Bleeding Hearts (12 page)

The other way women were different from men was in relationships. Yes, women were often abused. They were abused a lot if you counted the metaphysical level as well as the physical one. Paul believed they brought it on themselves. Women could never decide what they wanted from a relationship and stick to it. They were always changing their assumptions and expecting men to let them change the rules. They said they wanted to be independent, but when they were out of a relationship they were always declaring themselves to be “miserable.” They said they wanted to be strong, but when their men slept with other women or batted them around the kitchen or drank up all the rent money, they accepted the first apology they got and went on trying to “keep the relationship together.” It was enough to make you believe in a hereditary, sex-linked, sex-specific form of masochism.

Actually, Paul Hazzard liked masochism in women. It was useful. He had spotted it right away in Hannah Krekorian, even before he spoke to her. The way she stood. The way she walked. The way she nibbled guiltily on a cookie, as if indulging in chocolate chips were the moral equivalent of working as a camp guard in Dachau. Paul Hazzard knew the signs. And, since he had gone to that particular meeting in hope of meeting someone who would suit his purpose, he had been interested. It was too bad that Hannah was neither young nor pretty. Paul liked his women very young and very pretty. Unfortunately, he also liked them very rich, and the three things rarely went together, at least in women who were available to him. Even at the height of his career, when he had his own series on PBS and his books sold twenty-five thousand copies a week, there were certain women who had remained beyond his grasp. Very young, very pretty, very rich women wanted to marry rock stars. To find someone willing to take on a stodgy old psychologist, he had to make compromises.

He had to do something soon, or his life was going to fall apart. That was the problem here. Nobody had the faintest idea what Jacqueline’s dying had done to him financially. Not even the children. The children just thought he was stingy. If he’d been stingy, he wouldn’t be in this mess. Maybe he needed a few sessions at Shopaholics Anonymous. He didn’t, of course. He wasn’t some silly woman with even less sense than character who didn’t know when to cut up her credit cards. He’d stopped shopping when he’d gotten worried enough.

He was sitting at the desk in the first floor study, looking at the phone he had just hung up. That had been Hannah, inviting him to a party she was giving this Friday night. She would have mentioned it when they went out to dinner, but his conversation had been so interesting, it had just put the party straight out of her head. Paul was sure there had been no party planned on the night he’d taken Hannah Krekorian to dinner. This was her way of making sure she saw him again. Paul thought it was a very good sign.

He left the study, made his way to the front hall, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. This house had thirty-five hundred square feet on each floor, but not many rooms, except at the top, where Alyssa and Nick had their apartment. The kitchen was in the basement. The living room, the study, and the library were on the first floor. The dining room and another reception room were on the second floor. Paul went into the dining room and looked around. Caroline was sitting at one end of the long table, eating shredded wheat and looking sour. She had her special small pitcher of skim milk and a glass of bloodred just-from-the-juicer juice beside her. James was sitting at the other end of the table, eating English muffins piled with butter and cream cheese and drinking coffee black. He looked happy as a clam. There was another difference between men and women, Paul thought. Men would never force themselves to eat things that made them feel sour. They’d eat what they wanted and take the consequences. Women were always saying they wanted to make their own standards instead of living up to the standards set by men, but you could no more get them off one of their ridiculous diets than you could turn Waikiki Beach into the diamond as big as the Ritz.

Paul got himself a cup of coffee from the sideboard and put it at a place midway down that side of the table. He got cream cheese and butter and bagels from the sideboard too, and sat down. Caroline glared at him.

“Of course you realize this is sabotage behavior,” she said frostily. “You both know how important it is to me to stick to this diet. You’re both afraid that if I change, things won’t be so pleasant for you. So you eat that stuff where I can see you, hoping to make me lose control.”

“I’d never try to make you lose control,” James said airily. “I don’t indulge myself in missions impossible. Did I hear you on the phone, Dad? Caroline says you’ve got a new paramour but she’s so young you don’t want anybody to know.”

“I think you ought to consider the entire etiology of eating disorders,” Paul said to Caroline. “You don’t need to lose weight. You’re thin as a rail. What are you doing on a diet?”

“I’m on a maintenance diet.”

“You’re in denial,” Paul said. “This is some kind of incipient anorexia nervosa. Your dieting is out of control.”

“Don’t tell
me
when I’m out of control,” Caroline snapped. “You don’t own my emotions. I own my emotions. You’ve got no right to tell me how I feel.”

“I’m not telling you how you feel. I’m just trying to point out—”

“You’re just trying to manipulate me, that’s all you’re doing. That’s all you’ve ever tried to do. You were a manipulative and withholding parent from the beginning, and you know it. You just hate knowing I know it. You just hate it that you can’t use it on me anymore.”

“Could we try not subjecting me to it anymore?” James said. “It’s Sunday morning. Maybe we ought to go to church.”

They both stared at him blankly.

“Well,” James said, “it would have to beat having another one of these arguments. These arguments are the pits. And they never get anywhere.”

“I have a right to express my anger.”

“I have a right not to listen to it.”

“That’s not true,” Caroline said quickly. “I have a right to express my anger and I have a right to be listened to.”

“I don’t know where you got that from—scratch it; yes, I do—but in case you haven’t heard, slavery has been illegal in this country since the Emancipation Proclamation. And slavery is the name for the condition where some people have an absolute right to some other people’s time. I
do
have a right not to listen to it. And now I would like to discuss something else.”

“I don’t have to stay here and be subjected to this abuse.” Caroline stood up. Her shredded wheat was half eaten. Her juice had barely been touched. Paul wondered what it was the juice of. Radishes? With the juicer, you never knew. Caroline stalked to the dining room door and stopped. “You can try as hard as you want to keep me under your thumbs, but it won’t work,” she declared. “I’m a
survivor.
”

Then she turned her back to them and stalked away.

Down at his end of the table, James was eating his way through the last half of his last English muffin, sinking his teeth into two inches of cream cheese, catching the overflow of butter with his tongue. Paul watched him curiously. James was unlike either of his other children. Nothing bothered James.

“Caroline,” James said carefully, “is furious with me. She left her tote bag in the front hall last night, and when I came home I tripped over it. She was very put out.”

“Did you do it on purpose?”

“No,” James said. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me. Putting a frog in her bed, that would have occurred to me. Maybe I’ll do it sometime. I was a little potted, if you want to know the truth. I went drinking with Max and we had a better time than usual. When I tripped over the tote bag, I jabbed myself with that oversize compass of hers. I’m still bleeding.”

“I don’t suppose it was anything serious,” Paul said dryly.

“It’s not. I was wearing boots. Are you all right? You were talking on the phone, weren’t you? Do you have another lady?”

Paul buttered his bagel carefully. “I don’t have another lady, exactly. I’ve met a woman I rather like.”

“Really? What’s her name?”

“Hannah Krekorian.”

“Armenian,” James said judiciously. “Or at least her husband was. I suppose that’s her married name.”

“It is. And believe it or not, she’s not twelve years old. She’s damned near as old as I am.”

“Well-preserved?”

Paul thought of Hannah’s dumpy figure, her plain, uninteresting face. “Not exactly,” he said. “She’s just someone I’m comfortable with. I’m going to go to a party at her house this coming Friday night. A crush with cocktails, I think.”

“On the Main Line?”

“No,” Paul said. “On Cavanaugh Street. In the city. You know about that. There was a piece in the
Inquirer.
”

“Home of the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” James laughed. “Well, I hope you’re prepared. Maybe this woman is a friend of Gregor Demarkian’s and she took up with you only because Gregor Demarkian wants to meet you because Gregor Demarkian has decided to look into all that about what happened to Jackie and so—”

“For Christ’s
sake
,” Paul said. “I don’t even think that’s a pleasant suggestion. What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing’s gotten into me. I just think the coincidence is funny. Your Hannah what’ s-her-name probably doesn’t even know Gregor Demarkian. But with Candida writing her memoirs and all—” James shrugged.

“Candida’s memoirs are going to be mostly about sex,” Paul said, “no matter what the rest of you think. I know that woman. Don’t bring up all that about Jackie in front of Caroline. She’ll get hysterical.”

“She’ll get hysterical anyway. She can manufacture excuses for hysteria more efficiently than I could ever give her causes for it. You want another bagel? I’m getting up.”

“No,” Paul said. “No, thank you. I’m fine for now.”

Actually, he was hungry as hell, but he didn’t want James to notice that. Paul was always telling James that James ate too much. Which James did. But James didn’t care. Paul took a sip of his coffee and sighed.

Paul wasn’t worried that Gregor Demarkian might want to look into the death of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. He didn’t think there was anything about that that Gregor Demarkian could find—or anything he could do about anything he did find. There were other reasons why a man might prefer not to court a woman with a detective in attendance.

Of course, Paul told himself, he had no reason to expect that a detective would be in attendance. James was right. Hannah Krekorian probably didn’t even know Gregor Demarkian. Living on the same street and sharing an ethnic heritage did not add up to acquaintance in modern Philadelphia. And what could he do even if Hannah did know Demarkian? It was really too late to turn back now.

Hell, Paul Hazzard thought, it was worse than too late.

Any retreat from where he was standing at that moment would be a form of suicide—and he didn’t mean the psychic kind.

Fred Scherrer was in his second hour of listening to the woman with the black eye when the phone call came. He would have put the caller off with an excuse if it had been anyone on earth except who it was. The woman with the black eye had no name she could remember. She had been sitting in Fred’s Park Avenue living room since four o’clock that morning, when she had been released into Fred’s custody by St. Dominic Hospital. She was five foot three, one hundred pounds, and reasonably young. Fred guessed she was in her early thirties. Her hair was dyed ash blond. She wore a pair of clean blue jeans that were a little too long for her and a flannel shirt that was much too big for her in the shoulders. The clothes belonged to a paralegal in Fred’s firm named Mary Ann. This woman had no clothes of her own because they had all been torn off. When she was found, she was lying curled up on a bench in Bryant Park, wearing nothing but a bra. According to the hospital, she had been subjected to multiple rapes. According to the hospital, she was suffering from shock. According to the hospital, there was nothing anybody could do for her except give her food and wait. They had been perfectly happy to release her into Fred Scherrer’s custody. If they had still been a Catholic hospital, they wouldn’t have been allowed to. The rules set down by the archdiocesan office of Catholic Charities would have forbidden it. But St. Dominic had not been a Catholic hospital for some five years now. It had been taken over by the city, and by the city’s bureaucrats. This woman was unidentified, uninsured, and black. She was not their problem.

She was, Fred thought, one of the most gracious women he had ever seen. She moved with such precise politeness, she might have been an instructor in a school of etiquette. The nurses had taken one look at the color of her skin and said: welfare. Fred didn’t think so. She’d been found in the wrong part of town. Bryant Park did not normally cater to a welfare population. Manners like these had to be learned. Sitting with your hands folded and unmoving in your lap and your legs pressed together at the ankles was not a skill routinely taught at P.S. 37. Maybe Mary Ann had noticed the discrepancies too. Mary Ann was how the woman with the black eye had come to be sitting in Fred Scherrer’s living room. Mary Ann had been waiting for a friend of hers in the emergency room of St. Dominic Hospital when the woman with the black eye had been brought in. Mary Ann’s friend had cracked her wrist trying to do a handstand in the Crystal Channel Saloon.

Sid came into the living room from the kitchen and mouthed “Candida DeWitt” as obviously as he could into the air behind the woman with the black eye’s head. Fred looked at Mary Ann, nodded slightly, and got up. Mary Ann was sitting on the floor at the other woman’s feet. She was listening intently as the woman with the black eye went on and on in a pleasant uninflected voice about how
affecting
the Monet exhibit had been at the Guggenheim, or maybe it wasn’t the Guggenheim, she got these museums all mixed up sometimes, she could never remember what they were called.

Fred reminded himself that it was time for him to give Mary Ann another lecture about how she ought to go to law school. She would make a very decent lawyer and a very committed one. Then he followed Sid out to the kitchen and closed the door behind him.