Gregor had no idea what had happened between then and the time, three and a half years ago now, that he had come back to live in this place. He had seen urban neighborhoods turn around before. The Upper West Side of Manhattan had gone from Mostly Undesirable to Very High Rent in no time at all. Cavanaugh Street was the only urban neighborhood he had ever heard of that had turned itself around on purpose. Urban renewal failed. Enterprise zones were less than useless. Revitalization projects shot themselves in the foot. Here, the grandmothers had wanted to stay and the grandchildren had decided to help them. The tenements had been torn down and replaced by neat brick replicas of Federal houses. The brownstones had been converted either into floor-throughs, like the one he lived in, or one-family town houses with living rooms that took up their entire second floor. There was still a grocery store—Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store—but it sold as much to tourists coming in from the Main Line as it did to people in the neighborhood. People in the neighborhood liked Armenian food, but they also ate their share at Burger King and McDonald’s. The religious supply store was gone. If you wanted an oil lamp or a picture of the Virgin, you had to talk to Father Tibor Kasparian and listen to a lecture on why you really ought to give that money to the poor. Even Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School was less insolently ethnic than it appeared. Its students were mostly refugees who had come to America from Armenia after the collapse of the Soviet union . Its stated purpose was to get those students ready to take their places beside their thoroughly Americanized cousins at Groton and The Hill.
From the window of his living room, Gregor could see across the street into the living room of Lida Arkmanian’s town house, which was on the third floor instead of the second. When they were growing up, Lida had been the prettiest girl on Cavanaugh Street, and Gregor had been in love with her. Now he looked down to the street and saw Donna Moradanyan and her son, Tommy, coming out of Lida’s front door. They were being met on the stoop by Russell Donahue, Donna’s steady “friend” and seen off by Lida herself, looking magnificent in something bright red and flowy. Cavanaugh Street always looked best in this kind of weather. It was a place of bright emotions and happy thoughts, like the world seen through fairy dust in Peter Pan. It never seemed suited to the nasty darkness that made up so much of Philadelphia’s climate.
Lida Arkmanian’s town house was decorated in the same kind of red-and-white streamers Gregor’s own town house was decorated in. Donna Moradanyan had been active over there, too. Gregor tilted his head and looked down the street. There was a Saint Joseph display on the steps of Holy Trinity Church, and red-and-white streamers wound around every lamppost from here to there. Donna was definitely outdoing herself this time. Gregor wondered if Tommy Moradanyan was going to buy Russell Donahue a Father’s Day present, and if so, what that would mean. God only knew, he was as anxious as any of the old ladies on the street to see Donna Moradanyan married to a responsible man.
Gregor backed away from the window. He went to the kitchen phone and called a cab. He had to watch himself around this place. It was too easy to turn into a matchmaker on Cavanaugh Street. It was too easy to turn into a gnome who thought the most important thing in life was who married who and what they wore when they did it. It was maddening.
The kitchen clock said it was two, on the nose. The cab company said it would take ten minutes to get a taxi to Gregor’s front door. Gregor said fine and hung up.
It was past time for him to take a little trip, that was the truth. He was getting something worse than stale.
Gregor opened his briefcase again. Press clippings, magazine stories, the transcript of a radio program—lots and lots of paper, but not a single piece of information he couldn’t have gotten on his own in one long day at the main branch of the Philadelphia Public Library. Gregor had the feeling that, unlike John O’Bannion, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York was something of a conspiracy theorist.
And that could mean nothing but trouble.
2
AN HOUR AND A HALF later, sitting in first class on the Amtrak train speeding toward New York City—why he bothered to travel first class for this short a trip, Gregor didn’t know—Gregor opened his briefcase again. Bennis was right about more than the fact that this murder should have been put down to random violence and the investigation abandoned at least a week ago. She was right about the kind of snake pit he was about to land himself in. Gregor had put a brave face on it back at the apartment, but he knew the truth. Unless the Archdiocese of New York was willing to smuggle him into this case trussed up in feathers in the back of an armored car, there was going to be no way to keep his presence in New York and his connection to the ongoing inquiry into the death of Charles van Straadt secret. The NYPD was going to be pleased at his arrival only for public consumption. When you were failing miserably at making headway in a high-profile crime, it was to your advantage to seem as if you were willing to accept any help you could get. In private, Gregor knew they were going to be ready to shred him with their teeth, and he didn’t blame them. Things were bad enough as they stood. New York City Homicide didn’t want a man who was now—no matter what he might have been before—an amateur coming in and making them look like fools. Unfortunately, on one or two occasions, Gregor had made the men of one police department or another look like fools.