this. Hannah and Sheila and I have a plan.”

  2

  As it turned
out, riding in a pickup truck was almost more uncomfortable than getting into one. Gregor didn’t understand the fascination the damned things had for so many people. It wasn’t that he was from the wrong generation. It was men his age who bought these things when they didn’t have to—doctors and lawyers who wanted to seem like—what?—in their spare time. Maybe he just had the wrong history. He’d grown up poor. His experience with rural life had been almost entirely negative until he was well into his twenties, and even then it was more negative than not. God only knew that special agents of the FBI hated the very idea of being assigned to some country backwater, and not because it was bad for the career. There were nuts in them thar hills, and the nuts were armed.

  Gary Albright was armed, but that was only to be expected. Gary Albright was a police officer. He had taken himself off this particular case, but Gregor had no reason to believe that he’d stepped down in total. There would be other cases to handle while the problem of Ann-Victoria Hadley went on.

  The scenery going past their windows was still unmistakably, uncompromisingly Philadelphia. Gregor took a little comfort in that.

  Gary Albright was staring straight ahead. “Mr. Jackman said you were getting married,” he said finally. “Sometime soon. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.” Gregor couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  There was a long silence. Gregor had the uneasy feeling that there would be many long silences with Gary Albright. He didn’t seem like a man who would talk just to talk.

  “Mr. Jackman said you were widowed,” Gary Albright said finally. “I was sorry to hear it. That’s a hard thing.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. The statement was true enough. “It was a hard thing. But it’s been many years now.”

  “Miss Hadley isn’t widowed,” Gary Albright said. “She isn’t divorced, either. She’s never been married.”

  “And you think that had something to do with her being attacked?”

  “No,” Gary Albright said. He was still staring straight ahead. He was the calmest man Gregor had ever seen who wasn’t a serial killer, and Gregor had to remind himself that he had no way of knowing for sure that Gary Albright wasn’t a serial killer.

  “It’s just that I don’t understand it,” Gary said finally. “Not being married, I mean. Life is a lonely place. I’d think everybody would get married, if they could. Even homosexual people want to get married. But Miss Hadley could have. From what I’ve heard, she could have a couple of times over. She was in the Navy, did you know that?”

  “No,” Gregor said.

  “She was a WAVE, in World War II,” Gary said. “She was a prisoner of war for a while, with the Japanese. Not for long. There’s people who say that she was proposed to by an admiral.”

  “They could have gotten that wrong.” In Gregor’s opinion, small towns got most things wrong. They also got most things in their worst possible light.

  “Maybe,” Gary admitted. “But there was a guy in town, a guy I knew, died a couple of years ago. He was a judge before he retired. He asked her to marry him, and she turned him down. She said she didn’t want to give up her independence. Do you understand that?”

  “I don’t know that I do. I do know there are a lot of women who say they feel that way.”

  “In her case it wasn’t as bad as it could have been,” Gary Albright said. “She had a lot of brothers, so she’s got a lot of nieces and nephews and grandnieces and nephews. They come up to visit a couple of times a year. She has them all up to that place of hers, dozens of them, so many there’re people sleeping on her floors. I still don’t understand it.”

  “Maybe she was hard to get along with.”

  “Miss Hadley?” Gary considered it. “I don’t think so. I mean, she wasn’t exactly easy. She wanted her own way and she tended to get it. It’s kind of funny. There’s somebody else like that, right in town, and she isn’t married either. Miss Marbledale.”

  “Who’s Miss Marbledale?”

  “She runs the school, pretty much,” Gary said. “You’ll meet her. She’s on the suspect list for the case. Not that I think she killed anybody, mind you, or even tried, as it is, and really if she killed anyone, it’d be Franklin Hale. Or maybe Alice McGuffie. But, here’s the thing. She’s a lot like Miss Hadley. Only—I’m not sure I know how to put this—only with less of a spirit of adventure, I guess.”

  “No stint in the Waves,” Gregor suggeted.

  “And no running around on foreign trips,” Gary said. “Miss Hadley went to Mongolia and lived in a tent for a couple of weeks. That was only last year. Miss Marbledale’s only been foreign maybe two or three times that I remember, and it’s always been to regular places like, you know, Rome or England. With a tour with other schoolteachers. And then she brings back slides. You know how that goes?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. He did, too. He knew exactly. He had had teachers like that when he had been in school.

  “I was out of the country when I was in the Marines,” Gary said. “But I haven’t been except for that. I don’t see the point. I belong here. I can’t see they have anything that we don’t have. Art, you know, but I’m not that big on art. I like Beethoven.”

  “That’s good,” Gregor said.

  “It was Miss Marbledale who turned me on to Beethoven,” Gary said. “Now I’ve got the beginning of the Fifth Symphony as my ring tone. But she doesn’t teach much anymore, if you know what I mean. She’s an administrator.”

  “Why is she on the suspect list?” Gregor asked. “You said you didn’t think she’d kill Ann-Victoria Hadley. There must be a reason.”

  “Oh, there is,” Gary said. “And maybe you’ll change the suspect list when you get your hands on it, but I put everybody involved in the suit on it if they were in the position to have done the battery. If they were in the vicinity, you know. Miss Marbledale used to be a science teacher. She presented the science teachers’ case when the policy was being debated before the school board. As if the science teachers’ side was the official side of the school.”

  “Not in favor of Intelligent Design, I take it.”

  “No,” Gary said. He looked suddenly unsure of himself. The moment passed and was gone. He looked impassive again. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “It was the first thing that made me think there might be something to it. To Darwin’s theory, I mean. Miss Marbledale is the smartest person I’ve ever known. And she’s not like Miss Hadley in one way that’s important. She doesn’t create a fuss just to create a fuss. I could see Miss Hadley being all insistent on evolution because she thought it would make people upset, but I can’t see Miss Marbledale doing that. If Miss Marbledale says she thinks evolution is true, then she really thinks evolution is true. And I’d bet anything she’s really looked into it.”

  “And you don’t think evolution is true?” Gregor asked.

  Gary Albright made a face. “I’m not a scientist,” he said, “but I wasn’t bad at science in school, and I’ve tried to read this stuff. And it makes no sense to me. The people who want Intelligent Design say things that do make sense to me. Think of all the things there are. Your spleen, you know, and that kind of thing. All that stuff works together, and if one of the parts is gone it doesn’t work. I mean, everybody knows that. They can’t just take your pancreas out and have the rest of the parts go on working. That’s why you die of pancreatic cancer in the first place. I think I’m making a mess of this explanation.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “I understand what you’re saying. I also understand that there’s an answer to that particular objection.”

  “That’s what she said,” Gary Albright said. “Miss Marbledale, I mean. At the first board meeting we had on the subject, she said that the problem was that we were thinking as if the thing a thing did now was what it always did. But she said that wasn’t the case. Sometimes a thing evolved to do one thing, and then as more evolution happened, the body started using it for something else. So it could have been important to the animal in its fi
rst use and that’s why it evolved at all, but then it became important later in its second use when its first use wasn’t needed anymore. I’m not an idiot. I can understand that. I just—”

  “What?”

  Gary Albright shrugged. “I just don’t buy it, I guess. Not entirely. Because I don’t think this is an argument about animals and how they got their parts. It might be that for Miss Marbledale, but it really wasn’t that for Miss Hadley and it really, really, really isn’t that for the people who are bringing this lawsuit. Henry Wackford, I mean. And the people from the development.”

  “Who’s Henry Wackford?”

  “He’s the village atheist,” Gary Albright said, making a face. “He’s somebody who likes to make a fuss just to make a fuss. Started a chapter of the American Humanist Association in town a few years ago. Now he’s got half a dozen people or so who meet at his house every month and talk about I don’t know what. And the people from the development, Mrs. Cornish and those people, they come from out of town, they move in to take jobs and then move out again. I don’t think any of them really know anything about Darwin’s theory. I mean, they can’t explain it when you ask them. Miss Marbledale can explain it.”

  “If they don’t believe in the theory, why do they want it?” Gregor asked.

  “Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Gary said. “It’s not about biology, it’s about religion. It’s about taking people away from religion, taking children away from it. Making religion look stupid. And it’s about morality. If religion is true, it isn’t all right for people to go off doing whatever they feel like—drugs, sex, you name it. But if religion isn’t true there’s no reason why people shouldn’t be doing those things.”