by Jane Haddam
The Ararat was always so dark at night, it was difficult to get a grip on anything, even when it was happening right next to you. It took Gregor a good half-minute to adjust his eyesight to the dimness in the middle of the room, and to begin to pick out familiar figures at the tables there. Lida Arkmanian was there, having dinner with Hannah Krekorian and the older Mary Ohanian. Sheila and Howard Kashinian were there, having dinner together and alone and looking sour-faced and grim in the conduct of it. Even Bennis Hannaford was there, having dinner with old George Tekemanian’s grandson Martin and his prissy daughter-in-law Angela, who were probably telling her off for letting old George have food that wasn’t on his diet. Martin and Angela Tekemanian regularly took Bennis Hannaford out to lecture her, and Bennis regularly let them. In her opinion, the reason they really wanted to take her out was that she had made her debut at a good ball on the Main Line and at the Philadelphia Assemblies, and that was the kind of thing Angela was impressed by.
At the round table in the very center of the restaurant, however, was the star of their show: Donna Moradanyan. For once she had neither her small son Tommy nor her formidable mother with her. She was alone with her beloved, Russ Donahue, once one of John Jackman’s best and youngest homicide detectives. Russ was tall and spare and redheaded, a curiosity on Cavanaugh Street, filled with the dark-haired children and grandchildren of Armenian immigrants—but he was sitting down. Donna was standing up, and she was something of an anomaly too. Tall and blond and athletic, Donna was the least Armenian-looking woman Gregor had ever seen, although she was definitely Armenian. All four of her grandparents had come from Yerevan.
Donna was standing next to the table, holding the little glass candleholder in her hand. The candle was still lit, which seemed strange to Gregor. Shouldn’t waving it around in the breeze like that have blown the flame out? Donna was waving herself around in the breeze. She was wearing one of those spaghetti-strapped A-line shift things with a T-shirt under it. Gregor had seen them everywhere in Philadelphia that spring. The shift was bright red and the T-shirt was stark white. There was something about the way Donna was standing that made her seem just on the edge of violence.
“Oh, dear,” Tibor said in a whisper. “I think there is something very wrong here, Krekor.”
Tibor’s whisper carried, although Donna didn’t seem to hear it. The whole of the Ararat had gone deathly still. Even the tourists were quiet, and tourists, in Gregor’s experience, never shut up.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” Donna said in a clipped, angry voice. “I’m not even sure I care anymore. But if you think I’m going to let you get away with this—”
“Donna, for God’s sake,” Russ said, starting to stand up.
Donna put a hand on Russ’s shoulder and pushed him back. Russ wasn’t expecting the move. He staggered sideways a little and then dropped back into his chair. If he had gone sideways half an inch more, he would have ended up on the floor. He looked stunned.
“Donna,” he said.
“Oh, he shouldn’t say it like that,” a woman at a nearby table hissed. Gregor thought it was old Miss Belladarian, ninety-five if she was a day and a lifelong member of the Society for the Prevention of Vice. “He sounds so weak.”
Old Miss Belladarian was sitting with old Mrs. Vartenian, one of the street’s prime harridans. She nodded vigorously now and said, loud enough to be heard in Delaware, “Yes, yes. He should be forceful. He should be a man.”
Oh, for God’s sake, Gregor thought.
Old Miss Belladarian was sighing. “Men aren’t what they were in my day,” she said piously. “They’ve lost their manliness to all this new world feminism.”
“Nonsense,” old Mrs. Vartenian said. “Men were never anything but a pack of children with less common sense than God gave chickens, but they ought to act like men. They have an obligation.”
Gregor’s head was beginning to hurt again.
Donna was waving the candle around in its holder. The flame still had not gone out. It was beginning to look like a kind of miracle.
“I’ve had it with you,” Donna said, sounding tremulous. “I really mean it, Russell. I’ve had it with you.”
“Why?” Russ asked desperately. “Donna, what the hell is going on here? All I said was—”
“You don’t understand one thing about me,” Donna said. “Not a thing. Not after all this time.”
“Donna, listen—”
“And I can’t trust you. That’s the important part. I can’t trust you as far as I can throw you.”
Russ looked stunned. “Trust me? What does any of this have to do with trusting me? All I said was—”
“Ah,” old Mrs. Vartenian said. “I see what all this is about now. This is about sex.”
Old Miss Belladarian blushed.
Old Mrs. Vartenian starting talking in rapid-fire Armenian, which made Father Tibor Kasparian blush.
Donna seemed suddenly to become aware of the candle and the candleholder in her hand. She looked at it with an expression that seemed to say that she was looking at a dog turd, then turned around, raised it over Russ Donahue’s head, and sent it hurtling to the floor. The floor of the Ararat was hardwood. The thin glass of the candleholder shattered into a thousand shards. The candle rolled, still burning, down the slight slope caused by the warp in the floor toward Gregor Demarkian’s table. It came to rest under Sheila and Howard Kashinian’s table. The flame began to lap blackly against the hem of their tablecloth.
“Jesus Christ,” Howard said, bending over almost double in an attempt to stamp the fire out.
Sheila looked at him in exasperation and put the flame out with her shoe. “Ass,” she said.
“You,” Donna Moradanyan said to Russ, “are absolutely impossible.”
Then she stomped away from him, past Gregor and Tibor, past old Mrs. Vartenian and old Miss Belladarian, past Howard and Sheila, out into the purple night. She left the door to the Ararat open when she went, caught in a heavy dark breeze and groaning slightly under the sound of the wind.
“Jesus Christ,” Howard Kashinian said again.
Russ Donahue was still sitting in his chair, looking embarrassed and upset and confused and angry all at once. He was much too aware of the people around him, staring in his direction, talking in whispers that weren’t really whispers. Gregor had a crazy urge to go tell old Mrs. Vartenian to get herself a better hearing aid. If the woman wanted to conduct her gossip in full view of the general public, then she ought at least to be able to manage a real whisper.
All of a sudden Linda Melajian rushed forward out of nowhere and snatched the candle out from under Howard and Sheila’s table. The edge of the tablecloth was singed black. Linda began to hurry toward the back.
“Somebody close the door,” she called over her shoulder, sounding nothing like a Gypsy at all. She didn’t even sound like an Armenian. “Oh, dear,” she kept saying. “What are we going to do now?”
Somebody shut the door. Gregor didn’t see who it was. Bennis Hannaford stood up at her table in the back and came into the center of the room to where Russ was. Russ was still sitting stunned in his chair, his mouth hanging slightly open, his hair wet with sweat.
“What happened?” he demanded when he saw Bennis. “What’s going on here? All I said was that I liked her hair down around her shoulders instead of pinned up. That’s all I said.”
“It doesn’t matter what you said,” Bennis Hannaford told him.
Russ rubbed the palms of his hands in front of his face.
Bennis saw Gregor and Tibor, walked over to their booth, and threw herself down on one of the cushions.
“Well,” she said. “It finally happened. I’ve been waiting for it for weeks, and now it’s finally happened.”
“What’s happened?” Gregor demanded. “What are you talking about?”
Bennis took her pack of Benson and Hedges out of the pocket of her skirt, lit up, and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. The front booth
was the only place in the Ararat where customers were allowed to smoke. Linda Melajian’s mother hated smoke, and she thought that if Bennis was made uncomfortable enough, she would stop smoking altogether. Linda Melajian’s mother did not know Bennis Hannaford as well as she should have.
Bennis took another drag, released another stream of smoke, and sighed.
“Gregor,” she said, “if Donna Moradanyan ever actually ends up at the altar, it’s going to be a miracle. Trust me. It’s going to be a very big miracle.”
Gregor—who had lived with the preparations for Donna’s wedding for so long now that he sometimes found himself thinking it had already happened—felt as if he’d fallen down the rabbit hole.
SIX
1.
THE NEWS ABOUT THE woman they called Mrs. Patricia Willis had been everywhere for so long, the news about the arrival of Karla Parrish had been wiped out of public consciousness. Julianne Corbett knew, because she had been watching. She had been watching the story about Mrs. Willis intently. It isn’t every day that one of your constituents kills her husband and blows up her car in a municipal parking garage. The story was beginning to take on that eerie timeless quality of an urban legend. There was also the practical factor. Nobody got into the United States Congress on talent, experience, or good intentions. It took money, and that meant campaign contributions. Tiffany Shattuck had found Mrs. Willis’s name on the contributors’ list the night the explosion happened—and called Julianne about it, at four o’clock in the morning, as if it had been late-breaking word of a presidential assassination.
“She gave us a lot of money,” Tiffany had informed Julianne as solemnly as she could when she had had no sleep and far too much beer. “Over and over again. She was a very solid supporter of your campaign.”
Julianne might have been angry, but she had been restless and agitated and unable to sleep, and when the phone rang she had been sitting up in bed going through all one hundred and twenty-four stations on her cable-ready TV, looking for something to watch that made some sense. American Movie Classics was showing Take Care of My Little Girl, a just-after-World-War-II social-conscience film where Jeanne Crain learns the evils of the sorority system from an ex-G.I. who has come to her campus on the G.I. bill. At least four stations were showing infomercials about exercise equipment. (Who bought exercise equipment at four o’clock in the morning?) The rest of the offerings all seemed to be religious. Julianne didn’t really mind Mother Angelica, but at four A.M. all the offerings on the Eternal Word Television Network were in Italian. She had been about to hunt through her night table for her crossword puzzle books when Tiffany had started heavy breathing in her ear.
“What if somebody finds out?” Tiffany demanded. “I mean, this is the biggest scandal since I don’t know what. The biggest scandal ever in the state of Pennsylvania, I bet.”
Maybe that was true. Julianne didn’t know much about scandals in the state of Pennsylvania. They hadn’t been on the menu when she was going to elementary school. What had been on the menu, as far as she could remember it, was what would now be called sexual harassment. It was as clear to her now as it had been at the time—the day Bobby Brenderbader had copped a feel at the drinking fountain; the day John Valland had snapped her bra strap in class while Mrs. Magdussen was explaining the virtue of the Union side in the Civil War. Julianne shook it all out of her head and brought herself back to the present. A middle-aged balding man whose belt was just a little too tight was going on and on about how Christ led him to understand the importance of complex carbohydrates.
“She couldn’t have been a really huge contributor,” Julianne said reasonably. “I would have heard about it.”
“You did hear about it,” Tiffany persisted. “She was on the November list. You must remember.”
“I don’t remember. Tiffany, for God’s sake, there were two hundred people on that list.”
“I know, I know.”
“Was she at the reception?” Julianne’s campaign staff had given a reception for her two hundred largest noncorporate contributors, just to stay in touch.
Tiffany cleared her throat. “No, she wasn’t. We sent her an invitation and she didn’t answer it. She didn’t even RSVP. We followed up on it.”
“And?”
“And I suppose she said she couldn’t come,” Tiffany said irritably. “I don’t know. I didn’t handle her invitation. We had a whole committee to handle invitations.”
“Yes, Tiffany. I remember.”
“I still say we ought to take it seriously. In this day and age, I mean. It could come back to haunt us in the next election.”
“I don’t think so, Tiffany. Didn’t Rosalynn Carter have her picture taken with John Wayne Gacey?”
“President Carter didn’t get elected again either. Julianne, really. You ought to do something about this.”
“What?”
“What do you mean, what? Something.”
“Well,” Julianne said reasonably. “I can’t very well give the money back, can I? The woman is dead. Her husband is dead. I’m probably broke. What am I supposed to do?”
“The woman isn’t dead,” Tiffany said. “Did you hear that on the news? Did I miss something?”
Julianne reached into her night table for the Tylenol. “No, no,” she said reassuringly. “It was just a slip of the tongue. I suppose I’ve been thinking she must be dead. Since nobody can find her.”
“She’s probably in Bolivia.” Tiffany snorted. “If it was me doing something like that, I’d take a lot more than fifteen thousand dollars. You can’t get anywhere on that kind of money these days. Maybe you should issue a press release.”
“Saying what?”
“Saying that even though she was a large contributor, you’d never even met her.”
Julianne swallowed a Tylenol dry, and then another. “I think that would only call attention to something it’s unlikely would be noticed any other way. Don’t be silly, Tiffany. It’s late. Go back to sleep.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Work on the Karla Parrish reception, then. It’s—what? Soon.”
“I can’t work on the Parrish reception. I can’t think of anything but this. It’s the creepiest thing I ever heard of.”
Four years before, a young woman living near Pittsburgh had killed both her small children because her new boyfriend had promised to marry her if she did. This was not the creepiest thing Julianne had ever heard of. She shifted a little in bed and stretched.
“Go to bed,” she told Tiffany. “Seriously. Or work on something current. Stop worrying about Mrs. Willis.”
“Nobody calls her Mrs. Willis on television,” Tiffany said. “They always call her Patricia. As if they didn’t want you to know she was his wife. Do you think all men are worried that their wives are going to kill them in their sleep?”
“No,” Julianne said. “Go to sleep. Get off the phone. Let me go to sleep. It’s been a long day.”
“I’m going to have another cup of coffee and read the Inquirer report again,” Tiffany told her. “It’s the most complete. Maybe they’ll bring in Gregor Demarkian. Then we’d make the national news with this thing, and I could say I was part of it.”
“Go to sleep,” Julianne had said again—and that had been when? Last night? The night before? Sitting at her desk this morning, with the sun coming up outside the windows, Julianne couldn’t remember what she had done when over the last month, or why. What she did know was that she was in the office before seven, with her full war paint on, drinking coffee out of a mug big enough to hold a small lobster. The computer contributor sheets were spread out across her green felt desk blotter. The invitations list to the Karla Parrish reception was propped up against her Rolodex. Her new cat calendar was lying flat against the hardwood next to her phone. Why was it that people still had green felt desk blotters? she wondered. They didn’t blot ink pens anymore. Half the time they didn’t even have pens of any kind anymore. The offices were full of word processor
s.
Julianne ran her finger down the contributors’ lists again and frowned. She hadn’t realized that these lists were so detailed. There was the name: Patricia (Mrs. Stephen) Willis. There were the amounts and the dates they had been received: $11,000 on the first of June; $14,500 on the twelfth of September; $22,000 this past March. Julianne knew that you had to tell some federal commission or other who your campaign contributors were and what they had contributed, but she hadn’t realized that that information would be this—specific. She started to rub the side of her face and then stopped herself. She didn’t want to smear her makeup. She wished it were time for Tiffany to come into the office. There were things she needed to talk out. Unfortunately, the rules were clear. When an employee can call an employer at four o’clock in the morning, the employer is a saint. When the employer can get an employee out of bed at six A.M. just to talk office talk, the employer is a tyrant. Julianne shoved the contributors’ lists away from her and stood up.
She wasn’t going to issue a press release. Of course she wasn’t. That would be silly. On the other hand, what might not be silly was a little damage control. Because Tiffany was right. You could never tell what would damage you these days.
Julianne looked out the less dirty of her windows and down to the street. She went back to her desk and picked up the invitations list for the Karla Parrish reception. She had been reading about Karla, even in the middle of all this fuss about the death of Patricia Willis. If it hadn’t been for that death, the reception would have been really big news. That, Julianne remembered, was the kind of luck Karla always had. Just when she was about to make a big splash, someone else came along and made a bigger one, and Karla’s splash was lost in the tidal wave. When they were all in college together, Julianne remembered, the bigger splash had always come from Patsy MacLaren.