by Jane Haddam
The problem with the agent standing on Gregor’s doorstep was that he was a Looney Tune par excellence. If Gregor had had to reinvent from memory the epitome of a very dedicated domestic spy agent, he would have come up with this young man. The pale hair. The overneat clothes. The air of nervousness that just wouldn’t quit—the man was so tense, he was generating electricity. He was also about twenty-six, and that couldn’t be. Gregor had had a conversation just last week with a friend of his who was still in the Bureau. The big news over there now was that the Looney Tunes boys were being trimmed. “Not eliminated,” his friend had told him, “but there’s a hiring freeze and they’re not training any more and we all keep crossing our fingers and praying to God that we’re going to get rid of the nuts entirely.”
Gregor wrapped his arms around his body and marched up Cavanaugh Street away from the church, watching the young man on his stoop and the jumpy way he kept seesawing from one foot to the other. That the young man looked out of place in this neighborhood went without saying. He was the wrong body type and had the wrong coloring. That he would also be out of place in the Bureau was Gregor’s to ponder alone, but it presented an interesting chain of reasoning. If you’re paring back on Looney Tunes but you can’t really fire them all, what do you do with them? What sort of work would a Looney Tune be qualified for, once he could no longer spend his time tapping the phones at the Organization for the Vegetarian Solution to World War?
Gregor crossed the street, dodged a little to avoid a standing display of Indian corn that had been wound around a lamppost as if the lamppost had been a maypole, and noticed in passing that the paper flag on Lida’s third floor had been changed. This new one was much more neatly and professionally done, meaning Donna Moradanyan was back from the Main Line. It was also three entirely different colors. It made Gregor wonder where the confusion lay, here or on the other side.
Gregor got to his stoop, went up the concrete steps without touching the rail so he wouldn’t disturb the brown and amber ribbons someone had braided there, and then wondered when the braiding had been done. Donna Moradanyan was not only back, she was back with a vengeance. He stopped at the top of the stoop where the young man was standing and watched for a moment while the young man looked around himself, making wide arcs with his head like an electric eye scanning a security field. Then the young man turned back to the door, picked out the buzzer button next to “Apartment 3, Demarkian,” and pressed.
Gregor leaned forward, tapped the young man on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me. I’m Gregor Demarkian.”
“Gregor Demarkian,” the young man said blankly, and then seemed to snap to. “Oh. Yes. Oh. Excuse me. My name is Jeremy Bayles. I’m from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Steve Hartigan sent me.” He plunged his hand into his hip pocket, pulled out a small square sealed envelope, and handed it to Gregor. Then he tried to smile.
Gregor held the envelope for a moment and wondered if he were really old enough for people named Jeremy to be old enough to be agents at the Bureau. He supposed he’d run into an agent named Tiffany next. He opened the envelope, pulled out a square of what was closer to cardboard than paper, and read:
Gregor. I know, I know. I couldn’t help it. I was swamped and I didn’t have any other choice. Be nice to the boy. I need the information. Steve.
Gregor folded the card and put it in his pocket.
“Well,” he said.
“What are all the flags?” Jeremy Bayles asked. “I mean, everywhere I look, there are flags.”
“Armenian flags,” Gregor said. “This is an Armenian neighborhood. Armenian-American, at any rate.”
“But they’re not all the same flags,” Jeremy Bayles said reasonably. “Which one is the Armenian flag? What are the others? Why is everybody in the street? Is there some kind of international festival going on here or what?”
In a way, there was some kind of international festival going on every day on Cavanaugh Street, but Gregor didn’t think it was something Jeremy Bayles would understand. Gregor wasn’t even sure it was something he could explain. He got his key out and opened the front door instead, thanking God once again that this door, at least, was on automatic lock. He’d had the automatic lock installed himself, after his first Christmas in the neighborhood, when the old lock had never been on unless he put it on. The rest of them might want to court burglary like maidens at a dance, but he wasn’t that stupid.
He stepped back, let Jeremy Bayles enter the foyer before him, and brought up the rear.
“Armenia only declared its independence this past September twenty-fourth,” he explained. “I’m not sure anyone really knows what the flag will be like in the long run. Every time a new version comes out over there, a new version goes up over here.”
“What about the people in the street?”
“There are always people in the street.”
“Oh.”
“To be fair, we’re playing host to a lot of new immigrants these days. They like to be out and around. When they’re not, things get to be a little crowded.”
“I didn’t think cities were like this any more,” Jeremy Bayles said. “I thought they were all like Washington. Armed camps.”
“Even all of Washington isn’t an armed camp.”
“It isn’t?”
“Haven’t you ever been to Georgetown? Or Foggy Bottom?”
“Oh.” Jeremy Bayles looked confused. “But those aren’t really Washington,” he said. “They couldn’t be. Rich people live there.”
If Steve Hartigan had been forced to take this idiot on staff, he was more than swamped and the hiring freeze extended much farther into the Bureau than the Looney Tunes camp. Gregor took another look through the mail—you never knew when you might miss something—and then gestured to the stairs. Jeremy Bayles nodded, but he wasn’t really paying attention. He was looking at the enormous cardboard turkey that covered old George Tekemanian’s door, and the papier mâché Pilgrim’s hat that sat on the newel post at the bottom of the stair rail. The papier mâché Pilgrim’s hat was big enough to fit the Jolly Green Giant and had been made by Bennis, who had revised her latest sword and sorcery novel by making papier mâché copies of everything in the book. For weeks, Gregor’s apartment had been a mine field of papier mâché trolls, papier mâché dragons, papier mâché knights and papier mâché castles. It was only when the papier mâché unicorn stabbed him in the rear end that he finally put his foot down. Jeremy Bayles picked up the Pilgrim’s hat, admired it, and put it down again. Then he began following Gregor to the stairs.
“You people sure do like to celebrate Thanksgiving,” Jeremy said.
“Mmm,” Gregor said. They reached the second floor landing and Gregor saw that the ASLEEP UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE sign had been taken down from Bennis Hannaford’s door. In its place was a cardboard turkey even bigger than old George Tekemanian’s, but with a fan of (possible) Armenian flags for tail feathers. Donna Moradanyan was back and on the warpath.
“So,” Gregor said. “How is Steve? Is he still doing fugitive work?”
“Oh, no.” Jeremy Bayles sounded shocked. “I didn’t even know he’d ever done that. He’s with the banking and fraud division now. He’s been heading up our investigation of the savings and loan mess and possible criminal fraud involved in that. It’s very important work.”
“I’m sure it is. He used to like more excitement than that, though, when I knew him.”
“But it is exciting work. It’s fascinating.”
“It doesn’t have any high-speed car chases in it.” They had reached the third floor and the landing outside Gregor’s door. When Gregor had left that morning, his door had had a nice, polite spray of Indian corn hanging under the bell. Now it had another of those enormous cardboard turkeys. This one had a pair of wirerim glasses on its nose and a copy of Criminal Procedures and Practices in its beak. Gregor tried his door, found it was unlocked—neither Bennis nor Donna ever remembered to lock up again after they’d been inside—and
ushered Jeremy Bayles into his apartment. There was a life-size rag doll in Pilgrim good-wife clothes standing in his foyer, but he ignored that.
“So,” he said. “What could Steve possibly want me for? The only thing I know about the savings and loan mess is that my own went bankrupt and got merged with something I can barely pronounce.”
“It isn’t about the mess,” Jeremy Bayles explained. “It’s about a man. Or two men, actually. One of them’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“Donald McAdam. He’s dead. Then there’s the other one, and Steve said you’d know, because it was in the paper you were going to see him. It was in W, I mean.”
“What was in W?”
Jeremy Bayles blinked his pale, lashless eyes ingenuously. The worst of that ingenuousness was that it was undoubtedly sincere.
“It was in W that you were going to spend Thanksgiving with this guy Steve is so worked up about,” he said. “You know. Jonathan Edgewick Baird.”
2
There are men who retire to desert islands and Caribbean beaches and ski chalets in Vermont, glad to abandon the work they’ve spent their lives doing and dedicate the rest of their days on earth to wasting time. There are others who are haunted forever by their titles and their offices and their commercial selves, doomed to wander for eternity among the forever lost. For Gregor Demarkian, retirement had been more like trading paid employment for unpaid and forced assignments with chosen ones. Less than two years after he had left the Bureau for good, he had accidently become involved in the Main Line murder of Bennis Hannaford’s father. That was how he had met Bennis, and how he had acquired the title the Inquirer and all its sister publications had become so enamored of: the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. The title might have stuck in any case, but it was reinforced by what came next—Gregor’s involvement in one of the most sensational cases of the decade, backed by the Archdiocese of Colchester, New York, and served up to the media like a flaming desert. Other cases had followed, if you could call them cases—Gregor resisted—and by now his dogged insistence that since he didn’t have a private detective’s license he couldn’t be a private detective felt weak even to him. For one thing, it was an easy distinction to get around. John Cardinal O’Bannion had merely called him a “consultant” and gone right on treating him like a detective. For another, it was obvious that Gregor wasn’t going to stop involving himself in extracurricular murder and didn’t even want to. The kinds of murders he dealt with these days were far more interesting than the ones he’d dealt with at BSD, and far more soothing to the soul, too. It was comforting to realize that the world still operated on logic, even if it pretended not to. Under other circumstances, Gregor would have been almost pleased to hear about a suspicious death that someone wanted him to look into. It had been a long dry stretch since the last one, and he’d been getting bored. Under these circumstances, he wasn’t so happy. The death of Donald McAdam had made all the papers and all the magazines, but it had seemed fairly cut and dried to him. Donald McAdam had been a damned fool and died the way damned fools often do, by pushing his luck once too often. Then there was the question of Jonathan Edgewick Baird, whom he knew as Jon Baird, a friend of Bennis Hannaford and her brother Bobby. Gregor had nothing at all against investigating Bennis Hannaford’s friends, but if he was going to do it he wanted Bennis Hannaford’s permission. He at least didn’t want to accept an invitation she had given him in good faith and then use it to spy on people she might care about.
Of course, knowing Bennis, the mere suggestion that there might be a murder out there to investigate would leave her thrilled, and she wouldn’t care if the chief suspect were her own grandmother.
Gregor moved into his kitchen, put the kettle on to boil, and rifled through his cabinets for his jar of instant coffee. He and Tibor had both given up trying to make coffee from grounds. They were afraid they were going to poison themselves. Gregor put the jar on the kitchen table and got out two mugs and two small silver spoons. Then he sat down and waited for Jeremy Bayles to do the same.
“It’s not that I don’t want to help,” he said, “it’s just that I can’t see what I can help with. I’ve read the newspaper accounts of the way McAdam died—”
“It’s all much stranger than that,” Jeremy Bayles said quickly.
“—and I can’t see that there was any way for his death to be suspicious. And as for Jon Baird, I’ve been thinking about it ever since you mentioned his name. He couldn’t have had anything to do with McAdam’s death. He was in jail at the time.”
“Oh, I know,” Jeremy Bayles said. “We don’t think Baird murdered McAdam. It’s not like that at all.”
“What is it like?”
Jeremy Bayles coughed. The kettle was already spewing steam. Gregor had an awful feeling that he hadn’t put enough water in it. He’d ruined two other kettles that way in the past six months. He got up and poured water into the mugs anyway, and came up with just enough.
“Donald McAdam,” Jeremy said, “was under investigation by our unit because of his possible involvement in a green mail fraud at the Farmers and Mechanics Savings and Loan in Bimalli, Florida. We thought there might be a connection because he had the same sort of deal with a man named Robert Hannaford here in Philadelphia. Steve said he thought you were acquainted with Robert Hannaford’s sister?”
“I’m acquainted with Robert Hannaford’s sister.”
“Yes. Well. The deal went like this. McAdam would find a stock with a nice low price, call it Consolidated Widgets. He’d go out and buy a tremendous amount of this stock on margin, and then his confederate—in Philadelphia it was Robert Hannaford; in Bimalli it would be a man named Chester Evans who works for Tamm-Norwick Investments—anyway, his confederate, always a broker or an investment banker, would float a rumor that there was going to be a takeover attempt of Consolidated Widgets. Takeover attempts mean rising stock prices. Buyers would flood the market bidding up Consolidated Widgets. McAdam would sell out at the inflated price. And then the rumor, of course, would turn out to have been untrue. McAdam would have made a killing. His confederate would have received about fifty thousand dollars in cash for services rendered. And the ordinary buyers in the market would have been bilked.”
“Including a few savings and loans,” Gregor said.
“Including savings and loans, including insurance companies, including pension funds.” Jeremy Bayles waved his hands in the air, took a sip of his coffee, and grimaced. “Yes. Well. McAdam and his confederate would do well and the brokers would do well because they’d still make all those commissions, but what we’re talking about here is major fraud and McAdam did a lot of it. They had him testifying in more than three dozen cases at the time he died.”
“Good Lord,” Gregor said. “The man really did get around. You say you don’t think Jon Baird murdered him. Would he have reason to, by the way?”
“No,” Jeremy admitted. “No opportunity and no motive from what we can see. Baird’s company owned McAdam’s and McAdam had one of those impossible golden parachutes where it’s not worth it to fire the guy, but the day McAdam died, he signed an agreement with Baird clearing all that up.”
“From jail?”
“If you mean Baird, yeah,” Jeremy said. He tried his coffee again. He grimaced again. Gregor didn’t know what he was complaining about. Compared with Gregor’s usual coffee, this stuff was ambrosia. “I know it’s not supposed to be legal for federal prisoners to operate businesses from prison,” Jeremy went on, “but the fact is that we can’t deny them access to the phones as long as they’ve got anything going on appeal, and these guys are great at figuring out how to keep going at appeals until the day they’re released. I’m not kidding. Baird was running Baird Financial from his cell and there was this other guy who did a computer fraud on a bank out in Iowa and got out of prison with twenty-five million dollars waiting for him that we could never find.”
“He must have been a better con man than most.”
; “Oh, he was. Anyway, as for McAdam, that was in terms of Jon Baird and the people at Baird Financial, and to tell you the truth, even if the agreement hadn’t been signed the McAdam thing would have been pretty small potatoes over there anyway. Just before Jon Baird went to prison, Baird Financial started negotiations to merge with Europabanc. Just about the time McAdam died, the negotiations paid off. Baird Financial and Europabanc are set to merge next month, and it’s going to be the biggest thing in international finance since the birth of the first Rothschild. Next to that, McAdam’s twelve and a half million dollars isn’t much.”