by Jane Haddam
There was the scratchy sound of a key in a lock and then the whoosh of an opening door. Helen Tevorakian’s voice sailed through the apartment. “She’s around here someplace, Krekor,” Helen said. “The only thing I worry about is that she might be sleeping.”
The teakettle was spitting water and air. Hannah took it off the flame and poured boiling water into her teacup. She heard the front door close and said, “I’m not sleeping, Helen. I’m in here.”
“She’s in the kitchen,” Helen said irrelevantly. “Come this way, Krekor. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in this apartment.”
Hannah didn’t know if Gregor had ever been in this apartment either, but it hardly seemed to matter. She turned off the stove and sat down in front of her tea. She put a single spare teaspoon of sugar in it and waited for them to come in. Only Gregor entered. He was wearing his heaviest long coat and his longest scarf. He looked cold.
“Where’s Helen?” she asked him.
“Helen’s gone off someplace to do her laundry. She’s trying to give us a little privacy.”
“Did you ask her to?”
“Yes.”
“Helen’s very good at taking directions. Do you remember? She used to get ribbons for it when we were all in school.”
“Mmm. I was just over at Father Tibor’s apartment. He wasn’t home.”
“He went to lunch with somebody. Some young woman. I heard Helen talking to Sheila Kashinian about it on the phone. He’ll be back around five-thirty or so. He promised.”
“Good.” Gregor unwound his scarf and draped it over the back of a chair. He took off his coat and threw that over the back of another chair. Hannah appraised him dispassionately. It was different for boys, she knew that. With girls, it was what you looked like and that was it. Unless you had a fairy godmother or the money for a good plastic surgeon, girls were born blessed or cursed. Boys could change everything with what they did. Gregor had not been considered especially attractive in grammar school or high school. As soon as he’d gone off to the University of Pennsylvania, all that had changed. As soon as he’d graduated, he’d become a catch. All the girls on Cavanaugh Street had wanted to go out with him.
Gregor sat down in the chair with the scarf on the back of it. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You’re staring at me. Do I have my shirt on inside out?”
“No, Krekor. I was just thinking about us. You and me and Lida and the rest of us. When we were in high school.”
“Were you? I try not to.”
“It’s all I seem to think about these days. Not just—not just since Paul died, you know, but from before. From when I first met him. It doesn’t seem possible that that was only a week ago.”
“I think I’ll get myself something to drink.”
Gregor got up, found hot water, found a cup, found a spoon, looked for coffee, and settled for one of the teabags instead. He put a cup of tea together and sat down again.
“Well,” he said. “Here we are. Are you feeling all right?”
“Yes, Krekor. I am all right. Are the police going to arrest me?”
Gregor stirred uneasily. “I don’t know.”
“I keep expecting them to,” Hannah said. “It only makes sense. There I was, standing over the body with a smoking gun. So to speak.”
“Yes, I know, Hannah. But these things are more complicated than that.”
“And you know I didn’t kill him.”
“I believe you when you say you didn’t kill him.”
“Yes.” Hannah nodded. “There is a distinction there, and you ought to make it. But I didn’t kill him.”
Gregor took his teabag out of his cup, tasted the tea, made a face, and reached for the sugar. “Let’s start further back now, to about the time you ran upstairs. You ran upstairs because the things Candida DeWitt was saying made you upset—”
“I ran upstairs because the existence of Candida DeWitt made me look like a damn fool,” Hannah corrected him. “Excuse my language, Krekor, but I can’t help it. I am very good at self-delusion, but even I have to quit sometimes.”
“What do you mean by self-delusion?”
“I mean that I still don’t know what Paul Hazzard wanted out of me, but whatever it was, it wasn’t my self. He was not the kind of man who would be attracted to a woman like me. He didn’t have to compromise. He could have Candida DeWitt.”
“He doesn’t seem to have wanted Candida DeWitt,” Gregor pointed out.
Hannah waved this away. “He could have had a woman like Candida DeWitt. He could have had someone young. Do you know what my theory is?”
“What?”
“After the murder of his wife, Paul’s business went downhill. That is common knowledge, Krekor, we don’t have to speculate about that. He needed money but he had trouble finding women with money to marry him, because they did not want to put themselves in the same position as the wife who died. And I have money, Krekor. Not millions and millions and millions of dollars, but enough. All five of my sons pitched in together to make me a portfolio ten years ago, and they have managed it very well.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “that’s a thought. But I think you’re being a little too hard on yourself. You have a lot more to offer than your portfolio.”
“Possibly, Krekor, yes. But not to a man. Not for romantic purposes.”
Gregor started to protest, then looked away. Hannah smiled grimly. Oh, she had been right to be upset last night. She had been right. She had been making such a spectacularly public fool of herself.
Gregor cleared his throat. “All right, now. Let’s go back to the point when you ran upstairs. Did you go straight to the bedroom?”
“I went straight to the master bathroom.”
“You didn’t stop anywhere along the way? You didn’t take any detours? You didn’t throw yourself on your bed or look in your closet or anything else like that?”
“No.”
“Okay. Now, try to remember. When you went into your bedroom, were either of the windows open?”
“The windows?” Hannah drew a blank. “Of course they weren’t open, Krekor. It’s February. It’s below zero outside at night.”
“But you didn’t check to see if either of the windows was open?”
“No, I didn’t check, Krekor, but if one of them was, I didn’t open it. You are being ridiculous.”
Gregor shifted in his chair. “Let’s try it from another angle,” he said. “Did you at any time feel cold? When you first got up to the second floor? As you were crossing to the bathroom? Were you cold at all? Did you feel a breeze?”
“No, Krekor.”
“Would it have been possible for you to take that route with the window closest to the bathroom wide open without your noticing either that it was open or that it was cold?”
“I don’t know, Krekor. I was very upset.”
“And you were crying,” Gregor said.
“That’s right.”
“You were crying very loudly.”
“Very loudly.”
“Were you aware of it when Paul Hazzard came into the bedroom?”
“I don’t know when he came into the bedroom, Krekor, but he did knock on my bathroom door. I assume it was when he first came in. I had not been in the bathroom long.”
“You had the door locked?”
“Oh, yes.”
“What did he say to you when he knocked on the door?”
Hannah thought it over carefully. “He called out my name,” she said, “and then he asked me to talk to him and then he asked me to please come out.”
“But you didn’t do either of those things.”
“Oh, no.” Hannah shook her head. “I was crying too hard and I didn’t have anything to say. And I looked awful. I always look awful when I cry.”
“Did he go on trying to persuade you?”
“No, Krekor, he did not. He said only that he was going to stay right there in the bedroom until I came out, and then he started walking back and forth.�
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“You could hear that?”
“It was right outside the door, Krekor. It was very close. And I was listening for it, if you know what I mean.”
Gregor had finished his tea. He stood up and put his cup in the sink.
“Did you hear anything else? Did you hear Mary Ohanian come upstairs?”
“No.”
“Or Helen Tevorakian?”
“No.”
“Did you hear anybody at all come into the room? Or the sound of the bedroom door closing?”
“No, Krekor, but you have to understand. I was crying. I was wailing. I was having what Bennis would call a ‘world-class emotional binge.’ ”
“But you did come out eventually,” Gregor said, leaning with his back against the counter. “Was the emotional binge over? Had you decided you wanted to talk to him?”
“No, Krekor, none of those things. I thought he had gone away.” She paused and thought about it. “Because the sounds of the moving stopped. First he walked faster. And then he just stopped. I couldn’t hear him moving out there at all anymore.”
“And that was it,” Gregor said. “You couldn’t hear him moving. You didn’t actually hear anything else.”
Hannah shuddered. “He must have been dead, Krekor. I understand that now. But I didn’t hear any of the things you might think I should have. I didn’t hear him fall—or if I did, I just thought it was more of his pacing. I did hear him—well, I thought he was swearing under his breath. It was hard to tell.”
“When was this?”
“Just about the time he stopped pacing. You see, Krekor, that was another reason I thought he’d gone. It all fit in. He got tired of waiting for me to come to my senses. He got angry. He swore a little under his breath and then he went.”
“You couldn’t make out what he said?”
“No, Krekor. It didn’t sound like words at all. It sounded more like a moan.”
Gregor Demarkian seemed to start, and Hannah looked at him curiously. What an odd thing for him to take so strongly, she thought.
“Is that all you wanted to know?” she asked him. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you very much. I was right there and I should know, but I don’t.”
“One last thing,” Gregor told her. “When you came out of the bathroom. What did you do?”
“I opened the door and I looked out. I couldn’t see him anywhere. I walked out into the middle of the bedroom and then—”
“Stop. Before you get to ‘and then.’ Can you remember whether the bedroom door was open or closed?”
“It was closed, Krekor. I looked there first thing when I came out. In case he was just leaving or he was standing on the landing where he could see me.”
“I don’t suppose you can remember whether you closed the bedroom door when you first came into the bedroom?”
“No, Krekor, I can’t remember. I don’t think I did.”
“Never mind. Go back to the ‘and then.’ ”
Hannah took a deep breath. “Well,” she said, “I walked out into the bedroom, and I nearly tripped over him. I remember that. It is all very fuzzy, Krekor, I am sorry, I think I went into some kind of shock. He was lying there on the carpet and there was blood everywhere, just everywhere. And I dropped to my knees and I grabbed—I grabbed that thing—”
“The dagger? Where was it? Was it in the body?”
“It was on the floor in a pool of blood. I could never have taken it out of the body. I grabbed the—the dagger—and then I realized I was cold, so cold, and somewhere in there I started screaming and screaming and in the back of my mind I kept telling myself I had to do something about it. I had to get downstairs and call you or call the police or call an ambulance or something and in the middle of it all I stood up, and she was standing in the doorway to the bedroom with a very odd look on her face.”
“By ‘her’ you mean Candida DeWitt?”
“Yes.”
“She was looking at you and she had an odd look on her face?”
“No, Krekor. I don’t think she was looking at me.”
“She was looking at Paul Hazzard?”
Hannah shook her head. “She was looking over my right shoulder, I think. She was maybe staring into space. I am not doing very well with this, Krekor, but I am doing the best I can.”
“You’re doing fine,” Gregor assured her.
Hannah looked into the bottom of her teacup. “I wish I understood things better… Not just what happened last night, but life. I wish I understood why things are.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said noncommittally.
Hannah got up and put her own teacup in the sink. Really, it was useless to try to explain things to men.
They never understood anything.
2
At the time that Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard died, Alyssa Hazzard Roderick’s only real interest in her will was insofar as it went to prove that Paul didn’t have a motive to murder her. That the will was set up in such a way as to pass the bulk of Jacqueline’s estate to Paul Hazzard’s children when Paul Hazzard died had been explained to her, but Alyssa hadn’t seen the point in paying attention to it. After all, Paul was a relatively young man, and a healthy one. He worked out and ate tofu and never touched more than a glass of wine after dinner. Alyssa thought Paul was going to live to be at least a hundred and three. He was going to live much longer than she would, because she was going to be done in by her love of chocolate-chip cookies. Caroline always said Alyssa had an addiction to chocolate-chip cookies. That was the only explanation Caroline could find for why Alyssa would eat them first thing in the morning, sitting up in bed.
It wasn’t first thing in the morning and Alyssa wasn’t sitting up in bed. It was four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, the day after her father’s murder. Alyssa was not sure this was a very good time to do what she wanted to do. Caroline was still sitting downstairs in the living room, working. James was out—but out where? And for how long? Then there was Nicholas to consider. Nicholas was at his club for the afternoon, playing backgammon. How long he stayed depended on whether he won or lost.
Alyssa had no idea why she wanted to hide this little excursion from her husband, or why she wanted to hide it from anybody else. She just did. She just wanted to go off and get a little piece of private information for herself, on her own, just this once. She’d tell Nicholas all about it later. She really would. She’d tell James and Caroline too, if she had to. Honestly, it wasn’t as if she didn’t have a right to do what she was going to do. It was just that she wanted to do it on her own and without… fuss.
There was a door on the back staircase that led directly from the apartment Alyssa and Nicholas kept on the top floor to the rest of the house. It was never locked. Alyssa never locked it from her side because she didn’t see any reason to. Caroline and Paul and James didn’t lock it from theirs because they were pretending to be a really close, really involved family unit. At least, that was what Alyssa thought was going on. It was hard to get things straight with people like Caroline and Paul. They talked such fluent recovery that you could never figure out what they were trying to mean, if anything. Alyssa much preferred James. James might pretend to believe in crystals and powders and potions, but he didn’t really believe in them, and if you called him on it, he would say so.
Alyssa let herself into the main house and went down the fourth floor corridor to the main stairs. There were several big bedrooms on this floor, but only one of them—Caroline’s—was occupied. Alyssa looked in there for a moment, but without much interest. The look of Caroline’s bedroom always mirrored the state of her immortal soul. This time it was neat to the point of being antiseptic and as lacking in personality as a room at the Holiday Inn. Obviously, Caroline’s soul was being anal this month. Alyssa checked out the necklaces hanging on the jewelry tree—Caroline’s inner child had a positive passion for jade—and decided she didn’t like any of them. She left the room and went downstairs to the third floor.
The third floo
r was much more interesting than the fourth floor. Both James and Paul had rooms on it, and there was also a small sitting room James had turned into a kind of museum. This was where he kept the bits and pieces of his trade that had gone out of fashion. This was where he piled up now-useless copper bracelets and discarded pyramids, smooth stones for aid in trance channeling and packets of herbs meant to scent away your psychic pain. Lately, crystals had been finding their way into the collection, first a few, then more and more. Crystals must be about to become passé. What would they be replaced by, Alyssa wondered. Just when you thought the New Age had gotten as silly as it could get—just when you were sure people couldn’t get any stupider than they had already been—people like James came up with something new.
Alyssa gave the museum a quick look-over—nothing new there—and then glanced into James’s room, just to make sure he wasn’t there. Then she went into Paul’s room and sat down on the bed. The room was unnaturally clean today. Paul himself had never kept it this neat. Today it had been put back together again by the pair of policemen who had come to take it apart. They had been trained in dustless surfaces and hospital corners.
“Yes?” Caroline’s voice suddenly shot up the stairs, sharp and angry. “Yes? Is there somebody up there?”
Alyssa got off the bed and went into the hall. “Caroline? It’s just me. I was on my way downstairs to see you.”
“You didn’t sound as if you were on your way downstairs.” Caroline was still on the first floor. Alyssa could tell by the way her voice sounded. It was a relief.
“I stopped in to look at James’s museum,” Alyssa said. “He seems to be on the verge of giving up crystals.”
“You should have called down to me,” Caroline told her sharply. “You scared me half to death. I thought you were a thief at least.”
Any thief with half a brain in his head would come in on the first floor, in the back, where the kitchen was. That was the easy way.