Free Great Day for the Deadly by Jane Haddam

Gregor said. “Why don’t you let me borrow your magazine for a minute. I want to go to the men’s room. I’ll meet you in the restaurant in a couple of minutes.”
    “Talk about something else,” Dave said. “Talk about this girl he’s seeing. Woman. I don’t know what to call her. Young enough to be his daughter, from what I can tell.”
    Gregor tucked the magazine into the pocket of his coat. “She is young enough to be my daughter, and I’m not ‘seeing’ her, as you put it. I have a much too well developed sense of self-preservation. I’ll see you two in a couple of minutes, all right?”
    “All right,” Schatzy said.
    “She has a strange name,” Dave persisted, too brightly. “Dennis or Hennis or Lennis or something.”
    “Bennis,” Gregor told him. “Bennis Hannaford. They’ve got her books in the same newsstand where Schatzy probably bought this magazine. I’ll see the two of you later .”
    Dave started to babble again, but Gregor had already turned his back and begun making his way toward the interior of the hotel. Behind him, he could hear wind whistle every time one of the glass doors were opened or shut. He passed the reception desk and noted in a distracted way that someone had put out a few forlorn decorations, a leprechaun sitting on a pot of gold and a stand-up cardboard shamrock for St. Patrick’s Day. What was it about some people that they couldn’t let a holiday pass without gearing themselves up to celebrate another one?
    What was it about some people that they couldn’t leave well enough alone? Dave Herder meant well—he always meant well—but he couldn’t take a hint. Gregor didn’t mind talking about murder. As long as the murder in question wasn’t a serial one or in some other way the obvious work of a psychopath, it could even be interesting. He did mind talking about Bennis Hannaford, and about everyone else he knew back on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia. At least, he minded this weekend.
    The men’s room was near a bank of pay phones, in a wide empty space in the lobby paneled in blond wood and carpeted in green. Gregor pushed himself through the swinging door with the copy of People rolled up in his hand as if he were about to swat a fly with it. The problem with talking about Bennis—or Donna Moradanyan, or Father Tibor Kasparian, or George Tekamanian, or Lida Arkmajian, or any of the rest of them—wasn’t that he missed them. He always missed them when he was away from them. The problem was that at the moment he felt that they’d abandoned him.
[2]
    Of course, in reality, Gregor Demarkian had not been abandoned at all. When he was being sensible, he knew this. What he was feeling was a mass and mix of things. Before Elizabeth had died, he had been what he now had to admit was a pretty popular Bureau type: The man so dedicated to his work he hadn’t known anything else existed. In his case, he had known Elizabeth existed, but she had taken care of everything else for them. She had kept in touch with their families. She had arranged for his mother’s funeral and for his nieces’ birthday presents and for the anniversary liturgies to be sung for the repose of his father’s soul. There were Bureau agents who had no emotional lives at all. Gregor had one, but the one he had was Elizabeth—and until she was gone he hadn’t realized how important it all was to him. It had been strange, waking up on the morning after he buried her, staring the end of his leave of absence in the face and knowing he didn’t want to go back. It had been even stranger, weeks later, with his resignation accepted and his life at loose ends, realizing he was going to have to pull himself together and give himself a reason for existing.
    He had gone back to Cavanaugh Street on a whim, as a self-consciously deliberate first step in the direction of getting himself reoriented to normal life. He had been born and brought up on Cavanaugh Street in the days when it had been little more