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 seemed 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.