Feast of Murder(34)

“I’m glad she thought so,” Gregor had said, and then he had deflected the subject. The last thing he had wanted to think about was the campaign—subtle at first; now approaching full-scale war—that Bennis and Donna Moradanyan were running to discover his birthday and give him a party. The only good luck he’d had in that was in the fact that none of the other people on Cavanaugh Street were interested in joining in. Armenian culture really was traditionally Christian, in the most venerable definition of the term. It was entirely uninterested in the physical birth of anything. It cast its vote on the spiritual side.

Gregor himself had cast his vote on the prudent side. The conversation he had had with Bennis about Jon Baird had taken place in the living room of her apartment, among the papier mâché models of trolls and dragons and unicorns she had made to help her revise her latest fantasy novel. That was what Bennis did for a living, and a very good living it was, too. Main Line or no Main Line, she had no family money. Her father, a misogynist of the first water, had seen to that. All the things she did have, and the list was considerable, came out of the series of books on knights and damsels and leprechauns in distress she’d been writing for almost five years now, the good old dependable regularly produced volumes of the Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia that showed up year after year on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list. When Gregor had first met Bennis, he had thought that Zed and Zedalia must be people. As it turned out, they were places. Zed was a place ruled by men. Zedalia was a place ruled by women.

“It all works out,” Bennis had told him, “because none of it is supposed to be real, just taking place in real time.”

Gregor sometimes wondered if Bennis’s life took place in real time, but he let that pass. He understood her mood. He’d gone downstairs in the hope that Bennis would help him decide whether to take Jon Baird up on his proposition. As propositions went, it wasn’t very interesting.

“He says he’s got a link and it has to be in his inner circle,” Gregor had told Bennis, “and I told him that for that he needed a tape recorder and a little old lady with a nasty mind. The whole thing smacks of rich man’s paranoia.”

“The whole thing smacks of an escape hatch,” Bennis had told him solemnly. “Do you really want to spend another holiday on Cavanaugh Street, with Lida trying to shove us together in closets and Hannah Krekorian taking you aside for little chats about all the widowed men she’s known who’ve just keeled over in their prime because they lacked companionship?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

“From the way you’ve described them, they sound like a thoroughly nasty group of people.”

“They are. They’ll make me feel right at home. Like being back around good old Daddy’s table, except it’ll be somebody else taking the abuse.”

“Maybe there’ll be an eligible bachelor on board and you can come back to Cavanaugh Street with an engagement ring on your finger. That would set Hannah Krekorian on her ear.”

“Maybe I’ll have discovered the solution to the great mystery of the Baird family relationships: why would Jon Baird even want both of his wives on the same little boat. Maybe he’ll even kill one of them, and then you’ll have a murder to investigate.”

“God forbid.”

“God hasn’t forbidden it up to now, Gregor. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable request on my part.”

Whether it had been a perfectly reasonable request on her part or not, Gregor did not, to this day, know. He only knew that Bennis had been right—he really couldn’t have stood another holiday dinner on Cavanaugh Street, not right this minute, although he had no intention of giving all that up for good—and he’d been feeling the need to get away for months. From that moment it had been decided, almost without him, and he was on his way to this foggy street in coastal Virginia.

Foggy was a very weak word for it. It was now eight o’clock on Saturday morning, an hour before they were formally expected. They were sitting in the car they had hired—a nondescript Ford, this time, instead of the pale pink Rolls Bennis had almost insisted on; the nondescript Ford came with a driver anyway—parked at the curb in front of the boardwalk that led to Pier 36. They could see the sign that said “Pier 36.” They could see the sign underneath it that was supposed to list the boats parked in its berths. The line for Berth 102 had a notation beside it that said “Pilgrimage Green,” but the rest of the lines were empty. The fog was too thick for Gregor to tell if that meant the rest of the berths were empty, or that the harbormaster didn’t really care whether his charges were listed on his signs or not.