Murder Superior(72)
Gregor looked down at the two-page spread of paper Tibor had turned for his inspection, caught his own picture—standing next to Bennis, looking hot and disheveled while Bennis looked as close to perfect as Bennis usually did—let his eye travel up to the headline and winced. The Inquirer had done it to him again. It never failed. It was a kind of vendetta. The main headline read: DEMARKIAN OUT. The subhead sounded less like baseball news: NO ROOM FOR PHILADELPHIA’S OWN ARMENIAN-AMERICAN HERCULE POIROT, ACCORDING TO POLICE LIEUTENANT. Gregor turned the paper around so it was right side up for Tibor and sighed.
“Has Bennis seen that yet?” he asked.
Tibor shook his head. “Bennis is not awake, Krekor, you should know that. She is never awake until very nearly noon. Are you very upset about this police lieutenant?”
“I’m getting very interested in just how bad a reputation he’s got. Look at that subhead. ‘According to Police Lieutenant’ Newspapers never say it like that. They say ‘According to Police.’ ”
“It is Donna Moradanyan you have to watch out for,” Tibor said. “She is very worked up this morning. She has decided we have to hold Mother’s Day again.”
“What do you mean, hold it again?”
“Hannah Krekorian’s children and grandchildren could not come, Krekor, and Hannah was disconsolate, and there was no one to cheer her up because everyone was having Mother’s Day but Hannah was not, so now Donna Moradanyan thinks we should hold it again. Mother’s Day. For Hannah. To make her feel as if she’s had one.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“We will do this next Sunday, Krekor, and it will require a party where people play games. Donna and Lida Arkmanian were planning it this morning. During a party where people play games, I would like to be in Florida on vacation.”
“I don’t blame you. What about the refugees? Don’t they need anything from you that could keep you away?”
“The refugees will all be invited, Krekor. You know what these women are like. There are no refugees, just people who are probably fifth cousins twice removed if you look back far enough but nobody wants to bother so you let them stay on the living room couch just in case. I wish I had come to Cavanaugh Street when I was first a refugee. It would have saved me a bout of dysentery in Jerusalem.”
“Considering what else could have happened to you in Jerusalem, I think you got off easy with the dysentery.”
“I do not think it is natural for someone as young as Donna to be so close to someone as old as Lida. Not like this. Lida is old enough to be the mother. Donna is old enough to be the daughter. They should fight.”
Linda Melajian had come back with Gregor’s scrambled eggs—three of them, on a big plate that also contained four Jimmy Dean spicy breakfast sausage patties and a pile of hash browns the size of a small dog. None of this was Armenian food, but the Ararat served it anyway because the Melajian women were convinced that if they didn’t, people like Gregor and Father Tibor would never get any breakfast at all. It was Cavanaugh Street’s one complaint about Bennis Hannaford that she seemed never to have cooked breakfast for anybody, even for herself. That was tempered by reports from Lida Arkmanian and Sheila Kashinian about what happened when Bennis did cook.
Gregor thanked Linda for the plate, grabbed the salt and began to pile it on. He ignored Tibor’s fretted tsking—Tibor ate pastry for breakfast, pastry so sweet it could make Gregor’s teeth curl—and picked up a triangle of toast to add more butter to it. It already had enough butter on it to qualify it as a bona fide outpost of a dairy state.
“If you keep that up, you will give yourself an illness,” Tibor said.
Gregor looked up to tell him what a crock that was—this was the man who fried his own chicken in bacon fat—but as he did he caught sight of Ararat’s front door out of the corner of his eye, and turned to see who it was opening to let in. The door had opened and shut again and the young man had been standing near the table nearest the cash register for half a minute before Gregor’s mind was able to put it all in place. It wasn’t the sight of a black man on Cavanaugh Street that was the surprise, or even a black man in the Ararat for breakfast. There was a time when that would have been a shock, but not anymore. Gregor knew every detective in the Philadelphia police force’s homicide division, and a number of them had been to Ararat to eat breakfast with Gregor Demarkian. (The tourists, white or black, weren’t supposed to know about breakfast.) It wasn’t the color of this man’s skin but the arrangement of his features that gave Gregor Demarkian pause. The man looked so damn familiar but Gregor just couldn’t place him.