by Jane Haddam
When the doorbell rang, Paul Hazzard had been holding forth to a little circle of women that included one of the old ladies (Mrs. Vartenian, looking fierce) and all six of the Devorkian girls. The Devorkian girls looked as awestruck as if they’d wandered into Madonna’s dressing room. Hannah was hovering around at the edges. She seemed to have a compulsion to touch him, just a little, so gently it might never be detected. A light whispering rub of sleeve on sleeve. The side of a hand along the hem of a jacket. Paul Hazzard didn’t notice. His face was lit up, as if a powerful light had gone on inside him. He was in his element. He had an audience.
“What you have to understand,” he was telling the women clustered around him, “is that there are no hierarchies of pain. That’s the worst of the sickness of the society around us. That’s how that society keeps us in line. Here we are, so damaged we can barely function, and what do we hear? We hear that we shouldn’t be, because somewhere in the next street or next town or next county or wherever, somebody has it worse than we do. And if we insist on naming our pain and owning our anger, we get hit with the big guns. Hiroshima. Dachau. How can we possibly say we’ve been damaged when people have been through things like that and lived perfectly good lives?”
“But that’s true, isn’t it?” Linda Melajian said. “My great-grandmother came from Armenia, and you should have heard the stories she used to tell about what happened to her. She had a baby and a husband, and they were both killed when the Turks came through during the massacres. She had pictures of them she used to keep in her room. But then she came here and married my great-grandfather and had other children, and she was fine.”
“She was in denial,” Paul Hazzard said promptly.
“I came from Armenia,” Mrs. Vartenian said ominously. “In 1916.”
“What you have to understand,” Paul Hazzard said, “is that the human being is a delicate instrument. A very delicate instrument. Especially in childhood. Something like Hiroshima, or the concentration camps, or these massacres you’re talking about—major traumas like these can affect the lives of the people who suffer from them forever. I’m not denying the power of experiences of that kind. What I’m trying to explain is that experiences that are much less dramatic may in reality be much more damaging. After all, the Nazis were the enemy. Nobody expected them to be anything else. Not even the children. A child is much more deeply and permanently hurt when someone close to him abuses him—when he’s the victim of parental neglect, for instance.”
“I’ve heard of things like that,” Traci Devorkian said. “Junkies, usually. They get high as kites and don’t clean the house or feed their kids for weeks at a time and the cops come in and the kids’ beds are wet with pee and I don’t know what and then it gets in the papers and the pictures are really gross.”
“Pee?” Kelli Devorkian said. “Why would the kids pee in bed?”
“They don’t have any control of their bladders,” Debbi Devorkian said. “They haven’t been brought up right.”
“If our parents didn’t pay attention to us for a couple of weeks, I wouldn’t pee in bed,” Kelli Devorkian declared. “I’d go out with Bobby Astinian and neck till my brains fell out.”
“Shut up,” Staci Devorkian said. “Mother is right over there. You’ll get us all grounded.”
“I was thinking of something a little more subtle than gross neglect,” Paul Hazzard went on. “I was thinking of the kind of mother who always makes her children wait a minute before she gets them the milk they ask for, or always has one more thing to do—one more thing that takes only a minute—before she can look at the pictures they’ve painted or hear the story they want to tell.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Linda Melajian said. “That sort of thing happens all the time. That’s just life.”
“Not really,” Paul Hazzard contradicted her. “It’s a kind of control. It’s one of the ways parents ensure that their children stay within the preferred family pattern—within the preferred family sickness, if you will. Middle-class children today are really at much higher risk for permanent psychological damage than children were in earlier eras, or even than poor children are today. There’s no excuse, you see.”
“No.” Linda Melajian shook her head. “I don’t see.”
“A child in a farm family in the eighteenth century with a critical and withholding mother could tell herself that her mother’s behavior didn’t mean her mother didn’t love her. It was only that there was so much work to do and so little food and worries always about money. A poor child of today can tell herself the same kinds of things. But a middle-class child… Paul Hazzard shrugged. “There’s no way to escape reality for the middle-class child. The middle-class child knows her mother doesn’t love her.”
“I don’t know,” Marci Devorkian said firmly. “There seems something off about all this to me.”
Candi Devorkian said, “Shhh!”
“I am ninety-seven years old,” Mrs. Vartenian said, “and I have lived long enough to say you are speaking nonsense.”
“Oh,” Candi Devorkian murmured. “Oh, dear.”
It was impossible to tell if Paul Hazzard would have taken on Mrs. Vartenian. The general consensus later was that Paul Hazzard was probably smarter than that. A man didn’t get very far as a psychologist—no matter how appealing his theories—without knowing something about people. Anyone on Cavanaugh Street could have told him that it was inadvisable to take on the old ladies unless you were willing to fight an emotional thermonuclear war. What interested Gregor was that Paul took this opportunity, and only this one, to stop the conversation. He had sailed right through Candida DeWitt’s arrival, not even pausing in his pronouncements to register Candida’s presence. His voice had sailed across the now-otherwise-quiet living room in the wake of Candida’s self-announcement. His arguments had been as reasonably stated and complete as if he’d been giving them on the podium of the main convention ballroom in the Hilton Hotel. Candida DeWitt might as well not have existed until he decided she did.
Candi Devorkian’s distressed “Oh, dear” still seemed to be floating through the air. Paul Hazzard turned away from her and her sisters and faced Candida with a noncommittal smile on his face. He looked as if he were addressing a saleslady. Candida, Gregor thought, had been subjected to this act before. She looked amused.
“Well,” Paul said. “Candida. I didn’t know you and Hannah were friends.”
“We’ve never met before tonight,” Candida said.
Paul Hazzard hesitated, frowning. This was not what he had expected. He didn’t understand what he was supposed to do next.
“Well,” he said again. “I’m at a loss. You have an invitation.”
“Of course.”
“Where did you get it?”
“It came to my mailbox in Bryn Mawr,” Candida told him. “The way you would expect I’d get it.”
Paul turned uncertainly to Hannah, who was standing just a little behind him. Gregor had never seen her face look so mutinous, so angry and upset. The contrast between Hannah and Candida DeWitt made Gregor uneasy. Candida was such a physically lovely woman. Hannah was so… solid.
Paul turned toward Hannah and raised an eyebrow. “Did you—?”
Hannah shook her head. “If Miss DeWitt is a friend of yours—”
“Mrs.,” Candida said.
“If she is a friend of yours,” Hannah went on doggedly, “then I am happy to have her here, Paul, but I did not send the invitation. I couldn’t have. I didn’t know who she was.”
“I’m not a friend of Paul’s,” Candida said. “At least, I’m not anymore. He barely speaks to me.”
“That’s not true,” Paul said quickly.
“I find it all very odd, really,” Candida went on pleasantly. “Under the circumstances, it should be me who isn’t speaking to him. After all, I’m not the one who tried to convince the police that he was the perpetrator in a murder they thought I’d committed.”
“I don’t get it,” Tra
ci Devorkian said loudly.
It was about time somebody intervened. Gregor kept expecting Bennis to leap up and do something. She wasn’t moving. He got up instead. He was so bad at these things. It might really be much better if he went to the bathroom and forgot the whole thing.
At his side, Bob Cheswicki said, “Well, now I know why she’s worth all the dough she gets. Holy cow.”
Gregor wondered where Bob Cheswicki had come from. A moment before, he had been near the group around Paul Hazzard. It was as if he’d melted away from the scene of the action as soon as there was a sign of trouble. Some policeman he was turning out to be. That’s what became of spending all your time behind a desk.
Gregor eased himself into the little empty space that had arranged itself around Paul Hazzard and Candida DeWitt like a magnetic field.
“Excuse me,” he said. “My name is Gregor Demarkian.”
Candida turned to him with interest. “Mr. Demarkian. I’m very glad you’re here. I was hoping you would be here.”
“Because you wanted to meet me?”
“Of course not. Because I knew your being here would make Paul very upset. Ask Paul. As far as he’s concerned, everything I’ve done for the past four years or so has been just to make him upset.”
“I don’t know why you’ve done what you’ve done.” Paul spoke angrily. “I don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s pathological.”
“A psychiatric term for everything,” Candida said brightly. “He did try to get me arrested for the murder of his wife, you know. He told the police all sorts of things that weren’t quite true. Fortunately, I had an ironclad alibi.”
“All I did was answer questions,” Paul told her. “All I did was exactly what my lawyer advised me to do, and even you said Fred Scherrer was a man worth listening to.”
“Oh, he is. He’s definitely a man worth listening to. I’ve been listening to him all this afternoon. On the subject of libel law.”
“Candida, for God’s sake.”
Little ripples were going through the crowd now. Even Gregor, who was not sensitive to that sort of thing, could feel them. People had begun to speculate.
“What did she mean, the murder of his wife?”
“His wife was murdered?”
“Who is this person?”
Somebody in the crowd would know who “this person” was. That was inevitable. Of course, Bennis did know. Gregor wasn’t worried about that. He could count on Bennis to be sensible in a situation like this. The trouble would come when some fool in the crowd would make the connection between Paul Hazzard and a newspaper story he had read once or a clip he had seen on the eleven o’clock news. Then he would blurt it all out, and then where would they be? Gregor stepped a little closer to the space between Candida and Paul. It made him think of the fifty-seventh parallel.
“Maybe I should get Mrs. DeWitt a drink,” he said. “We have some excellent rum punch.”
“Mrs. DeWitt is not going to stay,” Paul Hazzard said.
“Of course I’m going to stay,” Candida contradicted him. “And I’d love some rum punch. It’s exactly the sort of thing I have a craving for.”
“You have a craving for sensationalism,” Paul Hazzard said. “It’s a form of personality disorder.”
The tension in the room was so palpable now, it was like an ether made of fine wires. Hook it up to a battery and they would all be electrocuted.
“Rum punch,” Gregor repeated. “Come with me. It’s right over here.”
There were more ripples in the crowd, more murmurs, a cough or two. Then Hannah Krekorian suddenly seemed to come to life. She had been standing frozen through almost all of Candida DeWitt’s conversation with Paul. She had been so quiet, Gregor had forgotten she was there. Now she said “Oh!” in a loud, anguished voice that was so raw, it sounded like the wail of a wounded cat. Her thick, pasty face got red and her neck and chest, visible around the scooped-out neckline of her party dress, turned maroon. Never in his life had Gregor been made so aware of the fact that Hannah was a plain woman. Pain made her ugly.
“Oh,” Hannah said again. She was half in tears and half in tantrum. She looked from Candida to Paul to Candida to Paul to Candida to Paul. Then she veered around in a great clumsy arc and ran for the duplex’s spiral stairs. Going up to the second floor, Hannah was exposed to the shocked stares of everyone who was important to her on Cavanaugh Street. Even little Tommy Moradanyan was awake and staring. Hannah was clumsy and large and made a lot of noise. The stairs were delicate and shook under her weight.
“No, no,” Lida Arkmanian said from the other side of the room. “This is not right.”
“This is outrageous,” Paul Hazzard announced. He wheeled on Candida DeWitt. “You were always a manipulator, Candida, but this is the first time I’ve ever noticed that you were a bitch.”
Paul Hazzard gave Gregor a furious look that could have meant everything or nothing, and went shooting up the stairs after Hannah.
He looked ready to kill somebody.
2
Now the emergency support mechanisms went into operation. Now the women of Cavanaugh Street got moving. Gregor didn’t know what motivated them. If he had been in their places, he would have done something before Hannah had gone running up those stairs and Paul had gone running up after her. Either that, or he would have followed them both. Actually, somebody did that. Mary Ohanian went sprinting up the spiral stairs and came back less than a minute later.
“She’s locked herself in the bathroom up there and he’s talking to her through the door,” Mary Ohanian said, out of breath. “I don’t think she’s paying much attention to what he’s trying to tell her.”
“I wouldn’t listen to a thing he tried to tell me,” Sheila Kashinian announced. “Can you imagine?”
Gregor got hold of the sleeve of Candida DeWitt’s dress and began to pull her out of the limelight. “If I were you,” he told her, “I’d either retreat into obscurity or leave entirely. Leaving would be the better course.”
“I suppose it would.” Candida allowed herself to be led, but she was looking back at the spiral stairs. “I suppose I should stay long enough to talk to her. To tell her it wasn’t Paul’s fault. This wasn’t something he set up to hurt her.”
“Did he set it up at all?”
“Of course not. I just thought—”
Gregor had pulled them back toward the buffet table and the window. The space around the table was empty now except for Tommy Moradanyan, who had found the shrimp unattended and taken advantage of the situation.
Gregor poured a glass of punch and handed it to Candida DeWitt. He poured a glass of raki for himself.
“She’d be better off without him,” Candida DeWitt said suddenly. “You do realize that, don’t you? Paul Hazzard is very bad news. In spite of the fact that he didn’t kill his wife.”
“Do you know that for a fact? That he didn’t kill his wife?”
“Oh, yes. I know it almost as well as if I’d been standing in the room when Jacqueline was stabbed. He ruined Jacqueline, you know. He—twisted her.”
“Did you know Jacqueline before you met Paul?”
“The proper question would be whether I knew Jacqueline before she met Paul. I didn’t. I did know her before he began to… work on her. That’s what Paul does when he gets tired of women. He works on them.”
“Did he work on you?”
“He tried. That was what was wrong with the way the police were doing their thinking. They believed—they insisted on believing—that Paul wanted Jacqueline dead so that he could be with me. But Paul didn’t want to be with me. He had broken our—relationship—off nearly six weeks before Jacqueline died. It was the first time in my life I hadn’t been the one to end it.”
“Maybe he broke it off only because his wife told him he had to,” Gregor suggested. “Maybe that was his motive. He broke it off under duress. He didn’t want to. He rid himself of the duress. Then he could resume the relationsh
ip.”
“If Paul was interested in resuming the relationship, he wouldn’t have tried to hand me over to the police on a silver platter,” Candida told him.
“True.”
“Paul would never have wanted to be rid of Jacqueline. Whatever for? He was tired of her, yes, but she was useful to him and he had her completely cowed. She was really very stupid about men. Paul had affairs all the time and she never noticed. As long as Paul showed up for the family things her people gave and took her to the Assemblies every year and never got photographed with anyone else who belonged on the society pages, Jacqueline thought everything was all right.”
“I’ve heard her described in much less flattering terms,” Gregor said. “She seems to have—upset other people a good deal more than she seems to have upset you.”
Candida shrugged. Her glass was empty. She handed it to Gregor and waited patiently while he refilled it. She was an old-fashioned woman in her way. She let men do things for her. It probably worked.
“Jacqueline,” she told Gregor, “was an extremely easy woman to say things against. She was essentially stupid. She was arrogant in the way only really upper-class people can be arrogant. She was mostly oblivious of other people. Except that she wasn’t oblivious of Paul. Which was her mistake. It’s always a mistake not to be oblivious of Paul.”
Activity had been going on in the room around them, feverish activity that Candida DeWitt had ignored and Gregor had failed to notice. Now he saw Helen Tevorakian coming down the spiral stairs, looking worried. He stopped talking to Candida DeWitt to listen.
Lida Arkmanian and Sheila Kashinian were waiting for Helen at the bottom of the stairs. Helen was more or less of Lida and Hannah’s generation, and Sheila had been adopted into it by popular acclamation. Helen reached the foyer and shook her head. She was wearing a fussy dress pasted over with pink sequins. It made her look fatter than she really was.
“I don’t know what’s going on up there now. They’re absolutely quiet, except that Hannah is crying.”
