by Jane Haddam
“I’m not arguing with you.”
“I’d like to see him arrested for that,” John said.
“And maybe you won’t get that,” Gregor told him. “From the material you gave me, he doesn’t seem to be doing a lot of it. There aren’t a lot of people involved, at least in the operations you’ve been able to tie directly to him. And he’s hidden the money trail perfectly. If you were expecting me to stumble across whatever it is he’s doing with the cash that has to be flowing into this, I’m going to have to disappoint you. If the professionals aren’t going to do it for you, I’m not going to be that much help.”
“You sometimes have interesting ideas.”
“I’m not a clairvoyant,” Gregor said. “John, you lose some. If you’re going to get this guy on bank fraud, you’ll at least be able to get him into a prison and keep him there. Maybe you ought to accept the fact that you’re going to have to leave it at that.”
“I hate leaving it at that,” Jackman said. “I hate this whole immigration thing from one end to the other. I don’t care if you’re for more immigrants coming in or against it. The way this is set up, the people on the absolute bottom are getting killed. Worse than killed.”
“I know, John.”
“I’m sorry I dumped this on you,” John said. “I thought I’d just take one more chance that somebody could have some insight. It’s bad enough when these guys are evil. It’s worse when they’re smart.”
“Maybe it will turn out he was involved in the murder of Hernandez,” Gregor said.
“Was he?”
“‘Involved’ is an elastic word,” Gregor said. “For what it’s worth, it doesn’t seem like his style, exactly. Especially the hit on Hernandez. I can see someone like Cary Alder ordering a hit on Hernandez, or even killing the man himself, but I don’t think he would have done it in Marta Warkowski’s living room. I can’t even see him going down to that building in person. He’d be far too public.”
“Cary Alder is always far too public,” John said. “It’s enough to make you nuts.”
2
Gregor Demarkian found Detective Morabito sitting on a bench in front of the station house when he walked out to “get some air.” The air was cold and he didn’t really want any of it, but the pressures inside were more than he was willing to put up with any longer. Besides, there was nothing to do. There were a million questions, but before forensics came back with information, there was no way to definitively answer any of them. Some of them might never be answered at all.
Detective Morabito was smoking a cigarette. It surprised Gregor more than a little. The police could no longer smoke around crime scenes. That was a sensible precaution and Gregor approved of it. The police could no longer smoke indoors in public places, either. That was true of everyone. A public bench fit into none of these categories, but Gregor thought there was some kind of rule that meant Morabito wasn’t supposed to smoke anywhere at all.
The neighborhood was not of the kind Gregor had been thinking of. It was not residential. It was not coherent. Storefronts stretched out along the street, each with a little concrete parking lot in front of it. The places had names that were entirely generic and without character. Zippy Tires. Dollar Bonanza. Modern Pawn.
Gregor went to sit down next to Morabito, who was in the middle of throwing one cigarette butt to the ground and lighting a new stick. Morabito looked up, and shrugged, and went on lighting.
“If you shoot off your mouth, I’ll have HR down on me in a second,” he said. “Smoking cigarettes. One more thing I’m not supposed to do anymore, even on my own time.”
“Technically, you’re not on your own time,” Gregor pointed out. “Although I see what you mean.”
“Do you? I thought there was supposed to be a difference between having a job and being owned by somebody. Anybody. Even the city of Philadelphia. I do what you want on your time and then I go home and it’s my time and it shouldn’t be any of your business. Smoking cigarettes. Drinking beer. Putting stuff up on the Internet you don’t like the sound of. When I was in school, they had this thing in the textbook called the panopticon. It was a kind of prison—”
“I know what a panopticon is,” Gregor said. “It’s a prison that’s designed so that the prison administration can see everything the prisoners do, every minute of every day.”
“Right. Well, that’s what it’s like these days. They own you, these people. Every little scrapping piece of you. Breathe the wrong way and you’re out on the street, rooting through garbage cans. But your kids aren’t. Your kids are in their schools, being taught that everything you are and everything you do and everything you believe is evil. And if they’re boys, they’re being taught that they’re evil, too.”
It had been a long time since Gregor had smelled cigarette smoke. Bennis had given up the habit years ago. Tibor had given up the habit before Gregor had ever met him, when he first came from Armenia and found out that American cigarettes were almost as expensive as liquor.
“Do you live in the city?” Gregor asked.
Morabito shook his head. “Little township right on the edge. Lancaster, they call it. Little houses. Little lawns. Hundreds of people, all of them just like me. All of them fed up.”
“About workplace rules?”
“About everything,” Morabito said. “You ever wonder why we do it, any of us? Work hard and play by the rules. Righty-roo. Except that if you play by the rules, you’re a sucker, and we all know it. I got admitted to Penn, did you know that?”
“No,” Gregor said. “I went to Penn. It’s a hard get. Did you go?”
“Even after all the financial aid and all that crap, I’d’ve had to borrow forty thousand dollars just to get myself through, and that wouldn’t have included money to live on. My father and I sat down and did the math and decided we couldn’t do that. You have to pay that stuff back. You make a promise. So I went to community college instead. Now there’s this woman running for president who wants to ‘forgive’ all the college loans. Do you know what that means? She wants to just make them go away. If you’re somebody like me, if you wouldn’t make promises you couldn’t keep, you can just suck it up. If you’re some irresponsible dick head who just didn’t give a damn if you could ever make good, you’re fine. You’ll go to Penn for free on the rest of us. You’ll probably end up head of HR somewhere telling guys like me we can’t smoke a cigarette in our own living rooms and you’ll take our kids away from us if we don’t raise them your way.”
Morabito’s second cigarette was burned nearly to the butt. He threw it into the gutter and got out another one. Gregor could feel the waves of anger coming off him like heat. He hadn’t noticed the anger before. He thought it must have been there.
There was a very slight wind. The smoke from Morabito’s cigarette twisted in it, slightly. Morabito was staring out across the street at Bob’s BBQ, but not seeing it.
“I know I’m not supposed to say it,” Morabito said, “but I will say it, and if you turn me in you can go to hell. There’s a lot going wrong in the world today, but you know what isn’t going wrong? ICE. ICE picking up all the illegals and shipping them back where they came from. You want to hear about playing by the rules? Those people don’t give a flying damn.”
“Some of them are children.”
“And all of them come from hellholes where the gangs grab twelve-year-olds and put them to work on the street,” Morabito said. “Don’t you think I know that? And if I had kids in one of those places, I’d want to get them up here as fast as I could. But they’re not the only ones. My wife’s family is from Kosovo. It took us five years to get her cousin into the country. She couldn’t just walk across the border somewhere. By the time she got here, she was a wreck. She’ll probably always be a wreck. And why? Because the illegals break the rules and overwhelm the system and then expect to get away with it and we let them. And if you complain that people like my wife’s cousin should come first because they did the right thing—well, th
en you’re a racist bigot who doesn’t belong in the police department.”
“We bring a fair number of people from Armenia to my neighborhood,” Gregor said. “I don’t think it’s just Kosovo—”
“It’s not,” Morabito said. He stood up. The cigarette was only half smoked. The city around them felt empty and inorganic. A man was being pushed out the door of one of the pawnshops across the street. He looked drunk.
“I don’t care anymore,” Morabito said. “I keep thinking about that woman who started all this. Nice woman, probably. No evidence otherwise. Lived in the same place all her life. Went to Mass every single day from what people have told us. Where does she end up? In a garbage bag. It’s one of those metaphors. That’s where we’re all ending up, the people like me. In garbage bags.”
“Maybe she’ll come out of her coma and be able to tell us what happened to her,” Gregor said. “There’s a part of me that really hopes that will be our solution. It’s always easier when you know exactly what happened.”
“Maybe the guy who put her in the garbage bag will turn out to be the guy we found dead in her apartment,” Morabito said. “Then we can all listen to lectures about how illegals don’t commit crimes, it’s white guys like me you have to worry about. I could have gone to Penn. I could be telling guys like you how to run your lives. I wasn’t enough of an asshole.”
“Well,” Gregor said.
“Never mind,” Morabito said. “Let’s go find out who killed that illegal piece of shit. Let’s pretend we care. It’s all coming apart anyway.”
Morabito took off, back into the building. Gregor twisted around to watch him go.
The lecture was so much like the lectures Gregor had heard from Russ, or heard other people say they had heard from Russ, it was shocking.
3
Gregor did not start out going in any particular direction. He was just getting away from the hothouse, getting into the air. He remembered this phase of things from his own days in law enforcement. Everything had gone wrong but nothing had gone particularly right. There were conjectures but no real facts. People were spinning every piece of gossip and stray observation. Gregor sometimes wondered what it had been like in the days before modern forensics, when this was all detectives had had. He wouldn’t have liked to see the rates for false arrest, or worse.
He was still getting used to the fact that these neighborhoods around Cavanaugh Street were so close together and yet so very … diverse. He really hated the word “diverse.” It felt like a piece of jargon, a sanitized phrase meant to conceal as much as it revealed. “Diverse” sounded like one of those old UN posters of happy children of different colors holding hands. These neighborhoods were little monocultural enclaves, sealed off from each other, always potentially hostile.
He reached St. Catherine’s Parish in no time at all. Coming at it from the direction of the station house, he reached St. Catherine’s Church first. It was a tall brick building with a tower that looked like it ought to contain bells. Gregor didn’t think it did. He couldn’t remember ever hearing bells while he was in this neighborhood. There were no bells at the Armenian church on Cavanaugh Street, either. When that church had to be rebuilt, they had offered Father Tibor a bell tower. Father Tibor had been astonished. What would he use it for?
Gregor was just coming up to the tall steps when the church’s double front doors opened and people began trickling out. There weren’t many of them, and all of them were older women. They might be older Spanish women, but they were the older women of his own childhood—short, heavyset, dressed entirely in black.
In a moment they were followed out by a small man in Mass robes and then another man with a candle on a tall pole. On further observation, the second man was not a man at all but a boy about Tommy Moradanyan’s age, looking disgruntled and uncomfortable.
The small man—the priest—shook a few hands, said a few words, then came down the stairs toward Gregor.
“It’s Mr. Demarkian, isn’t it?” he said. “I saw your picture in the paper. I’ve been expecting you. Well, you or the detectives. We did have a couple of uniformed patrolmen in yesterday.”
The boy with the candle seemed to mutter something under his breath. Then he turned and hightailed it into the church. The priest turned around to watch him go.
“Their grandmothers insist,” the priest said. “If they’re here assisting at Mass, they’re not out there doing God only knows what. I’m Henry Alvarez. Father Alvarez. I’m the priest at St. Catherine’s these days.”
“It’s good to meet you,” Gregor said. “Do you mind if I ask you a question? Do the people here really have that much to worry about from the police? And I’m not even the police.”
Henry Alvarez had made it to the bottom of the steps. “It’s ICE they worry about mostly. And nobody knows what ICE is going to do anymore. Now, to answer the question you’re not going to ask but you’re going to think about anyway. No, I don’t have a Spanish accent. I was born in Queens. My father was born in Queens. My grandfather was born in Queens. We all sound more like Jimmy Cagney than a movie version of a Spanish immigrant.”
“But you speak Spanish,” Gregor said.
“I have to,” Henry Alvarez said. “Most people in this neighborhood do speak English, but they’re more comfortable in Spanish, and some things you have to be comfortable when you say them. And not enough people here speak English as a first language for us to celebrate Mass in English only. Except for the four o’clock. The four o’clock Mass on weekdays I celebrate in English.”
“The one Marta Warkowski attended,” Gregor said.
Henry Alvarez nodded. “Every single day, Monday through Friday. She was an old-fashioned daily communicant. They exist in every Catholic country, no matter what the home language. Saturdays and Sundays, we have no Masses in English. She came to the noon Mass on Saturdays and the seven A.M. on Sundays. I think the point of the seven A.M. on Sundays was to avoid the kiss of peace as far as possible. I don’t think she would have been comfortable with that even if this was still a Polish parish. She wasn’t a touchy person, Marta.”
“And Hernandez? Was he a touchy person?”
“At the kiss of peace? I wouldn’t know. I don’t think he ever came to Mass if he could help it, and he could help it most of the time.”
The two men were now standing at the bottom of the church steps. Maybe because Gregor was not identifiable as law enforcement, the street was not empty. Teenage boys were sitting on steps, calling out to girls as they passed. The doors of bodegas were opening and closing. A food stand on the corner was serving a growing line of customers who each came away from the counter holding something wrapped in a tortilla.
“It must be lunchtime,” Gregor said. “I should get myself a taco. Or six.”
Alvarez laughed. “They’re very good tacos. Not Taco Bell. I can’t tell you much about Marta Warkowski, you know. She came to Mass, but she never really talked to me. Or to anyone in the neighborhood, as far as I know. A couple of times I made a point of getting out ahead of her so I could shake her hand after Mass. She was perfectly polite, but she didn’t stop to talk.”
“She must have talked to some people,” Gregor said. “She must have done some shopping, if nothing else.”
“She did grocery shopping once a week,” Alvarez said. “Or at least, once a week she left the neighborhood on foot and came back in a cab, and when she came back in the cab, she had grocery bags. Wednesday afternoons. Some of the women in the Sodality told me about it. They resented it, I think, that she didn’t shop locally. They took it as part and parcel.”
“Of what?”
“Of the fact that she didn’t belong here,” Alvarez said. “That she wasn’t one of them. That she was a stranger and an outsider and wanted to stay that way. Not that she ever could have been anything else, of course. They wouldn’t have trusted her. She didn’t belong here.”
“She did belong here once,” Gregor said.
“Oh, yes,” Al
varez said. “And once upon a time her grandparents moved in here and pushed out the Irish who were here before them. Things change. I’m sure she resented it. I would resent it. There’s a push these days back in New York, the Columbia campus has started to take over Harlem. Harlem resents it. And I couldn’t tell you what to do about it.”
“Nothing anybody tries to do about it seems to work,” Gregor said.
“And nothing ever will,” Alvarez said. “But a lot of people out at Penn will yell and scream about racism and a lot of other unbelievable crap and make everything worse. People aren’t wrong to resent it when their homes are yanked out from under them. Everybody wants a home, a place he can go and just relax, just not think twice about what he’s doing or saying or going to find around the next corner. You don’t have to hate other people to want to spend some of your time with your own. I think it must be very hard to have to live in a place where you are entirely alien.”
“And Marta Warkowski was entirely alien?”
“Entirely,” Alvarez said. “And don’t give me a lecture about how she should have moved out years ago. Assuming she had the money to do that—and she actually might have—she couldn’t have gone anyplace that would have been more home to her than that apartment. Born and brought up there. Made her first communion and confirmation from there. Buried her parents and at least one sibling from there. Anywhere else would have been an outpost in the wilderness.”
“And Hernandez?”
Alvarez shrugged. “Classic case of culture clash,” he said. “To Hernandez, Marta Warkowski was insane. She had that enormous apartment to herself, and he was constantly looking for places to put new families, large families who needed the room. He’d see these families stuffed into tiny little places, three and four to the room. Miserable conditions, and dangerous conditions, too, and not just in the usual fire hazard sort of way. The people who own these buildings pay off building inspectors right and left, but there’s a limit. There’s always a danger they’re going to get caught and hauled up in front of the authorities. Then the families are out on the streets. The landlords have empty apartments. And sure as hell, excuse the expression, somebody is going to pick up the phone and call ICE. So every time Hernandez had a new family he wanted to place, he’d bug her to move out to a smaller apartment and she’d haul Alder Properties into housing court.”
