by Jane Haddam
Gregor looked inside. The room was an unqualified mess, the way rooms got when they had been worked over by tech men, but the tech men themselves were gone. Aside from a single uniformed patrolman standing next to the body, there was only a white-coated man from the medical examiner’s office, waiting. Gregor walked over to the body and looked down at it.
Candida DeWitt had been an attractive woman in an understated way. She was now an attractive corpse, but there was nothing understated about her. Her lipsticked lips looked too bright against the whiteness of her face. Her eyes looked as if she had used kohl on them instead of eyeliner. Her eyes were open. They were very blue.
Gregor got down on his haunches and leaned closer to Candida DeWitt’s chest, trying to see what could be seen of the wound.
“Russell,” he called. “Come here for a minute.”
Russell Donahue came and got down on his haunches too.
“Just one wound,” he said. “A smash, bang right in the heart.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “It looks like the other ones though, doesn’t it? The ones last night on Paul Hazzard.”
Russell Donahue was doubtful. “We’ll have to check with Forensics,” he said. “Whatever was used here couldn’t possibly have been the same weapon. We have the weapon in the Hazzard murder case.”
“Do we? Do you have your lab reports back yet?”
“No,” Russell admitted. “But it couldn’t have been a coincidence, Mr. Demarkian. The weapon we found being just the right shape to make the wounds and all the rest of it—”
“There’s nothing coincidental about it,” Gregor said. “The only coincidence in this case happened when Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard died. Since then, we’ve been dealing with cold-blooded deliberation.”
“You sound like you know what’s going on,” Russell Donahue said in amazement. “You sound like you know who killed them.”
“That’s moot.” Gregor leaned toward the body again and pointed at the wound. “We’re going to need cross-sections, like the ones we’re having done on Paul Hazzard and the ones that were done when Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard died.”
“We’ll get them.”
Gregor pointed to a space just to the right of the puncture. “Pay particular attention to this. Look at that.”
“The dress is torn,” Russell Donahue said.
“The dress is slit,” Gregor corrected him. “There were slits like that in Paul Hazzard’s shirt last night. Not six of them, of course. It happens only when the force of the blow is particularly strong. It isn’t an edge that was deliberately designed to cut.”
“What are you talking about?” Russell Donahue demanded. “Mr. Demarkian, if you know who killed these two people, you have to tell me about it. You can’t just let whoever did these things wander around loose—”
“I don’t know who killed these two people,” Gregor said, “at least, not necessarily. What I know is what they were killed with. I held the murder weapon in my hands today. And it didn’t even occur to me.”
“Wait,” Russell said. “What you’re implying is that that dagger thing wasn’t used to kill Hazzard.”
“Of course it wasn’t. Why should it be?”
“For one thing, it fits the wound. For another thing, it was lying there next to Hazzard’s body.”
“It was lying there next to Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body too, but it wasn’t the murder weapon.”
“When it was lying next to Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body, it didn’t have blood on it.”
“Have you ever seen the cross-section drawings from the original Hazzard case?”
Russell Donahue shook his head. Gregor stood up and looked around. There was a long, low couch in the middle of the room with a coffee table in front of it, facing the fireplace. There were a pair of delicate-looking end tables with lamps on them. There was a bookcase whose second shelf was a backlit display space holding ornamental china. There was nothing suitable to write on. Candida DeWitt had not been overly fond of furniture.
Gregor searched through the pockets of his coat until he came up with paper and a Bic ball-point pen. His pockets were always full of Bic ball-point pens. The paper was the envelope he had received his last overdue notice from the library in. He walked over to the nearest wall and plastered the envelope against it.
“Take a look at this,” he said. “The cross-section of the wound found in Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body looked like this.” He drew carefully on one side of the envelope.
“So?” Russell Donahue demanded, studying what Gregor had done.
“Now look at this,” Gregor said. “This is approximately what the outline of the dagger looks like.”
“Be careful not to get ink on the wall.”
Gregor ignored him and drew.
“There,” he said when he was finished. “Look at that.”
“I am looking at it. They’re near enough to identical—”
“No, they’re not,” Gregor insisted. “Look, that’s the mistake everybody has been making, right from the beginning. Everybody’s been so impressed with the points of comparison, they’ve failed to notice the obvious. Which is that these two drawings are nowhere near identical. And neither are the real things on which they’re based.”
“I don’t think you can count the fact that the dagger is longer than the wound is deep,” Russell Donahue objected. “Assuming your representation is accurate. I mean, the murderer wouldn’t have been able to get the entire dagger into the wound—”
“Of course he wouldn’t have. That’s not what I mean.”
“You mean that little thingy over on the left side.”
“Exactly.”
“There are a lot of reasons why that might not have shown up in the wound,” Russell said. “I’m not pretending to know everything there is to know about forensics—”
“Try using common sense,” Gregor told him. “The wound in Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body was deep enough and definite enough so that the medical examiner was able to take a cross-section that looked like this.” He pointed to his first drawing. “I’ve seen the picture. It was unbelievably clear. Do you honestly think, if the wound was that deep and that well defined, that there wouldn’t also have been traces of that left side of the handle?”
“Maybe,” Russell Donahue said reluctantly. “But Mr. Demarkian—”
“No buts,” Gregor told him. “Where’s Roger Stebbins?”
“Here,” Roger Stebbins said. “I’ve been right behind you the whole way. I’ve been listening.”
“Good.” He turned to Roger. “Have your people searched this room? Have they searched the house?”
“They’ve done a once-over,” Roger said. “They wouldn’t do a full shakedown until later in a situation like this. What are you looking for?”
“An envelope addressed to Candida DeWitt. With Hannah Krekorian’s return address on it. Probably on the back flap.”
“I see what you’re getting at,” Russell Donahue said. “You want to see the envelope her invitation to Hannah Krekorian’s party came in. But would she have kept something like that?”
“I think she would have,” Gregor said. “Candida was a very formal woman. Old-fashioned in a lot of ways. She would have expected to write a thank-you note after the party was over.”
“After that party was over?” Russell Donahue was incredulous.
“Habit is a powerful thing,” Gregor told him. “My friend Bennis Hannaford always saves the envelopes, except where she knows the person who invited her very well. Did Candida DeWitt have a maid?”
“She must have had, living in a house like this,” Roger Stebbins said, “but maybe it’s someone who comes in during the day. There’s no one here now except Fred Scherrer. And the body.”
“Get me Fred Scherrer,” Gregor said. “Maybe he knows.”
The two police officers looked at each other in a way Gregor had become used to. They were telegraphing a thought that could be paraph
rased: I don’t care what his reputation is, I think he’s nuts. Roger Stebbins left the room anyway, in search of Fred Scherrer. He came back a couple of minutes later with Fred in tow. Fred kept looking sideways at the body and going a little green. Finally, he turned his back to it, squared his shoulders, and folded his arms. Gregor had the distinct feeling that he would refuse to turn around for any reason whatsoever. They could walk around to the back of him and start talking from there. They could sneak up behind him and yell boo. It wouldn’t matter.
Gregor couldn’t really blame Scherrer for not wanting to stare for minute after minute at the corpse of a woman of whom he had been fond. He sat down on the couch so that Fred didn’t have to turn to look at him and said, “Mrs. DeWitt said something at Hannah Krekorian’s party last night about consulting you on the subject of libel. Was that true?”
“To an extent,” Fred answered. “There had been an… incident here. Somebody had gotten into the house and spray-painted some graffiti on the fireplace. Nasty stuff. Threatening death. Candida was in the middle of writing a book about her life. A lot of it was going to have to do with the murder of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. Naturally. She thought—”
“—that one of the Hazzards was trying to warn her off,” Gregor finished for him. “This incident wasn’t reported?”
“No, it wasn’t. I told Candida it should have been. I warned her those people were dangerous. Now one of them’s killed her.”
“You’re sure it was one of the Hazzard children?”
“I find it difficult to think of them as children,” Fred Scherrer said, “but yes, I’m sure. From what Candida told me, the house wasn’t broken into. She locked up when she left and put the alarm on, and when she got back, the fireplace had been defaced. The doors were locked. There weren’t any broken windows. The alarm had been reset. It had to have been someone who knew what they were doing.”
“There must have been other people who fit that description besides the Hazzard children,” Gregor suggested.
“There must have been plenty,” Fred agreed, “but Candida couldn’t think of any who might have had a motive. And neither could I.”
Motive, Gregor thought. Motive, motive, motive. The classic motives were love, hate, and money—and he would bet on money every time.
“Let’s go on to something else,” he said. “Did you know that Mrs. DeWitt intended to go to Hannah Krekorian’s party last night?”
“Oh, yes. She asked me to go with her.”
“And you refused?”
“Point-blank.” Fred Scherrer shook his head. “I knew it was going to lead to trouble.”
“This kind of trouble?”
Fred blanched. “Of course not. If I’d known that, I would never have let her go. Although I’ve got to admit, getting Candida to give up doing something she’d decided to do was damn near impossible. I just thought there was going to be a scene, that’s all. I didn’t want any part of it. That way, if she got sued for harassment or something, I would be in a position to defend her.”
“Did Mrs. DeWitt tell you how she came to be invited to this party?”
Fred nodded. “She got an invitation, ‘in her mailbox’, as she put it, in the middle of the week. She used the phrase ‘in my mailbox’ so many times, I finally asked her what she meant by it. She said she didn’t think the invitation had actually come in the mail. She said she thought someone had simply put it in her mailbox.”
“Did she have reason for that?”
“I don’t know. I suppose she must have.”
“Did you see the invitation? Or the envelope?”
“I saw the invitation,” Fred Scherrer said. Comprehension dawned. “I see. You’re right, of course. She would have kept the envelope for the return address. It’s probably upstairs in her desk. In her bedroom.”
“I’ll go check,” Roger Stebbins said. He hurried out of the room.
Gregor turned his attention back to Fred Scherrer. “Did Mrs. DeWitt tell you why she was going to the party? Did she give you any indication of what her purpose was?”
“She said she wanted to see what would happen,” Fred Scherrer said. “When Jackie—Jacqueline—when Paul’s wife died, in the police mess that followed that, Paul tried to throw suspicion on Candida as a way to deflect suspicion from himself. He and Candida had only recently severed a long-term relationship, and it was Paul’s idea, not Candida’s. I think she’s always been very… unhappy about all that.”
“Did she say anything to you last night, after Paul’s murder? Anything about what had happened at Hannah Krekorian’s house or who she thought might have killed Hazzard.”
Fred Scherrer shook his head. “She said that now that Paul was dead, she knew for sure who had killed Jackie. But it was my impression that she always thought she knew who killed Jackie.”
“But this was different?”
“Oh, yes. This was certainty.”
“And that’s exactly what she said. Now that Paul Hazzard was dead, she knew who killed his wife.”
Fred Scherrer closed his eyes, concentrating. “I’ll tell you exactly,” he said. “We were sitting in a cab, and she’d just explained the whole thing about the invitation to me. Then she said, ‘And now that he’s dead, of course, it clears everything up. I know just what happened the last time.’ I suppose she could have meant how it was done, and not who.”
“Especially if she already knew who,” Gregor said.
“Especially then,” Fred Scherrer agreed.
There was a sound at the door, and they both turned slightly. Fred Scherrer was careful not to turn too much. Gregor watched as Roger Stebbins came blundering through, looking too big and clumsy and out of place among all the delicateness of the room. He was holding a plain white envelope in one hand and grinning.
“Found it,” Roger Stebbins said. “There’s a little secretary thing in an alcove off the main bedroom. You unlatch the label part and pull it down, and behind that there are a lot of little pigeonholes. It was in one of those.”
Gregor put out his hand. “Can I have that?” he asked. “Are you preserving the surface to check for prints?”
Roger Stebbins handed the envelope over. “It’s the wrong kind of paper for prints. You think that’s going to be of any use to us otherwise?”
“In one way, I think it’s going to be a great deal of use,” Fred Scherrer said. “Unless Hannah Krekorian is a lot smarter than she looked last night, I think this takes care of any suspicion that she sent that invitation to Candida herself. That was an engraved invitation Candida got, wasn’t it? An engraved blank?”
“Right,” Russell Donahue said.
“That’s an envelope from Hallmark,” Fred Scherrer said.
“This is an envelope with an uncanceled stamp on it,” Gregor said. “Mrs. DeWitt was right. It did come in her mailbox. But not in her mail.”
“Wonderful,” Russell Donahue said. “Is all this supposed to mean something? What are we supposed to do now?”
Gregor Demarkian stood up.
“Now,” he said, “you’re supposed to take me home.”
Two
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN SOMETIMES ENVIED the police officers he saw on television, the men and women who leapt out of bed at four in the morning when they fortuitously dreamed a hunch, went chasing all over town waking up suspects to ask just a question or two, and ended up in an eleventh-hour shoot-out with the depraved villain on the roof of an abandoned building. Gregor didn’t have much use for shoot-outs or for chasing around town. He liked the Nero Wolfe paradigm, where the Great Detective sat around all day earing shad roe and getting fat and no one dared to lecture him about his cholesterol. What he envied the television police was their ability to forget about time. All the way back to Cavanaugh Street from Candida DeWitt’s house, Gregor was acutely conscious of the fact that it was nearly ten o’clock on a Saturday night. It would have been earlier, but Russell Donahue had gotten held up at the last minute by a discussio
n of protocol with Roger Stebbins. Gregor had opted out of that one. He went to stand in the cold on Candida DeWitt’s terrace. The vista was beautiful. After a few minutes, Fred Scherrer joined him. If it hadn’t been a useless waste of time when he was eager to get something done, Gregor might have enjoyed himself.
Actually, there was nothing much he could get done. When Russell Donahue finally pulled onto Cavanaugh Street, Gregor made him stop several blocks from his own apartment. Then he ordered Russell to pull up to the curb and park. Russell complained about the illegality of it all. It was embarrassing when police officers got their cars ticketed or towed away. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did. Gregor ignored him.
“Do you have a flashlight?” he asked.
Russell Donahue reached into the glove compartment and came up with a flashlight. It was a good big one, the kind that was used in factories and on back lots, heavy and black. Russell handed it over.
“Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Gregor stood on the sidewalk in front of Hannah Krekorian’s apartment building and looked to the right and to the left. Very few of the buildings on Cavanaugh Street were actually flush up against each other. Most were separated by narrow alleys that led to trash bins and utility sheds. Hannah’s building had an alley on each side. Gregor tried to work out which side her bedroom window would look out on, and then realized that the answer was neither. There was actually a view from Hannah’s bedroom windows. It wasn’t much of a view, but it was a view. That meant those windows had to face the back.
“Come on,” Gregor told Russell Donahue, who had climbed out of the car, locked up carefully, and was now standing on the pavement. His ears seemed to be turning blue. “I want to get a look at the fire escape,” Gregor explained.
“I got a look at the fire escape last night,” Russell protested. He stamped his feet against the cold. “I’m really very thorough, Mr. Demarkian. It’s just a fire escape.”
“Come on,” Gregor said again.
They went down the alley to the left side, which was unfortunately the one that held the garbage for both Hannah’s building and the one next door. They emerged into a small courtyard in the back and looked around. There was a scattering of good security lights on the back of Hannah’s building and the back of the building with which it shared a garbage station. All the lights still didn’t make the courtyard brightly lit. They must have been put in by amateurs. They were aimed incorrectly. Still, Gregor thought, it wasn’t a menacing well of blackness back here. It was possible.