Murder Superior (8 page)

Today, today, today, Gregor thought. Today you’re just disgruntled because Cavanaugh Street is celebrating a holiday you have no way to celebrate. In a few minutes the street will be full of people, Cavanaugh Street regulars joined by the new immigrants who had come over since the Soviet Union’s fall, and you will be totally out of place.

Bennis Hannaford often said that if Gregor Demarkian didn’t have a reason to take a despairingly existential view of life, he would invent one. Young Donna Moradanyan agreed with her. Donna Moradanyan had the apartment on the floor above Gregor’s in the four-story brownstone that faced Lida Arkmanian’s town house. Bennis had the apartment on the floor below him. Between the two of them, they did a better than fair job of running his life.

Someday, something unambiguously wonderful is going to happen in your life, Gregor told himself, and then you won’t know how to behave.

Linda Melajian was standing in the middle of Ararat’s front room, setting a table with restaurant flatware and frowning at the way the yellow linen napkins were folded. The napkins were yellow because they went well with Armenia’s new flag, a copy of which was displayed along the side wall in a frame of flowers that always looked so fresh, somebody must have been changing them daily. Gregor reminded himself that old Deena Melajian had fled the Communist invasion in 1946 and then wondered how Linda thought she was going to get away with having skipped church just to set up for the Mother’s Day crowd. Everyone who came in this afternoon was going to ask her why she couldn’t make time for God.

Gregor tapped on the window. Linda looked up and waved. Gregor went on down the street. The tall front doors of Holy Trinity Church were propped open. Howard Kashinian must have come out while Gregor was watching Linda in the Ararat. Gregor speeded up his steps. It was a good thing he had someplace to go today. It would take his mind off all this hyperbolic celebration of motherhood. It would stop him from wondering what it was all these people thought he was up to—which was a question he often asked about Cavanaugh Street without getting any kind of sensible answer. Gregor didn’t even think he’d mind spending the day surrounded by nuns. In Gregor’s private cosmology, convents and Cavanaugh Street went together in ways mysterious and divine. They were both largely populated by women with a mission.

Donna Moradanyan’s mission was to decorate as much as possible with as little excuse as possible. To that end, she had decorated the front of the brownstone where her apartment and Gregor’s were with bright yellow and blue satin ribbons, bright yellow and blue satin bows, and white chiffon hearts sewn into ruffles so enthusiastic they almost seemed alive. Just how Donna Moradanyan had managed to do this, Gregor did not know. It couldn’t have been easy getting those ribbons up close to the roof like that. It had to have been nearly impossible to plant that chiffon heart—the one the size of an overgrown twelve-year-old-boy—right in the center of the stones between the third and fourth floors. Did Donna fly? Did she care what having a house that looked like this did to the dignity of her neighbors?

Donna Moradanyan thought Gregor Demarkian had too much dignity, and he knew it.

Over at Holy Trinity, there were rumblings and hiccups. The congregation was beginning to emerge. Gregor hurried up his front steps, determinedly ignoring the gigantic
M
woven out of blue and yellow ribbons that covered the front door. Then he let himself into the foyer and looked around. Since it was Sunday, there was no mail. Since it was a holiday, there was no old George Tekemanian in the first floor apartment—old George would be spending the day with his grandson Martin and his great-grandchildren. Gregor headed on up the steps to the second floor.

It was odd to think about it now, but back when Elizabeth died, the last thing he’d thought he would do was come back to Cavanaugh Street. He hadn’t even thought there would be a Cavanaugh Street to come back to.

What would his life have been like without this place?

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN HAD MET
Bennis Hannaford in a way he would once have refused to believe he would ever meet anyone—in the course of investigating a murder for whose solution he had no official responsibility. In fact, back in the days when he was still with the Bureau, the idea of getting involved in murder investigations—or in criminal investigations of any kind—as what amounted to an amateur would have sounded to him absurd. Like most professional policemen—and that was what a Bureau agent was, really, a professional policeman—Gregor had scant use for amateurs. Unlike so many professionals, he didn’t mind amateurs in fiction much. Bennis gave him novels by Agatha Christie and Rex Stout and he read them with a fair degree of amusement. There was something about the way in which he himself had become involved in other people’s murder cases, though, that made him uneasy. It made him uneasier that he had no hold on that part of his life. So far, he had been tangled up in seven of what he called his “extracurricular murders.” He had become the darling of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and
People
magazine. If one more person dared to call him “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” he was going to commit a murder of his own. The problem was, if he
didn’t
commit a murder of his own, he had no guarantee that he would ever be involved in another case. It was worse than odd. It was like being visited by fairies, or having to rely for your Christmas presents on a very capricious Santa Claus. Of course, he didn’t think of murder cases as Christmas presents. It was just that he sometimes wished he had more stability in his life.

“Get married again,” Father Tibor Kasparian would have told him. “Marry Bennis,” the women said—including Donna Moradanyan, Lida Arkmanian, Hannah Krekorian, Sheila Kashinian, Mary and Deborah Ohanian, Linda and Sylvia Melajian, Christie and Melissa Oumoudian…

“Get a private detective’s license,” Bennis Hannaford said.

Bennis’s door had a single chiffon heart on it, meaning she had come out early this morning and taken off whatever else Donna had decided to put up. Gregor pressed the buzzer on the door frame and waited.

“Come right in,” a voice called from inside. “I’ve got goddamned plaster of paris in my goddamned hair.”

Of course she had goddamned plaster of paris in her goddamned hair, Gregor thought. She’s always got something going on that makes no sense and interferes fatally with whatever she’s supposed to do next What Bennis was supposed to do next was to accompany him to this party at St. Elizabeth’s College, where the Sisters of Divine Grace would open their first-ever nuns’ convention. When Gregor had originally been told about the nuns’ convention, he’d thought it was the first ever, but that had turned out not to be the case. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondolet had held one in St. Louis back in 1988.

Bennis Hannaford’s foyer was taken up in large part by a plaster of pans model of Queen Zahvea’s castle from
Sorcerers of Zed
,
Witches of Zedalia
. What Bennis Hannaford did for a living was write sword and sorcery fantasy novels, of which
Sorcerers of Zed
,
Witches of Zedalia
was the seventh or eighth, Gregor couldn’t remember which. He wasn’t disturbed by the castle because it had been where it was now for quite a while. Bennis had constructed it and then stashed it in the foyer, meaning to throw it out or donate it to one of the fan organizations. That she had never gotten around to either was entirely typical. One of the scale-model knights had fallen off his horse. Gregor put him back on and called out.

“Where are you? Why are you making plaster of paris?”

There was a clank of pots and pans from the kitchen and a not-so-muffled curse. Bennis’s language was appalling, and it didn’t help any when she told Gregor it was the result of all those expensive girls’ boarding schools she’d been sent to. The pots stopped clanging and the door to the kitchen swung open, revealing Bennis in her spring and summer uniform of jeans that had seen better days in 1966, T-shirt that had last been clean for Richard Nixon’s first inaugural, and hair that had started out tied into a knot at the top of her head but was now someplace else. Bennis Hannaford was a beautiful woman when she wanted to be, but Gregor had noticed that she very rarely wanted to be.

“Well,” he said when he saw her, “you don’t look ready to go to a party.”

She made a face at him. “I don’t have to look ready to go to a party. We don’t have to be there until quarter to one and it’s not even eleven thirty. Oh, by the way. Sister Scholastica called. She wanted to make sure we knew where we were going.”

“Do we?”

“I gave a talk at St. Elizabeth’s once. ‘The Woman Writer in Fantasy and Science Fiction.’ I got a lot of people upset. Come into the kitchen. I’ve got to finish this idiotic model today or it won’t be ready on time.”

Gregor was about to ask finished on time for what—when Bennis made models to help her with her books, they didn’t have any on time to be finished for—but he didn’t. He merely followed Bennis’s slight five-foot-four-inch frame into the kitchen and dusted off a chair to sit down on. Bennis’s apartment was always an unholy mess. The cleaning lady who came in twice a week couldn’t seem to get it straightened out, and neither could the cadres of older women who periodically showed up to “help Bennis out.” Stack Bennis’s belongings neatly away in closets and drawers and they came right back out again, springing into the air as soon as one’s back was turned, as if all the storage spaces in the apartment were inhabited by evil genies with ambitions to be the spirits of jack-in-the-box toys. The same held true for dust. It didn’t matter how diligently one wiped and polished. It didn’t matter how many expensive sprays one used to put a shine on the woodwork. The shine would be gone and the dust would be back in less time than it took to put water on to boil for a celebratory cup of coffee.

The plaster of paris model Bennis was making seemed to be some kind of pockmarked planetary surface. It looked like the moon, but Gregor couldn’t think of anyone who might want a model of the moon. Bennis put a cup down in front of him and turned on the gas under her kettle. Then she set out a spoon and the sugar bowl and a jar of instant coffee. Bennis’s instant coffee wasn’t bad. It wasn’t Lida Arkmanian’s percolated variety, but it wasn’t bad. It beat what Gregor and Tibor got when they attacked supermarket sacks of specially ground coffee beans and put them in a coffeepot.

“In case you’re wondering about the plaster of paris,” Bennis said, “it’s a topographical map of Armenia. Or I hope it is. I’m constructing it off a globe so ancient it might as well still show the world as flat, but it was the only one Lida could come up with with the borders of Armenia clearly marked, so here I am. They need it for the school. Tomorrow.”

“Of course,” Gregor said.

The school was a parochial school—the first Gregor had ever heard of in an Armenian-American parish—set up to accommodate the children of the immigrants who had come to Cavanaugh Street in the wake of earthquakes and political revolutions. It had also acquired a little group of children of the native-born residents of Cavanaugh Street, whose parents purported to like the idea of their children “growing up to know their heritage.” Since most of these parents wouldn’t touch their heritage with a ten-foot pole—unless they could eat it—Gregor thought that the real draw was the simple localness of it. The school was housed in a four-story brownstone right next to Holy Trinity Church. The children who attended could walk there in the mornings, and quite a few of them could reach the school’s front doors without ever having to cross a street.

“Anyway,” Bennis said, “I’m practically done except for the painting, and I’m not really going to do the painting per se, if you see what I mean. I’m only going to figure out what color has to go where and then write a code in pencil on the model and then the kids will paint it themselves. Did you used to do things like this when you were in school, Gregor? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to me that all this stuff is really work.”

“They’re only children,” Gregor said mildly. “And you know how I feel about education. Most of them won’t remember a thing of what they learn two months after they go out into the real world.”

“Well, don’t say that in front of Lida. She’ll think you’re encouraging the children to drop out.”

“Maybe I am.”

“Right.”

Bennis got up, got the coffee, and poured him out a cup. She was standing so close to him the plaster of paris in her hair was clearly visible as flakes. Then she moved away and Gregor was left wondering why he’d thought that about the flakes, or felt so compelled to notice just how close she’d been to him. Standing over by the stove, a good ten feet away, she was just Bennis as he always saw Bennis. She was a perpetual thorn in his side. She was the woman Father Tibor Kasparian called “Bennis the Menace.” She was only thirty-six or thirty-seven, while Gregor was twenty years older than that.

She poured herself a cup of coffee while she was still standing next to the stove, drank it down black—but with enough sugar in it to give diabetes to the Visigoths’ invading hordes; Gregor saw her spooning it out of the sugar sack—and put the cup in the sink.

“I’d better go wash my hair,” she said. “You know how long it takes to dry and I hate those goddamned little hair dryers. Is there supposed to be anything solemn about this occasion? Can I wear a red dress?”

“I think you should wear a hair shirt and carry a staff,” Gregor said. “That way the nuns will know you’re serious about atoning for your sins.”

“The nuns won’t know what sins I’ve got to atone for, and besides I don’t atone. What’s the point? There’s those I forget what you call them in the refrigerator, the meatballs with the bulgur crusts. Lida brought them. You can heat them up in the microwave.”

“I’ve already eaten. And we’re supposed to go up to St. Elizabeth’s and have lunch.”

“That never stopped you yet.”

Gregor was about to say he wasn’t the kind of glutton these women liked to make him out to be, twenty extra pounds or no twenty extra pounds, but Bennis was already gone, her bare feet slapping carelessly against the wooden floor of her foyer, on the way to the privacy of her shower. Gregor wondered suddenly if Bennis felt she needed privacy from him—and then he shoved that away, because it made him feel a little crazy. In fact, everything about his relationship with Bennis made him feel a little crazy lately. It was as if, after years of running along on a track on which they were both comfortable, an invisible hand had thrown a switch that got them both off course. He had even started to dream about her.