“So go see this Gregor Demarkian. You’ll have a story you can tell in the cafeteria for weeks. People around here won’t be able to get enough of it.”
“Right,” Liza said, standing up. “I guess I’d better go now. I told them I’d be only about fifteen minutes and it’s been more like half an hour. What an idiot that Shirley Bates is.”
“The world is full of jerks,” Leyla said.
“Right.” Liza picked up her tray. “And my supervisor is one of them. I’ll leave the newspaper for you. I didn’t have time to read it with Shirley blathering away at me.”
“When you meet Gregor Demarkian, find out if he’s really sleeping with that Bennis Hannaford woman,” Leyla told her. “The newspapers are always so vague. It could make a person crazy.”
THREE
1.
GREGOR DEMARKIAN SOMETIMES WONDERED why he had ever become involved in law enforcement at all. Unlike a lot of the men he had trained with, all those years ago in J. Edgar Hoover’s America, he hadn’t grown up listening to radio serials and dreaming about being Eliot Ness. In his last years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he had often felt like the housekeeper at a fraternity house. There was just so much mess and it kept coming at you. All you could do was sweep it back and shop for bigger brooms, aware from the start that you were never going to get the place cleaned up so that it would stay clean. In Philadelphia these days, he felt more like he was unraveling wool. Crime was a fabric made of yarns and threads. If you picked at it long enough, it came apart in your hands. That was the kind of thing Tibor was always saying, and Gregor didn’t really believe he’d started to think like Tibor. What he was trying to work out was why he felt so much more responsible about it all these days, when he wasn’t paid to investigate criminals, when he wasn’t sworn to eradicate crime. Sometimes he felt as if the Federal Bureau of Investigation was a machine that had worked well with him and worked just as well without him. Now he was out where there were no machines, and nobody else seemed to be taking care of business.
Gregor certainly felt responsible for what had happened to Bennis Hannaford in spite of the fact that it had been her idea to go to that silly cocktail party. Gregor had received an invitation of his own and ignored it. What kept nagging at him in the aftermath of the explosion was that he had known of the link between Julianne Corbett and Patricia MacLaren Willis, thin though it was. He had known that Patsy MacLaren had contributed money to Julianne Corbett’s political campaign. Of course, if that was enough of a link to get somebody’s cocktail party blown up, the entire Philadelphia Main Line ought to look like a Fourth of July fireworks display every Sunday evening in the summer. What Gregor really felt about the breaking of Bennis Hannaford’s arm was scared to death. She hadn’t been seriously hurt, but she had been very close to people who were seriously hurt. One woman was dead. Karla Parrish, the woman Bennis had been standing right next to, was in a coma and no one knew how long it would take her to come out of it, if she ever did. There were people with damage to their eyes and their faces. If Bennis hadn’t been on her way out to have a cigarette, she could have been—anything. It was the first time Gregor Demarkian had ever been grateful for Bennis Hannaford’s nicotine habit.
“The trouble with you,” John Jackman said when he dropped Gregor off on Cavanaugh Street after their trip out to Fox Run Hill, “is that you won’t admit that for all intents and purposes, you’ve married again.”
“I haven’t married again,” Gregor said. His voice sounded very fast, made up of rush. “Bennis and I don’t—I mean, we’ve never even contemplated—”
“I know what you don’t do,” John Jackman said, “but if you think Bennis hasn’t at least contemplated it, then you don’t know Bennis.”
“John, for God’s sake.”
“You’re in each other’s laps all the time. She worries about your cholesterol. You worry about her driving. She fusses with your ties. You complain about the way she spends money. People who see you together think that you’re married. Or at least living together.”
“Living together,” Gregor repeated. Today, not only were all of Donna Moradanyan’s wedding decorations still up, there were new ones. The entire front of the duplex town house Hannah Krekorian shared with Howard Kashinian’s old aunt had been wrapped up in white satin ribbons and decked out in gold satin bows. The town house looked like a gift box of chocolates with radiation poisoning.