by Jane Haddam
“They make really wonderful chicken salad in the restaurant downstairs,” the woman in the pastel suit was saying. “It will be perfect for you. I know how you love your chicken salad.”
Fred got out of the elevator as soon as the doors opened on the ground floor. He didn’t care if the elderly nun liked chicken salad or not. He passed the reception desk and saw that it had sprouted decorations it hadn’t had when he’d checked in on Saturday night. There was a bright crimson cardboard heart trimmed in red paper lace next to each of the check-in stations. The young woman stationed at the cashier’s desk was wearing a “Be My Valentine” heart pin on her right shoulder. Fred passed them all and went out onto the street.
Valentine’s Day was—when? Friday? Thursday? Decorations were appearing all around him, in the windows of stores, on the doors of restaurants and delis. This was a busy part of the city. Fred walked up to one of the hotel doormen and gave him the address of the Hazzard town house. The doorman was wearing one of those “Be My Valentine” pins on his tunic. It was so cold out here, Fred’s face felt stiff enough to crack. The doorman was stamping his feet and whacking his gloved hands together every chance he got.
“I wouldn’t bother to pay for a cab to go there,” the doorman said. “It’s only about ten blocks away. That way.” He pointed into the traffic.
“What about the neighborhood?” Fred asked him.
The doorman shrugged. “You shouldn’t have too much trouble, even in that coat. But things are the way things are these days. It’s a new world.”
Actually, Fred thought, it was a very old world. He could have told the doorman things about the crime in ancient Rome that would have curled his hair. He dodged into the traffic and headed out in the direction the doorman had pointed him in. He would have walked a good ways no matter what the doorman had told him. Walking helped him think. Besides, one of the reasons he had picked this hotel was that he’d known it was close to the Hazzard town house.
Daggers. Jacqueline. Living rooms. Stab wounds. Prosecutors. When he’d come to Philadelphia to defend Paul Hazzard against charges of murder, he had thought about the project in purely technical terms. Paul Hazzard was a friend of his. Paul Hazzard was in trouble. Paul Hazzard needed to be gotten out of trouble. Fred had asked Paul the ultimate question—did you do it? and received the ultimate answer—no I didn’t—and taken enough care to ensure he was being told the truth, but he hadn’t gone beyond that. It had been different with Paul, because Paul was somebody he knew. Fred had been reluctant to push the way he might have pushed other people. Fred hadn’t even been sure he wanted to know what had really happened there. And now…
Daggers. Jacqueline. Living rooms. Stab wounds. Prosecutors. Money. Blood.
It was very cold. Fred Scherrer had been moving quickly. Now he was standing right in front of the Hazzard town house, looking up at its shiny black door. Around him, the city seemed to have deteriorated. One or two of the buildings looked abandoned. There was a vacant lot full of rubbish up the street. Paul had been so proud of this house and his ownership of it. It had been a form of instant background. Fred didn’t think Paul had been capable of preventing himself from lying about how he had gotten hold of it. He wondered how much longer Paul would have been able to hold on to it in the middle of all of this. Philadelphia was falling apart. New York was falling apart. It was all going to hell.
Fred went up the stairs to the front door and pressed the bell.
Philadelphia and New York could do what they wanted to do.
He was going to get this straightened out in his head.
2
Caroline was in her studio when the doorbell rang, bent over her drafting table under the hot light of a flexible lamp. She should have been at work, but she hadn’t been able to face it. First Daddy, then Candida. The local press was having a field day. The national press was probably being just as bad, but Caroline hadn’t checked. She hated television. It was a propaganda machine for codependence.
Caroline would have felt annoyed with herself for not going in to work—not guilty; she had purged herself of guilt—except that James hadn’t gone in either. She had heard him call Max this morning and cancel all his appointments. Alyssa hadn’t left the house either, but there was nothing unusual in that. Alyssa went out only for social reasons anyway. They were all there together and not talking to each other. It was exactly the way it had been after Jacqueline died.
Caroline needed an arch support anchored at the north end of the trellis. She picked up the compass, placed the point of the pencil where it needed to be, placed the swing point where she thought it had to go to give her the sweep she needed, and drew. She got it wrong.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang again. Caroline got up, let herself out of the studio, and went to listen at the stairwell. If nobody else answered the door, she wasn’t going to. She didn’t want to talk to people today. She was sure somebody would answer though. She knew James and Alyssa far too well.
The doorbell rang for the third time. James came jogging out from the back of the ground floor, from the direction of the basement stairs. He must have been in the kitchen.
“Coming,” he shouted as he came.
Caroline leaned far over the railing and saw James stop as he reached the door and go for the eyehole. Then he stepped back and started to open up.
“Fred,” he said, “what are you doing here?”
Caroline watched Fred Scherrer come into the foyer. His coat was open and his hands were bare. He looked cold. James closed the door behind him and began walking toward the ground floor living room.
“I’m staying over a couple of days in case they need me for the investigation,” Fred was saying. “At least, that was my idea. But they don’t seem to need me for the investigation and I was getting a little nuts. I guess I wanted the walk.”
“You ought to be glad you didn’t come over yesterday,” James told him. “There were about six reporters stationed out there all afternoon and half the night. I hope they all die of frostbite.”
“Who is it?” Alyssa’s voice came bouncing out from the same direction James had come in. Caroline thought they must have been back there together. She wondered what they could have been up to.
Alyssa appeared in the foyer.
“Oh, Fred,” she said. “It’s you. I was wondering why we hadn’t heard from you. It seemed only natural that you’d come over.”
After that the three of them went off into the living room, and Caroline couldn’t see them anymore.
Up on the landing, Caroline stepped back and tried to think. She didn’t want to see Fred Scherrer any more than she wanted to see anybody else. She didn’t like Fred Scherrer. After Jacqueline had been murdered, Fred Scherrer had been a first-class pain in the ass. Still, he was tricky, there was that. You could never tell what he was up to. It didn’t make sense for her to leave him down there with James and Alyssa, where she couldn’t hear them.
Caroline went back into the studio and looked around. Her drafting table was a mess. Her black leather tote bag was sitting on the floor next to her drafting table stool, open. Caroline took her equipment off the drafting table and put it in the tote bag. Then she snapped shut the tote bag’s magnetic clip and hoisted the bag onto her shoulder. She felt her efforts were halfhearted. She was usually obsessively neat about her studio. Now her drafting table was still a mess and she was going to turn her back on it and walk out.
Obsessiveness is a symptom of codependency. Perfectionism is the essence of codependency. One of these days she really had to get her act together.
Caroline locked the studio door behind her. Then she started down the stairs, listening carefully. This was one of those old houses that was too well built. She couldn’t hear anything. She went down a few steps and stood still, waiting. Then she gave up and went down the rest of the way.
At the entryway Caroline could finally hear something. It was Alyssa’s voice, high and musical, going on and on about trivialities.
“Nicholas keeps telling me that there’s going to be all this money and that the taxes have already been paid on it or the taxes have been figured in, I don’t remember which,” Alyssa was saying, “and I’ve been telling Nicholas that after this it’s going to be impossible for us to spend any significant time in Philadelphia. I mean it was bad enough after all that mess with Jacqueline, but for this to happen just as all that was beginning to fade from public memory—I just can’t stand it.”
Caroline walked over to the living room archway and looked through. James stood next to the portable bar, pouring himself a glass of Perrier water. Alyssa sat on the love seat with her legs tucked under her, lotus fashion. Fred stood in the middle of the room, looking up at the weapons on the wall. None of them had noticed her. She walked all the way inside and said, “Hello.”
Fred Scherrer turned around. “Hello,” he said. “I was wondering where you were. I thought you might have gone in to work.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to get any work done,” Caroline said.
“That’s what I told myself.” James finished pouring his Perrier and took a sip. “It’s just the way I told Max. If I kept my appointments today, everybody I saw would want to know when I was going to channel Paul’s spirit so the police could catch his murderer. I couldn’t face it.”
Fred Scherrer went back to looking at the weapons wall. “I’ve been thinking about this wall ever since your father died. It’s been making me crazy. And now that I’m here, looking at it, it doesn’t tell me a thing.”
There were all kinds of things on the portable bar besides Perrier water. There was even liquor of half a dozen kinds. It was one of Daddy’s hypocrisies. Daddy talked a good game about addictions, but he was the ultimate example of a man in denial. He didn’t really believe he could have any addictions himself. Caroline knew she had every addiction on record, in spite of the fact that she’d never actually tried any hard drugs. She knew that if she was ever so much as in the same room with heroin or cocaine, she would fall into a drug-induced swoon and have to be rushed to the hospital. She went through the bottles on the portable bar and rejected each one in turn. The liquor was an obvious no-no. The regular soda had sugar in it and the diet soda had aspartame. The one bottle of “fruit juice” wasn’t really fruit juice at all, but a commercial “punch” full of chemicals. Caroline gave up and went to sit down on the long couch that had its back to the street-side window. That way, she stayed well away from Alyssa.
“So,” she said. “Exactly what’s going on here? Are you holding some kind of investigation?”
“Of course Fred isn’t holding some kind of investigation,” James said, irritated. “Fred doesn’t hold investigations. He defends people after they’ve been investigated.”
“I’m sure Fred holds investigations sometimes,” Alyssa said. “He would have to, wouldn’t he? Fred has a very interesting theory about all this, Caroline. He thinks the key to it all is Jacqueline. I told him I thought Jacqueline had died so long ago, nobody could possibly know any more about it than they already did.”
“That makes sense,” James said.
Alyssa waved this away. “Caroline knows what I’m talking about. I wonder what that Demarkian person is doing, that’s what I wonder. Fred talked to him yesterday, but other than that, he seems to have disappeared. I think it’s creepy.”
“I never thought there was any mystery about what happened to Jacqueline,” Caroline said. “I thought Daddy killed her.”
Fred Scherrer turned around, curious. “Did you? You never had any doubt in your mind?”
“Of course not.”
“You don’t have any doubt about it now?”
“No, I don’t. Why should I?”
“Well,” Fred Scherrer said, “there are a couple of problems here. There’s the fact that Paul was killed with the same weapon or something very much like the same weapon and in the same way as Jacqueline was. There is that.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Caroline insisted. “In the first place, we don’t know he was killed with the same weapon, because we don’t know what the weapon was that killed Jacqueline. In the second place, it was a famous case, in all the newspapers. It would be easy to copycat that kind of crime.”
“Maybe,” Fred Scherrer said. He sounded skeptical.
“If I’d thought Daddy had killed Jacqueline, I wouldn’t have gone on living in this house,” Alyssa said. “Talk about creepy. Did you lock your bedroom door every night before you went to sleep?”
“Of course I didn’t,” Caroline said. “For God’s sake, Alyssa, you’re being ridiculous. Daddy wouldn’t have any reason to kill me. Or you or James either. We didn’t have any money to leave him. And he wasn’t screwing somebody he hoped we wouldn’t find out about.”
“There’s another way these two crimes are alike,” Fred Scherrer said. “The murder of Jacqueline Hazzard and then the murder of Paul Hazzard. Have you noticed? None of the three of you has an alibi for either one.”
Caroline had put her tote bag down right next to her on the floor. Now she reached over and picked it up. She tried to carry cans of plain, unadulterated apple juice around with her at all times. She bought them at an organic deli half a block from the place she worked. The organic deli also carried potato chips that had been broiled instead of fried. They were peculiar.
Caroline found a can of apple juice and took it out. It had an earth-friendly snap top that left no garbage when it was opened. She opened it and put the can down on the arm of the couch. Then she put her tote bag carefully back on the floor.
“Do you know what I think you’re doing?” she asked Fred Scherrer. “I think you’re trying to work us all up. I think you’re trying to say things we’re all going to regret.”
James laughed. “Hell,” he said. “That’s what defense attorneys do.”
“He’s not being a defense attorney in this case,” Caroline said. “He’s being a suspect, and that’s the point. He isn’t trying to solve Daddy’s murder. He doesn’t have to. The police will do that. He isn’t trying to solve Jacqueline’s murder either. He knows all he has to know about that. He’s trying to get out from under what happened to Candida, that’s what he’s trying to do.”
“Caroline, be reasonable,” her brother told her. “As hard as it may be to go against your nature, at least try to be reasonable. The same person who killed Dad had to have killed Candida. No matter what did or didn’t happen to Jacqueline, even you have to see that.”
“No,” Caroline said. “I don’t have to see it.”
“Caroline likes coincidences,” Fred Scherrer said, still looking at the wall of weapons. “Big coincidences.”
“You’re just here to stir us all up,” Caroline said placidly. “It’s a form of codependency—”
“—oh, for Christ’s sake,” James exploded.
“—but it’s a very toxic form of behavior,” Caroline went on, ignoring him. “It’s really very destructive. It’s almost always resorted to out of fear. I wonder what you think this is going to get you.”
“I wonder what you think this is going to get you,” Fred Scherrer said, intrigued. “Do you ever actually talk like a human being? Or is your whole head stuffed full of this kind of jargon?”
“Her whole head is stuffed full of cotton wool,” James said.
Over on the love seat, Alyssa stirred. Then she stood and walked over to the couch where Caroline was sitting. Caroline moved aside, but Alyssa wasn’t coming for her. Alyssa was leaning against the back of the couch and looking out into the street. Caroline turned sideways so that she could see too.
“Quiet, everybody,” Alyssa ordered. “We’ve got company.”
“What kind of company?” James asked. “If it’s more reporters, I’m going to have them arrested.”
“It’s Demarkian and those two policemen,” Alyssa said. “The ones who were all on the news together Saturday night. They look very grim.”
“You’re dr
amatizing yourself,” Caroline said. “It’s called the soap-opera syndrome. It’s a form of addiction.”
Alyssa wasn’t listening to her. None of them were. None of them ever did. Caroline looked out at Gregor Demarkian and the other two men climbing the steps to the town house’s front door. By now, she thought, they all really ought to know better.
3
Across town, on Cavanaugh Street, Christopher Hannaford stood in the kitchen of Lida Arkmanian’s town house, putting together a salad. He was wearing socks but no shoes, jeans, and a flannel shirt but no belt. His black hair was a mess. Lida was standing on the far side of the kitchen, at the counter next to the stove, putting together the salad dressing. This was at least the fourth time Christopher had made a salad in this room. It had become a routine. It ought to be making him feel wonderful, or at least be making him feel secure. Instead, he felt like cow dung.
“Listen,” he said finally. “Why don’t you just talk to me? Why don’t you just tell me what’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong, Christopher.”
“Of course something is wrong, Lida. For Christ’s sake. What do you take me for?”
“Maybe ‘wrong’ is the wrong word to use.”
“Fine. Pick the right word to use.”
“You’re making too much out of nothing.”
He sliced a pile of radish chips the size of Mount McKinley. He opened the drawer in the counter next to the refrigerator and got out a plastic storage bag. He put the radish chips into the plastic storage bag and the plastic storage bag in the refrigerator. Really trivial things were beginning to seem terribly important.
“Lida,” he said again.
