“But not everybody keeps things in their night-table drawers,” Dan Exter pointed out. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“By itself, of course it doesn’t mean anything,” Gregor agreed, “but I think you’d better have this house searched from top to bottom, and see if you can find anything at all that would indicate that Patricia MacLaren Willis ever lived here, because so far I can’t. And since the impression I got was that she was supposed to have lived here for some time—”
“Round about twenty years,” Dan Exter said.
“Well,” Gregor said, “you see what I mean. If Patricia MacLaren Willis obliterated all trace of twenty years of her life from a house this size, she must have been at it for weeks.”
FIVE
1.
GREGOR DEMARKIAN COULDN’T REMEMBER feeling suffocated in Fox Run Hill—but back on Cavanaugh Street, climbing out of John Jackman’s unmarked car in front of the Ararat, he was aware of feeling suddenly able to breathe. Cavanaugh Street wasn’t even very breathable at the moment. Philadelphia is cold in the winter and hot in the summer, and now it was hot, and sticky, and heavy with humidity. It was also getting not-exactly-dark, the way summer nights did. The horizon would have been a red and purple glow if Gregor could have seen the horizon. All he could see were the tops of brownstone buildings and brick row houses, well kept on Cavanaugh Street itself, crumbling and unsteady on the streets shooting off it. Everybody lives in a gated community these days, he thought grimly. Everybody lives in a fortress surrounded by chaos. John Jackman cranked down the driver’s side window of his car and leaned out to look at Gregor’s face. Gregor thought idly that they ought to do better by the police. They ought at least to buy them cars with power windows.
“Are you all right?” John Jackman asked. “You look funny.”
“I’m fine,” Gregor said. “Are you and Bennis talking to each other these days?”
“Not exactly.” Jackman looked uncomfortable. “I mean, I am the person who was trying to get a member of her own family executed.”
“I thought that wasn’t up to you.”
“It wasn’t. But, Gregor. Seriously. If you want to screw up a love affair, I guarantee it, testifying in favor of the death penalty at the punishment phase hearing of your lover’s own sister will definitely do it. Even if it’s not a sister she especially liked.”
“It’s a sister she hated to the bone.”
“I know. I know. Even so. What are you trying to do, fix me up with Bennis again?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s good, you know, Gregor, because no matter what else is going on here, Bennis is not exactly ready to settle down.”
“I have noticed.”
“I’m not exactly ready to settle down either. Is there some point to this conversation?”
Gregor was looking down a side street called Bullock. In the hours he had been away, Donna Moradanyan had gone to work on Cavanaugh Street. White and gold satin ribbons seemed to be wrapped around everything. The streetlamps had white and gold satin ribbons twisted into spirals that reminded Gregor of old-fashioned barber poles. Gregor’s divided-up brownstone and Lida Arkmanian’s town house across the street were covered in white and gold bows, without an inch of the original masonry showing on either one. The steps of Holy Trinity Church were lined with white silk flowers in pots covered with white paper and decked out in sprightly gold bows. Next to all of this, Bullock Street looked worse than bare and spare. It looked like a black pit. In the building Gregor could see best, better than halfway down the block, caught in a stray gleam of light from a streetlamp, there was a window broken on the fourth floor.
“Gregor?” John Jackman said again.
Gregor snapped to and shook his head. “Well,” he said. “Do you have that list of things I asked you to do?”
“My sergeant has them. They’ll be done by tomorrow. Are you sure you don’t have a fax machine?”
“Positive.”
“Then I’ll bring the forensics when I come to see you tomorrow. You really ought to get a fax machine, Gregor.”
“I know. You’ll set up the interviews.”
“I said I would. I will if you tell me to. But, Christ, Gregor, appointments to interrogate witnesses—”
“It will help.”
“If you say so. But if you ask me, I think we ought to crash every one of those doors every time one of those idiots refuses to open it. Who the hell do they think they are?”
“It’s who they think we are that matters.”