by Jane Haddam
It’s me who’s taking myself too seriously, he thought now,although he really didn’t entirely mean it. It was hard to look at yourself and know when you were being overwrought, especially when you were upset. Still, he was tired of standing the way he was standing. His back ached. The street below him was almost clear of people now. The sun was too high in the sky, although he could tell from what few people there were, and what people there had been, that, sun or no sun, it was very cold out there. He looked around and found his wallet and his cell phone on top of the television. He put them both in his pocket, although he often didn’t carry the cell phone. That felt overwrought and ridiculous. There might be a point to it if you had children and worried about emergencies. There might be a point to it if you were the president of the United States and the fate of the world hung on your decisions—now there was a thought, the fate of the world hanging on the decisions of George W. Bush—or if you were the vice president and needed to know if the president had been assassinated. There was another thought. It didn’t matter. He just thought it was silly, carrying a cell phone the way most people did, as if taking a call from their wives about what they wanted to have for dinner tonight was so important it couldn’t wait until they were safely in an office or a phone booth and able to sit down when they talked.
He checked his other pocket for keys. He could always get into his place by asking old George Tekemanian, because old George had copies of all the keys, but old George wasn’t always at home these days. Gregor got his long, black coat off the coat stand in the foyer and put it all the way on. He didn’t bother looking for a hat. He didn’t care how cold it was. He thought men looked ridiculous in hats. He’d thought that decades ago when all men were assumed to be required to wear those felt fedoras that served no other purpose than to make them look like Christmas trees topped by the angel of death.
He went down to the first floor and tapped on the door of old George’s apartment just in case. There was no answer, meaning that old George had either gone down to the Ararat to schmooze or off with his grandson Martin and Martin’swife, Angela, probably to buy a machine that cut cube steaks into paper dolls you could dress up in parsley nurse’s uniforms. He went out onto the street and looked around. There was nothing much to look at. The street was as it had been since he had moved back to it soon after his wife, Elizabeth, had died and he had retired from the FBI and the only life he had ever felt completely comfortable in. By then he wasn’t comfortable with that life either. He had no idea if he was comfortable with this one.
He stopped at the construction site and spent a moment or two watching the crews hauling a large piece of stone to a well of concrete that seemed to have been constructed as a place for it. If he’d thought about it at the time, he would have said that he expected a new church to rise on the site of the old one in about six months to a year. It had been longer than six months, and the new church had barely been started. There had been a lot of debris to clear away, and too much left standing that could not be left standing if reconstruction was to take place. For months nothing had happened out here but blasting and tearing down and hauling away, as if the contractors were in league with the people who had bombed the place and they only wanted to finish the job.
He made himself stop looking at it and walked on up the street. He considered buying the paper at the newsstand or Ohanian’s and decided against both. The news made him mostly depressed these days. He went into the Ararat and looked around. Bennis was not in the restaurant. This was where she had said she was going, but this was not where she was. Tibor was sitting by himself on the long, low padded benches of the window table. Grace was gone, too.
Gregor unbuttoned his coat and wondered what it meant that he hadn’t noticed the cold while he was walking outside. He put the coat on the hook next to the window table and slid in opposite Tibor.
“Where’s Grace?” he said. “I saw you walking with Grace near the church this morning.”
“She went with Bennis to buy a velvet dress,” Tibor said.
“This is a requirement for the concert Grace is playing at the week after next, I think. Or next week. She needs a velvet dress.”
Linda Melajian came over with a cup and a saucer and the Pyrex coffeepot. “Gregor,” she said, “I’ll order you a breakfast special as soon as I get Hannah Krekorian her cruller.”
“I don’t want the breakfast special, Linda, thanks. I’m not hungry. I’ll just have coffee.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Linda said.
“What?” Gregor said. “I’m not hungry. It happens. I can’t always eat two pounds of sausage and potatoes in the morning.”
“Forget always,” Linda said, “you haven’t eaten anything for breakfast for two weeks. It’s like you’re on a hunger strike or something.”
“Do I look like I’m on a hunger strike?”
“So, fine, what is it? You’ve decided you hate the food here? You’re too good for us?”
“Linda.”
“I’ll get you the breakfast special,” Linda said, “and you’ll eat it.”
She whirled around and went marching away across the room to the narrow door at the back that led to the kitchen. Gregor watched her with something like shock.
“That was interesting,” he said. “Whatever is wrong with her?”
Tibor cleared his throat. He was younger than Gregor, but he had been more hardly used. He looked older. This morning he also looked tired.
“It is you there’s something wrong with, Krekor,” he said. “You do not act like yourself.”
“I don’t see who else I could be acting like. I am myself.”
“You are not yourself,” Tibor said again. Gregor might have been imagining it, but Tibor’s accent sounded thicker than it had for years. Tibor was having the breakfast special. He had a big oval plate in front of him with scrambled eggs, sausage, fried potatoes, and toast spread across it like the debris looters leave after a citywide blackout.
“Listen,” Gregor said. “I think I proposed to Bennis this morning.”
“You think?”
“It was a little complicated. I didn’t exactly put it—in the form of a question. I didn’t exactly—”
“Well, Krekor, you must have done something exactly because Bennis was here and she was not in a good mood. She was in a very bad mood. She was, ah, furious—”
“Angry as hell?”
“That, yes. Angry as hell. Snapping at people. Throwing things. I do not think this is the way she would be if you had just proposed to her. I think she would have said yes and gone shopping.”
“Bennis doesn’t shop much.”
“She would shop for a wedding, Krekor, believe me.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
Linda Melajian came back with the breakfast special in her hands. She slammed the plate down on the table in front of Gregor hard enough to make the sausages jump. “There was one coming up and I diverted it to you. Eat something. Maybe you’ll make more sense.”
“Why am I not making sense?” Gregor said.
“Men,” Linda Melajian said. “God, I don’t understand what any of you think you’re doing. I really don’t. You’ve all got your heads screwed on backward, and then you blame it all on us when things go wrong.”
“Linda,” Gregor said, “what are you talking about?”
“Eat your breakfast,” Linda said, turning her back on them and marching away again.
Gregor pushed the plate away from him. He couldn’t imagine eating all that food. It looked like one of those precautionary photographs in a nutrition textbook: eat a meal like this, dripping with fat, and you’ll die of coronary disease before you’re thirty.
“Wonderful,” he said, “now she’s mad at me, and I don’t even know why.”
“She’s mad at you because Bennis is mad at you, Krekor;you don’t need to think about it. But you are not yourself. And you should think about that.”
“Am I really not myself just because I d
on’t feel like working? Is there something about me that ceases to be a real human being if I don’t want to investigate another murder? Other people retire. They go fishing or they join a country club and play golf. They read books. Why is that supposed to be so completely off-limits for me?”
“You have not joined a country club to play golf, Krekor; and more to the point, you’re not happy. Tell me about proposing marriage to Bennis.”
Gregor took a long sip of coffee. It was too hot. It made his throat scream. “I told you. I didn’t do it straight off like that. I didn’t ask the question. I just … brought it up.”
“Brought what up?”
“The fact that we probably ought to be married.”
“And you said it like that? That you ‘probably ought to be’?”
Gregor thought back about it, but he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said. He did remember the sound of Bennis’s voice, and it hadn’t been good.
“Something like that,” he told Tibor. “I don’t really remember how it went. I was thinking of my brother, Stefan.”
“The one who died in the army.”
“That seems to be all I’ve ever told anybody about him. But, yes. That one. The only brother I’ve ever had. I was thinking about what it was like when he died, what I had felt like, and I was looking at the construction on the church. You can’t really see it from my window, you know, but you can see the trucks parked out front. So I was looking at that, and then I just sort of brought it up.”
“And?”
“And she grabbed her stuff and walked out. I’d say stormed out, but when Bennis storms she’s a lot more active than that. I don’t seem to be able to do anything right these days.”
Tibor reached across the table and took one of Gregor’ssausages. It was one of those paradoxes that tended to make Gregor depressed. Gregor was tall, but anything but thin. He looked like an older, out-of-shape Harrison Ford, or what Harrison Ford would have looked like if he’d aged ten years and never had a personal trainer. Tibor was short and wiry and as thin as bone, no matter what he ate.
“It is not the wrong thing,” Tibor said, “asking Bennis to marry you. So I assume that you didn’t ask. You said something instead.”
“Asking is saying something,” Gregor pointed out, “but I didn’t put it in the form of a question. And then she asked me if I was asking, and I said not exactly, I was observing, or something like that.”
“And now she has gone shopping. Yes, Krekor, I do see. You will have to find her and ask her properly. It will be all right.”
“I don’t think I can ask her properly,” Gregor said. “It’s—I don’t know what it is. It feels wrong on some level.”
“It seems wrong to you that you and Bennis should be married?” Tibor was surprised.
“No,” Gregor said. “It seems wrong to me that I should ask.”
“You think she should ask you?” Tibor was even more surprised.
“No,” Gregor said, feeling exasperated. “I don’t know, Tibor, I’m sorry. It seemed wrong to ask; and then she was upset with me because I didn’t want to help John with his black widow case, and I couldn’t get across to her how boring it all sounded. One more black widow. One more serial killer. Over and over again, the same things, the same motives, the same means, the same situations. You’d think human beings would have more creativity than that.”
“And that’s why you don’t want to work? Because murder has become boring?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
Linda Melajian came back, saw that a single sausage had been eaten, and didn’t bother to give another lecture. She just refilled his cup with coffee and went away.
“I think you should go and find Bennis and make things up with her,” Tibor said. “Not go now. Wait until she comes back from shopping. She’s not in a good mood when she shops. But when she comes back, make it up with her.”
“I suppose,” Gregor said, but he did more than suppose really. He had every intention of making it up with Bennis, who was the only other person on the planet besides himself that he considered entirely sane. It was like that old joke about the Amish couple in their isolated farmhouse. “Everybody in the world is crazy but me and thee, and I’m not too sure about thee.”
He picked up his fork and tried a potato, but it tasted like cardboard and sand.
3
Twenty minutes later, just as a jackhammer went off at the construction site, Gregor Demarkian walked home down Cavanaugh Street. He had come far enough back into his senses so that he did notice the cold this time. It was brutal. The wind was brutal, too. Construction projects sometimes came to a halt because of bad weather, but maybe that was only for snow or rain. This bad weather had not stopped work on this site.
He stopped in front and watched the workers doing things he didn’t understand. He hadn’t the faintest idea how a building went up or what kept it up. He kept his hands in his pockets and his head down in the collar of his coat. The jackhammer made a wall of noise, blocking out the world.
He didn’t hear his cell phone go off—he couldn’t have, even if the ringer had been on—he felt it, vibrating against his hand at the bottom of his pocket.
He pulled it out and said, “Yes?” into the air, where a receiver ought to be.
Somebody said something he didn’t understand, and he said, “Wait.”
The jackhammer was making it impossible for him tohear anything at all. He walked up the street toward his apartment a little ways, and then a little ways more, until he got to the intersection and had to cross.
“Sorry,” he said, “there was construction going on. This is Gregor Demarkian. Who is this?”
There was so long a pause on the other end of the line that Gregor thought for a moment that it was a wrong number. Then he heard somebody clearing his throat.
“Mr. Demarkian?” the someone said. Gregor thought the voice was familiar and not at the same time. It was a very young voice, and it sounded as if it had been crying.
“Listen,” the voice said, “I’m sorry to bother you, and I don’t know if you remember me, but we’ve met; and I thought you were the only person I could think of who would know what to do. And you stayed with us that time, and you did know what to do. So I’m sorry to be so messed up. I mean, my name is Mark DeAvecca—”
Chapter Two
1
Gregor Demarkian would not have agreed to go up to Massachusetts to see Mark DeAvecca if he had believed that anybody had actually murdered anybody else. His malaise about work was neither feigned nor neurotic. The idea of “investigating” anything made his mind numb. Things did not need to be investigated as much as they needed to be understood. That was the decision he had come to, on one of the long and all-too-silent nights after he and Bennis had had their argument in the living room. It wasn’t that Bennis wasn’t speaking to him. Bennis was incapable of not speaking to anyone. She was the kind of woman who preferred to have her fights bare-knuckled and in overtime. It was more that they weren’t having a fight at all. Bennis was speaking to him and usually polite about it. She went down to the Ararat with him for dinner. She went shopping with Donna Moradanyan Russell and came home with packages. She made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with him while she drank it. It was more what she wasn’t doing that was the problem. She wasn’t chattering to him about matters on Cavanaugh Street or with her publishers. She wasn’t reaching for him in bed at unexpected times of the night. She wasn’t lecturing him. What bothered him the most, if he were honest about it, was that she wasn’t fighting with him. It was an ominous sign. Bennis had been fighting with him almost from the day they’d met. It was her preferred method of engagement. Gregor didn’t like to think what it meant when she was not engaged in it.
He tried to tell her about Mark DeAvecca after he got the call—after all, she’d met him; she knew his mother slightly and his stepfather very well—but although she had listened for a few minutes in what appeared to be interest, she’
d drifted off on him in no time at all.
“Do what you want to do,” she’d said, while he was caught in one more futile attempt to explain what had so bothered him about that phone call.
He’d looked away and tried again. “He doesn’t sound like himself,” he’d said. “He sounds drugged.”
Maybe it wasn’t so strange that a teenaged boy sounded drugged. If it had been any other teenaged boy, Gregor wouldn’t have thought so. Maybe Bennis hadn’t spent enough time with Mark to realize how out of character it all was. There were other “maybes,” but Gregor didn’t want to think about them. He made himself think about the fact that “drugged” didn’t really describe what he was hearing.
