by Jane Haddam
Caroline nodded sympathetically. “It’s terrible, isn’t it, to see someone throw away her life like that. She has such enormous energy. She could have had such a deeply fulfilling and emotionally significant life.”
“Right,” Gregor Demarkian said. “You were talking about Hannah Krekorian?”
“Oh, yes.” Caroline sighed. “The thing to remember is that codependents in denial are very dangerous people. They’re under such pressure and they’ve got such deep reserves of shame and self-blame and untapped anger and rage, they’re likely to do anything. I met this Hannah person Daddy was going around with. I think she was a time bomb ready to go off. I think she did go off. Daddy wanted to go out and buy her a valentine, but I warned him against it. Women like that always take that kind of gesture as the next best thing to a proposal of marriage.”
“Do they?” Gregor Demarkian asked.
“Trust me,” Caroline told them emphatically, “when you get through all the nonsense you have to get through, that Hannah woman will be at the bottom of it. A world-class codependent, desperately unhappy and fanatically in denial. It’s inevitable.”
2
The young woman behind the desk at the florist’s shop wanted $578.50 for the delivery of one hundred and one roses to Lida Arkmanian—and she wanted a few explanations too, although she wasn’t going to ask for them and Christopher Hannaford wasn’t going to volunteer them. The florist’s shop was at the far end of Cavanaugh Street just where it dead-ended into Elman. There was an Armenian name on the sign outside and a pile of those powdered-sugar-covered Armenian cookies on a plate next to the cash register. Christopher had considered going to a florist somewhere else in the city. He hadn’t seen what good he would do by it. The only person left on Cavanaugh Street who didn’t know what was going on, or at least suspect, was Gregor Demarkian. It amazed Christopher that the man could be so dumb. Then he wondered what Gregor would think if someone told him about it. Then he gave that up. Christopher Hannaford had done some fairly obsessional things in his life, but obsessional thinking wasn’t one of them. He had always been able to chuck useless lines of inquiry and occupy his mind with something else.
The other reason Christopher hadn’t gone off Cavanaugh Street to buy the roses was that it would have been silly in the long run. Eventually the roses were, going to have to be delivered. That would mean a florist’s van and a lot of flowers going to Lida Arkmanian’s door. How in the world was anybody going to hide that? It wasn’t as if what was going to be delivered were one long white box.
Christopher paid for the roses in cash. Having spent much of his earlier life in serious debt, he didn’t like credit cards. There was a box of heart-shaped chocolate-covered strawberry-creme-filled candies on sale on the counter, and he threw down three of those to eat on his way to breakfast. The young lady behind the counter glanced at the candies, nodded, and rang them up. Christopher had the uncomfortable feeling that she knew he liked to eat a lot of chocolate and that everybody else on Cavanaugh Street knew it too. Christopher just hoped the local radar didn’t extend to his private practices in private places. The last thing he wanted in his life was a morning sitting across the table from Bennis, knowing that she knew that he liked to—oh, never mind.
The young woman behind the counter handed him his change. “Now, let me get this straight,” she said. “You wanted the roses delivered today at two o’clock. Today.”
“Yep.”
“Not Valentine’s Day.”
“I’ve got something else cooking for Valentine’s Day.”
“Something bigger than this?”
“Yep.”
“Well, that’s going to be a gas and a half. If you order it through us, you better give us a couple of days’ notice.”
“They can’t be there before two o’clock because she won’t be home until one-thirty. She’s got a meeting of the Armenian-American Heritage Library Association.”
“I know,” the young woman said. “My mother has that too. In fact, Lida will probably bring my mother home. I’ll send the flowers over as soon as I see the whites of their eyes.”
“Great.” Christopher took one of the candies out of its wrapper and bit into it. “Thanks a lot.”
“Have a nice day,” the young woman said.
Out on Cavanaugh Street, it was ten o’clock and sunny, but still bitterly cold. Christopher was used to California, and this weather was beginning to annoy him. Didn’t this city ever thaw out? He tried to remember how he had felt about it when he was growing up here. As far as he could recall, he hadn’t noticed the weather. He finished the first of the candies and opened the second. Christ, he hadn’t felt this good in he didn’t know how long. He really hadn’t. This was better than champagne and chocolate. This was even better than marijuana, and marijuana had been Christopher’s favorite thing on earth until a combination of his own age and the stubbornness of the United States government in maintaining the illegality of it had made it too much trouble. Nothing would ever make this too much trouble. He wondered if she was sitting there in her meeting right now, thinking about him. Maybe she was thinking about the things they did instead, and blushing. She was always blushing. Christopher had never met a woman who was so easy to make blush. He finished the second candy and opened the third. He was working again. That was always the best sign. His pockets were full of scraps of paper with lines of poetry written on them.
He had reached the Ararat Restaurant. He stuffed the last corner of candy into his mouth and went inside. It was really terrible candy, nothing at all like the Godiva things he had been eating at Lida’s the night before. He was going to have to buy Lida some more Godiva chocolates. He was eating her out of the ones she had at home.
Bennis sat alone in the window booth, drinking black coffee and reading the Inquirer. She looked up when he walked in and he waved to her.
“Linda,” he said to Linda Melajian, who was going by with a pile of menus under one arm. “Can you get me a cup of coffee and a mushroom omelet? I’m going to be sitting over there with Bennis.”
“Be right there,” Linda Melajian said. “Isn’t it awful? Don’t you feel terrible? Helen Tevorakian was in here this morning, saying she didn’t think Hannah would ever be able to sleep in that bedroom again.”
“Well, it’s terrible enough,” Christopher agreed.
“Nobody can talk about anything else,” Linda Melajian said. “You should have heard this place during the breakfast rush. We must have had fifty people in here. And then, of course, Gregor didn’t show up, for the first time in I don’t know how long. He always eats breakfast here when he’s at home. I thought we were going to have a riot.”
“Maybe you can stake out his apartment and catch him when he comes home.”
“Don’t joke,” Linda Melajian said. “The way people are around here this morning, they’re likely to do anything.”
Christopher sat down opposite Bennis. Bennis looked up from her paper again.
“Well, well,” she said. “The bear emerges from hibernation.”
“I haven’t been hibernating,” Christopher said. “I was at the party last night.”
“So you were. Of course, it’s practically the only time I’ve seen you since you got here.”
“I’ve been trying not to make a pest of myself.”
“Is that what it is?”
“I’ve been having a very refreshing vacation, Bennis. Isn’t that what vacations are for?”
“I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I always know what I’m doing.”
Linda Melajian came over with a cup of coffee. Christopher thanked her and started drinking it. Bennis took her classic Hannaford sugar cravings out on coffee so sweet it was almost a syrup, but Christopher couldn’t stand to drink coffee that way. He preferred his candy straight.
“Listen,” he said, “believe it or not, I came looking for you because there was something I wanted to ask you. Something I think maybe I should have
told Gregor Demarkian last night. Not that it’s really anything important.”
Bennis looked interested. “Do you mean you know something about the murder? I mean, of course you should tell Gregor if you know something about what happened last night. That’s the whole point of an investigation. To find out what happened.”
“It’s not about what happened last night. It’s about me. And Paul Hazzard.”
“You? You knew Paul Hazzard?”
“Not exactly,” Christopher said. “Not the way you’re using the term. You remember that place you paid for me to go to right after Daddy died, the therapy place for compulsive gambling?”
“I remember you went. I also remember you didn’t stay very long.”
“You also know I haven’t done anything but buy a lottery ticket once a month for years. You haven’t had to bail me out, have you?”
“No,” Bennis admitted. “I haven’t.”
“Okay, then. The thing is, the place I went to was run by Paul Hazzard’s organization. He used to have some kind of corporate entity set up to keep all the pieces in place. Maybe he still does. Anyway, most of the time the man himself never went near the place. It was run by people he’d trained. But while I was there, he did show up just once for a couple of days.”
“And?”
“And it was strange,” Christopher said. “It was very strange. That was what I wanted to talk to Gregor about. I also wanted to tell him I’d had contact with Paul Hazzard before so it didn’t come out later and look like Christ only knows what. But it’s more than that. It’s what happened while he was up there. In Vermont.”
Bennis got out a cigarette and lit up. “You’re being very mysterious,” she said. “In fact, you’re getting me very nervous. Does this whatever-it-is have something to do with you personally? Did you have a motive for killing that man?”
“It’s not that,” Christopher told her. “It’s just that this thing—this thing that happened with Paul Hazzard—well, the implications could be not so good for your friend Hannah. It was something that happened with Paul Hazzard and an, um, older woman.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Bennis said.
Linda Melajian came back with a mushroom omelet on a plate with toast and hash browns. You got your cholesterol at the Ararat whether you wanted it or not.
Christopher reached for the salt.
“Let me explain the whole thing to you,” he said to Bennis. “Let me start from the beginning.”
Five
1
YEARS AGO, WHEN GREGOR Demarkian had only recently met Bennis Hannaford, Bennis used to give him books. The books were always murder mysteries of the most traditional kind—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout—and always seemed to follow the same pattern. First a murder was committed. Then suspect A was designated most likely to have committed it. Then it was proved to be impossible for suspect A to have committed it. Then it turned out that suspect A had committed it after all. Of course, Gregor realized that not all these books had that identical plot. The problem was that many of them had. The pattern was fixed firmly in his brain. It insisted on coloring his expectations of what was going to happen next in his own life. It made him very uncomfortable. There was Hannah, the most likely suspect—so likely now that it was beginning to seem impossible that the murderer could be anyone else. Gregor kept trying to twist the picture and make the most likely suspect come out to be Candida DeWitt. It just wouldn’t work. She hadn’t had any blood on her at all. That wasn’t conclusive, but it went a long way to make her a less likely prospect than Hannah. Then there was the weapon. Gregor had the feeling that under the circumstances, Candida DeWitt was the person with the least access to the ornamented dagger. She might have a key to Paul Hazzard’s house left over from the days when she was on good terms with the family, but it was a long shot. Candida’s relationship with Paul Hazzard had fallen apart just about the time when Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard was murdered. If Gregor had been Paul Hazzard, after that murder he would have had all his locks changed. That wouldn’t have been to keep out Candida DeWitt. She would have been a very minor problem. He would have wanted the locks changed to make sure no overly ambitious reporter could gain access by scaring up one of the stray keys that were sure to be lying around, given to friends who had promised to water the plants while the family was away on vacation or to building contractors doing serious repairs. Down in Washington, Gregor had known people who changed their locks every year, exactly because things like this happened. A house with locks in it that had been around for a while might be safe enough from random burglars, but it was likely to be as open as a bordello’s front door to an entire collection of friends, foes, acquaintances, and strangers. Gregor knew what happened to house keys. He knew what had happened to his own.
Unfortunately, even if Candida did have a usable key to Paul Hazzard’s house, that didn’t let Hannah off the hook. There was still the blood to consider. There was still the motive to consider. Candida DeWitt might very well have hated Paul Hazzard. The newspapers and magazines all liked to pretend she did. Still, the sequence of events that had brought her to hate him was over four years old. There had been six stab wounds in Paul Hazzard’s chest. This was a crime committed in hot blood. Would Candida’s blood have been that hot after all this time? She hadn’t been raving or upset by the time the crowd reached Hannah’s bedroom after the murder. In fact, except for Gregor himself and Bob Cheswicki, she had been the most levelheaded one there.
Gregor sat in the chair next to the desk that belonged to Russell Donahue in the big bull pen of a squad room in the police station that served Cavanaugh Street—a much cleaner and nicer and less ominous place than the one where Gregor had met Bob Cheswicki earlier that morning—and tapped his fingers against Russell’s copy of Halberstam on Contracts.
“Mary Ohanian,” he said. “And Helen Tevorakian.”
“You said that before,” Russell told him. “We called. They’re meeting you at two.”
“Yes, I know. Russell, listen. If you could do anything at all at this moment, what would you do? Arrest Hannah Krekorian?”
“I don’t know,” Russell said. “I suppose so. Maybe I’d wait a few days. Maybe I’d talk to the district attorney first. I’d have to talk to the district attorney first in a case like this. There are a couple of things I might want to straighten out. There are one or two things about this case—”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I understand that. What I was thinking, though, was that it might be in the best interests of everybody involved if you did arrest Hannah Krekorian. Right away.”
“What?”
Gregor stood up. “Not right away,” he said. “Not right this minute. There are a couple of things I want to check out first. Mary Ohanian and Helen Tevorakian. Candida DeWitt.”
“What about Candida DeWitt?”
“We have to talk to her. Today. But after that I think the best thing to do, assuming that everything still stands more or less as it stands now, is to arrest Hannah and get it over with.”
“But why?”
“Because you would have arrested her if I weren’t here mucking up the process. Because once you arrest her, everybody else in this case will relax.”
“Except Mrs. Krekorian. She won’t relax. It’s no fun to be arrested.”
“We’ll work the timing right,” Gregor said. “We won’t let her spend any actual time in jail. We’ll get the judge set up and the bail and all the rest of it. I don’t want to persecute her, Mr. Donahue.”
“Russ,” Russell Donahue said. “It still won’t be pleasant. Getting fingerprinted. Getting photographed. That woman will go all to pieces.”
“She might,” Gregor admitted, “but she’ll go to pieces even worse at a trial. We want to avoid the trial.”
“One way or the other, she’s going to have to be at the trial.”
“I’m trying to ensure that she won’t have to be there as the defendant,” Gregor said. “Let’s try to get in
touch with Candida DeWitt. Let’s see if we can’t go out there this evening and ask her a few questions.”
“I’m not on duty this evening.”
“You are now.”
“I’ve heard about you.” Russell Donahue sighed. “Sit down again, Mr. Demarkian. I’m going to go out and have Mary Lee Espicci call Candida DeWitt. She’s better at getting appointments than I am. I’ll be right back.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
He sat down again. Russell Donahue disappeared. Gregor picked up Halberstam on Contracts and noted that Russell’s place was marked by a course registration receipt from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Russell Donahue must be good. Penn didn’t make allowances for students who worked full-time jobs in urban police departments. Penn didn’t make allowances for anybody. If you wanted to be treated like a special case, you went to Penn State. Still, Russell must have convinced the law school to allow him to attend part-time. That was remarkable enough in itself.
Russell came back from wherever it was he’d gone and sat down again behind his desk.
“All taken care of,” he said. “We’re set up for seven-thirty tonight. I may even get to grab a hamburger for dinner. She’s got Fred Scherrer with her, by the way.”
“He came to pick her up last night,” Gregor said. “I’m not interrupting a class?” He tapped Halberstam.
Russell Donahue shook his head. “I do contracts Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at nine. The department works around me. They’re very good about things like this here, except sometimes for women. Lady working Burglary had to threaten a sex discrimination suit to get her schedule arranged.”
“I’m surprised the law school admitted you as a part-time student.”
“They didn’t. I got shot. About three years ago. I was in the hospital for months, and then when I came out I couldn’t work and nobody knew if I was ever going to. So I took my disability and I got myself into the law school and I did two years straight. Then I got better and I could work again and I was running out of money and I was second in my class—”
