Festival of Deaths (10 page)

“That’s right. There were people in and out of the storeroom from about four o’clock in the morning on, and she definitely wasn’t there all that time. She was found around six, maybe six thirty. I’d have to look at the paperwork. I don’t remember.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gregor said. And that was true. Since nobody had asked him to investigate this case, and since he had no intention of investigating this case, he didn’t need to be picture perfect about details. His curiosity could be satisfied by broad strokes. “It was a while, and she wasn’t there to begin with. I’m not an expert on skull bashing, you know. My expertise was always poisons.”

“She didn’t have anything to do with any poisons.”

“What about dope?”

“Not a trace. Not in her apartment, not in her office, not in her body, not in the storeroom.”

“What about other things? Cash? Jewelry? Credit cards?”

“She was an immigrant from somewhere in Central America. She lived in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood that was also heavily poor. She made less than five hundred dollars a week. She didn’t have any cash. She had about a thousand dollars in a savings account and a little over two hundred in checking. She had a pair of gold earrings. She was wearing them when she was found. She had a rosary made out of turquoise. It was found in her apartment. She had a Visa card with a clean balance. It was missing. Along with her wallet.”

“Did you check the records?” Gregor asked. “Deposits and withdrawals?”

“We checked. No big deal.”

“It does sound like a mugging, doesn’t it? Except for the business with the body. I take it, from the way you’ve been talking, that she wasn’t actually killed in the storeroom.”

“She was not.”

“In her apartment?”

“Nope.”

“Any idea where?”

“I could say nope again,” Don Elkham said, “but it would be redundant. You see what Chickie’s problem is here. He can’t just write it off as a run-of-the-mill mugging. It just won’t fit. He went through that whole building—the building where the body was found—just on the off-chance she was killed somewhere on the premises, but no luck. He went through the building where her apartment was, too. He didn’t find anything, but what if he had? It still wouldn’t spell mugging. Not with the corpse traveling around like Marco Polo.”

The waitress came up with their drinks. Don took his martini and gulped it. Gregor took a sip of his Burgundy, decided it was as bad as the food was going to be, and put his glass down. Then he watched Don take a second gulp and wondered just what was going on here.

“I thought,” he said, after Don had put down his glass, “that you were going to ask me to stay out of this, assuming anybody involved ever asked me in. But you don’t seem to be.”

“It isn’t necessary,” Don said.

“What do you mean, it isn’t necessary? Because the problem is in New York and I’m here?”

“No, not because of that. You travel. That’s how you got in all the magazines. The Armenian-Ameri—never mind.”

“Good.”

“The thing is,” Don said, “Chickie doesn’t care. If you’re involved or not, I mean.”

“Then why set up this lunch?”

“Because he doesn’t want to be left in the dark, that’s why. He doesn’t want to wake up one morning and find out you’ve solved his case for him and your picture is all over the
Daily News
and he hasn’t got the faintest idea what’s going on. He doesn’t want to look stupid in front of a bunch of television reporters.”

“So what does that mean?” Gregor asked. “What am I supposed to do?”

Don Elkham shrugged. “Do anything you want. You will anyway. I’ll give you Chickie’s number if you decide you want to play it ethical for once. Of course, I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the greatest amateur detective since Sherlock Holmes, which is what you are according to
Life
magazine last I heard, but still—”

But still.

Gregor thought it was going to be a miracle if he got out of this restaurant without breaking Don Elkham’s neck.

T
HERE IS A POINT
in the progress of celebrity when a man goes from being famous on occasion—when he has a new book published; when the law firm or the government agency he works for takes on a particularly important case—to being famous all the time. Gregor Demarkian had passed that point somewhere in the middle of investigating a murder at a convention of nuns. At least, he had passed that point in Philadelphia. It was possible that in New York or Los Angeles, he would be able to go for weeks at a time without anyone calling him up to ask for his favorite recipe for chocolate fudge brownies or his favorite prediction for who would win the World Series. Gregor didn’t know, because he hadn’t been out of Philadelphia since last Christmas, when he and Bennis had taken Tibor on a short “vacation.” Even then, his reputation had been pushing the line. It was now impossible for him to go anywhere where there had been the smallest amount of public violence without the local papers speculating that he had been called in to “consult.” He was beginning to think there wasn’t a town in America that didn’t have at least one unsolved, nonroutine murder on its police blotter, just waiting for the ministrations of the man the
Philadelphia Inquirer
had dubbed “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” In Philadelphia the situation was worse, because the situation was less focused. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
had stopped expecting Gregor to leap into the middle of any case that took its fancy. If Gregor didn’t say he was working on a solution to a murder,
The Inquirer
left it to the Philadelphia police. What
The Inquirer
did do was publish any picture of Gregor it could find—and there were a lot of them, because once the word was out that
The Inquirer
was paying, there were dozens of paparazzi manqué willing to pop their flash bulbs and bring back the trophy. Over the last few months,
The Inquirer
had published pictures of Gregor coming out of a restaurant, going into three different branches of the public library, and running to catch a bus. When there was the reasonable resemblance of an excuse, the paper got more elaborate. When Gregor had volunteered (as a result of Bennis’s threat that she’d play Axl Rose tapes in his ear if he refused) to serve as a draw at the annual Armenian Street Festival to benefit the Society for a Free Armenia,
The Inquirer
had published a solid page of pictures of Gregor getting pies thrown at his face.
Philadelphia
magazine had gone one better. It had published a full-page, full-color print of Gregor after a pie had caught him square on the nose. That was the same issue of
Philadelphia
that had contained the information that Gregor’s favorite food was Sara Lee’s chocolate fudge cake. This did not happen to be true—Gregor didn’t like packaged cake of any kind, and if he had he wouldn’t have admitted it; Lida Arkmanian would have murdered him—but it resulted in exactly 4,678 Sara Lee fudge cakes being delivered to Gregor’s door, six by messenger.

The nonsensical pictures of Gregor published in
The Inquirer
appeared on what used to be called the “Society Page” and was now called “Lifestyles,” and it was a picture from the “Lifestyles” page that was tacked to the bulletin board just behind the cash register at Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store when Gregor came in after his lunch with Don Elkham. Actually, it was well after. Lunch had been predictably terrible, and Gregor had felt the need to walk it off. He’d done some shopping and some reading at the library and some wandering around near the historic monuments before deciding it was time to get home. Now it was dark and wet and cold and he was carrying an unwieldy package full of new ties in tie boxes. Why they couldn’t just fold ties into little lumps and put them in a bag was beyond him. The picture on Ohanian’s bulletin board was of him standing around at intermission at a performance of the Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra. Bennis was at his side looking like a bird of paradise. He was in his brown suit looking like a lump. He rang the bell on Ohanian’s counter, readjusted the tie boxes in his arms, and sighed.

“Mary?” he called out. “Michael?”

There was a rustle of curtains at the back and a young boy stuck his head through to the front.

“Oh, Mr. Demarkian. Just a minute, will you? I’ve got a little problem here.”

The head disappeared behind the curtains again. Gregor put the tie boxes down on the counter. The head belonged to Joseph Ohanian, also known as Joey, who was just sixteen and supposed to be away at school at Deerfield. What he was doing home, Gregor didn’t know.

The curtains rustled for a third time and Joey came out, looking hot and frazzled. “Boxes,” he said with exasperation. “Dozens of boxes of canned stuffed grape leaves. Can you imagine that? My mother would eat canned stuffed grape leaves about the time she’d eat cyanide. She says we’ve got to stock ’em for the tourists.”

“Where is your mother?”

“With my sister and everybody else in the neighborhood. Over at Bennis Hannaford’s getting ready to watch that sex show.”

“What?”

There was a crash from the back room, and Joey winced. “Just a minute,” he said, and disappeared behind the curtain again.

Gregor left the ties where he had laid them down and went to the back of the store to get some cheese from the refrigerated compartment. While he was back there he picked up a can of smoked oysters and a jar of marinated artichoke hearts. With bread and pastry from the front, he could have what Bennis called one of his “perfectly awful dinners”—and nobody would bother him about it, because they would all be down at Bennis’s watching “that sex show.”

He wondered what sex show.

He put the oysters and the artichokes and the cheese down on the counter and watched Joey come back out through the curtains, more flushed than ever.

“A loaf of pideh,” he said. “And about a pound of bourma.”

“A
pound
? Are you having company, Mr. Demarkian?”

“If I were having company, I’d get two pounds.”

“Bennis Hannaford told my sister Mary the other day that you really have to watch what you eat from now on because you’re beginning to look less like Harrison Ford than like James Earl Jones, except of course you’re white, but Mary said she thought James Earl Jones was the sexiest man in movies, so Bennis said—”

“I thought you were supposed to be away at prep school,” Gregor interrupted. “Don’t you go to Deerfield? Weren’t you there last year? Don’t tell me the school year hasn’t started yet?”

The pideh were piled in a pyramid under the bulletin board with Gregor’s picture on it. The bourma were in a glass-fronted display case to the left of the cash register. Joey got the pideh first, put it in a paper bag, and put the bag down next to Gregor’s other things. Then he went to get the bourma.

“I’m sorry if I put my foot in it,” Gregor said. “I hope you haven’t been expelled or something worse.”

“No,” Joey said. “I haven’t been expelled. It’s just that I’ve been thinking.”

“About what?”

“Well, about places like Deerfield. They’re not fair, are they? I mean, it’s all well and good to say I got in because I worked hard and I’m smart—I mean, I did and I am—but that’s not the point, is it?”

“What is the point?”

“Well,” Joey said, “the point is, it wouldn’t matter how good or how smart I was, if my parents didn’t have the money, I couldn’t go. And it’s a lot of money, Mr. Demarkian. Almost fifteen thousand a year.”

“Are your parents having money trouble?”

“No, no. Not at all. That’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if they were having money trouble, or if they were poor, you know, because they just were or because they’d just immigrated to this country, you know, if it was something like that, it wouldn’t matter how smart I was, I would never be able to go. You were smart. You didn’t go to Deerfield.”

“That was a different era. If you don’t go to Deerfield, where do you go?”

“Well, my parents keep saying there are lots of good private schools in Philadelphia if I want to commute, you know, but they’re missing the point. I want to go to public school, you know, like a regular person. But the public school I’d have to go to from here is—uh—you know—like it’s dangerous. There have been a couple of shootings. That kind of thing. And so—”

“Joey,” Gregor said patiently. “Where are you going to school?”

“I’m not,” Joey said.

“You’re not,” Gregor repeated.

“I’m taking a year off,” Joey said. “I can do that. I’m sixteen. Legally, I don’t have to be in school at all.”

“Wait a minute,” Gregor told him. “Let’s work this out. Last year you were at Deerfield. Right?”

“Right.”

“This year you didn’t want to go back to Deerfield. Right?”

“Right.”

“You wanted to go to the local public school.”

“Right.”

“Which is the kind of place where students shoot each other.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“And when your parents wouldn’t let you go to this public school, you decided to take a year off.”

“You got it.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “What’s her name?”

Joey started, and then he began to blush. “Ah,” he said. “Well. Gee. How did you figure that out?”

“Is she Armenian?” Gregor asked.

“Armenian from Armenia,” Joey said. “Sofie Oumoudian. She came over with the first batch of refugees Father Tibor sponsored. She’s really very—”

“Does she have parents?”

“She lives with her aunt. Her father died when she was six and her mother died in the earthquake. In Armenia. A couple of years ago. You remember. Anyway, uh, she really is a very unusual person. Very beautiful, but not in an American way. Small and round instead of tall and thin, but it fits her. I don’t know. And very gentle. And very courageous. She had to be very courageous because she’s very religious, and back in Armenia when she was growing up, being religious—”

“Stop,” Gregor said.

“Sorry,” Joey said. “Look. I know that public school is dangerous. Sofie had her wallet stolen at knife point three times last year. I can’t just let her—”

“Let me tell you something else you can’t do,” Gregor said, “you can’t defend her from the kind of person who would stick her up at knife point in a school hallway because that person almost certainly belongs to a gang and almost certainly is taking cocaine and almost certainly doesn’t give a damn whether he gets hurt or not, but you do and that will get you killed.”