Festival of Deaths (34 page)

“Well,” John Jackman said after a while. “This Miss Oumoudian isn’t one of the people I’ve met, is she?”

“You’d remember,” Gregor said. “She’s new. Not in the neighborhood but around the block. She and her niece immigrated from Armenia just after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

“Immigrated,” John Jackman said. “That’s nice. No wonder you know so much about green cards.”

“She goes out with one of the boys from the family that owns the Middle Eastern Food Store,” Gregor said. “No, of course she doesn’t. I’m tired, John. It’s her niece—”

“The one that’s going on the class trip,” John supplied helpfully.

“Exactly. The niece is Sofie. She was going to high school down the block here and having a little trouble.”

“A little?”

“A lot. Tibor and I have been helping to set up a scholarship fund to send her to Agnes Irwin. The problem is convincing old Miss Oumoudian that it wouldn’t be taking charity.”

“And did you?”

“Not exactly,” Gregor said. “She thinks the money is going to be paid out for services rendered.”

“What?”

Gregor was still staring at Bennis’s closed door. Now he turned away from it and headed up the stairs, shaking his head.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get some work done.”

“I think it’s really too bad Bennis has decided she hates me,” John said. “I don’t hate her in the least.”

That was a can of worms that Gregor Demarkian had no intention of opening. He climbed the stairs to the third-floor landing and let them both in to his own apartment.

I
N THE BEGINNING, WHEN
Gregor Demarkian had first moved to Cavanaugh Street after the death of his wife, the floor-through apartment whose streetside living room window faced Lida Arkmanian’s upstairs living room window on the other side was mostly bare. Moving in, Gregor had bought the minimum amount of furniture and no decorative elements at all. Coming home one night it had struck him that his apartment looked very much like the apartments of the serial killers he had spent so much of his time tracking down. At least, it looked like the apartments of the neat ones. There was a certain kind of serial killer who liked to imitate a pack rat. He collected the memorabilia of everything, from cereal-box tops to human body parts to string. This kind of serial killer was almost always psychotic. He saw visions and everybody he knew thought he was strange. The neat kind of serial killer was something else again. He was more normal than most of the people he knew, and better adjusted, and better organized—at least on the surface. He was a pathological liar but a meticulous one. His apartment was as antiseptic as the waiting room of a cancer ward. Gregor’s apartment had been antiseptic in that way, too. His foyer had been empty. His living room had contained one couch, one coffee table, and one chair. Women who had visited his kitchen had felt compelled to rearrange it, as if there were something you could do to a bar table and four plain chairs to make the arrangement look more human.

Gregor Demarkian had made this observation about his apartment three years ago. He had not rushed right out and done anything about it. What he had done instead was to open up another barren part of his life, and one that seemed much more in need of immediate attention: his lack of connection to other human beings. When he came back to Cavanaugh Street and moved into the apartment, he was friendless, in any substantive definition of the term “friend.” Eight months later, he had Tibor in his life and Bennis Hannaford and Donna Moradanyan and Lida Arkmanian and God only knew who else, and curiously enough, there was an entirely different feel to his apartment. It wasn’t that he had made any changes. Gregor was the kind of man who took six months to buy himself a new Jet-Dry bulb when the one in his dishwasher wore out. It was the rest of them who had changed his apartment. Donna Moradanyan had drawn pictures and had them framed and hung them in his foyer, along with everything else she hung in his apartment from time to time, the glowing menorah in his living room window not being the least of them. Bennis had bought him a living room full of house plants, which she watered for him. If she didn’t, they would die. Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian had stocked his kitchen with equipment he never used (he didn’t know what it was all for) and pretty place mats and bright yellow kitchen curtains that at least made the place look less like the utility room at a group home.

John Jackman noticed the difference as soon as he walked in, and approved. He walked from foyer to living room to kitchen and around again, nodding his head.

“Not bad. I take it you’re in a better mood than you were during—ah—during the Hannaford case.”

“Sit down, John. Don’t worry about the Hannaford case.”

“I try not to.”

John Jackman sat down on one end of the couch, and Gregor went into the kitchen to do his usual bit with the coffee. Since discovering instant, he no longer made a brew that could be used to clean sewer pipes and probably did when his guests dumped his stuff down the drain. He set the water on to boil and propped open the swing door from the kitchen to the living room, so he and John could talk while he fussed with spoons and cups. He looked into the refrigerator to see if anything had appeared in it while he was gone and saw he was in luck. A plate of mamoul cookies was sitting right next to the only other thing in there, a bottle of Perrier water. The Perrier water belonged to Bennis. The mamoul cookies had a note stuck in with them that said,

BUY SOMETHING TO EAT, KREKOR, THIS IS NOT GOOD FOR YOU.

Gregor took the plate out and put it next to the cups.

“So,” he said to John through the door. “Did you check out the things I asked you to check out?”

“Yesterday. I told you I checked them out yesterday.”

“I know. I just want to make sure. I’ve made a great many really stupid mistakes in my life, going with my instincts without making sure.”

“Yeah. So have I. What do you want to be sure about?”

“First, about Maria Gonzalez. This would all be a lot easier if you got along with the New York police. …”

“I get along with the New York police,” John Jackman said. “I just don’t get along with Chickie baby.”

“Right. About Maria Gonzalez. They searched her apartment.”

“They did. It was a wreck.”

“I understand that. Did they find anything missing?”

“Nothing but what they already knew was missing. Her purse was missing, the one she’d been carrying at work that day. That was it. Of course, that isn’t the most accurate sort of finding. She could have had a stash of Baccarat crystal nobody knew about. She could have had a stash of dope.”

“But there was never any suggestion that she was involved with dope,” Gregor pointed out.

“There was evidence to the contrary,” John conceded. “The New York police talked to her neighbors. She went to Mass every morning before work. She baby-sat for other women’s kids. All they seemed to have against her was they thought she was a little too flashy in the way she dressed. Welcome to the big city.”

“What about things that weren’t missing that should have been? Did they find money in the apartment? Jewelry?”

“I see what you’re getting at. A thief would have stolen what he’d found, and the apartment was enough of a mess so he’d have found what was there. No, there wasn’t anything like that. Not on the lists I read.”

“That’s too bad. That means there’s no way we can know for sure.”

“Do we ever really know for sure, Gregor?”

Gregor thought
he
knew for sure often enough, far more often than he could prove it. He got down the pewter tray Howard and Sheila Kashinian had given him for Christmas last year and piled it up with cups of coffee and milk and sugar and mamoul cookies. At the last minute, he noticed the spoons he had left on the table and put them on too. He usually kept the pewter tray on top of the cabinets next to the refrigerator, which made it something of a stretch to get. Now he flexed his back where the reach had strained it a little. Then he picked up the tray and went into the living room.

“I don’t suppose it’s information I really need,” he said, “but I like to have everything I can get.”

“Don’t we all. You going to tell me what this is all about, finally?”

“Of course,” Gregor said. “We’ve got a serial killer on our hands.”

“What?”

“A serial killer,” Gregor said. “A—”

“Yes, I know,” John Jackman said, “but what is this guy? Bisexual? There are two corpses and a near corpse and one of them is—”

“Why do you think this has to be sexual?”

“Isn’t it always? The two I worked before were sexual.”

“There’s usually a sexual element,” Gregor conceded, “but it isn’t always so obvious. And why do you think it’s a man? Women have been serial killers in a number of well-known cases. Genene Jones, for instance, who murdered all those infants because she liked the high that came from responding to a code blue.”

“Wonderful,” Jackman said. “What in the name of God makes you think this—this person—is a serial killer?”

“There’s the correlation in the methods reports, for one,” Gregor said. “I’ve looked at your methods reports on the death of Maximillian Dey. I have also looked, although more briefly, on what you got from the NYPD on the death of Maria Gonzalez. The methods in those two deaths were not similar. They were identical. You could have used one report for the other and nobody would have known the difference.”

“So?”

“So,” Gregor said, “it’s true that ordinary murderers repeat their methods. What they do not do is repeat them this closely. In order to repeat this closely—to smash just the same teeth, just the same part of the jaw, just the same place on the cheekbones; the accuracy is astounding for a pair of deaths effected with a blunt instrument—in order to do all that, you’d have to plan. I’d be interested in knowing if New York has any unsolved cases sitting around with identical methods. I would guess they have several.”

Jackman still looked skeptical. “The third one wasn’t so exact,” he pointed out. “Carmencita Boaz is still alive.”

“With Carmencita Boaz, he was interrupted,” Gregor said. “I’m telling you, John, there can be no other explanation. It has to be a set of serial killings.”

John grabbed a mamoul cookie and chomped down on it. His coffee was getting cold, untouched.

“What about all this business with the green cards,” he asked. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“The green cards are how this serial killer finds his victims.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Selling forged IDs that make illegal aliens look legal is big business,” Gregor said. “It’s also easy business, if you know what you’re doing. And it’s fast. I saw a report on
60 Minutes
once—it might have been
Inside Edition
—where someone pulled up to a curb somewhere, asked for ID, and got it in less than half an hour.”

“Got a green card,” John Jackman said.

“And a social security card.”

“So what you’re saying is that this serial killer of yours supplies forged IDs to illegal aliens and then bumps off his customers?”

“Exactly.”

“Why?”

Gregor shrugged. “There isn’t any
why
with these people. Not the kind of
why
you and I would understand, anyway. We’ll find out once he’s arrested. Assuming he’s the kind who talks.”

“What if he isn’t the kind who talks?”

“Then our problem is going to be just a little bit bigger.”

“Gregor, if you really know who this person is, and if it’s really a serial killer we’re talking about here, then I think you’ve screwed around more than enough. I think you should provide me with a name and let me arrest this person.”

Gregor sighed. “Could you? Could you arrest, with what you have now? What do you have now?”

“Nothing,” John Jackman said reluctantly.

Gregor took a long drink of his coffee and picked up a couple of mamoul cookies.

“This is what happened,” he said. “Maria Gonzalez was killed at the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building, at work or just after work, and her body was stuffed somewhere for safekeeping. In the basement of the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building, maybe. Someplace temporarily safe but not safe enough. It was covered with a blanket or a plastic garbage bag. Then our killer took Maria’s keys, went up to her apartment, and ransacked the place.”

“Why?”

“My guess is that that forged green card wasn’t on her,” Gregor said. “The killer went up there to find it. Maybe he got angry when he was working. Maybe he just thought he’d put on a good show. At any rate, the status quo was acceptable until DeAnna Kroll sent out a hue and cry for Maria Gonzalez, and then the hiding place wasn’t safe any more. So our murderer brought the body upstairs—”

“How did he do that without getting seen?”

“It would have been very unlikely if the murderer had been seen,” Gregor said. “This fuss started between three and four o’clock in the morning. There wouldn’t have been that many people around. Besides, if the murderer had been seen, so what? Carrying something big and bulky wrapped in plastic—while
The Lotte Goldman Show
was setting up for a tape? Nobody would have noticed.”

“Maybe not,” John Jackman conceded.

“The murderer then put the body of Maria Gonzalez, minus her covering, into the storeroom. It must have been a blanket or something like that that Maria was wrapped in. Otherwise, why not just leave it with the body?”

“What did happen to it?”

“It probably went down the incinerator. Now we come to Maximillian Dey. Max was carrying chairs and other furniture for Shelley Feldstein. He went downstairs and was never seen again, until he was dead. Was he killed in that bathroom?”

“I think so, yes. I haven’t had time to read the report in any heavy duty way, but from what I remember, there were splatters on the wall behind him, which would indicate—”

“I know what it would indicate,” Gregor said. “That means there’s nothing we can do with Max. There’s no way to prove anything there. And the same is true of Carmencita Boaz, of course. It’s exactly the same situation. We’re going to have to rely on Maria Gonzalez.”