Bleeding Hearts (22 page)

Then Hannah Krekorian put her face in her hands and burst into tears.

I
T WAS JAMES WHO
was home when the police called, and James who went to the morgue to formally identify the body—a ritual he was shocked to discover was impossible to escape. The police sent a car for him. James didn’t know if they were worried about the dangers he would face trying to get a car of his own out of a parking garage or off the street (muggers), or the dangers the populace of Philadelphia would face if he tried to drive home after seeing his father lying on a slab like that, dead-white and looking faintly annoyed. Maybe they just thought it would be difficult to find a cab at—what?—eleven o’clock at night. James hadn’t been thinking of it as “late” when he got the call. Coming out of the morgue, though, it felt infinitely late, some kind of metatime eternally stuck between the eleventh and twelfth tolls of midnight. James kept hearing the theme from
The Twilight Zone
playing in his head.

All the way home from the morgue, sitting up front next to the uniformed driver who seemed to view traffic as a form of war game, James thought about how odd Paul looked, dead. He looked odd because he looked the same. James had had to lean far over the body to be sure Paul wasn’t breathing. He’d leaned so far he’d started to fall. The police matron had to catch him. After a while, James decided that there was a difference. Paul looked too thin. Paul had always been too thin, but alive he had covered it with personal magnetism and force of personality. James couldn’t call it force of character. Christ only knew, Paul had never had any character.

The police driver pulled up to the door of the town house and waited at the curb while James got the front door unlocked. He was like a worried date or the kind of taxi driver women fell in love with. James got the door unlocked and let himself inside. There were lights on that hadn’t been when he’d left. He felt instantly relieved.

“Who’s home?” he called out. “This is James.”

“James, it’s Alyssa.”

Musical voice pouring down from the second floor. Light on the second floor landing. James climbed the stairs.

“Alyssa? What are you doing here? Where’s Caroline?”

“Caroline’s working.” Alyssa came out of the second floor sitting room to meet James in the hall. She looked frazzled and upset. Her wispy clothes seemed to be emotionally shredded, like frizzed hair. “She’s in her studio. She’s got the intercoms off. I can see her in the security monitor but I can’t get her attention.”

“She’s been working like that for hours,” Nick Roderick said, coming out to the hall too. “We left her just like that when we went out to dinner, and you know what she’s like when she gets like that. She could be in there until morning.”

“We heard it over the radio,” Alyssa said. “We were at Palace of Glass, and then we went on to Dominique, you know, for dessert. And we were sitting in the bar, waiting for a table, when the news started, and it was the very first thing.”

“The dagger’s missing,” her husband said. “That was the first thing I checked.” He looked solemn. James thought he was hiding glee.

James went into the sitting room. The little glass drinks cart stood up against one of the love seats near the fireplace. James went over to it, filled a six-ounce glass with straight Scotch, and drank the Scotch down in a single long guzzle. Then he filled the glass again. He understood the attraction the idea of the “dysfunctional family” had for so many people. His own family was full of poisonous women.

“Don’t tell any of my clients I’m doing this,” he said.

“They drink herb tea and chant mantras when they’re upset.”

“Oh, James, be serious,” Alyssa said.

“I am being serious. I am also going to get seriously drunk. And neither you nor anybody else in this house is going to stop me.”

“I wouldn’t try to stop you.” Nick slumped into a chair. “I might even help.”

“If Caroline tries to lecture me, I’ll break her neck.” The second glass of Scotch was finished. James modified his approach to the third—not straight Scotch in a six-ounce glass, but Scotch and Drambuie on the rocks in something larger; he was beginning to feel almost calm enough to be civilized—and took it over to the wingback chair. He sat and stretched out his legs. “I do not suggest,” he said, “that you make a point of seeing people dead. It is very unpleasant. It is weird enough to make me start believing in channeling.”

“I thought you did believe in it,” Nick said.

“No,” James corrected him. “I only sell it.”

“You saw the body?” Alyssa said.

“Yes. That’s where I just was. At the morgue, looking at the body.”

“Why?” Alyssa was bewildered.

“Because somebody has to,” Nick put in. “Somebody has to make a formal identification. It’s standard procedure.”

“But it isn’t like Paul was some anonymous person on the street,” Alyssa protested. “He was very well known. And wasn’t he with people who knew him? Wasn’t tonight the night he was going to that party we talked about?”

“I don’t know,” James said. “They didn’t really tell me anything. I think they want a member of the family to make the identification. Don’t ask me what they were up to. They just called.”

“On the radio they just said he died at the home of an acquaintance,” Alyssa said. “I should have thought to put on the eleven o’clock news. There probably would have been more.”

“The radio mostly went on and on about his being stabbed,” Nick said. “That’s why I went looking for the dagger. Is this beginning to look really strange to either of you two?”

“Jacqueline stabbed and Paul stabbed,” James chanted. “That’s not strange. That’s a
plan.
”

“James,” Alyssa said.

“Maybe Caroline did it in a fit of psychic pique.” James finished his drink and started pacing. “God, you don’t want to look at a dead man’s face. It’s just too weird. It’s just too normal. Paul looked more alive dead than he looked—Never mind.”

“I don’t believe Jacqueline was killed with that dagger,” Alyssa said fiercely. “I don’t care what the police said. I don’t believe Paul was killed with it either. You just wait. There’ll turn out to be some other explanation for why it’s missing. It won’t have anything to do with the crime at all.”

Nick sighed. “She’s been like this since we got home. I can’t get it across to her that it would be too much of a coincidence. If the dagger is missing, it almost has to have something to do with the crime.”

“Yes,” James said slowly. He put ice in his glass and poured out more Scotch and more Drambuie. He felt sluggish and depressed, but his mind was still crystal-clear. It was going to be a long road to unconsciousness. It might actually take him the rest of the night.

“I’ll tell you something I did hear,” James said. “In passing, you understand. While I was hanging around the police.”

“You weren’t hanging around the police,” Alyssa said.

“The dagger isn’t the only thing the two deaths have in common,” James said. “It’s really very interesting. Candida DeWitt was there.”

“What?” Alyssa said.

James finished his drink and reached for the bottle of Scotch. Again.

“I think that woman is persecuting us,” he said. “I think she’s following us all round, making things happen. I think she’s going to end up murdering us all off, one by one.”

Fred Scherrer came to Cavanaugh Street when Candida DeWitt called him. He sat next to her as she gave her statement to the police and wondered what good he was going to be. He could never do much for clients who weren’t willing to listen to his advice. Candida DeWitt didn’t listen to anyone. When he got to her at the scene, he told her she didn’t have to tell anyone anything. She didn’t have to make a statement of any kind. It was never a good idea to make a statement right on the spot like that. Even perfectly innocent people got confused. Fred was almost positive that Candida was innocent of the murder of Paul Hazzard. Over the years, he had developed an instinct for that sort of thing. It was an instinct no detective would ever be able to match, because it had been developed from years of listening to guilty people tell him the truth. It wasn’t that no client had ever lied to him. Hundreds had tried. None had persisted. Fred was very good at making clients see that lying to their lawyer was a piece of idiocy. Their lives depended on Fred’s knowing the truth and all the truth. But Candida wasn’t giving off the right vibes, here. She wasn’t the kind of quiet she would have been if she had stabbed Paul. She even seemed a little frustrated. Fred thought he understood. Candida was the sort of person who wanted her enemies alive and kicking. She wanted to watch the expressions on their faces when she got her revenge.

In spite of his advice, Candida insisted on giving a statement. She sat down with a very polite and very young detective in a badly-fitting suit, and answered everything he asked her but volunteered nothing. Fred did not have high hopes for this young detective’s career. There were so many obvious questions to ask that didn’t occur to him to ask. What was Candida doing at that party? When was the last time before the murder that she had been in contact with Paul? The young detective had to know who Candida was. If he hadn’t started out knowing, by now he should have been told. Oblivious, he went on and on with his list of routine questions.

After it was over, Candida put on her coat, picked up her purse, and waited for Fred to lead her to the door. She waited with the air of someone who had done nothing more important than trade recipes with a friend.

Fred had driven his own car down to Philadelphia from New York, but he hadn’t used it to come in to town from Bryn Mawr. He didn’t know his way around the city well enough to trust that he wouldn’t be the victim of a carnapping, crawling through the dark streets in a highly polished Mercedes-Benz. He’d engaged a taxicab instead, and paid for it too, both because of the long trip in from the Main Line and because he wanted it to wait. Fred Scherrer could bribe taxi drivers with the best of them. He was not cheap about baksheesh. The cab was waiting just a couple of blocks down when he and Candida came out of Hannah Krekorian’s apartment building. The cab would have been closer, but Hannah’s block was still clogged with police cars.

Fred walked Candida to the cab in silence, opened the door for her, helped her in. It was largely symbolic help—a gesture invented for hobble skirts and bustles—but Candida liked that kind of symbolism. Fred closed her door and went around the cab to get in himself on the other side. He leaned into the front seat and asked the driver to take them back to Bryn Mawr. Then he pulled the bulletproof privacy shield shut and turned to Candida.

“All right,” he said. “Now you’re going to tell me what’s going on.”

“Of course,” Candida said. She had her purse on the seat at her side and her hands folded in her lap and her legs crossed at the knee. She could have been Donna Reed playing the perfect ladylike housewife.

“Did you know Paul was going to be at that party? Did you go there to cause a scene deliberately?”

“Of course,” Candida said. “I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. I did ask you to come with me.”

“And I told you I didn’t like parties and I refused to come. I won’t do that again. Have you known this woman, this Hannah Krekorian, a long time?”

“I’d never met her before tonight.” Candida explained about the invitation. “I went to talk to Alyssa about it. For some reason, I thought she was the most likely one to have sent it. Not that I told her that. I implied I thought it was Caroline. It’s not really Caroline’s kind of thing though. That mess written on my fireplace, that’s Caroline’s kind of thing.”

Fred rubbed his face with the palms of his hands. “You do realize how this looks? Paul has a new woman friend. You show up to put a damper on things. Paul ends up dead. Right now the two prime suspects in this case are Hannah Krekorian and you.”

“I realize that.”

“Do you also realize that the way the timing stacks up, at least from what I heard, you seem to have either stumbled on the corpse a second after Mrs. Krekorian turned Paul into one or else you turned Paul into a corpse a second before Mrs. Krekorian discovered him? That Demarkian man was doing timetables the whole time I was waiting for you, and I don’t blame him.”

Candida was serene. “There’s a flaw in the timetables. I was there when that Helen person came downstairs. I remember what she said.”

“What did she say?”

“She said the door to the bedroom was locked,” Candida said. “She didn’t see anybody or anything. She heard Hannah Krekorian crying and Paul pacing. But it could have been Hannah Krekorian pacing. It could have been anyone. She didn’t
see
anything.”

“Was somebody else missing from downstairs?”

“I don’t know. There were a lot of people there. Over a hundred, I think.”

“Did any of these hundred or so people besides you and Hannah Krekorian actually know Paul?”

“I don’t know the answer to that either, but I think it would be an interesting line of investigation. All those workshops and seminars and support group meetings. It’s always hard to say for certain that Paul didn’t know somebody. If you see what I mean.”

“Oh, I see. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m a little shook up, of course. I’ve never seen a dead body face-to-face before. When Jacqueline died, I was out of state. And there was all that blood. And Mrs. Krekorian was hysterical. I suppose you heard about the dagger.”

“I heard about it.”

“There wasn’t any blood on it the last time. It was absolutely clean. I wonder what this means.”

“I don’t know what it means.”

“I’m glad I went there,” Candida said. “I don’t care if it will get me in trouble. Paul didn’t care about that woman. He was using her in some way. Paul liked women young and pretty and thin as rails. I should know.”

“He could have matured in his old age,” Fred Scherrer said.

“He didn’t. He just ran out of money. That’s what this is going to turn out to be. Mrs. Krekorian is going to have some money.”

“My, you’re cynical. I don’t think I ever noticed that about you before.”