by Jane Haddam
“I know what you mean, but sometimes there are considerations of size involved. If you find a six-foot-ten-inch three-hundred-and-fifty-pound football player lying dead on the floor with his neck broken and the fingerprints of his assailant imprinted in his flesh, those fingerprints might belong to a woman, but she’d be a very large woman.”
“I see what you mean. I hope you see what I mean. Do you understand women?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. I don’t even understand Bennis, and she’s my own sister.”
“Nobody understands Bennis,” Gregor said. “It’s not possible.”
“Sometimes I think there’s just nothing you can do right,” Christopher went on. “If you fall in love with a woman because she’s beautiful, she’s angry at you for that. If you fall in love with her for herself and you don’t care what she looks like, she’s angry with you for that. If it matters to you how old she is, she’s angry with you for that. If it doesn’t matter to you how old she is, she’s angry with you for that. It’s enough to make you want to start drinking in the mornings.”
“The Ararat doesn’t sell alcohol in the mornings.”
“I guess I don’t really want any. I think I’m having a bad day.”
They were right at the door of the Ararat. Gregor didn’t have time to ask him if there was some woman in particular who had caused these ruminations—in Gregor’s experience, there always was—or if he was, truly, just having a bad day. Maybe this was the result of a week or so of staying in the same apartment with Bennis. That could do this kind of thing to anybody.
Gregor opened the plate glass door and let Christopher go in ahead of him. Inside, Linda Melajian was in the process of putting out little straw baskets full of heart-shaped candies on all the tables. The baskets had that unmistakable Donna Moradanyan touch. On each and every one of the baskets’ handles, a short length of red yarn had been tied into a bow and anchored with a minuscule red-and-white striped arrow.
“Isn’t it wonderful that Donna Moradanyan is feeling so much better the last couple of days?” Linda Melajian said.
Gregor took up residence in the window booth. “Wonderful,” he repeated.
“I’ll go get coffee,” Linda Melajian said. “I’ll tell my father to get ready for one cholesterol special and one mushroom omelet. Old George isn’t still sick, is he?”
“He looked fine to me,” Gregor told her. “He’s out helping Donna do something to our building.”
Linda hurried away, got the coffee, hurried back again. She set them up with a pot and then disappeared on the run one more time, going back to the kitchen.
“So,” Gregor said to Christopher. “You and Paul Hazzard. Why do I feel that’s an unlikely combination?”
“Because it is.” Christopher laughed. “Me and the recovery movement, that’s an unlikely combination too. Do you remember when you first met us, when all that happened at our house, when my father died?”
“Oh, yes,” Gregor said.
“Well”—Christopher poured coffee—“about that time I was in, I think it was seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth of debt in gambling losses. Really crazy gambling losses. Cards. Roulette. Nonsense.”
“Illegal gambling?”
“Mostly, yeah. But I didn’t do too badly at places like Vegas and Reno when I had the cash. The problem was what I did when I didn’t have the cash.”
“Meaning run a tab.”
“Precisely. I ran a lot of tabs with a lot of people and always the wrong people. More than once, Bennis bailed me out of trouble. The year my father died, I was more than a little overdue. I was getting phone calls threatening me with bodily harm, if you know what I mean.”
“Death?”
“No, just maiming.” Christopher smiled. “Even at the time I wasn’t crazy enough to wait around until somebody was threatening to kill me. Anyway, Bennis bailed me out of that and then she loaned me the money to go to this place in Vermont for three months, where a friend of mine had gone to quit gambling. That wasn’t her idea, by the way. It was mine. If you say ‘therapy’ to Bennis, she spits.”
“I know.”
“Right. Well. Anyway. I went. And as you can guess, it was a place run by Paul Hazzard’s organization. I’ve been trying to work out the timing. My father died after Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard did—after by at least a couple of years, I’m sure, which means that I was up in Vermont either while Paul Hazzard was standing trial or after it was over, but not before.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. Well. I was there for about a month and I was going crazy, only not crazy about gambling. Do you know anything at all about how these therapy programs work?”
“Maybe,” Gregor said cautiously. “I’ve heard a lot of stories since this thing started.”
“The stories were probably all true,” Christopher told him. “The first day, I was dragged into a room with a psychologist in it and lectured about my ‘addictions.’ There was no such thing as a simple ‘addict.’ All addicts had multiple ‘addictions.’ If I was addicted to gambling, then I had to be addicted to other things as well. The regime at the center was purged of all refined sugar, all alcohol, all tobacco, all drugs, all red meat.”
“Red meat?”
“Yeah, well, according to the theory, red meat has a natural tranquilizer in it, an animal protein that acts as a tranquilizer, I don’t remember, and a tranquilizer is a drug.”
“Oh.”
“You’re getting that look on your face,” Christopher said. “Everybody does when they come in contact with the recovery movement for the first time. You get used to this stuff if you hear it often enough. Anyway, the deal was, we had group therapy at two every afternoon, and what we were supposed to do at Group was testify to the damage our addictions had done to us. To be exact, Mr. Demarkian, we were supposed to tell horror stories. I had some pretty good horror stories about gambling, and I told them, but then they wanted horror stories about my ‘other addictions.’ Which I didn’t think I had. I mean, I smoked marijuana fairly frequently in those days, but I wasn’t compulsive about it. It certainly never interfered with my work or my life. The same thing with wine.”
“So?”
“So,” Christopher said, “they kept pushing me and pushing me. They kept telling me I was lying. They kept telling me I was in denial. I asked them what I was supposed to say if I was telling them the truth—if I wasn’t addicted to marijuana or a closet alcoholic or whatever, how did I express that so that they knew I was telling the truth. And the basic answer was that there was no way I could prove I was telling the truth, because there was no way I could be telling the truth, because if I wasn’t addicted, the question would never have come up. It went beyond guilty until proven innocent. It became guilty with no way to prove yourself innocent. Guilty because you were accused.”
“What did you do?”
Christopher shrugged. “I’d signed myself up for three months. Bennis had paid for three months. And I did have a problem with gambling. I decided to give it a shot. One day I staged a big conversion scene in group. After that I just made stuff up.”
“Horror stories, you mean?”
“Right. I was good at it too. I was so good at it, I became a kind of institutional wonder story. I got trotted out for all the visiting dignitaries. So, when Paul Hazzard himself showed up in person, I got trotted out then too.”
Linda Melajian was back with the food. Gregor accepted his absently and saw that Christopher was paying no attention to his omelet at all. Gregor finished off the coffeepot and handed it back to Linda.
“When you say ‘trotted out,’ what do you mean?”
“We’d have special therapy sections with the participants picked in advance. Not the usual groups. There were a bunch of us who were considered to be good for the institution’s image.”
“And there was one of these special therapy sessions when Paul Hazzard visited?”
“Right. The thing is, Hazzard visited for quite a long time, at
least a week, maybe longer. He didn’t just come in and out for one session. And he didn’t come alone. He had one of his daughters with him.”
“Which one?”
“Alice?” Christopher asked. “Does that sound right? Thin blond woman who eats a lot.”
“Alyssa.”
“Is that it? Whatever. She was there, but she wasn’t allowed to sit in on our group sessions. So when Hazzard first met Sylvia Charlow, his daughter wasn’t there.”
“Who was Sylvia Charlow?”
“Woman in our group. Older woman, about sixty-five or so. Fairly well preserved, with all that means. She was in Vermont with one of those codependency things. You know. An addiction to addictions. I’ve never been entirely sure what they mean by it all.”
“Neither have I.”
“With Sylvia, her value to the institution was that she talked so well about herself,” Christopher said. “She was really eloquent. I kept wondering why she didn’t give up therapy and write a woman’s novel. She had such a command of prose. When Paul Hazzard met her he was enchanted, and we could all see it. And sure enough, when Group was over he took her aside.”
“Aren’t there ethical considerations in a case like that?” Gregor asked. “I keep hearing things about Paul Hazzard. They all seem to be—about women.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. There are ethical considerations, Gregor, but for God’s sake. Nobody pays attention to them. Paul Hazzard sure as hell never did. I saw him later that same evening, after dinner, with Sylvia in tow. They were leaving the main building and going for a walk on the grounds.”
“By themselves?”
“Most definitely by themselves. I saw them the next day too. He had her stuffed into a corner of the main lounge away from everybody else. He was sitting so close to her, his knees were digging into her thighs. She had to sit sideways to accommodate him. And he kept leaning over her. He reminded me of a vulture.”
“I think he was one.”
“I think he was too,” Christopher agreed. “The thing is, this little dance went on for a couple of days, and then suddenly Paul Hazzard’s daughter seemed to be aware of it. She was furious. I mean really furious. Every time she saw them together, even if they were just standing side by side in the middle of a crowd of people, she would come over and bust them up. Sylvia wasn’t taking this very well. Paul Hazzard was ready to kick somebody. And all that interference wasn’t making Alyssa Hazzard any happier. She got madder and madder and madder by the day.”
“I think therapy sounds like a wonderful thing,” Gregor said blandly. “I thought the point of all this nonsense was to get your life under control. Or at least to get your emotions under control.”
“Never mention control to anyone in recovery,” Christopher said. “A need for control is a sign of codependency. Maybe they’ve got a point. Maybe I was watching three completely noncodependent people. They were certainly out of control. I think Sylvia was thrilled with the trouble she was causing. She was that kind of woman. Paul Hazzard was after her anytime his daughter’s back was turned. The daughter was getting more and more frenzied. Then, just before lunch one day, Paul Hazzard and Sylvia Charlow disappeared. Poof. One minute they were with us. The next minute they were gone. A minute and a half later, Alyssa showed up to eat. She looked all around the dining room and didn’t find either one of them. She looked all around the dining room again. Then she said, ‘That goddamned shithead’ in a very loud voice and went racing out again. At which point, of course, we all did the inevitable.”
“Which was what?”
“Which was follow them, of course. The staff tried to stop us, but there was nothing they could really do about it. We all poured out of the dining room and went racing up the stairs to the second floor. Alyssa Hazzard went straight up to Paul Hazzard’s room and started banging on the door. It was locked, of course, but she kept banging. In the end, there was nothing he could do.”
“He opened up.”
“Of course he did. To give him credit, he wasn’t disheveled and neither was Sylvia. There was no reason at all to think they were doing anything more provocative than talking. I don’t think Alyssa cared what they were doing. She just started screeching at them.”
“Was she screeching anything in particular?”
“Yep. That’s why we’re having this conversation, isn’t it? It was what she said to Sylvia that struck me, a couple of days ago, as having relevance to what’s been going on around here. Like I said a little while ago. It’s a side issue now.”
“What did she say to Sylvia?”
“She said, ‘You silly cow. He’s after you only for your money.’ ”
Gregor considered this. It fit, of course, but did it make any difference?
He thought even Hannah now believed that Paul Hazzard had been after only her money. And they all knew Hannah wasn’t committing these murders.
“What did Alyssa Hazzard say to her father?”
Christopher Hannaford laughed and poked at his omelet with his fork. “Oh, that was typical. That was right out of a soap opera. ‘You old ass,’ she told him. ‘You know what trouble you got us all into when you tried this the last time. You know what kind of trouble you’re going to get us all into again. What the hell do you think you’re trying to pull?’ It was hysterical, Gregor, it really was. I didn’t even blame her. He was an old ass.”
Five
1
FRED SCHERRER HAD BEEN dealing with police officers now for better than thirty years, and he couldn’t help thinking that he would have made a better one than most of the ones he’d met. He would certainly not be as prone to thinking in tracks. That was why he was so often victorious in his fights against official law enforcement agencies. That was why he was so good at getting acquittals not only for the possibly innocent, but for the flagrantly guilty. Police departments got into ruts and dragged district attorneys down with them. Judges took what was handed to them and never bothered to think a case through. If Fred had been this particular police department dealing with this particular case, he would have gotten out of one particular rut right away. He would have stopped insisting to himself and everybody else that the two murders had to have been committed by the same person. Fred didn’t see why that was necessary at all. For the first murder he favored that old woman in whose apartment the murder had been committed. For the second murder he favored himself.
Of course, Fred thought, lying on the made-up bed in the hotel room he had rented at the Sheraton Society Hill, he knew the second murder had not been committed by himself. He’d had a few wild nights in his life, especially in the army, but he would have remembered it if he had stabbed the woman he was interested in to death. That didn’t matter. If you thought of the law as a contest—and Fred always had thought of the law as a contest, a gladiators’ showdown between the forces of Oppression and the champions of the Individual—all that really mattered was the win and lose. Fred had worked very hard to be the one who always won. That was all that mattered.
It was now eleven o’clock on Monday morning and he was going crazy. That was all that mattered. He was staring at the ceiling. He was devising clever prosecution strategies to put his own sweet butt in the electric chair. He was trying to remember if Pennsylvania had an electric chair. He was doing nothing useful at all, and he was about to burst. He still thought it had been the right decision, to stay over for a couple of days now that Candida was dead. This way he didn’t look as if he were trying to escape investigation. He wished somebody would come to his door and demand something out of him that he would have to cope with. His room was nice and big and clean and empty. His ceiling was painted in thick cream that looked as if it had been polished. The room service in this hotel was a marvel. He had to do something.
“Listen,” Sid had said on the phone that morning. “Get out of that room. Go to the library. Let me fax you some work. You know you by now, Fred. If you don’t have anything around to occupy your mind, you’re going to do somethi
ng stupid.”
“Don’t fax me any work,” Fred had told him then. “It will only get lost. I’ve got other things on my mind for the moment.”
What he should have had on his mind was Candida dead on the floor, Candida murdered, Candida the person. What he ought to have been doing was having an orgy of emotion. Fred had never been very good at emotions. They had always seemed to him to be such a waste of time. He preferred to think.
Daggers, he thought now. Walls. Town houses. Jealousy. Money. Everybody thought he needed more money. Billionaires thought they needed more money. There was no end to it.
He sat up on the bed. What hair he had was a mess. He could feel it sticking out of his skull in sharp points. He smoothed it down.
Money, he thought again. Money and the dagger. Those were the keys. It was all so clear to him, sharp as a photograph, except that it wasn’t exactly. It was as if he were looking at the picture upside down. Jacqueline lying on the floor of the living room in that town house, lying dead the way he had seen her in the police photographs that had been handed over to him in discovery. Candida De Witt, talking calmly in the car on Friday night about what she knew and what she didn’t know. Candida, lying dead herself on another living room floor. Christ, what was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he make it come out straight?
He got off the bed. His coat was lying over the back of the desk chair on the other side of the room. He had left it there when he had gone down to breakfast to let the maid clean up. The maid had picked it up and shaken it out and folded it neatly and left it there herself. Fred shrugged it on and searched around in the pockets to find his gloves. He never actually wore his gloves, but he liked to know he had them with him. He was the same way about the personal confessions of his clients. He liked to know if they were guilty or innocent. He made a point of insisting that they tell him. He was better than a priest at never telling anyone else. It just made him feel better to know.
Fred let himself into the hall, checked the pocket of his pants for his room key, and headed for the elevators. Going down, he went over it all one more time. There were two other people in the elevator car with him. One was a stout little elderly nun in a white habit that reached just to the middle of her knees, and a black veil. She looked mad as hell. The other was a middle-aged woman in a powder-blue suit with a pleading expression on her face. They seemed to be together.
