by Jane Haddam
“Oh, dear Lord,” he said. “That’s a mess.”
“Yes,” old George agreed. “That’s a mess. It’s what I was trying to get across. Tommy is a very bright child, but he’s a child. He understands about half of things, which in this situation is the worst possible thing. And there is something more, Krekor. I think, in the months since then, the problem has been getting worse.”
“Worse how?”
“I don’t know. I am not a psychiatrist, Krekor. I am not even Ann Landers. I know only that Donna is very upset. And she is getting more and more upset every day.”
“She hasn’t talked to you about it?”
“She wouldn’t talk to me about it, Krekor. I am not her confidant.”
“What about Lida Arkmanian? Or Bennis? Isn’t Bennis her best friend?”
“Bennis is her best friend, but if they have talked about this, I don’t know. Women talk about everything together when they are friends, Krekor, do they not?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been able to figure out the first thing about women.”
“I, Krekor, have been able to figure out that whatever it is I think I am doing right, I am doing wrong, but this may not be universal. Robert Redford may have a different experience.”
“Robert Redford has a different experience from all of us,” Gregor said, getting up. “Do you think I should talk to her? Do you think there’s anything either one of us can do?”
“I think we should leave her alone to work it out for herself. You know how upset they all get when they think we’re meddling. Of course, they all meddle themselves the first chance they get, but this is human nature. Isn’t that right?”
“Of course it is,” Gregor said, and supposed he even believed it. After all, he had spent his life meddling in one thing or another. He hadn’t even been able to retire without finding a way to go on meddling.
He went out into old George’s foyer and picked up his coat and Bennis’s computer printouts.
“I’ll be back later today,” he said. “I’m glad you’re looking so much better than you did yesterday.”
“Angela came in and threatened to nurse me back to health,” old George said. “That always fixes me right up.”
2
Up on the third floor a few moments later, Gregor got his door open, threw his coat onto his coatrack, and looked at the sheaf of computer papers he still had under his arm. He thought about going up to Donna Moradanyan’s apartment, but decided against it. Old George was right. Donna wouldn’t welcome his meddling. If she wanted his help, she’d come along and ask for it. He threw the bolt on his door with a satisfying click and went into his kitchen. It didn’t matter to him that nobody else on Cavanaugh Street ever seemed to lock anything. He was a man of the world. He knew better. He threw Bennis’s computer paper onto his kitchen table and went hunting around for coffee.
“Hazzard,” he said to himself absently. “Paul Hazzard.”
It was impossible, really. He couldn’t stop himself. All the time he’d been down at old George’s, even when he and George had been talking about Donna Moradanyan, some part of his brain had been thinking about Paul and Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. And why? Bennis hadn’t said a single really intriguing thing about the case. He had no new evidence and no hope of getting any. The investigation was four years old and probably of no interest to anybody but melodrama enthusiasts like Bennis Hannaford and writers for second-rate local newspapers and supermarket tabloids. And yet…
“It’s that damned dagger, that’s what it is,” Gregor said to the air.
He had a jar of instant coffee in one hand and a white coffee mug in the other. He put them both down on the counter next to the sink and drifted over to the kitchen table. He made terrible coffee. Tibor made worse coffee, but that didn’t make his own any better. It was like the difference between arsenic and cyanide. One might be a little less strong than the other, but they were both lethal. He paged through the computer printouts and shook his head.
“Newspaper stories,” he muttered to himself in disgust. That’s all these pages held—old newspaper stories, old magazine stories, clips and items from several dozen sources. The computer service Bennis subscribed to must be some kind of media research vehicle. It wouldn’t help him any. If there was anything Gregor had learned after twenty years in the FBI, it was that newspapers almost never got anything right.
He got his kettle, filled it with water, and put it on the stove. Then he went to the phone hanging on the wall near the refrigerator. It took a little thought to decide who would be best to call. It was a question of who had access to what information and who owed whom a favor. Finally, he made up his mind and punched a number out on the touchtone pad.
“Philadelphia Police Department,” the woman on the other end of the line said, answering. “Commissioner’s office.”
“This is Gregor Demarkian. I’d like to speak to Robert Cheswicki, please.”
“If you will wait a moment, I’ll see if he’s in.”
Gregor waited for her to ask him to spell his name. When she didn’t, he got a little nervous. Secretaries and telephone operators who didn’t ask him to spell his name usually got it wrong. He had been transformed into “Greg Marks” by more people in more places than he wanted to count. This time he was lucky. Either this woman was better at names than most of the people Gregor had dealt with, or Bob Cheswicki was very good at deciphering mangled messages.
“Gregor,” Bob said, sounding as sunshiny and beamy as he looked in person. Gregor had always thought there was something wrong with an assistant commissioner of police who was cheerful all the time. “Where did you come from? I haven’t heard from you in ages!”
“I’ve been leading a reasonably quiet life the past few months, believe it or not. Nobody’s thrown the corpse of a taxi dancer into John Cardinal O’Bannion’s lap. Nobody’s camped out on my doorstep and insisted I do something about the weird things her mother-in-law has started to do with food. It’s been very boring.”
“You don’t sound bored,” Bob said judiciously. “I take it you’ve found something to perk you up?”
“I’ve found something to annoy me,” Gregor admitted. “I was wondering if you’d do me a favor. If you’d get me some information I need.”
Bob Cheswicki was cautious. “If it’s about a current case, I might not be able to—”
“No, no, no,” Gregor said. “The case is old. Very old. Four years old, in fact. I thought we’d work out a trade. Wednesday, I’ll buy you lunch at La Vie Bohème, you’ll bring along everything you can get your hands on about the murder of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Then Bob came on again, and he sounded strangled. “Gregor, if you know something we don’t know about that case, all I can tell you is we want to hear it. You don’t know how we want to hear it. There are still men in this department who blow up every time they think about Paul Hazzard getting off, and I’m one of them.”
“I don’t have any new information,” Gregor told him. “I’m just—curious.”
“That’s enough for me.” Bob was definite; “If you get curious enough, you might actually come up with something. Twelve o’clock?”
“Perfect.”
“See you there.”
The phone went to dial tone, and Gregor hung up.
I must be crazy, he thought.
I don’t have anything to go on. I haven’t got a hope of getting anything to go on. And now Bob Cheswicki is going to be keeping his fingers crossed I find a way to jail Paul Hazzard, if not actually execute him.
Why do I do these things to myself?
Three
1
THERE WERE PEOPLE WHO thought Paul Hazzard was a fraud—a con man with all the right credentials and a telegenic face, but no conviction. There were other people who were afraid he wasn’t a fraud, that he believed all the nonsense he spouted, that he thought he was making sense. The reality was a little more complicated. Paul Haz
zard did not lack conviction. He believed absolutely that most of the people in the world were exactly what he said they were: masses of addictions and post-traumatic stress disorders, shamed out of any hope of acquiring self-esteem on their own, in denial. There was a virus loose in the world, the virus of shame and guilt, the virus of hidden abuse. This was not like ordinary abuse. Paul thought that ordinary abuse, like battering and incest, was probably easier on everyone, because there was no confusion that it was what it was. Hidden abuse was insidious. It was made up of sideways glances and offhand refusals. It thrived on hierarchy and competition. It was the essence of “standards.” It didn’t surprise Paul Hazzard at all that middle-class Americans were so miserable. The highest standard of living in the history of the world, an almost unprecedented freedom of action, access to art and information so wide and cheap it would have made John Stuart Mill giddy—none of that mattered because none of the people Paul Hazzard dealt with could climb out of their pain long enough to experience the world around them. These were the people Paul Hazzard helped—or used to help, when his seminars were crowded, and his books sold millions of copies. He was sure he helped them. They came up to him wherever he went to speak and told him how he had changed their lives.
What complicated this situation was twofold. In the first place, Paul Hazzard wasn’t stupid. In the second, he had his suspicions. His lack of stupidity surfaced in what had become cynicism about the socioeconomic composition of his audience. He hadn’t failed to notice that really poor people had no interest in healing their shame or finding the child within. Maybe they were too damned distracted by worrying about where the rent money was going to come from and figuring out how to get their children two blocks down the street to school without being shot. Maybe they were poor because they were distracted. That’s what a lot of people in the field would have said. Paul had always found meetings of recovery leaders shocking. Paul had been brought up in a fairly liberal family. It was liberalism of a haphazard and unthoughtful kind, but it was liberalism nonetheless. Recovery leaders talking together always sounded like caricatures of Republicans in The Nation. The poor were responsible for their poverty. Bad things never happened to good people. Bad things happened because you hadn’t done your grief work or because you hadn’t owned your anger or because you resisted turning responsibility for your life over to your higher power. Recovery was all about taking responsibility for your life by giving up control of it—and if you didn’t do both those things, it was no surprise if you ended up drinking muscatel out of a paper bag on the Bowery. Anything could be an addiction. All addictions were progressive, incurable, and ultimately fatal. If you didn’t do something about yours, whatever happened to you was your own damned fault. Maybe you were trying to punish yourself.
Paul Hazzard’s suspicions had to do with sex—and he never expressed them to anybody. If he had, in this place and in this climate, he would have been lynched. This did not mean he did not believe his conclusions were true. It did mean that he understood how to operate in his environment, which was what he would have called (in one of his seminars) an “important life skill.” Feminism was everywhere. It would get you if you didn’t watch out. He couldn’t let anyone know what he really thought, which was this: Grief work and healing your shame and discovering your inner child and owning your anger and recognizing your abuse and all the rest of it were very necessary, but they were necessary only for women. The party line in the recovery movement was that women outnumbered men at seminars and in support groups because women were more in touch with their feelings than men. Women were more enlightened. Men had bigger problems and a stronger will to denial. Paul Hazzard thought this was hogwash. Women outnumbered men in recovery because women experienced the world differently than men did. Women found addictive what men could take in their stride. Women were damaged by blows men would hardly notice. Women were weak. Paul Hazzard knew all this because he knew himself. He’d smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for twenty years. Then, on his fortieth birthday, he’d taken all the cigarettes in the house and thrown them in the garbage. He’d had a bad couple of months. He’d been impossible to live with. His temper had been hair-trigger and irrational. Then the couple of months was over and he was fine. He’d never smoked another cigarette. He’d never had the desire to smoke another cigarette. Contrast that to the women in his groups, who talked about their “addiction to cigarettes” decades after they’d had their last smoke and came awake every morning wishing they could light up.
The other way women were different from men was in relationships. Yes, women were often abused. They were abused a lot if you counted the metaphysical level as well as the physical one. Paul believed they brought it on themselves. Women could never decide what they wanted from a relationship and stick to it. They were always changing their assumptions and expecting men to let them change the rules. They said they wanted to be independent, but when they were out of a relationship they were always declaring themselves to be “miserable.” They said they wanted to be strong, but when their men slept with other women or batted them around the kitchen or drank up all the rent money, they accepted the first apology they got and went on trying to “keep the relationship together.” It was enough to make you believe in a hereditary, sex-linked, sex-specific form of masochism.
Actually, Paul Hazzard liked masochism in women. It was useful. He had spotted it right away in Hannah Krekorian, even before he spoke to her. The way she stood. The way she walked. The way she nibbled guiltily on a cookie, as if indulging in chocolate chips were the moral equivalent of working as a camp guard in Dachau. Paul Hazzard knew the signs. And, since he had gone to that particular meeting in hope of meeting someone who would suit his purpose, he had been interested. It was too bad that Hannah was neither young nor pretty. Paul liked his women very young and very pretty. Unfortunately, he also liked them very rich, and the three things rarely went together, at least in women who were available to him. Even at the height of his career, when he had his own series on PBS and his books sold twenty-five thousand copies a week, there were certain women who had remained beyond his grasp. Very young, very pretty, very rich women wanted to marry rock stars. To find someone willing to take on a stodgy old psychologist, he had to make compromises.
He had to do something soon, or his life was going to fall apart. That was the problem here. Nobody had the faintest idea what Jacqueline’s dying had done to him financially. Not even the children. The children just thought he was stingy. If he’d been stingy, he wouldn’t be in this mess. Maybe he needed a few sessions at Shopaholics Anonymous. He didn’t, of course. He wasn’t some silly woman with even less sense than character who didn’t know when to cut up her credit cards. He’d stopped shopping when he’d gotten worried enough.
He was sitting at the desk in the first floor study, looking at the phone he had just hung up. That had been Hannah, inviting him to a party she was giving this Friday night. She would have mentioned it when they went out to dinner, but his conversation had been so interesting, it had just put the party straight out of her head. Paul was sure there had been no party planned on the night he’d taken Hannah Krekorian to dinner. This was her way of making sure she saw him again. Paul thought it was a very good sign.
He left the study, made his way to the front hall, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. This house had thirty-five hundred square feet on each floor, but not many rooms, except at the top, where Alyssa and Nick had their apartment. The kitchen was in the basement. The living room, the study, and the library were on the first floor. The dining room and another reception room were on the second floor. Paul went into the dining room and looked around. Caroline was sitting at one end of the long table, eating shredded wheat and looking sour. She had her special small pitcher of skim milk and a glass of bloodred just-from-the-juicer juice beside her. James was sitting at the other end of the table, eating English muffins piled with butter and cream cheese and drinking coffee black. He looked happy as a clam. Ther
e was another difference between men and women, Paul thought. Men would never force themselves to eat things that made them feel sour. They’d eat what they wanted and take the consequences. Women were always saying they wanted to make their own standards instead of living up to the standards set by men, but you could no more get them off one of their ridiculous diets than you could turn Waikiki Beach into the diamond as big as the Ritz.
Paul got himself a cup of coffee from the sideboard and put it at a place midway down that side of the table. He got cream cheese and butter and bagels from the sideboard too, and sat down. Caroline glared at him.
“Of course you realize this is sabotage behavior,” she said frostily. “You both know how important it is to me to stick to this diet. You’re both afraid that if I change, things won’t be so pleasant for you. So you eat that stuff where I can see you, hoping to make me lose control.”
“I’d never try to make you lose control,” James said airily. “I don’t indulge myself in missions impossible. Did I hear you on the phone, Dad? Caroline says you’ve got a new paramour but she’s so young you don’t want anybody to know.”
“I think you ought to consider the entire etiology of eating disorders,” Paul said to Caroline. “You don’t need to lose weight. You’re thin as a rail. What are you doing on a diet?”
“I’m on a maintenance diet.”
“You’re in denial,” Paul said. “This is some kind of incipient anorexia nervosa. Your dieting is out of control.”
“Don’t tell me when I’m out of control,” Caroline snapped. “You don’t own my emotions. I own my emotions. You’ve got no right to tell me how I feel.”
“I’m not telling you how you feel. I’m just trying to point out—”
“You’re just trying to manipulate me, that’s all you’re doing. That’s all you’ve ever tried to do. You were a manipulative and withholding parent from the beginning, and you know it. You just hate knowing I know it. You just hate it that you can’t use it on me anymore.”