Festival of Deaths (24 page)

“Could I get one of these dreidels here?” Gregor asked David Goldman. “In the United States?”

David shrugged. “I wouldn’t say it would be impossible, but I would say it wouldn’t be easy. One of the import houses might have them. But why bother? It’s not as if these were the big, ornamental kinds, you know, three or four times the ordinary size and carved into special wood and whatnot. These are the little wooden ones you see everywhere. And an importer who was very religious, as I said about Itzaak, might not want—”

“Yes, yes. Bear with me for a minute, please, Rabbi. I might be able to get one of these here, but it would be difficult, so the chances are that these two came from Israel.”

“That’s right.”

“Meaning that whoever they belong to—assuming it’s one person—had been to Israel.”

“Or been in contact with someone who had been in Israel, yes.”

“But he wouldn’t necessarily have to be Jewish,” Gregor said.

“Oh, no,” David Goldman told him. “Lots of people buy dreidels, even in the United States. Children like to play with them. Adults sometimes just like to have them. And of course, with a certain kind of gentile, especially a certain kind of American gentile—”

“The kind that not only does not believe in God,” Tibor said, “but that has no respect for religion—”

“Yes,” David Goldman said, “well, there is a certain kind of gentile who buys Israeli dreidels in particular for good luck. I remember that from being in Jerusalem. Hardcore gamblers, most of them were. And they’d keep the dreidels in their pockets and then go off to the casinos in Monaco or on Crete. They were not very pleasant people.”

“No,” Gregor said. “I can see how they might not be. The third one, assuming there is a third one, hasn’t turned up?”

“No,” David Goldman said. “A couple of other dreidels have turned up. DeAnna Kroll found one stuck in one of those plastic dry cleaning bags that were covering Lotte’s clothes, but it was an ordinary one. She gave it to Lotte yesterday morning.”

“Has anybody else found any others at all? Ordinary or not?”

“Oh, Mr. Demarkian. Of course they have. It’s like I said. They’re all over the place.”

“All over the place,” Gregor repeated, and then shook his head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“Will you talk it over with the police detective?” David asked.

“Of course I will,” Gregor said. “But I don’t know what good it will do. I don’t know what he can do with the information. I don’t know what I can do with it.”

“You can keep the dreidels,” David Goldman said. “They ought to come in handy. In case they mean anything.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

David Goldman shrugged. “I said it was a little strange. Well, there it is, it’s a little strange. And Lotte is very disturbed about everything that’s been happening, of course.”

Gregor picked up the two dreidels and put them in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, looking them over carefully first, noting the anomalous letter.

“I didn’t say you did the wrong thing. You did the right thing. I’d like to talk to Dr. Goldman about it later, if she wouldn’t mind. I just don’t know if it will lead anywhere.”

“Of course,” David Goldman said.

“It will lead somewhere,” Father Tibor said firmly. “Everything always leads somewhere, Krekor, even if not to the place you would expect.”

“I think I’m going to have another plate of sausage,” old George Tekamanian announced. “Martin said something about a wonderful new kind of tofu burgers.”

On that note, Gregor decided to order himself koritzov gatah.

It wouldn’t be kosher, it wouldn’t solve the murder of Maximillian Dey, and if Bennis saw him eating it, she’d kill him.

But at least it would be sweet.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN AND TIBOR
Kasparian were due for their lunch with Helena and Sofie Oumoudian at one o’clock. What Gregor had intended to do in the hours between the time he got back from breakfast and the time he had to meet Tibor so they could walk to the Oumoudians together was work. “Work” was an elastic concept in Gregor’s life these days. He did not like to define it as doing what he had done before he retired. What else he meant by it he wasn’t sure. Talking to David Goldman about the dreidels was “work” in the sense Gregor used the word now, and so was talking to John Jackman on the phone about the status of the lab reports the city of Philadelphia was running on the blood of Maximillian Dey. He wanted to push all that talk about dreidels to the back of his mind and let it ferment. Maybe it would come to something. He fully intended to call John Jackman today, but he didn’t want to call him yet. It was only eight thirty in the morning when he left the Ararat. John Jackman often got to work that early, but he didn’t arrive at a decent mood until at least noon. Besides, it was highly unlikely that there would be any word on the lab reports until later in the day. The Philadelphia police department was good, and it was being pushed—having a corpse turn up in the middle of a bunch of famous visiting television people from New York was practically the definition of being pushed—but money was tight everywhere, and Philadelphia was no exception.

Gregor Demarkian could remember days when money was not tight and police departments were not understaffed, but they were a long time ago. Agents at the Bureau had a one-word answer for what had gone wrong and why everything was such a mess: cocaine. Gregor Demarkian knew next to nothing about cocaine. There were FBI agents who had enlisted as soldiers in the drug war—along with DEA agents and local police forces and customs agents and military men—but Gregor had never been one of them. The mere thought of drugs made him catatonic. Serial killers were terrible people, but at least they made some kind of sense. Serial killers might be evil, but they were at least logical. To Gregor’s mind, a thirty-year-old investment banker who was blowing his mind out with free base hadn’t needed drugs to make him stupid and a fifteen-year-old motor jockey who thought crack was an amusement to eat up Saturday night had a pair of parents who deserved to be shot. He had never met a single person involved in drugs who could think his way out of a paper bag. Gregor Demarkian preferred to spend his time on what he couldn’t help thinking about as Real Crime, crime with method and motive, crime with passion and purpose, crime with sense.

Gregor left the Ararat right after David Goldman did. David Goldman had appointments, and Gregor didn’t want to watch old George Tekamanian eat yet another plate of hash browns and yet another order of bacon. He didn’t have to worry about how old George would get home. Tibor would see to that. He took a wad of money out of his wallet, threw it on the table, waved good-bye to Linda Melajian, and went back onto Cavanaugh Street. The sidewalk was crowded with children on their way to Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School. Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School only went up to grade eight. If it had gone farther, he wouldn’t have had to worry about Sofie Oumoudian and Joey Ohanian could have gone back to Deerfield. Unfortunately, even the eighth grade was a bit of a stretch. There were only two students in it, and next year there would only be three.

Gregor let himself into his building, checked the mail even though he knew it wouldn’t be there—half the time, it didn’t arrive before four o’clock in the afternoon—and paused to admire Donna Moradanyan’s latest extravaganza, a free-standing papier-mâché menorah at least as tall as he was, painted gold on the base, white on the candles, and hot phosphorescent pink on the candle flames. A note attached to the mock-holder for the mock shammes said,

HOWARD.

THIS GOES AT THE BASE OF THE CHURCH STEPS ON THE LEFT SIDE BETWEEN THE BUSH WITH THE SILVER RIBBON ON IT AND THE ARMENIAN FLAG.

That was good. That meant that Howard Kashinian was supposed to remove this menorah and put it outside in front of the church, where presumably it would cause fewer traffic problems than it was causing in this foyer. Gregor wondered why Donna had asked Howard to do it and not him. Gregor and Howard had been in the same class all the way through grammar school, except for the year Howard had spent in the reformatory. Lida and Hannah had been a year ahead of them and Sheila had been a year behind. And Howard was in no better shape than Gregor was.

Gregor went up the stairs and stopped on the second-floor landing. He could hear no movement going on behind Bennis’s door, but he was fairly sure she was up. She’d been complaining all week about a copy-edited manuscript she was supposed to go over. She wasn’t much of a sleeper, anyway, at least when he wanted her to be. In the middle of murder cases, he usually wanted her to be. He knocked sharply on her door and waited to see what would happen.

What happened was that there was the sound of shuffling from the foyer inside, and the door was opened just enough for Bennis to stick her head out. Her great floating storm cloud of black hair had not been brushed. It stuck out every which way from her scalp, the way the hair of cartoon characters did when they were supposed to have received an electric shock. She hadn’t gotten dressed yet. Instead, she’d buttoned an oversize flannel shirt over her pale green nightgown. The nightgown looked like silk. The flannel shirt probably belonged to one of her brothers. Looking at her, it was impossible to tell that Bennis Hannaford had once had a coming-out party that cost so much money, it occasioned an editorial in the
New York Times
.

“Can I come in?” Gregor asked her.

Bennis nodded and stood back. “Believe it or not, I’m awake. Believe it or not, I’ve been awake for hours.”

“I’ve been having breakfast.”

“I’ve been smoking cigarettes. Come into the kitchen. If you haven’t overdosed on coffee, you can have some more.”

Gregor had, in fact, overdosed on coffee, but he let Bennis pour him a cup anyway, just to be polite. The copy-edited manuscript she’d been talking about was laid out across the kitchen table, covered with the notes Bennis had made in bright green felt-tipped pen. Most of these notes said “
STET!!!
” in a frantic scrawl that seemed to indicate a writer at the end of her rope. One or two indicated a problematic situation Gregor wouldn’t have begun to know how to deal with. “
Subjunctive mood
,” one of these read, canceling a change from “if she were” to “if she was.” Gregor sat down and pushed a page with the words

DESIGNATIONS OF OFFICES IN THE HIERARCHY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, LIKE CARDINAL, SHOULD
ALWAYS BE CAPITALIZED

out of his way.

“Bad mess?” he asked sympathetically.

Bennis looked blank for a moment. “Oh, no,” she said, when she finally understood. “She’s wonderful, really. I mean, she’s twenty-two and her grammar is sketchy because they don’t teach grammar anymore, but she’s not a prig and she isn’t trying to make my work politically correct, which it would have a hard time being anyway since it’s set in the twelfth century or whenever, but you know what I mean. No, this one isn’t any trouble at all.”

“What do they look like when they are trouble?”

“A solid mass of red and they take me two months. Where are my cigarettes? You look all up and awake. I take it you went down to Ararat.”

“I went down to Ararat. Would you like to hear what I was listening to at Ararat?”

“Sure.”

Gregor outlined David Goldman’s story about Lotte Goldman’s story about the dreidels as quickly and succinctly as he could, which was considerably more quickly and monumentally more succinctly than David Goldman had. Bennis sat in a kitchen chair with her legs folded up under her and smoked. Bennis always smoked. It was the one bad habit she had not managed to give up since moving to Cavanaugh Street. Gregor was beginning to think nicotine was a true addiction—meaning a substance that took over for some other bodily function when you used it. Maybe when you used nicotine, your adrenal gland stopped producing enough adrenaline to keep you moving. God only knew, if social pressure could make someone quit, Bennis ought to be tobacco-free.

When Gregor finished talking about David Goldman, Bennis was halfway through with her Benson & Hedges Menthol. She blew a stream of smoke into the air and said, “That’s interesting. Do you suppose it means anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“You ought to find out how easy it is to get one of those Israeli dreidels in this country. You ought to send somebody out looking for one.”

“I’d have to do that both here and in New York,” Gregor said. “I could probably do it here. John would send someone if I told him it was important. What would I do in New York?”

Bennis had turned away a little at the mention of John Jackman’s name. Now she took another drag on her cigarette and stared at the ceiling. “Call the police in New York,” she said. “After what’s happened here, they can’t go on treating the death of Maria Gonzalez like an ordinary mugging. Maybe they’ll have somebody they can send out trying to buy dreidels.”

“It’s the kind of thing the district attorney’s office would do, not the police,” Gregor told her. “After they’ve already got their man in jail, to back up their case, if you see what I mean. And even if it turned out that it was impossible to buy one in either New York or Philadelphia, I don’t know what it would mean. The dreidels weren’t found near the scenes of the crimes. They don’t seem to have anything to do with anything.”

“They’re just strange.”

“That’s right. And I don’t like strange. Do you know what else I think is strange?”

“What?”

“The business with the wallet.”

“What business with the wallet?” Bennis cocked her head. “You mean the fact that Maximillian Dey had his wallet stolen before the show left New York?”

“It’s not just that Maximillian Dey got his wallet stolen,” Gregor said, rearranging his body on the chair and stretching out his legs. Bennis had very modern, very angular, very uncomfortable kitchen chairs. She also had very modern, very angular, very uncomfortable marble sculpture in her living room. Gregor often wondered how she could stand it.

“Think back to yesterday,” Gregor told her. “When we got to the studio, the first thing that happened was that we ran into Max, and he dropped—”