“He came to pick her up last night,” Gregor said. “I’m not interrupting a class?” He tapped Halberstam.
Russell Donahue shook his head. “I do contracts Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at nine. The department works around me. They’re very good about things like this here, except sometimes for women. Lady working Burglary had to threaten a sex discrimination suit to get her schedule arranged.”
“I’m surprised the law school admitted you as a part-time student.”
“They didn’t. I got shot. About three years ago. I was in the hospital for months, and then when I came out I couldn’t work and nobody knew if I was ever going to. So I took my disability and I got myself into the law school and I did two years straight. Then I got better and I could work again and I was running out of money and I was second in my class—”
“Right,” Gregor said. “I’m impressed.”
“Are you?” Russell Donahue suddenly looked distinctly odd. “That’s good.”
“Well,” Gregor said. “I guess I’d better be getting out of here. Mary and Helen will undoubtedly be early.”
“We’ll get a police car to take you over. I’ll bring a car and pick you up too. Six-thirty be all right?”
“That’s a little early, isn’t it?”
“We’ll be going out to Bryn Mawr and there’ll be the weekend traffic.”
“Okay.”
“Go right on downstairs and out the front door. I’ll have a patrol car waiting for you.”
“Okay,” Gregor said again. Russell Donahue still looked distinctly odd. Now, what was this about?
Gregor got his coat off the back of his chair and shrugged it on.
2
By the time he got to Cavanaugh Street, Gregor Demarkian was feeling more than a little guilty about his plans for Hannah Krekorian. They made sense in the long run, but Russell Donahue had been absolutely right about the short run. Hannah was going to hate everything that happened to her. She wasn’t going to remain calm. The whole scene was going to be an enormous mess, but he didn’t see any way to get around it. If he didn’t do something drastic soon, Hannah Krekorian was going to be arrested, tried, and convicted of the murder of Paul Hazzard.
Mary Ohanian and Helen Tevorakian had agreed to meet him at the back of Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store. Mary couldn’t take the time away from work to go over to Helen’s. Besides, Hannah was at Helen’s. Nobody wanted to bring Hannah into this more than they had to.
Gregor had the police car pull up to Ohanian’s directly. He thanked the patrolman and got out. Cavanaugh Street was empty except for a florist’s van in front of Lida Arkmanian’s town house up the street. A man was climbing the steps to Lida’s front door with what looked like a million roses in his arms. Gregor wondered why. Valentine’s Day was almost a week away. He wondered who the flowers were from, too. Lida’s children were usually more cutesy about Valentine’s Day than that. They sent pink teddy bears with balloons that said, “I’m a fuzzy wuzzy bear and I wuv you!”
The display in front of Ohanian’s window had changed a little. Now it consisted of a gigantic outline of a heart cut out of red cardboard and hung with white crepe paper streamers, inside of which was a collection of letters Gregor found it impossible to pronounce. He even found it impossible to concentrate on them. “Bdembrbdra Borgander!” Maybe. Maybe it was “Debgrvwzk Dekobgdr!” Gregor assumed whatever it was was something Valentine’s Day-like in Armenian. Of course, the Ohanians had been in America for a couple of generations by now. They might not have gotten the words right.
Gregor let himself into the store, checked out a display of pideh tortured into heart shapes, and decided that the real danger in having Donna Moradanyan depressed came in the form of the efforts of other people to take her place. Gregor was positively nostalgic for the days of waking up to find his front door wrapped in pink metallic ribbon and dotted with sugar-candy cupids firing arrows at chocolate-chip-cookie hearts.
Krissa Ohanian was standing behind the counter when Gregor came in. She looked up and said, “They’re in the back there. Mary’s supposed to be doing a pastry inventory. I think they’re talking instead.”
Krissa Ohanian was Mary Ohanian’s aunt, and one of those big, solid Armenian women who in another place and time would have been relied on to keep the family together through war and famine. Gregor didn’t know if Krissa was married. He did know she clucked over Mary as if Mary were her own. Mary was barely eighteen years old. To Krissa, that qualified as being hardly out of diapers.