Bleeding Hearts (25 page)

Bob leaned over and made himself another cup of instant coffee. “But you don’t believe it,” he said.

“No,” Gregor admitted, shaking his head. “I don’t believe it.”

“Could that be because you know Hannah Krekorian? Could that be because you don’t want to believe that someone you’re close to could have committed a murder?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same question all morning. And do you know what? I don’t think so. Oh, it’s true enough that I’d rather it didn’t turn out that Hannah had committed this murder. My life would be a lot more pleasant in a hundred ways if somebody else turns out to have done it. But it’s more than that. This thing doesn’t—fit somehow. It doesn’t work. I can’t make it come straight in my mind.”

“It comes straight in my mind,” Bob said. “Let me be honest with you, Gregor. Last night we didn’t arrest Mrs. Krekorian because we had some details we wanted to get straight before we made an accusation. This morning the only reason we haven’t arrested her is because she’s a friend of yours. And I don’t know how much longer we’re going to be able to extend the courtesy.”

“I don’t blame you,” Gregor said. He thought about it. “Can we go do some looking? The both of us together, I mean, or me and Russell Donahue.”

“It would have to be Donahue. I’ve got a full plate here and I’m not supposed to be involved in this investigation anyway. Do you have something in particular you want to do?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I want to go out to Paul Hazzard’s house.”

“Just go out to his house?”

“Well, I’m willing to talk to anybody who might be there, but that’s not really the point. I want to see that wall of weapons. I want to stand in the living room and really look at it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

Bob Cheswicki shrugged. “Russ is going to have to go out there anyway. He might as well go out there this morning with you. Let me get hold of him.”

“Thank you.”

Bob Cheswicki unearthed his phone from a pile of papers and began to dial. “Gregor, do you know what you’re doing? Have you got the least idea of what you’re trying on?”

“No,” Gregor said. “But I know I’m doing the right thing.”

That was true too.

Gregor felt thoroughly optimistic for the first time since he’d heard Hannah Krekorian start screaming.

N
UMBER 232 IN
The Handbook of Daily Meditations for Codependents
said it very clearly: You are in control of your own availability. Caroline knew it hadn’t been written to mean what she was making it mean at the moment. It meant you didn’t have to be emotionally
there
for anybody you didn’t want to be
there
for. It also meant that your time was your own. Nobody had the right to determine what you were going to do with it but you. That last part could be used to cover this, but not quite. Caroline didn’t really know what the writer of
Daily Meditations
would have made of this situation, or what Melody Beattie, John Bradshaw, or her father would have made of it either. Her father had been through something very similar to this when Jacqueline died. It had had no effect on his philosophy as far as Caroline could tell. The recovery movement wasn’t really prepared to take on institutional obligations like murder investigations and military draft laws and the requirement of all citizens to pay their income taxes. The recovery movement was much more comfortable with private and familial abuse. That way they could say over and over again that you were responsible to nobody but yourself. It didn’t matter that it didn’t make any sense.

Actually, to Caroline it did make sense. It was just a question of widening the vision a little. You
were
responsible to nobody and for nobody but yourself. You
were
in control of your own availability. It was the mark of a ravaged and codependent society that laws had been put in place to force you to behave otherwise.

This situation,
as Caroline called it to herself, was the sight of Gregor Demarkian and a nondescript, vaguely black-Irish young man in an off-the-rack suit coming up the front walk. Caroline had seen them getting out of their cab when she looked up from her work just a few seconds before. Caroline was working at home, in the first floor living room of the town house she shared with her brother and sister (and until last night had shared with her father) because she knew from experience that her office was going to be impossible today. It didn’t matter that it was Saturday. Half the people who would normally be at home in bed would come out just to see her. There she was, daughter of the dead man, orphaned by a couple of murders. The people who didn’t come would call, and to their number would be added all the reporters who had managed to get a hold on this story and who wouldn’t want to let it go. One or two journalists might easily get a book contract out of it. Caroline had a lot of work to do. She had a series of demonstrations in Boston next week. She had the next six months of shows to present in outline before the station’s programming board next month. She had a show to tape this coming Tuesday night. If she had loved her father, she would have dropped it all, to do her grief work. She expected to be overwhelmed with rage at any moment, furious at him for abandoning her by dying. In the meantime, she had to draw illustrations for a set of cardboard panels giving step-by-step instructions for how to build a gazebo.

Gregor Demarkian and the young man in the off-the-rack suit reached the front door and rang the bell. Caroline toyed with the idea of not answering, and saying later that she hadn’t been home. She decided against it. It was the kind of thing the police always caught you out at. Then they pretended to believe it made you look guilty. Caroline remembered that, too, from all the fuss about Jacqueline.

Caroline put her pencil down and got up and went to the door.

“Yes?” she said when she opened up. It was cold and windy outside. A blast of icy air hit her legs and penetrated the thin cotton of her black boxer pants with no trouble at all. Caroline shivered.

The young man in the off-the-rack suit took a leather folder out of his inside jacket pocket and flipped it open. “I’m Detective First Grade Russell Donahue,” he said politely. “I’m investigating the death last night of a resident of this house, Paul Hazzard. This is a consultant for the Philadelphia police department, Gregor Demarkian.”

“I know Mr. Demarkian from the newspapers,” Caroline said. “Could you tell me what you want?”

“Well,” Russell Donahue said, “we’d like to come in and look around, for one thing.”

“Do you have a search warrant?”

“That’s not the kind of looking around I meant, ma’am. At least, not at this point. Of course, we can go back and get a search warrant if you want us to. You are—?”

“My name is Caroline Hazzard. I was Paul Hazzard’s daughter. I understand that you must be eager to look through my father’s things. I understand you even have a right and an obligation to do so. But without a search warrant or some consultation with my brother and my sister?”

“Are your brother and your sister home?” Russell Donahue asked.

“No,” Caroline said.

“I think Ms. Hazzard is operating under a misconception,” Gregor Demarkian said. To Caroline, he looked fat and unappetizing and out of shape. Definitely in denial. “We don’t want to look through your father’s things, Ms. Hazzard. Far less do we want to search the house, at least at this time. What we are interested in this morning is the wall on which the antique weapons are kept. Assuming that they’re still kept there.”

“We want to see the place the dagger came from,” Russell Donahue put in.

Caroline looked back over her shoulder. She could go on like this for a long time. She might even chase them away from the door this morning. But what good would it do her? They would only come back later, armed with warrants and a combative attitude. They would get what they wanted and be angry with her at the same time.

Caroline stepped back. “It’s the first door on your left as you go down the hall. The archway thing. I was working in there when you rang the bell.”

“Working at what?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

He had walked past her down the hall. Russell Donahue was right behind him. Caroline closed the front door and followed them both.

“I do a local cable television show on carpentry for women,” she said. “I was drawing demonstration boards.”

Gregor Demarkian was standing next to the coffee table where she had been working, leaning over her drawing of the gazebo’s entrance-side elevation. “What’s a demonstration board?”

“An instructional drawing.”

“They’re very colorful.”

Caroline hated to have her things touched. It made her feel furious. It made her feel violated. It was a form of violation. It was a form of symbolic rape. She nudged him away from her drawings.

“They’re colorful like that so that I can do demonstrations in front of large groups of people and no one will have to strain to see.”

“I take it these are the weapons on the wall,” Russell Donahue said.

Gregor Demarkian coughed.

Caroline turned her attention to the plainclothes policeman and the wall of weapons behind him, which did not need to be pointed out in that awkward and obvious fashion. The wall in question was covered over in weapons from side to side and top to bottom. The weapons were crammed in next to each other so thickly, it was in some places impossible to see the wall behind them. Japanese ceremonial swords. Milanese short knives with silver hafts and gold-inlaid holster sheaths. Arabic fighting daggers carved in intricate whorls and patterns. Caroline made a face. Paul had always been such a worshiper of death.

Gregor Demarkian walked up close to the wall and examined it.

“I’ve heard that the dagger in question, the one that was suspected in the death of your stepmother, is missing,” he said.

“That’s right.” Caroline nodded. “My brother James looked for it last night, when he got word that Daddy was—that Daddy was dead. It was gone then.”

“Was it gone earlier in the evening?”

“I don’t know,” Caroline said. “I don’t know if James would know either. It’s not as if we looked at it every chance we got. It wasn’t even very noticeable. Not next to all the rest of this stuff.”

“Could you show me where it belonged?”

Caroline crossed her arms over her chest. “Show yourself. It belonged in the rack that’s empty at the moment. Next to that blowgun with the feathers on it.”

“I see.” Demarkian nodded. “How tall are you?”

“Five five,” Caroline said.

“Could you reach it—the dagger, of course—could you reach it without straining?”

“I never tried.”

“Will you try now?”

Caroline shrugged, came closer, and reached. She had to stand on tiptoe to touch the rack. She backed away.

“Five five,” Gregor said again. “You said you have a brother and a sister. Do they live nearby?”

“They live here,” Caroline said. “James has a room on the bedroom floor across from mine. Alyssa and her husband have the apartment at the top of the house.”

“Fine. Is your sister as tall as you are? Taller?”

“We’re about the same height.”

“And your brother?”

“James is very tall. Almost as tall as you are. The way Daddy was very tall.”

“Mmm,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Caroline backed up a little and sat down on the arm of one of the chairs. “You know,” she said, “if I were you, I wouldn’t bother too much about us. About James and Alyssa and me, I mean. We’re hardly the likely suspects in this case.”

“Oh?” Russell Donahue was polite. “Who is?”

“I should think your two best bets would be Candida DeWitt and that woman Daddy was seeing, that Hannah somebody. She came to the house this week, you know. On Tuesday or Wednesday. When I first saw her, I couldn’t understand what it was Daddy was doing with her. I understood later, of course.”

“Did you?” Gregor Demarkian asked. Really, Caroline thought. He ought to do something about himself. He ought to join an Overeaters Anonymous group. Food could be an addiction.

Caroline nodded. “Oh, yes. Usually, of course, Daddy was like all infantilized men. He liked girls better than he liked women, twenty-one-year-olds with IQs like golf scores and big china-blue eyes. Not to marry, of course. He was more sensible than that. But for fun. You know.”

“So you decided that your father was interested in marrying Hannah Krekorian,” Russell Donahue said.

“Not necessarily,” Caroline told him. “I suppose she had a great deal of money.”

“She was reasonably well off,” Gregor said dryly. “
I
s reasonably well off.”

“I assumed she had to be. Daddy is dead broke these days. After Jacqueline died, the book sales and the workshops dried up and there was his shopping addiction. He was absolutely out of control. Of course, he didn’t think he was. Addicts never do.”

“Right,” Russell Donahue said.

Caroline squelched a sudden desire to explain it all to him—how shopping addictions were just the same as addictions to alcohol or nicotine or heroin; how addicts are helpless to control their own behavior; how addictions start out bad and can only get worse unless the addict gets into recovery. It all made perfect sense if you understood the theory, but so many people didn’t want to understand the theory. About this one thing Caroline thought her father had been unquestionably right. The most serious disease in America today was not codependency. It was denial.

“The point I’m trying to make about this Hannah person,” Caroline said carefully, “is that she was a world-class codependent. A real enabler. Right down to the martyr complex.”

Gregor Demarkian looked blank. “Hannah Krekorian? With a martyr complex?”

“Of course. You could see it right away. It was in all that stuff she said about Mother Teresa.”

Russell Donahue looked confused. “I don’t understand. What does Mother Teresa have to do with any of this?”

“Mother Teresa is like a litmus test,” Caroline explained patiently. “If you want to know just how sick our society is, measure the extent to which we insist that that woman is a saint.”