by Jane Haddam
“What made you sure?”
“Paul Hazzard made us sure. When he heard about it, he made a very public and very nasty scene. In front of sixteen witnesses, by the way, including four police officers and a district court judge.”
“Where was he told about the will?”
“The contents came out at the inquest. He should have heard about it before that, of course, but he was tied up doing seminars and the lawyers hadn’t been able to get hold of him long enough to tell him. He blew a fit, Gregor. I saw him.”
“Funny, isn’t it? I’ve never met the man, but from everything I’ve heard about him, he doesn’t sound like the kind who’d be likely to blow fits.”
“I think all these psychologist guys are a little nuts underneath.”
“I still don’t understand about the motive,” Gregor said. “If Paul Hazzard was bringing in a million five a year—by the way, was that net or gross?”
“Net before taxes.”
“Net before taxes. Well then. Even after taxes, even after this mistress of his, he must have had something left.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“From a million five. Did he buy sports cars? Did he gamble?”
“Nope. He just didn’t pay attention. It adds up, Gregor. It really does. Fifteen magazines every time you pass a newsstand. A sweater you see in a catalogue and like so you order it in all six colors. Fifteen pairs of shoes. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year. It adds up. I can show you the balance sheets if you like. We subpoenaed them.”
“Aren’t they confidential information?”
Bob Cheswicki shrugged. “I made you an official consultant to the police department for this case ten minutes after you called. I got the chief’s permission. We’re paying you a dollar.”
“Wonderful,” Gregor said.
“You can look over the records all you want,” Bob Cheswicki said, “but it still comes down to the same thing. On the night Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard died, Paul Hazzard wasn’t broke, but he was the next best thing to. And by the time he got finished paying Fred Scherrer’s bill, he really needed money.”
Five
1
CHRISTOPHER HANNAFORD GOT UP late on Thursday morning because he got up late every morning. Out in California, the radio show he did started at midnight and went to six A.M. In California, this was a schedule he liked. Waking near noon, wandering across the vast empty expanse of his loft space to his Pullman kitchen, making coffee: All in all, it was a very good routine for composing poetry in his head. In spite of the fact that the radio show made him quite a bit of money—and the poetry made him no money at all—Christopher persisted in thinking of poetry as what he “did.” He even had reason to think that way. Monetary awards notwithstanding, modern poetry in the United States was a structured field with its own set of rewards, and Christopher had won all of them. He’d had an issue of Poetry magazine devoted entirely to his work. His pieces had appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic and The New Kenyan Review. He’d been asked to read at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Christopher had once told his sister Bennis that poetry was the only thing he had ever been able to take seriously. That wasn’t quite true—there were one or two women he had taken very seriously—but it expressed the one thing he had ever had trouble expressing, so he went with it. Christopher Hannaford took poetry so seriously, he had never actually told anybody he committed it.
Since Bennis had a one-bedroom apartment, Christopher was sleeping on the fold-out living room couch. The couch faced the oversize living room window that looked out on Cavanaugh Street. Halfway up this window there was a plant ledge covered not with plants, but with papier-mâché models of castles with moats, populated by miniature knights on horseback and damsels in pointed hats and dragons breathing painted fire. Bennis always made models of Zed and Zedalia when she was revising her books. Zed and Zedalia were the principal kingdoms in the fantasy world she wrote about. Zed was a country ruled by a king. Zedalia was a country ruled by a queen. They displayed, Bennis had told the New York Times Magazine, the differences between the masculine and the feminine principles in government. Christopher had read that quote and then called to ask her if she’d meant it. She’d told him not to be a damned fool. She had enough trouble keeping track of her characters’ names without worrying about turning them into analogies of God only knew what.
At the moment, both the masculine and the feminine principles of government seemed to have succumbed to the dragonic one. Christopher sat up a little and contemplated the pointed tail, the red spurts of flame, the scaly back. These models had to be a form of automedication. That’s all there was to it. Bennis couldn’t need this kind of detail to write. Christopher contemplated making himself a cup of coffee. He contemplated getting up and taking a shower. He contemplated reading one of Bennis’s books. It had been years, since the publication of Zedalia in Winter, since he’d tried.
Bennis’s living room window looked directly across the street into another living room window, a much bigger living room and a much bigger window than Bennis had. Christopher lay propped up on the back of the couch and watched the furniture in that living room do nothing in particular. He imagined Lida Arkmanian coming in from downstairs or upstairs or the back hall, rearranging things, doing away with dust. Did she do her own dusting? Christopher didn’t think so—women who owned town houses of that size rarely did any domestic work at all—but he could imagine her dusting. He could imagine her straightening shelves and washing down counters too. He had never found those things particularly alluring activities. He didn’t do any of them himself and he never asked the women he knew to do them, or even asked them if they could. He just found something he liked—half-attractive and half-comforting, oddly enough—in thinking of Lida doing them.
There was a small brass Tiffany carriage clock on the end table to the right of the couch. Christopher picked it up. It had that kind of ornate lettering he found so hard to read. Positioned so that he could imagine the rococo numerals as a species of decorative dots, he saw that it was two minutes to twelve. It was too late for lunch, that was certain, unless he wanted to ask today and wait until tomorrow. He didn’t want to wait until tomorrow. And dinner would be better anyway. Less light.
Christopher got out of bed and went down the hall to Bennis’s bedroom. Bennis was out. Christopher thought she was doing that on purpose these days, so that he had a chance to sleep. He went to the suitcase he had left on the small bench at the foot of Bennis’s bed and looked through it. Christopher Hannaford had never been much for formal clothes. The closest he had ever come to wearing a suit was the blazer-and-tie combination required as a kind of quasi-uniform by his New England prep school. He’d worn a tuxedo or two to a wedding or two. He’d had to, because he was always being asked to serve as an usher or a best man. He always managed to get the jacket off and the tie untied and his sleeves rolled up in the receiving line. He didn’t have anything formal with him. He just didn’t want to look poor. He didn’t tell himself that Lida was too fine, too good, too pure to care about his financial status. He thought any woman in her fifties with a lot of money who was asked by a younger man to go out to dinner would be a damn fool not to worry about his financial status.
Fortunately, Christopher Hannaford was very well off. He was well off enough to play around with late-night radio shows and writing poetry, because his father had been considerably better than well off. Christopher found jeans and a workshirt and a sweater in what he thought of as the “insufferable snot with Hatteras connections” style and put them on.
Actually, the thing about the radio show was that it might cease to be playing around very soon. That was part of the reason he had come east to stay with Bennis. He wanted to ask her advice about this offer he’d gotten. It was amazing, really. Seven children in the family, and Bennis was the only one of them who had inherited the Hannaford genius with money. Christopher put on a pair of clean socks, shoved his feet into his cowboy boots,
and headed out of the apartment.
Coming out into the cold air of Cavanaugh Street, standing at the top of the stoop and watching children run down the sidewalk and older people walk by, only pretending not to look at him, Christopher almost lost his nerve. People were so connected here. Everything was so public. A couple of dozen people were going to see him ring Lida Arkmanian’s doorbell. What would happen then?
If Bennis’s experience was anything to go by, what would happen would be a full-blown gossip circus, stopping just short of Peyton Place details. “The really incredible thing about what goes on around here,” Bennis had told him, “is that everybody is absolutely convinced that everybody else is falling in lust left, right, and center but it never seems to occur to anybody that when that happens, people mostly do something physical about it.”
Right. Bennis often sounded like that, off paper. Christopher knew what she meant. He went down the steps to the sidewalk, looked both ways in a perfunctory manner, and jaywalked across the street to Lida’s front door.
Lida’s front door had two gigantic crepe paper cupids on it. They seemed to be engaged in a duel with their arrows. Christopher was betting on the one with the silver dust in his eyebrows. He had the face of a cherub who could commit a murder and get away with it.
Christopher pressed the doorbell and stepped back to wait. He expected a maid. What he got was the grating scratch of an intercom coming on and Lida’s voice—it hardly sounded like Lida’s voice; it hardly sounded like anything human—saying,
“Yes? Who is it, please?”
The intercom button was hidden behind the left side of the silver-dust cupid. “Lida? This is Chris Hannaford. Did I get you at an awkward time?” dick. Dead air. Static. Cough. “Christopher. When I buzz, the door will open. You can come right in.”
“Where will I find you?”
“I’ll come to the living room. Just a moment.”
Click. Dead air. Buzz.
Christopher hated this sort of thing. Of course, nobody wanted to be a servant anymore. He didn’t blame them. It was an awful life and there weren’t many chances for advancement. He simply wished there were better alternatives than all this grate and buzz.
He got the front door open just in time and quickly pushed his way into the foyer. It was high-ceilinged and elegant and very, very clean, exactly as he remembered it. The living room was on the second floor. He went up the stairs.
Lida was wearing a pair of charcoal-gray wool slacks and a white silk shirt. She reminded him of the older women Saks sometimes used to model clothes for their suburban catalogues. He stopped at the edge of the stairs he had just come up and smiled.
“Hi,” he said. “I did get you at an awkward time.”
“No, no.” Lida shook her head. “I was upstairs trying to make a Valentine train, out of cardboard, to fill with candy. For Donna Moradanyan’s son, Tommy. Have you met Tommy?”
“The short one with the Rhodes scholar vocabulary,” Christopher said.
“I do not believe he is short for a boy of three. I’m afraid I wasn’t having very good luck. I’m not very artistic. That’s Donna’s department.”
“I’m not very artistic either. Maybe I could help you out anyway. I could hold the tape or keep the sides of the train standing upright while you try to figure out how to fasten them together.”
“Don’t be silly. You don’t want to waste your time like that. You have so much to do.”
“I don’t have a single thing to do except sleep on Bennis’s couch and eat her out of house and home. Which is hard, by the way, because food gets delivered to her door more regularly than the mail. Really. I’d like to help. It would keep me out of Bennis’s hair for a while and let her get some work done.”
Lida turned away from him. Christopher could see the lines of tension in her back, under the thin layer of silk. She had her hair knotted at the nape of her neck, the way ballerinas liked to do. The loose hairs there seemed to be standing on end. Christopher felt his own skin getting very, very hot.
“All right,” she said, turning back to him. “It’s quite a climb. I have a little workroom in the attic.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“Yes,” Lida said slowly, “let’s go.”
Christopher let her get a little way up the stairs before he started after her. This was where he had to be careful. This was the hardest time. He was as sure as he could be that they both wanted the same thing. It wouldn’t be a good idea to presume on that and rush things.
Rush things?
Sometimes Christopher Hannaford found himself astounded that any man and woman anywhere ever managed to end up in bed with each other. Getting there the first time was such a mess of conflict and confusion.
Lida stopped two-thirds of the way up the stairs and looked back at him. She looked tense and hurt and confused.
“Aren’t you coming?” she asked him.
“Oh, yes,” Christopher said. “I’m definitely coming.”
He thought it would be the better part of valor not to point out to her that, under the circumstances, she might just have made a very dirty pun.
2
Alyssa Hazzard was one of those women who kept her life busy with Projects, the kind of Projects that required committees to stage benefit balls and get their pictures in the paper. Unlike some of the women who worked with her on these committees, she did not deceive herself about what she was doing. Some people maintained that society charity was a fraud. Alyssa Hazzard agreed with them. Obviously, if any one of them had been seriously interested in raising money for AIDS research or providing operating funds for the Philadelphia Cancer Hospice, they could have done more for either cause by just donating the cost of the dresses they would wear to the parties they gave to raise money. That was what critics didn’t understand. They always bought new dresses to wear to charity parties, and the dresses always cost a minimum of eight thousand dollars apiece, and if you added that all up…
Actually, Alyssa never bought new dresses for charity parties. She made do by recycling clothes through the better thrift shops and by being good at alterations on her own. She had a Balenciaga she had worn three times, getting away with it by claiming that it was a vintage dress and an artwork and a homage to her mother. In another life Alyssa wouldn’t have bothered with benefit balls at all. She had taken them up only after Jacqueline had been murdered and Paul had gone on trial. It was very interesting the way all that worked. All her friends had stuck valiantly by her side the whole time Paul was in the dock. They had called her daily and urged her to be brave and made a big point of inviting her to be on their committees. Then, after the trial was over, it was as if she had ceased to exist. The phone calls stopped—and when she made phone calls of her own, they weren’t taken and they weren’t returned. The invitations to be on committees stopped too, and the invitations to parties, and the quick little morning flurries asking her to lunch or to a visit to a gallery. A court had proclaimed Paul Hazzard innocent of the murder of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. Alyssa’s friends seemed to think they knew better.
Alyssa didn’t have the same trouble with the women who ran the benefit balls because the women who ran the benefit balls did not know that she was Alyssa Hazzard. They knew her only as Mrs. Nicholas Roderick, informally called Ali, which she had allowed to be assumed to be a diminutive of Alice. Her picture had appeared in the newspapers quite often during the trial. Her picture had appeared on the television news too. She had stuck by her father throughout it all. She wasn’t unhappy that she had done it. In this crowd it did her no harm. None of these women ever read anything in the papers that didn’t mention their own names. None of their husbands looked at anything but the front pages and the financial sections.
Alyssa did more than hide her home life from the women she worked the charity circuit with. She hid the charity circuit from her family as well. Nick, of course, she did not hide. She needed him as an escort when she went to parties and she needed him to figure
out the money when there was money to figure out, because she wasn’t very good at it. Caroline and Paul and James were another matter. Alyssa supposed they knew she did these things. Their newspaper reading was as selective as everybody else’s, but Paul at least glanced through every page of any paper he bought, just in case he saw something that inspired him. Caroline probably restricted her reading to Dear Abby and Ann Landers and Dr. Joyce Brothers. As for James—there was no telling what James did, but once he had made a joke about the company she kept, so Alyssa assumed he had heard or read something. The point was that no member of her family except Nick knew anything in particular about what she did, and Alyssa wanted to keep it that way.
Alyssa had every reason to believe that her family was no more interested in learning about her life than she was in having them learn about it. That was why she was so shocked when she came out of The Silver Unicorn after her luncheon meeting for the steering committee for the Turkish ball to benefit the American Heart Association and saw That Woman waiting at the curb. That That Woman was waiting was undeniable. As soon as Alyssa came through The Silver Unicorn’s doors, That Woman straightened like a soldier and walked half a step forward.
That Woman was how Alyssa Hazzard Roderick tended to think of Candida DeWitt. It was not for the usual reasons. Candida didn’t look like the Other Woman. She looked like a Main Line matron. Alyssa had not cared for her stepmother, Jacqueline. In her opinion, Jacqueline was so awful, Paul was a saint for not having had affairs with every female he’d come across during the entire course of his second marriage. Except, of course, that he may have. The problem with Candida DeWitt, to Alyssa’s mind, was when she had surfaced. Just around the time Jacqueline died. Just around the time the police were looking for a good motive to hook on to Paul. Alyssa was sure Paul would never have been arrested if Candida hadn’t been on the scene, making such good newspaper copy.