Deadly Beloved(44)

“I don’t like this gated-community crap. Fortress mentality, that’s all it is. And worse. Racism pure and simple.”

“Not so pure and not so simple. They would probably be overjoyed if somebody like, say, Clarence Thomas decided to buy a house there.”

“Clarence Thomas lives in Virginia. They make me angry, Gregor.”

“They make me depressed,” Gregor said. “But the chances are good that they’re going to be able to tell us where our missing woman is.”

“They know that? And they aren’t telling us?”

“They don’t know they know it. Could you find out something else for me?”

“Maybe.”

“We need to know if Mrs. Willis had friends outside Fox Run Hill. You said she didn’t have a job.”

“Not a job we could find out about, no.”

“You checked with the IRS?”

“Definitely.”

“All right, then. What about the sort of thing women in her position like to do? Volunteer work. The museums. The symphony. That kind of thing.”

“You can’t honestly believe she went back to her volunteer work after she’d blown up her own station wagon.”

“No,” Gregor said. “I’m just looking for a friend. A very good friend. The best friend she has.”

“You mean somebody who might be hiding her.”

“Not exactly. Not in the way you mean it.” He gestured at the Ararat. “You want to come in and have dinner with me, John? If Bennis still isn’t talking to you, she can sit with somebody else. Assuming she’s here at all.”

“If Bennis is here, she wouldn’t want to sit with anybody else,” John Jackman said. “She’d want to sit with me and make my life hell. Thanks a lot, Gregor, but I just can’t. I’ve got a pile of work to do back at the office.”

“The other thing I want from you is sightings reports. I take it you are getting those?”

“Dozens of them. By the hour. We ought to be glad this Mrs. Willis is just an ordinary middle-aged lady. When we have kids or, God help us, black people—”

“I know. You get dozens by the minute. You’re not going to save the world, John.”

“I know. But I keep trying. I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at eight.”

“I’ll be ready.”

“Dan Exter said you were as impressive as hell. That’s a compliment, Gregor. Only thing Dan Exter is usually impressed with is the Queen of England, and he’s not so big on her since Chuck and Di turned out to be such putzes.”

“Right,” Gregor said. “I like him too.”

John Jackman started to roll up his window. “Take care of yourself, Gregor. We need you to make us look good, even if we don’t need you for anything else.”

Gregor was about to say that they needed him for a lot more, but John Jackman already had his window rolled up and his car sliding down along the curb. Gregor felt the first heavy raindrops against his forehead like dollops of mayonnaise. Half a block up, Hannah Krekorian opened a window and leaned out of it. She looked as if she were about to take a dive headfirst onto the pavement. She pulled back at the last minute and disappeared inside her home again. Gregor noticed that the window had a big white and gold bow on it. If the neighborhood looked like this now, how would it look on the day of the actual wedding? Would there be carpets of seed pearls covering the sidewalks? Would there be tulle and lace skirts around all the fire hydrants?

Gregor decided not to tell anybody what he’d thought about the fire hydrants. Donna Moradanyan was far too likely to take him seriously.

He gave one last look around at the well-lit and overdecorated Cavanaugh Street, and one last look into the black maw of Bullock, and then went in to the Ararat.

No matter what else was going on in his life, he had to eat.





2.


Lately, Gregor Demarkian had been staying out of the Ararat as much as possible. Since he couldn’t cook and didn’t much like either delivery pizza or fast-food hamburgers, this was not as often as he would have liked—but it was enough to make it seem as if he had been avoiding the place, and as soon as he walked in he knew that people on the street had been speculating about why. Of course, people on Cavanaugh Street speculated about everything all the time. It was what they had for a hobby instead of needlepoint or crochet. Even so, it made him uncomfortable. He opened the door and stepped in out of the rain and fifty heads turned to look at him and stayed turned, as if he were a curiosity, as if it were his first week back in the neighborhood. Gregor had vague memories of the first few weeks he had been back in Philadelphia after retiring from the FBI. At the time, he had been treated like a cross between an escaped zoo animal and a pet iguana.