Murder Superior(20)

Part 1





Chapter 1


1


THERE WAS A HAND-LETTERED cardboard sign hanging in the display window of Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store, and every time Gregor Demarkian passed it he wondered if there was something about being Armenian that made people a little cracked. Then he thought of the most cracked person he knew—who happened to be a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant named Bennis Hannaford—and decided it wasn’t worth worrying about. It was Sunday, the eleventh of May, a bright hot day at the beginning of what promised to be a glorious spring. Gregor Demarkian had spent twenty years of his life with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, ten of them with the Department of Behavioral Sciences. The Department of Behavioral Sciences was that division of the Bureau that helped local police forces coordinate national hunts for serial killers. Gregor had founded it but not named it, the name having been visited on him and all the agents he worked with by some second assistant bureaucrat who had had friends in Congress so long he had lost the knack of speaking English. Bright spring days while he had still been with the division had not been happy. Psychopaths responded to a warming of the weather just like anybody else. When the sun started to gleam, Dagwood Bumstead took his family to the beach and the local nutcase took his victim to a wooded hillside ten miles out of town. Or somewhere. Gregor Demarkian had started his career with the Bureau swearing he was never going to retire. He had ended it at the beginning of his wife’s last painful year of battling with cancer. He had never looked back. In the midst of Elizabeth’s dying, it had been hard for him to recognize how he’d come to feel about his job—it had been hard to remember he’d ever had a job—but in the years since, he’d been unable to avoid it. By the time Gregor Demarkian had left the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he had come to hate his work with a passion.

The sign in the display window of Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store said:

    IN FOR MOTHER’S DAY—HEART-SHAPED HONEY CAKES WITHGRANNY GLASSES.



Underneath it was a heart-shaped honey cake that indeed had granny glasses, made of silver sugar pearls, and bright eyes with long lashes inside the glass frames, too. Next to the honey cake was a tiny vase of plastic flowers with MOTHER printed across the bulbed-out part at the end of it, and another vase with something incomprehensible printed on that Gregor supposed the incomprehensible thing must be mother spelled out in Armenian, but he couldn’t be sure. There had been times in his life when he’d been able to do a fair job of dredging Armenian words from the pit of forgetfulness a life in major cities had confined them to, but today was not one of those times. It was hard to tell exactly what today was. It was Mother’s Day, of course. No one walking down Cavanaugh Street could have mistaken it for anything else. Mother’s Day might once have been a sticky-sentimental gesture by a corrupt Congress looking to do something nobody could cause a scandal over. It might have metamorphosed into one more shtick for the retail sector to exploit. On Cavanaugh Street, however, it was something like a patron saint’s feast day. Gregor Demarkian had grown up on Cavanaugh Street. In those days it had been an Armenian-American immigrant ghetto, the kind of place where bricks fell off the facades of buildings and plaster crumbled from their inner walls and social workers arrived with the regularity of bowel movements to berate the population on how they were doing it all wrong. It was now Philadelphia’s jewel of urban renewal, a clean place lined by town houses and floor-through condominium apartments, trendy restaurants and import boutiques, even a bookstore and a religious supply house used by all the priests in all the Eastern rite churches in the city. That this change had come about was due entirely to the way the children of Cavanaugh Street felt about their mothers, which, in Gregory’s opinion, was right up there in both fanaticism and common sense with the way the people of Jonestown had felt about Reverend Jim. Gregor could just imagine one of the women of his own generation—Lida Arkmanian or Hannah Krekorian or Sheila Kashinian—giving the order for a mass march into the sea. First they’d give the order for a mass march into rubber boots.

Of course, Gregor didn’t want to imply that he didn’t think well of Armenian mothers. He’d had an Armenian mother of his own, once, and an Armenian grandmother, too. They were wonderful women. Bossy, maybe. A little on the hysterical side when it came to how much their children ate or how many layers they wore on perfectly nice days when no layers at all would probably have made more sense, but still—

He was past Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store now, almost up to the Ararat restaurant. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, nearly time for the liturgy to finish at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. Any minute now, Father Tibor Kasparian would bless the congregation and Sheila Kashinian would begin to tap her foot. All the old ladies would rustle and blush and try to hide the fact that what they really wanted to do was get out to the vestibule and the front steps as quickly as possible, where they could get some serious talking done. It was to avoid church that Gregor had gone for his walk in the first place. He had nothing against church—he certainly had nothing against Father Tibor’s sermons—but today…