“Interesting neighborhood,” he told the cabbie.
The cabbie shrugged. “Got a great big police station sitting right in the middle of it. Even the junkies aren’t stupid enough to pull a drive-by right in front of the police station.”
Gregor had heard of plenty of junkies stupid enough to pull drive-bys right in front of police stations. The people who pulled drive-bys were not notable for their high practical intelligence. Gregor stepped back on the sidewalk and let the cab pull away from the curb. The women who had been looking at Bride’s were now looking at Modern Bride. One of the storefronts on the other side of the street had a long white wedding gown in its plate-glass window. It took Gregor a while to realize that this was the St. Vincent de Paul shop, a charity outlet that sold secondhand clothes. Gregor wondered who gave her wedding gown to the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Then he wondered who got her wedding gown from the St. Vincent de Paul Society. No matter how poor you were, would you want a gown from a wedding that had failed to live up to its promise? Or was it the marriage that would have failed to live up to its promise? And what did marriage promise? Gregor could remember his marriage to Elizabeth, what it had felt like to be married, what he had felt it made him obligated to do and be, but it wasn’t easy to put that sort of thing in words. Whatever the words were, they would have nothing to do with the cover of the latest Cosmopolitan, which also had a bride on it, although a bride with exposed breasts. The white headline to the right of the bride’s head read: Our Exclusive Quiz! Is Your Marriage Destined to Explode? Underneath that there was another headline that read: 12 Surefire Ways to Make Your Honeymoon Hotter Than Hot!
Gregor went up the broad stone steps to the police station and through the double bulletproof security doors into the vestibule. The security doors were fitted into a steel frame that had been fitted into the dark wood of the station’s interior. Back before the days of drive-by shootings, it had been possible to make an aesthetic statement with a building full of law enforcement officers. Of course, there had been drive-by shootings of a kind even in the twenties; the FBI had committed a few of them itself. Wasn’t that the point of what happened to Bonnie and Clyde? Gregor gave his name to the enormous African-American man in the sergeant’s uniform behind the desk and asked to see John Jackman.
“Gregor Demarkian,” the sergeant repeated. He flipped through a card file on his desk, found something he liked, and nodded. Then he picked up the phone, pressed a button, and said, “Mr. Demarkian to see Mr. Jackman.”
He put the phone down again. “You can go right up,” he told Gregor. “Through that door and up in the elevator to three. When you get out on three, you will have to submit to a weapons search.”
“A weapons search? In a police station?”
“If it was up to me, I’d put a metal detector at the front door, but it isn’t up to me. Jackman and Company think metal detectors would inhibit access to the general public.”
“I’d think they’d at least do that,” Gregor said.
“Of course,” the sergeant went on, “that leaves the question of whether you really want this general public to have access, which depends on how you look at it and what you think it is that wants access to here, but I’m not going to bend your ear with it. I think Mr. Jackman is in a hurry.”
“Yes,” Gregor said.
“They shot a cop,” the sergeant said. “A bunch of kids did. Fifteen-year-olds. Shot him right out there on the steps. Right in the head. He was dead before we got to him.”
“Oh,” Gregor said.
“Soon as I get my twenty,” the sergeant said, “I’m moving to Montana.”
Gregor turned around and went through the door the sergeant had indicated. He went up in the elevator and got out on three. There was indeed a weapons search station right outside the elevator doors. It was manned by a young woman in uniform and an older man, also in uniform, whose main virtue seemed to be that he was absolutely huge. Gregor wondered where they found regulation blue to fit him. He gave the young woman his Mark Cross pen and spread his legs apart so that she could run the obligatory hand up and down the inside pants legs.
“That’s fine,” she said after a minute. “You can go on through, Mr. Demarkian. I’m sorry if we’ve caused you any inconvenience.”
“No inconvenience,” Gregor said.
“You can go through,” the big man said.
The big man was sitting down. Gregor got the impression that he was always sitting down, unless there was trouble, which there probably was very little of. Gregor went down the hall to another desk and gave his name to the clerk there. She was in uniform too, but she wasn’t really a cop. Instead of a badge on her chest she had an embroidered patch that read PPD—SUPPORT.