by Jane Haddam
“Oh,” Bennis said.
Gregor started writing again.
4. Murderer arrives at Hannah’s apartment and gets in through window, 7:00 to 7:05 last night
5. Murderer hides in guest room intending to stay there until party is finished
6. C. DeWitt arrives and causes scene
7. Hannah goes to master bathroom
8. P. Hazzard goes to master bedroom
9. Murderer leaves guest room and goes into master bedroom, locking master bedroom door
Gregor tapped the piece of paper he had pulled out of his trouser pocket, the timetable put together by Mary Ohanian and Helen Tevorakian. “We have to check out the particulars,” he said, “but this is how it has to have happened. That’s what I mean, Russell, about a carefully planned murder that depended so much on luck. The plan was for a murder later in the evening. The luck was in catching Paul Hazzard the way he was caught. It was a much better setup than the original plan, but it couldn’t possibly have been engineered.”
“If it happened the way you’re saying it did, it must have been someone Hazzard knew very well. It must have been someone he expected to see at that party,” Russell said.
“No, it didn’t have to be someone he expected to see at the party,” Gregor corrected him. “After all, he’d just been ambushed by Candida DeWitt. Another surprise of that kind would probably have seemed relatively minor.”
“But it was someone he knew well,” Bennis insisted.
“Oh, yes.”
“As an explanation, this still bothers me a lot,” Russell Donahue said. “The times seem all wrong. They’re too tight.”
“They’re much too tight,” Gregor agreed. “When I was talking to Helen and Mary this afternoon, one of them said it was impossible. There wasn’t enough time in this schedule for someone to have murdered Paul Hazzard. I remember thinking that exposure was inevitable. The odds were enormous that someone would have seen the murderer either going into the bedroom, or killing Paul Hazzard, or going out of the bedroom.”
“Is that what you mean by luck too?” Russell Donahue asked. “I don’t like it, Mr. Demarkian. It’s too many good breaks and too many timetable coincidences.”
“Only if the murderer was, in fact, not seen.”
“You mean the murderer was seen?” Bennis was shocked. “But Gregor—oh, you mean the murderer was seen but the person who saw him, or her, didn’t know it was the murderer.”
“The person who saw him, or her, was Candida DeWitt,” Gregor said, “and she most certainly knew what she was looking at was a murderer, a two-time murderer. That’s why she’s dead.”
“But why wouldn’t she have told?” Bennis protested. “She must have been crazy.”
“She wasn’t crazy,” Gregor said. “She was just angry. Very, very, very angry. And she thought she was going to be smart.”
The phone rang. Russell Donahue got up from the chair he had dropped into a little while before and went to answer it.
“It’s probably for me,” he said. “Just a second.”
It was for him. Russell picked up the receiver, grunted a few times, and said, “Thank you very much.” Then he hung up again.
“Well,” he told Gregor and Bennis, “Mr. Demarkian, you were right about one thing. Whatever killed Paul Hazzard, it wasn’t that ornamented dagger. They’ve run it through every test they can think of and it all comes up negative. That dagger had Paul Hazzard’s blood on it all right, but it got that blood on it outside Paul Hazzard’s body. It was never for a second inside that man’s chest.”
Three
1
ON SUNDAY MORNING LIDA Arkmanian woke up by the alarm clock, got out of bed, went to her bathroom, and took a shower. When she was finished with her shower, she wrapped herself in a terry-cloth bathrobe and went to her closet to pick out a dress for church. She stood in her closet for a good fifteen minutes, trying to decide between the pale blue silk with the princess collar and the jade wool with three-quarter-length sleeves, before she realized what she was doing. It shocked her, more than a little. She hadn’t thought about church in a week. She hadn’t thought about the implications of church in a week. She wasn’t really thinking about them now. What she was thinking about was the way the skin on the back of Christopher’s neck felt to the tips of her fingers. It was a very odd thing. When she was married—and long before she was married, when she was growing up and first curious about sex and trying so hard not to let anyone know she was curious about sex—the feelings she had always concentrated on were her own, situation passive. The first time a boy had ever kissed her, she had centered herself, feeling what it felt like to have his lips brush against hers, his arm around her back. She had never given a thought to what his lips felt like to her—whether they were rough or smooth, whether they tasted of cinnamon or Vaseline. She had cared for nothing but what he had made her feel. That was true, she thought now, of all the years of her marriage. She had paid attention to all the things her husband had made her feel. She had never noticed at all how he had felt to her. It seemed wrong, somehow, backhanded. Were all women like this?
She had the jade wool in one hand. She put it back on the hanger bar and went out into the bedroom again. Christopher was sitting up in bed, waiting for her, expectant. When all this had started, Lida had been sure that it was some kind of joke. Christopher was bored and trying to find something to do he hadn’t done before. Christopher had never slept with an old lady and wanted to know what it was like. Over the past twenty-four hours, Lida had changed her mind. She was not a very sophisticated woman, but she had never had any trouble knowing when a man was serious.
Lida belted the bathrobe more tightly around her waist and walked over to the bed. She sat down on the edge of it. When she had thought that Christopher was not serious, he had made her feel young. Now she was far too aware of the slackness of the skin on her face and neck, the fine tracing of lines on the backs of her hands. She did not want to be too aware of getting old. Her cousin Delphinia was too aware. Delphinia spent a lot of time with plastic surgeons.
“Hello,” she said to Christopher.
“You had on the alarm clock,” Christopher said. “Whatever for? It’s Sunday morning.”
“On Sunday mornings I go to church.”
“Oh.” Christopher considered this the way he might have considered a confession of culinary abnormality—“On Sunday mornings I eat fried chicken feet,” for instance. Lida thought she ought to be grateful that Christopher knew what a church was. He stretched put a hand and touched her hair and smiled.
“Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.
“Good Lord, no,” Lida said. “That’s all we’d need.”
“Why? You said yourself that everybody on the street knows what’s going on anyway, except maybe Gregor Demarkian. What’s the matter, if we go to church together, Gregor will suddenly see light dawn?”
“Krekor does not go to church. Or at least he does not go very much. I should go today to be with Hannah, I suppose.”
“I think it’s a good idea.”
“You’ve never even been interested in religion?” Lida asked him. “You’ve never for a moment believed in God?”
“I want to know what’s really going on here,” Christopher said. “Do they disapprove of you, is that it? Do they disapprove of us for doing this?”
“I don’t know. It’s not what I’m worried about.”
“Then what are you worried about? From everything I’ve seen, Tibor Kasparian is a nice man. He’s not going to leap out of the pulpit—”
“—we do not have a pulpit—”
“—and start calling you a scarlet woman. Neither is anybody else. Maybe your friend Hannah will be a little jealous.”
“Hannah has other things on her mind.”
“And maybe my sister will start fussing—which is par for the course for Bennis, and there isn’t a damn thing either one of us can do about it—but I don’t think any of these t
hings amounts to a serious drawback to the two of us going to church together. It might even be interesting. I don’t usually like churches.”
“I thought you didn’t.”
“I don’t like people who try to tell me what I’m supposed to do and what I’m supposed to think and what I’m supposed to feel. I don’t like the idea of feeling that I’ve done something wrong just because I’ve started to be happy. I don’t like the idea of you feeling like that.”
“I don’t feel like that, Christopher. I don’t understand where you get your ideas.”
“I watch MTV,” Christopher said.
“Well, you should watch Mother Angelica,” Lida told him. “I do not think of it as someone trying to tell me what to do. I think of it as a bargain I made. If I am to call myself a Christian in the Armenian Church, then I have obligations.”
“One of which is not to sleep with me.”
“Sleeping with you does not matter, Christopher. Sleeping with you for a week when we are not even thinking of getting engaged and not having any intention of stopping, that matters.”
His fingers stroked her cheek. “I’m glad you have no intention of stopping.”
“Christopher, you are impossible.”
“I work at it.”
“You work at the most astonishing things,” Lida said.
She got up off the bed. She felt a little cold and a little silly, sitting there with nothing but this bathrobe on and a pair of underpants underneath it. She went to the closet drawers and got out a bra and a new box of panty hose.
“Christopher,” she said, calling through the open closet door, “do you believe what Bennis said last night? That Hannah is no longer a suspect?”
“Sure. She got it from Gregor Demarkian.”
“It was good of her to call and tell us.”
“There was nothing good about it. She was trying to find out how late we got in.”
“I do not think you are always fair to Bennis, Christopher. She is a much nicer woman than you seem to think.”
“She is a much nosier one than you’ve ever imagined. What are you doing in there?”
“I’m getting dressed.”
Her navy blue linen was hanging to the right of the jade wool. Lida took that one and put it on. It was one of the most conservative dresses she owned, man-tailored, like an elongated shirt. What was she trying to do here? She went to the built-in drawers again and fumbled through the top one until she found her silver beads. They were conservative too.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said, going to the closet door as she put on her earrings. “I am going to take you with me to church.”
“Great,” Christopher said. “Turn your back. When you see me naked in daylight, you get embarrassed.”
Lida turned her back. She got less and less embarrassed every time she saw Christopher that way. But there was no need to tell him that.
“Can I wear jeans and a decent sweater?” he asked her. “That suit Howard Kashinian loaned me fits funny.”
“You can wear your jeans,” Lida said. “Lots of people do now.”
“Great,” Christopher said again.
Lida’s navy blue shoes were on the second level of the shoe rack. She got them down and put them on.
It was bad enough that she was going to take Christopher to church, she thought. What was worse was that she was feeling irritated with church.
She was also feeling irritated with herself.
All those shoes on shoe racks.
All those dresses on padded hangers.
All those “accessories” in the built-in drawers, color-coordinated or dyed to match.
What had she been doing with her life?
2
James Hazzard never woke up to an alarm clock if he could help it. Since he ran his own business and passed himself off as a god to his clients, he could usually help it. Some of his colleagues had expanded their practices by opening quasi-churches of their own. The women started Temples of Diana and the men flirted with satanism. James’s position was that it was a mistake to get involved in anything he couldn’t carry through with a straight face. That was why he hadn’t immersed himself in the recovery movement. He had tried, once, by going to one of his father’s seminars—although not one that his father himself was running. Midway through, the participants had been required to write letters to their inner children, and it had just been too much. James had nearly died laughing.
He wished that he could die laughing now, or maybe that he could just die. It was eleven-fifteen on Sunday morning and he was cold. Worse than that, he was with Caroline and Caroline was on one of her patented rampages. He wondered who she had learned her rampages from. Paul had been self-controlled to the point of petrification. Jacqueline had had the emotional life of a sea slug. Maybe their own mother had been histrionic. James couldn’t remember their own mother.
“She went searching through his things on purpose,” Caroline said. “She was trying to take control of the rest of us. It’s a kind of abuse, James.”
“Everything is a kind of abuse.” This was true. James was sure of it. Having a mother who wanted French toast for breakfast every morning was a kind of abuse.
“You don’t take me seriously, James,” Caroline said. “That’s a kind of abuse too. You refuse to mirror back to me my own reality.”
To James Hazzard’s mind, his sister Caroline’s reality resembled an Escher print. He didn’t have time to consider it at the moment, however, because the funeral director was making his way back to them across the enormous reception room. The man was wearing a suitably hangdog expression and holding his hands at his sides the way boys did when they were walking in line at the kind of private school that didn’t have a military tradition but wished it did. His name was Arthur Pommerant and James didn’t like him much.
“I have very good news,” Arthur Pommerant said. “I have discussed the matter with our preparations department, and there will not have to be a closed casket after all.”
“Oh,” James said.
“Why would we want an open casket?” Caroline demanded. “Why would we want to look at a dead body?”
Arthur Pommerant looked confused. “It’s for the wake,” he explained. “The deceased is usually on view at the wake. It puts quite a damper on things when the deceased isn’t on view at the wake.”
“I think it’s barbaric,” Caroline said.
“For God’s sake,” James told her. “This isn’t an arena for getting your needs met. This is something we all have to get through for the sake of the public and the papers and whatever fans Dad had left. Will you just let it go?”
“I see what you’re trying to do,” Caroline said. “You’re trying to make me look hysterical and unreasonable. Then you can make yourself look like a paragon of objective rationality and get anything you want.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” James exploded.
Arthur Pommerant was looking from one to the other of them. He was not embarrassed. James thought he must have seen family fights a million times before. Maybe everybody squabbled at funerals. Maybe that was one of the ways families got through them.
“Look,” he said to Arthur Pommerant, “could you do us a favor? Could you find out whether the suit we had sent over ever arrived.”
“I know it arrived,” Arthur Pommerant said. “I unwrapped it myself.”
“Fine. Wonderful. What about the sheet music?”
“I don’t know what you had to have sheet music for,” Caroline snapped. “Daddy didn’t like music. Daddy was tone deaf.”
“The sheet music is in the hands of our organist,” Arthur Pommerant said. “We all thought the selections were quite nice. Very nice indeed. A truly spiritual offering.”
“What about the menu for the wake?” James was feeling desperate. “You said you’d handle that. I’d like to know what—”
“Oh, it’s a little too early for that yet,” Arthur Pommerant told him. “We’ll have a full workup on th
e menu by tomorrow. And I want to assure you that we have been quite careful about all the arrangements. There shouldn’t be any difficulty at all arising out of the unusual delay we have had here in taking charge of the deceased for burial.”
“Oh, my God,” Caroline said.
Arthur Pommerant had a look on his face that James would have called beaming, except there was no smile to it. It was as if he had just played a very difficult game and won. For the first time in his life, James was inclined to credit the conspiracy theories his father and his sister had always been so fond of. He was also inclined to tell Arthur Pommerant that he would give the service at the wake himself, and that that service would be a Druid ritual, complete with the blood sacrifice of a bull.
“Well,” Arthur Pommerant murmured. “Maybe I should leave the two of you alone for a moment or two, to talk things over…”
“Yes,” James said, relieved. “Maybe you should.”
“All you have to do if you need me is to ring,” Arthur Pommerant said. “Or you can come along to the back and knock on my office door. Aren’t you waiting for someone else?”
“My sister Alyssa,” James said.
“She wouldn’t come near this place,” Caroline pointed out. “She said she would show up only to get us waiting around, fretting about her. It’s how she reassures herself that she’s still important to the family. It’s—”
“I know,” James said quickly. “It’s a kind of abuse.”
Caroline’s face got red. “Don’t patronize me,” she said. “I’m a fully adult human being who is perfectly capable of making her own decisions.”
“Why don’t you just make the decision to shut up?”
“I’ll be right in back in the office,” Arthur Pommerant said. “Really. It’s no trouble at all to get in touch with me if you need me. Just ring. Or come on back. I’m always on call.”
“Necrophiliac,” Caroline said.
Arthur Pommerant disappeared.
The Pommerant Funeral Parlor was on a city street that looked almost residential but was probably mostly deserted. Through the window of the reception room, James could see a hole-in-the-wall deli on the other side of the street with a red heart trimmed in white paper lace in the window. It was the first time it had penetrated to James’s consciousness that they were very close to Valentine’s Day. Maybe they should bury Paul on Valentine’s Day. Maybe that would say something.
