Festival of Deaths(28)

“That’s right. There were people in and out of the storeroom from about four o’clock in the morning on, and she definitely wasn’t there all that time. She was found around six, maybe six thirty. I’d have to look at the paperwork. I don’t remember.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gregor said. And that was true. Since nobody had asked him to investigate this case, and since he had no intention of investigating this case, he didn’t need to be picture perfect about details. His curiosity could be satisfied by broad strokes. “It was a while, and she wasn’t there to begin with. I’m not an expert on skull bashing, you know. My expertise was always poisons.”

“She didn’t have anything to do with any poisons.”

“What about dope?”

“Not a trace. Not in her apartment, not in her office, not in her body, not in the storeroom.”

“What about other things? Cash? Jewelry? Credit cards?”

“She was an immigrant from somewhere in Central America. She lived in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood that was also heavily poor. She made less than five hundred dollars a week. She didn’t have any cash. She had about a thousand dollars in a savings account and a little over two hundred in checking. She had a pair of gold earrings. She was wearing them when she was found. She had a rosary made out of turquoise. It was found in her apartment. She had a Visa card with a clean balance. It was missing. Along with her wallet.”

“Did you check the records?” Gregor asked. “Deposits and withdrawals?”

“We checked. No big deal.”

“It does sound like a mugging, doesn’t it? Except for the business with the body. I take it, from the way you’ve been talking, that she wasn’t actually killed in the storeroom.”

“She was not.”

“In her apartment?”

“Nope.”

“Any idea where?”

“I could say nope again,” Don Elkham said, “but it would be redundant. You see what Chickie’s problem is here. He can’t just write it off as a run-of-the-mill mugging. It just won’t fit. He went through that whole building—the building where the body was found—just on the off-chance she was killed somewhere on the premises, but no luck. He went through the building where her apartment was, too. He didn’t find anything, but what if he had? It still wouldn’t spell mugging. Not with the corpse traveling around like Marco Polo.”

The waitress came up with their drinks. Don took his martini and gulped it. Gregor took a sip of his Burgundy, decided it was as bad as the food was going to be, and put his glass down. Then he watched Don take a second gulp and wondered just what was going on here.

“I thought,” he said, after Don had put down his glass, “that you were going to ask me to stay out of this, assuming anybody involved ever asked me in. But you don’t seem to be.”

“It isn’t necessary,” Don said.

“What do you mean, it isn’t necessary? Because the problem is in New York and I’m here?”

“No, not because of that. You travel. That’s how you got in all the magazines. The Armenian-Ameri—never mind.”

“Good.”

“The thing is,” Don said, “Chickie doesn’t care. If you’re involved or not, I mean.”

“Then why set up this lunch?”

“Because he doesn’t want to be left in the dark, that’s why. He doesn’t want to wake up one morning and find out you’ve solved his case for him and your picture is all over the Daily News and he hasn’t got the faintest idea what’s going on. He doesn’t want to look stupid in front of a bunch of television reporters.”

“So what does that mean?” Gregor asked. “What am I supposed to do?”

Don Elkham shrugged. “Do anything you want. You will anyway. I’ll give you Chickie’s number if you decide you want to play it ethical for once. Of course, I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the greatest amateur detective since Sherlock Holmes, which is what you are according to Life magazine last I heard, but still—”

But still.

Gregor thought it was going to be a miracle if he got out of this restaurant without breaking Don Elkham’s neck.





TWO


1


THERE IS A POINT in the progress of celebrity when a man goes from being famous on occasion—when he has a new book published; when the law firm or the government agency he works for takes on a particularly important case—to being famous all the time. Gregor Demarkian had passed that point somewhere in the middle of investigating a murder at a convention of nuns. At least, he had passed that point in Philadelphia. It was possible that in New York or Los Angeles, he would be able to go for weeks at a time without anyone calling him up to ask for his favorite recipe for chocolate fudge brownies or his favorite prediction for who would win the World Series. Gregor didn’t know, because he hadn’t been out of Philadelphia since last Christmas, when he and Bennis had taken Tibor on a short “vacation.” Even then, his reputation had been pushing the line. It was now impossible for him to go anywhere where there had been the smallest amount of public violence without the local papers speculating that he had been called in to “consult.” He was beginning to think there wasn’t a town in America that didn’t have at least one unsolved, nonroutine murder on its police blotter, just waiting for the ministrations of the man the Philadelphia Inquirer had dubbed “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” In Philadelphia the situation was worse, because the situation was less focused. The Philadelphia Inquirer had stopped expecting Gregor to leap into the middle of any case that took its fancy. If Gregor didn’t say he was working on a solution to a murder, The Inquirer left it to the Philadelphia police. What The Inquirer did do was publish any picture of Gregor it could find—and there were a lot of them, because once the word was out that The Inquirer was paying, there were dozens of paparazzi manqué willing to pop their flash bulbs and bring back the trophy. Over the last few months, The Inquirer had published pictures of Gregor coming out of a restaurant, going into three different branches of the public library, and running to catch a bus. When there was the reasonable resemblance of an excuse, the paper got more elaborate. When Gregor had volunteered (as a result of Bennis’s threat that she’d play Axl Rose tapes in his ear if he refused) to serve as a draw at the annual Armenian Street Festival to benefit the Society for a Free Armenia, The Inquirer had published a solid page of pictures of Gregor getting pies thrown at his face. Philadelphia magazine had gone one better. It had published a full-page, full-color print of Gregor after a pie had caught him square on the nose. That was the same issue of Philadelphia that had contained the information that Gregor’s favorite food was Sara Lee’s chocolate fudge cake. This did not happen to be true—Gregor didn’t like packaged cake of any kind, and if he had he wouldn’t have admitted it; Lida Arkmanian would have murdered him—but it resulted in exactly 4,678 Sara Lee fudge cakes being delivered to Gregor’s door, six by messenger.