Murder Superior (7 page)

Actually, Norman Kevic lived a borderline life and he knew it. He was lying here on the couch in his office because he didn’t want to go home, and the exhaustion simply gave him a good excuse. His house was too big and too empty. Because he was who and what he was, he got a lot of sex. It had been years since he had a real relationship, with a woman who would talk to him and be there when he wanted company but didn’t want a party. Nice women never liked him for long, and he didn’t blame them any more than he blamed his maids. His mouth started running and he just couldn’t make it stop. His nerves got to tingling and his body revved up and his mind shifted into high gear and it was all over, nobody could talk to him, nobody to slow him down, he was out and about and on another rampage.

Right now, he was in the middle of another collapse. As soon as the show was over, he had come in here and laid himself out. He wouldn’t be able to get up again for hours unless he made an effort at it, which he did not intend to do. He let his hand drop to the carpet and felt around on the floor for his buzzer. It was the kind of buzzer patients are given in hospitals so they can call a nurse. Norm pressed down on it three or four times and then let it drop.

In no time at all, there were footsteps in the hallway outside, sharp little cracks that spoke of stiletto heels on engineered parquet. Norm considered opening his fly and decided against it. Stiletto heels meant Julia Stern, and Julia Stern had no use for him at all. For a while, Norm had taken to insisting on having his buzzer answered only by the women he wanted it answered by, but it hadn’t worked out in the long run. The women he wanted hadn’t wanted him and had had a tendency to quit when they were forced to deal with him on a regular basis. There were other things he wanted from his partners and the general manager that trading this sort of favor for was an easy way to get Julia Stern didn’t like him, but she was efficient, and he could use a little efficiency for a time.

The stiletto heels stopped just outside the door. The doorknob turned and the door opened. Julia Stern was a woman in her twenties with too much hair piled too high on her head and too much flab around the middle. Norm wondered what it was like, being a woman this homely and knowing that you were homely. He wondered that about a lot of women, and then sat back in astonishment as they each and every one of them got married and settled down to have a passel of kids. They always married just the sort of men Norm thought would be more interested in someone who looked like Melanie Griffith.

Julia Stern was wearing a short black leather skirt cut halfway up her thigh and a long cotton sweater that reached nearly to the skirt’s hem. Norm wondered why it was that heavy young women were always so eager to show off their legs. Julia Stern was chewing gum.

“You buzzed,” she said. “I
presume
that means you want something.”

“Breakfast,” Norm said solemnly.

“What kind of breakfast? Ham and eggs? Pancakes and syrup? Didn’t you have breakfast before?”

Norm couldn’t remember if he’d had breakfast before or not. The idea of ham and eggs made him ill. The idea of pancakes and syrup made him feel he was suffocating in maple.

“I want three large glasses of orange juice and a pot of coffee,” he said. “I think I’ve got the orange juice in the refrigerator downstairs. I’m dehydrated.”

“Right,” Julia Stern said.

“Go get him something to eat,” the voice of Steve Harald said, booming into the room from the hall. “I’ve got to talk to him and I want him sober.”

Julia Stern made a face and turned away, muttering something under her breath that was probably subversive. Norm paid no attention. If he paid attention to every subversive thing every member of his staff ever said, he wouldn’t have any staff. Once the doorway was clear, it was filled with the form of Steve Harald, who was tall and thin and fashionable and the station manager. Norm was almost as curious about him as he was about homely women. When Norm was in high school, it was always people like Steve Harald who were the most important ones, the ones who got elected to things, the ones whose yearbook prophecies were solemn predictions of future success instead of jokey references to adolescent embarrassments. Norm’s yearbook prophecy had read “Most likely to be eating a Hostess Twinkie when the world ends.”

And yet here they were.

Steve was the station manager, with a salary but no stake in the enterprise, with three thousand square feet in Paoli and his kids in public schools.

Norm was the star with a piece of the action.

Was any of this supposed to make any sense?

Steve leaned against the doorjamb and said, “Fifteen Japanese jokes an hour. I counted them.”

“I didn’t know I was being that predictable.”

“I averaged them. All that crap about the fugu.”

“Well, Steve, you have to admit it’s pretty weird. Eating a fish that can kill you if you look at it sideways and getting a kick out of putting your life in danger.”

“That’s not why they do it.”

“How the Hell do you know why they do anything?”

“I know why
you
do things, Norm, and I’m telling you it’s got to stop. It’s really got to stop. We’re in mucho trouble with the Japanese-American community as it is. We’re going to be in trouble with the FCC before you know it.”

“No we’re not,” Norm said. “It comes under the First Amendment. You know that.”

“I know that these are perfectly tasteless jokes with no point to them at all. This is not Detroit Japan bashing does not go over big here. If you have to get this out of your system, do a show.”

Do a show, Norm thought. The room was looking a little fuzzy. The room had been looking a little fuzzy all along, of course, but the quality of it had changed now, it had become tinged with red, and for a moment Norm thought he was having a vision of Hell. Hell was just the way he had always been told it, would be, full of red flames and grinning Devils. Then the Devils turned into pink-cheeked troll dolls with neon orange hair.

“Steve?” he said.

“What is it?”

“You know that party I’m supposed to go to, the one for the nuns’ convention?”

“Yeah.”

“Is anybody else from the station going to be there?”

“Nobody else from the station, as far as I know. Henry Hare is going to be there from VTZ. It was in the press release your own people put out.”

“Yeah.”

“You can’t remember anything anymore.”

“Yeah. listen, Steve. Are you Catholic?”

“Nope. I think my grandparents were Lutheran. My parents weren’t anything in particular.”

“I’m Catholic.”

“I know.”

“I just keep thinking about it, you know. A big room full of nuns like that. Thousands of nuns all in the same place.”

“So what?”

“So nuns are trouble,” Norman Kevic said. “Nuns have always been trouble. They’re bad luck if they aren’t anything else, and you can’t control them. And I keep thinking—you know who else is going to be at that party?”

“No.”

“Gregor Demarkian. The name mean anything to you?”

Steve Harald hesitated. Norm waited expectantly. He had always suspected Steve of being functionally oblivious—of paying no attention to anything that didn’t relate directly to his job at the station—and now Norm was sure of it.

“Gregor Demarkian,” Norm said, “is the guy who does murders. The one the
Philadelphia Inquirer
calls ‘the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot’ ”

“Oh,” Steve said.

“Never mind,” Norm said. “But I keep thinking about it, if you know what I mean. I keep thinking about the world’s most famous consultant on murder being right there in the middle of all those nuns, and what we could do with that I hate nuns.”

“You’ve said that,” Steve said.

Actually he hadn’t, but he’d probably implied it, so Norm decided to let it go. The sound of stiletto heels told him that Julia was coming back. He sat up a little on the couch and got ready to throw a hurricane of orange juice down his throat.

“There was a murder in the Motherhouse of their convent a little while ago,” Norm said musingly. “I remember reading about it. Demarkian was in on it.”

“On the murder?”

“On the investigation. I wonder what we could make of it.”

“Don’t make anything of it,” Steve said. “You’re in enough hot water with the Japanese. All you have to do is insult Henry’s wife’s alma mater or her best-remembered nun teacher or what the Hell. You may be part-owner of the station, but Henry is still chairman of the board.”

And Henry’s wife is a little slut with an appetite for nymphomania, Norm thought but he didn’t say it, because it wouldn’t have come as news to anybody and there was no point. Besides, Julia really was there, right behind Steve, carrying a plastic tray from the cafeteria. The tray was covered with glasses of juice and cups of coffee and little bowls full of sugar and creamer. Julia hadn’t been taking any chances.

Steve stood aside to let Julia through. Norm held out his hands for the tray.

“I hate nuns,” Norm said. “I hate them more than I hate the Japanese. At least the Japanese don’t think they’ve got a pipeline right up through the stratosphere to God.”

T
HERE WAS A HAND-LETTERED
cardboard sign hanging in the display window of Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store, and every time Gregor Demarkian passed it he wondered if there was something about being Armenian that made people a little cracked. Then he thought of the most cracked person he knew—who happened to be a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant named Bennis Hannaford—and decided it wasn’t worth worrying about. It was Sunday, the eleventh of May, a bright hot day at the beginning of what promised to be a glorious spring. Gregor Demarkian had spent twenty years of his life with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, ten of them with the Department of Behavioral Sciences. The Department of Behavioral Sciences was that division of the Bureau that helped local police forces coordinate national hunts for serial killers. Gregor had founded it but not named it, the name having been visited on him and all the agents he worked with by some second assistant bureaucrat who had had friends in Congress so long he had lost the knack of speaking English. Bright spring days while he had still been with the division had not been happy. Psychopaths responded to a warming of the weather just like anybody else. When the sun started to gleam, Dagwood Bumstead took his family to the beach and the local nutcase took his victim to a wooded hillside ten miles out of town. Or somewhere. Gregor Demarkian had started his career with the Bureau swearing he was never going to retire. He had ended it at the beginning of his wife’s last painful year of battling with cancer. He had never looked back. In the midst of Elizabeth’s dying, it had been hard for him to recognize how he’d come to feel about his job—it had been hard to remember he’d ever had a job—but in the years since, he’d been unable to avoid it. By the time Gregor Demarkian had left the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he had come to hate his work with a passion.

The sign in the display window of Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store said:

IN FOR MOTHER’S DAY—HEART-SHAPED HONEY CAKES WITHGRANNY GLASSES
.

Underneath it was a heart-shaped honey cake that indeed had granny glasses, made of silver sugar pearls, and bright eyes with long lashes inside the glass frames, too. Next to the honey cake was a tiny vase of plastic flowers with
MOTHER
printed across the bulbed-out part at the end of it, and another vase with something incomprehensible printed on that Gregor supposed the incomprehensible thing must be
mother
spelled out in Armenian, but he couldn’t be sure. There had been times in his life when he’d been able to do a fair job of dredging Armenian words from the pit of forgetfulness a life in major cities had confined them to, but today was not one of those times. It was hard to tell exactly what today was. It was Mother’s Day, of course. No one walking down Cavanaugh Street could have mistaken it for anything else. Mother’s Day might once have been a sticky-sentimental gesture by a corrupt Congress looking to do something nobody could cause a scandal over. It might have metamorphosed into one more shtick for the retail sector to exploit. On Cavanaugh Street, however, it was something like a patron saint’s feast day. Gregor Demarkian had grown up on Cavanaugh Street. In those days it had been an Armenian-American immigrant ghetto, the kind of place where bricks fell off the facades of buildings and plaster crumbled from their inner walls and social workers arrived with the regularity of bowel movements to berate the population on how they were doing it all wrong. It was now Philadelphia’s jewel of urban renewal, a clean place lined by town houses and floor-through condominium apartments, trendy restaurants and import boutiques, even a bookstore and a religious supply house used by all the priests in all the Eastern rite churches in the city. That this change had come about was due entirely to the way the children of Cavanaugh Street felt about their mothers, which, in Gregory’s opinion, was right up there in both fanaticism and common sense with the way the people of Jonestown had felt about Reverend Jim. Gregor could just imagine one of the women of his own generation—Lida Arkmanian or Hannah Krekorian or Sheila Kashinian—giving the order for a mass march into the sea. First they’d give the order for a mass march into rubber boots.

Of course, Gregor didn’t want to imply that he didn’t think well of Armenian mothers. He’d had an Armenian mother of his own, once, and an Armenian grandmother, too. They were wonderful women. Bossy, maybe. A little on the hysterical side when it came to how much their children ate or how many layers they wore on perfectly nice days when no layers at all would probably have made more sense, but still—

He was past Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store now, almost up to the Ararat restaurant. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, nearly time for the liturgy to finish at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. Any minute now, Father Tibor Kasparian would bless the congregation and Sheila Kashinian would begin to tap her foot. All the old ladies would rustle and blush and try to hide the fact that what they really wanted to do was get out to the vestibule and the front steps as quickly as possible, where they could get some serious talking done. It was to avoid church that Gregor had gone for his walk in the first place. He had nothing against church—he certainly had nothing against Father Tibor’s sermons—but today…