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A Great Day for the Deadly(4)

By:Jane Haddam


“All right,” Schatzy said.

“She has a strange name,” Dave persisted, too brightly. “Dennis or Hennis or Lennis or something.”

“Bennis,” Gregor told him. “Bennis Hannaford. They’ve got her books in the same newsstand where Schatzy probably bought this magazine. I’ll see the two of you later.”

Dave started to babble again, but Gregor had already turned his back and begun making his way toward the interior of the hotel. Behind him, he could hear wind whistle every time one of the glass doors were opened or shut. He passed the reception desk and noted in a distracted way that someone had put out a few forlorn decorations, a leprechaun sitting on a pot of gold and a stand-up cardboard shamrock for St. Patrick’s Day. What was it about some people that they couldn’t let a holiday pass without gearing themselves up to celebrate another one?

What was it about some people that they couldn’t leave well enough alone? Dave Herder meant well—he always meant well—but he couldn’t take a hint. Gregor didn’t mind talking about murder. As long as the murder in question wasn’t a serial one or in some other way the obvious work of a psychopath, it could even be interesting. He did mind talking about Bennis Hannaford, and about everyone else he knew back on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia. At least, he minded this weekend.

The men’s room was near a bank of pay phones, in a wide empty space in the lobby paneled in blond wood and carpeted in green. Gregor pushed himself through the swinging door with the copy of People rolled up in his hand as if he were about to swat a fly with it. The problem with talking about Bennis—or Donna Moradanyan, or Father Tibor Kasparian, or George Tekamanian, or Lida Arkmajian, or any of the rest of them—wasn’t that he missed them. He always missed them when he was away from them. The problem was that at the moment he felt that they’d abandoned him.





[2]


Of course, in reality, Gregor Demarkian had not been abandoned at all. When he was being sensible, he knew this. What he was feeling was a mass and mix of things. Before Elizabeth had died, he had been what he now had to admit was a pretty popular Bureau type: The man so dedicated to his work he hadn’t known anything else existed. In his case, he had known Elizabeth existed, but she had taken care of everything else for them. She had kept in touch with their families. She had arranged for his mother’s funeral and for his nieces’ birthday presents and for the anniversary liturgies to be sung for the repose of his father’s soul. There were Bureau agents who had no emotional lives at all. Gregor had one, but the one he had was Elizabeth—and until she was gone he hadn’t realized how important it all was to him. It had been strange, waking up on the morning after he buried her, staring the end of his leave of absence in the face and knowing he didn’t want to go back. It had been even stranger, weeks later, with his resignation accepted and his life at loose ends, realizing he was going to have to pull himself together and give himself a reason for existing.

He had gone back to Cavanaugh Street on a whim, as a self-consciously deliberate first step in the direction of getting himself reoriented to normal life. He had been born and brought up on Cavanaugh Street in the days when it had been little more than Philadelphia’s Armenian-American immigrant ghetto. With everything that had gone on in the central cities in the years since he’d left, he’d expected to return to nothing at all, to rubble and crack houses, to dirt and prostitution. Instead, he’d found a refurbished street full of people he’d known all his life, the tenements bought up and remodeled as floor-through condominiums or single-family town houses, the church decked out with every conceivable embellishment that would be allowed by an Armenian bishop. It had been a revelation, and he had bought an apartment almost without thinking about it. He’d settled in without knowing what he was going to do. Fortunately for the kind of man he had let himself become, he had not had to do much. Like Elizabeth, they had given him the life he wasn’t able to put together for himself.

The men’s room had a little anteroom, with chairs and sinks and a long, low counter for doing God knew what. There were also mirrors. Gregor sat down in one of the chairs and opened Schatzy’s copy of People magazine. There was a picture of the corpse, taken from above, while it was lying on a morgue slab. People was the only magazine on earth better than The National Enquirer at getting a picture of a dead body. Gregor stared at the face of Brigit Ann Reilly and wished the picture were in color. Black and white blurred too many details.

“Taxine,” Gregor muttered to himself. “Coniine. Lobeline. Some kind of vegetable alkaloid. I wonder where she got it from.”