“I should know, Gregor. It’s me we’re talking about.”
“Bennis, in case you haven’t noticed, there is something you and I don’t do together. And as long as we don’t do that together, then, unless you’re much less vital a person than I have ever suspected, there will be times when you could not possibly be yourself with—”
“My, my,” Bennis said. “What’s this conversation starting to be about?”
“I think it had better start to be about dinner,” Gregor said. “Go put on something you can wear where the air-conditioning isn’t turned up to frigid and I’ll buy you dinner at the Ararat.”
“I think I’d rather go back to that conversation we were just having.”
“I think I wouldn’t,” Gregor said firmly. “I think we’ve all been… thrown off balance by Donna’s getting married and I think we ought to forget all about it. Go get dressed, Bennis.”
Sitting cross-legged on the floor like that, Bennis Hannaford looked no more than fourteen years old. Gregor thought she was going to go on insisting, but instead she put her new cigarette out less than half smoked and stood up in a single fluid motion.
“I’ll only be a minute,” she told him.
Gregor sat down on the arm of the couch and watched her walk off down the hall to her bedroom, her bare feet making gentle slapping noises against the wooden hall floor.
TWO
1.
GREGOR DEMARKIAN DIDN’T REALLY believe in mysteries. In his experience, what the newspapers heralded as a mystery was often a case of simple arrogance. Most human beings are naturally pessimistic about themselves. They believe in their own incapacities more than in their capabilities. What most people call their conscience is only their wordless conviction that if they do anything in the least bit wrong, they will get caught. Gregor had spent twenty years of his life with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had spent the second ten of those twenty years as the founder and head of what the Bureau liked to call the Behavioral Science Department, as if it were a group of bright young things in lab coats watching rats run around mazes. What it really was was a collection of hardened veterans who spent their time concentrating on the interstate pursuit of serial killers. Gregor had pushed for its establishment because of his frustration at the ineptitude with which the Bureau was investigating the man who turned out to be Theodore Robert Bundy. When Gregor had left the Bureau on his last leave of absence, to care for Elizabeth that last year of her life, it had been going strong, fueled by what had become to seem an epidemic of serial murder. Men who killed women. Men who killed little boys. Men who killed little old ladies who wheeled private shopping carts to their local food co-ops. Gregor couldn’t remember hearing about even one serial killer in all the years he was growing up. Now the world seemed to be full of them. The new director of the Behavioral Science Department had been quoted in Time only a week ago, declaring that the whole thing was the fault of the media. Serial killers killed so that they could get their names in the paper. Andy Warhol had been right. Everybody wanted to be famous for fifteen minutes. Gregor thought that theory was a little bit cracked, but he might be wrong. What he was sure of was that there was no mystery about any of these men. When the police found a twisted silver key lying next to the body of a murdered teenage girl left in a ditch in Tacoma, Washington, it wasn’t because she had the magic treasure chest that would provide the winning lottery numbers for the next sixteen games but didn’t know it. It was just that her murderer wanted to leave a calling card (the serial ones all did that these days; they had all seen the movies about Dahmer and Gacey) or that the key had been lying in the grass and when she had fallen she had turned it up. In the end it would turn out to be more accident than plot. Gregor was sure this thing with Patsy MacLaren Willis would work out that way too. She had decided to kill her husband. She had decided to go out with a bang. Now it was just a question of finding her. What John Henry Newman Jackman needed him for, Gregor didn’t know.
It was seven o’clock in the morning and Cavanaugh Street was not quite waking up. Gregor had gone through the Philadelphia Inquirer story about Patsy MacLaren Willis twice and come up with nothing more interesting than technical details. The gun that had been used to kill Stephen Willis had been a 657 41 Magnum. The house Patsy and Stephen Willis had lived in at Fox Run Hill was over seven thousand square feet big. He had also drunk two cups of his own very bad coffee. Now he looked out his broad living room window and saw that the light was on, across the street and one floor down, in Lida Arkmanian’s living room. Down the block, all the lights were on in Sheila and Howard Kashinian’s town house. Gregor had grown up on Cavanaugh Street when it was still a very poor and very immigrant ethnic neighborhood. People lived in tenements and did their shopping at markets that seemed to have been lifted whole and intact from Yerevan. Now most of the markets had been replaced by upscale little shops that catered to tourists looking for the “authentic” Armenian artifacts to take home to the suburbs and the tenements had all been converted to town houses and co-ops, where the apartments each took up an entire floor. The people of Cavanaugh Street hadn’t gotten rich, but their children and grandchildren had, and the children and grandchildren had provided. Lida Arkmanian’s reward for thirty years of scrimping and saving and suffocating in a tiny apartment with a window that looked out on a vacant lot was that town house and another house in Boca Raton and a three-quarter-length chinchilla coat. Of Lida’s five children, three were doctors, and two were lawyers with very prestigious Philadelphia firms. Hannah Krekorian’s reward for all the years she came to church in gray cloth coats that didn’t quite fit that she’d found on the sale tables outside the going-out-of-business stores was a duplex co-op with two Jacuzzis and a kitchen big enough to serve a small restaurant. She’d had another duplex co-op just like it a couple of years earlier, but then someone she knew had been murdered in it and she hadn’t felt safe staying there. Her two daughters had chipped in to get her this new place, and to send her to Europe for a month to calm her nerves. Gregor supposed that even he himself was rich, at least as he would have defined the word when he was still a child. He owned this third floor floor-through apartment. He had enough in savings and investments and pensions never to have to work for money again. He bought hardcover books when he wanted them without thinking about what they cost. Now he went all the way up to the broad plate glass of his window and pressed his face against it. Standing like this, he could just see the front steps of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. There was a bus stop right in front of the steps and a streetlamp meant to keep the bus stop “safe.” There was no way to tell if anyone was awake over at the church or not. Gregor turned back and looked at his coffee table. His coffee mug was on it, still half full of his awful coffee. The newspaper was on it too, folded over and looking smudged. Gregor walked away from the window. He picked up the newspaper and threw it in the wastebasket. He stood over the wastebasket, looking at the paper lying in a nest of crumpled Kleenex and the cellophane wrapper from a package of Drake’s Ring-Dings. He always kept Ring-Dings in the apartment for Donna Moradanyan’s son Tommy.