by Jane Haddam
Linda Melajian looked startled. “You don’t know what’s wrong with Donna Moradanyan? Really? I’d have thought it was obvious to everybody.”
“You would?”
“Well, of course,” Linda Melajian said. “I mean, after all—”
Gregor never got to hear what Linda meant, or what was after all. The plate glass door blew open so forcefully, it rattled all the other plate glass windows facing the street. A gust of wind hit the stack of folded napkins on the table where Linda had been working and scattered them across the floor. Salt and pepper shakers jumped, and copies of the Philadelphia Inquirer rippled in the breeze. Bennis Hannaford stood in the door, wearing jeans, a turtleneck, a flannel shirt, a pair of L. L. Bean Maine hunting boots, and a bright red scarf. Gregor thought she had to be freezing, out in the cold like that without a coat. Bennis didn’t seem to be noticing the temperature.
She had a stack of computer printouts under her arm. She grabbed them in her right hand, held them in the air, and announced: “Gregor, I’ve got the most outrageously awful thing to tell you.”
2
Gregor Demarkian had reason to know that Bennis Hannaford was not a flake. In spite of the way she liked to act in public—which was as a cross between a Barbara Stanwyck madcap debutante from a thirties movie and Agatha Christie’s Mrs. Ariadne Oliver—she was in her way a brilliant businesswoman and certainly a successful writer. What she wrote was sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels, but Gregor was not the kind of person to whom genre fiction simply didn’t count. Especially genre fiction that sold that many copies and made that much money. Of course, Gregor had never actually read anything Bennis had written. He’d tried on several occasions, but he was always brought up short by the unicorns. Bennis always had unicorns in her novels. She always had witches and dragons and sorcerers too. It made Gregor dizzy. Tibor and old George Tekemanian had read the whole series, though, and they said the work Bennis did was wonderful.
The problem with Bennis, as far as Gregor was concerned, was not the flakiness she liked to pretend to, but the driving determination she liked to indulge. That, Gregor knew, was the key to Bennis. Out in the world somewhere, Gregor was sure, there were hundreds of other women who wrote as well as Bennis did. There were probably dozens who published as frequently and were as well reviewed. None of them had a tenth of the energy, or the bullheadedness.
Unfortunately, Bennis did not restrict her application of drive, determination, energy, or bullheadedness to her professional life. She brought those things to everything she did, including eating breakfast in the morning. She caused herself a lot of trouble.
Now she threw her sheaf of computer printout paper on top of Gregor’s Philadelphia Inquirer, said, “Hi, Linda” and “Could I have a pot of really muddy black coffee and a full sugar bowl?” and threw her red scarf on top of Gregor’s coat. Then she sat down and put her chin in her hands.
“Just guess,” she said, “what I found out last night.”
Gregor Demarkian did not like to guess things with Bennis Hannaford. He suspected Bennis of setting traps. He said, “I don’t know. Wasn’t your brother supposed to come in last night? Has he got a new job?”
“He’s got the same job he always had,” Bennis said, “and he’s fine and all the rest of that and he’s sleeping in. It’s not about Christopher, for God’s sake. What do you take me for?”
I take you for a prime pain in the nether regions, Gregor told himself, but he didn’t say it out loud. “I take it whatever awful thing you’ve found out is about a person. You’ve got that news-about-a-person expression on your face. Who is it?”
“Hannah Krekorian.”
Gregor blinked. “That’s odd. This seems to be Hannah’s day. Linda was just telling me that Hannah got her out of bed this morning, trying to place a catering order for a big party she’s decided to hold this Friday night.”
“Did she really?” Bennis said. “I take it this was a spur-of-the-moment thing?”
“Linda seems to think so.”
“I bet it’s a get-acquainted party,” Bennis said. “That would just fit. Oh, I really can’t believe this is happening.”
“A get-acquainted party for Hannah Krekorian?” Gregor said.
Linda Melajian came up carrying a tray holding two large pots of coffee, two saucers, two cups, two spoons, two napkins, and an immense sugar bowl. Bennis said, “Thanks a lot,” poured one of the coffee cups two-thirds full of evil black liquid, seemed to fill the rest of the cup up with sugar, and bent over her computer printouts. Linda picked up Bennis’s coffee cup and put a saucer under it.
“Back in a minute with breakfast,” she said.
Bennis looked after Linda’s retreating figure. “I suppose you ordered one of those breakfasts that are a kind of suicide pact with your arteries. I ought to lecture you about it but I just don’t have the time. Listen. Yesterday afternoon Tibor had that demonstration at City Hall or wherever with Father Ryan and Father Carmichael and all those people—”
“The demonstration about the street vendors. I remember. In protest against the city raising the licensing fee or something like that.”
“Right,” Bennis said. “Well, about, I don’t know, maybe seven o’clock last night, I get a call from Tibor that he’s been arrested and he owes a fine and can I come down and pay it. Which is all right, because I knew that was probably coming when the day started. So I packed up all the money I could find in the apartment—”
“Which was probably too much,” Gregor interrupted automatically. “You keep too much cash around. You’re going to get robbed.”
Bennis ignored him. “Anyway, I got all this money together because I knew I was going to get down to the courthouse and find out there were five other people too broke to pay their fines and then what was I going to do, so I took the whole wad and I went out onto the street to find a cab. And I did. Right away. That’s because just as I got out there to look for one, Hannah Krekorian came home in one. With a companion.”
“So who was this companion?” Gregor asked. “You make it sound like Jack the Ripper.”
“I think Jack the Ripper is very apt. Although I didn’t recognize him then. He was too far away. A really tall, cadaverously thin man in a good coat. It wasn’t until I got back that I realized who it was.”
“Because you’d been thinking about it,” Gregor said slowly.
“Not at all.” Bennis was indignant. “I wouldn’t get this worked up just from speculation.”
Oh, yes, you would, Gregor thought, but he didn’t say that either. Instead, he took a long sip of hot black coffee and tried to be encouraging. “You saw him again, I take it? Hannah and this person were still on the sidewalk when you got back?”
“If they had been, they would have frozen to death. It was hours, Gregor. No, they must have gone out to dinner or something. They were getting out of a cab at Hannah’s place again when I got home with Tibor and the rest of the clergy—and I won’t do that again anytime soon; good Lord—and since I was standing right there at the church, and that’s a lot closer, I got a good look at his face.”
“Which you recognized,” Gregor said.
“I most certainly did.”
“Well?” Gregor asked her. “Who was it? It couldn’t really have been Jack the Ripper. Nobody alive today knows who that was.”
“Maybe I just mean he was the next best thing. It was Paul Hazzard. Does the name ring a bell?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said slowly.
Bennis nodded. “That might have been the year your wife was so sick. The year of the trial, I mean. Otherwise, I think you’d remember it. It was a kind of national soap opera, complete with press leaks and stolen tape recordings and I don’t know what else. Everybody thought the state of Pennsylvania had him nailed—Paul Hazzard, I mean—and even now just about everybody’s sure he killed his wife. It’s just that he had Fred Scherrer for a lawyer, so he didn’t get convicted of it.”
Linda Melajian came up
to the table with another tray. “Here you go,” she said, starting to set down dishes, “The coronary bypass surgery special.”
3
Gregor Demarkian knew enough about the way the courts operated in the United States—and especially about the way the courts operated in cases of murder—not to have any illusions that the guilty were always convicted or the innocent set free. He had sat in a courtroom in Tupelo, Mississippi, and watched a man he knew had slaughtered five young women set free for insufficient evidence. He had sat in the FBI office in Salt Lake City and waited for word that the state of Utah had put a man he was sure was innocent to death by firing squad. The vagaries of the political system were the primary reason he was opposed to the death penalty in spite of the fact that he had worked for so much of his career with perpetrators who in every moral sense deserved to be dead. In favor of the death penalty or not, consciousness of the arbitrariness of organized justice notwithstanding, Gregor still believed implicitly in the principle of innocent until proven guilty. There were times when he had privileged knowledge, when he knew a verdict was wrong because he possessed information the jury did not have. In cases in which he had no more information than the jury had had, or even less, Gregor went with the decision their deliberations had settled on. He would have eaten dinner at the house of an acquitted poisoner with no qualms at all. “Everybody’s sure he killed his wife” was not the kind of information Gregor Demarkian allowed to influence his life.
The sausages at Ararat were round spiced patties from Jimmy Dean, his favorite. He cut one in quarters and speared a piece.
“I remember the case now,” he said. “There was a whole lot of nonsense about an antique dagger.”
“It wasn’t nonsense, Gregor. It seemed like the only explanation at the time. It was a dagger that her grandfather had brought back from some Pacific island he’d gone to in the early twenties. I remember seeing it once when I was about eight years old. I went there for a birthday party for Jacqueline’s sister Juliana.”
Gregor was surprised. “You went there? You mean you knew the woman who was murdered?”
“Not exactly.” Bennis shook her head. “Jacqueline Isherwood was a lot older than I was—my sister Myra’s age, in fact. I think Jacqueline and Myra went all through boarding school and college together. I only really knew Juliana, and by the time Jacqueline was murdered, Juliana was dead.”
“How?”
“Overdose of Seconal when she was twenty-six. Juliana was not a very stable person. We weren’t very good friends or anything. The Isherwood girls were all very serious about psychology. And you know how I feel about psychology.”
“Mmm.” Gregor speared another piece of sausage and thought about it. “Wasn’t there something impossible about that dagger? Wasn’t it that there wasn’t any blood on it or—”
Bennis sighed. “There wasn’t any blood on it, that was the thing. And there should have been, because the dagger was sort of ridged—it had millions of little cut-out patterns in it and it would have been impossible to clean all the blood out of it in such a short time, and Jacqueline was found less than an hour from the time she was killed—”
“By the husband?”
“Yes, Gregor, I think so. You can look in here.” Bennis tapped her stack of computer printouts. “That’s just about everything ever printed on the case. I subscribe to one of those networks, you know. Your computer plugs into it and then when you want some information you just ask and out comes all this. It’s very helpful. Like with the dagger. The police thought the dagger had to be the murder weapon because the wound was so odd. One of the true crime magazines had the police drawings of the cross-sections the autopsy people made. Apparently, if you looked at Jacqueline from above, what you saw was the round hole where the sharp point went through her chest and then a little curved depression to the right. Your right, as you looked at it. But if you looked at the cross-section, it got stranger.”
“I think it’s strange enough the way it is,” Gregor said. “A little curved depression? Where? In her skin? In her clothes?”
“In her skin,” Bennis said. “She wasn’t wearing many clothes, just a bra and a pair of panties, and it wasn’t much of a bra. That was in the papers at the time too. It was one of the reasons so many people thought Paul Hazzard must have killed her. Who does a woman walk around in front of in nothing but her bra and panties, especially in her living room, if not her husband?”
Gregor Demarkian’s wife, Elizabeth, had never in her life walked around in front of him in her bra and panties. He ate some hash browns and wondered why any woman would do that.
“Cross-sections,” he said finally.
Bennis grabbed the computer printout and pulled it toward her. “Here’s the cross-section. The doctor who did the autopsy testified at the trial that he didn’t usually do cross-sections of this kind, but the odd shape of the depression bothered him, and so he did. Take a look at it. You can’t tell from this angle, but the hole the sharp part made—the part that actually pierced Jacqueline Isherwood’s heart—was perfectly round.”
Gregor looked. For a tissue cross-section, the outline was strikingly clear. He wondered if the magazine that had published it had tidied up the edges to make a better illustration. What Bennis had looked like this:
Gregor pushed the printout back to her. “Do you have a picture of the weapon that probably wasn’t the weapon? Or doesn’t your computer service do photographs?”
“They come over the fax. Really, Gregor. You’re going to have to catch up with technology one of these days. It’s wonderful, the things we can do with microchips.”
“The only microchips I want to hear about are deep fried and made of potato,” Gregor said. “Do you have that picture?”
“Of course I do.”
Bennis rifled through the computer printout again, found a loose sheet of paper, and passed it over. On it, Gregor found a smudged black-and-white photograph of a very curious weapon, a round, needlelike shaft point attached to a sharp-edged curved handle, ornately carved. It looked like this:
Gregor studied it for a moment, then handed it back to Bennis. “The objections were well founded. There have to be a million ridges in the surface of that thing. It would have taken days to make a good job of cleaning it, and even then you probably couldn’t have gotten everything. Not if you’d plunged that thing into a woman’s chest. What’s it made of?”
“Iron,” Bennis said. “I think some of the decorative scrollwork may be copper or brass.”
“Well, iron or copper or brass, cleaned or not, right shape or otherwise, I wouldn’t have believed this was the weapon in a murder in twentieth-century America under any circumstances—except maybe if it had been found sticking out of the woman’s chest when the police arrived at the scene, and even then I’d have questions. People just don’t do things like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like use antique daggers to do their nearest and dearest in. What for?”
Bennis frowned. “Well, it was right at hand, wasn’t it? It was hanging there on the wall. Maybe there was an argument—”
“Try to picture it to yourself,” Gregor said patiently. “You’re having a royal bust-up with your father. The two of you are yelling and screaming at each other. You’re so furious, you want to kill him. So you walk to the wall, take this extremely odd-looking thing out of the brackets holding it up there, walk back to your father, who has been standing still for all this in the meantime—”
“Oh,” Bennis said. “Maybe it didn’t happen that way. Maybe it was premeditated. Paul Hazzard decided to kill his wife. So he waited until she was alone and not expecting anything, then when her back was turned he took the dagger down from the wall—”
“Why?” Gregor demanded.
“Why what?”
“Why take the dagger down from the wall,” Gregor insisted. “It’s a highly individualized weapon. Using it would be like announcing there was something out-of-the-way about this dea
th. Why not bring a Saturday night special, or a flic knife? Go down into central Philadelphia and pick something up on the street. Go to New York and pick something up so nobody could connect it to you. You could get it in any of a dozen ways, but you’d have the kind of thing a hopped-up street tough would bring with him if he broke into the house, and that would make the police much more likely to think it was a burglary instead of you.”
“I see what you mean,” Bennis said. “But Gregor, Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard wasn’t killed with a Saturday night special or a flic knife. She was killed with something that made this funny wound.”
“I know,” Gregor acknowledged. “That’s how we can be sure this was not a premeditated crime. It was probably entirely spur-of-the-moment. It just wasn’t committed with that silly dagger.”
“Then what was it committed with?”
Gregor shrugged. “Some perfectly common item the killer had on him, or her, at the time. Some ordinary instrument nobody would connect with homicide on a day-today basis, but that just happens to be lethal if used in the wrong way. That kind of thing.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, Bennis. This is your murder mystery. You’re the one who came barging in here to tell me that Hannah Krekorian was seen coming home in a cab with a man you’ve decided has murdered his wife.”
“Gregor—”
Gregor cut his omelet into strips with the edge of his fork, then picked up a piece of toast and bit into it.
“Hannah Krekorian is a grown woman,” he said. “If she wants to keep company with a man, it’s her own damned business and none of yours. Paul Hazzard was tried and acquitted of the murder of his wife over four years ago. It is the business of the judicial system of the state of Pennsylvania to determine his guilt or innocence, not yours. Persisting in accusing this man of a crime after he has been duly acquitted—and when you have absolutely no specialized knowledge of your own—is un-American and probably immoral in a larger sense. Stay out of this, Bennis. You are not Hannah Krekorian’s mother and she’s not yours.”
