Free Dear Old Dead by Jane Haddam

Gregor waited until the clucks had died away. Then he went into his living room and looked out on Cavanaugh Street.
    Years ago—so many years ago now, he didn’t want to remember; my God, he was nearly sixty—when Gregor Demarkian had been growing up, Cavanaugh Street had been just another Philadelphia ethnic neighborhood, a few ramshackle blocks of tenements dotted here and there with groceries and shoe stores, dry cleaners and religious supply shops. Back in the 1960s, when Gregor first joined the Bureau, it had begun that characteristic slide of American urban neighborhoods, that descent into carelessness and decay. Gregor remembered coming back for his mother’s funeral. The steps of Holy Trinity Church were crumbling. The gold paint on its double front doors was chipped and peeling. The building where Gregor’s mother had lived was in fairly good repair, but the building next to it was abandoned on the top two floors. Pacing the sidewalks on the night of the wake, getting away from the endless stream of condolences delivered to him by people he didn’t know any more, Gregor had accidentally turned the wrong corner and found himself face to face with a porno bookstore. Porno bookstores hadn’t been then what they became later. Decadence hadn’t been fashionable enough then. Gregor knew that porno bookstore was a sign, the mark of the beast, the beginning of the end.
    Gregor had no idea what had happened between then and the time, three and a half years ago now, that he had come back to live in this place. He had seen urban neighborhoods turn around before. The Upper West Side of Manhattan had gone from Mostly Undesirable to Very High Rent in no time at all. Cavanaugh Street was the only urban neighborhood he had ever heard of that had turned itself around on purpose. Urban renewal failed. Enterprise zones were less than useless. Revitalization projects shot themselves in the foot. Here, the grandmothers had wanted to stay and the grandchildren had decided to help them. The tenements had been torn down and replaced by neat brick replicas of Federal houses. The brownstones had been converted either into floor-throughs, like the one he lived in, or one-family town houses with living rooms that took up their entire second floor. There was still a grocery store—Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store—but it sold as much to tourists coming in from the Main Line as it did to people in the neighborhood. People in the neighborhood liked Armenian food, but they also ate their share at Burger King and McDonald’s. The religious supply store was gone. If you wanted an oil lamp or a picture of the Virgin, you had to talk to Father Tibor Kasparian and listen to a lecture on why you really ought to give that money to the poor. Even Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School was less insolently ethnic than it appeared. Its students were mostly refugees who had come to America from Armenia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its stated purpose was to get those students ready to take their places beside their thoroughly Americanized cousins at Groton and The Hill.
    From the window of his living room, Gregor could see across the street into the living room of Lida Arkmanian’s town house, which was on the third floor instead of the second. When they were growing up, Lida had been the prettiest girl on Cavanaugh Street, and Gregor had been in love with her. Now he looked down to the street and saw Donna Moradanyan and her son, Tommy, coming out of Lida’s front door. They were being met on the stoop by Russell Donahue, Donna’s steady “friend” and seen off by Lida herself, looking magnificent in something bright red and flowy. Cavanaugh Street always looked best in this kind of weather. It was a place of bright emotions and happy thoughts, like the world seen through fairy dust in Peter Pan. It never seemed suited to the nasty darkness that made up so much of Philadelphia’s climate.
    Lida Arkmanian’s town house was