Deadly Beloved

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor found Bennis lying on her back on the living room floor, a cigarette in her hand, a rose crystal ashtray planted firmly in the middle of her admirably flat stomach. She was staring at the moldings on her ceiling and humming something by the Eagles under her breath.

  “I thought it was you,” she said. “Are you feeling better now?”

  “I kept expecting you to show up at my front door. Or to send Tibor or Donna or somebody.”

  Bennis took a deep drag and blew out a stream of smoke. “We discussed it, Donna and me. We decided we were doing you more harm than good by fussing over you the way we were. I would have come up after a while though. Maybe about an hour. Just to make sure you weren’t, you know. Suicidal.”

  “Is that the way I appear to you? Suicidal?”

  Bennis took the ashtray off her stomach and put it down next to her on the floor. She held her cigarette high in the air and turned over on her stomach.

  “You seem—odd to me,” she said, “and to Donna too. Not like yourself. Not even like the way you usually are when you’re sad.”

  “I miss my wife.”

  “I know.”

  “I think I miss her all the time. I just don’t notice it usually. I—push it away from me.”

  “Good old testosterone stoicism.”

  “More like good old Bureau training. And the army too, during the period I was in the army. Even the Bureau may have changed by now, I suppose.”

  “I can’t imagine being married,” Bennis said, tapping ash into the ashtray. “I think about it when I’m with Donna sometimes, and I run right into a wall. Did I ever tell you that my mother loved my father?”

  “You’ve mentioned it.”

  “She did too,” Bennis said. “She loved him more than she ever loved any of us and she always knew what he was. I think I grew up thinking it was a kind of disease. Love, I mean. And marriage was just a place where people tried to kill each other off.”

  “It can be a place where people are safe,” Gregor said. “Where you can be exactly who you are and not have to worry about it.”

  “My father was always exactly who he was. He didn’t need my mother for that.”

  “Your father was a psychopath.”

  Bennis put her cigarette out and sat up. Then she reached into her pocket for another cigarette and lit up again. The flame from her lighter made her face look made of shadows and light.

  “Sometimes, when I’m upstairs with Donna,” she said, “I think about them making it permanent, Donna and Russ, you know, and then, even though I know them both, I get sick to my stomach, you know, I just start getting crazy. Does that make sense?”

  “In a way.”

  “If I didn’t have to stick around for the wedding, I think I’d go off to France for a couple of weeks and get into trouble. Maybe you could come with me.”

  “I’d put a damper on your party. I’d want to do nothing but sleep and eat cassoulet.”

  “Gregor, listen. About what you said before. I mean, aren’t you safe with me? Can’t you be yourself with me?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “Only most of the time? I can always be myself with you.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “I should know, Gregor. It’s me we’re talking about.”

  “Bennis, in case you haven’t noticed, there is something you and I don’t do together. And as long as we don’t do that together, then, unless you’re much less vital a person than I have ever suspected, there will be times when you could not possibly be yourself with—”

  “My, my,” Bennis said. “What’s this conversation starting to be about?”

  “I think it had better start to be about dinner,” Gregor said. “Go put on something you can wear where the air-conditioning isn’t turned up to frigid and I’ll buy you dinner at the Ararat.”

  “I think I’d rather go back to that conversation we were just having.”

  “I think I wouldn’t,” Gregor said firmly. “I think we’ve all been… thrown off balance by Donna’s getting married and I think we ought to forget all about it. Go get dressed, Bennis.”

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor like that, Bennis Hannaford looked no more than fourteen years old. Gregor thought she was going to go on insisting, but instead she put her new cigarette out less than half smoked and stood up in a single fluid motion.

  “I’ll only be a minute,” she told him.

  Gregor sat down on the arm of the couch and watched her walk off down the hall to her bedroom, her bare feet making gentle slapping noises against the wooden hall floor.

  TWO

  1.

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN DIDN’T REALLY believe in mysteries. In his experience, what the newspapers heralded as a mystery was often a case of simple arrogance. Most human beings are naturally pessimistic about themselves. They believe in their own incapacities more than in their capabilities. What most people call their conscience is only their wordless conviction that if they do anything in the least bit wrong, they will get caught. Gregor had spent twenty years of his life with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had spent the second ten of those twenty years as the founder and head of what the Bureau liked to call the Behavioral Science Department, as if it were a group of bright young things in lab coats watching rats run around mazes. What it really was was a collection of hardened veterans who spent their time concentrating on the interstate pursuit of serial killers. Gregor had pushed for its establishment because of his frustration at the ineptitude with which the Bureau was investigating the man who turned out to be Theodore Robert Bundy. When Gregor had left the Bureau on his last leave of absence, to care for Elizabeth that last year of her life, it had been going strong, fueled by what had become to seem an epidemic of serial murder. Men who killed women. Men who killed little boys. Men who killed little old ladies who wheeled private shopping carts to their local food co-ops. Gregor couldn’t remember hearing about even one serial killer in all the years he was growing up. Now the world seemed to be full of them. The new director of the Behavioral Science Department had been quoted in Time only a week ago, declaring that the whole thing was the fault of the media. Serial killers killed so that they could get their names in the paper. Andy Warhol had been right. Everybody wanted to be famous for fifteen minutes. Gregor thought that theory was a little bit cracked, but he might be wrong. What he was sure of was that there was no mystery about any of these men. When the police found a twisted silver key lying next to the body of a murdered teenage girl left in a ditch in Tacoma, Washington, it wasn’t because she had the magic treasure chest that would provide the winning lottery numbers for the next sixteen games but didn’t know it. It was just that her murderer wanted to leave a calling card (the serial ones all did that these days; they had all seen the movies about Dahmer and Gacey) or that the key had been lying in the grass and when she had fallen she had turned it up. In the end it would turn out to be more accident than plot. Gregor was sure this thing with Patsy MacLaren Willis would work out that way too. She had decided to kill her husband. She had decided to go out with a bang. Now it was just a question of finding her. What John Henry Newman Jackman needed him for, Gregor didn’t know.

  It was seven o’clock in the morning and Cavanaugh Street was not quite waking up. Gregor had gone through the Philadelphia Inquirer story about Patsy MacLaren Willis twice and come up with nothing more interesting than technical details. The gun that had been used to kill Stephen Willis had been a 657 41 Magnum. The house Patsy and Stephen Willis had lived in at Fox Run Hill was over seven thousand square feet big. He had also drunk two cups of his own very bad coffee. Now he looked out his broad living room window and saw that the light was on, across the street and one floor down, in Lida Arkmanian’s living room. Down the block, all the lights were on in Sheila and Howard Kashinian’s town house. Gregor had grown up on Cavanaugh Street when it was still a very poor and very immigrant ethnic neighborhood. People lived in tenements and did their shopping at markets that see
med to have been lifted whole and intact from Yerevan. Now most of the markets had been replaced by upscale little shops that catered to tourists looking for the “authentic” Armenian artifacts to take home to the suburbs and the tenements had all been converted to town houses and co-ops, where the apartments each took up an entire floor. The people of Cavanaugh Street hadn’t gotten rich, but their children and grandchildren had, and the children and grandchildren had provided. Lida Arkmanian’s reward for thirty years of scrimping and saving and suffocating in a tiny apartment with a window that looked out on a vacant lot was that town house and another house in Boca Raton and a three-quarter-length chinchilla coat. Of Lida’s five children, three were doctors, and two were lawyers with very prestigious Philadelphia firms. Hannah Krekorian’s reward for all the years she came to church in gray cloth coats that didn’t quite fit that she’d found on the sale tables outside the going-out-of-business stores was a duplex co-op with two Jacuzzis and a kitchen big enough to serve a small restaurant. She’d had another duplex co-op just like it a couple of years earlier, but then someone she knew had been murdered in it and she hadn’t felt safe staying there. Her two daughters had chipped in to get her this new place, and to send her to Europe for a month to calm her nerves. Gregor supposed that even he himself was rich, at least as he would have defined the word when he was still a child. He owned this third floor floor-through apartment. He had enough in savings and investments and pensions never to have to work for money again. He bought hardcover books when he wanted them without thinking about what they cost. Now he went all the way up to the broad plate glass of his window and pressed his face against it. Standing like this, he could just see the front steps of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. There was a bus stop right in front of the steps and a streetlamp meant to keep the bus stop “safe.” There was no way to tell if anyone was awake over at the church or not. Gregor turned back and looked at his coffee table. His coffee mug was on it, still half full of his awful coffee. The newspaper was on it too, folded over and looking smudged. Gregor walked away from the window. He picked up the newspaper and threw it in the wastebasket. He stood over the wastebasket, looking at the paper lying in a nest of crumpled Kleenex and the cellophane wrapper from a package of Drake’s Ring-Dings. He always kept Ring-Dings in the apartment for Donna Moradanyan’s son Tommy.

  “What am I doing, exactly?” he asked himself.

  Then he went out into his foyer and took his best navy blue cardigan sweater off the coatrack next to the door. It always seemed to be chilly in the mornings on Cavanaugh Street, except in August, when it was wet and muggy and hot. Gregor let himself out his front door and locked it carefully behind him. He wouldn’t be caught dead treating Cavanaugh Street as if it were a village in the old country, with nothing to worry about from thieves and junkies. He went down the stairs to the second floor and looked at Bennis Hannaford’s door. If he knew Bennis, she would have stayed up all night working and reading and be in no shape to go to breakfast now. He went down another flight of steps to the front hall and looked at old George Tekemanian’s door as if just looking at it could tell him if the old man was awake or not. Old George usually was, in spite of the fact that he was well over eighty. Gregor hesitated only a moment before he knocked. Old George’s voice called out “come in” almost immediately, as if he had been awake in there for hours, just waiting for somebody to show up.

  Old George didn’t lock his door either. Gregor opened it. Old George was sitting in splendor in his bright yellow wing chair, wrapped in a red silk dressing gown, sporting thick socks with bats embroidered on them on his long, thin feet. Old George’s grandson Martin was always buying him things to make him look more sophisticated, but making old George look more sophisticated was a lost cause. Old George’s grandson Martin’s wife was always buying him “healthful” food to snack on, but at the moment old George was eating a Twinkie.

  “Krekor,” old George said. “Would you like to come in and have a Twinkie?”

  Gregor let the Twinkie pass. “I’m going over to get Tibor out of bed,” he told the old man. “Want to come with me?”

  “You won’t get Tibor out of bed,” old George said. “He wakes up at four to read.”

  “Whatever. Maybe we’ll go to the Ararat and have some breakfast.”

  “I don’t think so, Krekor. The Ararat these days is not what it used to be. It is too full of wedding things.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I am very glad Donna is getting married, Krekor, but this is truly crazy. She came down here yesterday with samples of satin ribbon to tie the favors and wanted to know which one I like best. She had two dozen samples, Krekor, and they were all some kind of white.”

  “That sounds more like Donna’s mother than like Donna.”

  “And then there are these showers,” old George went on. “In my day, parties of this kind were for women only. Now they’re all having them and they all expect me to come. Lida. Hannah. Sheila Kashinian. Helen. Everybody.”

  “They expect me to come too. I just don’t go.”

  “You have legitimate excuses. I have nothing. Do you know what they do at these parties?”

  “No.”

  “They play games about sex. That is what they do. They make me blush.”

  “I’m going to go get Tibor,” Gregor said. “Wedding craziness or no wedding craziness, I still have to eat.”

  “I keep telling myself it will be a very good thing for Tommy to have a father who is around the house and wants to take care of him. That is how I get through it all.”

  “I keep telling myself that if it gets very, very bad, I can always take off for the Caribbean for the duration. You’re sure you don’t want to come down with me?”

  “Yes, Krekor. I’m sure.”

  “Say hello to Donna and Bennis when you see them then. I’ve got to be downtown for most of the day.”

  Old George Tekemanian took another large bite of his Twinkie, and sighed.

  2.

  For years, Father Tibor Kasparian had been like nobody else on Cavanaugh Street. An immigrant from Soviet Armenia, a veteran of the gulags and the free-floating religious persecution of the old Soviet empire, he had been not only an oddity but an object of awe. That he should have come through All That and still be as sane and stable as he was seemed like a miracle to people whose idea of adversity ran to rather fuzzy memories of the Great Depression. That he should still be so convinced of the truth of the religion he had been ordained to serve was more than a miracle. It was, according to Mary Ohanian’s passionate declaration, proof positive of the existence of God. Over the years, though, Tibor had become less exotic. The Soviet Union had broken up, making Armenia independent for the first time in almost a century. Refugees had poured onto Cavanaugh Street, as they had onto the streets of every Armenian-American neighborhood in the country. There were other people there now who had been through the kinds of things Tibor had been through, if not for the same reasons. Bennis had put it best one night in the Ararat. The thing about Tibor was not that he had suffered for his faith under the Soviets, it was that he had suffered on purpose. Even now Gregor thought he had never known anybody so determined to get into trouble for his principles.

  Tibor lived in an apartment attached to the back of Holy Trinity Church, reached by walking through a cobblestoned courtyard carefully overhung with vines. The apartment had been designed for a priest and his family. Armenian priests, like those in most of the Eastern churches, were usually married, unless they had been tapped by their hierarchies as possible material for promotion to bishop. Bishops were not allowed to marry—a rule that was left over from the days when the Armenian Church had been part of the Catholic Church. There were a lot of those, Gregor supposed, although the Armenian Church didn’t like to admit to them except when everybody was talking about ecumenism for the newspapers, at which times it was understood that Christians who looked united also looked good. Tibor had had a wife, named Anna, back i
n the Soviet Union, but she had been executed years before he escaped to Israel and came to the United States. Even Gregor, who was Tibor’s closest friend on Cavanaugh Street, had no idea what Anna had been executed for. Tibor now had this huge apartment, given to the priest of Holy Trinity no matter who he was, owned and maintained by the church, and no people to put in it. Sometimes he took in homeless families and refugees, but mostly he just rattled around by himself. And bought books, Gregor thought, as he leaned hard against the front doorbell. Tibor always bought books.

  The sky was gray with clouds but very light. The courtyard in front of Tibor’s door was slick with dew, making it treacherous to walk on. Gregor heard shuffling on the other side of the door and stood back. The door opened and Tibor peered out, fully dressed but mentally on another planet.

  “Oh,” he said. “Krekor. Is it late? I was reading.”

  Tibor stepped back, and Gregor went into the apartment, almost colliding with a tall stack of paperbacks that had been shoved against the walls just inside the front door. It was a very tall stack of paperbacks—as high as Gregor’s waist, and he was a tall man. Gregor leaned over and checked them out. The three on the top were Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy, Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, and the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catechism threatened to destroy the whole pile because, unlike the rest of the books in the stack it was the size of a hardcover book. Gregor saw little pieces of paper sticking out of it, covered with marks from a bright red felt-tip pen. Nobody on earth could read Father Tibor Kasparian’s handwriting. Tibor saw where Gregor was looking, and shrugged.

  “I have one or two philosophical disagreements with the Catholic Church,” he said. “Also, unlike this Pope, I think I like inclusive language, except maybe that I am not ready to call God my mother. Come into the kitchen, Krekor. I was just making coffee.”