by Jane Haddam
Nick sighed. “She’s been like this since we got home. I can’t get it across to her that it would be too much of a coincidence. If the dagger is missing, it almost has to have something to do with the crime.”
“Yes,” James said slowly. He put ice in his glass and poured out more Scotch and more Drambuie. He felt sluggish and depressed, but his mind was still crystal-clear. It was going to be a long road to unconsciousness. It might actually take him the rest of the night.
“I’ll tell you something I did hear,” James said. “In passing, you understand. While I was hanging around the police.”
“You weren’t hanging around the police,” Alyssa said.
“The dagger isn’t the only thing the two deaths have in common,” James said. “It’s really very interesting. Candida DeWitt was there.”
“What?” Alyssa said.
James finished his drink and reached for the bottle of Scotch. Again.
“I think that woman is persecuting us,” he said. “I think she’s following us all round, making things happen. I think she’s going to end up murdering us all off, one by one.”
2
Fred Scherrer came to Cavanaugh Street when Candida DeWitt called him. He sat next to her as she gave her statement to the police and wondered what good he was going to be. He could never do much for clients who weren’t willing to listen to his advice. Candida DeWitt didn’t listen to anyone. When he got to her at the scene, he told her she didn’t have to tell anyone anything. She didn’t have to make a statement of any kind. It was never a good idea to make a statement right on the spot like that. Even perfectly innocent people got confused. Fred was almost positive that Candida was innocent of the murder of Paul Hazzard. Over the years, he had developed an instinct for that sort of thing. It was an instinct no detective would ever be able to match, because it had been developed from years of listening to guilty people tell him the truth. It wasn’t that no client had ever lied to him. Hundreds had tried. None had persisted. Fred was very good at making clients see that lying to their lawyer was a piece of idiocy. Their lives depended on Fred’s knowing the truth and all the truth. But Candida wasn’t giving off the right vibes, here. She wasn’t the kind of quiet she would have been if she had stabbed Paul. She even seemed a little frustrated. Fred thought he understood. Candida was the sort of person who wanted her enemies alive and kicking. She wanted to watch the expressions on their faces when she got her revenge.
In spite of his advice, Candida insisted on giving a statement. She sat down with a very polite and very young detective in a badly-fitting suit, and answered everything he asked her but volunteered nothing. Fred did not have high hopes for this young detective’s career. There were so many obvious questions to ask that didn’t occur to him to ask. What was Candida doing at that party? When was the last time before the murder that she had been in contact with Paul? The young detective had to know who Candida was. If he hadn’t started out knowing, by now he should have been told. Oblivious, he went on and on with his list of routine questions.
After it was over, Candida put on her coat, picked up her purse, and waited for Fred to lead her to the door. She waited with the air of someone who had done nothing more important than trade recipes with a friend.
Fred had driven his own car down to Philadelphia from New York, but he hadn’t used it to come in to town from Bryn Mawr. He didn’t know his way around the city well enough to trust that he wouldn’t be the victim of a carnapping, crawling through the dark streets in a highly polished Mercedes-Benz. He’d engaged a taxicab instead, and paid for it too, both because of the long trip in from the Main Line and because he wanted it to wait. Fred Scherrer could bribe taxi drivers with the best of them. He was not cheap about baksheesh. The cab was waiting just a couple of blocks down when he and Candida came out of Hannah Krekorian’s apartment building. The cab would have been closer, but Hannah’s block was still clogged with police cars.
Fred walked Candida to the cab in silence, opened the door for her, helped her in. It was largely symbolic help—a gesture invented for hobble skirts and bustles—but Candida liked that kind of symbolism. Fred closed her door and went around the cab to get in himself on the other side. He leaned into the front seat and asked the driver to take them back to Bryn Mawr. Then he pulled the bulletproof privacy shield shut and turned to Candida.
“All right,” he said. “Now you’re going to tell me what’s going on.”
“Of course,” Candida said. She had her purse on the seat at her side and her hands folded in her lap and her legs crossed at the knee. She could have been Donna Reed playing the perfect ladylike housewife.
“Did you know Paul was going to be at that party? Did you go there to cause a scene deliberately?”
“Of course,” Candida said. “I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. I did ask you to come with me.”
“And I told you I didn’t like parties and I refused to come. I won’t do that again. Have you known this woman, this Hannah Krekorian, a long time?”
“I’d never met her before tonight.” Candida explained about the invitation. “I went to talk to Alyssa about it. For some reason, I thought she was the most likely one to have sent it. Not that I told her that. I implied I thought it was Caroline. It’s not really Caroline’s kind of thing though. That mess written on my fireplace, that’s Caroline’s kind of thing.”
Fred rubbed his face with the palms of his hands. “You do realize how this looks? Paul has a new woman friend. You show up to put a damper on things. Paul ends up dead. Right now the two prime suspects in this case are Hannah Krekorian and you.”
“I realize that.”
“Do you also realize that the way the timing stacks up, at least from what I heard, you seem to have either stumbled on the corpse a second after Mrs. Krekorian turned Paul into one or else you turned Paul into a corpse a second before Mrs. Krekorian discovered him? That Demarkian man was doing timetables the whole time I was waiting for you, and I don’t blame him.”
Candida was serene. “There’s a flaw in the timetables. I was there when that Helen person came downstairs. I remember what she said.”
“What did she say?”
“She said the door to the bedroom was locked,” Candida said. “She didn’t see anybody or anything. She heard Hannah Krekorian crying and Paul pacing. But it could have been Hannah Krekorian pacing. It could have been anyone. She didn’t see anything.”
“Was somebody else missing from downstairs?”
“I don’t know. There were a lot of people there. Over a hundred, I think.”
“Did any of these hundred or so people besides you and Hannah Krekorian actually know Paul?”
“I don’t know the answer to that either, but I think it would be an interesting line of investigation. All those workshops and seminars and support group meetings. It’s always hard to say for certain that Paul didn’t know somebody. If you see what I mean.”
“Oh, I see. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m a little shook up, of course. I’ve never seen a dead body face-to-face before. When Jacqueline died, I was out of state. And there was all that blood. And Mrs. Krekorian was hysterical. I suppose you heard about the dagger.”
“I heard about it.”
“There wasn’t any blood on it the last time. It was absolutely clean. I wonder what this means.”
“I don’t know what it means.”
“I’m glad I went there,” Candida said. “I don’t care if it will get me in trouble. Paul didn’t care about that woman. He was using her in some way. Paul liked women young and pretty and thin as rails. I should know.”
“He could have matured in his old age,” Fred Scherrer said.
“He didn’t. He just ran out of money. That’s what this is going to turn out to be. Mrs. Krekorian is going to have some money.”
“My, you’re cynical. I don’t think I ever noticed that about you before.”
“I’m not cynical about everything,” Can
dida said. “I’m just cynical about Paul. And now that he’s dead, of course, it clears everything up. I know just what happened the last time.”
“What?”
Candida took her purse off the seat and put it on her lap. She opened it up and looked through it until she found a gold cigarette case and a gold Dunhill lighter.
“I smoke five cigarettes a year,” she told him, “always in moments of extreme stress. This stress seems to be extreme enough. What do you think?”
Fred Scherrer thought Candida DeWitt was a remarkable woman.
A remarkable woman.
3
Less than a minute after it happened, Lida Arkmanian’s mind was somewhere else, on another planet, in another dimension, lost in space. It was anywhere but there in the bed in the master bedroom of her own town house, lying stretched out against Christopher Hannaford’s side. It was doing anything but thinking about the way her body felt. Her body seemed to have parts she’d never expected the existence of. These parts were popping and shuddering and snapping like champagne inside a corked bottle. Lida thought about the tears on Hannah Krekorian’s face and about Candida DeWitt. She thought about the man she had been married to for thirty-two years, who had loved her without limit but who had not been able to make her feel like this. She thought there had to be something terribly wrong with her. She went to start all over again.
“I shouldn’t have given up cigarettes,” Christopher said out of the dark. “This is the perfect moment.” He began to stroke her hair, so gently she could barely feel it. “Lida?”
“What is it?”
“That’s never happened to you before.”
How could it be so cold under all these blankets? How could it be so cold? Lida pulled the quilt up to her chin. “Don’t be ridiculous, Christopher. I am—over fifty years old.”
“I don’t care if you’re over a hundred years old. That’s never happened to you before.”
Lida sat up. She had blankets all around her. It was dark. Nobody could see her. Why did she feel so exposed?
“All right,” she said. “Yes. That never happened to me before.”
Christopher put his hands behind his head and looked serious. “Did you like it?”
“Of course I liked it,” Lida said. “What wasn’t to like?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it never happened to you before because you never wanted it to happen to you. I knew a woman once who said it was too threatening. Orgasms, I mean. They made her feel too. vulnerable. So she didn’t let herself have them.”
“How did she prevent it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think it’s all the unorthodox things you do,” Lida said carefully. It was impossible to talk about these things. It was only barely possible to think about them. “I think it’s because you don’t do—and you do—well, you know what I mean.”
“Nope. I haven’t done a single unorthodox thing yet. I haven’t even gotten out the whipped cream. Never mind the cherries.”
“Christopher.”
“Seriously,” Christopher said. “It’s because of menopause. I’ve been assuming you’ve been through menopause.”
No man of Lida Arkmanian’s generation would ever have mentioned menopause to her. Even her doctor called it “the change.” Lida was glad the room was too dark for Christopher to see her blushing.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, Christopher, I’ve been through menopause.”
“I thought so. Gregor’s always saying how you’re a year older than he is, though God knows you look ten years younger. He should watch what he eats. Anyway, the thing about menopause is, once a woman goes through it, the orthodox way, as you put it, isn’t usually the right way. It can hurt.”
“Oh,” Lida said.
“Not that I have anything against the orthodox way,” Christopher said. “I mean, I’ll do it hanging from the exposed beams in the family room if you want me to—”
“Christopher, for God’s sake.”
“—I was just trying to be a good sort. I have been a good sort, haven’t I? It’s been all right?”
“Yes,” Lida said. “It has been better than all right. I just wish I didn’t feel so… guilty.”
“About the sex?”
“No,” Lida told him. “No, not really. I feel embarrassed about the sex, sometimes, I mean it’s been days, Christopher, and we haven’t done anything else. Today I didn’t even open my mail. Are you like this all the time?”
“Nope. But I am when I get a chance. Why not?”
“Why not.” Lida sighed. “There doesn’t ever seem to be an answer to why not. So here we are again. Do you know you’re only two years older than my oldest son?”
“Does that bother you?”
“No.” Lida sighed again. “That doesn’t bother me either. It doesn’t bother me that half the street probably knows what we’re doing—and what does Bennis think? You come to visit her and then you just disappear.”
“Bennis is smart enough never to ask questions she doesn’t want the answers to.” Christopher sat up. “I’m going to get a bottle of that New York State champagne we were drinking this afternoon. You want some chocolate? I’m starving.”
“I’ll take a glass of champagne.”
Christopher got out of the other side of the bed, keeping his back to her. He whipped a robe around himself in no time at all and tied the belt. Lida was impressed. He had not been so careful when all this had started, and she had not told him that it embarrassed her when he walked around naked. He must have guessed.
Christopher came back to the bedroom with his arms full. He dropped the chocolate on the quilt—a little pile of heart-shaped dark-chocolate cremes from Godiva that Lida’s daughter had sent—and handed Lida a glass.
“Here you are,” he said, pouring champagne. “Do you know it’s already two o’clock in the morning?”
Lida took a sip of champagne. “It’s Hannah I feel guilty about,” she said. “Not having her here. Not wanting her here. In spite of everything she has been through.”
Christopher poured a glass for himself. “It’s not as if she didn’t have anywhere to go,” he pointed out. “Helen Tevorakian offered to take her. You didn’t abandon Hannah on Cavanaugh Street.”
“Helen Tevorakian doesn’t have half the room I do. And it’s more than that. It’s more even than that I didn’t want to send you back to Bennis’s to sleep tonight.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s what it’s always been,” Lida said impatiently. “Always, even when we were children. I was the pretty one and she was the plain one. I got roses from secret admirers for Valentine’s Day, and Hannah got cards from Helen and me. I had six boys ask me to our senior dance, and one of the five I turned down I fixed up with Hannah. I worry it was all too much.”
“But what’s that supposed to mean, too much?” Christopher asked. “It’s not as if Hannah’s life has been one unrelieved stream of failures with men. It couldn’t have been. She was married. She has children and grandchildren.”
Lida cocked her head. “On the day Hannah was married, right after the ceremony while she was standing in the receiving line to the dinner, Daphne Tessevarian walked up to her and said it was too bad she looked so fat in her wedding dress, but once she had children it wouldn’t matter so much because she would be expected to gain weight.”
“Ouch.”
“Christopher, listen.” Lida clutched the quilt to her chest—it kept slipping—and took another sip of champagne. It felt good. It tickled. “Listen,” she said again. “Krekor is convinced that he knows Hannah and that Hannah could never have stabbed anyone, but I am not so sure. I am not so sure at all. What with Paul Hazzard, she was so happy, Christopher, she was thrilled, and then that woman showing up and everything falling all to pieces and in public like that, in front of everyone. And the man was stabbed six times at least, as if he were stabbed in anger. I don’t think Hannah could think through a murder and commit it, but I think she
might be able to kill someone like Paul Hazzard in anger.”
“I think you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions. You’d have to account for the dagger. You’d have to account for a lot of things. I think it’s much more logical to suspect Candida DeWitt.”
“Yes,” Lida said softly. “We all want to suspect Candida DeWitt. It absolves us all of the responsibility.”
“I feel responsible for only one thing,” Christopher said. He finished off the last of the chocolate hearts and put his champagne glass behind him on the night table. Then he took Lida’s champagne glass out of her hand and put it on the night table too.
“Let’s go back to what we were doing,” he said. “I’ll bet you anything you want that I can get you to feel like that again.”
“I thought that was impossible,” Lida said. “I thought with men, once they—you know—I thought then they had to wait for a different night.”
“I didn’t say I could get me to feel that way again. I said I could get you to.”
“Does this have something to do with whipped cream?”
“No,” Christopher said. He stretched them both out on the sheets and then he kissed her. “Whipped cream is for when you’re bored, and I am not bored. How about you?”
“No.” Lida felt a little breathless. “I am not bored.”
“Good.”
Good?
Christopher got back under the quilt and Lida put her hand on his bare back.
He had a very nice back.
He had a very nice everything.
How long was she going to be able to get away with this?
Three
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN DID NOT believe he would shield anyone from the consequences of murder, not even a woman he had known all his life. He was not so sure he would remain clearheaded in the face of evidence against her. It wasn’t just a question of his having known Hannah Krekorian. It wasn’t even a question of his having liked her. The real problem was his expectations. Here was a woman he had seen day after day for the past couple of years. He wasn’t relying on what he remembered about them all from forty or fifty years ago. He had Hannah these days to consider, and Hannah these days was a heavy, talkative woman in middle age who paid more attention to the sound of her own voice than she did to what other people said to her. Hannah these days cooked too much food when her family came to visit, spent too much money on birthday and Christmas presents, and vaguely resented the very idea of Gloria Steinem. It wasn’t that women like Hannah Krekorian didn’t commit murder. Gregor had good reason to know that they committed it in batches. The problem was that they didn’t commit this kind of murder. If Hannah had poisoned her family one by one and collected the insurance money, or put cyanide in the candy she handed out to the children who came to her door on Halloween, or overdone the insulin injections she gave to a failing old aunt or mother—those were the kinds of murders women like Hannah committed, and only after there were half a dozen bodies on the floor did anyone realize they were crazy. This sort of thing was something else. Six stab wounds into the chest of a grown man. It didn’t fit.