by Jane Haddam
The picture of him on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer didn’t fit his image of himself, but he had expected worse, so he wasn’t too upset. He’d never expected for a moment that he’d be able to escape publicity altogether. That was like believing the tooth fairy really did bring Tommy Moradanyan his quarters. Even Tommy didn’t believe that. At least the headline on the Inquirer was more sensible than some of them had been in the past. It said
PAUL HAZZARD FOUND DEAD
which was at least to the point. Unfortunately, the picture under the headline was not of Paul Hazzard but of Gregor coming out of the building where Hannah Krekorian had her apartment. Gregor supposed there was a picture of Paul Hazzard somewhere inside the paper. The subhead didn’t bode well either. It said
CHIEF SUSPECT IS CLOSE FRIEND OF GREGOR DEMARKIAN
as if the paper knew something neither he nor the police did. Surely Hannah was only half the chief suspect list? Surely Candida DeWitt was on it too.
Gregor got some change out of his pocket, fed it into the metal newspaper-dispensing machine, and pulled out a paper. He was standing at the corner of Calumet and Trell, half a block south of the bus stop. It was quarter after eight in the morning and he was bitterly cold. He should have taken a cab out from Cavanaugh Street, or waited until later in the day. The world wouldn’t have fallen moribund and dead if he’d had his usual breakfast at the Ararat. The case wouldn’t have solved itself either. He hadn’t been able to face it. Linda Melajian and all the Melajians connected to her, Father Tibor, old George Tekemanian, maybe even Bennis—what would he have said? What could he have said? It was much too early to assure them that everything was going to be all right.
Bob Cheswicki had asked Gregor to meet him at the police station—“first thing in the morning,” which to Bob could mean anywhere between six and nine—on Calumet. It was close enough to Cavanaugh Street so that Gregor might have walked if it had been less cold and less dark. Or maybe he wouldn’t have. He shook his head. Cavanaugh Street was such a model of urban renewal, Gregor sometimes forgot that so much of the rest of Philadelphia looked like this.
The garbage piled up in plastic bags in front of the stoops looked frozen into place. The young man standing in the doorway of the building half a block up looked furtive and faintly dangerous. Gregor wished the sun would come out. Instead, just at that moment he felt a tinge of wetness against his face, the hint of another bout of rain or snow or hail. The streets were full of slush and his feet were wet.
Gregor took one last look at the paper—“Demarkian emerges from murder scene” the caption to the front-page photograph said—and went up the street to the station. As he passed the building where the furtive young man was hiding, the young man seemed to melt into the concrete and stone. Gregor let himself into the station and got a small shock. It was an ordinary police station in many ways. It had a large waiting room with benches in the front. It had a large area of cluttered desks in the back. The two sections were divided by a long wooden counter where a fat police sergeant sat. There were a couple of pay phones on the wall directly opposite the counter. There were a set of doors in one wall of the desk section, marked LOCK-UP, UPSTAIRS, RECORDS, AND REST ROOMS. Gregor didn’t want to ask why the rest rooms were in a place unavailable to the general public. What really worried him was the bulletproof glass. It was everywhere. It made a wall between the desk section and the one with the benches in it, rising from the countertop in a thick sheet no one could hear through. In order to talk to the desk sergeant, you had to use a microphone system like the ones they used in prisons. Bulletproof plastic, not glass, Gregor realized, looking at it more closely. What it reminded him of was numbers joints in downtown Washington, D.C. Things had gotten so bad, even the mob didn’t feel safe. Gregor looked over the benches, which were empty. Maybe it was just too cold for any serious criminality on the streets of Philadelphia today. Gregor had been in rooms like this before. They were usually packed with people, no matter what hour of the day or night.
Gregor went up to the bulletproof wall. A sign above what looked like a telephone handset said PRESS BUZZER FOR ASSISTANCE. Gregor put the receiver to his ear and pressed the buzzer.
On the other side of the counter, the sergeant, an older African American man with white hair and large shoulders, looked up from the paper he was reading. When he saw Gregor, he came to the counter and picked up his half of the speaking mechanism. It really was just like a prison, Gregor thought. It would make him insane to have to work there.
“Yes?” the sergeant said.
“Gregor Demarkian for Bob Cheswicki.”
“Entrance to your right. When you hear the buzzer, push hard, come in. Be quick.”
With all the rest of the security around this place, Gregor would have expected the sergeant to ask for his identification. Gregor wondered if the sergeant hadn’t asked because Gregor was expected or because the sergeant didn’t expect trouble from a middle-aged white man in a good wool coat. If the latter was the case, Gregor could have told the sergeant a thing or two. John Wayne Gacy was a middle-aged white man in a good wool coat. John Wayne Gacy had killed God only knew how many people.
The door was cut out of the counter and the plastic protective shield like a line-drawing door in an old Warner Bros, cartoon. Gregor pushed through, then shut the thing behind him with a strong push. It resisted and sucked closed in its own time. The air in the desk section was staler and hotter than that in the section from which Gregor had just come. The baseboard heat registers seemed to be turned on full.
The name tag on the sergeant’s uniform said E. WASHINGTON. Gregor took off his gloves and stuffed them in the pockets of his coat.
“Is all this really necessary?” he asked. “This looks like Beirut.”
“Gangs,” the sergeant said. He didn’t look too worked up about it. “This is Beirut.”
“You seem to be having a pretty quiet time this morning.
“Yep. Had a war zone here last night though. Sixteen people dead. Didn’t even make the front page of the newspaper.”
“No,” Gregor said. “No, I don’t suppose it would have.”
“Bob Cheswicki’s up on the third floor,” E. Washington said. “He told us to expect you. Go right on up.”
“Stairs only?”
“Used to have an elevator. Then the Hot Bloods rigged one of their Molotov cocktails to it, and for once the damned thing worked.”
Gregor went over to the door marked UPSTAIRS.
“I’m going up, then,” he said. “Have a quiet day.”
“I can only hope.”
Gregor thought about trying to make more conversation. Instead, he started climbing the stairs to the third floor.
2
The stairs were steep and there were a lot of them. This was an old building with ten- and twelve-foot-high ceilings, making for longer climbs. Fortunately, Bob Cheswicki was in plain sight when Gregor finally reached his destination. So were a lot of other people. Here was the population Gregor had expected to see downstairs where the sergeant was. Here were young men in black leather jackets and eye patches and face tattoos. Here were sharp-looking girls in high heels and not much else, chewing gum and swearing nonstop at everything that passed in a uniform. The young men were manacled and handcuffed. The girls were free but deprived of their handbags. None of the young men was more than twenty. None of the girls was more than fourteen. All of them had the rough-edged blue-red fingertips that were produced from too much skin-popping.
Bob Cheswicki was leaning over the shoulder of a uniformed officer who was sitting at a desk in the middle of the room. The uniformed officer was checking something on a computer printout. On the left side of the desk there was a pile of Saturday night specials.
“Seventeen,” the uniformed officer said. “That’s what it says here. Seventeen. We’ve only got fifteen.”
“Okay,” Bob Cheswicki said. “Take them all out and strip-search them again. Get a matron for the girls
.”
The uniformed officer looked doubtful. “The Legal Aid guy is downstairs.”
“Send Stepanowski to deal with the Legal Aid guy.”
“But—”
“For God’s sake, Haraldsen. We’re not trying to convict them, we’re just trying to disarm them.”
“Right,” Haraldsen said.
Bob Cheswicki looked up and saw Gregor. “Oh, good. I get a reprieve. Hello, Gregor. Come along this way. We’ll let the officers get on with this mess on their own.”
Bob backed away from Haraldsen’s desk and made his way toward the other end of the room. Gregor followed him, weaving in and out among the young men and their girls, excusing himself to uniformed officers not much older than their charges. The officers looked tense as hell and scared to death. The door at the back led to a corridor of other doors, but not a very long one. Bob Cheswicki went through the third door on his left and sat down at the desk. The room was five by seven and barely large enough to fit the two of them. The desk was piled six inches deep in paper. Bob had a water maker and the makings of instant coffee on top of his two-drawer green metal file cabinet. The file cabinet was just the right height and size to serve as a kind of side table. Bob found two clean styrofoam cups, dumped heaping teaspoons of Folger’s crystals into each, and poured water. He handed one to Gregor.
“Sorry for all the confusion. Believe it or not, this is what I do with myself these days. They have an official name for it down at headquarters, but it keeps slipping my mind. Bureauspeak. I’m supposed to ‘mediate street conflicts.’ If you can believe that.”
“Gang wars.”
“Exactly.”
“Do you have a lot of them?”
“One or two a year in different areas of the city. Somehow, working on them lacks the satisfaction of working on something like the Hazzard case. Either Hazzard case. With the Hazzard case, you’re likely to catch somebody.”
“You didn’t last time,” Gregor noted.
“Oh, we caught him all right. We just didn’t convict him. And yes, I still believe that in spite of what happened at your friend’s apartment last night. Paul Hazzard killed his wife. There’s never been a doubt in my mind. In the end, you know, he barely tried to deny it.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said. In his experience, murderers denied everything vigorously and often, no matter what the circumstances. “Let’s not worry about the other Hazzard case for the moment, except where it might connect—”
“Like with the weapon.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said, “like with the weapon. I’ve been thinking about that weapon all night. In the end, I suppose it’s the most important thing to be explained. What was it doing there? How did Hannah get hold of it? Who brought it into the house?”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely. This is not some standard kitchen knife we’re talking about. This is not a penknife somebody might carry around in his pocket. This is a valuable antique. I take it that by now somebody has verified that it was the same dagger?”
“They’ve verified that we’ve got every reason to believe it was the same dagger,” Bob said. “The dagger that was on the wall in Paul Hazzard’s living room is missing. The officer who picked up James Hazzard checked. And asked, of course.”
“Of course. Did James Hazzard say when he’d seen it last?”
“No.”
“Did he notice it missing last night on his own?”
“He says not.”
“What about the position of the dagger?” Gregor asked. “One of the things I’ve never been able to get clear in my mind is where that dagger was on that wall. Toward the floor? At shoulder height? Higher?”
Bob Cheswicki considered. “It’s one of those really old Federal houses,” he said, “and the ceilings are fairly high, but this thing was placed in the middle of a bunch of others—there are dozens of weapons on that wall—at what would be about eye level for you. This is from what I remember, and it was a long time ago. But I think I’m accurate. You’re a very tall man.”
“Six four,” Gregor said.
“So it was pretty far up,” Bob concluded, “but not outrageously so.”
“The point is that it couldn’t have been taken by accident. Someone couldn’t have stuck it into a pocket by mistake, without thinking. It would have had to have been reached for.”
“Definitely.”
Gregor tapped his fingers impatiently against a pile of papers on Bob Cheswicki’s desk. “I don’t like it. What do you think, by now, if you count my time with the Behavioral Sciences Department at the Bureau, I must have investigated hundreds of murders, wouldn’t you think?”
“Well, yes, Gregor. But some of them came in sets.”
“I know that, but that’s not the point. The point is that in all that time, in the Bureau, out of the Bureau, it doesn’t matter, never once have I found a case where a murderer used an odd or unusual weapon or an odd or unusual method unless he had to. Had to. Murderers do not go rigging up locked rooms or stabbing people with antique South Pacific ornamental daggers unless they have no alternative. This just doesn’t make sense.”
“I know it doesn’t make sense,” Bob said. “That’s why I want you with us. To help make sense out of it.”
Gregor got out of his chair and tried to pace. There wasn’t much room. He kept bumping into furniture.
“Look at the murder of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard,” he said. “Here is a woman in her own living room, in a house that was in all probability like all houses, meaning stocked with everyday weapons. I assume there were sets of steak knives in the kitchen?”
“I didn’t check,” Bob said, “but there must have been.”
“Of course there must have been. Steak knives in the kitchen. Ice picks. Razor blades. Then there was that wall that the dagger was on. You said there were dozens of other weapons. Were there more obvious weapons?”
“What do you mean, more obvious?”
“Straightforward large knives,” Gregor suggested. “This dagger is actually fairly small. How about something like a bowie knife or a small sword? Something closer at hand that would have been harder to miss.”
“I suppose there must have been. Gregor, I just don’t know these details off the top of my head.”
Gregor waved this away. “We can check later, but what I’m saying only makes sense. There was no reason at all to use that dagger in the murder of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard.”
“It wasn’t used in the murder of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard,” Bob put in quickly. “It wasn’t what killed her. We determined that.”
“It wasn’t what killed her, but it was lying out next to the body or near it—”
“It was about three feet away on a small coffee table.”
“Fine. It wasn’t in its place on the wall. It was lying out where you would find it and jump to conclusions. And you did and you did.”
“I didn’t do either. I never believed in that thing as a weapon.”
“Well, the police did.” Gregor ran into the chair he had been sitting in and pushed it as far out of the way as possible, which wasn’t very far. He was beginning to feel distinctly claustrophobic. “Bob, I’m not trying to make you look stupid. I’m not trying to make the Philadelphia police look stupid. I’m just trying to point out to you how nonsensical all this is.”
“I know how nonsensical all this is,” Bob said. “And the police were stupid. I mean, those officers were. Two of the least competent officers in Homicide.”
“Last night,” Gregor said, “Paul Hazzard is killed in Hannah Krekorian’s apartment with the same dagger that was suspected to have been the weapon in the death of his wife four years ago. So far so good. There are three ways that dagger could have made its way into Hannah’s apartment.”
“Shoot.”
Gregor nodded. “Okay. In the first place, Paul Hazzard could have brought it himself. We talked about that a little last night. That officer of yours suggested that Paul Hazzard might hav
e brought it as a kind of show-and-tell piece, a prop for him to use when he told people about the murder.”
Bob frowned. “You didn’t believe that, and I didn’t either. The feeling I got last night was that the last thing Paul Hazzard wanted to discuss was that murder.”
“I got the same feeling myself. He brought it up with me, but it seemed as if he were heading me off at the pass, if you know what I mean. Bring the subject up and get it out of the way so it doesn’t come back to ambush you later in the evening.”
“Right.”
“The second possibility is that Hannah brought the weapon from Paul’s apartment. The only reason she would have had to do that is if she were planning to kill Paul. She might not have realized that the weapon had been proven not to have been the one that really killed Paul’s wife. She might have wanted to kill Paul Hazzard and throw suspicion back on the family. Or on Candida DeWitt.”
