Authors: Jane Haddam
Bleeding Hearts
A Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mystery
Jane Haddam
A MysteriousPress.com
Open Road Integrated Media
Ebook
This book is for
Meg Ruley
who got this started
and keeps it going
and thinks better of me
than I do
Prologue: On the Night Father Tibor Got Arrested…
PART THREE: Cloaks and Daggers…
EPILOGUE: Valentine’s Day on Cavanaugh Street With All That Implies…
On the Night Father Tibor Got Arrested…
1
“B
ENNIS,” FATHER TIBOR KASPARIAN
said, his Russian-accented voice coming over the speakerphone in thick bright blobs, like elasticized marmalade. “Bennis, you have to help me. I have finally been arrested and now I want to get out.”
It was seven o’clock on the evening of Friday, February 1, and Bennis Hannaford was hunched over her brand-new Macintosh, putting the finishing touches on last year’s operating budget for Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. She had a Benson & Hedges menthol in an ashtray near her left hand. It had been burning away, untouched, for a good three minutes. She had a mug of coffee near her right hand. It was half drunk but stone cold. On the display screen in front of her she read:
NOVEMBER 16TH 9:22 PM—$28—GIVEN TO ANNIE LEMBECK, HOMELESS PERSON, KNOCKED ON RECTORY BACK DOOR. OFFERED DINNER. WAS REFUSED. OFFERED APPLE. WAS ACCEPTED. LISTENED ONE HALF HOUR TO STORY OF ALIENS TAKING OVER MAYOR’S OFFICE. STORY MAY HAVE MERIT.
There were hundreds of entries like this one. They filled up the little stack of computer disks Father Tibor had turned over to her on New Year’s Eve. Bennis had spent weeks reading them and wondering if Father Tibor had anything else to do. She knew perfectly well Father Tibor had something else to do. He had to get arrested, for one thing. She wondered where he found the time.
The entry under the entry she had just read said:
NOVEMBER 16TH—9:25 PM—ONE APPLE—GIVEN TO ANNIE LEMBECK, HOMELESS PERSON…
Bennis picked up her cigarette, tapped away the long column of ash that had accumulated on the end of it, and took a drag.
“It’s seven o’clock,” she said. “I thought you told me you were going to get arrested at three.”
Father Tibor sighed. “Father Ryan said we would get arrested at three. I think Father Ryan is a little out of date.”
“Which means what?”
“Which means protesting restrictions against street vendors in downtown Philadelphia is not the same as protesting the Vietnam War in front of the Pentagon. Everybody was very nice until the very last minute, and then it was our fault.”
“What was your fault?”
Father Tibor sighed again. “It was Stephen Hartnell from First Congregational. He had taken some cold medicine and he got sleepy. He got so sleepy he fell over, and he’s a big fat man, so the thing he was standing next to fell over, and the thing was a big flimsy can full of glass bottles to be recycled, and the next thing we knew there was glass all over the road, and they made a big crash, and this policeman panicked and shot his gun into the air, and then there was a dog—”
“Never mind,” Bennis said. “What about the street vendors?”
“The street vendors will be fine, Bennis, but it will not be because of us. Reverend Casey from African Methodist got up and gave a speech about how it was racism; when the immigrants needed to be street vendors they could do it without any interference and now when it is African Americans who need to do it there are registration requirements and licensing fees. All of which is probably true, but the important part is that Reverend Casey got to say it on Channel Five—”
“—ah—”
“—and now everybody is talking about compromise. Will you come and get me, Bennis? I have to pay a twenty-five-dollar fine and I left my wallet at home. If you’re busy, I could call Donna Moradanyan—”
“Donna’s Tommy’s got the flu. I’ll come get you. What precinct are you at?”
“I’m not at a precinct. I’m at the superior court. I will go back now and listen to the arraignment of the prostitutes. They are very young, Bennis.”
“I know.”
“This is a remarkable country, Bennis. People who were born and brought up here do not understand. How long do you think you will be?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe.”
“All right. I will go back and listen to the prostitutes. There is one, Bennis, I do not think she is sixteen.”
Bennis was sure there were several prostitutes at Tibor’s court who were not yet sixteen, and maybe one or two who were not yet fourteen, but she didn’t have a chance to tell Tibor so. The speakerphone’s speaker stopped crackling and went to a hum. Bennis leaned over her coffee and shut the sound off. Her cigarette was burned to the filter. She got out another one and lit up again. Her head ached faintly. It always did that when she worked too long at the computer. She took a long, deep drag on her cigarette, promised herself to quit smoking again for Valentine’s Day, and stood.
“Money,” she told herself, and then, “note.”
Her computer was at the curved center of a built-in workspace in one corner of her bedroom. The edges of this workspace were twin piles of mess. Bennis rummaged around in the closer of these messes and came up with a piece of paper and a Bic medium-point pen.
Christopher,
she wrote,
I had to go out. Go up to the fourth floor and ask Donna Moradanyan for the key. Eat something. See you later. Bennis.
She grabbed a roll of transparent tape and her coat, started for the hall, then stopped. She checked the pockets of her jeans for money and decided she needed more. She went into the kitchen and raided her cookie jar for the three hundred dollars she kept there. For all she knew, Tibor wasn’t the only member of the demonstration who needed twenty-five dollars for the fine. She might as well be prepared.
She let herself into the hall, fastened the note to her door with tape, and went downstairs. There was light showing through the crack under the door of old George Tekemanian’s first-floor apartment. She thought about stopping, but didn’t. If she got talking to old George, she could lose an hour.
She let herself out on the stoop and looked up and down Cavanaugh Street for cabs. There were none at the moment—there was no traffic of any kind—but Bennis knew it wouldn’t be long before a taxi showed up. Cabs liked Cavanaugh Street.
Bennis sat on the bottom step to wait. Across the street, Lida Arkmanian’s town house was lit up like a lighthouse and festooned with hearts and ribbons—Donna Moradanyan’s first foray into decorating the street for Valentine’s Day. Two blocks up, light spilled out of the plate-glass windows of the Ararat Restaurant, darkened periodically by the shadows of waitresses and diners moving back and forth in front of the big main arc light. Bennis stretched her legs and considered lighting another cigarette, and then she saw the cab.
It was a cab with its occupied light glowing, but there was always a chance it was going to drop its fare on Cavanaugh Street, so Bennis stood up and went to the edge of the curb to wait for it. It did stop on Cavanaugh Street, up beyond the Ararat, in front of the narrow brownstone Howard Kashinian had renovated and turned into two duplex apartments. One of those two apartments he had kept for his own great-aunt Melina. The other he had sold to Hannah Krekorian after Hannah’s husband’s death. It was Hannah Krekorian whom Bennis saw get out of the cab now, her stout little middle-aged-to-getting-old figure moving briskly against the wind. The wind was very bad. February was always a cold time in Philadelphia. This February was starting out to be brutal. Hannah scurried quickly to the first step of her stoop, then turned around.
At the curb, the street-side passenger door to Hannah’s cab remained open. Bennis watched, fascinated, as first one trouser-clad leg and then another emerged from it. The legs were followed by a body and then a head, all unnaturally elongated, all sticklike and stretched. What a tall, thin man, Bennis thought. And it was true. He was immensely tall and emaciatedly thin. He looked like some sort of flexible rod with a coat attached to it. From this distance, Bennis couldn’t make out any of the detail of his face—the best she could do was note that the coat was an expensive one, obvious from the way it moved and the way it hung and the things it didn’t do in the cold—but there was something about him that seemed familiar, and the familiar thing was not pleasant. Bennis reached for her cigarettes, thought better of it, rubbed her hands together in the frigid breeze. The tall, thin man shut the curbside door and paid the driver. He walked over to Hannah Krekorian and took her arm. The two made their way up the steep cement staircase to the brownstone’s front door. Bennis stepped halfway off the curb and began to signal for the cab.
He does look familiar, she told herself. Why does he look familiar? He wasn’t anyone who lived on Cavanaugh Street. He wasn’t anyone she’d known growing up on the Main Line either, although that would have made more sense. Most of the people on Cavanaugh Street were either Armenian immigrants or the children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Armenian immigrants. Some of them were tall, but after a certain age all of them ran to fat. None of them had that fine-boned fragility that made a person, male or female, look more ghostlike than real. Even Gregor Demarkian, who was six foot four, was a big massive solid man, not an elegant one.
I have seen that man before, Bennis told herself. I really have.
Then the cab pulled up to the curb and she had to get into it. That was always the way things seemed to work out. She got curious about something and something else came along to prevent her from satisfying her curiosity. It was the way the universe was organized. There was something cosmic out there that was trying to get her. There was—
—there was a distinct possibility that she was getting her period.
She leaned over the front seat and told the driver, “Superior court.”
The driver gave her a strange look, but took gamely off.
Bennis sat back and sighed. She told herself she could go over to Hannah’s tomorrow and just
ask
who it was. That was what would make the most sense.
Then she closed her eyes and let the cab take her across town, lulling her even in the Friday-night traffic, making her drift off to sleep in spite of the weekend lights. When they pulled up in front of the superior court building, she was nearly snoring.
“Hey, lady,” the cabdriver said.
Bennis came to and reached for her wallet.
Back on Cavanaugh Street, a gust of wind coming up the stairs as Gregor Demarkian opened the front door to let himself in, tugged at the tape Bennis had used to fasten her note to her brother Christopher to her door, ripped the note away, and sent the note and the tape both spiraling down the dark center of the stairwell.