by Jane Haddam
“They didn’t find it because it wasn’t there,” Gregor explained. “It was back where it belonged, back where it always was when its owner didn’t have to carry it around. I don’t know if the police ever saw it. If they did, I don’t know how they would have connected it. It would have been different if they had found it in the house.”
“If it wasn’t in the house, where was it?” James sounded exasperated. “And are you honestly telling me that the murderer kept it? Just washed it off and kept it? And all these years? Whatever for?”
“The murderer had to keep the weapon,” Gregor explained, “because it was not easy to replace, it was needed for other things, and it would have been missed. Whether it was kept around for years, I have no idea. Paul Hazzard and Candida DeWitt may have been killed with a replacement. It doesn’t matter. The difficulties, the impossibilities, of disposing of this weapon do lead me to one conclusion though. I think Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard was killed in cold blood. I also think her murder was planned—but I don’t think it was planned for very long. I think the murderer thought it through for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, standing in this room.”
Alyssa stirred on the love seat. “That can’t have been the way Daddy died,” she said, “not if you’re solving his murder with earrings in people’s guest rooms. That could only have been the way Daddy died if that woman did it in a fit of pique then and there.”
“If that woman, as you put it, had murdered your father in a fit of pique then and there, that ornamental dagger wouldn’t have been at the scene covered in your father’s blood.”
“What a wonderful way to put it,” Alyssa said sourly.
“It had to be accounted for,” Gregor told her. “And there was only one way to account for it. It was being used to cover up for the real weapon, to throw suspicion in other directions.”
“Why didn’t your murderer just use that ornamental dagger on Daddy?” Alyssa demanded. “Wouldn’t that have made more sense?”
“Maybe it would have,” Gregor said, “but it wouldn’t have been so sure. The murderer had no idea if that ornamented dagger could actually kill anybody.”
Fred Scherrer snorted. “To hear Paul tell it, that idiotic thing had slaughtered tribesmen without number in its native wherever. He was always very big on how deadly that dagger was.”
“What I want to know is where the real weapon actually is,” James said. “How do we get to it and what does it look like?”
“Oh, that,” Gregor said. “My guess is that the weapon is here.”
“Why?” Fred Scherrer asked.
Bob Cheswicki broke in. “Because we already went to where it usually is this morning and it wasn’t there.”
“Give me a second here.”
Gregor leaned forward and got a hand on Caroline Hazzard’s tote bag. He had it lifted up off the floor before she had a chance to stop him. He held it close to his chest and looked through it. Then he said, “Here it is” and looked up at the assembled company.
“She needed it for work, you see,” he said. “She couldn’t just throw it away because it was such an unusually large size; she had to have it made to order. She had to have all her equipment made to order. It was expensive and it was obvious. She couldn’t just have it disappear.”
He pulled the oversize compass out of the tote bag and dropped the tote bag itself onto the floor. He held the compass up for everybody to see. The big pencil clamped into one point of the V looked dull. The sharp metal tip of the anchor point looked anything but. The metal of the compass had been oiled and shined. It glinted in the light pouring in through the window from the street.
Gregor pulled the V apart as far as it would go and pointed to the sharp-edged flat center arc.
“That’s what everybody mistook for the handle of the dagger,” Gregor explained. “The fit wasn’t exact when matched up against the cross-sections, but cross-sections are often not exact. You see the difference though.” He leaned over and tapped the drawings on the coffee table. “The dagger had a curved handle that went to either side of its point. These drawings show something with a flat-edged arc to only one side of the point.” He laid the anchor point of the compass on top of the point on the drawing and stood back. They were as exact a match as a cross-section taken from human flesh could ever get.
“Jesus Christ,” James Hazzard said.
And then Caroline Hazzard started to laugh.
“It was Daddy’s idea, you know, that dagger. He walked in and saw Jacqueline on the floor and he knew exactly what I’d done. He didn’t care. We thought a lot alike, Daddy and me. Our relationship was very symbiotic. He didn’t start therapy early enough though. He had a tendency to panic.”
“Caroline,” Fred Scherrer said, “I don’t think you ought to go on like this.”
“I don’t think it makes any difference,” Caroline said. “It isn’t going to matter much one way or the other. I’ve been in therapy for years. I’m not going to get convicted of anything. Maybe I’ll just say Daddy came into my room and screwed me every chance he got when I was eight. That ought to take care of everything, shouldn’t it, Fred? It would even be true on a metaphorical level, and not just when I was eight.”
“Caroline, for God’s sake,” Alyssa said.
“I really think you’re all getting far too worked up about all of this,” Caroline said. “It’s all going to turn out just fine, and you know it. And as far as I’m concerned, Daddy deserved to be dead.”
The real question, Gregor thought, was not whether Paul Hazzard deserved to be dead, but whether he deserved to have had Caroline kill him—but that might be a little complicated for this crowd.
Gregor felt better about stepping back and letting Russell Donahue and Bob Cheswicki do what they did best.
Epilogue
Valentine’s Day on Cavanaugh Street With All That Implies…
1
TOMMY MORADANYAN WENT TO play group on Thursdays, and because of that Donna Moradanyan had the time between eight-fifteen and eleven-thirty to get things done. This was less expansive than it seemed. What Donna wanted to get done almost always involved climbing ladders and hammering things outside other people’s bedroom windows. Looking at the decoration of Cavanaugh Street from a purely aesthetic point of view, it was positively peculiar how so many of the best places to hang red net hearts and pink cupids were directly under the noses of people who liked to sleep late, especially since so few people on Cavanaugh Street did sleep late. Still, it had to be done and it had to be done now. Decorating the street was the only thing keeping Donna Moradanyan sane through Valentine’s Day.
“It was absolutely crazy,” she’d told Bennis Hannaford the night before. “I’d been going crazy for weeks, so depressed I could hardly even eat, and you know what that means around here, and then the phone rings and I pick it up and there he is. Just like that.”
“Did he sound the same?” Bennis asked.
“He always sounds the same. He probably sounded the same when he was five years old. Sometimes I think he is five years old.”
“What did he want?”
Donna shrugged. “How am I supposed to know? Even he doesn’t know. He wanted to talk. One thing about Peter Bennis. He surely can talk.”
“You could always hang up on him.”
“I always want to hang up on him,” Donna said. “I always stop myself. He’s Tommy’s father, after all.”
“The contribution of one sperm is a necessary but not sufficient condition for that familial designation.”
“You’ll have to translate that for me later,” Donna told Bennis. “Anyway, the thing is, Tommy’s been down for weeks because Peter’s not around to pay attention to him. I don’t think it’s Peter in particular—it can’t be; they don’t know each other—but Tommy’s at the stage when he wants a father around to love him and there isn’t one. So I’ve been thinking maybe I made a mistake, maybe I should have insisted on Peter’s marrying me when I had the chance—”
> “Raspberries.”
“I know, I know. I came to the same conclusion. I mean, there he was on the phone and he’s a grown man and he’s practically thirty by now and what’s he talking about? Baseball cards. He’s started collecting baseball cards.”
“I think there’s money in it.”
“Peter being Peter, he’ll lose his shirt. Whatever. I just changed my mind, that’s all. Tommy and I are better off without him. I’m young. It’s not impossible that somewhere along the way I’ll find someone Tommy and I wouldn’t be better off without. If you know what I mean.”
“Sure,” Bennis said without hesitation. “Is this someone in particular? Someone you know now?”
“I don’t know,” Donna answered.
And that was true. She really didn’t know. She didn’t know much about anything except that if she didn’t get this heart up to the roof soon, Valentine’s Day was going to be over and she was never going to have the chance. The heart was absolutely wonderful. It was composed of hundreds of small mirrors tinted different shades of red and pink, and whenever the sun shone on it it glittered. Gregor had taken off for the Ararat with Bennis. Old George had promised to pick Tommy up at play group. Donna had nothing on her hands but time.
She tucked the heart and the things she needed to secure it with into a backpack. Then she let herself out on the fourth floor fire escape and started climbing the metal ladder to the roof.
It was a very good thing she had never been afraid of heights.
2
DOWN THE STREET, AT the Ararat, Gregor Demarkian and Bennis Hannaford were sprawled across the benches in the window booth, bent over coffee and English muffins while Linda Melajian hurried back and forth from the kitchen, followed by a steady stream of Armenian in a high-pitched voice. The high-pitched voice belonged to Linda Melajian’s grandmother, who was spending the day at the restaurant while Linda’s father looked around for a new live-in nurse. Linda Melajian’s grandmother went through live-in nurses the way a man with diarrhea goes through toilet paper. The word on the street was that she treated those nurses like toilet paper too. She certainly did screech. Gregor wondered why it was no one ever seemed to go about strangling women like this.
Linda had left a pot of coffee on the table. Gregor topped off his cup and sat back.
“In the beginning, I made the same mistake everyone else did,” Gregor said. “I kept trying to work out how the murderer—Caroline Hazzard, we know now—how she planned to kill Paul Hazzard in the middle of that party. And it was impossible, of course. She had no way of knowing she would be able to get him alone while that party was in progress. That wasn’t what she intended to do at all.”
“She intended to kill him later,” Bennis said.
“Exactly. She intended to find a handy hiding place and wait until the party was over. Then, with Hannah and Paul in the apartment, she’d have a very dangerous but very useful setup, perfect for her purposes as long as she was careful. She went to a great deal of trouble to make sure there were enough suspects. She stole Paul Hazzard’s invitation and slipped it in Candida DeWitt’s mailbox. She had no idea that Candida would show up at the party to make a scene, but it didn’t matter what Candida did. Caroline was simply trying to establish a certain impression.”
“Go back to the beginning,” Bennis commanded. “First, Caroline got in through Hannah’s bedroom window just around seven o’clock somewhere—”
“Which was the moan Sheila Kashinian heard,” Gregor said. “Then she hid in the guest room, dropping one of her sister Alyssa’s earrings to throw even more suspicion around. She checked out the neighborhood on Wednesday evening, by the way. Russell Donahue had his people around and they finally came up with something. I knew she had to have been seen.”
“She hid in the bedroom,” Bennis prompted.
“When Hannah and Paul had their fight, Caroline could see all the running around to the bedroom through the guest room door. She decided to take a chance and it worked. As soon as things quieted down a little, she rushed into the master bedroom and locked the door behind her. Remember, Hannah was still hysterical and Paul Hazzard himself was agitated. Caroline just took advantage of all the confusion to catch him off guard. My guess is that she reached out to hug the man—these people are incredible; they emote constantly—and as soon as she was close enough, she stabbed him with the anchor point of that compass. The six times, I think, were sheer pique. Then she put the compass away—in the inside pocket of this big cape she had, by the way; Russell Donahue found that, too, in her closet with the pocket all crusted bloody—and then she put the dagger down. More diversion. Then she unlocked the door and headed for the window.”
“Which is when Candida DeWitt saw her.”
“Right. Not all of her, you understand. Just a foot disappearing or the edge of that cape. If it had been anything more than that, anything surer, I think Candida would have told someone. The way things were, she decided to take matters into her own hands.”
“Which was stupid.”
“Not necessarily stupid.” Gregor shook his head. “Remember, Candida had based her life on taking chances. Now she had a book in process that stood to make her a great deal more money than it would otherwise if only she knew the explanation of what had happened to Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. And suddenly, she did.”
“Did she have to tell Caroline about it?”
“She didn’t tell Caroline about it. Caroline simply knew that she’d been seen. She thought she’d been seen but not recognized. She wasn’t taking any chances.”
“Marvelous person, Caroline Hazzard.”
“An incredibly lucky person,” Gregor said. “The first time, when she killed her stepmother—because she was afraid of what her stepmother was going to do now that Candida DeWitt was on the scene; Candida was off it by then, but I don’t think Caroline knew that—anyway, the first time Caroline just picked up the weapon that was closest to hand and went at it. The fact that there was a weapon on the wall that imitated the one she’d used was a sheer fluke. The fact that her father was the only person in the house who’d been home, and therefore the only one who’d seen, was lucky too. Caroline Hazzard set out to commit very simple crimes that ended up looking complicated because of chance—and because she always knew how to make use of chance.”
“And she killed her father because he was seeing Hannah?”
“She killed her father for money. She’d always intended to. Paul Hazzard had no idea what he was protecting in that daughter of his, and neither did Alyssa. Caroline was willing to wait for the money as long as she had her father’s exclusive attention. And she did, you know, for almost four years.”
“And then Hannah came along?” Bennis was skeptical.
“Hannah is a nice, comfortable middle-aged woman with a good deal of money who would be more than willing to spend it helping someone she loved put his life back together,” Gregor said. “Paul Hazzard was used to being a media star. He knew enough about the business he was in to realize he could be one again if he went about it the right way and spent enough in the process. I think he made a very smart move, picking up on Hannah.”
“Not for Hannah.”
“No,” Gregor admitted. “Not for Hannah. What are we going to do about Hannah? Before all this started, it would never have occurred to me that someone like Hannah could be in the market for—uh—for—”
“Sex?”
“I don’t think that’s the word I’d use, Bennis.”
“She’s only a year older than you are, Gregor.”
“I know. I know. But she seems older than that. They all do. Even Lida.”
“Lida’s still very pretty.”
“Is she? Well, maybe she is. But at least Lida would have sense enough not to get involved with someone like Paul Hazzard.”
“That’s true,” Bennis said. “What about a much younger man?”
“You have a filthy mind,” Gregor said. “For God’s sake.”
; Bennis leaned forward across the booth’s table and looked out the window at Cavanaugh Street.
“What time is it?” she asked.
Gregor checked his watch. “Quarter to nine.”
“They’re early.”
“What are early?”
“The balloons.”
Gregor poured himself more coffee. “Sometimes,” he said, “in fact, most of the time, you don’t make any sense at all.”
3
THE BALLOONS WERE INDEED early, and there were so many of them, dozens and dozens of them, that Lida Arkmanian didn’t know what to say. She was in the kitchen when the doorbell rang, sitting across the breakfast table from Christopher Hannaford. She had sweat on the back of her neck and a pain in her arms that felt like the beginning of tetanus. She had never been so tense in all her life.
The balloons were big silver-and-red hearts. They were filled with helium and each carried little baskets of heart-shaped candy in a heart-shaped straw bag. Lida went into the living room to watch them come in. They came in until they filled the entire room. Lida sat on the edge of her couch and watched them come, carried in in bunches by two men in blue uniform overalls. When it was over one of the two men went up to Christopher and had him sign a sheet of paper on a clipboard. Then the two men left and shut the door behind themselves, and Lida started to cry.
Christopher stopped in the living room door and watched. Lida could feel him watching. She still couldn’t make herself stop.
“I don’t know why you’re crying,” he said. “You’re the one who’s throwing me out. I don’t want to go anywhere.”
In the old days, women used to carry handkerchiefs in their pockets or their pocketbooks. Why had they ever stopped? There was a box of tissues in one of those fancy-colored cardboard boxes on the fireplace mantel. Lida couldn’t think of how it had gotten there. She got up and got a tissue and blew her nose. She always looked so terrible when she cried.