Bleeding Hearts (37 page)

On Monday morning Gregor Demarkian came out of his building to find Donna Moradanyan on a ladder in front of it, tacking a garland of pink chiffon cupids around the edges of the street door. She was being helped by old George Tekemanian, who was sitting on the low side wall of the stoop with a box of spangly things on his lap. Gregor said hello to both of them and they both said hello back, but they weren’t really paying attention. Donna was holding a running conversation with herself, not quite under her breath.

“First the netting,” Donna was saying, “and then the spring has to go with the red crepe or you’ll be able to see it…

Old George Tekemanian looked solemn. “It is a mechanical device,” he said. “Every time anyone opens the front door, the box next to Bennis’s living room window will open and a cupid will pop out.”

Gregor stepped back and looked up. There was no box near Bennis’s living room window. Not yet. He told himself he ought to be grateful that the box was not being planned for his living room window. He stepped closer to the building again and turned toward the street. Christopher Hanna-ford was standing on the sidewalk in front of Lida Arkmanian’s town house, looking up at Donna on her ladder. Gregor wondered where Christopher had come from. He wasn’t carrying a paper under his arm. He didn’t look cold.

Christopher shook his head a little and began to cross the street. Halfway over he called out, “Are you going to breakfast, Gregor? I wanted to talk to you.”

“I’m going to breakfast,” Gregor said.

“Maybe I will go to breakfast too,” old George Tekemanian said, looking hopeful. “I’m cold.”

“No,” Donna Moradanyan said derisively. “I’ll take you over myself when this is done.”

Old George Tekemanian sighed.

Christopher had reached them. He had his hands in the pockets of his jeans. His jacket was unzipped. His thick patch of trademark black Hannaford hair puffed and shuddered in the breeze.

“God, it’s miserable in Philadelphia in February,” Christopher said. “It must have been miserable when I was growing up here, but I don’t remember it like that.”

“You were too busy being young,” old George Tekemanian said.

“We’ll see you two later,” Gregor told George and Donna. “Good luck with the… mechanical device.”

Donna paid no attention to him. Gregor started up the street toward the Ararat. His scarf was wrapped tightly around his throat. His coat was long and every available button was buttoned. He was wearing gloves, and his gloved hands were firmly in his pockets. How did Christopher Hannaford stand it, wearing almost nothing really warm at all?

“So,” Gregor said. “Bennis was telling me on Saturday that you knew Paul Hazzard, or had met him. That you had something to tell me about him anyway.”

“I have something to say,” Christopher Hannaford agreed carefully. “I don’t know if it will be any use to you at this point. Bennis says you already know what’s going on.”

“Not exactly,” Gregor said. “I know who committed the murder—who committed all three murders, starting with the murder of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard. I know what the murders were committed with, and I’m pretty sure that once the police get hold of the weapon, they’ll be able to prove it actually was the weapon. I even know why Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard was killed and why Candida DeWitt had to die. I just don’t understand why Paul Hazzard was stabbed six times.”

“Is that official, from the police, that he was stabbed six times?”

“Oh, yes. Stabbed six times and stabbed hard. Not so hard that a woman couldn’t have done it, but hard.”

“I never believed that stuff when I read it in detective stories,” Christopher said. “A woman’s crime, a man’s crime. Even before women’s lib I didn’t believe it. The women I’ve known have mostly been capable of anything.”

“I know what you mean, but sometimes there are considerations of size involved. If you find a six-foot-ten-inch three-hundred-and-fifty-pound football player lying dead on the floor with his neck broken and the fingerprints of his assailant imprinted in his flesh, those fingerprints might belong to a woman, but she’d be a very large woman.”

“I see what you mean. I hope you see what I mean. Do you understand women?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. I don’t even understand Bennis, and she’s my own sister.”

“Nobody understands Bennis,” Gregor said. “It’s not possible.”

“Sometimes I think there’s just nothing you can do right,” Christopher went on. “If you fall in love with a woman because she’s beautiful, she’s angry at you for that. If you fall in love with her for herself and you don’t care what she looks like, she’s angry with you for that. If it matters to you how old she is, she’s angry with you for that. If it doesn’t matter to you how old she is, she’s angry with you for that. It’s enough to make you want to start drinking in the mornings.”

“The Ararat doesn’t sell alcohol in the mornings.”

“I guess I don’t really want any. I think I’m having a bad day.”

They were right at the door of the Ararat. Gregor didn’t have time to ask him if there was some woman in particular who had caused these ruminations—in Gregor’s experience, there always was—or if he was, truly, just having a bad day. Maybe this was the result of a week or so of staying in the same apartment with Bennis. That could do this kind of thing to anybody.

Gregor opened the plate glass door and let Christopher go in ahead of him. Inside, Linda Melajian was in the process of putting out little straw baskets full of heart-shaped candies on all the tables. The baskets had that unmistakable Donna Moradanyan touch. On each and every one of the baskets’ handles, a short length of red yarn had been tied into a bow and anchored with a minuscule red-and-white striped arrow.

“Isn’t it wonderful that Donna Moradanyan is feeling so much better the last couple of days?” Linda Melajian said.

Gregor took up residence in the window booth. “Wonderful,” he repeated.

“I’ll go get coffee,” Linda Melajian said. “I’ll tell my father to get ready for one cholesterol special and one mushroom omelet. Old George isn’t still sick, is he?”

“He looked fine to me,” Gregor told her. “He’s out helping Donna do something to our building.”

Linda hurried away, got the coffee, hurried back again. She set them up with a pot and then disappeared on the run one more time, going back to the kitchen.

“So,” Gregor said to Christopher. “You and Paul Hazzard. Why do I feel that’s an unlikely combination?”

“Because it is.” Christopher laughed. “Me and the recovery movement, that’s an unlikely combination too. Do you remember when you first met us, when all that happened at our house, when my father died?”

“Oh, yes,” Gregor said.

“Well”—Christopher poured coffee—“about that time I was in, I think it was seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth of debt in gambling losses. Really crazy gambling losses. Cards. Roulette. Nonsense.”

“Illegal gambling?”

“Mostly, yeah. But I didn’t do too badly at places like Vegas and Reno when I had the cash. The problem was what I did when I didn’t have the cash.”

“Meaning run a tab.”

“Precisely. I ran a lot of tabs with a lot of people and always the wrong people. More than once, Bennis bailed me out of trouble. The year my father died, I was more than a little overdue. I was getting phone calls threatening me with bodily harm, if you know what I mean.”

“Death?”

“No, just maiming.” Christopher smiled. “Even at the time I wasn’t crazy enough to wait around until somebody was threatening to kill me. Anyway, Bennis bailed me out of that and then she loaned me the money to go to this place in Vermont for three months, where a friend of mine had gone to quit gambling. That wasn’t her idea, by the way. It was mine. If you say ‘therapy’ to Bennis, she spits.”

“I know.”

“Right. Well. Anyway. I went. And as you can guess, it was a place run by Paul Hazzard’s organization. I’ve been trying to work out the timing. My father died after Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard did—after by at least a couple of years, I’m sure, which means that I was up in Vermont either while Paul Hazzard was standing trial or after it was over, but not before.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Well. I was there for about a month and I was going crazy, only not crazy about gambling. Do you know anything at all about how these therapy programs work?”

“Maybe,” Gregor said cautiously. “I’ve heard a lot of stories since this thing started.”

“The stories were probably all true,” Christopher told him. “The first day, I was dragged into a room with a psychologist in it and lectured about my ‘addictions.’ There was no such thing as a simple ‘addict.’ All addicts had multiple ‘addictions.’ If I was addicted to gambling, then I had to be addicted to other things as well. The regime at the center was purged of all refined sugar, all alcohol, all tobacco, all drugs, all red meat.”

“Red meat?”

“Yeah, well, according to the theory, red meat has a natural tranquilizer in it, an animal protein that acts as a tranquilizer, I don’t remember, and a tranquilizer is a drug.”

“Oh.”

“You’re getting that look on your face,” Christopher said. “Everybody does when they come in contact with the recovery movement for the first time. You get used to this stuff if you hear it often enough. Anyway, the deal was, we had group therapy at two every afternoon, and what we were supposed to do at Group was testify to the damage our addictions had done to us. To be exact, Mr. Demarkian, we were supposed to tell horror stories. I had some pretty good horror stories about gambling, and I told them, but then they wanted horror stories about my ‘other addictions.’ Which I didn’t think I had. I mean, I smoked marijuana fairly frequently in those days, but I wasn’t compulsive about it. It certainly never interfered with my work or my life. The same thing with wine.”

“So?”

“So,” Christopher said, “they kept pushing me and pushing me. They kept telling me I was lying. They kept telling me I was in denial. I asked them what I was supposed to say if I was telling them the truth—if I wasn’t addicted to marijuana or a closet alcoholic or whatever, how did I express that so that they knew I was telling the truth. And the basic answer was that there was no way I could prove I was telling the truth, because there was no way I
could
be telling the truth, because if I wasn’t addicted, the question would never have come up. It went beyond guilty until proven innocent. It became guilty with no way to prove yourself innocent. Guilty because you were accused.”

“What did you do?”

Christopher shrugged. “I’d signed myself up for three months. Bennis had paid for three months. And I did have a problem with gambling. I decided to give it a shot. One day I staged a big conversion scene in group. After that I just made stuff up.”

“Horror stories, you mean?”

“Right. I was good at it too. I was so good at it, I became a kind of institutional wonder story. I got trotted out for all the visiting dignitaries. So, when Paul Hazzard himself showed up in person, I got trotted out then too.”

Linda Melajian was back with the food. Gregor accepted his absently and saw that Christopher was paying no attention to his omelet at all. Gregor finished off the coffeepot and handed it back to Linda.

“When you say ‘trotted out,’ what do you mean?”

“We’d have special therapy sections with the participants picked in advance. Not the usual groups. There were a bunch of us who were considered to be good for the institution’s image.”

“And there was one of these special therapy sessions when Paul Hazzard visited?”

“Right. The thing is, Hazzard visited for quite a long time, at least a week, maybe longer. He didn’t just come in and out for one session. And he didn’t come alone. He had one of his daughters with him.”

“Which one?”

“Alice?” Christopher asked. “Does that sound right? Thin blond woman who eats a lot.”

“Alyssa.”

“Is that it? Whatever. She was there, but she wasn’t allowed to sit in on our group sessions. So when Hazzard first met Sylvia Charlow, his daughter wasn’t there.”

“Who was Sylvia Charlow?”

“Woman in our group. Older woman, about sixty-five or so. Fairly well preserved, with all that means. She was in Vermont with one of those codependency things. You know. An addiction to addictions. I’ve never been entirely sure what they mean by it all.”

“Neither have I.”

“With Sylvia, her value to the institution was that she talked so well about herself,” Christopher said. “She was really eloquent. I kept wondering why she didn’t give up therapy and write a woman’s novel. She had such a command of prose. When Paul Hazzard met her he was enchanted, and we could all see it. And sure enough, when Group was over he took her aside.”

“Aren’t there ethical considerations in a case like that?” Gregor asked. “I keep hearing things about Paul Hazzard. They all seem to be—about women.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. There are ethical considerations, Gregor, but for God’s sake. Nobody pays attention to them. Paul Hazzard sure as hell never did. I saw him later that same evening, after dinner, with Sylvia in tow. They were leaving the main building and going for a walk on the grounds.”

“By themselves?”

“Most definitely by themselves. I saw them the next day too. He had her stuffed into a corner of the main lounge away from everybody else. He was sitting so close to her, his knees were digging into her thighs. She had to sit sideways to accommodate him. And he kept leaning over her. He reminded me of a vulture.”

“I think he was one.”

“I think he was too,” Christopher agreed. “The thing is, this little dance went on for a couple of days, and then suddenly Paul Hazzard’s daughter seemed to be aware of it. She was furious. I mean really furious. Every time she saw them together, even if they were just standing side by side in the middle of a crowd of people, she would come over and bust them up. Sylvia wasn’t taking this very well. Paul Hazzard was ready to kick somebody. And all that interference wasn’t making Alyssa Hazzard any happier. She got madder and madder and madder by the day.”

“I think therapy sounds like a wonderful thing,” Gregor said blandly. “I thought the point of all this nonsense was to get your life under control. Or at least to get your emotions under control.”