by Jane Haddam
“Coffee,” Casey Holder said. “I don’t think so. Unless you have decaf?”
Candida kept her expression neutral. She didn’t keep decaf in the house. It tasted like cow’s piss.
“We have herb teas,” she suggested instead. “Red Zinger, I believe, and—Sleepytime?”
“Yes, Mrs. DeWitt,” Louise said. “We have Sleepytime. We also have Mandarin Orange and Lemon Zinger.”
“Mandarin Orange,” Casey said quickly. “That will be perfect.”
“I will bring along the honey in case you like it sweet,” Louise said. Then she turned around and disappeared.
Candida stared at the empty space where Louise had been and thought hard. It was so difficult to decide what to do sometimes. She had always been a very easygoing sort. She had always had to be. She had never operated out of revenge before. She found it very difficult to understand what it would be best to say or who it would be best to talk to or when it would be best to sit still and not move at all.
This did not seem a time for sitting still. Casey Holder was gazing up at her, half-fascinated and half-tense, an anxious young woman who would always resent other women, for reasons she would never be willing to explain to herself.
“You know,” Candida told her, “if what you really want is some kind of hint, you ought to talk to Fred Scherrer. If your Gregor Demarkian is right and somebody always knows, then Fred Scherrer is definitely the man who knows about this.”
7
FRED SCHERRER HAD BEEN interviewed for 60 Minutes by Ed Bradley, and in the middle of that interview he had declared—in a sound byte that made the air—that he could defend Saddam Hussein in an Israeli court and get him off. Fred Scherrer was fifty-two years old, and for the last thirty of those years he had been the most famous defense attorney in America. He might have been the most famous lawyer in the history of America with the exception of Clarence Darrow. He was certainly a phenomenon. Illiterate teenagers in southern Georgia knew his name. Associate justices of the United States Supreme Court cursed him over cocktails in the bar of the Burning Tree Country Club. Millions of middle-aged women with a lust for blood and an insatiable curiosity about capital cases snapped up the books he wrote for $22 a pop, making him the only lawyer on record to have a book spend one hundred sixty-four weeks on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list.
If one of the middle-aged women with a lust for blood had met Fred Scherrer, she might not have been impressed. He was not a physically prepossessing man. Five foot seven, a hundred fifty-four pounds, kick-sand-in-my-face thin running to wrinkles and paunch—from a distance, Fred Scherrer resembled the sort of man who spends his life working at the post office but never has quite enough juice to get promoted off the carrier routes. It was only face-to-face that he began to be impressive.
Right now Fred Scherrer wasn’t even being impressive face-to-face. He had shut himself down, in a way, turned all the interior emotion off, blanked himself out. He always did that while he was waiting for a jury to come in, which was what he was doing. He was being especially impassive, because there was no doubt whatsoever what verdict this jury would bring back. Getting Saddam Hussein off in Jerusalem was one thing. Getting Chuckie Bickerson off in Westchester County was something else. This was the sort of case Fred took for practice. Chuckie Bickerson had kidnapped a fifteen-year-old Mount Vernon cheerleader from the parking lot of her school at four o’clock in the afternoon in full view of her boyfriend, the junior varsity cheerleading squad, and the sour-faced Puritan English teacher who served as adviser to the Glee Club. The phrase “asking to get caught” came to mind, but Fred found it ludicrously inadequate. And dumb? Good God. Talking to Chuckie Bickerson could give a normal person a migraine. Chuckie had raped and murdered the cheerleader, of course. He’d raped and murdered a few other girls too, and when the police finally caught up to him—which, after the stunt in Mount Vernon, wasn’t too difficult—they’d found the bodies of those girls in Chuckie’s basement, just lying there stacked up against the vinyl-covered furniture and stretched out on the industrial-grade rug. The smell had been awful.
Chuckie’s smell was awful too. It was as if the sourness of his sweat were woven into him, unremovable by soap. Fred would never have taken his case if Chuckie hadn’t insisted on pleading innocent.
Ass.
Chuckie stirred in his seat, stretched his arms, shook his head. “I got to go to the bathroom,” he said. “Where’s that guy that takes me to the bathroom?”
“Maybe he’s gone to the bathroom himself. He’ll be back in a minute, Chuckie. Just hold your water.”
“I been holding my water,” Chuckie said. “I been holding myself. Why didn’t you let me get up there and talk?”
I didn’t let you get up there and talk, Fred thought, because I didn’t want to be witness to a lynching. He said, “The defendant doesn’t have to testify, Chuckie. And it’s generally a good idea if he doesn’t. Prosecutors can be very tricky bastards.”
“I could have explained myself,” Chuckie objected. “I mean, I had things to say.”
“I know you did, Chuckie.”
“I could have told them all about those girls. The things they said to me. The things they did.”
“I know.”
“Once you’ve screwed ’em, their lives are ruined anyway,” Chuckie said. “My mother told me that. A woman’s virtue is all she has. If she loses it, she might as well be dead.”
“Your mother must have been a very interesting woman, Chuckie.”
“Oh, she was. Except she wasn’t really my mother. My real mother went away somewhere. Why didn’t you tell them about the eyes?”
“The eyes?”
“Yeah, you know. When somebody gets murdered, the picture of the murderer stays in their eyes, and all you have to do is look. But my picture didn’t stay in any of their eyes. So I couldn’t have murdered them.”
“It was a case of multiple serial suicides.”
“Suicides,” Chuckie said firmly. “That’s the ticket.”
“There’s Sergeant Devere,” Fred said. “If you’re going to the john, you’d better do it now.”
“I still say you should have told them about the eyes,” Chuckie said. “That would have cleared up everything.”
Fred stood up and waved to Sergeant Devere, who nodded and began to come across the front of the courtroom to them. Sergeant Devere didn’t like Chuckie any more than Fred did, but Sergeant Devere was a professional. In fact, as far as Fred was concerned, Sergeant Devere was awesome. If Devere ever started to play poker for serious, he’d get rich.
“Chuckie wants to go to the bathroom,” Fred told Sergeant Devere. “I’d like to go for a walk, if you get what I mean.”
“Of course,” Sergeant Devere said. “I’ll take Mr. Bickerson out back for a while.”
“I don’t see why I always have to be out back whenever you take a walk,” Chuckie said. “I’ve seen trials on television. The accused guy doesn’t always have to go out back.”
“Judge’s orders,” Sergeant Devere said.
“Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the first day here, you grabbed a paperweight during recess and tried to take a policewoman hostage.”
“Self-defense,” Chuckie said sullenly. “You can’t blame a guy for what he does in self-defense. I’m being railroaded here.”
“Right,”
“Mr. Bickerson?” Sergeant Devere said.
Fred moved away from the table, giving Devere room to work with Chuckie’s shackles. Chuckie was wearing shackles because on their second day in court, he’d tried to kick the bailiff in the groin. Fortunately for the bailiff, Chuckie had seen karate kicks only in the movies. He’d never before actually tried to do one.
Fred left the courtroom, looked around the corridor outside—newspeople everywhere; more cameras than a store that was going out of business on Broadway—and then made his way to the stairs. He went down the single flight to the basement and along
the corridor there to the cafeteria. He found Sydney Mellerstein, his junior partner, sitting alone at a table against the wall, drinking coffee. Fred got a cup of coffee for himself, paid for it, and went over to join Sid.
“Jury’s still out.” He sat down.
Sid sighed. “They must be staging an orgy. They couldn’t be having trouble coming to a decision. How’s Chuckie?”
“Chuckie’s Chuckie.”
“That’s too bad. I picked up our messages before I came down here. You got a call from Caroline Hazzard.”
The coffee the cafeteria served in this courthouse was terrible. In Fred’s experience, the coffee the cafeterias served in all courthouses was always terrible. The coffee served in the cafeterias in state legislative buildings was worse. Fred doctored his cup with enough milk and sugar to produce something on the order of a mocha egg cream, and put Chuckie Bickerson firmly out of his mind.
“Caroline Hazzard,” he said. “Now, there’s a blast from the past—the recent past, but the past. I wonder why it was Caroline who called instead of Paul.”
“Maybe because Paul has sense enough not to bother you with hysterical phone messages when you’re right in the middle of a murder trial.”
“Hysterical. That’s right. Caroline is the hysterical one. Always talking about her inner child and how hard she’s working to heal her addictions. What did she want?”
Sydney took a long swig of his coffee. He grimaced. “She wants to hire you. She wants you to work for free. You owe it to the family. You can’t let that woman get away with this.”
“Let what woman get away with what?”
“Let Candida DeWitt get away with publishing her memoirs,” Sid said. “That’s what this flap is all about. Candida DeWitt is publishing her memoirs. I refrained from telling Ms. Hazzard that I intend to camp out all night in front of the door to my local bookstore when the time comes, just so I can have the first copy I can get my hands on. Whew. This is going to be a pip.”
“I wonder how graphic she’ll get,” Fred mused. “ ‘Mr. Fortune Five Hundred Empire Builder may look self-possessed in public, but in private he likes to be dressed up in diapers and fed a bottle of baby formula.’ ”
“Do people do things like that?”
“They do considerably worse. I hope she gets very graphic. I’ll defend her in the libel actions for free. It’d be worth it for the publicity. It’d be worth it to see Candida again. I wonder how she is.”
“I always thought you rather liked her,” Sid said. “I liked Candida better than I liked any of them, at least at the time. Of course, they were all under a lot of strain.”
“You could say that. They’re probably still under a lot of strain. I knew Paul at Harvard, you know.”
“Yeah,” Sid said. “I know.”
“He was very successful at that—stuff he does. Enormously so. I suppose that’s where Caroline picked it up.”
“He married a rich woman,” Sid said. “It’s funny how nobody ever mentions that. Nobody mentioned it at the time. Paul had made a fair piece of change, but she had serious money.”
“That’s true.” Fred nodded. “And there was that house, right in the middle of Philadelphia—that belonged to her originally, didn’t it?”
Sid snorted. “You shouldn’t let Harvard cloud your judgment. It belonged to her all right, but Paul was always going around saying how it had been in ‘his’ family since whenever, that ‘his’ great-something grandfather built it. He would outright lie about it.”
“I’m sure he still does,” Fred said. “I think the family name was originally Hazuelski. His father changed it. Paul was Hazzard at Harvard. But it—got around.”
“Did it matter?”
“In a way. In those days. Yes. Of course, I was an outsider too, a public school boy on scholarship—but I like being an outsider. It doesn’t bother me. Paul was from Philadelphia and he was almost-but-not-quite, if you know what I mean. A second-string prep school. A dancing class but not the right dancing class. Invitations to the big deb balls but not to the really important little ones. I remember wondering at the time if Paul was marrying Jacqueline for love or for position or for simple obsession. I don’t think I ever reached an answer in my own mind.”
“Why did she marry him?” Sid asked curiously.
Fred laughed. “Because she was a thoroughly ridiculous woman, that’s why. Jacqueline was the sort of rich woman who has love affairs with projects. The recovery movement was her project. Or maybe Paul’s career in the recovery movement was her project. I don’t know.”
“Whatever,” Sid said. “They’re always saying in the papers that you know who really did it. They’re always saying you’re the only one who knows.”
“The only way I could be the only one who knows is if I’d done it myself,” Fred said, “and I didn’t. I’m glad to be able to say I was in Gstaad at the time. You shouldn’t read the tabloids, Sid, they’re bad for you.”
“You read them,” Sid said.
“The Bickerson jury will be returning to the courtroom in three minutes,” a woman’s low voice said pleasantly through the loudspeakers hanging above their heads. “Will all principals please return to the courtroom. The Bickerson jury will be returning to the courtroom in three minutes…”
Fred checked his watch. “Hour and a half. Maybe they sent out for Chinese.”
“Maybe Chuckie will throw another fit when the verdict is read.” Sid got to his feet. “Is he really that dumb, or is he putting on an act? I keep thinking nobody could be really that dumb.”
“He’s really that dumb.” Fred got to his feet himself. “But she isn’t. I wonder what it is she thinks she’s up to.”
“Who?” Sid demanded.
“Candida DeWitt,” Fred said, leading the way back out into the corridor. “She really isn’t a stupid woman, you know, and this memoir thing is damn near terminal idiocy. So she’s got to be doing it on purpose.”
“Right.” Sid sounded dubious.
“I wonder what she’s up to,” Fred said again. “I wonder if I paid her a visit if she’d tell me.”
8
GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS OUT to dinner with a friend who had been with him in the FBI, but that was all right. Lida Arkmanian had a key to his apartment. She had a key to old George Tekemanian’s apartment on the first floor of this same building and a key to Hannah Krekorian’s place up the street, but for some reason Lida had keys to neither Bennis Hannaford’s apartment nor Donna Moradanyan’s. There was no significance in this. Keys got passed around on Cavanaugh Street the way baseball trading cards had before they got valuable enough to collect. Keys came and went too, until somehow they mysteriously disappeared, and then somebody had to ask Gregor to jimmy a lock.
Since Gregor’s key was the only one she needed for the moment, and since it hadn’t disappeared, Lida was thinking about keys in only the most desultory way, because she was tired and drifty-headed and really in need of an early night. She had spent the past several hours making pastries of various kinds, for no good reason at all. God only knew she didn’t need to eat more desserts than she already did, and Gregor needed it even less. God only knew she had better things to do with her time than cook—or did she? That was a very hard question to answer. Lida didn’t know what a fifty-eight-year-old woman was supposed to do with her time. She just knew that she’d been feeling restless all evening, and wondered if she ought to take a vacation. She was much too jumpy to sit still, and so it had seemed the perfect solution to do some serious cooking and let her nerves do some good for somebody while she couldn’t make them calm down. Now it was eight-thirty and she was coming empty-handed out of Gregor Demarkian’s third-floor apartment, having left a pile of halvah in his refrigerator tall enough to qualify as a foothill. She felt like a complete idiot.
Not such good decorations this time, she thought, giving a last look at Gregor’s apartment door. It sported a single large metallic red-and-silver heart in honor of the upcoming Valentine’
s Day, but nothing as exuberant as Donna ordinarily put up to celebrate a holiday. Donna Moradanyan decorated this entire town house, inside and out, and most of Cavanaugh Street on any excuse at all, and did it with energy too. One Christmas, she’d wrapped the entire front façade of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church in ribbon and tinsel until it looked like a package. One Halloween, she’d decorated a lamppost on Cavanaugh Street to look so convincingly like the Devil, someone had called a cop. This time Donna’s heart didn’t seem to be in it, so to speak. She didn’t seem to have the fire.
February, Lida murmured to herself, starting down the stairs. February. That’s all it is. I ought to get Hannah and go to the Bahamas until the good weather comes back. That would cheer me up.
She reached the half-landing, looking down the stairwell at what she expected to be nothingness, and stopped. There was definitely not nothing on the landing outside Bennis Hannaford’s apartment door. There was a tall young man with longish hair and an immense down parka, looking agitated. He must have heard her coming. He turned, caught sight of her on the half-landing, and relaxed a little.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m sorry if I startled you. The front door was unlocked, so I just came in—”
—the front door was always unlocked. Gregor was always lecturing old George and Bennis and Donna about how they ought to remember to lock it—
“—but now that I’ve gotten up here, I’ve knocked and knocked, and nobody answers, and I just don’t know what to do. I’m Christopher Hannaford.”
“Oh,” Lida said, feeling instantly better. “Oh, yes. Bennis’s brother. She told us you were coming.”
“She doesn’t seem to have remembered I was coming,” Christopher said. “She isn’t home.”
Lida came the rest of the way down the stairs to the second floor and looked thoughtfully at Bennis’s door. “I think I know where she is,” she said. “She must have gone to pick up Father Tibor at the demonstration—”
