Festival of Deaths(82)

“It’s like this all the time now,” she said in a wondering voice. “It’s amazing. Where do they get the energy?”

“Detective Jackman,” Gregor reminded her.

She picked up her phone and punched a couple of buttons. Then she said, “Guy named Gregor Demarkian here for John” and waited. A second later, she put down the phone.

“He’ll be here in a minute,” she said. “You can take a seat, if you like.”

The seats were all made of plastic and cracked. They were also filthy. “That’s all right,” Gregor said. “I’ll stand.”

“Bungeeeee!” the young man in the back said, hopping around on one foot.

One of the cops standing next to him reached out, grabbed his shoulder, and pushed him down into his chair. “Jesus Christ,” the cop said. “What did I ever do to deserve this?”

“Wait a minute,” the desk sergeant said. “Aren’t you the one they call the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot?”

“I’m the one they call the black Cardinal Cushing,” John Jackman said, coming through the propped-open fire doors to the left of the counter and grabbing Gregor by the arm. “I’m going to take this man upstairs, sergeant. If I get calls from anybody lower than the chief for the next thirty minutes, I don’t want to know about them.”

Gregor supposed that this meant that John Jackman did not now have a wife or a girlfriend or a lover, but that was the kind of question he should save for later, and he appreciated what John was doing for him. What John was principally doing for him was providing him with an escape from having to answer the sergeant’s question about the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. Gregor hated answering questions about the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. He wasn’t all that fond of the original Hercule Poirot. If the newspapers had to nickname him after some character in crime fiction, they could at least have chosen one of the characters Gregor actually liked.

John Jackman was pushing Gregor through the fire doors he had come through himself, but not up the stairs. There was a door beyond the fire doors that led outside to a parking lot. John shoved Gregor through that and stumbled out into the cold after him.

“You told your sergeant a lie,” Gregor protested. “She won’t know where to find you.”

“She can call my beeper,” John said. “Come on. I want to get out of here before anybody thinks up anything else for me to do.”

“Where are we going?”

“To WKMB. I’ve got the lab reports—I’ve got them on me—”

“You’re not wearing a coat.”

“I never wear a coat. Here’s the car, Gregor. In.”

Gregor got in. It was an ordinary police car, but there was only one uniformed officer in the front instead of two. The uniformed man waited until both Gregor and John Jackman were seated and John had the door pulled shut. Then he peeled out. Gregor hated peeling out. He kept getting crystal clear images of a car peeling right into the side of a building somewhere and leaving pieces of itself all over the sidewalk.

“You seen my publicity?” John asked him. “Or have you been too busy reading your own?”

“I’ve been too busy reading my own,” Gregor told him. “What did they say about you?”

“They called me a cross between Virgil Tibbs and Sidney Poitier. And then they said that if this city had any sense, it would make me the next chief of police.”

“So?”

“So they only said it because I’m black, Gregor. And at the moment, we have a chief of police who happens to be a good friend of mine and in no hurry to retire, for God’s sake, and he isn’t going to like this.”

“He’ll live with it.”

“Yeah. Give me a second, here, Gregor and we’ll start on the lab reports. Sidney Poitier, for God’s sake. Virgil Tibbs.”

Gregor had always thought Sidney Poitier was a very fine actor. This didn’t seem to be the time to say so.





2


PHILADELPHIA IS RINGED BY highways and linked together by concrete overpasses. On a good day, this system makes travel from one side of the city to the other a snap. This was not a good day. With Hanukkah falling so late this year—practically in the lap of Christmas—the usual seasonal traffic had been doubled. Everywhere the roads were full of drivers who came into the city only one day out of three hundred and sixty-five and who didn’t have the faintest idea where they were going. Everywhere the roadsides were crowded with vehicles disabled by their owners’ stupidities. The traffic was maddening. Gregor tried to sit back and ignore it. He couldn’t, because their driver was as tense as a cop about to break up a domestic argument. John Jackman was irritated as well. Gregor thought cops had to deal with too much frustration over important things. They deserved a break from the Almighty on side issues like the traffic. They weren’t going to get it.