One of Our Own

Book 30: Gregor Demarkian Novels

by Jane Haddam

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

A mysterious black van is spotted by several people at various times in the area around Cavanaugh Street, Philadelphia's Armenian-American enclave. Presumed by some to be related to the increasing ICE raids around the area, the mystery deepens one night when a body falls out of the back of the van when speeding through the neighborhood. Marta Warkowski, a reclusive older woman, is found bound up in a garbage bag after it falls out of the van. In a coma, Warkowski is unable to tell police how she ended up as she did. When they go to search her apartment, the police find the dead body of her building's super, a man with whom she has a history of conflict. How did she end up in a garbage bag in the back of a mysterious van? How did he end up dead in her locked apartment? What does all of this have to do with the real estate holdings of infamous local developer, Cary Alder? Gregor Demarkian, former FBI agent and consultant, is ready to retire. He and his wife Bennis have agreed to foster a child, Javier, with a mysterious past and limited language skills. But he is pulled in once again, for a final case, to uncover the truth about the murder—and attempted murder—on Cavanaugh Street.

Release date: November 17, 2020

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 272

Sample

ONE

1


Gregor Demarkian took Pickles out for a walk the long way around, starting at his own house and going all the way up Cavanaugh Street and then back again. The ice storm was over but still a problem. The sidewalk was slick. The utility poles all looked like they were frosted. Pickles was not enamored of this bit of exercise. Gregor was surprised she was willing to get her business done at all.

What Gregor wanted was to take a look at Donna Moradanyan’s house, the same house where Tommy Moradanyan and his sister lived, the same house where they had all lived together with Russ Donahue. He had no idea what he expected to see. There was a time when any house Donna Moradanyan lived was a spectacle for the neighborhood and beyond. She liked decorating for holidays, and her idea of decorating was to wrap entire buildings in lights or colored tinfoil or shiny paper or whatever else occurred to her to carry out a theme. Sometimes she wrapped her own house this way. Sometimes she went on to another building or two on the street. One Groundhog Day she had decked out the Ararat Restaurant with plastic grass and flowers and added a mechanical groundhog that sprang up to celebrate spring. On Valentine’s Day she had covered Gregor’s own house in wriggling cupids with red and white hearts on the tips of their arrows. Stories and pictures appeared on the local news stations. People came from as far away as Bucks County and the Main Line to see what she was going to do next.

This morning the house was dark, with nothing to cover it but its own red brick. There had been no decorating since Russ had gone to prison. In some ways, there had been no Donna since Russ had gone to prison. She went about her day the way she always had. Her children were well dressed and well fed. Tommy got halfway decent grades in school. Charlotte was the star of her ballet class. Donna herself had taken a job as an editor at a small local newsmagazine. Gregor had heard she did well there. Even so, it was like Gertrude Stein said—there was no there there. The Donna Moradanyan of today was a competent, organized woman. She just wasn’t really Donna Moradanyan.

Pickles decided to do her business right in front of Donna’s house, which Gregor thought was a statement of some kind, he didn’t know about what. Gregor used the pooper-scooper and cleaned up after the dog. He half expected Tommy to come barreling out to talk to him. There had to be a lot left to say after the mess of the night before. There was always the chance that Gregor, with his contacts, might have heard something about what it all meant. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t, but Tommy didn’t come out anyway.

Gregor gave a last look at the brick facade and started back toward his own house. He got as spooky as Donna sometimes these days. He didn’t know what to do about it. Things just seemed … wrong, somehow. He couldn’t put them right.

He let himself into his front foyer and heard sounds from the kitchen. A moment later, Javier came running out, and Pickles snapped against the leash hard enough to break free. Javier was talking a mile a minute in Spanish. Pickles was licking his face and scattering wet drops of melting ice everywhere.

Bennis came out, too. “Hey,” she said. “The Melajian boys were just here. We have breakfast.”

“The Ararat delivered breakfast?”

“Just this once for the special circumstances,” Bennis said. “I talked to Linda about it a couple of days ago. I thought it would be a bit much to take Javier to the Ararat first day out, so she put together a few things for us to have here.”

“Did she send eggs?”

“Scrambled only. She said sunny-side up doesn’t travel well. There’s sort of a lot of it.”

Javier and Pickles had disappeared into the kitchen. Gregor followed Bennis back there and saw Javier sitting at the table in front of a plate piled up with pancakes, waffles, hash browns, sausages, and toast. Next to him, Pickles was being presented with a small plate of pancakes with butter and syrup.

“Oh, no,” Bennis said. She grabbed the small plate and put it on the floor. Pickles followed it. “No dogs at the table,” Bennis told Javier. Then she leaned over and told Pickles the same thing.

“Of course, I don’t know what Tibor does,” she said, “and I’ve got a suspicion that pancakes aren’t what you really want to feed dogs, but we’ll work it out. He’s going to bring over some of her things later. Do you mind Pickles staying a few days?”

Gregor sat down at an empty place and started going through the plastic containers of—everything. “Of course not. She seems to be acting like a therapy dog. I hope Tibor doesn’t mind.”

“I don’t think he minds. I don’t know if he’s making much sense this morning, though. You’re making a lot more sense than I expected you to.”

“All I did was go down and check things out. I probably didn’t even need to. It isn’t like they got arrested. They were just witnesses. They talked to the uniforms. They talked to the detectives headquarters sent out, or maybe the precinct. I don’t even know. They gave their information and we all came home. It was just a weird incident.”

“You were the one who said it was an attempted murder.”

“I can’t think of what else it would be,” Gregor said. “But the woman was alive when she was taken away in the ambulance, I’m just glad Javier wasn’t there.”

“I’m just sorry Tommy was,” Bennis said. She looked toward Javier. Gregor noticed that the boy had started in on the fruit jams. There were five or six different kinds. He was using all of them.

Bennis had tea and a plate with a piece of melon on it. She sat down herself, saw Javier was struggling to reach the big tub of hash browns, and pulled it closer to him. Javier said gracias and went at it.

“Lida called. She and Hannah are coming over sometime today. They baked cookies. Father Tibor is sleeping in. I suppose Tommy is sleeping in, too.”

“Did you talk to Donna?”

“Sort of. And the weather is awful, so I was thinking we’d just stay in today. Javier and me, I meant. You can do what you want.”

“Is there somewhere you wanted to go?”

Bennis shrugged. “There are things that need to be done. Clothes, for instance. I have all his school uniforms, that was easy, but I don’t have that much in the way of stuff for him to wear otherwise. I didn’t want to go out and pick up a bunch of things I liked and just stick him with them. Even children have their own tastes. I don’t know what he wants in colors, or if he likes jeans or khakis, or any of that sort of thing. And he needs a backpack. I can get that off the Internet at L.L.Bean, but then there’s that color thing again, and there are different kinds. There are a lot of things to think about.”

Gregor looked over at Javier. Pickles was in his lap, and chomping down on something. Bennis got up, took the dog, and put it back down on the floor.

“No dogs at the table,” she said to Javier, very emphatically this time. Then she sat down again. “I’ve got my suspicions about the language thing,” she said. “I think it’s like the first time I was by myself in Paris.”

“He speaks Spanish,” Gregor pointed out.

“I know. But I was in Paris on my own for the first time, and I was getting kind of frantic, because I didn’t speak the language and I kept seeing myself starving to death in the street because I couldn’t figure out how to order any food and the French are really such jackasses about pretending they don’t know what you’re trying to say. And then I was in this bakery, patisserie, you know, and I was trying to buy some pastry, and it suddenly hit me. I wanted to buy pastry, and the girl behind the counter wanted to sell me pastry, and given those circumstances, we’d find a way.”

“You aren’t making any sense.”

“I think Javier’s ability to understand what I’m talking about sort of waxes and wanes with how motivated he is to get the message.”

“Ah.”

Somewhere out in the foyer, the landline rang. Bennis stood up.

“I’ll get it. And I was thinking just last week that we ought to get rid of the landline because we never use it anymore.”

“It’ll probably be a robocall. You can hang up.”

Bennis left the room. Gregor turned his attention to Javier. Pickles was back in his lap, but she wasn’t chomping on anything this time, so Gregor let it go.

Javier stroked the dog’s head.

“You don’t know it yet,” Gregor told him, “but you’re about to be surrounded by a bunch of Armenian ladies who were born to be grandmothers. They’re going to be all over you. You’re going to have cookies.”

“Oreo,” Javier said, almost solemnly.

Gregor laughed. “Those, too. But there are going to be cookies they make themselves. In big batches, bigger than you can get at any grocery store.”

“Chips Ahoy!” Javier said. “Fig Newtons!”

Gregor laughed again. “We’ve got Girl Scouts around here,” he said. “We’ll get you some of those, too.”

“Mallomars.”

Just then, Bennis came back, looking puzzled.

“It’s for you,” she said. “It’s John Jackman.”

2

Over the years Gregor Demarkian had known him, John Henry Newman Jackman had become the most famous politician in Pennsylvania. He had started as a detective of homicide in Bryn Mawr, a position that had made him joke that racial stereotypes didn’t work in Bryn Mawr, because the only black man in the suburb was on the side of law and order. He had moved from there to become head of homicide in Philadelphia, and then police commissioner in Philadelphia, and then mayor. Until Barack Obama came along, Gregor had been sure he had been looking to become America’s first black president. At the moment, he was having to settle for a seat in the United States Senate and more interviews on CNN than most people could handle without losing their minds.

There was a little chair next to the telephone table in the foyer. It was solid enough to sit in, but ornate in the way furniture was when Bennis didn’t expect anybody to use it. Gregor sat down and picked up the receiver.

“John? Are you calling from Washington? Why are you calling on the landline? Nobody calls on the landline. I don’t understand why we still have it.”

“It was the number I could remember,” John said. “Besides, I figured somebody would be home. I don’t mind talking to Bennis.”

“You still haven’t told me what’s wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong,” John said. “At least, not exactly. Believe it or not, I’m calling for a friend. And no, I’m not in Washington. We’re on recess. I’m spending the holidays out in Bryn Mawr. At the moment, though, I’m downtown.”

“All right. Downtown doing what?”

“Like I said. Calling for a friend. Do you know who William Jefferson is?”

“Of course I do. Took over as police commissioner after that whole thing blew up.”

“The whole thing blew up,” John Jackman said. “Well, that’s one way of putting it. Biggest corruption scandal in the history of the Commonwealth and it happens while I’m on the job. Do you know I’ve introduced a bill to make private prisons illegal?”

“I have been following your career, John, yes. But—is that back again? Is there another judge out there shanghaiing people to keep the prison populations up?”

“No,” John said. “No, I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure how much you knew. You got shot. You were in the hospital. I understood you had a long rehab. I didn’t know if you were keeping up. Bill Jefferson thought you probably had been keeping up, which is why I’m making this phone call. He thinks you might not be interested in talking to him.”

“I’m a little tired,” Gregor said. “This is sounding like gibberish.”

“I’m supposed to reassure you that the department is no longer a cesspit of corruption, and it’s safe for you to deal with them.”

“It was safe enough for me to deal with them when they were a cesspit of corruption. What’s going on here? Has he got a murder he wants a consultant for?”

“Not a murder, no. It’s that thing that happened last night.”

“The woman in the garbage bag,” Gregor said.

“Exactly.”

Gregor stretched out his legs. “You do realize, both of you, that I wasn’t actually there? It was Tibor Kasparian and Tommy Moradanyan who witnessed whatever that was? Tibor just called me and asked me to come on out and help. Meaning stand around and listen to the cops question them. I did see the woman and the garbage bag on the ground, but by the time I got there the ambulance men were there already. They were packing her up to get her to the hospital. I take it she didn’t die.”

“Not yet.”

“It’s that close?”

“I don’t know where we’re at now,” John said. “The report I got said she was a complete mess, but that’s to be expected. You always want people to live, of course, but I think the issue here is the same whether she lives or dies. Things are kind of complicated. Jefferson wants some help.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Put him on.”

“He wants some help down here.”

“You want me to come down there.”

“We’ll send a car. I take it you still don’t drive. We’ll send an unmarked, don’t worry. Just come down here and talk to Bill and the two detectives we’ve got working this. You don’t have to go on with it past that if you don’t want to.”

“But you wouldn’t call me in if you didn’t want me to.”

“Yeah, well.”

“How fast do I have to be ready?”

“We could pick you up in twenty minutes.” There was a long pause. Then Jackman said, “You can’t have changed that much, Gregor. This is you. You’re up. You’re probably in a suit and tie already.”

Gregor was in a suit and tie already. Gregor pulled his legs in and stood up. “All right. Just ring the bell when you get here. Do you know Bennis and I have a foster child? He came to us last night.”

“Jefferson really does need help, Gregor. This really is a complicated situation.”

“Just ring the doorbell. Actually come up to the door. I’m not going to keep everybody’s cell phone clear just so the cops can call me from the curb.”

Gregor hung up. Then he went down the hall again to the back of the house and the kitchen.

Javier and Bennis were still at the kitchen table. Javier had started in on fruit and cheese. He was handing thick slices of cheese to Pickles, who was sitting patiently on the floor next to his chair. Bennis was just putting down her cell phone.

“That was Ed George,” she said as he came in. “He’s on his way over. He has paperwork.”

“Hadn’t we decided we were going to make this a nice calm day, get acquainted with Javier?”

Javier looked up. Pickles put her paws up on Javier’s leg and looked over the surface of the table. Javier reached for a strip of bacon.

“What did John Jackman want?” Bennis asked.

Gregor sat down and told her. His plate was still where he had left it, and still mostly full of food. He got a strip of bacon for himself and gnawed on it halfheartedly.

“I think it’ll be all right,” Bennis said. “I don’t think he wants us to sign anything right this minute. I think the point is for us to read it over and then go get it signed in front of a notary. At least he said something about a notary, and he didn’t say anything about bringing a notary.”

“And Lida isn’t here to try to introduce him to every gay man she’s ever met in Philadelphia so she can get him safely married and—I don’t know what she wants. I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean it to be like this. I really did mean to take the month off so we could concentrate on this.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bennis said, leaning over to take yet another strip of bacon out of Javier’s hands before he could feed it to the dog.

3

Edmund George showed up before the police did, which meant he had to have been just around the corner. He was wearing a fedora over a black cashmere coat and a plaid cashmere scarf. He looked like a model for GQ magazine, the Absolutely Youngest Partner in the Absolutely Most Prestigious Law Firm in the world. The chances were he wasn’t that young. There had been a few lost years back there when Gregor first met him.

He came through to the kitchen with his attaché case held out in front of him. He put the attaché case on the kitchen table and surveyed the wide spread of food there. Then he sat down in front of the nearest empty space.

“Good morning,” he said to Javier.

“Buenos días,” Javier said.

“He looks better than the last time I saw him,” he said to Bennis. “Is that Father Tibor’s dog?”

“The general consensus is that he’s using it sort of like a therapy dog,” Gregor said. “Tibor doesn’t mind, and the dog makes Javier happy, so—”

Bennis put a cup and saucer down in front of Ed. “Eat all you want,” she said, “but do us a favor and don’t feed the dog. Javier’s been feeding her all morning. She’s going to end up throwing up all over the living room.”

Ed ignored the food and started to take papers out of his attaché case. “These are mostly from the Department of Homeland Security,” he said, “and that’s just busywork. I don’t know why they think we’re all going to be safer if we fill out enough forms, but they do. I’ve looked into the whole thing about Javier’s background, and I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Do we really know much of anything about the backgrounds of any of these children?” Gregor asked. “This is the part of all this I don’t understand. They come up here, ‘unaccompanied minors,’ they call them. Who knows where they’re from or what they’ve been through?”

Ed George shrugged. “Gregor, most of these kids, they may be unaccompanied, but you can talk to them. They’ll tell you where they’re from. They’ll talk about their lives at home.”

“You can’t verify any of it,” Gregor pointed out.

“No, you can’t,” Ed said. “But you can punt. You at least have something to say. Angela Gonzalez from Honduras. Jose Gomez from El Salvador. It gives you something to write down and it makes everybody feel better. Unless you’ve had better luck than the rest of us, we don’t even have a last name for this one.”

“I wonder if we just couldn’t make up a last name for him,” Bennis said. “We could call him Santamaria, because he’s always sitting in the Mary chapel in church.”

“He’s going to have to have a last name for school,” Ed said. “What are you using there?”

“Demarkian,” Gregor said. “It seemed like the most sensible thing to use.”

Ed shook his head. “You might as well use that on this stuff. I’ve been fudging it for weeks now. They haven’t been happy with me. That’s why you have all this, now. I’ve been putting off doing it until we could decide what to do about a surname. And it’s not safe to let it go too long.”

“We really have to worry about that,” Gregor said, feeling completely disoriented. “Do you realize how many people this neighborhood has brought over from Armenia just since I came back to live here? Never mind before that. I can remember all kinds of snags and problems and I don’t know what else. Armenia was under Soviet control for a lot of the time. But I don’t remember anybody ever worrying about raids from immigration.”

“It’s a new world,” Ed said.

“Is it just because he’s, you know, Spanish?” Bennis asked.

Ed shook his head. “It’s everybody, everywhere. Except Canadians. Nobody seems to care about the Canadians. But we’ve got a guy in the office doing immigration from the UK, and they’re threatening one of his guys with deportation over a DUI from 1982. Granted it was a pretty spectacular DUI and the guy spent a month in jail, but we’d never have had that kind of problem even five years ago.”

“Sister Margaret Mary said they keep watch for ICE vans over at the school,” Bennis said. “They’ve never had ICE there, but some of the other schools in the city have. It seems insane to me.”

Ed George got another sheaf of papers out of his attaché case. It was smaller, but also more official looking in some way. Gregor picked it up and looked at it.

“Department of State?”

Ed took the sheaf of papers back. “We’re going to try something. If it doesn’t work, it can’t hurt us. If it does work, we’re going to be able to protect Javier here, at least in part. We’re going to make his visit official.”

“Whatever Javier’s story,” Gregor said, “I don’t think he was the Honduran minister of agriculture.”

“And we don’t know who his parents were, so we can’t say his father was the Honduran minister of agriculture, either,” Ed said. “We’re also stuck with not knowing his country of origin. But maybe that’s a good thing. We’re going to guess that he’s Mexican.”

Gregor nodded. “That’s the most logical thing, if you think about it. I’ve been thinking that he can’t have come far. He wasn’t hurt or abused. That’s almost never the case with kids who take the long trek up here from Central America. They get preyed on.”

“My interest is that the Jesuits have an educational exchange program going on with Mexico,” Ed George said. “Javier is actually a little too young to qualify, but it’s like everything else in his case. We don’t know his age, so we can fudge it a little. I’ve talked to the Maryknoll nuns down at the border and the sisters here and the head of the program in Philadelphia and we worked something out. You can use Demarkian as his last name. That’s all right. That won’t matter. But from now on we have to be consistent. This at least has to look good.”

“So the State Department will think Javier is here on an educational exchange program?” Bennis said. “And that will protect him from ICE?”

“Sort of,” Ed said. “Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about the raids. If ICE decides it wants to swoop in somewhere and check everybody’s documentation, there’s nothing we can do about it. And they sometimes pick up people who are here perfectly legally but can’t prove it. After all, can either of you prove you’re in the United States legally? I couldn’t. I don’t carry my birth certificate around and I keep my passport in my safe-deposit box. And if ICE does stage a raid and scoop him up with a bunch of other people, he won’t necessarily be given a chance to phone you. Assuming he knows how to phone you.”

“We’re getting him a cell,” Bennis said.

“In that case, if he suddenly goes missing, you’re going to have to go looking for him. If I were you, I’d make sure somebody walks him to and from school every day. And the office is all set up to go looking for him if he gets snatched. But what this will do”—Ed pointed at the State Department paperwork—“is make him not exactly undocumented. He’ll have paperwork he can carry and you’ll have paperwork you can keep, saying he’s part of this program. But it would be a really good idea if you could hurry.”

“Why?” Gregor asked.

“Because,” Ed said, “we probably can’t get this backdated. He’s supposed to have done all this before he ever crossed the border. And we’re not going to send him back down there to cross the border again, so we’re going to have do a few dipsy doodles so it isn’t clear that he came in illegally first. You fill those out today, if you can. When I come back to get them, I’ll bring a notary from the office. And I’ll come back at six.”

“I’ll do them,” Bennis said quickly.

Out in the hallway, the doorbell sounded, playing the first few notes of “Für Elise.”

“I’ll get it,” Gregor said.


Copyright © 2020 by the Estate of Orania Papazoglou.