Dear Old Dead(63)

Gregor walked back into the center of his room, threw the papers onto his still-unmade bed, and sat down in the chair next to the desk. Then he picked up the phone there and dialed. If this had been Philadelphia, not only would the van Straadt case still have been all over the papers, he himself would have been all over them, too. He could just imagine what the Philadelphia Inquirer was saying about him right this minute: “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot Takes on the Big Apple.” That would be about right. It depressed Gregor mightily to be in a place where murder was so common that even the sequential killings of two members of an internationally prominent family couldn’t hold the attention of the public for three days. Well, maybe that wasn’t quite fair. The public was probably still interested. They just weren’t interested enough to get the professionals interested. What would it take to get them off their rear ends and moving? The World Trade Center blast had done it. Maybe they could get really involved in something like a flying saucer landing in Central Park. Or maybe not. Maybe New Yorkers would look on Martians as just one more set of damn tourists.

The phone was ringing and ringing in his ear. No one was answering. Bennis must be out. Gregor hung up and drummed his fingers against the desk. Frustration didn’t even begin to describe it. He felt bottled up.

He got up and went over to the window to look outside. The Archdiocese of New York had more clout than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had a room overlooking Sixth Avenue. Down on the street, cars were bright colored blobs. They looked like they were having a hell of a lot more fun than he was.

They’re probably all down there hating the traffic, Gregor told himself, but the thought wouldn’t stick. He had to get out of this room. It was driving him crazy.

He had taken his wallet and his change and his keys out of his pants the night before and put them on the night table next to his bed. Now he picked them up and stuffed them into his pockets again. A walk, that was what he needed. A walk would clear his head.

If anything could.





2


WHETHER GREGOR DEMARKIAN’S WALK cleared his head or not was a moot point. He took a very long one, going down Fifth Avenue to look in the windows of Bergdorf Goodman and Saks, clucking indulgently at all the silly looking clothes Bennis would probably buy six of and never wear. He went west to Times Square and looked at the bright fronts of the theaters and the neon jumpiness of the adult entertainment centers. The adult entertainment centers seemed to be operating twenty-four hours a day. After a while, he began to walk slowly up Central Park West. He had gotten explicit directions to the Akareeba Restaurant from Hector Sheed. He had been a little worried about how difficult it would be to find a cab that would take him there. In New York, when you didn’t know the neighborhoods, it was difficult to know what you were getting yourself into. In the end, Gregor decided not to worry. He was involved in walking. He would go on walking. He walked up past the Dakota and the San Remo and the other great apartment buildings on Central Park West, and then farther, past buildings just as large and just as grand but without the famous names. The buildings got more and more run down and the people got shabbier and shabbier the farther north he went, but the energy level actually seemed to be rising. These people were poor but not destitute, that was it. This was poverty as Gregor had known it, growing up. Here the broad sidewalk of Central Park West was cluttered with people selling from blankets and garbage bags spread across the pavement. He was offered watches and sunglasses and books and ties in the space of half a block.

“Traditional for Father’s Day,” a very young man with black skin and the almond eyes and fine-boned jaw line of a Thai watercolor portrait. “Ties for every occasion.”

Gregor reached the Akareeba Restaurant in a much better mood than any he had been in since he had arrived from Philadelphia. He believed in the melting pot, he really did, especially since nothing was ever completely melted in it. A friend of his at the Bureau had once described the United States as a kind of pudding stone. There was a mass of glue and then a plethora of different rocks. The rocks were stuck together in the glue, but never dissolved in it.

If I go on like this, I’m going to start singing “America the Beautiful” on street corners, Gregor told himself. The Akareeba was only one block north of Central Park North. Gregor walked that block, made the right turn he had been told to, and found himself face to face with a gaudy front that took up a third of the commercial space along that side of the street. “AKAREEBA” the sign said in shiny foil letters. The letters were made up of tiny sequins in half a dozen colors that shivered and jumped in the wind. The windows were painted over with African scenes that featured large numbers of bare-breasted, monumentally well-endowed women. Gregor could just imagine what the wives and girlfriends of the men who came here said about those. He found the door, four steps down from the street, and went in through it. He found himself at the edge of a large room full of dark wood tables and presided over by a long, ebonywood bar. The bar was out of a 1930s movie. There was more glass behind it than there was in Gregor’s bathroom in the Hilton. There were enough bottles and glasses and siphons and tumblers to cater a Washington political wedding. There was no hostess. Gregor moved into the gloom and looked around. It was only eleven fifteen. Maybe Hector wasn’t here yet.