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Overview
Once one of Wall Street’s most powerful forces, Donald McAdam’s life changed when he found himself in a tight spot with the SEC. Either give up everything, they told him, or inform on your friends. Never one for loyalty, McAdam chose the wire, and sent half the stockbrokers in New York to prison. Now he’s filthy rich, isolated, and so paranoid that he buys his cocaine laced with strychnine, in hopes of building up a tolerance for the poison. His caution doesn’t help him, however, when he tumbles off his high-rise balcony and falls headfirst back down to Wall Street.
Soon afterward, one of the men McAdam put away invites ex–FBI investigator Gregor Demarkian on a very peculiar cruise—onboard a cramped precise replica of the Mayflower. But when the behavior of the passengers proves rather un-Puritan, Demarkian discovers something that would have shocked Columbus: a New World murder.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480462472 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | MysteriousPress.com/Open Road |
| Publication date: | 01/14/2014 |
| Series: | Gregor Demarkian Series , #6 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 306 |
| Sales rank: | 496,545 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Not a Creature Was Stirring (1990) introduced Haddam’s best-known character, former FBI agent Gregor Demarkian. The series spans more than twenty novels, many of them holiday-themed, including Murder Superior (1993), Fountain of Death (1995), and Wanting Sheila Dead (2005). Haddam’s later novels include Blood in the Water (2012) and Hearts of Sand (2013).
Read an Excerpt
Feast of Murder
A Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mystery
By Jane Haddam
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1992 Orania PapazoglouAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6247-2
CHAPTER 1
1
On the day the very young man from the Federal Bureau of Investigation came to Cavanaugh Street, Gregor Demarkian found a picture of the Pilgrimage Green in the morning mail. Actually, the morning mail was the only mail he had—and from what he'd heard from friends who lived in other parts of Philadelphia, he was damned lucky to get it in the morning. His problem with the mail was the same as his problem with half of the rest of his life lately. Gregor had spent twenty years in the FBI himself, ten of those years as founder and head of Behavioral Sciences, the department that coordinated interstate manhunts for serial killers. Like any other high Washington official—like senators, congressmen, presidents, cabinet secretaries, and heads of major departments—he had lived a life free of bureaucratic bungling, management inefficiency, and general bad service. The Bureau made it a point not to bungle with the sort of people who could influence its next appropriation. For the ten long years of his reign at BSD, Gregor had had tax refunds that showed up in his mailbox two weeks after he'd filed his return, phone equipment that got fixed within an hour or two of his making a complaint, and mail that arrived at his office at least twice a day. The Social Security Administration never botched his name or got his number confused with that of a retired miner from Bozeman, Montana. The Post Office never delivered his Visa payment to the Vi-Sal Hair Salon in downtown L.A. He lived, in fact, in a kind of paradise, except for two little problems. In the first place, his wife was dying, painfully and slowly (but much too fast for Gregor) of cancer. For another, long before she started dying, he had begun to hate his job. Sometimes, in his sleep, he saw the cases he had handled strung out before him like beads of blood: the young man who had roamed through Alabama, Mississippi, and northern Florida, killing small girls and taking their right hands for souvenirs; the old woman in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona who had gone from one live-in elderly help job to another, offing each of her charges as she went; the sweet engaged couple from western Virginia who had first murdered all of her living relatives and then all of his. Back at the beginning, when there was no Behavioral Sciences Department, and getting one started had been a holy crusade, Gregor had kept a picture in his office that was meant to remind him how important his work was and why he had to keep going no matter how much pain they made him take. The picture was of a twelve-year-old girl named Kimberly Ann Leach, the last of the countless victims of a man named Theodore Robert Bundy. In the end, not even Kimberly Ann Leach could motivate him. It was one thing to pick up a serial murder case here and there, over the years. It was another thing to live for nothing else. He tried to sleep and the crime scenes played back on the inside of his skull, crime scenes made more vivid and more lurid because he had not actually been at them. For some reason, those badly lit five-by-eight color prints were as potent as lime rickeys made with 151-proof rum.
On the day the picture of the Pilgrimage Green came in the mail—and the FBI reentered Gregor's life with a typically two-left-footed crash—all that was at least three years in the past. Gregor's wife was dead. Gregor's career with the Bureau had ended with his polite letter to the director two years before the old mandatory retirement age. His life in the District of Columbia—if he'd ever had a life in the District of Columbia, which was doubtful—was something he preferred not to remember. He lived on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia now, the very same Cavanaugh Street on which he'd been born. It had transmuted itself from an immigrant Armenian ghetto to an upscale urban enclave, but Gregor had owned his third-floor floor-through apartment across the street from Lida Arkmanian's townhouse long enough to be used to that. There was no reason at all why he shouldn't be completely adjusted to life as he expected it to be for many years to come. There was no reason why he should keep flashing back to life as he had gratefully left it in the past. There were and weren't reasons, but none of them mattered, because here he was.
Where he was, precisely, was standing at his living room window, looking down on as much of Cavanaugh Street as he could see. It was ten o'clock on the morning of Friday, the sixteenth of November, less than a week before Thanksgiving. On the other side of the street, the facade of Lida's modest stone palace was hung with brown and yellow cardboard cornucopias and sprightly turkeys made of quilted crepe paper fans. If he had been able to see his own building, Gregor knew, he would have found the same sort of thing. Down on the street, the store windows were plastered with Thanksgiving decorations, too. An hour ago, he had watched as the children of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School marched from their classroom building (at the north end) to the church basement, decked out as Pilgrims and Indians for their parts in the school play. It was business as usual for Cavanaugh Street. Give these people the slightest excuse for a holiday and they would run with it. Gregor was used to it. What he wasn't used to was—the other thing.
At the moment, "the other thing" was represented by a crudely colored, and oddly tentative, paper flag, drawn on the inside of a carefully cut up grocery bag and hung from Lida's third-floor guest-bedroom window. It was crudely colored because Lida had drawn it herself. Donna Moradanyan, Gregor's upstairs neighbor and the street's only real artist, had been out on the Main Line visiting her parents overnight. The flag was tentative because it had to be. The Republic of Armenia had declared its independence from the Soviet Union on September twenty-fourth. Since then, a positive rain of Armenian flags had descended on Cavanaugh Street. So had a positive rain of Armenians.
Gregor pressed his face to the glass, and looked down on the street again, and sighed. There was a little knot of them sitting on the steps of the church, young men in jeans so new and pressed the legs had creases, young women in brightly colored sweaters bought in the last week or so at K mart and Sears. If Gregor had had to guess what they were doing, he would have said reading the paper, although reading didn't quite cover it. They puzzled it out, with the help of dictionaries and passersby. They were terribly proud of themselves when they were done, and asked questions about municipal elections and the state lottery. Every last one of them bought at least one lottery ticket a week, just in case.
"Why not?" Gregor asked himself now. "Old George Tekemanian buys half a dozen lottery tickets a week."
Then he backed away from the window, rubbed his hands against his face, and told himself he had to get going. He had promised more people than he could count that he would do more things than he could count today, and he had to pack and be ready to leave tomorrow morning on top of it. Bennis had probably had her suitcases ready and waiting in her hall closet for a week.
At the thought of Bennis, Gregor Demarkian stopped, crossed his fingers, and listened. He was disappointed. No clatter of fitful typing came from the heating grate at his feet. No clang and clash of pots and pans rose up from the second-floor apartment's kitchen. Bennis had to be taking the day off—and that meant, of course, that Bennis had to be resting. When he went downstairs, he'd find the standard sign on her door: ASLEEP UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
"I wish I was asleep until further notice," Gregor said to no one in particular, but that sort of a thing wasn't even a hope to him. Bennis Day Hannaford was one thing. Gregor was another. The people on Cavanaugh Street allowed him to get away with much less.
"Snobs," Gregor said.
Then he grabbed his jacket and headed for his front door.
2
The picture of the Pilgrimage Green—sealed into a brown envelope with the logo of Baird Financial in the upper left-hand corner—was sitting on the hall table with the rest of the mail when Gregor came downstairs, meaning that someone (probably old George) had picked it up off the floor and sorted it out. Gregor got the envelope open just as old George got the door to his first-floor apartment open and began to peer out. Old George was eighty-something and had to have a first-floor apartment because he hated elevators and couldn't take stairs. At least, according to old George's grandson Martin's wife, old George couldn't take stairs. Old George's grandson Martin's wife was a bit of a terror. Old George's grandson Martin was a bit of a nut. He bought his grandfather all the gadgets his wife wouldn't let him have himself, so that old George's apartment was filled with things like sterling-silver liquor decanters in the shape of National Football League helmets and egg timers that sprouted crowing roosters instead of ringing bells when their cycles were done.
Eighty-something or not, there was nothing wrong with old George's eyes. He spotted the photograph in Gregor's hand and bobbed his head, excited. Old George was always excited about something. That was what made his grandson Martin's wife so crazy.
"Is that the boat, Krekor?" old George asked. "It doesn't look like much of a boat, to spend a week on with so many people."
"It's supposed to be a replica of the Mayflower," Gregor said. He turned the photograph over and read, "Pier 36. Berth 102. Saturday, November seventeenth. Nine o'clock."
"That sounds right," old George said.
"It's going to be ten days, not a week," Gregor told him. Then Gregor pawed through the rest of the mail, searching until he found an identical envelope with Bennis's name on it, feeling satisfied when he found it was there. Gregor didn't pride himself on knowing much about people. He was a facts and logic man, not a psychologist. Still, everything he had ever heard about Jon Baird—and every impression he had gotten the one time they'd met—said that here was a man who did everything through his office. A wife would have known that Gregor and Bennis were coming together and sent only one reminder. A secretary would send reminders to everyone on her list. Unless, of course, she was a very confidential secretary—and Jon Baird hadn't struck him as the kind of man to have one of those. Gregor pushed Bennis's envelope back into the stack.
"I remember reading about it five or six years ago, when it was built," Gregor said. "Baird went to an extraordinary amount of trouble. Finding people who could duplicate the methods of construction. Having fabrics made that no one had produced for a hundred and fifty years. It was quite a project."
"All so that this man could sail the boat from Virginia to Massachusetts to have his Thanksgiving?"
"I don't think he's ever used it for Thanksgiving before," Gregor said. "Mostly it's used for schoolchildren. They come on field trips and visit it. I think Baird even offers an overnight sail for parents and children. Or Baird Financial does. Jon Baird is the kind of man who makes it difficult to work out where the person ends and the company begins."
"How much of a replica is it?" old George asked. "Does it have plumbing? Does it have gas to cook with?"
"I don't know."
"Does Bennis know?"
"I don't think so."
Old George peered over Gregor's shoulder at the picture and shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "There's too much you don't know, Krekor, and none of it sounds promising. I think you should stay home and have your dinner with Lida the way everybody expected you to."
"I had last Thanksgiving dinner with Lida. I had Christmas dinner with Lida. I had Easter dinner with Lida." "You would be welcome to have every dinner with Lida."
"That's not the point."
"What is the point?"
Gregor stuffed the photograph into the breast pocket of his sweater. "We're late, that's the point," he said. "We promised Tibor we'd meet him at the church at ten o'clock and it's already ten past. Get your jacket and get going."
Old George gave him a long, steady, and slightly reproving look—but it didn't have any effect, and Gregor knew old George hadn't expected it to. He watched the older man return to his apartment for his latest jacket—something new Martin had bought him, made of leather and covered with zippers and chains—and was impressed again at how quickly the old man moved. Old George's gait was vigorous and shaky at the same time, like the progress of a car whose engine is capable of anything but whose chassis is held together with spit and chewing gum.
"Even so, Krekor," he said, as he came back out into the hall and pulled his door shut behind him, "I think you are being foolish. I think Bennis is also being foolish. If the two of you feel so badly that you are taking too much of our hospitality, you should make a Thanksgiving dinner and invite us yourself."
"You mean we should do it together?" Gregor asked.
Old George shot him a look. "Don't joke, Krekor. We're all very worried about you. We're all very worried about Bennis, too. She's old enough to be married. You're too old not to be married again."
"If we were married to each other, we'd provide Cavanaugh Street with its first known homicide. And I don't know who would kill who first."
"I think I will kill you both and put the neighborhood out of its misery," old George said. "Besides, with all the refugees we could use the apartments. Next week I will have four people staying with me. How many people will you have staying with you?"
Actually, Gregor had no idea how many people he would have staying with him, because he had no intention of being there to meet them. He had given Lida a copy of his key so that she could use his living room as "a temporary hotel," as she put it. He supposed she would fill his modest one-bedroom place with stranded Armenians of various shapes and sizes—and Bennis's, too. He also supposed those stranded Armenians would be long gone before he returned. Lida and her cohorts at the newly formed Society for the Support of an Independent Armenia were supposed to have a regular real estate service going. They seemed to have better luck finding rental space than Donald Trump.
Old George stepped through the main front door to the stoop and waited. Gregor followed him, trying not to look back at old George's apartment door. Gregor locked his apartment religiously, as all policemen, ex-policemen, and burglars do. Bennis locked hers because she had lived so much of her life in places where it paid to be cautious. The rest of Cavanaugh Street thought it was living in the nineteenth century. Doors were for going in and out of, not for locking up. When they locked up, they just lost their keys anyway. Besides, what could possibly happen to them in a neighborhood like this?
Gregor had tried many times to explain to them that their precious "neighborhood like this" was surrounded by neighborhoods like that, but it hadn't done any good. Hannah Krekorian was still enamored of the theory that there are no bad boys, and Lida Arkmanian thought a crack house was one of those little metal chalets you bought from Hammacher Schlemmer to break the shells of nuts in. It was enough to make a grown man weep.
"Krekor," old George called from the bottom of the stairs. "Come on now. I'm halfway there and it's you who are daydreaming."
Gregor wasn't daydreaming. He never daydreamed. He fell asleep when he tried.
He climbed down the steep concrete stairs without holding to the railing, joined old George on the pavement, and turned his head toward Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Feast of Murder by Jane Haddam. Copyright © 1992 Orania Papazoglou. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue The Death of Donald McAdam,Part One November 16–November 17,
Part Two November 17–November 18,
Part Three Finis,
Epilogue The Life of Gregor Demarkian,
