The last thing Gregor did on Sunday was to watch the transformation of Lida Arkmanian’s town house. It was a calculated metamorphosis. Sometime on Saturday evening, the strategy the women of Cavanaugh Street were using to take care of Hannah Krekorian had been judged inadequate and out-of-date. Instead of keeping her safely in Helen Tevorakian’s apartment, away from the gossip and the stress, they had decided to “take her out of herself.” What they meant was that they wanted to get her thinking about something else. That was going to be very difficult to do. The man had been killed in Hannah’s bedroom, after all. Hannah wasn’t even going to be allowed back into the room until Monday. Hannah went to church, but it was obvious to everybody that she spent the whole time wondering if people were staring at her. Then there were the newspapers. The newspapers were nuts. Gregor had made a point of not looking at them—he didn’t want to see himself described as “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot” one more time—but he knew what Helen Tevorakian and the others meant. Their problem was what to do with Hannah now that they had decided that something had to be done with her. Their solution was to put her on a ladder against the façade of Lida Arkmanian’s town house, three stories up. She was supposed to be hanging red crepe paper.
“You know how depressed Donna has been lately,” Helen Tevorakian said when Gregor asked. “Well, now she’s feeling better.”
“Donna wanted to make Lida’s house look like a box of chocolates with lace and a ribbon,” Sheila Kashinian said. “It’s a very cute idea.”
“All we wanted to do was to make sure that Hannah wasn’t brooding about it all the time,” Maria Varoukian said. “We wanted to take her mind off her troubles.”
Privately, Gregor thought there were kinder ways to take Hannah’s mind off her troubles than to prop her up three stories over a busy city street in the frigid February cold. He also thought Donna Moradanyan must not simply be feeling better, but getting on to delirious. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed it Saturday night. Sometimes he thought he never noticed anything. Still, no matter how crazy the project had been, it had served its purpose in a number of ways. Hannah had been made to feel part of the community again, not singled out by strange things going on in her apartment or under suspicion of murder or anything else. Lida’s town house, the front of which Gregor could see from his living room window, looked insanely wonderful, with bright white satin bows on the sash of every window and metallic red-and-white stripes leading from the top of an old and now-unused antenna to the edges of the roof. It didn’t remind Gregor of a box of chocolates, or of anything else he had ever encountered in the real world, but it was a nice effect. The women were all proud of themselves too, because Hannah had been so terrified up there on that ladder that she hadn’t been able to think about the murders for a minute—or for several hours afterward either.
2
On Monday morning Gregor Demarkian came out of his building to find Donna Moradanyan on a ladder in front of it, tacking a garland of pink chiffon cupids around the edges of the street door. She was being helped by old George Tekemanian, who was sitting on the low side wall of the stoop with a box of spangly things on his lap. Gregor said hello to both of them and they both said hello back, but they weren’t really paying attention. Donna was holding a running conversation with herself, not quite under her breath.
“First the netting,” Donna was saying, “and then the spring has to go with the red crepe or you’ll be able to see it…
Old George Tekemanian looked solemn. “It is a mechanical device,” he said. “Every time anyone opens the front door, the box next to Bennis’s living room window will open and a cupid will pop out.”
Gregor stepped back and looked up. There was no box near Bennis’s living room window. Not yet. He told himself he ought to be grateful that the box was not being planned for his living room window. He stepped closer to the building again and turned toward the street. Christopher Hanna-ford was standing on the sidewalk in front of Lida Arkmanian’s town house, looking up at Donna on her ladder. Gregor wondered where Christopher had come from. He wasn’t carrying a paper under his arm. He didn’t look cold.
Christopher shook his head a little and began to cross the street. Halfway over he called out, “Are you going to breakfast, Gregor? I wanted to talk to you.”
“I’m going to breakfast,” Gregor said.
“Maybe I will go to breakfast too,” old George Tekemanian said, looking hopeful. “I’m cold.”