Bleeding Hearts

by Jane Haddam

  “Could we try not subjecting me to it anymore?” James said. “It’s Sunday morning. Maybe we ought to go to church.”

  They both stared at him blankly.

  “Well,” James said, “it would have to beat having another one of these arguments. These arguments are the pits. And they never get anywhere.”

  “I have a right to express my anger.”

  “I have a right not to listen to it.”

  “That’s not true,” Caroline said quickly. “I have a right to express my anger and I have a right to be listened to.”

  “I don’t know where you got that from—scratch it; yes, I do—but in case you haven’t heard, slavery has been illegal in this country since the Emancipation Proclamation. And slavery is the name for the condition where some people have an absolute right to some other people’s time. I do have a right not to listen to it. And now I would like to discuss something else.”

  “I don’t have to stay here and be subjected to this abuse.” Caroline stood up. Her shredded wheat was half eaten. Her juice had barely been touched. Paul wondered what it was the juice of. Radishes? With the juicer, you never knew. Caroline stalked to the dining room door and stopped. “You can try as hard as you want to keep me under your thumbs, but it won’t work,” she declared. “I’m a survivor.”

  Then she turned her back to them and stalked away.

  Down at his end of the table, James was eating his way through the last half of his last English muffin, sinking his teeth into two inches of cream cheese, catching the overflow of butter with his tongue. Paul watched him curiously. James was unlike either of his other children. Nothing bothered James.

  “Caroline,” James said carefully, “is furious with me. She left her tote bag in the front hall last night, and when I came home I tripped over it. She was very put out.”

  “Did you do it on purpose?”

  “No,” James said. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me. Putting a frog in her bed, that would have occurred to me. Maybe I’ll do it sometime. I was a little potted, if you want to know the truth. I went drinking with Max and we had a better time than usual. When I tripped over the tote bag, I jabbed myself with that oversize compass of hers. I’m still bleeding.”

  “I don’t suppose it was anything serious,” Paul said dryly.

  “It’s not. I was wearing boots. Are you all right? You were talking on the phone, weren’t you? Do you have another lady?”

  Paul buttered his bagel carefully. “I don’t have another lady, exactly. I’ve met a woman I rather like.”

  “Really? What’s her name?”

  “Hannah Krekorian.”

  “Armenian,” James said judiciously. “Or at least her husband was. I suppose that’s her married name.”

  “It is. And believe it or not, she’s not twelve years old. She’s damned near as old as I am.”

  “Well-preserved?”

  Paul thought of Hannah’s dumpy figure, her plain, uninteresting face. “Not exactly,” he said. “She’s just someone I’m comfortable with. I’m going to go to a party at her house this coming Friday night. A crush with cocktails, I think.”

  “On the Main Line?”

  “No,” Paul said. “On Cavanaugh Street. In the city. You know about that. There was a piece in the Inquirer.”

  “Home of the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” James laughed. “Well, I hope you’re prepared. Maybe this woman is a friend of Gregor Demarkian’s and she took up with you only because Gregor Demarkian wants to meet you because Gregor Demarkian has decided to look into all that about what happened to Jackie and so—”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Paul said. “I don’t even think that’s a pleasant suggestion. What’s gotten into you?”

  “Nothing’s gotten into me. I just think the coincidence is funny. Your Hannah what’ s-her-name probably doesn’t even know Gregor Demarkian. But with Candida writing her memoirs and all—” James shrugged.

  “Candida’s memoirs are going to be mostly about sex,” Paul said, “no matter what the rest of you think. I know that woman. Don’t bring up all that about Jackie in front of Caroline. She’ll get hysterical.”

  “She’ll get hysterical anyway. She can manufacture excuses for hysteria more efficiently than I could ever give her causes for it. You want another bagel? I’m getting up.”

  “No,” Paul said. “No, thank you. I’m fine for now.”

  Actually, he was hungry as hell, but he didn’t want James to notice that. Paul was always telling James that James ate too much. Which James did. But James didn’t care. Paul took a sip of his coffee and sighed.

  Paul wasn’t worried that Gregor Demarkian might want to look into the death of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. He didn’t think there was anything about that that Gregor Demarkian could find—or anything he could do about anything he did find. There were other reasons why a man might prefer not to court a woman with a detective in attendance.

  Of course, Paul told himself, he had no reason to expect that a detective would be in attendance. James was right. Hannah Krekorian probably didn’t even know Gregor Demarkian. Living on the same street and sharing an ethnic heritage did not add up to acquaintance in modern Philadelphia. And what could he do even if Hannah did know Demarkian? It was really too late to turn back now.

  Hell, Paul Hazzard thought, it was worse than too late.

  Any retreat from where he was standing at that moment would be a form of suicide—and he didn’t mean the psychic kind.

  2

  Fred Scherrer was in his second hour of listening to the woman with the black eye when the phone call came. He would have put the caller off with an excuse if it had been anyone on earth except who it was. The woman with the black eye had no name she could remember. She had been sitting in Fred’s Park Avenue living room since four o’clock that morning, when she had been released into Fred’s custody by St. Dominic Hospital. She was five foot three, one hundred pounds, and reasonably young. Fred guessed she was in her early thirties. Her hair was dyed ash blond. She wore a pair of clean blue jeans that were a little too long for her and a flannel shirt that was much too big for her in the shoulders. The clothes belonged to a paralegal in Fred’s firm named Mary Ann. This woman had no clothes of her own because they had all been torn off. When she was found, she was lying curled up on a bench in Bryant Park, wearing nothing but a bra. According to the hospital, she had been subjected to multiple rapes. According to the hospital, she was suffering from shock. According to the hospital, there was nothing anybody could do for her except give her food and wait. They had been perfectly happy to release her into Fred Scherrer’s custody. If they had still been a Catholic hospital, they wouldn’t have been allowed to. The rules set down by the archdiocesan office of Catholic Charities would have forbidden it. But St. Dominic had not been a Catholic hospital for some five years now. It had been taken over by the city, and by the city’s bureaucrats. This woman was unidentified, uninsured, and black. She was not their problem.

  She was, Fred thought, one of the most gracious women he had ever seen. She moved with such precise politeness, she might have been an instructor in a school of etiquette. The nurses had taken one look at the color of her skin and said: welfare. Fred didn’t think so. She’d been found in the wrong part of town. Bryant Park did not normally cater to a welfare population. Manners like these had to be learned. Sitting with your hands folded and unmoving in your lap and your legs pressed together at the ankles was not a skill routinely taught at P.S. 37. Maybe Mary Ann had noticed the discrepancies too. Mary Ann was how the woman with the black eye had come to be sitting in Fred Scherrer’s living room. Mary Ann had been waiting for a friend of hers in the emergency room of St. Dominic Hospital when the woman with the black eye had been brought in. Mary Ann’s friend had cracked her wrist trying to do a handstand in the Crystal Channel Saloon.

  Sid came into the living room from the kitchen and mouthed “Candida DeWitt” as obviously as he could into the air behind the wo
man with the black eye’s head. Fred looked at Mary Ann, nodded slightly, and got up. Mary Ann was sitting on the floor at the other woman’s feet. She was listening intently as the woman with the black eye went on and on in a pleasant uninflected voice about how affecting the Monet exhibit had been at the Guggenheim, or maybe it wasn’t the Guggenheim, she got these museums all mixed up sometimes, she could never remember what they were called.

  Fred reminded himself that it was time for him to give Mary Ann another lecture about how she ought to go to law school. She would make a very decent lawyer and a very committed one. Then he followed Sid out to the kitchen and closed the door behind him.

  “She hasn’t budged. She doesn’t seem sleepy either. Candida DeWitt is on the phone?”

  “That’s right. I know you said not to bother you, but I thought—”

  “No, that’s all right. Did you get in touch with anybody else? Who’d be the D.A. on this if they ever caught the perpetrators?”

  “Raymond Barsi. I talked to him half an hour ago. He’s lighting a fire under the police department.”

  “I’ll light a fire under the police department if he doesn’t,” Fred said. “You talk to our people at the Daily News?”

  “Yeah. At the Post too. I didn’t have any luck at the Times.”

  “We’ll get the Times,” Fred said. “Don’t worry. I’ll turn this into the black version of the Central Park jogger case. This is the black version of the Central Park jogger case. They just don’t know it yet. Could you believe that hospital?”

  “Yes,” Sid said.

  Actually, Fred could too. He could believe a lot of things. Even Chuckie Bickerson hadn’t made him feel like he’d gotten lost in one of Franz Kafka’s nightmares, and Chuckie Bickerson made practically everybody feel like that. Fred stretched and scratched his head. “All right. Let me talk to Candida. Have you found a rental nurse yet?”

  “Not rental nurse, for God’s sake, Fred. Private duty nurse. Yes. She’ll be here at ten.”

  “Fine.”

  “Phone’s off the hook,” Sid said.

  The phone receiver was lying on its side on the kitchen table. There was no hold button on this set. Candida had probably heard every word Fred had said to Sid. Fred wondered what she’d thought of it. Fred had never been able to decide, with Candida, what really impressed her. Candida did not give much away.

  Fred picked up the receiver and said, “Candida? This is Fred.”

  “Fred,” Candida said. Her voice sounded like music. “Hello. I was beginning to wonder if I had been cut off.”

  “If you had been, you should have called right back,” Fred told her. “I’m always happy to hear from you. I’m sorry about the delay. Things are a little crazy here at the moment.”

  “Things are always crazy where you are, Fred. I’m used to it. To tell you the truth, I called to ask you a favor.”

  “So ask. Anything I can do.”

  “I was wondering if you could come down to Pennsylvania for the weekend. This coming weekend.”

  Fred cast an involuntary glance in the direction of his living room. By the time the weekend rolled around, they would know who this woman was, and what they were going to do with her, and whether there was a hope of catching the men or boys who had hurt her. They would be involved in warehousing her, that was all. Nobody needed Fred for that.

  Fred sat down in the nearest kitchen chair. “Of course I’ll come to Philadelphia,” he said. “I’ll be glad to. You’re not in some kind of trouble, are you?”

  “Oh, no,” Candida said. “No, of course not. Not legal trouble, or anything like that. You’ll stay with me, of course. I’ve got a perfectly nice guest room with its own Jacuzzi.”

  “I’ll be delighted. You sound worried.”

  “Oh, I’m not, not really. I just need some advice, and I couldn’t think of a better person to give it to me.”

  “You don’t want to give me a hint?”

  “No, no. It’s something I’ll have to show you. You’ll see. And don’t make too much of this. You know how you get.”

  “Overwrought,” Fred suggested.

  “Overzealous,” Candida amended. “I’ll see you—when? Friday? Saturday?”

  “I’ll be down Friday afternoon, if you don’t mind having me that early.”

  “I don’t mind at all.”

  “Good,” Fred said. “And Candida? I’m glad to hear from you.”

  “I’m glad I called,” Candida said. “I’ll see you Friday.”

  Then she hung up.

  Fred sat still for a while in his chair, tapping his feet against the oversize kitchen floor tiles. It wasn’t that unusual that he should hear from Candida DeWitt—although he’d never been invited to her house before. They had been in touch on and off since Fred had wound up Paul Hazzard’s murder trial with an acquittal. They contacted each other randomly and tentatively, as if neither one of them were entirely sure what they wanted to do besides that.

  It was unusual to hear such a note of strain in Candida’s voice. Candida was never strained. She was never angry or upset or indiscreet either. It went with the territory.

  “I wonder what Paul’s doing to her now,” Fred said to himself, out loud, as if Sid were in the room and he could ask for some input. Then he got up and replaced the receiver gently in its cradle.

  Once he started talking to himself, he knew it was time to stop thinking and start taking action.

  Action always made him feel a million times better.

  3

  Out in Bryn Mawr, Candida DeWitt sat in her living room in front of her fireplace, contemplating the white spray paint that now defaced the fireplace’s fieldstone façade. She didn’t mind the spray paint much. That could be removed. She didn’t even mind the message.

  DEATH TO YOU

  it said in oversize letters, but that was silly and melodramatic. If that had been the beginning and end of it, she would never have taken it seriously. No, it wasn’t the fact of the spray paint or its message that bothered her. It was how it had been done.

  None of her locks had been forced.

  None of her windows had been opened.

  At no point had her alarm system gone off or even started to go off.

  What that meant was that the person who had painted this message on this fireplace had entered Candida’s house with a key and known the house well enough to disarm the security system. Candida could think of only a handful of people who could do that, and they were all connected to Paul Hazzard.

  One of the reasons they had suspected Paul of murdering Jacqueline to begin with was the fact that none of the locks had been forced in that house either, and none of the windows broken, and the alarm system hadn’t gone off in spite of the fact it was armed.

  The similarities made Candida DeWitt very, very uncomfortable.

  Four

  1

  LA VIE BOHèME WAS not Gregor Demarkian’s idea of a restaurant. It wasn’t even his idea of a comfortable bordello. La Vie Bohème was one of those places with too many spider plants and Boston ferns in the windows that faced the street, too much space between the tables in the main room, and too much fondness for silverware that was supposed to be a work of art on its own. Gregor Demarkian had a lot in common with the bluff old colonels who went to lunch in Agatha Christie’s novels, although he didn’t think he had anything at all in common with Hercule Poirot. Gregor liked his chairs comfortable and his food in substantial quantities. He wanted peace and quiet while he was eating and a large cup of coffee when he was finished. He wanted sensible food like steaks and prime rib and menu listings in plain English—unless, of course, he was eating Armenian or Chinese. The problem with La Vie Bohème was that it played Ravel without ceasing, served its coffee in delicate little bone china contraptions no bigger than the pieces of a dollhouse tea set, and listed steak on its menu as boeuf à l’anglaise. Fortunately, the steak was an excellent two-and-a-half-pound porterhouse and the chairs, though gratingly elegant, we
re large. That was why Gregor agreed to go there, and why La Vie Bohème was Bob Cheswicki’s favorite restaurant. Of course, the prices were outrageous. That went with the territory. Gregor knew that from twenty years as a federal agent, dealing regularly with local law enforcement personnel. There was always one restaurant in every town that high-level police officials truly loved, but that they couldn’t afford on their own. That was where you took them when you wanted their cooperation.

  Gregor went from Cavanaugh Street to La Vie Bohème by cab. It was too far to walk, and what he would have had to walk through would not have been safe. It bothered him, what had happened to Philadelphia. The Philadelphia he’d grown up in had not been like this—and it was not just poverty that made the difference. This new president said he would pump a lot of money into the cities. Maybe that would work. Gregor liked the sound of it. His instincts, however, ran in the opposite direction. Money would be nice. It might even be essential. Attitude was what really mattered. The police he met these days didn’t seem to think they could do much about crime. The schoolteachers he met at the library lectures he sometimes gave and the mini-conventions he was asked to speak at mostly thought their students were stupid and not worth much more than the effort it took to warehouse them. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the African baseline essay or Shakespeare,” one of them had told him over cookies and punch at the Art Institute. “These kids are never going to be able to understand either.” Then there were the people themselves, bumped into in convenience stores and newsstands, corner diners and taxi stands and bus stops. Everybody seemed so tired. Everybody seemed so lost. It was as if Philadelphia were a wind-up toy beginning to wind down. Gregor kept half expecting a big hand to come down from the sky to tighten the spring.

  Since no big hand came out of anywhere to do anything, Gregor got out of his cab in front of La Vie Bohème, tipped the driver less handsomely than Bennis would have—really, Bennis was outrageous—and made his way across the sidewalk to La Vie Bohème’s front door. It was a big blond wood door with a brass handle big enough to be God knew what. The sign that said LA VIE BOHÈME was a tiny brass one screwed into the door at eye level for a tall woman, engraved with letters so small they were unreadable. The energy might be going out of things in general, but some people had more than you wanted them to have, Gregor thought. And they always expended it on things like this.