Bleeding Hearts (33 page)

“There must have been other people who fit that description besides the Hazzard children,” Gregor suggested.

“There must have been plenty,” Fred agreed, “but Candida couldn’t think of any who might have had a motive. And neither could I.”

Motive, Gregor thought. Motive, motive, motive. The classic motives were love, hate, and money—and he would bet on money every time.

“Let’s go on to something else,” he said. “Did you know that Mrs. DeWitt intended to go to Hannah Krekorian’s party last night?”

“Oh, yes. She asked me to go with her.”

“And you refused?”

“Point-blank.” Fred Scherrer shook his head. “I knew it was going to lead to trouble.”

“This kind of trouble?”

Fred blanched. “Of course not. If I’d known that, I would never have let her go. Although I’ve got to admit, getting Candida to give up doing something she’d decided to do was damn near impossible. I just thought there was going to be a scene, that’s all. I didn’t want any part of it. That way, if she got sued for harassment or something, I would be in a position to defend her.”

“Did Mrs. DeWitt tell you how she came to be invited to this party?”

Fred nodded. “She got an invitation, ‘in her mailbox’, as she put it, in the middle of the week. She used the phrase ‘in my mailbox’ so many times, I finally asked her what she meant by it. She said she didn’t think the invitation had actually come in the mail. She said she thought someone had simply put it in her mailbox.”

“Did she have reason for that?”

“I don’t know. I suppose she must have.”

“Did you see the invitation? Or the envelope?”

“I saw the invitation,” Fred Scherrer said. Comprehension dawned. “I see. You’re right, of course. She would have kept the envelope for the return address. It’s probably upstairs in her desk. In her bedroom.”

“I’ll go check,” Roger Stebbins said. He hurried out of the room.

Gregor turned his attention back to Fred Scherrer. “Did Mrs. DeWitt tell you why she was going to the party? Did she give you any indication of what her purpose was?”

“She said she wanted to see what would happen,” Fred Scherrer said. “When Jackie—Jacqueline—when Paul’s wife died, in the police mess that followed that, Paul tried to throw suspicion on Candida as a way to deflect suspicion from himself. He and Candida had only recently severed a long-term relationship, and it was Paul’s idea, not Candida’s. I think she’s always been very… unhappy about all that.”

“Did she say anything to you last night, after Paul’s murder? Anything about what had happened at Hannah Krekorian’s house or who she thought might have killed Hazzard.”

Fred Scherrer shook his head. “She said that now that Paul was dead, she knew for sure who had killed Jackie. But it was my impression that she always thought she knew who killed Jackie.”

“But this was different?”

“Oh, yes. This was certainty.”

“And that’s exactly what she said. Now that Paul Hazzard was dead, she knew who killed his wife.”

Fred Scherrer closed his eyes, concentrating. “I’ll tell you exactly,” he said. “We were sitting in a cab, and she’d just explained the whole thing about the invitation to me. Then she said, ‘And now that he’s dead, of course, it clears everything up. I know just what happened the last time.’ I suppose she could have meant how it was done, and not who.”

“Especially if she already knew who,” Gregor said.

“Especially then,” Fred Scherrer agreed.

There was a sound at the door, and they both turned slightly. Fred Scherrer was careful not to turn too much. Gregor watched as Roger Stebbins came blundering through, looking too big and clumsy and out of place among all the delicateness of the room. He was holding a plain white envelope in one hand and grinning.

“Found it,” Roger Stebbins said. “There’s a little secretary thing in an alcove off the main bedroom. You unlatch the label part and pull it down, and behind that there are a lot of little pigeonholes. It was in one of those.”

Gregor put out his hand. “Can I have that?” he asked. “Are you preserving the surface to check for prints?”

Roger Stebbins handed the envelope over. “It’s the wrong kind of paper for prints. You think that’s going to be of any use to us otherwise?”

“In one way, I think it’s going to be a great deal of use,” Fred Scherrer said. “Unless Hannah Krekorian is a lot smarter than she looked last night, I think this takes care of any suspicion that she sent that invitation to Candida herself. That was an engraved invitation Candida got, wasn’t it? An engraved blank?”

“Right,” Russell Donahue said.

“That’s an envelope from Hallmark,” Fred Scherrer said.

“This is an envelope with an uncanceled stamp on it,” Gregor said. “Mrs. DeWitt was right. It did come in her mailbox. But not in her mail.”

“Wonderful,” Russell Donahue said. “Is all this supposed to mean something? What are we supposed to do now?”

Gregor Demarkian stood up.

“Now,” he said, “you’re supposed to take me home.”

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN SOMETIMES ENVIED
the police officers he saw on television, the men and women who leapt out of bed at four in the morning when they fortuitously dreamed a hunch, went chasing all over town waking up suspects to ask just a question or two, and ended up in an eleventh-hour shoot-out with the depraved villain on the roof of an abandoned building. Gregor didn’t have much use for shoot-outs or for chasing around town. He liked the Nero Wolfe paradigm, where the Great Detective sat around all day earing shad roe and getting fat and no one dared to lecture him about his cholesterol. What he envied the television police was their ability to forget about time. All the way back to Cavanaugh Street from Candida DeWitt’s house, Gregor was acutely conscious of the fact that it was nearly ten o’clock on a Saturday night. It would have been earlier, but Russell Donahue had gotten held up at the last minute by a discussion of protocol with Roger Stebbins. Gregor had opted out of that one. He went to stand in the cold on Candida DeWitt’s terrace. The vista was beautiful. After a few minutes, Fred Scherrer joined him. If it hadn’t been a useless waste of time when he was eager to get something done, Gregor might have enjoyed himself.

Actually, there was nothing much he could get done. When Russell Donahue finally pulled onto Cavanaugh Street, Gregor made him stop several blocks from his own apartment. Then he ordered Russell to pull up to the curb and park. Russell complained about the illegality of it all. It was embarrassing when police officers got their cars ticketed or towed away. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did. Gregor ignored him.

“Do you have a flashlight?” he asked.

Russell Donahue reached into the glove compartment and came up with a flashlight. It was a good big one, the kind that was used in factories and on back lots, heavy and black. Russell handed it over.

“Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Gregor stood on the sidewalk in front of Hannah Krekorian’s apartment building and looked to the right and to the left. Very few of the buildings on Cavanaugh Street were actually flush up against each other. Most were separated by narrow alleys that led to trash bins and utility sheds. Hannah’s building had an alley on each side. Gregor tried to work out which side her bedroom window would look out on, and then realized that the answer was neither. There was actually a view from Hannah’s bedroom windows. It wasn’t much of a view, but it was a view. That meant those windows had to face the back.

“Come on,” Gregor told Russell Donahue, who had climbed out of the car, locked up carefully, and was now standing on the pavement. His ears seemed to be turning blue. “I want to get a look at the fire escape,” Gregor explained.

“I got a look at the fire escape last night,” Russell protested. He stamped his feet against the cold. “I’m really very thorough, Mr. Demarkian. It’s just a fire escape.”

“Come on,” Gregor said again.

They went down the alley to the left side, which was unfortunately the one that held the garbage for both Hannah’s building and the one next door. They emerged into a small courtyard in the back and looked around. There was a scattering of good security lights on the back of Hannah’s building and the back of the building with which it shared a garbage station. All the lights still didn’t make the courtyard brightly lit. They must have been put in by amateurs. They were aimed incorrectly. Still, Gregor thought, it wasn’t a menacing well of blackness back here. It was
possible.

Gregor shined his light on the fire escapes. There were three of them, one going only so far as one of the second story windows. Gregor thought that one led to Melina Kashinian’s bedroom window—although how Howard or anybody else expected an eighty-nine-year-old woman to go crawling down those metal stairs in case of fire was beyond Gregor’s comprehension. One of the other fire escapes led almost to the roof level, probably to an attic. Gregor knew that nobody lived that far up. He wondered why Howard had bothered to take the precaution. Howard was not known for spending unnecessary money on anything or anybody but his wife and himself. Maybe he’d intended to put another apartment up there and never got around to it. The last fire escape went to the fourth floor. Gregor walked over to it and shined his flashlight at the bottom step.

“It might as well be a staircase,” he said.

Russell Donahue agreed. “These are the best escapes made. They don’t fold up. They’re wider than the average. They’re strong as hell. I’m impressed with the landlord.”

“Don’t be. He was just making sure he couldn’t get sued.”

“Whatever the reason, I’d like to have these on my building.”

“Let’s go around to the other alley and see what it’s like.”

The other alley was much pleasanter than the one they’d come down. There was no garbage in it at all, just a big metal shed with a padlock on it that probably held paints and ropes and brick cleaner. Gregor walked out to Cavanaugh Street and then back to the courtyard, shining the flashlight up and down, thinking. He finally stopped at the foot of the fire escape that led to Hannah Krekorian’s bedroom window and tapped his foot against the flagstones there.

“There would have been a preliminary visit,” he said.

“Fine,” Russell Donahue said. “A preliminary visit to where? By whom?”

“To here. By the murderer,” Gregor said. “There would have had to be a preliminary visit, because this whole operation was very well-planned. Which is a funny thing to say about a murder that in the end depended so much on luck, but there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“You know,” Russell Donahue said, “Cheswicki warned me that you started talking like this after a while. He said I was supposed to keep reminding myself that you’re a genius.”

“I’m not a genius. And I’m making perfect sense. The murderer had the address of Hannah’s apartment, of course, because the murderer had one of those invitations. The problem with that is that everybody on earth seems to have had one of those invitations. Hannah was not being exclusive.”

“What about Hannah possibly being the murderer?” Russell asked. “A few hours ago you were recommending that we arrest her immediately. I take it that’s off.”

Gregor sighed. “I wasn’t recommending that you arrest her because I thought she’d killed anybody. I was just hoping to do something to light a fire under this case. This was beginning to shape up into one of those non-events. Murder happens. Everyone freezes solid. No one makes a move. Unless you’re dealing with an idiot who scatters clues the way Hansel and Gretel scattered bread crumbs, you never solve a case like that.”

“I take it you’ve changed your mind,” Russell Donahue said. “Now you don’t want us to arrest her.”

“Now I don’t think you can,” Gregor told him. “We’ll have to check, of course, but I’m willing to bet my life that Hannah Krekorian has a rock-solid alibi for the time of Candida DeWitt’s murder.”

“Why?”

“Because Hannah is being watched over by a bunch of Armenian-American women who worry. If she suddenly dropped out of sight for a few hours, I would have heard about it. Remember. I was sitting in my own living room when you called. I was available.”

“Right.”

“The murder of Paul Hazzard was definitely planned for last night. The plan was hatched when Paul Hazzard received his invitation to Hannah’s party. At that point, the murderer knew something critical. The murderer knew that Paul Hazzard would not only be at Hannah’s party, but that he would probably be at Hannah’s apartment after the party. I don’t mean that he would have slept overnight. I suppose he might have—before all this started, I used to think I knew the women I’d grown up with very well, but I’m giving that up—but the key here is that it wasn’t necessary for Paul Hazzard to sleep over for this plan to work. It was only necessary for Paul Hazzard to still be in that apartment when everybody else was gone.”

“It won’t work,” Russell Donahue said. His nose was turning blue. The tip of his nose was turning
bright
blue. “I see where you’re going here. First the murderer came out here to check out ways to get into Mrs. Krekorian’s apartment, and found the fire escape.”

“My guess is that the murderer came out here between five and seven o’clock at night,” Gregor told him. “Monday or Tuesday. On weekends we get a lot of tourist traffic out here, but on weekdays the only busy times are between five and seven. People stop at the Ararat and get take-out to eat back home in the suburbs.”

“Whatever.” Russell Donahue was not interested in this. “The murderer checks out the fire escapes and finds he’s got a way in—”

“—or she—”

“Or she. I’m not going to do that over and over again, Mr. Demarkian. It’ll make me crazy.”

“If you don’t, it might prejudice your reasoning.”

“Right. The murderer, he or she, works out how to get into the apartment—what about window locks?”

“What about them?” Gregor said. “You can always break a window. Considering what was being set up here, it might even have been an advantage.”

“All right. So, on the night of the party, last night, the murderer climbs up the fire escape, meaning to sneak into the apartment, but when he—or she—gets to the landing, there’s Paul Hazzard, designated victim, pacing around in the bedroom—”