Festival of Deaths

by Jane Haddam

  There was nothing to do about this but bull through it. Gregor had bulled his way through meetings with J. Edgar Hoover himself. He’d even bulled his way through a couple with Richard Nixon. Why did dealing with Bennis always seem so much harder? He walked up to the stoop and started to climb the stairs.

  “Bennis,” he said. “I thought you’d be gone by now. I thought you were going to be on your way to New York or Paris.”

  “Tomorrow,” Bennis said vaguely. She was looking at John Jackman. “I was supposed to leave tomorrow.”

  “Hello, Bennis,” John Jackman said.

  “Hello, John.” She turned away and looked toward Gregor for the first time since she had realized that Jackman was with him. “Except now it seems I’m not. Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Gregor took her by the elbow, turned her around, and moved her up the stairs. Her skin felt thick, like gelatin congealed. She was that cold. “I thought it was definite,” he said. “I thought you wanted to get away.”

  “Well, I do.” Bennis was letting herself be pushed. “I even called the travel agent. I even started to pack.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Problem,” Bennis repeated. “Well. Do you know a woman named Helena Oumoudian?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s Sofie Oumoudian’s aunt. Sofie goes out with Joey—”

  “Ohanian. Yes, Gregor, I know. Well, she’s in my living room.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Sofie Oumoudian and Father Tibor put her there,” Bennis said. “She’s got a fractured hip.”

  “She’s got a fractured hip and she made it up to your apartment? Up the stoop flight and then to the second floor?”

  “No. She broke her hip this afternoon. At old George’s place. They sent for the doctor.”

  “That was good.” They had reached the front door. Gregor tried the knob, found that the door had been left unlocked—again—and stepped back to let Bennis go in before him. He tried to let John Jackman in before him, too, but John wasn’t having any. John wanted to take up the rear. “I don’t understand,” he said to Bennis. “If she broke her hip at old George’s place—how did she break her hip at old George’s place?”

  “She and George were doing the tango. George was, you know, lowering her down to the floor.”

  “How’s George?”

  “Contrite.”

  Gregor checked the mail table and noted that his mail had been retrieved already—Bennis was always doing that, so that she could check the return addresses—and that the space where the huge menorah had been was now taken up by an equally huge Santa in his sleigh. Fortunately, the reindeer were not along.

  “So,” Gregor said, “that still doesn’t answer my question. Why is Helena Oumoudian in your living room?”

  “Well, for one thing, everybody agreed—in my absence, by the way, I was not a witness to this tango—that taking her up one flight of stairs to my apartment made more sense than taking her down the stoop flight and across a few blocks and then up I don’t know how many flights to her own apartment.”

  “All right.”

  “And I wouldn’t have minded that,” Bennis said, “because I was going to be leaving anyway and if they wanted to use the apartment for the old lady, who cared, except that isn’t all they wanted. They wanted somebody to take care of the old lady.”

  “What about Sofie Oumoudian?”

  “Sofie Oumoudian is leaving tomorrow on a three-day class trip. Sunday school class. You know. They’re going to Washington to sing Carols on the steps of the capitol. As if that would help.”

  “I should think Sofie would just have to stay here instead.”

  “It would break her heart. According to Tibor.”

  “Then there must be someone else,” Gregor insisted. “Lida. Hannah. I don’t suppose Sheila Kashinian would be any use. Howard would have a fit. How about Donna Moradanyan?”

  “Donna Moradanyan has a child to raise,” Bennis said in exasperation. “And she’s busy. I took her into New York last month to show her portfolio and now she’s working on a book cover for some mystery novel Bantam is publishing. And it’s her first job and she’s got a deadline.”

  “How’s the cover?”

  “It’s a cover painting,” Bennis said, “and it’s wonderful. I wish they’d assign her to me. Sheila Kashinian is never any use.”

  “What about Lida?”

  “Lida and Hannah are preparing to go on a trip,” Bennis said. “Together, I presume. Anyway, they’re much too busy.”

  “I take it they’ve annoyed you.”

  “Everybody’s annoyed me,” Bennis exploded. “Tibor won’t help because besides doing all the Christmas stuff he has to for the church—and there is a lot of it, really, this year, there’s too much—anyway, on top of all that he’s helping David Goldman do a library reading for the first day of Hanukkah for the Bryn Mawr library and he spends all his time walking around his apartment rehearsing his little speech. So he won’t help. And the only good news in all this is that I haven’t already paid for the Concorde tickets.”

  “You absolutely have to stay?”

  “Of course I have to stay. Somebody has to stay. The old woman has to be helped out of her chair and back into it again.”

  “Maybe you could hire a service. A practical nurse. That sort of thing.”

  “A service would take me at least two days to set up. I might as well wait for Sofie Oumoudian. But I don’t want to wait, Gregor. I want to get out of here.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Gregor said. “I’m in the middle of a murder investigation.”

  Bennis gave him the kind of look that suggested he’d invented this murder investigation just to keep her from setting off for Paris and went stomping up the stairs to the second-floor landing. She was wearing her classic hanging-around-the-apartment clothes and draped in her classic hanging-around-the-apartment disarray. Her great cloud of black hair had been inadequately pinned up with bobby pins and was now half falling down. The knee-sock clad feet emerging from the legs of her jeans were wearing no shoes. She must have been freezing out there.

  They got to the second-floor landing and stopped. Through the open door to Bennis’s apartment, Gregor could see past the foyer and into the living room. Helena Oumoudian was sitting in Bennis’s favorite black leather club chair, a tiny queen on an oversize throne, an Empress of the Universe whose diminutive size only underscored the force of her personality. She was dressed in the head-to-toe black lace Gregor remembered from their first meeting in the Oumoudians’ apartment. She was holding her black cane in front of her like Queen Victoria about to chastise Disraeli. Her spine was straight. Her head was held high. Gregor was sure that if he went closer, he would find her eyes as clear and sharp and bright as an evil imp’s.

  “There she is,” Bennis said, looking around Gregor to see inside. “It’s intolerable, Gregor, it really is.”

  “Miss Hannaford?” the sharp old lady’s voice called from inside. “Is that you now? There’s something wrong with the television set.”

  “She can make the cable go out just by looking at it,” Bennis hissed into Gregor’s ear. “What am I supposed to do about this?”

  “Wait a couple of days and leave for Paris,” Gregor said.

  Bennis made an extremely rude gesture and said, “Thanks a lot, Gregor. That’s just what was required in my hour of need.”

  “What else am I supposed to say?”

  “Miss Hannaford?”

  This time the voice was accompanied by a sharp crack, so much like a gunshot that John Jackman jumped.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What was that?”

  “That,” Bennis said, “was Miss Oumoudian’s cane. I’m expecting to find out she’s got a whip hidden in the folds of her dress somewhere and she’s only waiting for a chance to use it.”

  “Now, now,” Gregor said. “It can’t be that bad.”

  Bennis shoved her hands into the pocket of her jeans and glowered.
r />   “Yes it can be that bad, Gregor, yes it can. Trust me.”

  Then she marched past him and into her apartment, slamming the door behind her. Both Gregor and John Jackman winced at the violence of the sound.

  “Well,” John Jackman said after a while. “This Miss Oumoudian isn’t one of the people I’ve met, is she?”

  “You’d remember,” Gregor said. “She’s new. Not in the neighborhood but around the block. She and her niece immigrated from Armenia just after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

  “Immigrated,” John Jackman said. “That’s nice. No wonder you know so much about green cards.”

  “She goes out with one of the boys from the family that owns the Middle Eastern Food Store,” Gregor said. “No, of course she doesn’t. I’m tired, John. It’s her niece—”

  “The one that’s going on the class trip,” John supplied helpfully.

  “Exactly. The niece is Sofie. She was going to high school down the block here and having a little trouble.”

  “A little?”

  “A lot. Tibor and I have been helping to set up a scholarship fund to send her to Agnes Irwin. The problem is convincing old Miss Oumoudian that it wouldn’t be taking charity.”

  “And did you?”

  “Not exactly,” Gregor said. “She thinks the money is going to be paid out for services rendered.”

  “What?”

  Gregor was still staring at Bennis’s closed door. Now he turned away from it and headed up the stairs, shaking his head.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get some work done.”

  “I think it’s really too bad Bennis has decided she hates me,” John said. “I don’t hate her in the least.”

  That was a can of worms that Gregor Demarkian had no intention of opening. He climbed the stairs to the third-floor landing and let them both in to his own apartment.

  2

  IN THE BEGINNING, WHEN Gregor Demarkian had first moved to Cavanaugh Street after the death of his wife, the floor-through apartment whose streetside living room window faced Lida Arkmanian’s upstairs living room window on the other side was mostly bare. Moving in, Gregor had bought the minimum amount of furniture and no decorative elements at all. Coming home one night it had struck him that his apartment looked very much like the apartments of the serial killers he had spent so much of his time tracking down. At least, it looked like the apartments of the neat ones. There was a certain kind of serial killer who liked to imitate a pack rat. He collected the memorabilia of everything, from cereal-box tops to human body parts to string. This kind of serial killer was almost always psychotic. He saw visions and everybody he knew thought he was strange. The neat kind of serial killer was something else again. He was more normal than most of the people he knew, and better adjusted, and better organized—at least on the surface. He was a pathological liar but a meticulous one. His apartment was as antiseptic as the waiting room of a cancer ward. Gregor’s apartment had been antiseptic in that way, too. His foyer had been empty. His living room had contained one couch, one coffee table, and one chair. Women who had visited his kitchen had felt compelled to rearrange it, as if there were something you could do to a bar table and four plain chairs to make the arrangement look more human.

  Gregor Demarkian had made this observation about his apartment three years ago. He had not rushed right out and done anything about it. What he had done instead was to open up another barren part of his life, and one that seemed much more in need of immediate attention: his lack of connection to other human beings. When he came back to Cavanaugh Street and moved into the apartment, he was friendless, in any substantive definition of the term “friend.” Eight months later, he had Tibor in his life and Bennis Hannaford and Donna Moradanyan and Lida Arkmanian and God only knew who else, and curiously enough, there was an entirely different feel to his apartment. It wasn’t that he had made any changes. Gregor was the kind of man who took six months to buy himself a new Jet-Dry bulb when the one in his dishwasher wore out. It was the rest of them who had changed his apartment. Donna Moradanyan had drawn pictures and had them framed and hung them in his foyer, along with everything else she hung in his apartment from time to time, the glowing menorah in his living room window not being the least of them. Bennis had bought him a living room full of house plants, which she watered for him. If she didn’t, they would die. Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian had stocked his kitchen with equipment he never used (he didn’t know what it was all for) and pretty place mats and bright yellow kitchen curtains that at least made the place look less like the utility room at a group home.

  John Jackman noticed the difference as soon as he walked in, and approved. He walked from foyer to living room to kitchen and around again, nodding his head.

  “Not bad. I take it you’re in a better mood than you were during—ah—during the Hannaford case.”

  “Sit down, John. Don’t worry about the Hannaford case.”

  “I try not to.”

  John Jackman sat down on one end of the couch, and Gregor went into the kitchen to do his usual bit with the coffee. Since discovering instant, he no longer made a brew that could be used to clean sewer pipes and probably did when his guests dumped his stuff down the drain. He set the water on to boil and propped open the swing door from the kitchen to the living room, so he and John could talk while he fussed with spoons and cups. He looked into the refrigerator to see if anything had appeared in it while he was gone and saw he was in luck. A plate of mamoul cookies was sitting right next to the only other thing in there, a bottle of Perrier water. The Perrier water belonged to Bennis. The mamoul cookies had a note stuck in with them that said,

  BUY SOMETHING TO EAT, KREKOR, THIS IS NOT GOOD FOR YOU.

  Gregor took the plate out and put it next to the cups.

  “So,” he said to John through the door. “Did you check out the things I asked you to check out?”

  “Yesterday. I told you I checked them out yesterday.”

  “I know. I just want to make sure. I’ve made a great many really stupid mistakes in my life, going with my instincts without making sure.”

  “Yeah. So have I. What do you want to be sure about?”

  “First, about Maria Gonzalez. This would all be a lot easier if you got along with the New York police. …”

  “I get along with the New York police,” John Jackman said. “I just don’t get along with Chickie baby.”

  “Right. About Maria Gonzalez. They searched her apartment.”

  “They did. It was a wreck.”

  “I understand that. Did they find anything missing?”

  “Nothing but what they already knew was missing. Her purse was missing, the one she’d been carrying at work that day. That was it. Of course, that isn’t the most accurate sort of finding. She could have had a stash of Baccarat crystal nobody knew about. She could have had a stash of dope.”

  “But there was never any suggestion that she was involved with dope,” Gregor pointed out.

  “There was evidence to the contrary,” John conceded. “The New York police talked to her neighbors. She went to Mass every morning before work. She baby-sat for other women’s kids. All they seemed to have against her was they thought she was a little too flashy in the way she dressed. Welcome to the big city.”

  “What about things that weren’t missing that should have been? Did they find money in the apartment? Jewelry?”

  “I see what you’re getting at. A thief would have stolen what he’d found, and the apartment was enough of a mess so he’d have found what was there. No, there wasn’t anything like that. Not on the lists I read.”

  “That’s too bad. That means there’s no way we can know for sure.”

  “Do we ever really know for sure, Gregor?”

  Gregor thought he knew for sure often enough, far more often than he could prove it. He got down the pewter tray Howard and Sheila Kashinian had given him for Christmas last year and piled it up with cups of coffee and milk and suga
r and mamoul cookies. At the last minute, he noticed the spoons he had left on the table and put them on too. He usually kept the pewter tray on top of the cabinets next to the refrigerator, which made it something of a stretch to get. Now he flexed his back where the reach had strained it a little. Then he picked up the tray and went into the living room.

  “I don’t suppose it’s information I really need,” he said, “but I like to have everything I can get.”

  “Don’t we all. You going to tell me what this is all about, finally?”

  “Of course,” Gregor said. “We’ve got a serial killer on our hands.”

  “What?”

  “A serial killer,” Gregor said. “A—”

  “Yes, I know,” John Jackman said, “but what is this guy? Bisexual? There are two corpses and a near corpse and one of them is—”

  “Why do you think this has to be sexual?”

  “Isn’t it always? The two I worked before were sexual.”

  “There’s usually a sexual element,” Gregor conceded, “but it isn’t always so obvious. And why do you think it’s a man? Women have been serial killers in a number of well-known cases. Genene Jones, for instance, who murdered all those infants because she liked the high that came from responding to a code blue.”

  “Wonderful,” Jackman said. “What in the name of God makes you think this—this person—is a serial killer?”

  “There’s the correlation in the methods reports, for one,” Gregor said. “I’ve looked at your methods reports on the death of Maximillian Dey. I have also looked, although more briefly, on what you got from the NYPD on the death of Maria Gonzalez. The methods in those two deaths were not similar. They were identical. You could have used one report for the other and nobody would have known the difference.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Gregor said, “it’s true that ordinary murderers repeat their methods. What they do not do is repeat them this closely. In order to repeat this closely—to smash just the same teeth, just the same part of the jaw, just the same place on the cheekbones; the accuracy is astounding for a pair of deaths effected with a blunt instrument—in order to do all that, you’d have to plan. I’d be interested in knowing if New York has any unsolved cases sitting around with identical methods. I would guess they have several.”