by Jane Haddam
Lida had the salad dressing finished. She picked up the cruet and walked over to him. She put the cruet down next to the salad bowl and stepped back.
“Nothing is wrong,” she said stubbornly. “Believe me. Nothing is wrong.”
Christopher Hannaford didn’t think he’d ever been handed a bigger crock of shit in his life.
Six
1
WHAT GREGOR DEMARKIAN LIKED best about the detective novels Bennis Hannaford sometimes gave him was the part where the detective calls all his suspects into a room and solves the crime in front of an audience. Rex Stout was good for that sort of thing. So were Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie. Gregor much preferred fantasy in his fiction to reality, since the reality was so very seldom really real. Gregor found the fantasy of the gathered suspects enormously funny, and not only because he had never once, in twenty years of federal police work, seen suspects so gathered to receive a solution. Gregor had sympathy for the fictional detectives. He knew why they wanted to bring the dramatis personae into one place. What he couldn’t understand were the fictional suspects. Why did they bother to come? Why did they put up with this kind of mock gathering of the clans at all? Gregor had once suggested to a suspect in a kidnapping case that they ought to meet for lunch, informally, to go over the possible consequences of the suspect’s descent into perjury. The suspect had told him to go to hell and taken off for a week on the Jersey shore instead.
That the remaining serious suspects in the murder of Paul Hazzard were sitting together in Paul Hazzard’s living room when Gregor, Russell Donahue, and Bob Cheswicki drove up was an accident. Gregor knew that. He hadn’t called these three people together. He hadn’t brought Russell and Bob with him so that they could watch him stage a tour de force and pounce on the killer in an unsuspected leap, eliciting an unguarded confession and bringing the case to a close with a crash. He had come here to get the murder weapon, that was all. And yet…
Gregor stood in the foyer of the Hazzards’ town house with his coat over his arm and his shoes dripped slush and rock salt into the runner carpet. In front of him. Bob Cheswicki was saying polite things to Alyssa Hazzard Roderick as she took his coat and put it away in the hall closet. Russell Donahue was standing beside him, looking uncomfortable. He hadn’t been in plainclothes long enough to be used to houses like this. Over at the archway that led to the living room, Caroline Hazzard, James Hazzard, and Fred Scherrer were waiting. Caroline looked a little defensive. James and Fred just looked bland. Bob and Russell walked away toward the living room and Gregor handed his coat to Alyssa Roderick.
“Don’t you people ever call before you show up at the door?” she asked. “We could have been out, you know. I was thinking about being out. The way things have been going, I was seriously thinking of being out to Kathmandu.”
She shoved Gregory’s coat in the closet and then walked away, passing by the others who were crowding up the entranceway and going straight for the love seat. Gregor watched her sit down and tuck her feet under her. She looked petulant.
“I hope you’ve come about something important,” she continued. “I hope you’re close to finding some resolution to this. We’re all getting very much on edge.”
“Mmmm,” Bob Cheswicki said. “Well. Yes.”
Russell Donahue put his hands in the pockets of his trousers.
If it went on like this much longer, they would all be frozen into immobility by embarrassment. Gregor looked around the room at the people now arrayed there. Alyssa was still on her love seat. Caroline was still on the long couch and put her feet on the floor, with her knees and ankles together, in the pose Bennis made fun of as “dancing-class rigor mortis.” The men were all still standing, however, police and suspects both. It was as if they wanted to be ready for an impending emergency. Gregor considered the situation and made up his mind to it. This wasn’t what he had expected, but it was what he’d gotten. He might as well use it.
He walked across the room to a fragile-legged wingback chair and sat down in it. It left his back to the wall of weapons but allowed him to face all the people, which was what was really important. He put his hands on his knees and leaned forward.
“For the moment,” he said, “I would like a little information about the financial arrangements in this house. I would like to know about the trust funds Paul Hazzard set up for his children, and about the legacy of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard and how it was left. Was there a lot of money in those trust funds?”
James Hazzard folded his arms across his chest. His eyes grew cold. “I don’t think we have to tell you that,” he said. “I don’t think we have to tell you anything without our lawyer present. And even then we don’t have to tell you anything at all.”
“True,” Gregor said. He forbore pointing out that Fred Scherrer was a lawyer, one of the best in the United States, and right on the scene. He didn’t know what sort of relationship there was between Scherrer and the Hazzard children. He went on. “Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s will is not a secret. It was probated over four years ago. The arrangements made by Paul Hazzard for putting money in trust are somewhat more private, but not by much. This is a murder investigation. It would take only a few phone calls.”
“Make a few phone calls, then,” James said.
“Oh, whatever for?” Alyssa countered. Her face was pale. “What difference does it make if he knows about our trust funds? They’re not that large, Mr. Demarkian. And I’m not sure about the capital. I just know I get about forty thousand dollars a year, and so do the other two.”
“That’s right,” Caroline said.
James shrugged. “What’s the old saying? ‘Enough to do anything we want to do but not enough to do nothing at all.’ It’s too bad Dad wasn’t as careful about the money he kept for himself.”
“The rumors are true, then, that he was broke?” Gregor asked.
“He wasn’t exactly broke,” Alyssa answered. “It was more like he just didn’t have enough money to go on living the way he had been living. I mean, the upkeep on the house was taken care of—”
“That’s in Jacqueline’s will,” James put in. “She made a trust fund for the house, or something.”
“That’s right,” Alyssa went on. “So we could all live here forever for free and that meant Daddy too, but you know what people are like. He was used to getting his suits custom-made and flashing an American Express platinum card everywhere he went. He didn’t want to give that up.”
“He had to give that up,” Caroline said distastefully. “Jacqueline’s murder absolutely destroyed him. Nobody wants to go to a therapist who may have murdered his own wife.”
“Daddy didn’t murder his wife,” Alyssa said.
Gregory’s chair looked reasonably padded, but it wasn’t really comfortable. “Let’s go back to Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s will,” he said. “I take it it wasn’t what you all had expected before she died.”
“It wasn’t what Dad had expected,” James Hazzard said uneasily. “You could see that immediately. When he discovered the provisions, he was in shock.”
“It had been changed,” Fred Scherrer put in. “Just a couple of months before Jacqueline died, she’d moved it all around. We think—although there’s no way anybody can be sure about it now—we think it was because she found out about Paul and Candida.”
“The original will was much more usual?” Gregor asked.
“The original will gave Paul a life interest in Jacqueline’s estate and then divided the estate among Caroline, James, and Alyssa on Paul’s death,” Fred Scherrer said.
Gregor nodded. “That’s not very different from what the will read in the end, is it, except for the provision for Paul Hazzard himself?”
“It made a big difference to Paul,” Fred Scherrer said.
“That’s true,” Gregor agreed, “but it didn’t make any difference to the three people here. Did the three of you know the precise provisions of your stepmother’s will?”
“She sat u
s down and explained the whole thing a few years before she died,” James said. He looked suddenly contrite. “We didn’t like Jackie much, you know. She wasn’t a very pleasant woman. But she’d known us since we were small children, and I suppose she thought of herself as our mother. She was never able to have any children of her own.”
“And then Candida DeWitt came along,” Gregor said.
“Daddy was like that,” Alyssa said. “He was to skirts the way raging bulls are to matadors’ capes.”
“It wasn’t the same with Candida,” Caroline said. “It went on forever.”
“It was over and done with by the time Jacqueline was killed,” Alyssa pointed out. “We think Jackie found out about it and laid it on the line for once. She was such a wimp.”
“She was a codependent with severe dependency problems,” Caroline said sniffily. “She really needed a group. I don’t know why she never went into one. It’s not as if she didn’t know where to find one.”
Alyssa wrapped her arms around her knees and hugged them close to her chest. “Jackie really was a very strange person. She was capable of anything, I think. And she was very upset the few weeks or so before she was murdered. That came out at the trial.”
Fred Scherrer nodded. “It did. The prosecution made a big thing of it.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well, that’s only logical.” He tapped his hands against his knees, thinking. The rest of them—including Donahue and Cheswicki—looked at him with steady curiosity. That was the worst of playing the Great Detective. People kept expecting you to pull a rabbit out of a hat or do the Irish jig or otherwise behave in a decisive and spectacular manner. They kept waiting for it.
Gregor considered the situation one more time. Sometimes what you intended to do had to be scrapped in favor of what you could do. Especially when what you could do was more. He reached into his pocket and came up with the tiny brown cloth bag Bennis had given him to carry the stray pearl earring in. He got up, walked over to the coffee table, and shook the earring out on its surface. Then he stepped back and looked around.
Russell Donahue and Bob Cheswicki knew what Gregor was doing, and could make a fair guess as to why he was doing it. They didn’t move from their places. Fred Scherrer and James Hazzard were interesting. They moved toward the coffee table to get a better look at what was now on it. It was Alyssa Roderick and Caroline Hazzard who were held by what was there. Caroline had gone very stiff and suspicious, as if she suspected a trap. Alyssa looked thoroughly bewildered.
“Is that my earring?” Alyssa asked. “Where did you get it? I went looking for it everywhere yesterday and I just couldn’t find it anywhere.”
2
In some cases, at some times, there is a kind of sea change. The emotional climate shifts. The complexion of the evidence mottles and molts. The angle from which the detective sees the suspects tilts in unforeseen directions. That was what happened in this case now. Gregor had known since Saturday who had committed these murders. He had known how. He had even known why, in a fashion. He knew the sort of explanation of motive that could be given in a court of law. Now he knew something else, something he would never be able to explain to anybody. Now he knew what the murderer felt like.
The little group of people were drawing closer and closer to the coffee table. Alyssa had the earring in her hand and was turning it this way and that, as if there might be something about it she didn’t already know.
“I think it’s mine,” she said. “They’re all so alike, these things. It’s maddening. Everybody has them. It certainly looks like mine.”
“You are missing one?” Gregor asked gently.
“Yes, I am,” Alyssa told him. “I wanted to wear them to the funeral home yesterday, but when I went through my jewelry box I could find only one.”
“I don’t think you ought to say any more.” Fred Scherrer’s voice was very quiet. It was also very firm. “I don’t think you ought to say another thing until you’ve got some permanent representation.”
“But why not?” Alyssa was bewildered. “Do you mean this was found at the scene of the crime or something?”
Gregor took the earring out of Alyssa Roderick’s hand and put it back in its little bag. “It was not found at the scene of the crime,” he said. “Not exactly. It was found in the guest room of Hannah Krekorian’s apartment, across the hall from the bedroom in which your father died.”
“It’s not mine, then,” Alyssa said. “I’ve never been in Hannah Krekorian’s apartment. And I didn’t kill my father.”
“No,” Gregor agreed, “you didn’t kill your father. There was a possibility you had, of course, but the earring takes care of that. What’s important here is that you know who killed your father. Just the way you knew who killed your stepmother more than four years ago.”
“No,” Alyssa said, being very earnest. “I don’t know. I really don’t, Mr. Demarkian. I have no idea.”
“Mr. Donahue,” Gregor said, “may I have the briefcase, please?”
Russell Donahue hurried forward with the briefcase, which was nothing more than a couple of thin sheets of leather fastened together, capable of holding half a dozen sheets of thin paper and no more. Gregor took it, laying it down on the coffee table. Then he opened it up and extracted two sheets of tracing paper. Both sheets of tracing paper had the same drawing on them. The drawings looked like this:
“From the beginning of this case,” Gregor said, “from the beginning, that is, the death of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard, the unanswered and seemingly unanswerable question has always been: What was the weapon? Eventually this became a question of what was the weapon in all three murders. The dagger was never more than a continual ruse by the murderer. It was a piece of luck, sitting there on the wall like that after Jacqueline was killed. It wasn’t planned. It didn’t need to be planned. If the dagger hadn’t existed, no weapon of any kind would ever have been discovered. Because the weapon wasn’t a weapon.”
“Wonderful,” James Hazzard said. “You talk just like a detective in a book. Do you write fiction for a living?”
“If I did, I would have caught on to this much more quickly,” Gregor answered. “You know, sometimes, in a case of murder, you have to know everything, every small and particular detail, before you can arrive at the solution. A friend of mine gives me fiction to read, Mr. Hazzard, in which that is almost always the detective’s predicament. Before he can pronounce himself satisfied, before he can emerge triumphantly into the light with the solution in his hand, he must clear up a thousand small details and find the rationale for a hundred thousand random acts—except, of course, that in books nothing is ever truly random. In real life, on the other hand, a great deal is random. Many things happen in a murder case that are in no way connected to the murder at all. And as for the murderer…” Gregor shrugged. “It’s nice to know all the whys and wherefores, but it isn’t always necessary. In real life you sometimes find that all you need is one small piece of definite evidence.”
James Hazzard leaned over and stared at the tracing paper. “And this is it?” he asked dubiously.
“These,” Gregor said, “are copies of the drawings made by the medical examiner’s office of the cross-sections of the wounds caused by the weapon entering the bodies of both Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard and Paul Hazzard. The one from Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body is on the left. The one from Paul Hazzard’s body is on the right. I also have the cross-section taken from the wound in Candida DeWitt’s body. I’ll get it out for you if you like. There won’t be any significant difference.”
Alyssa shuddered. “I think we’ve had enough wounds. Can they really get pictures like this out of flesh? God, that sounds awful.”
Gregor moved the tracing paper around. “Cross-sections have become fairly common in stabbing cases over the past few years. They weren’t so common when your stepmother died, but the medical examiner at the time was very disturbed by the case. He was disturbed by the wound and by the fact that that
dagger was being promoted as the weapon. I don’t blame him for being disturbed. He showed more common sense than almost anybody else assigned to the case. Look at that wall up there.” Gregor gestured at the weapons wall. “There have to be a hundred weapons up here at least, some of them large, some of them extremely colorful. I’ve said it before. If you were going to grab a weapon from this wall in the heat of an argument and kill somebody with it, it wouldn’t be a small hand weapon on an inconvenient bracket you’d have to reach around to get to. No, there is only one explanation for the recurring presence of that dagger, and that is that it came in handy once—meaning immediately after the death of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard—because in a lot of ways it resembled the actual murder weapon.”
“The dagger resembled the actual murder weapon,” James repeated. He looked dazed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian, but I’ve always thought that dagger was a very odd-looking thing. I don’t think it looks like anything else at all.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “I felt the same way after I first saw the drawings in the original case, when I first had access to the cross-sections taken from Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body. I went on feeling that way even after I handled the actual murder weapon. I was doing then what you are doing now. I was trying to think of some weapon that resembled the dagger.”
“But you said there was a weapon that resembled the dagger,” James protested. “You just did.”
“No, I didn’t.” Gregor shook his head. “A murder weapon is not necessarily a weapon per se. People are killed with knives and guns and hand grenades, but they are also killed with bookends and bowling balls and pinking shears. Some nonweapons are obvious candidates for murder weapons, like straight-edged razors and fireplace pokers. Others are not.”
“So this is a weapon that’s not a weapon.” Fred Scherrer was following the proceedings shrewdly. “Surely the police know enough to look for something like that. Even assuming it had been cleaned up, whatever it was, why didn’t they find it?”
