Bleeding Hearts (20 page)

Beside Gregor, Candida DeWitt stirred. “No,” she called out in a loud, clear voice. “Let me go up there. I’ll probably have better luck talking sense into Paul than you will.”

Lida, Sheila, and Helen all turned in unison, keeping absolutely still as Candida crossed the room to the spiral stairs.

“I think you’ve done enough damage for one night,” Lida said coldly when Candida arrived. “I think you ought to have the good manners to get out of here and let the rest of us clean this up.”

“I didn’t send that invitation to myself,” Candida said mildly. “I find it interesting to speculate on just who did. What I said is true, by the way. I will have more luck talking sense into Paul than any of you would. I know what to say to him.”

“She might have a point,” Helen Tevorakian said reluctantly.

“Well, the good God only knows,” Lida said, “I don’t want to talk to the man. I just want to injure him.”

“So do I,” Candida said grimly. “And trust me, if I ever get my hands on him, I’ll do damage to a far more sensitive stretch of his skin than his face. Have we agreed? Shall I go up there?”

“Yes,” Helen Tevorakian said quickly.

Candida nodded to each of the three women in turn and hurried up the stairs. Helen, Lida, and Sheila looked at each other doubtfully.

“I hope we did the right thing,” Helen Tevorakian said. “She seems like a very nice woman, but—”

“I know what you mean,” Lida said. “The problem with strangers is that you don’t know how they’re going to behave—”

“I don’t care so much about how she’s going to behave,” Sheila said. “What I want to know is what it is she thinks she’s up to.”

“It’s so quiet up there,” Helen Tevorakian said. “It was when I was upstairs too. I stood out in the hall and listened and listened, but all I could hear was Paul Hazzard pacing back and forth, not talking to Hannah or anything. And Hannah was crying, of course.”

“Maybe they’ll all come down soon,” Lida said.

Sheila Kashinian snorted. “What do you think it is we’re going to do then?”

“If we don’t hear anything for five minutes, I’ll go up myself and try to help,” Lida said definitely. “That way we just won’t be sitting here, waiting for the phone to ring, if you know what I mean.”

“I used to sit around waiting for the phone to ring when I was engaged to Jack,” Helen Tevorakian said. “Then, when he would finally call, I’d pretend I didn’t recognize his voice.”

“Don’t let’s get into all that now,” Sheila Kashinian said. “We’ll forget where we are and we’ll never get anything done.”

There was the sound of rapid footsteps upstairs, and then a hollow bang, as if a door had been opened too quickly and hit the wall behind it. Everyone looked expectantly at the top of the spiral stairs. Gregor expected to see a high-heeled foot emerge from the landing above. Surely the first person down would be Candida DeWitt.

There was the sound of more footsteps. There was what seemed to be a gasp. And then it started.

It was the loudest and highest scream Gregor Demarkian had ever heard in his life. It went on and on and on and on without stopping. It had a staccato backbeat to it that rent and pierced and punctuated its rhythm like the percussion section in an orchestra of manic depressives. Everyone in the living room froze. Gregor made himself move forward only with the most determined exercise of will he had ever made in his life.

“What
is
that?” Christopher Hannaford asked sharply.

That broke the spell. Gregor started running. Christopher Hannaford ran after him. Christopher was younger and therefore faster and got to the stairs first. They both went pounding up to the second floor.

The second floor landing was empty and dark. The only light to be seen was at the end of the hall, spilling out of an open door. Christopher went down there and stopped dead in his tracks. Gregor ran up to him and pushed him out of the way. Candida DeWitt was standing just inside the doorway. Her arms were wrapped around her waist and she seemed catatonic with shock.

The shocking thing was lying on the floor in front of her, right at the foot of Hannah Krekorian’s king-size bed.

There was the body of Paul Hazzard, the face turned away from the door, half a dozen savage black punctures piercing the shirt at the center of the chest.

There was Hannah Krekorian herself, the front of her dress sodden with fresh blood, her hands holding a fancy curved-handled dagger that was covered with blood too.

Gregor didn’t know what was making him colder.

The scene he was looking at.

Or the breeze that was coming in through the open bedroom window.

A
SINGLE PEARL STUD
pierced earring was caught in the high pile of the carpet in Hannah Krekorian’s guest room, just in front of the tall bureau next to the guest room bathroom door. Gregor Demarkian nearly stepped on it. He was pacing, as he had been pacing for nearly two hours, up and down the second floor hall and in and out of the guest room and the bathroom and around and around wherever he could find free space. Hannah’s room was off-limits and the upstairs hall was full of people. One of the advantages of having an assistant commissioner of police in the house was the quickness of the service you got from the uniformed branch, and from Homicide too. Hannah’s apartment had been full to the rafters of police less than ten minutes after Bob Cheswicki had put in the call. A mobile crime unit had pulled up to the curb outside in less than fifteen. Now the place was humming and buzzing and rumbling and exploding in flashbulbs. It would have been infested with reporters too, except that there was a police guard at the door downstairs. The medical examiner’s people had brought an ambulance with them. Gregor had never understood why an ambulance was required to take a body to the morgue.

There was more than a pearl stud earring on the floor of Hannah’s guest room. Obviously, this was a room she did not enter often, and that her cleaning lady felt free to ignore. There were all sorts of things twisted into the carpet down there. Bobby pins. Safety pins. Bits of paper and half-inch lengths of string. Gregor picked the earring up and left the rest alone. It wasn’t evidence.

Gregor went back out into the hall. Bob Cheswicki was standing at the top of the stairs, looking flushed and tired. Beside him was a young officer in plain clothes, looking flushed and tired too.

“Gregor,” Bob said. “Come here. This is Detective First Grade Russell Donahue. He’s going to be our beard.”

“Beard?”

“Mr. Cheswicki is going to conduct this investigation,” Russell Donahue said, “and I’m going to pretend I’m conducting it, so that we satisfy protocol.”

“Well,” Bob said, “not exactly.”

Gregor held out his hand with the pearl in it. “I found this in the guest room. Caught in the carpet all the way on the other side of the room from the hall door. Near the bathroom.”

Bob Cheswicki and Russell Donahue looked at the pearl. “All right,” Bob said. “Was Mrs. Krekorian wearing pearl earrings tonight?”

“No,” Gregor told him.

“Was anybody else?”

“Not that I remember.”

“I don’t see that it would matter if anybody was,” Russell Donahue said. “Even if somebody came upstairs on pretext of using the bathroom and went snooping around instead and lost an earring, so what? People do that all the time. And even if it was the murderer who did it, it wouldn’t help us catch him. It wouldn’t matter that he’d been in the guest room. The murder took place in the bedroom.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

“My guess is that Mrs. Krekorian lost it once, she doesn’t even remember how long ago, and now you’ve found it,” Bob Cheswicki said. “Give it back to her.”

Gregor put the earring in his pants pocket. “Have you checked out what I asked you to?” he asked Bob. “I know it’s very farfetched—”

Bob Cheswicki turned away, embarrassed. Gregor didn’t blame him for being embarrassed. This was a mess of the first water. There was no way getting around it. It wasn’t a case that could be hushed up. For one thing, Paul Hazzard had just been murdered at least apparently with exactly the weapon his wife was supposed to have been killed with all those years ago, and that had been a very sensational case. For another thing, Gregor himself had been on the scene—and the woman holding the bloody weapon had been Gregor’s friend. Gregor could just imagine how the
Inquirer
was going to react to this one—and he had no illusions that the sensation was going to stay local for very long. Even if they managed to clear the case up in twenty-four hours, they were all going to end up on the cover of
People
before the month was out.

“Look,” Bob Cheswicki said. “I’m not going to arrest her. You realize that. That’s as a courtesy to you. At least I’m not going to arrest her yet.”

“I know. Thank you. And if it’s any consolation, I’ll almost guarantee you that Hannah Krekorian has never in her life killed so much as one of those fish her husband used to catch and insist on everybody eating.”

“Maybe.” Bob sounded doubtful. “But she was standing there with the weapon in her hand, all covered with blood.”

“I know.”

“And she did have a motive.”

“It was a pretty weak motive.”

“No, it wasn’t.” Bob Cheswicki shook his head. “It was exactly the right kind of motive. She was furious. She was upset. The man had apparently put her in a very embarrassing position—”

“He had? Or Candida DeWitt had? If Hannah was going to stab someone, wouldn’t it have made more sense to stab Candida DeWitt?”

“Why do you assume that anyone in this place was making sense?” Bob asked. “As far as I could tell by just looking at the body, the man was stabbed at least six times. That sounds like somebody out of control to me.”

“Candida DeWitt—” Gregor ventured.

Bob was now nodding vigorously. “Yes,” he said, “possibly. Even if she didn’t have any blood on her. There’s nothing to say she would have had, if she’d stabbed him and jumped straight away. That’s one of the sane reasons I’m going to have for not immediately arresting your friend. Candida DeWitt certainly seems to have had a better motive.”

“Then, there’s the weapon,” Russell Donahue put in. “It would be interesting to know how it got here.”

“There’s nothing to say it’s the same one,” Gregor said thoughtfully. “I mean, there’s nothing to say it’s the one that was found at the scene when Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard died. Did the Hazzards keep it after all that?”

“That’s a good question.”

“And of course it might simply be a different whatever-it-is,” Gregor said. “I’ve never been entirely sure what to call it.”

“It’s a dagger, Mr. Demarkian,” Russell Donahue said. “And I don’t think there could be two of them in Philadelphia. It’s an extremely rare—um—artifact. It’s supposed to be hundreds of years old and it came from some island in the Pacific. Papua New Guinea?”

“There’s such a place as Papua New Guinea,” Gregor said.

“I think what I’m trying to get at,” Bob said, “is that whatever happened here, it wasn’t what you were thinking about with the open window. It almost definitely wasn’t. I can prove it to you.”

“There’s a fire escape right outside that window,” Gregor said.

“I know.” Bob Cheswicki looked around. “Come with me,” he said finally. “Let me show you what I saw when I tried to work it out. It’s easy as anything to see what I mean.”

Paul Hazzard’s body had already been removed from Hannah Krekorian’s bedroom. Now there was a tape outline on the carpet and a smear of blood on the leg of the closest chair. The room was still full of people. Two men were bagging what they had picked up with the vacuum cleaner. A policewoman in uniform was on her knees in the bathroom, doing Gregor couldn’t begin to imagine what. A man in whites was folding up what looked like oxygen equipment, but Gregor was sure it couldn’t have been. In spite of all the help he’d given in all the extracurricular murders over the last few years, he still wasn’t any good with crime-scene hardware. He hadn’t been trained for it. The FBI investigated crimes, and in a few limited cases (such as in national parks or on Indian reservations) it even investigated ordinary murders, but by the time a Bureau agent reached the scene, the messy details had usually been reduced to a few dozen pages of ungrammatical official report. Every time Gregor thought he had finally figured out everything there was to know about mobile crime units, tech reports, autopsies, and physical evidence collection, some mysterious new gadget appeared out of nowhere and tripped him up.

Bob Cheswicki wound his way around the man in white and stood at the window.

“Look here,” he said. “This window faces the hall door, right?”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“It’s a good fire escape they’ve got out there, by the way. One of the new stationary kind with handrails. Not one of those old rusty clunkers that fold up and half the time don’t fold down when you need them. Anyway, the window is here, facing the hall door, and close to this wall”—Bob pointed—“which is the wall with the bathroom door in it.”

“The bathroom door is all the way down there,” Gregor said quickly.

“I know. It doesn’t matter. What matters is if Paul Hazzard was standing here in the bedroom, talking to Hannah Krekorian through the bathroom door, which is what one of the witnesses said, I don’t remember who—”

“Mary Ohanian,” Gregor said. “She was the first one to go up and check. She came running down the stairs—”

“I remember,” Bob Cheswicki said.

“You know,” Gregor said thoughtfully, “that means the door to the bedroom must have been open, then. Later, when Helen Tevorakian went up, it was locked.”