Bleeding Hearts (39 page)

Alyssa appeared in the foyer.

“Oh, Fred,” she said. “It’s you. I was wondering why we hadn’t heard from you. It seemed only natural that you’d come over.”

After that the three of them went off into the living room, and Caroline couldn’t see them anymore.

Up on the landing, Caroline stepped back and tried to think. She didn’t want to see Fred Scherrer any more than she wanted to see anybody else. She didn’t like Fred Scherrer. After Jacqueline had been murdered, Fred Scherrer had been a first-class pain in the ass. Still, he was tricky, there was that. You could never tell what he was up to. It didn’t make sense for her to leave him down there with James and Alyssa, where she couldn’t hear them.

Caroline went back into the studio and looked around. Her drafting table was a mess. Her black leather tote bag was sitting on the floor next to her drafting table stool, open. Caroline took her equipment off the drafting table and put it in the tote bag. Then she snapped shut the tote bag’s magnetic clip and hoisted the bag onto her shoulder. She felt her efforts were halfhearted. She was usually obsessively neat about her studio. Now her drafting table was still a mess and she was going to turn her back on it and walk out.

Obsessiveness is a symptom of codependency. Perfectionism is the essence of codependency. One of these days she really had to get her act together.

Caroline locked the studio door behind her. Then she started down the stairs, listening carefully. This was one of those old houses that was too well built. She couldn’t hear anything. She went down a few steps and stood still, waiting. Then she gave up and went down the rest of the way.

At the entryway Caroline could finally hear something. It was Alyssa’s voice, high and musical, going on and on about trivialities.

“Nicholas keeps telling me that there’s going to be all this money and that the taxes have already been paid on it or the taxes have been figured in, I don’t remember which,” Alyssa was saying, “and I’ve been telling Nicholas that after this it’s going to be impossible for us to spend any significant time in Philadelphia. I mean it was bad enough after all that mess with Jacqueline, but for this to happen just as all that was beginning to fade from public memory—I just can’t stand it.”

Caroline walked over to the living room archway and looked through. James stood next to the portable bar, pouring himself a glass of Perrier water. Alyssa sat on the love seat with her legs tucked under her, lotus fashion. Fred stood in the middle of the room, looking up at the weapons on the wall. None of them had noticed her. She walked all the way inside and said, “Hello.”

Fred Scherrer turned around. “Hello,” he said. “I was wondering where you were. I thought you might have gone in to work.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to get any work done,” Caroline said.

“That’s what I told myself.” James finished pouring his Perrier and took a sip. “It’s just the way I told Max. If I kept my appointments today, everybody I saw would want to know when I was going to channel Paul’s spirit so the police could catch his murderer. I couldn’t face it.”

Fred Scherrer went back to looking at the weapons wall. “I’ve been thinking about this wall ever since your father died. It’s been making me crazy. And now that I’m here, looking at it, it doesn’t tell me a thing.”

There were all kinds of things on the portable bar besides Perrier water. There was even liquor of half a dozen kinds. It was one of Daddy’s hypocrisies. Daddy talked a good game about addictions, but he was the ultimate example of a man in denial. He didn’t really believe he could have any addictions himself. Caroline knew she had every addiction on record, in spite of the fact that she’d never actually tried any hard drugs. She knew that if she was ever so much as in the same room with heroin or cocaine, she would fall into a drug-induced swoon and have to be rushed to the hospital. She went through the bottles on the portable bar and rejected each one in turn. The liquor was an obvious no-no. The regular soda had sugar in it and the diet soda had aspartame. The one bottle of “fruit juice” wasn’t really fruit juice at all, but a commercial “punch” full of chemicals. Caroline gave up and went to sit down on the long couch that had its back to the street-side window. That way, she stayed well away from Alyssa.

“So,” she said. “Exactly what’s going on here? Are you holding some kind of investigation?”

“Of course Fred isn’t holding some kind of investigation,” James said, irritated. “Fred doesn’t hold investigations. He defends people after they’ve been investigated.”

“I’m sure Fred holds investigations sometimes,” Alyssa said. “He would have to, wouldn’t he? Fred has a very interesting theory about all this, Caroline. He thinks the key to it all is Jacqueline. I told him I thought Jacqueline had died so long ago, nobody could possibly know any more about it than they already did.”

“That makes sense,” James said.

Alyssa waved this away. “Caroline knows what I’m talking about. I wonder what that Demarkian person is doing, that’s what I wonder. Fred talked to him yesterday, but other than that, he seems to have disappeared. I think it’s creepy.”

“I never thought there was any mystery about what happened to Jacqueline,” Caroline said. “I thought Daddy killed her.”

Fred Scherrer turned around, curious. “Did you? You never had any doubt in your mind?”

“Of course not.”

“You don’t have any doubt about it now?”

“No, I don’t. Why should I?”

“Well,” Fred Scherrer said, “there are a couple of problems here. There’s the fact that Paul was killed with the same weapon or something very much like the same weapon and in the same way as Jacqueline was. There is that.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Caroline insisted. “In the first place, we don’t know he was killed with the same weapon, because we don’t know what the weapon was that killed Jacqueline. In the second place, it was a famous case, in all the newspapers. It would be easy to copycat that kind of crime.”

“Maybe,” Fred Scherrer said. He sounded skeptical.

“If I’d thought Daddy had killed Jacqueline, I wouldn’t have gone on living in this house,” Alyssa said. “Talk about creepy. Did you lock your bedroom door every night before you went to sleep?”

“Of course I didn’t,” Caroline said. “For God’s sake, Alyssa, you’re being ridiculous. Daddy wouldn’t have any reason to kill me. Or you or James either. We didn’t have any money to leave him. And he wasn’t screwing somebody he hoped we wouldn’t find out about.”

“There’s another way these two crimes are alike,” Fred Scherrer said. “The murder of Jacqueline Hazzard and then the murder of Paul Hazzard. Have you noticed? None of the three of you has an alibi for either one.”

Caroline had put her tote bag down right next to her on the floor. Now she reached over and picked it up. She tried to carry cans of plain, unadulterated apple juice around with her at all times. She bought them at an organic deli half a block from the place she worked. The organic deli also carried potato chips that had been broiled instead of fried. They were peculiar.

Caroline found a can of apple juice and took it out. It had an earth-friendly snap top that left no garbage when it was opened. She opened it and put the can down on the arm of the couch. Then she put her tote bag carefully back on the floor.

“Do you know what I think you’re doing?” she asked Fred Scherrer. “I think you’re trying to work us all up. I think you’re trying to say things we’re all going to regret.”

James laughed. “Hell,” he said. “That’s what defense attorneys do.”

“He’s not being a defense attorney in this case,” Caroline said. “He’s being a suspect, and that’s the point. He isn’t trying to solve Daddy’s murder. He doesn’t have to. The police will do that. He isn’t trying to solve Jacqueline’s murder either. He knows all he has to know about that. He’s trying to get out from under what happened to Candida, that’s what he’s trying to do.”

“Caroline, be reasonable,” her brother told her. “As hard as it may be to go against your nature, at least try to be reasonable. The same person who killed Dad had to have killed Candida. No matter what did or didn’t happen to Jacqueline, even you have to see that.”

“No,” Caroline said. “I don’t have to see it.”

“Caroline likes coincidences,” Fred Scherrer said, still looking at the wall of weapons. “Big coincidences.”

“You’re just here to stir us all up,” Caroline said placidly. “It’s a form of codependency—”

“—oh, for Christ’s
sake
,” James exploded.

“—but it’s a very toxic form of behavior,” Caroline went on, ignoring him. “It’s really very destructive. It’s almost always resorted to out of fear. I wonder what you think this is going to get you.”

“I wonder what you think
this
is going to get
you
,” Fred Scherrer said, intrigued. “Do you ever actually talk like a human being? Or is your whole head stuffed full of this kind of jargon?”

“Her whole head is stuffed full of cotton wool,” James said.

Over on the love seat, Alyssa stirred. Then she stood and walked over to the couch where Caroline was sitting. Caroline moved aside, but Alyssa wasn’t coming for her. Alyssa was leaning against the back of the couch and looking out into the street. Caroline turned sideways so that she could see too.

“Quiet, everybody,” Alyssa ordered. “We’ve got company.”

“What kind of company?” James asked. “If it’s more reporters, I’m going to have them arrested.”

“It’s Demarkian and those two policemen,” Alyssa said. “The ones who were all on the news together Saturday night. They look very grim.”

“You’re dramatizing yourself,” Caroline said. “It’s called the soap-opera syndrome. It’s a form of addiction.”

Alyssa wasn’t listening to her. None of them were. None of them ever did. Caroline looked out at Gregor Demarkian and the other two men climbing the steps to the town house’s front door. By now, she thought, they all really ought to know better.

Across town, on Cavanaugh Street, Christopher Hannaford stood in the kitchen of Lida Arkmanian’s town house, putting together a salad. He was wearing socks but no shoes, jeans, and a flannel shirt but no belt. His black hair was a mess. Lida was standing on the far side of the kitchen, at the counter next to the stove, putting together the salad dressing. This was at least the fourth time Christopher had made a salad in this room. It had become a routine. It ought to be making him feel wonderful, or at least be making him feel secure. Instead, he felt like cow dung.

“Listen,” he said finally. “Why don’t you just talk to me? Why don’t you just tell me what’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong, Christopher.”

“Of course something is wrong, Lida. For Christ’s sake. What do you take me for?”

“Maybe ‘wrong’ is the wrong word to use.”

“Fine. Pick the right word to use.”

“You’re making too much out of nothing.”

He sliced a pile of radish chips the size of Mount McKinley. He opened the drawer in the counter next to the refrigerator and got out a plastic storage bag. He put the radish chips into the plastic storage bag and the plastic storage bag in the refrigerator. Really trivial things were beginning to seem terribly important.

“Lida,” he said again.

Lida had the salad dressing finished. She picked up the cruet and walked over to him. She put the cruet down next to the salad bowl and stepped back.

“Nothing is wrong,” she said stubbornly. “Believe me. Nothing is wrong.”

Christopher Hannaford didn’t think he’d ever been handed a bigger crock of shit in his life.

W
HAT GREGOR DEMARKIAN LIKED
best about the detective novels Bennis Hannaford sometimes gave him was the part where the detective calls all his suspects into a room and solves the crime in front of an audience. Rex Stout was good for that sort of thing. So were Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie. Gregor much preferred fantasy in his fiction to reality, since the reality was so very seldom really real. Gregor found the fantasy of the gathered suspects enormously funny, and not only because he had never once, in twenty years of federal police work, seen suspects so gathered to receive a solution. Gregor had sympathy for the fictional detectives. He knew why they wanted to bring the dramatis personae into one place. What he couldn’t understand were the fictional suspects. Why did they bother to come? Why did they put up with this kind of mock gathering of the clans at all? Gregor had once suggested to a suspect in a kidnapping case that they ought to meet for lunch, informally, to go over the possible consequences of the suspect’s descent into perjury. The suspect had told him to go to hell and taken off for a week on the Jersey shore instead.

That the remaining serious suspects in the murder of Paul Hazzard were sitting together in Paul Hazzard’s living room when Gregor, Russell Donahue, and Bob Cheswicki drove up was an accident. Gregor knew that. He hadn’t called these three people together. He hadn’t brought Russell and Bob with him so that they could watch him stage a tour de force and pounce on the killer in an unsuspected leap, eliciting an unguarded confession and bringing the case to a close with a crash. He had come here to get the murder weapon, that was all. And yet…

Gregor stood in the foyer of the Hazzards’ town house with his coat over his arm and his shoes dripped slush and rock salt into the runner carpet. In front of him. Bob Cheswicki was saying polite things to Alyssa Hazzard Roderick as she took his coat and put it away in the hall closet. Russell Donahue was standing beside him, looking uncomfortable. He hadn’t been in plainclothes long enough to be used to houses like this. Over at the archway that led to the living room, Caroline Hazzard, James Hazzard, and Fred Scherrer were waiting. Caroline looked a little defensive. James and Fred just looked bland. Bob and Russell walked away toward the living room and Gregor handed his coat to Alyssa Roderick.

“Don’t you people ever call before you show up at the door?” she asked. “We could have been out, you know. I was thinking about being out. The way things have been going, I was seriously thinking of being out to Kathmandu.”