Bleeding Hearts(100)

“Wonderful,” Russell Donahue said. “Is all this supposed to mean something? What are we supposed to do now?”

Gregor Demarkian stood up.

“Now,” he said, “you’re supposed to take me home.”





Two


1


GREGOR DEMARKIAN SOMETIMES ENVIED the police officers he saw on television, the men and women who leapt out of bed at four in the morning when they fortuitously dreamed a hunch, went chasing all over town waking up suspects to ask just a question or two, and ended up in an eleventh-hour shoot-out with the depraved villain on the roof of an abandoned building. Gregor didn’t have much use for shoot-outs or for chasing around town. He liked the Nero Wolfe paradigm, where the Great Detective sat around all day earing shad roe and getting fat and no one dared to lecture him about his cholesterol. What he envied the television police was their ability to forget about time. All the way back to Cavanaugh Street from Candida DeWitt’s house, Gregor was acutely conscious of the fact that it was nearly ten o’clock on a Saturday night. It would have been earlier, but Russell Donahue had gotten held up at the last minute by a discussion of protocol with Roger Stebbins. Gregor had opted out of that one. He went to stand in the cold on Candida DeWitt’s terrace. The vista was beautiful. After a few minutes, Fred Scherrer joined him. If it hadn’t been a useless waste of time when he was eager to get something done, Gregor might have enjoyed himself.

Actually, there was nothing much he could get done. When Russell Donahue finally pulled onto Cavanaugh Street, Gregor made him stop several blocks from his own apartment. Then he ordered Russell to pull up to the curb and park. Russell complained about the illegality of it all. It was embarrassing when police officers got their cars ticketed or towed away. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did. Gregor ignored him.

“Do you have a flashlight?” he asked.

Russell Donahue reached into the glove compartment and came up with a flashlight. It was a good big one, the kind that was used in factories and on back lots, heavy and black. Russell handed it over.

“Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Gregor stood on the sidewalk in front of Hannah Krekorian’s apartment building and looked to the right and to the left. Very few of the buildings on Cavanaugh Street were actually flush up against each other. Most were separated by narrow alleys that led to trash bins and utility sheds. Hannah’s building had an alley on each side. Gregor tried to work out which side her bedroom window would look out on, and then realized that the answer was neither. There was actually a view from Hannah’s bedroom windows. It wasn’t much of a view, but it was a view. That meant those windows had to face the back.

“Come on,” Gregor told Russell Donahue, who had climbed out of the car, locked up carefully, and was now standing on the pavement. His ears seemed to be turning blue. “I want to get a look at the fire escape,” Gregor explained.

“I got a look at the fire escape last night,” Russell protested. He stamped his feet against the cold. “I’m really very thorough, Mr. Demarkian. It’s just a fire escape.”

“Come on,” Gregor said again.

They went down the alley to the left side, which was unfortunately the one that held the garbage for both Hannah’s building and the one next door. They emerged into a small courtyard in the back and looked around. There was a scattering of good security lights on the back of Hannah’s building and the back of the building with which it shared a garbage station. All the lights still didn’t make the courtyard brightly lit. They must have been put in by amateurs. They were aimed incorrectly. Still, Gregor thought, it wasn’t a menacing well of blackness back here. It was possible.

Gregor shined his light on the fire escapes. There were three of them, one going only so far as one of the second story windows. Gregor thought that one led to Melina Kashinian’s bedroom window—although how Howard or anybody else expected an eighty-nine-year-old woman to go crawling down those metal stairs in case of fire was beyond Gregor’s comprehension. One of the other fire escapes led almost to the roof level, probably to an attic. Gregor knew that nobody lived that far up. He wondered why Howard had bothered to take the precaution. Howard was not known for spending unnecessary money on anything or anybody but his wife and himself. Maybe he’d intended to put another apartment up there and never got around to it. The last fire escape went to the fourth floor. Gregor walked over to it and shined his flashlight at the bottom step.

“It might as well be a staircase,” he said.