Bleeding Hearts (34 page)

“No,” Gregor said.

“No?”

“That wasn’t when the murderer entered the apartment. It couldn’t have been. I went all over that with Bob last night. Paul Hazzard would have seen. He would have struggled. He would have cried out. By the time Hannah locked herself in the master bathroom and Paul Hazzard came to pace outside it, the murderer had been in Hannah’s apartment for quite some time.”

“Really. Since when?”

“Since sometime between seven and seven-oh-five,” Gregor said promptly. “That’s when, according to Helen Tevorakian and Mary Ohanian, Sheila Kashinian heard a moan.”

“Sheila Kashinian,” Russell Donahue ruminated. “Is that the one in the earrings and the four-inch heels and the green-and-gold dyed mink coat?”

“That’s the one.”

“For God’s sake, Mr. Demarkian, you can’t take that woman’s word for anything. She’s crazy.” Russell Donahue stamped his feet to get feeling back into them.

“She may be crazy,” Gregor said, “but she’s no liar. Let’s go back to my apartment.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m cold. And because I want to talk to Bennis Hannaford for a while. Can you get in touch with anybody this late on a Saturday night?”

“Like who?”

“Like your lab and technical people. The ones who are running the tests on the evidence picked up last night.”

“I don’t know if I can get in touch with the exact people. But Cheswicki put rush orders all over all that stuff last night. There ought to be somebody over there who knows what’s going on with our stuff.”

“Good. I hate working blind like this. I want some confirmation of what can be confirmed. Like the fact that that idiotic dagger was not the murder weapon.”

“Right.”

“I’ve got it almost all worked out,” Gregor said. “It’s just a question of—well, never mind for the moment. Let’s go.”

“Right,” Russell Donahue said again, bleakly.

Gregor took the alley with the utility shed in it instead of the garbage, and went back out to Cavanaugh Street.

Bennis Hannaford was on the phone and the front door of her apartment was propped open with
The White Trash Cook Book
when Russell and Gregor came upstairs. They stopped and waved at her and she nodded distractedly.

“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” she was saying, “I really don’t. You have to understand—well, no—well, yes—I’ve thought of that already, but you can’t—oh, for God’s sake—no—no—never
mind
—I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Jesus.
”

Bennis hung up the phone and walked across the foyer to them. “Sorry,” she said. “Is there something the two of you want?”

“This is Russell Donahue,” Gregor said.

“We met last night.”

Gregor felt awkward. Bennis was not usually this—this stiff? Had he done something wrong?

“Well,” he said, “if you wouldn’t mind and you don’t have anything to do for the moment, I was hoping you’d come upstairs. There was something I wanted to show you. And something I wanted to ask you.”

“He’s outlining how the murder happened,” Russell Donahue said. “It’s very interesting. He has me totally confused.”

“I heard from Father Tibor,” Bennis said. “He said some friend of his was in your apartment when you got a phone call that Candida DeWitt was dead.”

“That’s true,” Gregor said.

There was a clattering from above them and Donna Moradanyan came running down the stairs, her hands full of red crepe paper and silver balloons, her blond hair sticking out in every direction. She saw them and stopped, blushing.

“Hi,” she said.

Russell Donahue seemed to stand a little straighter. “Hello,” he said. “Where’s your little boy?”

“He’s sleeping over downstairs at old George Tekemanian’s.”

“That must be fun for him,” Russell Donahue said.

“Yes,” Donna Moradanyan said. “Yes, it is.”

Bennis ran a hand through her thick black hair. “We’re going up to Gregor’s apartment, Donna. I’ll leave my door open. I talked to Sheila Kashinian. She’s got the helium you need for the balloons. When you’re ready for it, just call and Howard will bring it over. He stays up until midnight.”

“Great,” Donna said.

Bennis turned to Gregor. “My brother Christopher wants to talk to you. He knows something about Paul Hazzard. Or he met him once. It’s complicated.”

“Good,” Gregor said. “I’d like to talk to Christopher. Is he around here somewhere?”

“No,” Bennis said darkly. “He is definitely not around here somewhere, and quite frankly I couldn’t tell you where he was. Nobody ever tells me anything. Are we going upstairs?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Yes, of course, right away.”

“Good.”

Bennis wheeled around and started marching up the stairs to the third floor. She reminded Gregor of one of those grim-faced monsters in a Ray Harryhausen movie, a Greek fury processed through Freud.

“Valentine’s Day,” she said when she was halfway up to the third floor landing. “To hell with it.”

Right, Gregor thought.

As soon as he got upstairs, he was going to get back to the murders. They were going to be a lot less complicated than whatever it was Bennis had gotten herself involved with.

Actually, it turned out to be easy to get back to the murders once Gregor had let them all into his apartment. The change in scenery seemed to cause a change in Bennis. She calmed down dramatically and began bustling around the kitchen. She put the teakettle on. She looked into his refrigerator and made a face. The only time he had what she considered halfway decent food in his place was when Lida or Hannah or one of the other women brought some over—and they seemed to have given that practice up for Lent. If it hadn’t been for the Ararat, Gregor would have starved to death this week. Bennis sat down in a kitchen chair and stretched her legs.

“Well,” she said. “What is it? Did I accidentally stumble over the murderer in Hannah’s living room and not know it?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I want you to look at something I’ve got and tell me what it is.”

“Let me make that phone call,” Russell Donahue said.

He got up and started to dial from Gregor’s kitchen wall phone. Gregor went to the windowsill over his sink and fished around in the little straw basket he kept odds and ends in until he found the single pearl earring he had picked up from the carpet of Hannah Krekorian’s guest room the night before. He placed it on the table in front of Bennis.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s a pearl earring for a pierced ear,” Bennis said in mock solemnity. “In fact, it’s probably a Tiffany pearl stud.”

“Does it belong to Hannah Krekorian?”

“Of course not, Gregor. Hannah’s never had her ears pierced.”

“Do you know whom it does belong to?”

Bennis shrugged. “Practically everybody I know who has pierced ears has Tiffany pearl studs. They cost about five hundred dollars. They’re a really good anniversary gift or birthday gift in the really-special category. Donna has a pair she got from her parents. Lida Arkmanian has a pair her daughter Karen bought her for Christmas a couple of years ago. I have a pair.” Bennis pulled her hair away from her face. “I wear them all the time.”

“Are any of those people missing an earring?” Gregor asked.

“Donna isn’t,” Bennis said. “Or, at least, she wasn’t this morning. She was wearing hers. I don’t know about Lida.”

“Was Lida wearing hers at the party last night?”

“No, Gregor. She was wearing her gold shells. Don’t you ever notice anything?”

Gregor Demarkian had made a career out of noticing things. These were just not the right kinds of things. Bennis looked curiously at the earring.

“Did you find that in Hannah’s apartment last night?” she asked. “Was it at the murder scene?”

“It was in Hannah’s guest room. You don’t happen to know if Hannah had a guest staying there who might have been wearing earrings like this? Or how often that room is thoroughly cleaned.”

“That room is thoroughly cleaned every December first and June first. That’s when the cleaning service comes in and does a sweep,” Bennis said. “I can’t remember Hannah ever having a guest stay over in that guest room except her granddaughters, and they’re tiny. They don’t wear earrings yet.”

Russell Donahue came back from the phone. “I’ve got somebody checking,” he said. “She’ll call us back. Have you determined anything important while I was gone?”

“Maybe,” Gregor said.

He was still wearing his coat. He was still standing up. He shrugged his coat off and threw it on one of the kitchen counters. Then he searched through his pockets to find the piece of paper he wanted.

“There’s never anything around here to write on,” he complained. “There’s never anything around here to write with.”

Bennis got up. The water was boiling. She took coffee mugs out of Gregor’s cabinet and the instant coffee from his pantry shelf and put them on the kitchen table. Then she opened the drawer next to the refrigerator and came up with a pen and a much-used steno pad.

“Here you go,” she said, turning back to the refrigerator to get out the cream. The sugar was in a bowl in the middle of the kitchen table. Bennis got some spoons and sat down again. “Are you going to draw a picture? Or are you going to write down the name of the murderer and hide it in the cookie jar, and then when the police finally get around to doing something about the case you’ll pull the paper out and show everybody how much faster you were at working it all out?”

“Neither,” Gregor said. “I’m going to write down how it happened. Beginning at the beginning. Russell?”

“I’m paying attention.”

“Good. Let’s go back to what I was talking about before. The first and most important thing was the arrival of that invitation. That invitation provided opportunity. Remember that this is someone who has already killed once—killed Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard to be exact—and gotten away with it. It would have been a major mistake to murder Paul Hazzard in the same place and in the same way that his wife was murdered. Our murderer does not make major mistakes.”

“If that earring belongs to your murderer,” Bennis said, “she made at least one major mistake.”

“Did she?” Gregor asked. “Even assuming it belongs to the murderer, Bennis, it’s only a minor mistake. It wasn’t lost at the scene but in another room. It’s something that many people have, you said so yourself. It could never be successfully used in evidence.”

“It seems to have given you ideas.”

“That, yes,” Gregor said. He pulled the steno pad close to him and began to write.

1. P. Hazzard receives invitation

2. Murderer checks out Hannah’s apartment to see if entry is feasible

3. Murderer hand-delivers invitation, repackaged, to C. DeWitt

Russell Donahue studied the list and frowned. “There’s something I don’t understand. So what if that invitation was delivered to Candida DeWitt? That couldn’t have been enough to ensure that she’d show up.”

“There was no need to ensure that she’d show up,” Gregor explained patiently. “All along, the murderer intended for there to be two suspects in this case. One, of course, was Hannah Krekorian. The other was Candida DeWitt. I don’t even know if Mrs. DeWitt was meant to be a serious suspect. Casting suspicion in this way might have been simply spite. But to cast suspicion, it wasn’t necessary that Candida DeWitt actually attend Hannah Krekorian’s party. It was only necessary that she could be proved to have known where Hannah lived.”

“Oh,” Bennis said.

Gregor started writing again.

4. Murderer arrives at Hannah’s apartment and gets in through window, 7:00 to 7:05 last night

5. Murderer hides in guest room intending to stay there until party is finished

6. C. DeWitt arrives and causes scene

7. Hannah goes to master bathroom

8. P. Hazzard goes to master bedroom

9. Murderer leaves guest room and goes into master bedroom, locking master bedroom door

Gregor tapped the piece of paper he had pulled out of his trouser pocket, the timetable put together by Mary Ohanian and Helen Tevorakian. “We have to check out the particulars,” he said, “but this is how it has to have happened. That’s what I mean, Russell, about a carefully planned murder that depended so much on luck. The plan was for a murder later in the evening. The luck was in catching Paul Hazzard the way he was caught. It was a much better setup than the original plan, but it couldn’t possibly have been engineered.”

“If it happened the way you’re saying it did, it must have been someone Hazzard knew very well. It must have been someone he expected to see at that party,” Russell said.

“No, it didn’t have to be someone he expected to see at the party,” Gregor corrected him. “After all, he’d just been ambushed by Candida DeWitt. Another surprise of that kind would probably have seemed relatively minor.”

“But it
was
someone he knew well,” Bennis insisted.

“Oh, yes.”

“As an explanation, this still bothers me a lot,” Russell Donahue said. “The times seem all wrong. They’re too tight.”

“They’re much too tight,” Gregor agreed. “When I was talking to Helen and Mary this afternoon, one of them said it was impossible. There wasn’t enough time in this schedule for someone to have murdered Paul Hazzard. I remember thinking that exposure was inevitable. The odds were enormous that someone would have seen the murderer either going into the bedroom, or killing Paul Hazzard, or going out of the bedroom.”

“Is that what you mean by luck too?” Russell Donahue asked. “I don’t like it, Mr. Demarkian. It’s too many good breaks and too many timetable coincidences.”

“Only if the murderer was, in fact, not seen.”

“You mean the murderer
was
seen?” Bennis was shocked. “But Gregor—oh, you mean the murderer was seen but the person who saw him, or her, didn’t know it was the murderer.”

“The person who saw him, or her, was Candida DeWitt,” Gregor said, “and she most certainly knew what she was looking at was a murderer, a two-time murderer. That’s why she’s dead.”

“But why wouldn’t she have told?” Bennis protested. “She must have been crazy.”