Bleeding Hearts (36 page)

“She wouldn’t come near this place,” Caroline pointed out. “She said she would show up only to get us waiting around, fretting about her. It’s how she reassures herself that she’s still important to the family. It’s—”

“I know,” James said quickly. “It’s a kind of abuse.”

Caroline’s face got red. “Don’t
patronize
me,” she said. “I’m a fully adult human being who is perfectly capable of making her own decisions.”

“Why don’t you just make the decision to
shut up
?”

“I’ll be right in back in the office,” Arthur Pommerant said. “Really. It’s no trouble at all to get in touch with me if you need me. Just ring. Or come on back. I’m always on call.”

“Necrophiliac,” Caroline said.

Arthur Pommerant disappeared.

The Pommerant Funeral Parlor was on a city street that looked almost residential but was probably mostly deserted. Through the window of the reception room, James could see a hole-in-the-wall deli on the other side of the street with a red heart trimmed in white paper lace in the window. It was the first time it had penetrated to James’s consciousness that they were very close to Valentine’s Day. Maybe they should bury Paul on Valentine’s Day. Maybe that would say something.

James sat down in the nearest chair and looked up at Caroline. “Now,” he said, “start from the beginning and get it over with. You’re angry at Alyssa. That’s fine. Get angry at Alyssa once and for all so you can stop throwing tantrums in public.”

“I’m not throwing a tantrum, James. I am expressing my feelings.”

“If everyone went around expressing their feelings the way you do, civilization would come to an end.”

“She took that copy of Jacqueline’s will that Daddy had made. She took it out of Daddy’s shoe tree.”

“So what? The will is on file down at the lawyers’ offices, Caroline. Alyssa could have taken a look at it anytime she wanted to.”

“Alyssa didn’t go to the lawyers’ offices. She went sneaking around in Daddy’s room. She went looking in
secret.
She didn’t want us to know.”

“She was curious on a Saturday night when she didn’t have any other way to satisfy her curiosity. The lawyers’ offices were closed. She didn’t want to face one of your inquisitions.”

“I don’t hold inquisitions.”

“Daddy’s will divides his possessions pretty evenly among the three of us, Caroline. Alyssa has just as much right to look through his things as you have.”

“She sneaked into his room. She lied to me when I asked her what she was doing.”

“Maybe that was the simplest way of telling you to mind your own business.”

“She hid the copy of the will under her sweater.”

“She probably didn’t have any pockets.”

“She
lied
to me, James. I’m telling you, she’s up to something.”

“What could she possibly be up to?”

Caroline walked away and went to look out the window herself. Then she walked away from the window and began to look through her bag. It was her big bag, James suddenly realized, the one she used to carry all that equipment in when she went on trips. She was always complaining about how she hated to lug it around.

Caroline came up with a box of cough drops and dropped one in her mouth.

“Of course, what I really want to do is smoke,” she said. “All my addictions are reaching out to me. It’s inevitable in times of stress.”

James had quit smoking five years earlier. He had never once wanted a cigarette since.

“Why don’t you get to the point?” he asked her.

“I am getting to the point,” Caroline said irritably. “Now that Daddy’s dead, we three come in for a whole lot of Jacqueline’s money, isn’t that true?”

“We come into Jacqueline’s money, that’s true. I don’t know how much of it there is.”

Caroline dismissed this. “Jacqueline was rich. There’s tons and tons of the stuff. I think maybe Alyssa needs it for something.”

“Needs it for what? She’s married to a very successful attorney.”

“Successful attorneys aren’t always rich,” Caroline said. “Some of them spend too much. Some of them get into trouble.”

“Nick Roderick isn’t in any trouble. You’ve got no reason to say he is.”

“Maybe it’s Alyssa who’s in trouble, then. Maybe she wants enough for Nick to retire and go away someplace. Maybe she wants to get away from Philadelphia and everybody who knows.”

“Knows what?”

“Knows,” Caroline said.

Then she sat down on the couch and faced him, her knees together, her ankles together, a little smile on her face. She was making James feel very queasy. He didn’t like her attitude at all.

“I think we ought to look into this,” she said, “before one or the other of us winds up dead. We haven’t any one of us made a will, you know. If something happened to any of us, our money would go to our next of kin. Wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” James said. “It would.”

“There, then.”

Caroline popped another cough drop in her mouth.

Yes, James thought, Caroline definitely made him queasy, but it wasn’t because she’d convinced him that Alyssa was up to something.

It was Caroline he thought was up to something.

Halfway across town, in the apartment on top of the Hazzard house, Alyssa Hazzard Roderick was putting the final touches on her elaborate Sunday-go-to-the-funeral-home makeup and talking to her husband, Nick. She had a big red heart-shaped box of Russell Stover chocolates at her elbow, open, so that she could pick at it between taking swipes at her lips with her lipstick brush.

“… so Caroline got all upset,” she was saying, “but it didn’t really bother me, because that’s just like Caroline and I think it was important for me to know. I think it’s important for all of us to know. Don’t you, Nick?”

“I already knew,” Nick said. “You could have asked me.

“You were out. I don’t see what all this fuss is about, Nick, really. I just wanted to find out what I wanted to know and not have to explain myself to Caroline. God only knows, nobody in his right mind would want to have to explain anything to Caroline.”

“Gotcha,” Nick said. “I’m not arguing about that. I’m just saying it would have made more sense to ask me.”

“So when you came home, I did ask you. How much did you say it was again?”

“About fifteen million dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“There’s also this house. James isn’t going to be a problem about the house, but if we want to stay here, we’re probably going to have to buy Caroline out. Will you mind doing that?”

“I don’t know that I want to stay here,” Alyssa said. “Do you think Caroline will really want to move?”

“Once she has money? Sure. She doesn’t like any of the rest of us very much.”

“I suppose she doesn’t. I suppose I always thought she had money. With that television show of hers and everything.”

Nick was doubtful. “It’s a local television show, you know. It has had some syndication—”

“—all over the Northeast—”

“—all over the Northeast,” Nick agreed cheerfully, “yes, but I don’t think it’s that big a deal. Not as big a deal as a third of fifteen million dollars. Not as big a deal as Caroline thinks it ought to be.”

“Caroline always thinks she’s owed. That’s what we’re going to put on her tombstone. ‘I was owed.’ I suppose it ought to be ‘I was robbed.’ More to the point. Do you think I could get away with my sapphire earrings?”

“Not to a funeral home.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

Alyssa put down her lipstick brush—it was a useless exercise anyway; every time she got her lips red she felt the urge for another chocolate cream and every time she ate another chocolate cream her lipstick came off. If she had to choose between lipstick and chocolate, she knew which one she would have to have. She got her jewelry box off the vanity ledge.

“Five million dollars,” she said. “Is there going to be a lot of that left after taxes?”

“A few million or so,” Nick said.

“And I’ve got my trust fund too. Not that we’ll be as rich as some of those women I do charity work with. Still.”

“You’ll be completely independent unless you want to get stupid.”

“I’m never stupid about money, Nicholas, you know that. Can we go on a vacation when all this is over? You know, after the police business and all that, but before the trial. It’ll probably be months before they actually go to trial.”

“I think a vacation sounds fine.”

“Good. I’m really beginning to feel claustrophobic around here. I—oh, for God’s sake.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Look at this.” Alyssa got up and brought her jewelry case across to the chair where Nicholas was sitting, the Sunday paper in his lap. She handed the case over to him and said, “I know it’s a mess in there, but just look for yourself. I’ve lost one of my pearl stud earrings.”

A
S IT TURNED OUT,
Gregor Demarkian had been able to accomplish one or two things on Sunday. He had talked to Fred Scherrer on the phone. Talking to Fred Scherrer was like talking to any lawyer, only worse. It was impossible to find out anything you really wanted to know in a straightforward way at the same time that it was impossible to avoid revelations you had no interest in exploding under your feet like land mines. Gregor learned all about Fred Scherrer’s last two wives, about the arrangements Candida DeWitt had made with the men who kept her, about Fred Scherrer’s admiration for Candida as an intelligent businesswoman. He did not learn anything at all about the murder that he did not already know. Fred Scherrer had no alibi because Fred Scherrer was staying at Candida DeWitt’s house. At two o’clock on Saturday afternoon Scherrer had decided that he would not be able to live without two dozen Bavarian creme doughnuts from Dunkin’ Donuts in the kitchen. He had driven off to the center of Bryn Mawr and with one thing and another—traffic, stopping to buy a disposable razor, deciding to get two dozen jelly doughnuts in addition to the Bavarian cremes—hadn’t made it back until four-thirty. Then he had parked Candida’s car in Candida’s detached garage, walked into Candida’s living room, and found the body lying right where he then left it. He was too good and too experienced a lawyer to have touched anything. At least, he was if he wasn’t also the murderer. Gregor was aware of that. The problem was that there was nothing in Fred Scherrer’s story that could actually eliminate the lawyer as a suspect. Bob Cheswicki and Russell Donahue and his people were working very hard to place Fred Scherrer in all the places he claimed he’d been on Saturday afternoon. In the end, even if they succeeded it would make no difference. Determining the time of death was hardly an exact science. There was nothing to say Fred couldn’t have killed Candida before he left the house to buy doughnuts or after he got back.

The other thing of a productive nature Gregor did on Sunday was to talk to Russell Donahue and Bob Cheswicki. They came to Cavanaugh Street carrying computer printouts and cross-section drawings and anything else they had been able to get their hands on that related to the two deaths this weekend but wasn’t required to be locked up in an evidence cage or on file with the medical examiner’s office. Then the three of them sat down to exactly the kind of busywork that made Gregor’s head ache. Check. Double-check. Triple-check. Check again. By the time it was over, Gregor could have reproduced the wound drawings in his sleep. He was glad that Hannah Krekorian was no longer the prime suspect in this case, but if one more person had said The Sentence one more time, Gregor would have gone after the perpetrator with a two-by-four. The Sentence was: “Now that we have a time of death for Candida DeWitt’s murder, we know somebody was with Hannah Krekorian for practically every second of the relevant period, so she’s out of it.” One of the problems with The Sentence was that it was so grammatically and syntactically messy. Gregor kept wanting to edit it.

The last thing Gregor did on Sunday was to watch the transformation of Lida Arkmanian’s town house. It was a calculated metamorphosis. Sometime on Saturday evening, the strategy the women of Cavanaugh Street were using to take care of Hannah Krekorian had been judged inadequate and out-of-date. Instead of keeping her safely in Helen Tevorakian’s apartment, away from the gossip and the stress, they had decided to “take her out of herself.” What they meant was that they wanted to get her thinking about something else. That was going to be very difficult to do. The man had been killed in Hannah’s bedroom, after all. Hannah wasn’t even going to be allowed back into the room until Monday. Hannah went to church, but it was obvious to everybody that she spent the whole time wondering if people were staring at her. Then there were the newspapers. The newspapers were nuts. Gregor had made a point of not looking at them—he didn’t want to see himself described as “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot” one more time—but he knew what Helen Tevorakian and the others meant. Their problem was what to do with Hannah now that they had decided that something had to be done with her. Their solution was to put her on a ladder against the façade of Lida Arkmanian’s town house, three stories up. She was supposed to be hanging red crepe paper.

“You know how depressed Donna has been lately,” Helen Tevorakian said when Gregor asked. “Well, now she’s feeling better.”

“Donna wanted to make Lida’s house look like a box of chocolates with lace and a ribbon,” Sheila Kashinian said. “It’s a very cute idea.”

“All we wanted to do was to make sure that Hannah wasn’t brooding about it all the time,” Maria Varoukian said. “We wanted to take her mind off her troubles.”

Privately, Gregor thought there were kinder ways to take Hannah’s mind off her troubles than to prop her up three stories over a busy city street in the frigid February cold. He also thought Donna Moradanyan must not simply be feeling better, but getting on to delirious. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed it Saturday night. Sometimes he thought he never noticed anything. Still, no matter how crazy the project had been, it had served its purpose in a number of ways. Hannah had been made to feel part of the community again, not singled out by strange things going on in her apartment or under suspicion of murder or anything else. Lida’s town house, the front of which Gregor could see from his living room window, looked insanely wonderful, with bright white satin bows on the sash of every window and metallic red-and-white stripes leading from the top of an old and now-unused antenna to the edges of the roof. It didn’t remind Gregor of a box of chocolates, or of anything else he had ever encountered in the real world, but it was a nice effect. The women were all proud of themselves too, because Hannah had been so terrified up there on that ladder that she hadn’t been able to think about the murders for a minute—or for several hours afterward either.