“Would you have taken a taste?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Rob Collins said.
“Good,” Tibor put in. “I know the criminal is supposed to be quite stupid, Krekor, but that would be too much.”
“The other possibility,” Gregor said, “is that Sister Joan Esther did it on purpose, to annoy Mother Mary Bellarmine. But you see, we always come down to this one point. The poison—fugu or whatever—was in that particular pâté. I can’t see it there waiting to knock off Sister Joan Esther. There was no way the murderer could know that Sister Joan Esther would be the one standing next to that particular ice sculpture. The question is, was there any way for anyone to know that Mother Mary Bellarmine would be standing next to that particular statue?”
“I don’t know,” Rob Collins said.
That’s another thing that would be nice to find out,” Gregor said.
“Yeah.” Rob Collins shook his head. “Except maybe we won’t ever find anything out, because Jack’s already made his arrest. The prosecutors are furious, by the way. They know they’ve been handed a really bum case. Hell, even the newspapers know it’s a really bum case.”
“You ought to check into the financial arrangements for this field house they’re building,” Gregor said. “I don’t know anything about this Henry Hare, but I didn’t like what I saw of him, and I liked even less what I saw of his wife. And you know what multimillion dollar projects are like. The potential for white collar crime is enormous.”
“I can’t investigate Henry Hare,” Rob Collins said gloomily. “Not while Jack has got that little nun on the leash. I can’t investigate anyone.”
“Mmmm,” Gregor Demarkian said.
“I don’t like this,” Father Tibor Kasparian said. This is not a positive attitude.”
Tibor still had his paper open to the pages with the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot story on them. Gregor contemplated his own face upside down and watched Rob Collins do the same. This was definitely not a positive attitude, but he didn’t know what to do about it. This was definitely not a positive situation. He looked up and watched the maypole in Ararat’s front window. It would have looked gay and bright if Tibor hadn’t ruined it, by letting him know that it portended a party where not just people, but Actual Armenian-American Adults, would have to submit to pushing potatoes with their noses and acting out charades.
“Well,” Rob Collins said after a while, “what do you think we should do? Maybe we could hire somebody to break both of Jack Androcetti’s legs and take him out of the picture.”
“I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “Maybe we could arrange to have him called out of town.”
“Do you have friends who will do that for you from the FBI?” Rob Collins asked.
“Of course I don’t,” Gregor said. “I think movie producers ought to be shot. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has to be the stodgiest organization in the United States government. The Bureau does not go around playacting to make life easier for former agents. And when they try, they blow it.”
“Yeah,” Rob Collins said. “I’ve dealt with the Feds before. They always blow it.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “I wouldn’t say always.”
“Listen,” Linda Melajian said, rushing up to their table. “You’ve got to go see. There’s a big car parked right in front of your house with three men in it dressed all in black and I think they’re looking for you.”
Since Father Tibor lived behind Holy Trinity Church and Rob Collins didn’t live on Cavanaugh Street at all, Gregor Demarkian presumed that Linda was speaking to him. With that assumption, he got up from the table and went to stand beside the maypole in the window. He looked up Cavanaugh Street and found just what he’d been told to look for. There was most certainly a big black car parked on the street in front of his house, and there were most certainly a couple of men dressed in black inside it. That they were looking for him—and not for Donna Moradanyan, Bennis Hannaford, or old George Tekemanian—was tautological.
Gregor strode to the door of Ararat, pulled it open, and went outside.
3
LESS THAN TWO MINUTES later, Gregor was standing on the sidewalk between the black car and his own front stoop, knocking politely on one of the smoked glass windows nearest the street. Behind that window there was some movement to and fro, and then the whirring sound of the electric window opener bringing the glass down. The young man just on the other side of that window was wearing a clerical collar. He looked Gregor up and down and said, “Are you Mr. Demarkian? Mr. Gregor Demarkian?”