by Jane Haddam
It was too bad, really. On a metalevel, so to speak, Alyssa rather liked Candida DeWitt.
Candida moved forward again, getting closer. Women from the committee were coming out of The Silver Unicorn in little clubby clumps. They all seemed to be laughing in that oddly harsh way women do when they reach middle age and go to too many parties. Candida came up to Alyssa’s side and said, “Alyssa? I don’t know if you remember me.”
“Call me Ali,” Alyssa said in a pleasant voice, very much lower than the one Candida had used. “Or call me Mrs. Roderick.”
Candida’s eyes lit with understanding. “I see. They don’t know who you are. You seem to have done better with that than I have.”
“Done better with that?”
“You don’t think it’s been any different for me, do you?” Candida asked. “I try to put my lack of social engagements these days down to the fact that I’m getting older, but I know it’s not that. None of the kind of men I’m attracted to is the least bit interested in having a mistress who might very well have killed her last lover’s wife.”
“But you couldn’t have killed her,” Alyssa said. “That was proved absolutely at the time.”
“So what? People just cough politely and say, well, you never really know. And they’re suspicious enough to believe it. Will you walk with me a little while? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“Why me? Why not Caroline or James? Why not Paul?”
“I don’t know why you,” Candida said, “but you’re the one I seem to talk to. And I will admit I think you have the most sense. If we go west, we’ll be heading in the right direction for you to find a cab when the time comes. All right?”
It was true. When Candida DeWitt wanted to talk to one of the family, Alyssa was the one she talked to. When the family wanted to talk to Candida, they sent Nick. Cars had begun to pull up at the curb. Nobody offered to give Alyssa a ride. They knew she always refused.
Alyssa and Candida began to walk west, not hurrying, not strolling exactly. It was far too cold to stroll.
“Did you tell the family about my book?” Candida asked after a while. “I suppose they might have known under any circumstances. It was announced in a few places.”
“I told them,” Alyssa said. “They weren’t very happy.”
“I wouldn’t have expected them to be.” Candida shrugged. “Really, there’s no way to make everybody happy in situations like these. You just have to go ahead and do what’s right for you. That’s all I’m doing, you know.”
“I know. It still isn’t very pleasant for the rest of us.”
“Yes,” Candida said. “The question in my mind is, is it something more than just not very pleasant for one of you?”
“What is it exactly that you mean? They’re upset, Candida. They’re very upset. So am I.”
“It’s odd, you know. With all the nonsense Paul spouts about thinking with your heart and not your head, he’s a very controlled man. All of you are very controlled people, really. Even Caroline.”
“If you expect to get an argument out of me over that, Candida, you’re very wrong. It’s always been my contention that Caroline puts it on more than she really feels it.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. I just meant she isn’t an abandoned, spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment sort of person. She thinks things through.”
“I suppose she does.” Alyssa didn’t suppose anything of the kind. To her, Caroline was not the sort of person who “thought things through.” Caroline was not the sort of person who thought. Caroline was the sort of person who planned. There was a difference.
Candida was biting her lip. “What I’m trying to say,” she said carefully, “is that I don’t think, if I knew one of you had done something, oh, unkind, say, or threatening, I don’t think I’d put it down to a moment of impulsive spite. I think I’d have to assume it was very deliberate.”
It was worse than cold. It was freezing. Alyssa shoved her hands into her coat pockets. She had her best cashmere-lined gloves on, but they didn’t help.
“Is there a point to all this?” she asked Candida. “Has somebody done something? Has Caroline taken to calling you up in the middle of the night and threatening to do you in?”
“Nobody’s called me up in the middle of the night.” Candida seemed to be contemplating some kind of revelation and then deciding not to reveal. Alyssa was intrigued. Candida went on. “I want you to look at something. It arrived in my mailbox just this morning.”
Candida snapped open the button clasp on her bag and brought out a clean white envelope. Alyssa knew from its size and shape and the quality of the paper that it was an engraved, or at least thermoplated, invitation. She took it out of Candida’s hand and opened it up.
“ ‘The pleasure of your company is requested at a reception,’ ” she read. “It’s one of those all-purpose invite cards the jewelry stores make up. For a party for this Friday night. So what? Who’s Hannah Krekorian?”
“Hannah Krekorian,” Candida said judiciously, “is the woman your father took to dinner last Friday night.”
“Is she really?” Now Alyssa was more than intrigued. “She has to be reasonably loaded. I wonder why I’ve never heard of her.”
“I don’t know if she’s loaded or not,” Candida said. “What I want to know is how this invitation ended up in my mailbox.”
“She invited you to a party.”
“I don’t see why. I’ve never met her. And even if she wanted to meet me, which she might, given one thing and another, she wouldn’t invite me to this party. She’s already invited Paul. In fact, unless I’ve gotten very bad at reading this kind of thing at my age, which I don’t think I have, she’s in the way of giving this party in honor of Paul. Not that she would tell Paul that, of course.”
Alyssa handed the invitation back. “I can never get over how good your sources of information are. They’re much better than James’s, and he says he’s channeling one of the oldest souls in the universe.”
“They’re good because they have to be good.” Candida dropped the invitation back into her bag and snapped the bag shut again. “There are only two places this invitation could have come from, you know. One of them is Paul’s study, or wherever he put this invitation when he got it. It was handed to him, I expect. That’s why the envelope was blank when whoever sent it to me wanted to write my address on it.”
“I see,” Alyssa said. “You think one of us sent this to you. Me or James, maybe, but not really. You’re much more likely to suspect Caroline or Paul. I think Paul has more sense than this, you know.”
“Maybe he does.”
“I don’t see why any one of us would want to bother, just to embarrass you. We’d embarrass Paul as well. We’ve all had more than enough embarrassment.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“Where was the other place it could have come from?”
Candida looked at her oddly. “Hannah Krekorian, of course.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know Hannah Krekorian.
“I don’t. It’s who else this Hannah Krekorian knows that makes me think there’s a chance, an outside chance, that this invitation might have come from her. Do you know who Gregor Demarkian is?”
“Of course.”
“Hannah Krekorian is a friend, or at least an acquaintance, of Gregor Demarkian’s.”
“So?” Alyssa was blank. What could the woman be getting at? “I don’t see why this woman’s friends are an issue. And you just said, just a second ago, that she’d never invite you to this party.”
“Well, that’s true enough, as long as you assume that the purpose of this party is to put something on for Paul. But what if the purpose of this party is altogether different? What if it’s to put something on for Gregor Demarkian?”
“But why?” Alyssa insisted. “Why would Demarkian want to cause embarrassment to you and Paul? Do you know Demarkian?”
“Of course I don’t know Demarkian,” Cand
ida said in exasperation. “But Gregor Demarkian is a detective, Alyssa. And the Philadelphia Police Department is not happy leaving the murder of your stepmother as an officially unsolved crime. If you would just put two and two together—”
“But why?” Alyssa demanded again. “Why now?”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“No,” Candida agreed. “It doesn’t make sense. So that brings us back to square one. Somebody at the house sent me this invitation, hoping I’d use it and wind up with egg on my face. It wasn’t a very good idea.”
“It obviously didn’t work.”
“No, it didn’t work. It did get me angry. That’s not a very good idea either, Alyssa. I’m not a very pleasant person when I’m angry.”
“Well, go be unpleasant to somebody else,” Alyssa said, tugging her collar up against the wind. “I didn’t send you that thing. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t want the trouble it would get me into. Go pick on Caroline or Paul.”
“I’m not going to pick on anybody,” Candida said.
They had reached an intersection, how many blocks west of The Silver Unicorn, Alyssa didn’t know. Candida stepped to the edge of the curb and shot her hand into the air. A taxi appeared out of nowhere and pulled up beside her.
“I’ll let you take this one,” she told Alyssa. “I want to walk awhile longer. You should think of the things we were talking about.”
“What things?”
“What we were talking about,” Candida insisted. She had the cab’s door open. She was waiting politely.
Alyssa got in the cab and recited her address mechanically. Now, what was this all about?
But the driver pulled out into traffic, and Alyssa didn’t have a chance to ask. She looked back at the sidewalk. Candida had disappeared. She thought of the invitation. She decided it made no sense at all.
Even Caroline, who hated Candida with even more venom than she hated most women, wouldn’t do anything like this.
If Caroline wanted to make Paul look like a world-class horse’s ass, she’d find a way to do it in worldwide syndication.
Six
1
THE ENGRAVED INVITATIONS THAT Hannah Krekorian had sent out to everyone she knew on Cavanaugh Street had not been made up especially for this party. They were stock invitations with blanks on them for date and time. They could be ordered from Tiffany’s by the hundred. All the older women in the neighborhood had them. There had been a craze for them about a year before Gregor Demarkian moved back to Philadelphia. They went out of local fashion almost as quickly as they had come in. Almost nobody used them anymore. That Hannah did struck most of her friends as very odd. It also struck Gregor Demarkian as useful. The nice thing about stock invitations that hadn’t been especially made up was that there were always more of them hanging around somewhere. All Gregor had to do to get one for Bob Cheswicki was to call Hannah and ask her if she minded if he brought a friend. Of course, Hannah thought he was talking about a woman. Gregor could hear the alarm in her voice. Everybody on Cavanaugh Street expected him to come to his senses and marry Bennis Hannaford one of these days—in spite of the fact that both Gregor and Bennis thought any such move would mean they were equally certifiable. Hannah couldn’t help herself. No matter how much she might want to discourage Gregor from veering from the path that local gossip had already laid down for him, she couldn’t bear the idea of not seeing who he would bring. Gregor asked for the extra invitation when he ran into Hannah in Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store on Wednesday morning. Hannah brought it over to Gregor’s apartment herself on Wednesday afternoon. Gregor didn’t tell her what he was up to. He knew perfectly well she wouldn’t want a police officer who was still vitally interested in the case against Paul Hazzard at the party she was giving for Paul Hazzard. Even if she said the party wasn’t for Paul Hazzard.
“It’ll be all right,” Gregor told Bob when Bob arrived at his apartment at six-thirty on Friday, “because she doesn’t have the faintest idea who you are. Does Paul Hazzard?”
“He might know I’m an assistant commissioner of police,” Bob said, “but he wouldn’t know I’ve got any interest in the case. Why should he?”
“He probably won’t even know you’re an assistant commissioner of police.” Bennis came into the living room from Gregor’s kitchen, nibbling on a dolma she had found in his refrigerator. Bennis was wearing what Gregor thought of as “one of her Bennis outfits.” It was a long, straight dark dress with a plain neckline and close-fitting sleeves, sewn all over with tiny black and silver beads. Bennis looked wonderful, very twenties-glamorous and exotic, but Gregor had the uneasy feeling that she was wearing more on her back than it had taken Donna Moradanyan to buy her last car. Bennis finished the dolma and licked her fingers.
“There really isn’t any reason he should recognize an assistant commissioner of police,” she said reasonably. “It’s not like Mr. Cheswicki is the commissioner himself. The commissioner is always on television and being interviewed in the newspaper and whatever. Assistant commissioners are… anonymous.”
“It’s still a good thing we’re not lying about his identity,” Gregor said. “Just in case.”
Bob looked bemused. “I wish you were clearer about what it is you wanted me to do at this thing. I’m sure it will be a nice party and the food will be wonderful, but—”
“Aren’t you happy to finally get a chance to meet Paul Hazzard in person? After all these years of hearing about him?”
“Well, I am,” Bob said. “It will be interesting.”
“Maybe it will also be helpful,” Gregor told him. “I don’t know. I suppose I’m not sure what I’m looking for either. I just want someone else there whose impressions I can trust. Just in case.”
“That’s twice you’ve said that.” Bennis took her pack of cigarettes out of her evening bag. “Just in case of what?”
“Just in case Paul Hazzard really is the murderer,” Bob said cheerfully. “Gregor’s been going crazy with the material I gave him last week. I think he’s almost as interested in it as he would have been in a fresh case. We’ve started a pool down at the department about how long it’s going to take him to come up with a theory.”
“I’ve got six theories already. Don’t you think it’s time to go?”
Bennis shot a look at Gregor’s little table clock and sighed. “We’re going to be early as hell, but we always are, and if we don’t go, you’ll make me crazy pacing around worrying we’ll be late. Do you know what it is you’re trying to do here tonight?”
“I think so,” Gregor said.
“He usually does,” Bob Cheswicki pointed out.
Bennis had a big cashmere shawl to wear outside instead of a coat. She picked it up off the back of Gregor’s couch and wrapped it around herself.
“If we’re going to go, we ought to go,” she said. “Maybe Paul Hazzard will be there too, getting ready to help Hannah greet the guests. Then you two can have him all to yourselves for fifteen minutes.”
2
Gregor Demarkian was almost always the first person to arrive at any party. He was so distressed at the idea of being even a minute or two late, he sometimes arrived at his dental appointments a good fifteen or twenty minutes early. Tonight, however, he wasn’t going to be close to being the first on the scene—and it bothered him to realize he should have anticipated that. Old George Tekemanian was waiting impatiently for them in the hall when they came downstairs. They had agreed to walk old George over, and old George had been ready to go by quarter after six. So, apparently, had the rest of Cavanaugh Street. Gregor held the door open for old George while Bennis and Bob Cheswicki went down the steps to the street. When Gregor emerged into the night air, he suddenly saw what looked like a slow start to a Mardi Gras. Everybody seemed to be out. Everybody seemed to be dressed up. The neighborhood looked as wild as it did when Donna Moradanyan was really in the mood to decorate. Gregor saw Sheila Kashinian—in four-inch heels, too much
makeup, and her best blond mink—hanging off Howard Kashinian’s arm. He saw Mary Ohanian, and Linda Melajian’s mother, Sarah, gotten up in “party dresses” of the kind that used to be popular for “semiformals” in the early sixties. He saw Linda Melajian herself, in silver studs and leather, looking as if she were about to be married to a punk rock guru. The only people on the street who looked the least bit normal, or even sane, were Lida Arkmanian and Bennis Hannaford’s brother, Christopher. Lida was wearing a dress. Christopher was wearing a suit that didn’t look like it belonged to him. They were standing at the bottom of the steps to Lida’s town house, talking.
“Everybody wants to see what Hannah’s gentleman caller is like,” Bennis said. “I should have known.”
“We won’t be the first ones there,” Bob Cheswicki agreed.
“If Paul Hazzard did murder his wife,” Bennis said, “this will be practically as good as an execution. Can you just imagine it, he shows up a fashionable twenty minutes after the hour, and forty people leap out at him and yell ‘surprise!’ ”
“Nobody’s going to yell ‘surprise,’ ” Gregor said.
“They ought to.”
Gregor knew what Bennis meant. He turned toward Hannah’s apartment and began to march briskly down the street. Old George kept pace in that springy, self-satisfied way that meant he was thoroughly enjoying himself. It wasn’t a very long walk. Gregor passed the Ararat Restaurant, which seemed to be closed. That made sense to an extent. Certainly none of their usual customers from the neighborhood was going to show up tonight. It didn’t make sense in another way, because a lot of the business the Ararat did these days was with tourists. The Inquirer and the Star had both given the place wonderful reviews, and now a steady stream of people trekked out here from the other neighborhoods of Philadelphia and the towns of the Main Line to eat yoprak sarma and lahmajoon. With any luck, these people called before they came. Gregor passed Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store and saw that that was closed too. One of Donna Moradanyan’s red-and-silver hearts dangled in the larger of the two front windows. Under it was a huge plate of mamoul cookies made in heart shapes and covered with naatiffe frosting and the sign GIVE YOUR SWEETHEART A TRADITIONAL ARMENIAN VALENTINE’S DAY!
