“Maybe he was just trying to make you feel better. On account of your—advanced age.”
The little pile of scrap paper that constituted Shelley’s notes was still lying on the table. Shelley snatched them up and shoved them into her blazer pockets.
“You little bitch,” she said again. “If you ever, ever spill this slime to anybody I’ll kick you right in your fat ass.”
“I’ll sue,” Sarah said happily.
And that, Shelley thought, as she steamed across the atrium to the elevator bank, was the problem with the twentieth century.
In the days of Ruth and Naomi, she could have cleaved Sarah’s head with a meat ax and had a halfway decent chance of being considered justified.
3
IN THE DAYS OF Ruth and Naomi, Prescott Holloway would have been a desperado. He felt like a desperado now, walking the dark streets of a city he barely knew, looking for something he couldn’t put his finger on. It had been a long hard day and tomorrow would be a longer one. With Max gone, they would call on him to take up the slack. There would be slack to be taken up, too. Prescott knew that staff from WKMB were supposed to take over if Max was ill or incapacitated, but he also knew that Shelley Feldstein’s idea of taking over and WKMB’s were not identical. It would be just like it was back in New York. When Max got tied up, Prescott got put into play. Prescott didn’t mind it. It broke up his day.
What he wanted to break up his night was a drink, or a couple of them. He wouldn’t have minded more of that Scotch Max had had the night before. What else he wanted was a woman, but he wasn’t expecting to find one. Prescott’s ideas of safe sex had nothing to do with AIDS, but he followed them inflexibly nonetheless. So far, they’d kept him from getting arrested and they’d kept him from getting rolled. If he walked fast enough on a night like this, he could keep himself from getting mugged, too. Muggers didn’t like him. He walked too quickly and he looked too mean.
The sound of the heels of his cowboy boots on the pavement was like drumbeats.
It made him feel as if his possibilities were infinite.
THREE
1
THE HEADLINE IN THE Philadelphia Inquirer wasn’t bad—
POLICE INVESTIGATE GOLDMAN SEX SHOW MURDER
—but the subhead was even more embarrassing than usual, and all the way down to the Ararat that morning, Gregor Demarkian complained about it.
“‘Demarkian at Scene,’” he said to old George Tekamanian, who had decided at the last minute to have breakfast out and grabbed Gregor’s arm for support in the process. Old George Tekamanian was in his eighties somewhere, one of the last remaining members of Gregor’s mother’s generation on Cavanaugh Street. The other two were maiden lady sisters in their early nineties who lived in an apartment on the ground floor of Hannah Krekorian’s townhouse and claimed to be able to read crystal balls. Old George could remember when this neighborhood was so poor, the city didn’t like to pick up the garbage more than once or twice a week. He could remember when Lida Arkmanian’s townhouse had been a tenement carved up into fourteen one-bedroom flats. He could remember when people on Cavanaugh Street routinely lived in one-bedroom flats, in spite of the fact that they had four children and a grandmother living with them. Gregor could remember all these things, too, but unlike old George he was doing his best to forget them.
The subhead of the Inquirer story said: PHILADELPHIA’S POIROT FINDS BODY. At least it didn’t say “Philadelphia’s Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” Gregor wasn’t sure that made a difference.
“‘Demarkian Finds Body,’” he told George, steering the old man carefully across the last intersection between their brownstone and Ararat. “That would have been all right, too. I’m not asking for anonymity.”
“You are getting upset over nothing,” George said. “Tcha, Krekor, you are being ridiculous. It is a compliment they are paying you.”
“It is a boost in the advertising revenue they are paying themselves,” Gregor said. “It sells papers.”
“Well, then.”
“Well, then, nothing. I wasn’t put on this earth to sell papers.”
“You should learn to walk faster, Krekor. I don’t understand how you can poke along the way you do and not freeze solid in this cold.”
The answer was, of course, that Gregor couldn’t. He couldn’t walk as fast as old George—who positively creeped along in his apartment, but picked up speed as soon as he hit a pavement; it was Gregor’s vanity that old George had to be guided anywhere or helped along any street—and he was freezing. It was early in the morning and a gray day in mid-December. The first day of Hanukkah was this coming Sunday and Christmas was five days beyond that. Cavanaugh Street was as decorated as it was going to get. Donna Moradanyan had even managed to plant her gigantic red-and-silver bow on the flagpole that stood in the courtyard in front of Holy Trinity Church. The courtyard wasn’t much more than a wide place in the sidewalk and the flagpole had been paid for by Howard Kashinian, who hated the bow, but that was all part of the coming of the Christmas season, too. Gregor wondered what life was like at this time of year for David Goldman and Rebekkah. Was Hanukkah just as crazy? Did the craziness come for some other holiday at some other time of year? Maybe David and Rebekkah always had calmness and sweet reason, the way the angels in heaven were supposed to have when they weren’t fighting territorial wars against Lucifer and his minions. Gregor wasn’t entirely sure he believed in God, but he did believe in saints, and Rebekkah Goldman was definitely one of them.