Not a Creature Was Stirring (3 page)

He hadn’t told Susan she’d have to sleep with him if she wanted her credit, either. He might have implied it, but he hadn’t said it. He never made promises he had no intention of keeping.

“Miss Carpenter,” the fish was saying, “has submitted to us a photocopy of this—”

Teddy closed his eyes. A photocopy. Yes, he’d been waiting for a photocopy. After all, Susan Carpenter wasn’t the first. She wasn’t even the twentieth.

“Professor Hannaford,” the chairman said solemnly.

Teddy looked up quickly. He had broken out in a cold sweat.

“You understand,” he said, “that every professor has this problem from time to time with students, especially female students, who think they haven’t received the grade they, uh, deserved.”

“It comes up,” the chairman agreed, and then spoiled it by saying, “rarely.”

“Yes,” Teddy said. “Well. Rarely or not, it comes up. If you’ve read Miss Carpenter’s paper—”

“I have not.”

“Well, read it. You’ll see it’s nothing
NEJLA
would be interested in. Miss Carpenter’s, ah, communications skills are not of the highest. As for research—”

“Yes?”

“There isn’t any,” Teddy said. “It was an exposition. Textual analysis.”

“And Miss Carpenter’s analytical skills are not of the highest?”

“They’re nonexistent.”

“Ah.” The chairman sat back and folded his hands over his stomach. He no longer looked like a fish. He looked like a pregnant frog.

“I see,” he was saying. “This should be relatively easy to clear up. We have Miss Carpenter’s paper. We have your article—has it been published yet?”

“No,” Teddy said, knowing this was the worst luck of all. “It’s due in their spring issue.”

“I see. Do you have a copy?”

“Of course.”

“Fine, then. We’ll have both the paper and the article. We’ll have copies made before the hearing. Then, at the hearing—”

“What hearing?”

“The departmental hearing,” the chairman said. “There’ll have to be one. If the charges had any merit, there’d have to be a hearing in the Faculty Senate as well, but as you’ve assured me—” The chairman didn’t look assured. He looked, in fact, rather smug. Teddy was suddenly sure the chairman had known about his papers for years.

Just then, the buzzer went off on the chairman’s phone. The chairman picked up, grunted a few times, and then hung up again.

“That was Miss Holcomb in the office,” he said. “It’s a Mrs. Richard Van Damm. She says she’s your sister. She says it’s urgent.”

The chairman looked as if he thought Teddy had fixed this up just to escape from the interview, but Teddy didn’t care. Myra, of all people. Bless her malicious little heart. Myra could make an emergency out of a lost earring, but Teddy wasn’t going to tell the chairman that.

After all, for the moment, she was his salvation.

When the phone rang, Bobby Hannaford was sitting on the king-size bed in the second-floor master suite of his $1.5-million house in Chestnut Hill, trying to extract forty-two $100 bills from the waistband of his boxer shorts. It would have been easier if he hadn’t been so edgy, but he was always edgy on the days he saw McAdam. When the bell went off, he jumped half a foot in the air, scattering bills everywhere. He had to get down on his hands and knees to rescue the two that blew under the night table. When he got up, he was breathing heavily, and he still had money in his underwear. He snatched at the receiver with all the good humor he could muster, which was none at all.

“Bobby? Bobby, I know it’s probably a bad time, but I’ve got to talk to you.”

Bobby paused in his struggles with elasticized 100 percent cotton. He’d know that voice anywhere. When he died and went to Hell, it would be waiting for him in the fiery pit, right along with Donald McAdam.

“Shit,” he said, extracting another $600 from his shorts. He didn’t need Myra. He needed to think about McAdam. McAdam was getting crazy. If he got crazy enough, they were both going to get caught.

Bobby knew exactly what getting caught would mean. He’d gone about white-collar crime the way he went about everything else. He’d done a cost-benefit analysis. The benefit: three-quarters of a million dollars so far, in cash, most of it still in the tempered steel wall safe in his room at Engine House. The cost: either nothing, or public exposure, an IRS judgment, a criminal trial, and Leavenworth.

Leavenworth, in the name of Christ Jesus.

“Bobby,” Myra said.

“I’m here,” Bobby said. “Just a minute. I was changing when you called.”

“Stop changing for a minute. This is serious.”

“Myra, with you everything is serious.”

Myra snorted. “Stop acting like my algebra teacher. You’re as worried about this as I am. And you know it’s important. You said yourself—”

“I remember what I said, Myra.”

“When you want to,” Myra said. “I’ve called them. They’re coming. Whether that’s going to do the trick, I don’t know.”

“It can’t hurt. At least it will take his mind off us. If he runs that audit—”

“I don’t know,” Myra said. “The company has to be audited sometime.”

“This would be a directors’ audit,” Bobby said, “not the usual annual pain in the ass. You know he just wants to cause trouble—”

“Maybe he does,” Myra said, “but—”

“And don’t forget. You’re the one on the books with thirty thousand nobody knows where it came from. Except you, of course.”

There was a pause on the line. “That was low, Bobby. That was very low.”

“I’m not your husband,” Bobby said. “You can’t fool me. If you hadn’t had a stake in this yourself, you’d have left me to paddle my own canoe.”

“Maybe I should have.”

“I could answer that, Myra, but I don’t want to be indiscreet over the phone.”

There was another pause, a longer one this time. Bobby felt a little spurt of fear climb up his spine. Myra was a smart woman, and a vindictive one. And right at this moment, he needed her. He needed her more than she could know.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long day. And we don’t have anything to worry about now. They’re coming. It’ll take care of everything.”

“I hope so, Bobby.”

“I know so. He’ll be so worked up over Bennis, he won’t have time for us.”

“Are you sure there isn’t something you’re not telling me?” Myra said. “You haven’t, oh, fiddled with the books or anything? Because if you have—”

“What would I have to fiddle with the books for, Myra? Remember me? I’m the one who got the most money.”

“I remember. You’d think the old goat could just have made a will like everybody else. I wish he had. Maybe somebody would have killed him for it.”

“That’s a very indiscreet thing to say over the phone.”

“Only if he shows up murdered,” Myra said. “All right, Bobby. It’s all set up. Anne Marie’s expecting you on the twenty-third. Try to make it for dinner. There’s a guest.”

“With Mother this ill?”

“You know Daddy.”

The phone went to dial tone.

Bobby replaced the receiver. His mouth felt dry. His chest felt heavy. It hit him suddenly that he was forty-four years old, no longer too young for a heart attack.

In the telephone stall off the first floor sitting room at Engine House, Myra stared at the old-fashioned metal phone and wondered if she’d done the right thing. Get them here, Bobby had said. She had certainly done that. Or would have, when they arrived. Which every last one of them would.

Still, it might have been better if she’d told them the truth. The whole truth. Like the fact that Mother wasn’t securely home from the hospital and doing just fine, but dying. Like the fact that Anne Marie was having some kind of nervous breakdown. Like the fact that Daddy was on the warpath for real this time.

Of course, with that kind of information, some of them might not have come.

She tapped the phone table restlessly, then reached up to stroke the brooch she was wearing, a shiny tin Christmas ball Mother had made as a child. On the table’s polished obsidian surface lay an oversize white visiting card, scribbled over and splotched with fountain pen ink.
“Gregor Demarkian,”
it said.
“Head, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Retired.”

Here was something she hadn’t told anyone about—Daddy’s dinner guest. Two hours ago, she’d never heard of him. Now she just wished she hadn’t. There he was: a man with a funny name who had held the second-most-important position in the most Irish Catholic organization in the U.S. government, a man with a reputation for being both obsessive and fanatical about his work, a man with an even bigger reputation for being right. Myra wondered what he looked like. Myra wondered what Daddy wanted from him.

She tucked the card into her shirt pocket and got up. Anne Marie had taken to listening in on phone conversations, and Myra had no way of knowing if she’d listened in on that last one. She hoped she hadn’t. Things were in enough of a mess already.

It was going to be a hell of a Christmas.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18–SATURDAY, DECEMBER 24

THE FIRST MURDER

W
HEN GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS
very young, his mother told him stories about Armenia. Her Armenia wasn’t the historical Armenia, because she’d never seen that. She had been born in Alexandria and come to the United States before she was twelve. It was Gregor’s grandmother who had been in Yerevan that November of 1915 when the Turks had come. Blood everywhere, horses everywhere, a million and a half dead in less than a year: the stories had come pouring out into the dark of Gregor’s room every night when his mother came to put him to bed. Even now, after more than forty years, he could smell the stink of dying. He thought his grandmother must have been a truly great storyteller. Either that, or his mother had had a genius for imagination. Whichever it was, he found himself—at the age of fifty-five, after a bachelor’s degree at Penn and a master’s at Harvard and a twenty-year stint in the FBI—firmly anchored in the agony of a country he had never seen.

Gregor had been four years old the first time he had heard about the New Armenia—four years old and sitting in this very church, in the second pew from the front on the right—and he remembered that even then he’d thought the idea made no sense. They wouldn’t march back to Asia Minor. They wouldn’t reclaim their land from whoever had it now. They would simply stay in America and build a Real Armenian Culture, distinct but not separate from the Armenian culture around them. How they were supposed to do this, no one knew—especially because the children were having none of it. Still, it inspired them. There would be a Great Cause and a Great Effort, complete with Virtuous Sacrifices. Whatever else was going to happen to them, they weren’t going to get rich.

And now, of course, they had.

Gregor put his hands up to his eyes and rubbed. The liturgy was nearly over, and the church was full of incense. As far as Gregor knew, the peculiar scent of that incense was used only in Armenian Christian churches. He had never encountered it anywhere else. Now he wondered if it was contributing to his feeling of incipient schizophrenia. The smell was right. The words of the service were just what they had been for more than 1,200 years. Even the little priest was right, standing in the center door of the iconostasis, dressed in blue and gold and carrying a great golden cross on a long shaft. It was everything else that was wrong.

He didn’t know what he’d expected. He’d left this small ethnic neighborhood in Philadelphia just after he graduated from Penn. In the thirty-four years since, he had been back exactly twice—once for his wedding, right after his two-year hitch in the army; once about five years after that, in 1962, to see his mother buried from Holy Trinity Church. The years between had been full of changes, for himself and everyone else. He had no right to be disoriented by a Holy Trinity that was not just what it had been when he left.

On the other hand, it was entirely possible that it wasn’t the fact that things had changed that was bothering him, but the way they had changed. When he had first decided to come back to this neighborhood—to come home—he’d half-expected to find nothing to come back to. He’d pressed on simply because he’d had nothing else to do. Elizabeth was dead, fading away finally after years of terror and futility, anger and pain. His job was gone. He’d taken a leave for the last year of Elizabeth’s illness, and when she’d died he’d had neither the energy nor the inclination to go back to work. Then he’d woken up one morning to find himself in a nearly empty apartment in a high-rise off the Beltway, with no idea what day it was or what he was going to do with the day now that he had it, and it began to occur to him that he had to get going again.

He’d been ready to find Cavanaugh Street changed into an Hispanic neighborhood. He’d been prepared to accept it as a battleground for teenage gangs, a strip for prostitutes, a drug bazaar, a burned-out hulk. He’d steeled himself against just about anything, except the sight of Lida Kazanjian Arkmanian in a three-quarter-length chinchilla coat.

The congregation had begun to go up to Communion, making two lines in the outside aisles. The little priest—that would be Father Tibor, the one who had called him—was standing in front of the iconostasis again, holding a large gold cup and a small gold spoon with a handle like an elongated letter opener. As Gregor watched, a boy of no more than three stepped up, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth.

The line reached his pew. If he was going to receive, he would have to go now. Lida slipped out of the pew in front of him and turned, nodding her head vigorously. Gregor hesitated and then shook a negative.

The last Armenian liturgy he had attended had been Elizabeth’s funeral. It had been the last he’d intended to attend. He’d only come here today out of some kind of whim, the way he’d come back to Cavanaugh Street.

The people who had received Communion were leaving by the center aisle. They were moving quickly, in a hurry to get to the church steps and the permissible zone of conversation. One or two of them looked him over as they passed. Many more looked back at him when they thought they were safely beyond his field of vision. His scalp was beginning to tingle. God only knew what kind of stories had been floating around this neighborhood since he’d come back.