GREGOR DEMARKIAN COULDN’T REMEMBER feeling suffocated in Fox Run Hill—but back on Cavanaugh Street, climbing out of John Jackman’s unmarked car in front of the Ararat, he was aware of feeling suddenly able to breathe. Cavanaugh Street wasn’t even very breathable at the moment. Philadelphia is cold in the winter and hot in the summer, and now it was hot, and sticky, and heavy with humidity. It was also getting not-exactly-dark, the way summer nights did. The horizon would have been a red and purple glow if Gregor could have seen the horizon. All he could see were the tops of brownstone buildings and brick row houses, well kept on Cavanaugh Street itself, crumbling and unsteady on the streets shooting off it. Everybody lives in a gated community these days, he thought grimly. Everybody lives in a fortress surrounded by chaos. John Jackman cranked down the driver’s side window of his car and leaned out to look at Gregor’s face. Gregor thought idly that they ought to do better by the police. They ought at least to buy them cars with power windows.
“Are you all right?” John Jackman asked. “You look funny.”
“I’m fine,” Gregor said. “Are you and Bennis talking to each other these days?”
“Not exactly.” Jackman looked uncomfortable. “I mean, I am the person who was trying to get a member of her own family executed.”
“I thought that wasn’t up to you.”
“It wasn’t. But, Gregor. Seriously. If you want to screw up a love affair, I guarantee it, testifying in favor of the death penalty at the punishment phase hearing of your lover’s own sister will definitely do it. Even if it’s not a sister she especially liked.”
“It’s a sister she hated to the bone.”
“I know. I know. Even so. What are you trying to do, fix me up with Bennis again?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s good, you know, Gregor, because no matter what else is going on here, Bennis is not exactly ready to settle down.”
“I have noticed.”
“I’m not exactly ready to settle down either. Is there some point to this conversation?”
Gregor was looking down a side street called Bullock. In the hours he had been away, Donna Moradanyan had gone to work on Cavanaugh Street. White and gold satin ribbons seemed to be wrapped around everything. The streetlamps had white and gold satin ribbons twisted into spirals that reminded Gregor of old-fashioned barber poles. Gregor’s divided-up brownstone and Lida Arkmanian’s town house across the street were covered in white and gold bows, without an inch of the original masonry showing on either one. The steps of Holy Trinity Church were lined with white silk flowers in pots covered with white paper and decked out in sprightly gold bows. Next to all of this, Bullock Street looked worse than bare and spare. It looked like a black pit. In the building Gregor could see best, better than halfway down the block, caught in a stray gleam of light from a streetlamp, there was a window broken on the fourth floor.
“Gregor?” John Jackman said again.
Gregor snapped to and shook his head. “Well,” he said. “Do you have that list of things I asked you to do?”
“My sergeant has them. They’ll be done by tomorrow. Are you sure you don’t have a fax machine?”
“Positive.”
“Then I’ll bring the forensics when I come to see you tomorrow. You really ought to get a fax machine, Gregor.”
“I know. You’ll set up the interviews.”
“I said I would. I will if you tell me to. But, Christ, Gregor, appointments to interrogate witnesses—”
“It will help.”
“If you say so. But if you ask me, I think we ought to crash every one of those doors every time one of those idiots refuses to open it. Who the hell do they think they are?”
“It’s who they think we are that matters.”
“I don’t like this gated-community crap. Fortress mentality, that’s all it is. And worse. Racism pure and simple.”
“Not so pure and not so simple. They would probably be overjoyed if somebody like, say, Clarence Thomas decided to buy a house there.”
“Clarence Thomas lives in Virginia. They make me angry, Gregor.”
“They make me depressed,” Gregor said. “But the chances are good that they’re going to be able to tell us where our missing woman is.”
“They know that? And they aren’t telling us?”
“They don’t know they know it. Could you find out something else for me?”
“Maybe.”
“We need to know if Mrs. Willis had friends outside Fox Run Hill. You said she didn’t have a job.”
“Not a job we could find out about, no.”
“You checked with the IRS?”
“Definitely.”
“All right, then. What about the sort of thing women in her position like to do? Volunteer work. The museums. The symphony. That kind of thing.”
“You can’t honestly believe she went back to her volunteer work after she’d blown up her own station wagon.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I’m just looking for a friend. A very good friend. The best friend she has.”
“You mean somebody who might be hiding her.”
“Not exactly. Not in the way you mean it.” He gestured at the Ararat. “You want to come in and have dinner with me, John? If Bennis still isn’t talking to you, she can sit with somebody else. Assuming she’s here at all.”
“If Bennis is here, she wouldn’t want to sit with anybody else,” John Jackman said. “She’d want to sit with me and make my life hell. Thanks a lot, Gregor, but I just can’t. I’ve got a pile of work to do back at the office.”
“The other thing I want from you is sightings reports. I take it you are getting those?”
“Dozens of them. By the hour. We ought to be glad this Mrs. Willis is just an ordinary middle-aged lady. When we have kids or, God help us, black people—”
“I know. You get dozens by the minute. You’re not going to save the world, John.”
“I know. But I keep trying. I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at eight.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“Dan Exter said you were as impressive as hell. That’s a compliment, Gregor. Only thing Dan Exter is usually impressed with is the Queen of England, and he’s not so big on her since Chuck and Di turned out to be such putzes.”
“Right,” Gregor said. “I like him too.”
John Jackman started to roll up his window. “Take care of yourself, Gregor. We need you to make us look good, even if we don’t need you for anything else.”
Gregor was about to say that they needed him for a lot more, but John Jackman already had his window rolled up and his car sliding down along the curb. Gregor felt the first heavy raindrops against his forehead like dollops of mayonnaise. Half a block up, Hannah Krekorian opened a window and leaned out of it. She looked as if she were about to take a dive headfirst onto the pavement. She pulled back at the last minute and disappeared inside her home again. Gregor noticed that the window had a big white and gold bow on it. If the neighborhood looked like this now, how would it look on the day of the actual wedding? Would there be carpets of seed pearls covering the sidewalks? Would there be tulle and lace skirts around all the fire hydrants?
Gregor decided not to tell anybody what he’d thought about the fire hydrants. Donna Moradanyan was far too likely to take him seriously.
He gave one last look around at the well-lit and overdecorated Cavanaugh Street, and one last look into the black maw of Bullock, and then went in to the Ararat.
No matter what else was going on in his life, he had to eat.