Bleeding Hearts (32 page)

“Yes,” Russell Donahue said. Gregor said nothing.

“Close to it all in more ways than one,” Fred Scherrer said. “Did you know I was staying here for the weekend?”

“Yes,” Russell said quickly.

“I’ve been staying in the guest room,” Fred Scherrer said, “but that was mostly a technicality. If—this—hadn’t happened, I would probably have changed rooms by the end of the weekend.”

“Oh,” Russell Donahue said.

“I’m not going on and on about my private life for no reason,” Fred Scherrer said. “I want you to know what was going on up front.
They
think I’m hiding something.” Fred jerked his head back in the direction of Candida’s front door. “
They
think I killed her in a jealous rage and now I’m trying to make it look like she was somebody else’s victim.
They
probably think I killed Paul too.”

“Did you?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

Fred Scherrer smiled grimly. “If I’d wanted to kill Paul Hazzard, I could have done it four years ago, when I directed his defense after he was charged with his wife’s murder. Trust me, that would have been much more effective than stabbing him six times, even if he hadn’t gotten the death penalty. It would also have been much safer.”

“Something could have happened between that time and this,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“It could have, but it didn’t. I’ve barely seen the man in the last four years. Not that you ought to take my word for that.”

“I try not to take anybody’s word for anything.”

“Smart man.”

Fred Scherrer turned and looked back at Candida’s house. As far as Gregor could tell, the scene hadn’t changed at all. The door was still open. Men were still walking in and out. There were still too many lights on everywhere. Fred Scherrer shivered and turned back to them. Gregor thought that he looked feverish, that his eyes were unnaturally bright.

“Come on,” the attorney told them. “Let’s go up to the house and meet the bozos. Maybe you can do something to get their brains on track.”

The Bryn Mawr police handling the investigation into the death of Candida DeWitt were not, in fact, bozos. One of them, a big man named Roger Stebbins, Gregor knew from previous experience with murder in Bryn Mawr. Stebbins was not as good a police officer as his chief, but he was good, and comparing him to John Henry Newman Jackman might not have been fair. John Henry Newman Jackman, Stebbins’s chief, was the single best local Homicide man Gregor had ever met. Roger Stebbins was a man Jackman trusted. That was enough for Gregor any day.

Roger Stebbins was standing just inside the front door, against one wall of the two-story foyer, near a pair of doors that led off into a room on the left. Gregor paused a moment to be impressed with the foyer. The floor was marble. The staircase that led to the second floor balcony was a sweeping curve of polished mahogany and inlaid teak. There was a chandelier hanging from the nearly invisible ceiling by a thick chain, made up of hundreds of tiny prisms that scattered little rainbow arcs of light in every direction. Gregor remembered somebody saying that Candida DeWitt had done very well at her way of life. That seemed to be an understatement.

Roger Stebbins had straightened up a little when he saw Gregor and Russell Donahue come in. Now he crossed the foyer with his hand held out.

“Mr. Demarkian? I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Roger Stebbins.”

“I do remember you. This is Russell Donahue of the Philadelphia police. Detective first grade.”

“Right,” Stebbins said. He shook Russell Donahue’s hand in a perfunctory way and then shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He looked very worried. “I talked to John Jackman about this,” he said. “John sent his regards and said to give you all the help you wanted. I don’t exactly know what kind of help I could give. It all seems straightforward enough on the face of it.”

“Has the body been removed?” Gregor asked.

Roger Stebbins shook his head. “We left it. John said you might want to see it.”

“I do. We do,” Gregor said. “Where is it?”

Roger Stebbins looked back over his shoulder at the doors he had been standing next to when Gregor and Russell entered. “It’s in there. I’ve had to post a guard or keep watch myself every minute. That bastard Scherrer is like ooze. He gets into everything.”

Fred Scherrer didn’t seem to be into anything at the moment. He had disappeared. Gregor started toward the inner doors. Roger Stebbins and Russell Donahue followed.

“This is the living room, more or less,” Roger Stebbins said, “except you know what it’s like in these great big houses. There are at least three other rooms on this floor that a regular person might call a living room.”

Gregor looked inside. The room was an unqualified mess, the way rooms got when they had been worked over by tech men, but the tech men themselves were gone. Aside from a single uniformed patrolman standing next to the body, there was only a white-coated man from the medical examiner’s office, waiting. Gregor walked over to the body and looked down at it.

Candida DeWitt had been an attractive woman in an understated way. She was now an attractive corpse, but there was nothing understated about her. Her lipsticked lips looked too bright against the whiteness of her face. Her eyes looked as if she had used kohl on them instead of eyeliner. Her eyes were open. They were very blue.

Gregor got down on his haunches and leaned closer to Candida DeWitt’s chest, trying to see what could be seen of the wound.

“Russell,” he called. “Come here for a minute.”

Russell Donahue came and got down on his haunches too.

“Just one wound,” he said. “A smash, bang right in the heart.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “It looks like the other ones though, doesn’t it? The ones last night on Paul Hazzard.”

Russell Donahue was doubtful. “We’ll have to check with Forensics,” he said. “Whatever was used here couldn’t possibly have been the same weapon. We have the weapon in the Hazzard murder case.”

“Do we? Do you have your lab reports back yet?”

“No,” Russell admitted. “But it couldn’t have been a coincidence, Mr. Demarkian. The weapon we found being just the right shape to make the wounds and all the rest of it—”

“There’s nothing coincidental about it,” Gregor said. “The only coincidence in this case happened when Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard died. Since then, we’ve been dealing with cold-blooded deliberation.”

“You sound like you know what’s going on,” Russell Donahue said in amazement. “You sound like you know who killed them.”

“That’s moot.” Gregor leaned toward the body again and pointed at the wound. “We’re going to need cross-sections, like the ones we’re having done on Paul Hazzard and the ones that were done when Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard died.”

“We’ll get them.”

Gregor pointed to a space just to the right of the puncture. “Pay particular attention to this. Look at that.”

“The dress is torn,” Russell Donahue said.

“The dress is
slit,”
Gregor corrected him. “There were slits like that in Paul Hazzard’s shirt last night. Not six of them, of course. It happens only when the force of the blow is particularly strong. It isn’t an edge that was deliberately designed to cut.”

“What are you talking about?” Russell Donahue demanded. “Mr. Demarkian, if you know who killed these two people, you have to tell me about it. You can’t just let whoever did these things wander around loose—”

“I don’t know who killed these two people,” Gregor said, “at least, not necessarily. What I know is what they were killed with. I held the murder weapon in my hands today. And it didn’t even occur to me.”

“Wait,” Russell said. “What you’re implying is that that dagger thing wasn’t used to kill Hazzard.”

“Of course it wasn’t. Why should it be?”

“For one thing, it fits the wound. For another thing, it was lying there next to Hazzard’s body.”

“It was lying there next to Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body too, but it wasn’t the murder weapon.”

“When it was lying next to Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body, it didn’t have blood on it.”

“Have you ever seen the cross-section drawings from the original Hazzard case?”

Russell Donahue shook his head. Gregor stood up and looked around. There was a long, low couch in the middle of the room with a coffee table in front of it, facing the fireplace. There were a pair of delicate-looking end tables with lamps on them. There was a bookcase whose second shelf was a backlit display space holding ornamental china. There was nothing suitable to write on. Candida DeWitt had not been overly fond of furniture.

Gregor searched through the pockets of his coat until he came up with paper and a Bic ball-point pen. His pockets were always full of Bic ball-point pens. The paper was the envelope he had received his last overdue notice from the library in. He walked over to the nearest wall and plastered the envelope against it.

“Take a look at this,” he said. “The cross-section of the wound found in Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body looked like this.” He drew carefully on one side of the envelope.

“So?” Russell Donahue demanded, studying what Gregor had done.

“Now look at this,” Gregor said. “This is approximately what the outline of the dagger looks like.”

“Be careful not to get ink on the wall.”

Gregor ignored him and drew.

“There,” he said when he was finished. “Look at that.”

“I am looking at it. They’re near enough to identical—”

“No, they’re not,” Gregor insisted. “Look, that’s the mistake everybody has been making, right from the beginning. Everybody’s been so impressed with the points of comparison, they’ve failed to notice the obvious. Which is that these two drawings are nowhere near identical. And neither are the real things on which they’re based.”

“I don’t think you can count the fact that the dagger is longer than the wound is deep,” Russell Donahue objected. “Assuming your representation is accurate. I mean, the murderer wouldn’t have been able to get the entire dagger into the wound—”

“Of course he wouldn’t have. That’s not what I mean.”

“You mean that little thingy over on the left side.”

“Exactly.”

“There are a lot of reasons why that might not have shown up in the wound,” Russell said. “I’m not pretending to know everything there is to know about forensics—”

“Try using common sense,” Gregor told him. “The wound in Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body was deep enough and definite enough so that the medical examiner was able to take a cross-section that looked like this.” He pointed to his first drawing. “I’ve seen the picture. It was unbelievably clear. Do you honestly think, if the wound was that deep and that well defined, that there wouldn’t also have been traces of that left side of the handle?”

“Maybe,” Russell Donahue said reluctantly. “But Mr. Demarkian—”

“No buts,” Gregor told him. “Where’s Roger Stebbins?”

“Here,” Roger Stebbins said. “I’ve been right behind you the whole way. I’ve been listening.”

“Good.” He turned to Roger. “Have your people searched this room? Have they searched the house?”

“They’ve done a once-over,” Roger said. “They wouldn’t do a full shakedown until later in a situation like this. What are you looking for?”

“An envelope addressed to Candida DeWitt. With Hannah Krekorian’s return address on it. Probably on the back flap.”

“I see what you’re getting at,” Russell Donahue said. “You want to see the envelope her invitation to Hannah Krekorian’s party came in. But would she have kept something like that?”

“I think she would have,” Gregor said. “Candida was a very formal woman. Old-fashioned in a lot of ways. She would have expected to write a thank-you note after the party was over.”

“After
that
party was over?” Russell Donahue was incredulous.

“Habit is a powerful thing,” Gregor told him. “My friend Bennis Hannaford always saves the envelopes, except where she knows the person who invited her very well. Did Candida DeWitt have a maid?”

“She must have had, living in a house like this,” Roger Stebbins said, “but maybe it’s someone who comes in during the day. There’s no one here now except Fred Scherrer. And the body.”

“Get me Fred Scherrer,” Gregor said. “Maybe he knows.”

The two police officers looked at each other in a way Gregor had become used to. They were telegraphing a thought that could be paraphrased:
I don’t care what his reputation is, I think he’s nuts.
Roger Stebbins left the room anyway, in search of Fred Scherrer. He came back a couple of minutes later with Fred in tow. Fred kept looking sideways at the body and going a little green. Finally, he turned his back to it, squared his shoulders, and folded his arms. Gregor had the distinct feeling that he would refuse to turn around for any reason whatsoever. They could walk around to the back of him and start talking from there. They could sneak up behind him and yell boo. It wouldn’t matter.

Gregor couldn’t really blame Scherrer for not wanting to stare for minute after minute at the corpse of a woman of whom he had been fond. He sat down on the couch so that Fred didn’t have to turn to look at him and said, “Mrs. DeWitt said something at Hannah Krekorian’s party last night about consulting you on the subject of libel. Was that true?”

“To an extent,” Fred answered. “There had been an… incident here. Somebody had gotten into the house and spray-painted some graffiti on the fireplace. Nasty stuff. Threatening death. Candida was in the middle of writing a book about her life. A lot of it was going to have to do with the murder of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. Naturally. She thought—”

“—that one of the Hazzards was trying to warn her off,” Gregor finished for him. “This incident wasn’t reported?”

“No, it wasn’t. I told Candida it should have been. I warned her those people were dangerous. Now one of them’s killed her.”

“You’re sure it was one of the Hazzard children?”

“I find it difficult to think of them as children,” Fred Scherrer said, “but yes, I’m sure. From what Candida told me, the house wasn’t broken into. She locked up when she left and put the alarm on, and when she got back, the fireplace had been defaced. The doors were locked. There weren’t any broken windows. The alarm had been reset. It had to have been someone who knew what they were doing.”