Bleeding Hearts (21 page)

“Yeah. We’ll get to that later. Thing is, you’ve got Paul Hazzard standing here, staring at the bathroom door, and that would put him sideways to the window. It would have been in his peripheral vision. Do you see what I mean?”

“You mean if someone came through it, he would have noticed.”

“Exactly,” Bob Cheswicki said, “and that’s where we’ve got a problem with the window theory, because if Paul Hazzard had noticed someone coming through that window, one of two things would have happened. Either Hazzard would have called out, warned the rest of us that there was an intruder coming into the house—and we’d have heard it—or he would have fought his attacker, and we would have heard that.”

“If it was someone he knew,” Gregor proposed.

“He’d have cried out in surprise. He would have said something. There would have been some kind of noise, if not when the person first entered the room, then later when, what’s her name, Helen Tevorakian, went up. I remember what she said as well as you do. She said it was completely quiet up here. All she could hear was Hannah Krekorian crying and Paul Hazzard pacing.”

“And the door was locked,” Gregor said.

“We’re going to have to talk to all of these people again.” Bob Cheswicki sighed. “In a formal capacity. You should talk to them too. In a formal capacity or otherwise. My point is simply that no matter what may or may not have happened in any other respect, what definitely did not happen was that a thief or other stranger came through that window and killed Paul Hazzard, or that someone Paul Hazzard knew came through that window and killed him. Not while he was standing here, talking to Hannah Krekorian, at any rate, and as far as we can make out, he did nothing else from the time he came upstairs to the time he was killed.”

“Except pace,” Gregor pointed out.

“That makes the window scenario even more unlikely.”

“I suppose it does,” Gregor said.

“I’ll tell you something else.” Bob was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. “Paul Hazzard wasn’t killed by a stranger. At least, he wasn’t killed by a street thief or any other kind of stranger he might have been worried about on the face of it.”

“Why not?”

“Because we would have heard that too,” Bob Cheswicki said. “He would have put up a fight. The only way anybody got six stab wounds into Paul Hazzard’s chest like that is if they started from right up close, practically leaning into his arms. I know nothing is ever a hundred percent until you get the tech reports, but Gregor, I’ll stake my life on it. It’s the only way it could have been done. If it had happened any other way, we would have heard something.” Bob Cheswicki burst out in a sharp little laugh. “Good God, do you know what I was just thinking of? All that touchy-feely stuff people like Paul Hazzard are into. All that trading around of hugs. Well, somebody gave him a hug this time, all right.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” Russell Donahue put in faintly. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with a hug. I guess. I mean, just because this guy wasn’t a, um—”

Russell trailed off. Gregor contemplated him seriously. Donahue was very young and a little more hip than police officers tended to be. He seemed unhappy with what he was doing and as if he wanted to be somewhere else. As Gregor watched, he took an aimless tour around the room and then returned to them, looking glum.

“I guess there isn’t anything we can do here,” he said. “We should get downstairs and talk to the people.”

Gregor had never been in Hannah’s bedroom before tonight. He had never had any reason to be. It was a pleasant, faintly expensive place decorated in gray and pink with a touch of white here and there. Looking through the bathroom door, he could see that the mirror in there was tinted pink too. There was a reason for that. Bennis had explained it to him once. Mirrors tinted pink made your skin look younger.

Gregor felt distinctly disoriented. He had known Hannah Krekorian all his life—or at least he’d thought he’d known her. They had been all through grade school and high school together. Gregor had served as an usher at her cousin Richard’s wedding. If he closed his eyes, he could still see Hannah sitting on the stoop in front of the old unrenovated apartment house where her family had lived when they were all growing up, eight years old and taunting the hell out of him for striking out four times in a row at stickball. How had they all grown to be so old? How had they all grown to be so different?

Gregor looked through the bathroom door again, at the paints and powders and makeup pencils lying in rows in a compartmented glass tray that had probably been bought for the purpose. Gregor knew even less about women’s cosmetics than he knew about crime-scene paraphernalia. He would never have guessed that Hannah had all those things. He would never have guessed that she would have wanted to. She had three times the makeup Bennis did, and Bennis was beautiful.

Did that matter?

He shook himself a little to bring himself to. “Well. Listen. You two are right. We ought to go downstairs. Only do me a favor.”

“What’s that?” Bob Cheswicki asked.

“Let me be the first one to talk to Hannah Krekorian.”

The apartment was not so full of people anymore. Names and addresses had been taken. Extraneous people had been sent on their way. The very old ladies had gone home and the Devorkian girls had in all likelihood been ordered to bed. Hannah’s living room looked randomly littered, as if a high wind had blown through it. Scraps of party napkins and half-filled glasses were strewn here and there. It made Gregor think of Pompeii. The volcano had erupted, and everything had been petrified in place.

Christopher Hannaford and Lida Arkmanian stood together near the fireplace, talking. Lida was standing very straight. Christopher was leaning against the mantel. When Gregor walked in with Bob Cheswicki and Russell Donahue, Christopher straightened.

“Krekor?” Lida said.

“Where’s Bennis?” Gregor asked them. “I expected to find her glued to a policeman’s side. Possibly the medical examiner’s.”

“Bennis took old George Tekemanian home,” Christopher said. “He was looking a little peaked. She took Tommy Moradanyan too.”

“Donna is still in the kitchen with Hannah,” Lida said. “Making tea, I think.”

Gregor nodded. “Are you going to take Hannah home with you? She’s going to have to go home with somebody. I don’t think she’d be able to sleep in that room even if the police didn’t have it sealed as a crime scene, which they probably will.”

Lida looked at Christopher and then down at her hands. “No, Krekor. Hannah is not coming home with me. She is going with Helen Tevorakian.”

“Really?” Gregor said. “What’s the matter? Did you two have a fight?”

“Of course not,” Lida said.

“Everything’s really very well organized,” Christopher Hannaford put in. “Donna Moradanyan and Helen are with Hannah now, and then, as soon as the statements are taken, at least—” He frowned. “It is all right, isn’t it? They’re not going to—arrest anyone?”

“Do you mean that awful DeWitt woman?” Lida asked. “I hope they do arrest her. That
cat.
”

“If they arrested somebody,” Christopher said, “it wouldn’t be Candida DeWitt.”

“Who else could it be?” Lida demanded. Lida looked from one to the other of them. They looked back again. Lida caught her breath, shocked. “But that’s crazy,” she said. “Hannah? They can’t possibly think Hannah killed that man. She’s known him only a week!”

“She was the one with blood all over her and the murder weapon in her hands,” Christopher said.

“Are you sure it’s been only a week?” Gregor asked her. “Couldn’t Hannah have known Paul Hazzard before that and never told you about it?”

“No,” Lida said positively. “Met him casually or just been introduced, that possibly, yes, but not really known him, no. I would have heard about it.”

“You two told each other everything,” Gregor said.

Lida blushed bright red. “No. No, Krekor, that isn’t what I mean. I mean that Hannah was not a woman who hid her feelings. When she was happy she was happy. When she was sad she was sad. And she was not—discreet.”

“Unlike some other people we know,” Christopher said, “who are sometimes too discreet.”

Lida ignored him. “Hannah is a woman who talks, Krekor. She met Paul Hazzard at a meeting of the Friends of the Matterson Settlement House. It’s one of her charities. They talked at this meeting and he brought her home and then took her out to dinner. That was one week ago today, assuming it is still Friday. Last Saturday morning, she called me about it.”

“Umm. Has Hannah been acting oddly lately? Has she been different in any way?”

“Different? I haven’t noticed anything different, Krekor.”

“What about little things,” Gregor asked. “Like, say, makeup. Has she been wearing more makeup than usual?”

“Krekor, what are you talking about? You know Hannah. You see her every day. If she had been wearing more makeup than usual, you would have noticed it yourself.”

“Maybe. It’s just that, upstairs in her room just now, I noticed she had a lot of it. A
lot
of it. Much more than Bennis has.”

“Krekor, for goodness’ sake. Of course Hannah has more makeup than Bennis has. Bennis doesn’t need any and she’s under forty.”

“I think the theory is, the more you look like a model on the cover of a J. Crew catalogue, the more clothes you wear but the less makeup,” Christopher said, “where, on the other hand, if you’re a rather stodgy-looking middle-aged lady, you wear—”

“Stop it,” Lida said.

“I’d better go talk to Hannah,” Gregor said. “What about the two of you? Have you been asked to hang around here?”

“I just gave my statement to a police officer,” Lida said. “I was finished just a minute or two before you came down. I was talking about going home.”

“I was going to walk her there,” Christopher said. “To keep the muggers at bay.”

“We do not have muggers on Cavanaugh Street.”

“We might someday,” Gregor said. “I think Christopher is being eminently sensible.”

“Thank you,” Christopher said solemnly.

Gregor retreated. He liked Bennis’s brother Christopher. He always had, even at the beginning, all those years ago, when he’d had reason to be very suspicious. The problem was that Christopher always seemed to be talking on two or three levels at once, like those books by James Joyce that Gregor had been forced to read in English class at the University of Pennsylvania.

He went into the kitchen. Helen Tevorakian was nowhere to be seen. Maybe Bob Cheswicki already had her someplace quiet, where they could talk without being interrupted. Donna Moradanyan was standing at the far end of the room, near the stove. She was talking quietly to Russell Donahue, who looked more uncomfortable than ever.

Hannah Krekorian sat at her kitchen table, her face set and emotionless, her hands folded on the tabletop in front of her. She had a cup of coffee that looked as if it hadn’t been touched. It looked cold too. Gregor pulled out one of the other chairs and sat down as close to her as he could without actually touching her.

“Hannah?” he asked gently.

Hannah stirred slightly. “Krekor,” she said. “I have been waiting for you to come. I was sure that you would come.”

“Well, I came. I’m here. Why don’t I ask Donna to get you a fresh cup of coffee? That one looks cold.”

“They put rum in it,” Hannah said. “That’s why I didn’t drink it. I didn’t want to be drunk.”

“A little rum right now won’t make you drunk,” Gregor told her. “You’re in shock, you know. A little rum might actually be good for you.”

“They took that woman into the study. That DeWitt woman. They took her there and now she’s telling them that I killed Paul.”

“Did you kill Paul, Hannah?”

“No.”

“Did Candida DeWitt?”

“I don’t think so.” Hannah blinked, confused. “It was too
quiet,
you see. I thought he must have gone away. So I came out of the bathroom and there he was and that thing was on the floor next to him, lying there in the blood, and I just walked to it and I—I just picked it up. And it was cold, Krekor, it was so cold, with the window open and the door too, and the breeze coming through like that and I thought he must have opened the window, he must have been hot, and then I started screaming and I couldn’t stop. She wasn’t in the doorway then. She didn’t come in until afterward.”

“Afterward what?”

“After I started screaming,” Hannah said simply.

Gregor got up. “Let me get you that coffee,” he said. “Let me get you that rum too. You’re going to go home with Helen Tevorakian tonight. Did you know that?”

“I thought the police were going to arrest me and I would spend the night in jail.”

“Nobody’s going to arrest you.”

“I should have realized from the beginning,” Hannah said. “I should have known. What is it they say on the public service announcements for senior citizens? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

“What probably is?” The coffee in the pot on the stove was still very warm, if not hot. Gregor got a clean cup out of Hannah’s cabinets, poured it half full of coffee, took the rum bottle from the back of the counter, poured the cup most of the rest of the way full of rum, and topped the whole thing off with a gigantic helping of sugar. It was going to taste awful, but it would bring her out of this funk. He put the concoction down next to her elbow and said, “Drink that.”

Hannah took a sip and made a face. “Too sweet,” she said.

“Too good to be true,” Gregor prompted her.

Hannah took a good, long swallow. She shuddered. “Yes,” she said. “That was it. Too good to be true. Underneath, I don’t think I ever fooled myself. Only on the surface. You know, Krekor, I am fifty-eight years old.”

“That’s right,” Gregor said. “You would have to be, you and Lida. Because you’re all a year older than I am and I’m fifty-seven.”

“Yes,” Hannah said. “And I’ve known it all along, you know, even when I was a little child. Except, of course, when you are a child, you think it will change when you grow older.”

“What will change?”

“What you look like,” Hannah said. “I remember being six years old and sitting in front of the mirror in my mother’s bedroom and telling myself, ‘When I grow up, I will be beautiful.’ Well, Krekor, I am all grown-up and I am what I have always been. I am an ugly woman, and nothing on earth is ever going to be able to change that.”