Deadly Beloved (23 page)

“What?”

“It will be black gangs, you just watch. That’s what it always is these days. No wonder Africa is always in the middle of some kind of war. These are very violent people we’re dealing with here.”

“What are you talking about?” Liza demanded. “You’re not making any sense at all.”

“Of course I am,” Shirley said. “I’m talking about Negroes. Except we’re not supposed to call them Negroes anymore because the liberals won’t let you do anything. The liberals suck up to them. But everybody knows the truth anyway. You can’t avoid it.”

“I don’t think I want to continue this discussion,” Liza said.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Shirley said, “but I get tired of pretending that I can’t see what’s going on right in front of my nose. I mean, just look around this place. Look around down in ER. All that blood. Children coming in battered. Children coming in drugged up. People shot. It’s always Them.”

I ought to get up out of this chair and move, Liza told herself. I ought to slap this silly woman’s face. I ought to do something. But she was too tired. Her legs felt full of lead. Up at the checkout to the cafeteria line, Liza saw Leyla Williams, one of the best nurses in the Peds ICU and as black as the skirt on a witch’s dress. She started to wave frantically.

“There’s Leyla,” she told Shirley Bates. “Maybe she’ll come over to join us.”

“Leyla?”

Leyla saw them and nodded. Liza started to feel a little better. “Leyla’s one of my oldest friends at this hospital.”

Shirley turned around, saw Leyla coming toward them, and made a face. “And that’s another thing,” she said. “They really can’t keep this up with the affirmative action. Affirmative action. What a name for it. It just means letting in people who aren’t qualified and pretending they can nurse.”

“Affirmative action,” Liza said. “I get it. That’s how you got this job.”

“Pardon me?”

“Never mind,” Liza said.

Shirley Bates gathered her papers together and got up. “I’m going back to work now. I know I have to live with these people, but I don’t have to pretend to like it. You ought to consider these things, Liza. You ought to consider what it means to you to have liberals running the world.”

“Right,” Liza said.

Shirley Bates said, “You shouldn’t let those people fool you. Look what they did to that Congresswoman Corbett, who always made out she was such a big friend of theirs. I mean, most of them are still jungle savages.”

“Good-bye,” Liza said breathlessly, feeling distinctly dizzy. “Go away.”

“I’m certainly going to go away before
she
gets here,” Shirley Bates said.

Shirley disappeared just as Leyla came up. Liza leaned across the table and pushed a chair out for Leyla to sit down in.

“I just had the most extraordinary conversation,” Liza said. “I can’t believe I really heard—”

“We’re all still a bunch of savages and we’d still be cannibals, too, except the police put a lid on it,” Leyla said equitably. “Haven’t you ever talked to Shirley before?”

“Somebody should have warned me.”

“Well, now you’re warned. Don’t worry about it too much. She won’t last long. She has an IQ of minus twelve and she’s a terrible nurse.”

“How did she get the job?”

“She’s the niece of the vice president of the board of directors.”

Liza giggled. “Affirmative action,” she said.

Leyla hooted. “Back when I got hired at this place, the only kind of affirmative action they had was the kind that said people who looked like me couldn’t work here. Did you know I got hired as a nurse’s aide?”

“You mean you came here before you did your training?”

“When I came here, I had an RN from Penn State and a master’s degree in nursing from the Women and Children’s Crisis Program at Columbia Presbyterian. Welcome to affirmative action and 1962. What about you? You can’t look that awful just because Shirley shocked the shit out of you.”

“What? Oh, no. It’s not that. I did a night detail last night and then I came back on shift. I haven’t had much sleep.”

“You shouldn’t do things like that. It’s no better for the patients than it is for you.”

Liza looked down at the table. She had a copy of that day’s
Philadelphia Inquirer
too, but it was still folded and unread next to her cafeteria tray. She looked at the black-and-white photograph of the wreckage of Julianne Corbett’s party and bit her lip.

“Have you ever, I don’t know how to put it, have you ever had information about something important except that the information didn’t make any sense?”

“Like what?”

“Well, you know that woman who’s supposed to have killed her husband and blown up her own car with a bomb?”

“Sure. Patricia Willis. Today they’re saying maybe she tried to blow up Congresswoman Corbett’s cocktail party with a bomb.”

“I know. The thing is, when I first heard the name—the whole name, Patricia MacLaren Willis—anyway, when I first heard the name I thought it was a coincidence, because I used to know a Patsy MacLaren. And then when I saw the picture, I realized that I did know this Patsy MacLaren. I mean, this Mrs. Willis. Except it’s kind of strange. It doesn’t really make sense.”

“It doesn’t make sense how?”

“I don’t know how to put it. I look at the picture, and I definitely recognize it, but it doesn’t look the way it ought to. I shouldn’t be able to recognize it.”

“I think you need more sleep,” Leyla said solemnly.

“I know I need more sleep,” Liza admitted. “It’s just—well, what do you know about this Mr. Demarkian?”

“The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot? I know what I read in the papers. I think that if the
Inquirer
doesn’t let up on that joke, the man’s going to sue them.”

“Do you think he’d be, you know, patient about listening to what I had to say? In spite of the fact that it isn’t very coherent?”

“I don’t know. Do you really want to talk to him?”

“I think I do, yes. I mean, I really don’t want to talk to Julianne, I don’t know why but I don’t—”

“I forgot you knew Julianne Corbett. Vassar.”

“That’s right. Vassar. I don’t know, Leyla, maybe there’s too much rivalry there. Too much jealousy. For me. And I don’t want to go to the police. That doesn’t feel right to me at all. So I thought I’d talk to this Mr. Demarkian and explain what I had to explain and maybe he would listen to me.”

“I don’t see why not,” Leyla said. “Only you’d better be better at explaining it to him than you were at explaining it to me. I still don’t have the faintest idea of what you were talking about.”

“Maybe I don’t have the faintest idea either. It’s right there, you know what I’m saying. It’s right at the edge of my mind. I can’t seem to get ahold of it.”

“So go see this Gregor Demarkian. You’ll have a story you can tell in the cafeteria for weeks. People around here won’t be able to get enough of it.”

“Right,” Liza said, standing up. “I guess I’d better go now. I told them I’d be only about fifteen minutes and it’s been more like half an hour. What an idiot that Shirley Bates is.”

“The world is full of jerks,” Leyla said.

“Right.” Liza picked up her tray. “And my supervisor is one of them. I’ll leave the newspaper for you. I didn’t have time to read it with Shirley blathering away at me.”

“When you meet Gregor Demarkian, find out if he’s really sleeping with that Bennis Hannaford woman,” Leyla told her. “The newspapers are always so vague. It could make a person crazy.”

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN SOMETIMES WONDERED
why he had ever become involved in law enforcement at all. Unlike a lot of the men he had trained with, all those years ago in J. Edgar Hoover’s America, he hadn’t grown up listening to radio serials and dreaming about being Eliot Ness. In his last years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he had often felt like the housekeeper at a fraternity house. There was just so much mess and it kept coming at you. All you could do was sweep it back and shop for bigger brooms, aware from the start that you were never going to get the place cleaned up so that it would stay clean. In Philadelphia these days, he felt more like he was unraveling wool. Crime was a fabric made of yarns and threads. If you picked at it long enough, it came apart in your hands. That was the kind of thing Tibor was always saying, and Gregor didn’t really believe he’d started to think like Tibor. What he was trying to work out was why he felt so much more responsible about it all these days, when he wasn’t paid to investigate criminals, when he wasn’t sworn to eradicate crime. Sometimes he felt as if the Federal Bureau of Investigation was a machine that had worked well with him and worked just as well without him. Now he was out where there were no machines, and nobody else seemed to be taking care of business.

Gregor certainly felt responsible for what had happened to Bennis Hannaford in spite of the fact that it had been her idea to go to that silly cocktail party. Gregor had received an invitation of his own and ignored it. What kept nagging at him in the aftermath of the explosion was that he had known of the link between Julianne Corbett and Patricia MacLaren Willis, thin though it was. He had known that Patsy MacLaren had contributed money to Julianne Corbett’s political campaign. Of course, if that was enough of a link to get somebody’s cocktail party blown up, the entire Philadelphia Main Line ought to look like a Fourth of July fireworks display every Sunday evening in the summer. What Gregor really felt about the breaking of Bennis Hannaford’s arm was scared to death. She hadn’t been seriously hurt, but she had been very close to people who were seriously hurt. One woman was dead. Karla Parrish, the woman Bennis had been standing right next to, was in a coma and no one knew how long it would take her to come out of it, if she ever did. There were people with damage to their eyes and their faces. If Bennis hadn’t been on her way out to have a cigarette, she could have been—anything. It was the first time Gregor Demarkian had ever been grateful for Bennis Hannaford’s nicotine habit.

“The trouble with you,” John Jackman said when he dropped Gregor off on Cavanaugh Street after their trip out to Fox Run Hill, “is that you won’t admit that for all intents and purposes, you’ve married again.”

“I haven’t married again,” Gregor said. His voice sounded very fast, made up of rush. “Bennis and I don’t—I mean, we’ve never even contemplated—”

“I know what you don’t do,” John Jackman said, “but if you think Bennis hasn’t at least contemplated it, then you don’t know Bennis.”

“John, for God’s sake.”

“You’re in each other’s laps all the time. She worries about your cholesterol. You worry about her driving. She fusses with your ties. You complain about the way she spends money. People who see you together think that you’re married. Or at least living together.”

“Living together,” Gregor repeated. Today, not only were all of Donna Moradanyan’s wedding decorations still up, there were new ones. The entire front of the duplex town house Hannah Krekorian shared with Howard Kashinian’s old aunt had been wrapped up in white satin ribbons and decked out in gold satin bows. The town house looked like a gift box of chocolates with radiation poisoning.

“I couldn’t imagine just living with someone,” Gregor told Jackman. “Especially here. Especially on Cavanaugh Street.”

“That kind of thing goes on everywhere these days, Gregor. Even on Cavanaugh Street.”

“Maybe it goes on with teenagers, but it doesn’t go on with middle-aged men like me.”

“Whatever. You’ve been looking green ever since Bennis got hurt. I’m just saying that if you made this official in some way, people would understand better why it is you’re concerned. They’d cut you more slack—”

“I don’t need any more slack,” Gregor said quickly. “I’m fine.”

“Sure you are.”

“And it’s you she had the affair with,” Gregor pointed out. “You said at the time she knew better what she wanted than any woman you’d ever known. I’d think that if Bennis actually wanted the kind of thing with me you’re talking about, I’d have heard about it by now.”

John Jackman looked disgusted. “Get real,” he said. “Women who look like Bennis Hannaford do not make the first move. They don’t have to. Women’s lib or no women’s lib. And besides, she’s come close to making the first move with you a dozen times—”

“Don’t talk nonsense.”

John Jackman had the window next to his elbow rolled all the way down. He was beginning to sweat in the heat and humidity of the evening air. On the corner there was one of those newspaper sales boxes with a copy of the Philadelphia
Star
in its window. The
Star
was running a picture of the woman who had died in the explosion, a posed studio portrait, without the button with its fake fur message.

“Listen,” John Jackman said. “I want you to think about what you want to do next. We have to do something next. We can’t just sit around waiting for this Karla Parrish person to wake up and tell us what we want to know.

“Not that she’s likely to really know anything anyway,” Jackman went on when Gregor said nothing. “She was in Somalia or someplace when Mrs. Willis decided to off Mr. Willis.”

“Rwanda.”

“Wherever. Dan Exter thinks we’re all just spinning our wheels.”

“We are.”

“Well, we have to stop. I’d tell you to say hello to Bennis for me, but she doesn’t want to hear it. Does she curse me out when I’m not around?”

“She doesn’t talk about you at all.”

“It figures,” John Jackman said. “I’ve been thinking lately about getting married, Gregor. I’ve been thinking it wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Even with all the responsibilities.”

“Do you have somebody in particular in mind?” Gregor was honestly interested. Bennis was the only woman he had ever seen John Jackman with for longer than a week and a half.

John started to roll up his window. Gregor could hear the car’s air-conditioning system grinding away. The engine was rumbling and shuddering under the hood. “I always have somebody in particular in mind,” John said. “The problem is, I have a couple of somebodies in mind every month. I’ll be down here for breakfast tomorrow at seven, okay?”