by Jane Haddam
“Pour me some coffee too,” Max said. “I’ve got to go out tonight to one of those places where they serve nothing but herb tea and bean sprouts. God, I hate the healthy foods movement.”
James hated the healthy foods movement too. He especially hated the part of it where people like his father thought you were an unenlightened mess in need of immediate therapy if you had a cocktail every night before dinner. He poured two cups of coffee, doctored them both liberally with Johnnie Walker Black, and passed one over to Max.
Max had finished with his columns of numbers. He took the coffee James was handing him, put his feet on his desk, and said, “Your sister Caroline called. Not five minutes ago. She was hysterical.”
“Caroline is always hysterical. Was it something in particular this time?”
Max nodded. “Candida DeWitt, that’s what it was. Apparently nobody got around to telling her what was going on until today, and then your sister Alyssa just blurted it all out, and now Caroline—”
“—is acting like a Victorian virgin with the vapors. I’m glad you took the call instead of me.”
“I don’t mind talking to Victorian virgins with the vapors. Especially your sister Caroline. She’s like listening to the Donahue show. Do you suppose she is a virgin?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“It would be really wonderful if she were. Nobody’s a virgin anymore. I think virginity’s a very frustrating thing, don’t you? As soon as you try to do anything with it, you lose it.”
“Was all that supposed to make sense?”
“It makes perfect sense,” Max said lightly. “Never mind. Are you all worried about Candida DeWitt?”
James took a long sip of his coffee, which was smooth and soothing and just the right kind of bitter for the end of a working day. Oddly enough, he wasn’t in the least bit worried about Candida DeWitt. The death of Jacqueline Isherwood and the circumstances surrounding it had driven Caroline half crazy and embarrassed Alyssa and Nick, but they had been good for James. SOCIETY VICTIM WARNED, the headline on the National Enquirer said, and it was followed by a story about how “psychic James Hazzard, the victim’s stepson” had told his stepmother she would die a violent death within the month if she didn’t take steps to protect herself, which, of course, she hadn’t, so she did. It was all a lot of nonsense. James had never claimed to be a psychic, just a “trained astrological counselor,” whatever that meant. He had certainly never warned Jacqueline that she was about to die a violent death. He had never warned Jacqueline about anything. God, how he had hated that woman. Prissy, frumpy, uptight, and absolutely humorless—James just knew Paul had married her for her money. There couldn’t be any other reason. James himself hadn’t said four words a day to her for the last five years before she died. Jacqueline made his skin crawl.
SOCIETY VICTIM WARNED, the headline said, and then another one, in an even less respectable outlet: PERILS OF DISBELIEF. In any rational world, that sort of publicity should have been enough to kill half his business. The people he dealt with had a positive allergy to anything that smacked of low rent. Instead, his business had actually increased, and increased most dramatically in the level of his private consultations. It was as if all these people read the supermarket tabloids, and more than half believed them, on the sly. It was as if the entire upper-middle-class population of the United States had taken a step backward and sideways, into a new Dark Age of superstition and insanity, into a dream-world full of cackling demons that stayed just out of sight. James himself did not believe in astrology. He knew perfectly well that the stars and the planets were not where his charts said they were. He’d taken more than one astronomy course in college. He didn’t believe his fate was tied up with some cosmic force in the universe either. He didn’t think there was any cosmic force in the universe. He didn’t think there was any such thing as fate. He just—
His mug was more than two-thirds empty. He topped it up with coffee and Scotch—with a lot of Scotch—and then realized Max was staring at him. James raised his glass in a toast and said, “Here’s to nothing. What’s the matter with you?”
“It’s you we ought to be worried about,” Max said. “You look definitely odd right now.”
“I was indulging in a very dangerous activity. I was letting myself get ethics.”
“Oh, don’t do that. We’d go broke.”
“I know.”
“Maybe you can get ethics after you retire. You can write a big exposé of the New Age movement and make a million dollars going on talk shows and telling the public how you ripped them off.”
“If I did, thirty psychics would go on with me and tell the public how they never rip anybody off, and the audience would believe them. Do you ever wonder what’s wrong with people these days?”
“Not if I can help it.”
James took a deep swallow of coffee and Scotch and sighed. “Are you sure that was all Caroline wanted, to talk about Candida DeWitt?”
“Absolutely. Except for the usual, of course. Your dysfunctional family. How long you were going to be content to stay mired in denial before you came to your senses and decided to take control of your life.”
“Nothing about Fred Scherrer?”
“Fred Scherrer.” Max was puzzled. “The name’s familiar, but I can’t place it. Is it someone we know?”
“It’s someone I know. He’s a lawyer.”
“Oh,” Max said, comprehending. “The lawyer.”
“Exactly. The lawyer.”
“Not a mention, darling. Why? Was she supposed to say something about him?”
“No,” James said. “As far as I know, he doesn’t have anything to do with this at all. But I think it’s funny. You know. I think it’s funny that he hasn’t turned up.”
“Well, he’s hardly hiding, James. Scherrer’s a famous lawyer. I don’t think he’s been hiding in a hole in the ground ever since your stepmother was—ah—how should we put it?”
“Murdered,” James said. “And Fred Scherrer hasn’t been hiding in a hole in the ground. He’s defended two more famous people and done a lot of civil liberties work that doesn’t make such a splash in the papers. That’s not what I mean. I mean it’s funny he hasn’t turned up about this.”
“About Ms. DeWitt’s memoirs.”
“Exactly. Even Candida hasn’t mentioned him. And that’s odd.”
Max got up and got himself more coffee and more Scotch. “Everything’s odd around here,” he said, dropping the swish. “It makes me tired sometimes, how odd it all is. Does it really matter, if Candida DeWitt isn’t putting this lawyer in her memoirs?”
“It would matter more if she was,” James said. “I think I’m the only one who realizes it, but Fred Scherrer is far more potential trouble to the family than Candida DeWitt ever could be. Candida DeWitt gives good television, but she doesn’t actually know anything.”
“And Fred Scherrer does?”
“Yes,” James said slowly. “I can’t be absolutely sure. I’ve never tried to test it—but yes, I think he does.”
Somewhere behind James, still standing next to the coffee and the Scotch, Max coughed.
It was an uncomfortable cough that sounded a little strangled, and James understood it perfectly.
6
MARY ELIZABETH POODIAK HAD changed her name to Candida DeWitt four days after her twenty-first birthday, four days after the earliest date on which it would have been legal to change it. With the change, she had gone through the psychological equivalent of shedding a skin. The young woman who emerged from the Philadelphia courthouse as Candida DeWitt was not the same as the one who had gone in as Mary Poodiak. She walked differently. She spoke differently. She had a different glint in her eye. She felt like a bird coming out of an egg. Where before she had been hard and smooth, now she was a Personality. Where before she had been brittle and tough, now she was—what? Candida had never been able to put it into words, but it was the part of her that had attracted the richest and most ac
complished of men, and gotten her exactly what she wanted out of them. It was the part of her that suited her purposes so well, she never had to be hard or mercenary. Candida DeWitt was a woman who genuinely liked men, in all their maleness. She enjoyed listening to baritone voices yelling imprecations at football coaches. She was made contented by the soft swearing frustration of a conglomerator attempting to broil a steak in an electric oven. She could go to sleep to the sound of a hammer hitting nails. A woman who genuinely liked men and made very few demands on them beyond the financial—in certain times and under certain circumstances, that combination could be worth the weight of Jumbo the Elephant in gold, and it had been. This big house in Bryn Mawr was not all that Candida DeWitt owned. She had a nice tidy portfolio of stocks, a very interesting collection of municipal bonds, and a judicious selection of rental properties to see her through a comfortable old age. Memoirs or no memoirs, Candida DeWitt was set for life.
Of course, what Candida had been engaged in all these years was a kind of whoring. She knew that, although the frowsy little blonde who had come out to stay for the weekend didn’t seem to. The frowsy little blonde was an assistant editor at Candida’s publishing house, and she was supposed to be helping Candida put together a detailed outline of the book she had contracted to write. In the process, the frowsy little blonde—Casey Holder, Candida told herself, I have to remember that her name is Casey Holder—was doing everything in her power not to recognize the truth of just about anything at all.
Candida DeWitt had been intelligent about her body as well as her investments. She had kept herself reasonably trim and reasonably attractive, without indulging in the kind of obsessional dieting that turned middle-aged women into walking skeletons, like Nancy Reagan. Candida knew a lot of women like that. She didn’t envy them. She didn’t envy anyone. As far as she knew, she had a perfect life.
Well, almost.
If she’d had an absolutely perfect life, she wouldn’t have been writing this book.
Casey Holder was sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of the living room fireplace, frowning down at photocopies of Candida’s original sample chapters. She’d been pawing through them all night, as if she expected to find something new there.
“Of course, the really delicate thing,” Casey Holder said, “will be deciding how to handle the murder and everything that came after it. Linda told me to bring that up especially. She said the strategy on that ought to be planned right from the beginning.”
“Linda” was Linda Bell, the real editor on Candida’s book. Linda was also the president of this division of her publishing company and a reputed expert in how to make best sellers. Candida had wondered from the first if that could really be true. When Candida talked to Linda, she always got the impression that Linda hadn’t read the last few chapters Candida had written.
“I don’t think we have to worry too much about the murder,” Candida said now. “I did put it in the very first chapter. Or something about it, anyway.”
“Of course you did!” Casey Holder was encouraging. Candida wondered what that meant. So far, she had noticed an odd thing about publishing people: They never told you anything you had written was rank awful even if they thought it was. It was as if they expected you to explode at the very suggestion of real criticism.
“If there’s something wrong with the way I did it,” Candida said, “I can always change it. I do try to be reasonably accommodating, you know.”
“Oh, you’re very accommodating,” Casey Holder said. “There isn’t anything Linda wants changed about the first chapter. It’s perfect just the way it is. It’s very arresting.”
“So to speak.”
Casey Holder was oblivious. “The tension that chapter creates is just perfect, and it goes right to the heart of what people are going to want to read. And you follow it with the two chapters on the senator, and that’s good too, because the senator is always interesting to people who like gossip. And after the senator, well, things are very straightforward.”
“They were fairly monotonous, from what I remember.”
“Yes. I see. The point is, the real charge, the real excitement in this book the way you have set it up so far—it was you who set it up this way, of course, I mean, we’re going by your original proposal. It wasn’t our idea to put the murder first.”
“Of course it wasn’t.”
“All right, then, you see, the way you’ve set it up, the real interest is going to be in the murder.”
“Of course,” Candida said again. “I want the real interest to be in the murder.”
“So do we,” Casey Holder said, “so do we. But then the question becomes how you’re going to handle it, you see.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t see why I can’t just tell the story and get it over with,” Candida said reasonably. “Start at the beginning, write through the middle, and stop when I come to the end.”
Casey Holder looked distressed. “But there are issues. You must realize that. There are legal issues, for one thing.”
“What kind of legal issues?”
Casey Holder was being brave. “There are libel issues, for instance. If you’re going to speculate on the identity of the murderer—.”
“I’m not going to speculate on anything.”
“If you’re even going to hint, or slant the story in such a way that an inference couldn’t help being made—.”
“I’m not going to do any such thing,” Candida said. “I’ve been entirely open about what I intend to do. I don’t know who killed Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. Nobody knows. Nobody has ever been convicted of the crime.”
“Oh, convicted.” Casey Holder shook her head. “Convicted isn’t everything.”
“It is in the United States legal system,” Candida said firmly. “Innocent until proven guilty. That’s what the Constitution says.”
“Yes. Of course. But in your outline—.”
“I say that I will reveal information never before published.” Candida nodded vigorously. “And I will. I will reveal a lot of information never before published, because I have a lot of information never before published. But that information won’t be the identity of the murderer, because I don’t have that.”
Casey Holder was getting very uncomfortable. She was squiggling around on the rug like a baby too young to turn over yet, frustrated at being unable to move. Candida stretched out her right leg and used the toe of her high-heeled pump to press a button imbedded in the floor. That would buzz the kitchen and bring the maid, who could be sent off for coffee and liqueurs. Maybe coffee and liqueurs could cheer things up.
“Come now,” Candida said. “You must have realized you weren’t going to get the name of the murderer. You must have realized you couldn’t.”
“I think Linda was hoping you’d heard some rumors…” Casey sighed. “Things like this are so fascinating. Real murders among real people. That’s why true crime books sell so well. And of course, you know what Gregor Demarkian says.”
“Gregor Demarkian.” Candida processed the name through a couple of times and finally came up with a definite image. “Oh, yes. The detective. I’ve heard of him.”
“I thought you’d know a lot more about him than I do,” Casey said, “living on the Main Line and he’s from Philadelphia and everything. There are stories about him in the Inquirer all the time.”
“How do you know what stories are in the Inquirer? Do you mean publishing people in New York read the newspapers from Philadelphia?”
“Our clipping service clips articles about Demarkian for Linda Bell,” Casey said. “Linda’s wild to get him to do a book about his cases. She said it would be absolutely the hit of the season. He hasn’t been interested so far though. I don’t think he likes publicity.”
“What is it he always says that you think I should have heard of?”
“He says somebody always knows the identity of the murderer.” Casey sat up and stretched. “He says
even in really famous cases like Lizzie Borden and Jack the Ripper, there were people who knew what happened. They just never told and the truth never came out.”
“I suppose the murderer always knows what happened,” Candida said. “There’s that.”
“It’s not just the murderer. It’s people around the murderer. People who know the murderer.”
Candida shook her head decisively. “I don’t see what good that would do. If the murderer was some passing tramp, or a hophead looking for money for drugs, well, the murderer himself might not know he’d committed the murder ten minutes after he’d committed it. He might not remember a thing.”
“But Jacqueline Hazzard wasn’t killed by a passing tramp,” Casey said. “At least, that’s not what the police thought at the time.”
“The police thought a lot of things at the time,” Candida said, “including that I committed that murder myself to get Jacqueline out of the way so I could marry Paul. It was a damned good thing I’d been photographed shaking hands with the President of the United States at a fund-raiser for the homeless in Los Angeles twenty minutes after the crime was supposed to have been committed. The police think a lot of things.”
“I suppose they do,” Casey said. “Never mind. I guess Linda and I were really hoping that you were the one—well, you know—that you were the person who knew what really happened, and that you’d hint.”
“My dear girl,” Candida said. “If I did anything like that, I’d be sued. These are educated people we’re dealing with here. They don’t put up with nonsense of that kind. They make you pay for it.”
There was a soft sound of footsteps, rubber soles against hardwood floors, and Candida’s maid came into the room, still in uniform and looking expectant.
“There was something you wanted, Mrs. DeWitt?”
Candida DeWitt had never been married, but she understood that after a certain age that was not an asset. She called herself a widow and provided no further information.
“Louise,” she said now, “I’d like a cup of coffee, if you wouldn’t mind getting it for me. Perhaps Ms. Holder would like a cup of coffee too.”
