by Jane Haddam
“I don’t think that’s fair,” Russell Donahue put in faintly. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with a hug. I guess. I mean, just because this guy wasn’t a, um—”
Russell trailed off. Gregor contemplated him seriously. Donahue was very young and a little more hip than police officers tended to be. He seemed unhappy with what he was doing and as if he wanted to be somewhere else. As Gregor watched, he took an aimless tour around the room and then returned to them, looking glum.
“I guess there isn’t anything we can do here,” he said. “We should get downstairs and talk to the people.”
Gregor had never been in Hannah’s bedroom before tonight. He had never had any reason to be. It was a pleasant, faintly expensive place decorated in gray and pink with a touch of white here and there. Looking through the bathroom door, he could see that the mirror in there was tinted pink too. There was a reason for that. Bennis had explained it to him once. Mirrors tinted pink made your skin look younger.
Gregor felt distinctly disoriented. He had known Hannah Krekorian all his life—or at least he’d thought he’d known her. They had been all through grade school and high school together. Gregor had served as an usher at her cousin Richard’s wedding. If he closed his eyes, he could still see Hannah sitting on the stoop in front of the old unrenovated apartment house where her family had lived when they were all growing up, eight years old and taunting the hell out of him for striking out four times in a row at stickball. How had they all grown to be so old? How had they all grown to be so different?
Gregor looked through the bathroom door again, at the paints and powders and makeup pencils lying in rows in a compartmented glass tray that had probably been bought for the purpose. Gregor knew even less about women’s cosmetics than he knew about crime-scene paraphernalia. He would never have guessed that Hannah had all those things. He would never have guessed that she would have wanted to. She had three times the makeup Bennis did, and Bennis was beautiful.
Did that matter?
He shook himself a little to bring himself to. “Well. Listen. You two are right. We ought to go downstairs. Only do me a favor.”
“What’s that?” Bob Cheswicki asked.
“Let me be the first one to talk to Hannah Krekorian.”
3
The apartment was not so full of people anymore. Names and addresses had been taken. Extraneous people had been sent on their way. The very old ladies had gone home and the Devorkian girls had in all likelihood been ordered to bed. Hannah’s living room looked randomly littered, as if a high wind had blown through it. Scraps of party napkins and half-filled glasses were strewn here and there. It made Gregor think of Pompeii. The volcano had erupted, and everything had been petrified in place.
Christopher Hannaford and Lida Arkmanian stood together near the fireplace, talking. Lida was standing very straight. Christopher was leaning against the mantel. When Gregor walked in with Bob Cheswicki and Russell Donahue, Christopher straightened.
“Krekor?” Lida said.
“Where’s Bennis?” Gregor asked them. “I expected to find her glued to a policeman’s side. Possibly the medical examiner’s.”
“Bennis took old George Tekemanian home,” Christopher said. “He was looking a little peaked. She took Tommy Moradanyan too.”
“Donna is still in the kitchen with Hannah,” Lida said. “Making tea, I think.”
Gregor nodded. “Are you going to take Hannah home with you? She’s going to have to go home with somebody. I don’t think she’d be able to sleep in that room even if the police didn’t have it sealed as a crime scene, which they probably will.”
Lida looked at Christopher and then down at her hands. “No, Krekor. Hannah is not coming home with me. She is going with Helen Tevorakian.”
“Really?” Gregor said. “What’s the matter? Did you two have a fight?”
“Of course not,” Lida said.
“Everything’s really very well organized,” Christopher Hannaford put in. “Donna Moradanyan and Helen are with Hannah now, and then, as soon as the statements are taken, at least—” He frowned. “It is all right, isn’t it? They’re not going to—arrest anyone?”
“Do you mean that awful DeWitt woman?” Lida asked. “I hope they do arrest her. That cat.”
“If they arrested somebody,” Christopher said, “it wouldn’t be Candida DeWitt.”
“Who else could it be?” Lida demanded. Lida looked from one to the other of them. They looked back again. Lida caught her breath, shocked. “But that’s crazy,” she said. “Hannah? They can’t possibly think Hannah killed that man. She’s known him only a week!”
“She was the one with blood all over her and the murder weapon in her hands,” Christopher said.
“Are you sure it’s been only a week?” Gregor asked her. “Couldn’t Hannah have known Paul Hazzard before that and never told you about it?”
“No,” Lida said positively. “Met him casually or just been introduced, that possibly, yes, but not really known him, no. I would have heard about it.”
“You two told each other everything,” Gregor said.
Lida blushed bright red. “No. No, Krekor, that isn’t what I mean. I mean that Hannah was not a woman who hid her feelings. When she was happy she was happy. When she was sad she was sad. And she was not—discreet.”
“Unlike some other people we know,” Christopher said, “who are sometimes too discreet.”
Lida ignored him. “Hannah is a woman who talks, Krekor. She met Paul Hazzard at a meeting of the Friends of the Matterson Settlement House. It’s one of her charities. They talked at this meeting and he brought her home and then took her out to dinner. That was one week ago today, assuming it is still Friday. Last Saturday morning, she called me about it.”
“Umm. Has Hannah been acting oddly lately? Has she been different in any way?”
“Different? I haven’t noticed anything different, Krekor.”
“What about little things,” Gregor asked. “Like, say, makeup. Has she been wearing more makeup than usual?”
“Krekor, what are you talking about? You know Hannah. You see her every day. If she had been wearing more makeup than usual, you would have noticed it yourself.”
“Maybe. It’s just that, upstairs in her room just now, I noticed she had a lot of it. A lot of it. Much more than Bennis has.”
“Krekor, for goodness’ sake. Of course Hannah has more makeup than Bennis has. Bennis doesn’t need any and she’s under forty.”
“I think the theory is, the more you look like a model on the cover of a J. Crew catalogue, the more clothes you wear but the less makeup,” Christopher said, “where, on the other hand, if you’re a rather stodgy-looking middle-aged lady, you wear—”
“Stop it,” Lida said.
“I’d better go talk to Hannah,” Gregor said. “What about the two of you? Have you been asked to hang around here?”
“I just gave my statement to a police officer,” Lida said. “I was finished just a minute or two before you came down. I was talking about going home.”
“I was going to walk her there,” Christopher said. “To keep the muggers at bay.”
“We do not have muggers on Cavanaugh Street.”
“We might someday,” Gregor said. “I think Christopher is being eminently sensible.”
“Thank you,” Christopher said solemnly.
Gregor retreated. He liked Bennis’s brother Christopher. He always had, even at the beginning, all those years ago, when he’d had reason to be very suspicious. The problem was that Christopher always seemed to be talking on two or three levels at once, like those books by James Joyce that Gregor had been forced to read in English class at the University of Pennsylvania.
He went into the kitchen. Helen Tevorakian was nowhere to be seen. Maybe Bob Cheswicki already had her someplace quiet, where they could talk without being interrupted. Donna Moradanyan was standing at the far end of the room, near the stove. She was talking quietly to Russell
Donahue, who looked more uncomfortable than ever.
Hannah Krekorian sat at her kitchen table, her face set and emotionless, her hands folded on the tabletop in front of her. She had a cup of coffee that looked as if it hadn’t been touched. It looked cold too. Gregor pulled out one of the other chairs and sat down as close to her as he could without actually touching her.
“Hannah?” he asked gently.
Hannah stirred slightly. “Krekor,” she said. “I have been waiting for you to come. I was sure that you would come.”
“Well, I came. I’m here. Why don’t I ask Donna to get you a fresh cup of coffee? That one looks cold.”
“They put rum in it,” Hannah said. “That’s why I didn’t drink it. I didn’t want to be drunk.”
“A little rum right now won’t make you drunk,” Gregor told her. “You’re in shock, you know. A little rum might actually be good for you.”
“They took that woman into the study. That DeWitt woman. They took her there and now she’s telling them that I killed Paul.”
“Did you kill Paul, Hannah?”
“No.”
“Did Candida DeWitt?”
“I don’t think so.” Hannah blinked, confused. “It was too quiet, you see. I thought he must have gone away. So I came out of the bathroom and there he was and that thing was on the floor next to him, lying there in the blood, and I just walked to it and I—I just picked it up. And it was cold, Krekor, it was so cold, with the window open and the door too, and the breeze coming through like that and I thought he must have opened the window, he must have been hot, and then I started screaming and I couldn’t stop. She wasn’t in the doorway then. She didn’t come in until afterward.”
“Afterward what?”
“After I started screaming,” Hannah said simply.
Gregor got up. “Let me get you that coffee,” he said. “Let me get you that rum too. You’re going to go home with Helen Tevorakian tonight. Did you know that?”
“I thought the police were going to arrest me and I would spend the night in jail.”
“Nobody’s going to arrest you.”
“I should have realized from the beginning,” Hannah said. “I should have known. What is it they say on the public service announcements for senior citizens? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
“What probably is?” The coffee in the pot on the stove was still very warm, if not hot. Gregor got a clean cup out of Hannah’s cabinets, poured it half full of coffee, took the rum bottle from the back of the counter, poured the cup most of the rest of the way full of rum, and topped the whole thing off with a gigantic helping of sugar. It was going to taste awful, but it would bring her out of this funk. He put the concoction down next to her elbow and said, “Drink that.”
Hannah took a sip and made a face. “Too sweet,” she said.
“Too good to be true,” Gregor prompted her.
Hannah took a good, long swallow. She shuddered. “Yes,” she said. “That was it. Too good to be true. Underneath, I don’t think I ever fooled myself. Only on the surface. You know, Krekor, I am fifty-eight years old.”
“That’s right,” Gregor said. “You would have to be, you and Lida. Because you’re all a year older than I am and I’m fifty-seven.”
“Yes,” Hannah said. “And I’ve known it all along, you know, even when I was a little child. Except, of course, when you are a child, you think it will change when you grow older.”
“What will change?”
“What you look like,” Hannah said. “I remember being six years old and sitting in front of the mirror in my mother’s bedroom and telling myself, ‘When I grow up, I will be beautiful.’ Well, Krekor, I am all grown-up and I am what I have always been. I am an ugly woman, and nothing on earth is ever going to be able to change that.”
Then Hannah Krekorian put her face in her hands and burst into tears.
Two
1
IT WAS JAMES WHO was home when the police called, and James who went to the morgue to formally identify the body—a ritual he was shocked to discover was impossible to escape. The police sent a car for him. James didn’t know if they were worried about the dangers he would face trying to get a car of his own out of a parking garage or off the street (muggers), or the dangers the populace of Philadelphia would face if he tried to drive home after seeing his father lying on a slab like that, dead-white and looking faintly annoyed. Maybe they just thought it would be difficult to find a cab at—what?—eleven o’clock at night. James hadn’t been thinking of it as “late” when he got the call. Coming out of the morgue, though, it felt infinitely late, some kind of metatime eternally stuck between the eleventh and twelfth tolls of midnight. James kept hearing the theme from The Twilight Zone playing in his head.
All the way home from the morgue, sitting up front next to the uniformed driver who seemed to view traffic as a form of war game, James thought about how odd Paul looked, dead. He looked odd because he looked the same. James had had to lean far over the body to be sure Paul wasn’t breathing. He’d leaned so far he’d started to fall. The police matron had to catch him. After a while, James decided that there was a difference. Paul looked too thin. Paul had always been too thin, but alive he had covered it with personal magnetism and force of personality. James couldn’t call it force of character. Christ only knew, Paul had never had any character.
The police driver pulled up to the door of the town house and waited at the curb while James got the front door unlocked. He was like a worried date or the kind of taxi driver women fell in love with. James got the door unlocked and let himself inside. There were lights on that hadn’t been when he’d left. He felt instantly relieved.
“Who’s home?” he called out. “This is James.”
“James, it’s Alyssa.”
Musical voice pouring down from the second floor. Light on the second floor landing. James climbed the stairs.
“Alyssa? What are you doing here? Where’s Caroline?”
“Caroline’s working.” Alyssa came out of the second floor sitting room to meet James in the hall. She looked frazzled and upset. Her wispy clothes seemed to be emotionally shredded, like frizzed hair. “She’s in her studio. She’s got the intercoms off. I can see her in the security monitor but I can’t get her attention.”
“She’s been working like that for hours,” Nick Roderick said, coming out to the hall too. “We left her just like that when we went out to dinner, and you know what she’s like when she gets like that. She could be in there until morning.”
“We heard it over the radio,” Alyssa said. “We were at Palace of Glass, and then we went on to Dominique, you know, for dessert. And we were sitting in the bar, waiting for a table, when the news started, and it was the very first thing.”
“The dagger’s missing,” her husband said. “That was the first thing I checked.” He looked solemn. James thought he was hiding glee.
James went into the sitting room. The little glass drinks cart stood up against one of the love seats near the fireplace. James went over to it, filled a six-ounce glass with straight Scotch, and drank the Scotch down in a single long guzzle. Then he filled the glass again. He understood the attraction the idea of the “dysfunctional family” had for so many people. His own family was full of poisonous women.
“Don’t tell any of my clients I’m doing this,” he said.
“They drink herb tea and chant mantras when they’re upset.”
“Oh, James, be serious,” Alyssa said.
“I am being serious. I am also going to get seriously drunk. And neither you nor anybody else in this house is going to stop me.”
“I wouldn’t try to stop you.” Nick slumped into a chair. “I might even help.”
“If Caroline tries to lecture me, I’ll break her neck.” The second glass of Scotch was finished. James modified his approach to the third—not straight Scotch in a six-ounce glass, but Scotch and Drambuie on the rocks in something larger; he was beginni
ng to feel almost calm enough to be civilized—and took it over to the wingback chair. He sat and stretched out his legs. “I do not suggest,” he said, “that you make a point of seeing people dead. It is very unpleasant. It is weird enough to make me start believing in channeling.”
“I thought you did believe in it,” Nick said.
“No,” James corrected him. “I only sell it.”
“You saw the body?” Alyssa said.
“Yes. That’s where I just was. At the morgue, looking at the body.”
“Why?” Alyssa was bewildered.
“Because somebody has to,” Nick put in. “Somebody has to make a formal identification. It’s standard procedure.”
“But it isn’t like Paul was some anonymous person on the street,” Alyssa protested. “He was very well known. And wasn’t he with people who knew him? Wasn’t tonight the night he was going to that party we talked about?”
“I don’t know,” James said. “They didn’t really tell me anything. I think they want a member of the family to make the identification. Don’t ask me what they were up to. They just called.”
“On the radio they just said he died at the home of an acquaintance,” Alyssa said. “I should have thought to put on the eleven o’clock news. There probably would have been more.”
“The radio mostly went on and on about his being stabbed,” Nick said. “That’s why I went looking for the dagger. Is this beginning to look really strange to either of you two?”
“Jacqueline stabbed and Paul stabbed,” James chanted. “That’s not strange. That’s a plan.”
“James,” Alyssa said.
“Maybe Caroline did it in a fit of psychic pique.” James finished his drink and started pacing. “God, you don’t want to look at a dead man’s face. It’s just too weird. It’s just too normal. Paul looked more alive dead than he looked—Never mind.”
“I don’t believe Jacqueline was killed with that dagger,” Alyssa said fiercely. “I don’t care what the police said. I don’t believe Paul was killed with it either. You just wait. There’ll turn out to be some other explanation for why it’s missing. It won’t have anything to do with the crime at all.”
