by Jane Haddam
Gregor let himself into the air lock, shook the slush and rock salt off his shoes, and went on through to the reception area. Bob Cheswicki was standing at the reservations desk, talking to a tall brunette woman with a rhinestone snood holding her hair at the back of her neck. Bob Cheswicki, Gregor remembered, had recently been divorced. His wife of fifteen years had finally gotten sick and tired of being married to a cop. Gregor wondered how much time Bob spent chatting up the ladies. There were men who needed to be married. There were men who never would and never could be any good on their own. Gregor didn’t know if Bob Cheswicki was one of these or not. He could see that the young woman at the reception desk was not impressed. She probably saw streams of well-paid businessmen every day. Why should she be impressed with a cop?
Bob saw Gregor come in and straightened up a little. “Here’s Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Only three minutes late.”
“There was a lot of traffic,” Gregor said.
The young woman at the reception desk put herself out at least as far as giving Gregor a smile. Gregor Demarkian, after all, was Somebody in Philadelphia. He got his name in the papers and his face on the six o’clock news. There had even been an article or two about him in People magazine. The young woman grabbed a pair of enormously large, beribboned and tasseled menus out from under the surface of her desk, stepped into the foyer, looked straight into Demarkian’s eyes, and said, “Follow me, sir. It’s right this way.”
Then she turned her back and Bob Cheswicki winked. “Think I’d do any better if I told her I was Batman in my spare time?” he whispered into Gregor’s ear.
“No,” Gregor said.
“She just gave me all kinds of grief about bringing my briefcase to the table,” Bob said. “Apparently, it isn’t done at La Vie Bohème. I wish you’d brought a briefcase.”
“It looks like I should have brought one to take away what you brought to give me. What’s in that thing?”
“Everything,” Bob said solemnly.
The young woman had stopped halfway across La Vie Bohème’s main room. She was looking back and waiting patiently, a little frown on her face. There was a hanging fern just above her head whose tendrils fell so close to her hair, they made her seem as if she were wearing a hat. Gregor got a weird image of her starring in something called Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Had there really been a movie of that name, when he was younger?
“I suppose we’d better move,” Bob said.
“I was just riding in a cab,” Gregor said, “thinking about how awful everything’s gotten and how everybody’s attitude is all wrong.”
“We had better get moving. You’ve got Februaryitis. Never mind. A nice complicated murder will clear that right up.”
The young woman with the menus was beginning to look very angry. She was working hard not to, but Gregor knew the signs. He began to move toward her between the unidentified greens and spider plants.
Bob was probably right, Gregor thought. He probably did have Februaryitis, or whatever you wanted to call it. There was probably nothing wrong with the country that couldn’t be cured by a couple of weeks’ vacation in the Caribbean.
If that wasn’t it, then he must be getting old.
2
Whether or not bringing briefcases into La Vie Bohème was de rigueur, it was certainly implicitly discouraged. La Vie Bohème’s chairs were large and wide, but its tables were anything but. Gregor was reminded of the old-fashioned soda shoppes that had littered the neighborhoods of Philadelphia just before the Second World War. They’d had tables like this. Round. Small. Made of cast iron tortured into curlicues and flourishes and painted white. The tables at La Vie Bohème had glass tops. That was the only difference. The soda shoppe tables had only more contorted cast iron. Gregor remembered never having room to put his ice cream sundae down without worrying it would fall off. Now he wondered—as he wondered every time he came here—how he was going to cut his meat without upsetting it and everything else onto the floor. This was the kind of thing that bothered Bob Cheswicki not at all. He ordered a bottle of wine to split between the two of them—“I’m taking the day off. I wanted to enjoy myself while you were paying for it”—and began to pull papers out of his briefcase and spread them around the table. The glass top of the table was covered by a pearl-gray linen tablecloth. It slipped.
“Have the boeuf américaine,” he told Gregor while he got his presentation in order. “It’s a slab of prime rib two and a half inches thick. They’ve got the hottest horseradish this side of the Atlantic Ocean. What exactly do you know about Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard?”
The waiter arrived with their bottle of wine. It was a vintage Margaux that probably listed for over a hundred dollars a bottle. Bob really did intend to make him pay. He also did not intend to let the waiter pull any nonsense. The waiter went through the ritual of the wine tasting. Bob went through it muttering under his breath about evidence protocol. Gregor ordered the boeuf américaine. So did Bob. The waiter did not so much leave as escape.
“You’ve got to call their crap around here,” Bob said to the waiter’s retreating back. “They can be unbelievably pretentious.”
Gregor felt like pointing out that pretentiousness was at least part of what the people who came here were paying for. If all you wanted was really good beef, there were half a dozen steakhouses in the city who could give you that at one-fifth these prices. Gregor poured himself a glass of wine and tasted it. It was good, but not nearly as good as it would have needed to be for Gregor to consider it worth what it cost. He put his glass down on the table and said, “Back to Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. She was a friend or acquaintance or something of Bennis Hannaford’s sister Myra, by the way, but I suppose that’s natural. That’s the real Main Line.”
“Oh, she was real Main Line, all right,” Bob Cheswicki said. “Original Main Line, if you know what I mean. Railroad money. Lots and lots of it.”
“The town house she and her husband lived in was hers?”
Bob nodded. “Through her mother’s side of the family. It goes back to before the Declaration of Independence. That’s her mother’s side of the family all over, if you want to know. They’ve got lineage that sounds like it was made up by David O. Selznick. Four signers of the Declaration of Independence. Nine members of the Continental Congress and sixteen who attended the Constitutional Convention in one capacity or another. So much background, you’re surprised they didn’t strangle on it, except maybe they did. By the time Jackie’s mother married Jackie’s father, the mother’s side was stony-broke and not a hope in hell of recouping their losses. Not in that climate. Jackie’s mother was an only child.”
“And in those days young women of good family didn’t go into business,” Gregor said. “Yes, I see. But there was money on the Isherwood side?”
“Oh, yes, you bet. Lots and lots of it. It came to Jacqueline, of course. She was an only child too. Not very attractive though. At least I think she wasn’t.”
“You think?”
Bob Cheswicki shrugged. “By the time I saw her, she was in the morgue, and nobody is attractive in the morgue. I’ve seen pictures of her, of course, but you can never tell with pictures. People who take very bad ones can be very good-looking in real life.”
“Fair enough.”
“But I also figure she wasn’t very attractive because she married Paul Hazzard. I mean, this is serious Main Line money we’re talking about here. Sure, we get a case or two a decade of some debutante running off with her ski instructor, but it happens a lot less than the public wants to think. These women have their heads screwed on straight ninety-nine percent of the time. They don’t marry nobodies unless they have to. They know they can do better than that.”
Gregor had finished about half his glass of wine. He topped up and thought about what Bob had just told him.
“From what I understood,” Gregor said cautiously, “Paul Hazzard wasn’t a nobody. Of course, if what you mean is a nobody in Main Line social terms, I
understand, but—”
“No, no,” Bob insisted. “I mean a nobody. This is—thirty years ago at least we’re talking about here. When they were married, I mean. Paul Hazzard was a psychologist with a degree from Harvard and another one from Johns Hopkins. He had a very respectable practice and a decent income. He’d just written his first book. But he was still nobody. There was nothing at all to indicate that he’d turn out to be the psychological guru best-loved by just about everybody. I think, if you’d told one of the people who knew Paul Hazzard when he was first married to Jacqueline, if you’d told that person then that Paul Hazzard would eventually write a book that would sell two and a half million copies in hardcover—he’d have laughed in your face.”
Gregor thought he ought to get hold of this book. In his experience, books did not sell in the millions of copies like that without having something interesting about them.
“Maybe there was a way to tell,” Gregor told Bob. “Maybe Jacqueline Isherwood saw something in Paul Hazzard that everybody else missed. I don’t know what it’s like these days, but when I was young, women used to pride themselves on being able to do that.”
“Maybe,” Bob Cheswicki said. “But you have to go back to the background. It’s not the kind of chance one of these women would normally take, unless, as I said, she had to.”
“Meaning you think Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard was just plain enough not to be able to command the sort of husband she wanted in the marriage market she would ordinarily have been expected to compete in—I have to keep reminding myself we’re talking about thirty years ago here.”
“I know what you mean,” Bob said. “But it’s not much different in those circles even now, you know. It comes from having so much money, you never really have to work. What do you have left to compete for except each other?”
“Do the men compete for the women?”
“The men are spoiled brats.”
“Let’s get back to Jacqueline and Paul,” Gregor said. “They got married and then what?”
“And then nothing,” Bob told him. “They got married and they were happy, as far as anyone can tell. There were three children, all Paul Hazzard’s from a previous marriage. Caroline, James, and Alyssa. The children all went to the best private schools and then to the Ivy League. Paul wrote his book and started giving seminars on, I don’t know, that stuff.”
“Healing the shame within,” Gregor offered helpfully.
“That’s the kind of thing,” Bob said. “It’s all over the place now. I can never seem to make it stick in my head. It stuck in everybody else’s head though. Whoosh. And it wasn’t just Hazzard. It was dozens of people. Have you ever heard of the inner child?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Not exactly.”
Bob Cheswicki sighed. “I don’t know what it is either. I went into Waldenbooks the other day to buy myself the new Ed McBain, I went into the wrong section and there they were. Books about the inner child. Dozens of them. And those seminars. Did I tell you Paul Hazzard used to give seminars?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I’ve heard he used to give workshops, but I never was sure what they were workshops in.”
“Owning your anger,” Bob Cheswicki intoned solemnly. “Learning to nurture yourself. I’ve read the titles. And don’t ask me what they mean, because I don’t know. What I do know is what he used to charge. Three hundred dollars for a single all-day session—that’s three hundred dollars a head. Seven hundred fifty dollars for what was called a limited weekend, meaning Friday evening, all day Saturday, and Sunday breakfast. One thousand two hundred dollars for a full weekend, all three days, morning to night. One thousand five hundred dollars for the four-day, Thursday through Sunday, marathon special. Except he didn’t call it a special.”
Gregor was shocked. “Did anyone come? Who would pay prices like that?”
“Lots of people,” Bob replied. “A typical limited weekend at, say, the Sheraton, would draw about six hundred people—and at the height of his popularity he’d have limited weekends scheduled three times a month and booked up six months in advance. The marathons were much better attended. He’d hold those about once a month and he’d get about a thousand people at each of them, and they were booked up well in advance too.”
“It must have been a brutal schedule. He must have been exhausted.”
Bob Cheswicki shot him a cynical little smile. “He wasn’t exhausted at all. He didn’t do much more at any of these things but give a speech at Sunday breakfast or maybe open the conference on Thursday or Friday night. He lured what he called workshop leaders to do the actual sessions. He paid them minimum wage.”
“And they put up with that?”
“The assumption was that they were learning so much doing what they were doing, they should have paid him. And yes, they put up with it. Hell, they even believed it. I talked to some of them.”
The waiter returned, carrying salads and a pepper grinder the size of the baton the grand marshal carried in the Tournament of Roses parade. Gregor and Bob both waved pepper away and grabbed their salad forks.
“So,” Gregor said. “You keep talking about Paul Hazzard’s career in the past tense. Is it over?”
“Pretty much,” Bob admitted. “It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”
“Because he went on trial for killing his wife? Because people think he did kill his wife in spite of the fact that he was acquitted.”
“It doesn’t matter if people think he killed her or not,” Bob said. “In fact, it’s probably worse if they think he didn’t—from the point of view of the workshops, I mean. Look. What Paul Hazzard was selling—what all these guys are selling, really—is the theory that we make our own reality. That much I understand. We can be victimized, you know, and warped by our parents, but once we get into recovery and take control of our lives, well, then it’s a different story. If bad things happen to us, it’s because we secretly want them to happen to us—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gregor said sharply.
“I’m not being ridiculous,” Bob insisted. “I know this is all contradictory as hell, but nobody seems to care. They just go on and on like this. And think of it from the point of view of a young woman who is thinking of spending seven hundred fifty dollars for one of Hazzard’s workshops. If you were that young woman, would you really want to learn the secrets of life from a man whose wife was randomly murdered by a tramp? What kind of reality would you think Hazzard was making for himself?”
“But Bob, for God’s sake.”
“I know, I know. But trust me, Gregor, that’s the way people in this movement think about things. After the murder it was as if Paul Hazzard were jinxed. The people who thought he was guilty didn’t want to know him because nobody does want to know a murderer if they can help it, except maybe those strange women who want to marry one once he’s on death row; don’t let me get into that. The people who thought he hadn’t done it didn’t want to know him either though, because—well, I just explained that. Nobody signed up for his workshops. Nobody sent in for his inspirational audiotapes. The sales of his books went way down and one of them even went out of print. I’d guess his income went from about a million five a year to less than fifty thousand.”
Gregor gnawed a piece of radicchio, winced at its bitter flavor, and took a sip of wine. “That shouldn’t matter, should it? You said Jacqueline Isherwood was a rich woman. Her money wasn’t entailed or tied up in any way?”
“No, it wasn’t entailed,” Bob Cheswicki said, “but it turned out not to have been willed to Paul Hazzard either. There was money left in trust for the upkeep of the Philadelphia house. They can all live there forever for nothing, basically. The trust pays for the repairs, the light bill, the electricity, everything. There was money left in trust for the three children too, but to be paid out only on Paul Hazzard’s death. There was nothing at all left to him.”
“Not even an income?”
/> “Not even an income.”
“But why? I thought you said they got on well together.”
“I didn’t actually say they got on well together,” Bob said. “I said the marriage was mostly uneventful. As to Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s will, I think the intention was twofold. With the children—they’re not such children now, by the way; they’re in their forties—anyway, Paul Hazzard had put quite a bit of money into annuity trusts for the children while business was good. None of them was rich in the classic manner, and all of them had to do at least some work to live the way they liked to live, but they were mostly all right even without a share of Jacqueline’s money. And as for Paul Hazzard, well. There was a little problem with Paul Hazzard in the last year before Jacqueline died. Seems he was keeping a woman.”
The waiter came back to check on their progress with their salads. It was clear from his face that they hadn’t progressed enough. Gregor and Bob both ignored him.
“I didn’t think,” Gregor said, “that women were kept these days. I thought it was out of fashion.”
“Her name is Candida DeWitt—or that’s what she calls herself—and she most definitely likes to be kept. Oh, she owns her own house out in Bryn Mawr and a stack of securities in her own name and all the rest of it, but idiosyncratic as the arrangements might be, what she definitely is is kept. Expensively kept. And she comes right out and admits to it.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. “So Jacqueline’s will was a form of revenge.”
“I don’t know,” Bob admitted. “That’s what the prosecution alleged at the trial, of course, to present motive. Paul Hazzard thought Jacqueline was going to leave him because of Candida DeWitt. Paul Hazzard needed Jacqueline’s money. Paul Hazzard killed Jacqueline to get Jacqueline’s money. But the truth of the matter is, we didn’t really have a shred of evidence that Jacqueline knew about Candida DeWitt. The only thing we were absolutely sure of was that that will was a surprise to Paul Hazzard.”
